Daniel Gonzalez killed four people in three separate incidents over three days in September 2004. On Wednesday, September 15, he attacked a man in Southsea, Portsmouth, who survived, and later that day killed Marie Harding, a woman of 73, at Southwick on the Sussex coast. Two days later, on Friday, September 17, he killed Kevin Molloy in Tottenham, north London, attacked a man in Hornsey who also survived, and killed a married couple, Derek and Jean Robinson, in Highgate. He was arrested within hours of the last attack, at Tottenham Court Road Underground station. He was 24.
A jury at the Old Bailey convicted him of four murders and two attempted murders in March 2006. The question before it was never whether he had carried out the attacks, which he admitted, but whether his mind was so impaired that the murder charges should be reduced to manslaughter. The jury decided they should not. He was sent to Broadmoor high security hospital, where he died by suicide in August 2007, aged 27.
His case is also the subject of an independent inquiry, published in January 2009, into the care he received from the age of 17. The panel found years of missed appointments, shifting diagnoses and gaps in follow-up, and concluded that his care "could and should have been better." It also found that nothing in the records would have allowed anyone to predict that he would kill.
Daniel Gonzalez was born on June 21, 1980, in Surrey. His mother is English and his father is Spanish. He was their only child. His parents separated in 1986, and he kept regular contact with his father through his childhood. He was fluent in Spanish, though the inquiry report says he never lived in Spain. The spelling of his surname varies between the press, which used Gonzalez, and the inquiry report, which used Gonzales.
From 1991 he attended Gordon's School. Assessments there found that he had dysgraphia, a difficulty with writing, and an above-average IQ. In 1995 he began using street drugs, was briefly excluded from school, and still gained several GCSEs. That year he started at Brooklands College. The Camden New Journal later summarized his teens and early twenties as a run of dropped courses, short jobs and shoplifting.
The first police contact recorded in the inquiry report came in July 1996, after a dispute over a bus fare, and ended with a caution. In November 1996 his family doctor referred him to a children's centre, where he saw a social work practitioner rather than a psychiatrist, and was passed on to a drug unit. In 1997 his mother asked social services for a foster placement. He lived in supported lodgings with a foster couple, committed repeated thefts and criminal damage, and was placed on probation in October 1997. A holiday in Canada, away from street drugs, was followed by reports that he had become paranoid.
His first contact with psychiatric services came on December 9, 1997, when a junior doctor from a drug and alcohol team assessed him and prescribed an antipsychotic medicine as a precaution. In February 1998, aged 17, he was admitted to the Abraham Cowley Unit, an open psychiatric unit, under section 2 of the Mental Health Act 1983. A tribunal discharged him before the assessment period had run its course, over the objection of a consultant. After his discharge he was not placed under the Care Programme Approach, the framework meant to coordinate care for people with serious mental illness. Follow-up appointments were missed, and for several months it was unclear which consultant held responsibility for him.
In July 1998 he was discharged from outpatient care after refusing the drug team's help. In September 1998 a strategy meeting identified a potentially high risk of violence and of suicide, and concluded that he might never be able to live independently. On September 23, 1998, a consultant who assessed him for a court report judged him "probably psychotic" but suggested a personality disorder, with drug use as the main cause.
Five days later, on September 28, 1998, police took him to the Oaktree clinic, a low secure unit, under section 136 of the Mental Health Act, after self-harm and threats. He stayed there until early 1999 under a series of sections of the Act. The consultant at the clinic reached a working diagnosis of continuous paranoid schizophrenia, and tested it by briefly withdrawing his medication; symptoms returned after several weeks. The inquiry later described this as the longest continuous assessment he received before Broadmoor. It also criticized the clinic's discharge summary, which was written two months late and did not explain why he had been placed in secure care. After a move through Farnham Road Hospital he left the Abraham Cowley Unit as an informal patient in April 1999. The youth justice team, a key source of support, was not told of his discharge and took no part in planning it.
He spent the summer of 1999 in Spain with his father. On his return a new consultant treated him with medication, which produced a severe side effect and led to a change of treatment. He kept hearing voices, kept using street drugs and kept getting into trouble. The consultant gradually came to favor a personality disorder complicated by drug use, and questioned whether schizophrenia was the right diagnosis.
In April 2000 he was arrested and held on remand for burglary and robbery. In December 2000 he was sentenced to two years, and he was released on April 30, 2001. In custody, staff and visitors saw signs of illness and he was given antipsychotic medication, though the prison medical record was later lost. A consultant who assessed him in prison concluded that he had invented the voices to avoid a hospital order. That consultant did not review the notes from the Oaktree clinic and did not speak with his mother. On October 3, 2001, he discharged him from psychiatric services, finding no severe mental illness. The inquiry report said that this single assessment carried more weight in later decisions than the six months of inpatient observation that had come before it.
In June 2001 his mother asked him to leave her home. He slept rough, then found a hostel place, and in January 2002 he was back with her. She sought help for him. On June 25, 2002, three months after her referral, a new consultant saw him once, but the appointment ended early when he walked out and asked for a different psychiatrist. No letter was sent to his doctor, and no review followed. In July 2002 a crisis team assessed him at a hospital emergency department, and a recommended psychiatric review was never arranged. In September 2002 a locum doctor found "no evidence of enmeshed psychiatric disorder."
