Kieran Patrick Kelly was an Irish laborer who spent the last years of his freedom drinking and sleeping rough in the parks of south London. In 1984 he was convicted at the Old Bailey of the murder of Hector Fisher and the manslaughter of William Boyd, two men who lived the same way he did. Boyd died in 1983 in a police cell he was sharing with Kelly, after Kelly had been picked up on Clapham Common. Kelly was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison in Durham in 2001.
What has kept his name in the news is what he said after Boyd's death. Questioned by detectives, he described killing men over a span of about 30 years, beginning soon after he arrived in London in 1953. The Irish Post reported in 2019 that he confessed to upwards of 10 more murders. A retired detective, Geoff Platt, wrote in 2015 that Kelly had admitted 16 killings and could be responsible for as many as 31, and he accused the authorities of keeping the deaths quiet. The Irish journalist Robert Mulhern, who spent years on the case, concluded that the higher figures do not stand up but that Kelly was still a dangerous killer. None of the deaths beyond the two in 1984 was proved in court.
Kelly was born in Rathdowney, a village in County Laois, in 1929, according to an extract from Mulhern's book published by the Leinster Leader and a Leinster Express report on its launch. He spent most of his youth in Dublin, the Leinster Leader and the Leinster Express reported. In 2015 The Irish Post, summarizing Platt's book, described him as a Catholic and a republican.
His time in uniform is reported in two ways. Reports on the RTÉ podcast and television series about him in 2020 and 2023 said he joined the British Army at 18 and was dismissed in 1951. The 2015 Irish Post summary of Platt's account said instead that he served in the Irish Army.
Kelly married twice, once in Dublin and once in London, The Irish Post reported in 2015. The reports agree that he worked as a laborer, chiefly in building. A builder from Roscommon told Mulhern in 2017 that he had employed Kelly in London for four years in the 1970s, and the RTÉ television series later presented a builder who had taken him on as a casual laborer for several years. That builder knew nothing of any killings, but he was wary of what he called Kelly's "explosive temper," according to the Leinster Express and Midlands 103.
The family home in Rathdowney stood on a plot of about half an acre. A neighbor told Mulhern that the Kelly family left the village suddenly for Dublin. A neighbor's sister recalled that Kelly's mother came back most years with one of her sons and sat in the car outside the house without going in.
When Kelly first went to London is also reported differently. The 2015 Irish Post coverage of Platt's book put his arrival in 1953, at the time of the celebrations for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Platt told the paper that Irish friends working as laborers had advised him where to find cheap lodgings in south London. The book extract carried by the Leinster Leader and the Leinster Express's launch report say he emigrated to England in the 1960s, married there and worked as a builder's laborer, settling in the south of the city.
By the early 1980s he was living rough. The Irish Post described him in 2015 as an alcoholic who slept on Clapham Common, had been arrested for shoplifting and had served time in prison. Its 2016 report called him a vagrant with a long history of violence, theft and alcoholism. Platt, who worked on the case, told the paper that London's homeless drinking groups were harsh and poor, and that Kelly, a slight man, had to assert himself among them. "He was an alcoholic. He was looking over his shoulder his whole life," Platt said.
Mulhern said Kelly moved among tramps, homeless people and alcoholics, and in particular among gay homeless alcoholics like himself. He suggested that this was one reason the case did not come to light the way other murder cases did. "Perhaps some lives were viewed as more important than others," he told The Irish Post, adding that he did not mean it as a slight on the police. Platt also told the paper he believed Kelly was gay and lived in fear that it would be discovered.
The reports describe a run of earlier prosecutions that did not lead to convictions. In an interview about his book, Mulhern said his research showed that Kelly was acquitted of another London murder in 1977 and that two charges of attempted murder against him were dropped in 1982. Mulhern also said he found evidence that Kelly had pushed two fellow vagrants in front of trains, and that both men survived.
Platt's account, as The Irish Post summarized it in 2015, adds that records released under the 30-year rule in 2013 showed Kelly had been charged with eight murders before Platt became involved and acquitted of all of them. In one of those cases, according to Platt, he was tried at the Old Bailey over a death on the Underground early in 1983 and acquitted for lack of motive. The Irish Post repeated the story in its list of facts about the case. Mulhern's published findings, with a 1977 acquittal and dropped charges in 1982, do not match every part of it, and the differences have never been settled.
In 1983 Kelly was arrested on Clapham Common over the theft of a wedding ring. That is how the RTÉ television series of 2023 described it, as reported by Midlands 103 and the Leinster Express, which called the theft relatively minor.
Platt gave a fuller account to The Irish Post in 2015. Kelly and a companion, both looking for money for drink, approached an elderly man on the common and demanded his watch and wedding ring. The man called the police. Officers did not find the watch or the ring, but they arrested the two men for being drunk and disorderly and took them to the police station in Clapham. There they were put in a cell to sober up. William Boyd was already in the cell, drunk, asleep and snoring.
