In June 1979, in an interview room at Waltham Abbey police station in Essex, a man under arrest for a series of bank and security-van robberies in Hertfordshire told Detective Chief Superintendent Frank Cater that he had killed six people for money. John Childs, known as Bruce, had been in custody since September 1978. He gave the names, the dates and the methods, and he explained why no one would ever find the bodies: he had cut each one up and burned it in the fireplace of his council flat in Poplar, in east London.
The account he gave became the prosecution's case, first against himself and then against two other men, and the case has turned on that account ever since. Nothing physical of any of the six victims was ever recovered.
According to one retelling, the robbery inquiry reached him through a set of car keys left in clothing the robbers had changed out of. The keys led police to their owner, who had been paid to mind money and who, facing charges, named Childs and Harry MacKenney. Childs, once in custody, began to talk.
He had met MacKenney and Terence Pinfold in prison. After their release the two ran a business together in Dagenham, Essex, and gave Childs a job when he came out. In Childs's account the business was also a front for murder to order, with Pinfold arranging commissions and MacKenney joining in some of the killings.
The six, as he described them, were these. Terry Eve, known as Teddy, was killed in 1974; the court accounts date it to November, and other retellings to August. Childs said Eve was beaten with a length of pipe and an axe and then strangled. Robert Brown, an escaped prisoner, was killed in January 1975, shot three times and then attacked with an axe, a knife and a sword. In November 1975 George Brett and his ten-year-old son, Terry, who had come along for the drive with his father, were both shot in the head. Frederick Sherwood, who owned a nursing home, was shot in the head in July 1978, and Ronald Andrews in October 1978, lured to Childs's flat and shot. Childs said Andrews died because MacKenney was having an affair with his wife. For the Sherwood killing, investigators could find little connection to anyone who might have paid for it.
On disposal, Childs said that he and, as he claimed, MacKenney had first tried to mince the remains and flush them away, and that when that failed they burned the parts in the grate over many hours, breaking up whatever would not burn. The defense challenged whether this was possible at all: the heat, the smell, the time. Detectives answered by burning an eleven-stone pig, about 150 pounds, the same way, and reported that it could be done.
Childs pleaded guilty to all six murders and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1979, with a whole-life tariff. In 1980 his evidence was the core of the trial of Pinfold and MacKenney. MacKenney was convicted of murder and given life with a recommended minimum of twenty-five years. Pinfold was convicted of procuring the murder of Terry Eve; the jury acquitted MacKenney of that killing for lack of corroboration of Childs's word. Even at trial Childs was regarded as an unsatisfactory witness.
Pinfold and MacKenney appealed in 1981 and lost, and in 1987 they were refused leave to appeal again. Their case then went to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which referred it back to the Court of Appeal. Pinfold was released on bail in September 2001. At a hearing in October 2003 the court heard psychiatric evidence that Childs was an immensely plausible liar whose testimony was worthless as evidence, and MacKenney was bailed too. Campaigners for the two men also pointed to papers disclosed to them only in 2003, which they said showed that Scotland Yard had information that Terry Eve was alive and living in west London under another name three years after the date of his supposed murder. That claim comes from the men's supporters and was not the ground of the court's decision.
On December 15, 2003, Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, sitting with Mr. Justice Aikens and Mr. Justice Davis, quashed both men's convictions. Fresh evidence, he said, showed that Childs was a pathological liar, and the evidence against Pinfold and MacKenney was "so unreliable that it is worthless." Accounts of the time the two had served vary: one puts it at twenty-two years for Pinfold and twenty-four for MacKenney, another at twenty-three.
The ruling left Childs's own guilty pleas intact, which produced an odd legal position. The only evidence that six people were murdered, and of how, was the word of a man the Court of Appeal had found could not be believed about who else was there.
He kept talking from prison. In 1997 the Sunday newspaper The People reported that he had written to a pen pal through the Prison Reform Trust, describing how he dismembered the bodies and burned them in the Poplar flat. In 1998, while held at Long Lartin and then at Frankland Prison in County Durham, he told the Daily Mirror he had committed five more murders, a claim that ran on the front page and was never followed up. He married a woman named Tina in 1978; they divorced in 1982, and they had two children.
He has been described as the most prolific hit man in British history, and he was one of the first prisoners in England given a whole-life term. That order was last reported still in force.