Kieran Patrick Kelly was born in Rathdowney, County Laois, in the early 1930s and came to London as a young man. He lived rough in and around Clapham and Kennington for decades, drinking heavily, with a long list of minor convictions and no fixed address. The press called him the Tube Killer.
In 1983 he was arrested over the killing of William Boyd, a man who had been strangled with his own socks in a cell at Clapham police station where the two were being held overnight. While in custody he was linked to the death of Hector Fisher, who had been stabbed in a churchyard in Clapham in 1975. He was convicted of both murders at the Old Bailey in 1984 and sentenced to life.
That is the whole of the established record. What made him briefly famous came thirty years later. In 2015 a retired Metropolitan Police detective, Geoff Platt, published a book asserting that Kelly had confessed to killing thirty-one people over two decades, most of them pushed under trains on the Northern line, and that the police had suppressed it to avoid public panic. The story was carried widely.
It has not stood up. The British Transport Police said they held no record of any such investigation or confession. The Metropolitan Police said no evidence supported a figure of thirty-one. Journalists who went back to the contemporary coverage found reports of a handful of claims made by Kelly in custody, of the sort that men in his position frequently make, and no bodies, no cases and no files.
He died in prison in 2001. He is included here because he is asked about constantly and because what circulates about him is almost entirely unsupported. Two murders are proved. Everything past that is a book.