William Boyd died in that cell. He was strangled, and Kelly was later found guilty of his manslaughter. The Irish Post reported that Boyd, like Hector Fisher, was a vagrant alcoholic who lived in the parklands of south London. Its 2016 report said Kelly killed him because he snored too loudly. Little else about his life, not even his age, was ever made public.
Platt told The Irish Post that afterward Kelly was full of adrenaline and could not stop talking. In the interviews that followed, he began to confess.
The 1983 interviews were recorded. The RTÉ documentary team that made the 2023 television series had access to 120 minutes of the police audio, according to the Leinster Express and other reports on the series. In those recordings, Mulhern said, Kelly admits to many more killings than the two for which he was convicted. Coverage of the 2020 podcast series said he claimed to have murdered as many as 15 people over 30 years.
The counts reported since then vary. The Irish Post said in 2019 that he confessed to upwards of 10 more murders when questioned over Boyd's death. Its 2015 reports on Platt's book said he admitted 16. Scripps News, summarizing the book in July 2015, said 18. Mulhern noted in 2016 that the numbers attached to Kelly had ranged from 12 to 14 to 18 and up to 31.
Several of the deaths Kelly described were on the London Underground, according to The Irish Post and Mulhern's own account in the Leinster Leader. According to Platt, detectives on the South London Serious Crime Squad at first thought Kelly was exaggerating, but the details he gave matched reports of deaths on the Tube.
The confessions reached back to 1953. Coverage of the 2020 podcast and the 2023 television series identified the first death in his account as that of a man named Christie Smith, in 1953, shortly after Kelly left the army. The Irish Post's 2015 summary of Platt's book spelled the name Christy Smith, described him as Kelly's best friend, and said Kelly pushed him in front of a train after a day of drinking. Platt believed Kelly feared Smith knew he was gay. After that death, Platt said, Kelly went back to Ireland for a time before returning to London. No charge was ever brought over Smith's death.
The retired Metropolitan Police Detective Superintendent Ian Brown, who worked on the case in the 1980s, said in the 2023 series that Kelly "showed his animal cunning" and at times seemed to be playing the police. Mulhern asked whether Kelly was spinning a story, manipulating the detectives, completely mad, or admitting crimes he had not committed in order to make the whole account unreliable. He later described Kelly as "a curious and bewildering witness to his own story."
In 1984 Kelly was found guilty of the murder of Hector Fisher and of the manslaughter of William Boyd, The Irish Post reported in 2019. The extract from Mulhern's book carried by the Leinster Leader places the trial at the Old Bailey. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Hector Fisher was, like Boyd, a vagrant alcoholic living in the parks of south London, The Irish Post said. When and how he died, and how old he was, have never been made public.
The Irish Post's 2015 reports, drawing on Platt, said trying Kelly for the other deaths was thought too costly, that it was recommended he never be released, and that he received a sentence of "life to mean life." Mulhern put it another way: Kelly was convicted of only two killings because that was enough to put him away for life, so the police had no incentive to pursue the evidence on three or four others.
Platt told The Irish Post that he spent two years with Kelly while Kelly was held in prison. "I was living with him full time. I was the only person he was allowed to speak to," Platt said. He also said that Kelly's written confession later allowed some families to recover life insurance money that had been refused on the ground of suicide. These are Platt's own accounts, and the families and the claims have never been identified.
Kelly died in 2001 while serving his life sentence at HM Prison Frankland in Durham, Mulhern wrote in the Leinster Leader. The Irish Post also reported his death in prison in Durham in 2001. The date and cause of his death were not made public. Mulhern said his research turned up a letter of appeal written by Kelly.
The case returned to the news in the summer of 2015, when Platt, a retired police officer who had received a commendation for his work on the original investigation, published The London Underground Serial Killer. The book claimed that Kelly killed as many as 31 people in London between 1953 and 1983, and that the Home Office had covered up the Underground deaths to prevent mass panic on the network.
Platt quoted the Home Office as saying it had received a police report but "deemed it not of public interest." The Irish Post reported that police feared people would be too afraid to use the Northern line. Scripps News reported that the British Transport Police said they were aware of the claims but that they would be hard to verify after so long.
According to The Irish Post, Platt's claims prompted the Metropolitan Police Commissioner at the time, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, to commit to revisiting the investigation. The outcome of that review was not reported.
Robert Mulhern, a journalist from Naas who has reported for The Irish Post, RTÉ, the BBC and Sky News, made the RTÉ Radio 1 documentary Anatomy of an Irish Serial Killer in 2016. He told The Irish Post that Platt's book had set off a chain reaction in which outlets repeated its claims without testing the evidence. "Fact has been mixed with fiction, but nevertheless, Kelly was a very dangerous killer," he said.
For the documentary he worked with Ian Brown, a lead investigator on the case in the 1980s. Mulhern said Brown's professional estimate was that Kelly was responsible for five or six murders. Kelly's former solicitor, John Slater, told the documentary that Kelly would have been capable of the killings but that he had "grave doubts about whether he did it." Slater thought Kelly was "a bit of a fantasist," and wondered whether he wanted the kind of fame that attached to multiple murderers of the period.
