Nancy Emms was seventy-eight and lived alone in Wandsworth. When she died on April 9, 1986, her doctor recorded natural causes on the death certificate. It was her home help who noticed that the television was gone from the flat, and only then did a post-mortem show that she had been raped and strangled. Two months later the same thing nearly happened again. Janet Cockett, sixty-seven, chairwoman of the tenants' association on her Wandsworth housing estate, was found dead in her flat on June 9, and her death too was first taken to be natural. She had been strangled. On a window of her flat was a palm print.
Over the next six weeks the killer came back again and again, always the same way. He got in through an unsecured window, with no sign of forced entry, knelt on his victim's chest, clamped his left hand over the mouth and strangled with his right. On June 28, at a residential home in Stockwell, he killed two men, Valentine Gleim, eighty-four, and Zbigniew Strabawa, ninety-four, a veteran of the Second World War; both were sexually assaulted. On July 8 he robbed and strangled William Carman, eighty-four, in Islington. On July 21 he killed William Downes, seventy-four, in a Stockwell bedsit. On the morning of July 23 the caretaker at Ranelagh Gardens Mansions in Fulham found Florence Tisdall, an eighty-three-year-old widow who lived alone, raped and strangled. Four of the victims had been sodomized, possibly after death.
Kenneth Erskine was twenty-three, homeless and a solvent abuser. He had been born in Hammersmith on July 1, 1963, to an English mother and an Antiguan father, one of four brothers, and both parents had abandoned him. He was sent to special schools; his parents divorced when he was twelve; on a school field trip he tried to drown other children. He became steadily more violent and ended up sleeping rough, living on burglary, and had served time at Feltham. Because of his burglary record, the police had his fingerprints and his photograph, and he was arrested on July 28, 1986, at a social security office. His palm print matched the one at Janet Cockett's flat, and Fred Prentice, seventy-four, picked him out of a lineup as the man who had tried to strangle him in his bed a month earlier.
He was tried at the Old Bailey in January 1988 and was seen masturbating in the dock. He was convicted of seven murders, and the judge sentenced him to life with a recommended minimum of forty years, among the most severe recommendations ever made by a British court. The police suspected him of four more killings, including those of Wilfred Parkes, eighty-one, in Stockwell on June 2, 1986, and Trevor Thomas, seventy-five, in Lambeth on July 21, but did not find enough evidence to charge him.
In 1988 he was found to have a mental disorder within the meaning of the Mental Health Act and was moved from prison to Broadmoor Hospital. A psychiatric report dated March 17, 2006, on an assessment carried out in 2004, concluded that he had chronic schizophrenia and an antisocial personality disorder and had probably had them since March 1980, years before the killings. In July 2009 the Court of Appeal quashed the seven murder convictions and substituted manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility.
At Broadmoor, on February 23, 1996, another patient, Paul Wilson, asked Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, to lend him a videotape and then tried to strangle him with the cord of a pair of stereo headphones. Erskine and a convicted murderer, Jamie Devitt, heard the screams and pulled Wilson off.