In November 2002 he was arrested for shoplifting, and in January 2003 he received a six-month community rehabilitation order, followed in April 2003 by a 40-hour community punishment order. Probation staff repeatedly raised concern about his mental health. Community mental health team assessments judged him "not particularly ill." According to the inquiry, there was no psychiatrist involved in his care from September 13, 2002, until January 22, 2004, a gap of about 15 months.
In May 2003 he went to Spain again and stayed for about six months with his father and an aunt. By the report's account he was clearly unwell there, with no access to street drugs. In October 2003 he wrote a letter to his doctor acknowledging that he suffered from severe schizophrenia and asking to be admitted to hospital. He did not send it. When he returned to England his mother and grandmother gave the letter to a locum doctor. A detailed referral followed, but he was not offered an inpatient bed.
In January 2004 a locum psychiatrist assessed him, found no symptoms of mental illness, and suggested a day hospital, which he declined; a promised follow-up call did not happen. That month he broke his leg. In April 2004 he was given a care coordinator for the first time. He began going to weekend dance events and renewed a friendship with an old school friend. In July 2004 he was arrested on a warrant for failing to complete his community orders, and was fined 50 pounds for breaching the punishment order.
His mother and stepfather later said through the charity Hundred Families that they had repeatedly sought help before the attacks. His grandmother told the inquiry: "we are convinced that Daniel had a mental problem."
On September 11 he went to an event in London and came back the next day. On September 13, the Camden New Journal reported, police were alerted to him in Woking and took no action.
On September 15, in Southsea, Portsmouth, he tried to kill a man, who survived. The inquiry report treated the man's wife as a primary victim as well, because she was present and feared for her life.
The same day he killed Marie Harding, 73, at Southwick, in Sussex. Her death was the first of the four killings.
Early on September 17 he killed Kevin Molloy, aged 46, in Tottenham. Mr Molloy was a father of two, and his sisters later gave evidence to the independent inquiry.
Less than two hours later, in Hornsey, he tried to kill a man, who survived. The inquiry report also treated the wife as a primary victim.
Soon afterward, in Highgate, he killed Derek Robinson and Jean Robinson. They were a married couple, well regarded in the neighborhood, and they were chosen at random. At his trial Gonzalez said he had no idea who they were. He was arrested at Tottenham Court Road Underground station later that morning.
On September 23, 2004, he was remanded to HMP Belmarsh. On October 15, 2004, he was transferred to Broadmoor high security hospital in Berkshire. Doctors there judged him fit to face a jury, and in February 2006 the Camden New Journal reported that he faced four counts of murder, two of attempted murder and one of burglary, with the trial set to begin on February 27, 2006, before the Old Bailey. He was unemployed and, at 25, still living in Woking.
The trial opened in late February 2006 at the Old Bailey. Gonzalez admitted the killings and the two attempted murders. He denied murder on the ground of diminished responsibility, under which a person whose mind is impaired may be convicted of manslaughter instead. The defence argued that he was "not the master of his own mind" and that he had been guided by voices. The prosecution argued that he was feigning mental illness to avoid prison.
The court heard from psychiatrists called by both sides. A consultant forensic psychiatrist from Broadmoor told the jury that he had described his attacks in a matter-of-fact way, that other patients had been frightened by it, and that he had harmed himself and had assaulted his mother and grandmother during a visit. A second psychiatrist said that he had seemed bewildered and distracted after his arrest and while in prison. A third said that the most striking feature of his conversations with him was a lack of remorse that the psychiatrist described as quite striking in itself. The court was told that he had said he wanted to become a serial killer, and that he planned to target members of the public first and police officers afterward. Channel 4 News later reported that the court heard he had wanted to kill at least ten people. Relatives of the victims filled the public gallery.
The jury rejected the plea of diminished responsibility. The inquiry report refers to the jury's verdict "that he was guilty of murder rather than manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility." The date of the verdict has not been reported.
On March 27, 2006, Gonzalez received six life sentences, one for each of the four murders and the two attempted murders. No minimum term has been reported.
At Broadmoor he was regarded as one of the most disturbed patients the hospital had held. The independent inquiry heard that his condition improved markedly on medication after 2005, and the psychiatrists treating him came to see undifferentiated schizophrenia, alongside a personality disorder and drug misuse, as the most accurate picture. Channel 4 News reported that he told a psychiatrist that he thought he would be out in eight to ten years. He was supervised closely, and the Camden New Journal reported that staff had been with him around the clock.
On August 9, 2007, he died at Broadmoor, aged 27. The independent inquiry report records the death as an apparent suicide. A hospital spokesman told Channel 4 News that police attended, as is normal procedure when there is a death in custody, and that the hospital would not comment further until a post-mortem was complete. The outcome of an inquest has not been reported.