Mulhern then spent three years on a book, The Secret Serial Killer: The True Story of Kieran Kelly, published by Pen and Sword in 2019. The Irish Post and the Leinster Leader reported that he went through case files, traced witnesses and the original prosecuting detective, and drew on recordings of Kelly's conversations with detectives. He said he received information from high-level sources in the British justice system and met "deafening silence" elsewhere. He said the new evidence "dramatically advanced the assertion that Kelly killed more than two people," and asked why the Metropolitan Police had not acted on Kelly's own account.
The work continued in a six-episode RTÉ Documentary On One podcast series, The Nobody Zone, made with Third Ear Productions and released in 2020, and in an RTÉ One television series, The Nobody Zone: Interview with an Irish Serial Killer, first broadcast on November 6, 2023, according to Midlands 103. In the television series the actor Ned Dennehy played Kelly in a dramatization built on the original interview audio, and a forensic psychologist studied the tapes.
Mulhern's research also led him back to Rathdowney. On his visits to the village, local people, among them the town's doctor, told him that human-looking remains had been found there. The Irish Post reported the find as having been made in 1993. In Mulhern's own Leinster Leader column, the remains were recovered by two gardaí from Templemore in the mid-1990s, and in the book extract the owner gives the year once as 1994 and once as 1993.
According to the account Mulhern published, gardaí took the remains away and were reported to have thought them those of an animal, a view the finder disputed. The retired doctor corroborated the account, Mulhern wrote.
Mulhern said he had contacted Garda headquarters many times since 2016 without an explanation, and that requests had gone to stations in Portlaoise and Abbeyleix for records of the call-out. In 2019 he said the evidence from Rathdowney had "challenged the gardaí in Ireland." No finding about the remains, or any link to Kelly, was reported.
Only two deaths, those of Hector Fisher and William Boyd, were proved against Kelly in court, one as murder and one as manslaughter. Everything else rests on his own words, on Platt's book, or on Mulhern's research, and those accounts differ.
The number of killings. Reported totals run from five or six (Brown's estimate) through upwards of 10, 15, 16 and 18 confessed killings, to as many as 31 (Platt). Mulhern said figures in the teens or higher do not stand up.
The Underground. Kelly's name became tied to the London Underground through Platt's book. Mulhern said in 2016 that he found no evidence that Kelly ever killed anyone on the Underground. Platt's account, by contrast, describes an acquittal in 1983 over a death on the Underground and confessions that matched reported deaths there.
The cover-up. Platt's claim that the Home Office suppressed the deaths was reported in 2015 but was not shown to be true in any reported finding. The British Transport Police said the claims would be hard to verify.
Christie Smith. The 1953 death named in coverage of the RTÉ series and in Platt's account was not the subject of any reported charge or inquest finding.
Dates and details of his life. His date of arrival in England (1953 or the 1960s), his army service (British or Irish), and the year of his arrest (1983 in most reports, 1984 in Scripps News's summary of Platt's book) are all reported in more than one way.
The Rathdowney remains. Witnesses said remains were found in Rathdowney and taken away by gardaí in 1993 or the mid-1990s; the gardaí were reported to have thought them animal bones, and no explanation was published.
1929: Kieran Patrick Kelly is born in Rathdowney, County Laois; he spends most of his youth in Dublin.
1951: Dismissed from the British Army, which he had joined at 18 (RTÉ series coverage; Platt's account says the Irish Army).
1953: Arrives in London at the time of the coronation, by Platt's account; later confessions date the first killing he described to that year.
1960s: Emigrates to England, marries and works as a builder's laborer, in the account carried by the Leinster Leader and Leinster Express.
1970s: Works for a London builder for about four years.
1977: Acquitted of a London murder, according to Mulhern.
1982: Two attempted-murder charges against him are dropped, according to Mulhern.
1983: Arrested on Clapham Common over the theft of a wedding ring; William Boyd dies in the police cell they share; in recorded interviews Kelly confesses to many more killings.
1984: Convicted at the Old Bailey of the murder of Hector Fisher and the manslaughter of William Boyd; sentenced to life imprisonment.
1993 or mid-1990s: Remains are found in Rathdowney and taken away by gardaí, according to local witnesses.
2001: Dies in prison at HMP Frankland, Durham.
July 2015: Geoff Platt publishes The London Underground Serial Killer, claiming up to 31 killings and a cover-up; the Metropolitan Police Commissioner commits to revisiting the investigation.
2016: RTÉ Radio 1 broadcasts Robert Mulhern's documentary Anatomy of an Irish Serial Killer.
May 2019: Mulhern's book The Secret Serial Killer is published.
2020: RTÉ releases the podcast series The Nobody Zone.
November 6, 2023: The first part of the RTÉ One series The Nobody Zone: Interview with an Irish Serial Killer is broadcast.