On June 12, 1993, a Maltese chef named Emanuel Spiteri, forty-one, left the Coleherne, a leather pub in Earl's Court, with a man he had met there, and the two took the train from Charing Cross to his flat. A security camera caught them together on the platform. Spiteri let the man cuff and bind him on his bed; the man demanded his PIN, did not get it, and strangled him with a noose. Then he cleaned the flat, set it on fire, and later rang the police to tell them to look for a body at the scene of a fire. He said he would probably not kill again. It was the fifth killing in just over three months, and when the police released the Charing Cross footage the man in it, Colin Ireland, came forward to say he had been with Spiteri but had left him with another man. His fingerprints were already waiting for him.
Ireland was born on March 16, 1954, in Dartford, Kent, to an unmarried seventeen-year-old; his father was not named on the birth certificate. He grew up poor, moving house again and again, and was put into care for a time when his mother married. He left school at thirteen, was sent to borstal for theft, and at seventeen was convicted of robbery. Through the 1970s and 1980s came convictions for car theft, burglary, extortion, robbery and deception. He married twice, to Virginia Zammit in 1982 and Janet Young in 1989, and was violent to his second wife and stole from her. By the early 1990s he was in Southend-on-Sea, first homeless in a hostel and then in a flat of his own, and travelling to the Coleherne. He was not gay. He picked gay men, he told police, because they were the easiest targets, and he looked for those who wanted a partner to tie them up.
Peter Walker, forty-five, a choreographer, took him home to Battersea on March 8, 1993. Ireland bound him and suffocated him with a plastic bag, left two teddy bears arranged on the body, and shut Walker's dogs in another room. The next day, hearing nothing on the news, he called the Samaritans and a journalist at The Sun to report the dogs and the murder and to say he wanted to be famous as a serial killer. On May 28 he killed Christopher Dunn, thirty-seven, a librarian, in Wealdstone; Dunn was found naked in a harness, his death was taken at first for an accident in an erotic game, and it was not linked to Walker's. On June 4 he met Perry Bradley III, thirty-five, a businessman and the son of a Texas Democratic fundraiser, took his PIN and cash, let him fall asleep, and then, realizing Bradley could identify him, strangled him with the noose already around his neck.
Angry that three killings had brought no publicity, he killed again within days. On June 7 he went home to Dalston with Andrew Collier, thirty-three, a housing warden. A disturbance outside drew both men to the window, and Ireland gripped a metal bar across it, the one thing he forgot to wipe. He killed Collier's cat, strangled Collier, and posed the two bodies together, and then phoned the police to ask why they had not linked the four murders. Five days later he killed Emanuel Spiteri.
Charged with the murders of Collier and Spiteri, he confessed to the other three while awaiting trial. At the Old Bailey on December 20, 1993, he pleaded guilty to all five and received life for each. Mr. Justice Sachs called him exceptionally frightening and dangerous: "To take one human life is an outrage; to take five is carnage." In 1994 he was questioned in Wakefield Prison about other unsolved killings of gay men and claimed he would reveal six more bodies, one a month; nothing came of it. In December 2006 he was on the Home Office list of whole-life prisoners. The tabloids had called him the Gay Slayer.
He died at Wakefield Prison on February 21, 2012, aged fifty-seven, of pulmonary fibrosis, weeks after fracturing his hip.