Patrick Mackay

Victims

3 CONVICTIONS, all for MANSLAUGHTER on the ground of diminished responsibility, not murder; two further murder charges were dropped when the pleas were accepted. He has claimed up to eleven and police attributed as many; the remaining eight were never charged and rest on his own account

Years active

1973 - 1975

Location

England, United Kingdom

Method

Stabbing with knife

Status

Arrested on March 23, 1975, two days after the killing of Father Anthony Crean at Shorne in Kent. Charged with five murders. At the Old Bailey in November 1975 he PLEADED GUILTY TO THREE COUNTS OF MANSLAUGHTER ON THE GROUND OF DIMINISHED RESPONSIBILITY, for Isabella Griffiths, Adele Price and Father Crean, and the Crown accepted the pleas; two further murder charges were dropped. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve at least twenty years. HE IS BRITAIN’S LONGEST-SERVING PRISONER, having spent more than fifty years in custody. He has been refused parole repeatedly, in 2020, 2021 and 2023, the Parole Board finding that he remained a risk; in 2023 the press reported that he had been moved to an open prison. He was diagnosed a psychopath at fifteen and had been detained in Moss Side and other institutions before the killings. He has claimed as many as eleven killings and police have attributed up to that number to him; none of the others has ever been charged.

Patrick David Mackay was born in Dartford on September 25, 1952, to a violent alcoholic father who died when Mackay was ten. He was assessed repeatedly through childhood, killed animals, set fires, attacked his mother and sisters, and was described by one psychiatrist as a cold psychopathic killer who was likely to commit murder. He was admitted to Moss Side special hospital as a teenager and released in 1972.

In February 1974 he killed Isabella Griffiths, an eighty-seven-year-old woman in Chelsea, strangling her and leaving a knife in her body. In March 1975 he killed Adele Price, an eighty-nine-year-old widow in Kensington. Both were burglaries that turned into killings.

On March 21, 1975, he went to Shorne in Kent to see Father Anthony Crean, a Catholic priest who had befriended him and whom he had previously robbed. He attacked Crean with an axe and a knife in the priest's own bathroom and left him in the bath. He was arrested days later.

He confessed to eleven killings and later retracted most of them, and only three were pursued. In November 1975 the Crown accepted pleas of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility on all three, and he was sentenced to life. He has been refused parole repeatedly, most recently in 2023. Home Office and NHS reviews of the case examined how a man with his file had been discharged, and it has been cited ever since in arguments about the release of patients from secure hospitals.