The independent investigation into his care and treatment was commissioned by NHS South East Coast and Surrey County Council, with support from Surrey Police and Surrey Probation. The panel was chaired by Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, a mental health solicitor, with James Briscoe and Granville Daniels as panel members, a social care adviser, and project management by the public sector consultancy Verita. Evidence was taken between September 25, 2006, and September 11, 2007, and the report was published in January 2009. It also reviewed an earlier internal investigation by the Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust. Among the witnesses were his parents and his maternal grandmother, who, in the panel's words, "provided us with an important perspective," and the sisters of Kevin Molloy, as well as relatives of the two people who survived.
The panel's central finding was that the care he received was poor overall, despite considerable effort by many staff, and that things went wrong early and never recovered. It attributed the failures to a combination of human error, lack of resources, system failure and bad luck, and wrote that individual failings "largely stemmed from the system of delivery of services." Responsibility, it said, "has to be shared by many of those who worked with, or were responsible for, Mr Gonzales." The service model, a "jigsaw" of specialist and community teams, had fragmented care for a young man who was hard to engage. Information was not shared, handovers were poorly documented, and continuity was lost. Staff did not explore why he kept returning to services even while rejecting what they offered.
The panel was specific about the diagnostic problems. Discharge summaries were weak; assessors relied on a single meeting; old notes were not read; and a belief that his symptoms were invented shaped later decisions. Drug use was recorded repeatedly in his notes, but he was never formally recognized as having both a mental illness and a substance misuse problem, which the panel said he should have been. He should not have been discharged from outpatient follow-up in 2001, and he was left without psychiatric care between October 2001 and June 2002 despite requests from his mother and his doctor. The panel judged the lack of consultant leadership in using the Care Programme Approach from 2000 to be a significant failing. It concluded that he had suffered from schizophrenia from the age of 17 until his death, and that the atypical course of the illness, with no acute episodes after 1999, had made it hard to diagnose. The finding did not challenge the jury's verdict of murder.
On whether the killings could have been foreseen, the report was clear: "it was not possible to predict what Daniel Gonzales did," and the panel found nothing that signaled extreme violence. It also wrote that it was "not possible to say that any action or inaction by another person could have averted disaster," and that the underlying triggers and motives were "forever unknowable." It did conclude that the care he received was unlikely to succeed and did not succeed, and that proper care planning, risk management and engagement "would have produced more effective care." Good practice, it added, reduces the risk of harm even where it cannot guarantee that harm will be prevented. The panel noted that he resembled a considerable share of people with schizophrenia who have killed after contact with services, and that staff described him as typical of perhaps eight percent of one community team's caseload.
The report made seven recommendations. The main one asked the trust to review its culture of engagement, since additional policies alone would not help, and to adopt the recovery model or a similar approach that kept formal risk assessment but added curiosity about what motivated a person using services. Others asked that every significant decision be followed by a letter to the service user setting out what was decided and why; that responsibility between consultants be clarified when a person moves between teams; that care coordinators be allocated on objective criteria; that police station front-desk contact be reviewed; and that police be told when they are part of a crisis plan. The panel also noted improvements the trust and county council reported making since 2004.
His mother and stepfather spoke to Hundred Families, a charity supporting people affected by mental health homicides, and the panel recorded that his mother had raised concerns about his health for years. She had referred him, written to services asking for follow-up, and, at times, had asked him to leave her home when the household could not cope. She told the inquiry, of a period of psychosis, "We were frightened to death." The Camden New Journal's March 2009 report on the inquiry quoted his grandmother describing him as "the fifth victim." Relatives of those he killed and of the two men who survived were also heard by the panel.
Whether better care would have prevented the killings cannot be known. The panel would go no further than saying that the care he received was unlikely to succeed, and that it could not say any action or inaction by another person would have averted what happened. His family said they had repeatedly asked for help; the panel found no warning of violence on the scale that followed. His grandmother's description of him as "the fifth victim" is her view, not a finding of any court or inquiry.
Reports of his motive rest on his own statements and on psychiatric evidence given at trial, which the jury weighed against the claim that he heard voices. The inquiry concluded that the underlying triggers were unknowable. No other killing has been attributed to him, and no minimum term has been reported for the six life sentences.
June 21, 1980: Born in Surrey.
February 1998: First admission to the Abraham Cowley Unit, aged 17.
September 28, 1998: Taken to the Oaktree clinic under section 136.
April 2000: Arrested for burglary and robbery; sentenced to two years in December 2000.
April 30, 2001: Released from prison. October 3, 2001: discharged from psychiatric follow-up.
October 2003: Writes to his doctor, unsent, asking for admission to hospital.
July 22, 2004: Arrested on a warrant for failing to complete community orders.
September 15, 2004: Attack in Southsea; Marie Harding killed at Southwick.
September 17, 2004: Kevin Molloy killed in Tottenham; attack in Hornsey; Derek and Jean Robinson killed in Highgate; arrested at Tottenham Court Road station.
September 23, 2004: Remanded to HMP Belmarsh.
October 15, 2004: Transferred to Broadmoor.
February 27, 2006: Trial set to open at the Old Bailey.
March 27, 2006: Six life sentences.
August 9, 2007: Dies at Broadmoor, apparently by suicide.
January 2009: Independent investigation report published.