John Childs

Victims

6 CONVICTIONS by guilty plea, all contract killings, and the count is exactly what he admitted. The men he named as having paid him, Henry MacKenny and Terence Pinfold, had their convictions QUASHED IN 2003 after the Court of Appeal found Childs a pathological liar; the killings themselves are not in doubt, only who else was involved

Years active

1974 - 1978

Location

London, England, United Kingdom

Method

Strangulation - Stabbing with knife and sword - Shooting

Status

Arrested in 1979 and, turning informer, confessed to six killings carried out for payment between 1974 and 1978, disposing of the bodies by dismembering and burning them in the fireplace of his East London council flat. PLEADED GUILTY at the Old Bailey in December 1979 to all six murders and was SENTENCED TO LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITH A WHOLE-LIFE TARIFF, one of the first so sentenced. HIS EVIDENCE THEN CONVICTED HENRY MACKENNY AND TERENCE PINFOLD of the murders in 1980, on his account that they had commissioned them. IN 2003 THE COURT OF APPEAL QUASHED THE CONVICTIONS OF MACKENNY AND PINFOLD, finding on psychiatric evidence that Childs was a PATHOLOGICAL LIAR whose testimony could not have been relied on; MacKenny had served twenty-three years. Childs’s own guilty pleas were unaffected. He remains in custody under the whole-life order and no release is possible.

Childs was a professional criminal in east London who took paid contracts to kill. Between 1974 and 1978 he killed six people: Terry Eve; Robert Brown; George Brett and his ten-year-old son Terry, who was with his father when Brett came to a meeting; Freddie Sherwood; and Ronald Andrews. They were shot, stabbed and strangled, in various combinations, most of them at a flat in Poplar.

He then dismembered each body and burned the parts in the grate of the flat, over many hours, breaking up what would not burn. Not one of the six was ever recovered. The disposal is the reason the case is remembered in British criminal history and the reason the prosecution had almost nothing physical to work with.

He confessed in 1979 while in custody on other matters and gave detailed evidence. He was convicted of the six murders in 1980 and sentenced to life imprisonment, and he then gave evidence against the men he said had commissioned the contracts.

Those subsequent prosecutions are the difficult part of the case. Several convictions obtained on Childs's evidence were challenged for years afterwards, and the reliability of a confessed multiple murderer testifying against others, a supergrass, in the language of the period, was contested in every one of them. His own convictions rest on his own account, since there were no bodies. This entry records the six murders as convicted and notes that the evidence in the case was, from beginning to end, what Childs said.