Over five months in 2003, boys began to vanish from Freeport, on Grand Bahama: Mackinson Colas and Junior Reme, both eleven, DeAngelo McKenzie, thirteen, and Desmond Rolle, fourteen. A fifth boy, Jake Grant, twelve, also went missing; his case was later found to be unrelated. The Royal Bahamas Police Force, under intense pressure from the families, called in Scotland Yard and the FBI. None of it found the boys. On October 26, 2003, a thirty-five-year-old warehouse worker named Cordell Farrington walked into the Central Police Station in Freeport and confessed.
He told detectives that he had lured the boys to his home, sexually assaulted three of them and killed them all, and that the year before he had killed his lover, Jamal Robins, twenty-two, a man he had met at a drug rehabilitation center. He had hidden the boys' bodies in remote parts of the island and gone back weeks later to collect the remains, which he stored in numbered boxes at the house of an unsuspecting former girlfriend. He led the police to them.
Farrington was born in Nassau in 1968 and said he had been abused as a child. He had been addicted to crack cocaine and had got himself clean, had tried several kinds of work, including training for the priesthood, and in his spare time drew pictures of crying boys, some of which were shown at the Artists' Association of Grand Bahama. He had married and had a daughter; his wife said he was a good father, and that they separated after he began losing weight so fast that she suspected he was back on crack.
He was tried first for Robins's death. The two men had been in a relationship, and some days before the killing, between July and August 2002, Robins had told him he was leaving. On August 18, 2006, a jury convicted Farrington of murder, and the judge sentenced him to death. In 2008 the Court of Appeal, presided over by Dame Joan Sawyer, quashed the murder conviction and the death sentence, holding that a severe personality disorder had left him unable to form the intent to kill, substituted manslaughter by diminished responsibility, and imposed life.
In 2010 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the deaths of the four boys, and prosecutors accepted the pleas on the same ground of diminished responsibility. At the sentencing hearing, as the details of how the boys had died were read out, their relatives broke down and had to be helped from the courtroom. He received four life sentences.
In December 2014 he went back to the Court of Appeal, relying on a Privy Council ruling in another Bahamian case that a defendant must be heard before an appeal court substitutes a sentence. He told the judges he had had no chance to make submissions when his murder conviction was replaced in 2008. In March 2015 the court quashed the life sentence for Robins's death and sent him back to the Supreme Court to be resentenced. The four life sentences for the boys were not challenged.