The man who stabbed Anthony Davies on Pensarn Beach at Abergele in December 1995 left his own blood behind. Davies, a forty-year-old crematorium worker, fought back before he died and cut his attacker's hand deeply. A dog walker found his body on December 18, stabbed sixteen times in the abdomen, and a van like Peter Moore's had been seen near the scene. Three days later police arrested Moore, a cinema owner known up and down the North Wales coast, and within a week he had confessed to four murders, one of them a killing no one yet knew had happened.
Peter Howard Moore was born in St Helens, Lancashire, on September 19, 1946, and raised in Kinmel Bay, where he went to Towyn Primary School and Dinorben Secondary Modern. His father, whom Moore described as an abusive alcoholic, ran a hardware shop from the family house; when he died in 1979 Moore took the shop over. He lived with his mother, to whom he was close, until her death in 1993.
He made his name restoring and running small cinemas under the Focus name. He reopened his first, at Bagillt, in 1991, then the Empire in Holyhead, dark for three years, on November 24, 1994, and the 120-seat Futura in Denbigh on August 4, 1995. He also ran one in Blaenau Ffestiniog. He bought secondhand projection equipment and restored it himself so that he could keep his ticket prices low, and he habitually wore a black shirt and tie.
He had another life. By his own later admission he had carried out about twenty assaults over some twenty years, mostly on men, driving around at night in a police or Nazi uniform looking for someone walking alone and beating his victims with a police truncheon. At his trial one man described how, in the Pensarn beach car park on September 22, 1993, Moore told him he was under arrest and handcuffed him; the man got free, came back to find Moore stealing from his car, and was attacked with the truncheon before he ran for help.
The killings began in September 1995 with Henry John Roberts, fifty-six, who lived alone at Caergeiliog on Anglesey. A neighbor found him on his driveway, stabbed more than twenty times, his trousers pulled down. Two versions of how Moore reached him survive. In his confession Moore said he had never met Roberts and had come to the house in dark clothes and a Nazi-style hat, carrying a knife, and that Roberts came out protesting that he was not Jewish. A police officer on the case said instead that Moore had faked a breakdown outside the house days earlier, been invited in and shown Roberts's large collection of Nazi memorabilia, then come back at night and drawn him out with a loud noise. Both accounts agree that he took one of Roberts's swastika flags.
In October he met Edward Carthy, twenty-eight, at Paco, a gay nightclub in Liverpool. Carthy was drunk and asked for a lift home to Birkenhead. Moore drove toward North Wales instead, and when Carthy realized it and tried to get out of the moving car, Moore held him and stabbed him to death, then left his body in Clocaenog Forest.
On November 29 he killed Keith Randles, forty-nine, a nightwatchman living in a caravan to guard machinery at roadworks on Anglesey, on the road toward Llangefni, given in reports as both the A55 and the A5. Moore said he knocked on the caravan and pulled Randles outside, and that Randles begged for his life and fought as he was stabbed. He told detectives he had been worried about money and that the attack was a kind of stress relief. Press reports of the case quoted him as saying he had killed for fun.
After the arrest on December 21, police searched his home and found a bloodied knife and a collection of Nazi memorabilia, and a pond on his land gave up belongings taken from every one of his victims. Moore denied everything until the early hours of December 24, when he called officers to his cell and confessed to four murders, including that of Edward Carthy, whose death the police had not known about. He drew a map to the body in Clocaenog Forest, where animals had scavenged the remains. He also said he had been planning to kill the manager of the HSBC branch in Abergele over a large debt he owed the bank.
Later that same day he withdrew the confession and told police and his solicitor that his boyfriend, Jason, had done the killings. At his trial at Mold Crown Court, which opened on November 11, 1996, he pleaded not guilty and testified that the killer was Alan Williams, a forty-eight-year-old worker at the Empire Hotel in Llandudno whom he called Jason and had met while cruising on a beach in 1995; the nickname was taken as a nod to the killer in the Friday the 13th films. Police had requested guest and staff records from every hotel in the Llandudno area. Moore said he had been present at all four killings without taking part and had confessed falsely to give Jason time to get away. He admitted sexually assaulting men and taking part in the sadomasochistic gay scene in Wales. The prosecutor, Alex Carlile QC, opened by calling him "the man in black," a man of "black thoughts and the blackest of deeds."
The jury convicted him on all four counts, and in November 1996 he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he never be released. In June 2008 the High Court confirmed that he would spend the rest of his life in prison. He took the whole life order to the European Court of Human Rights in 2011. A ruling against him was announced in January 2012, but on July 9, 2013 the court held that such sentences must carry a possibility of review and release to be compatible with human rights. In February 2015, in a case brought by the Sheffield murderer Arthur Hutchinson, the court accepted that British whole life orders could be reviewed in exceptional circumstances and were therefore lawful. No release has followed.
From prison he kept going to law. In 2000 he sued a couple he had let move into his house in 1996 to look after it, saying they had sold everything he owned, and was awarded £12,842. In 2001 he claimed £165,000 from North Wales Police over damage done in the 1995 search and their failure to protect his property while he was in prison; the claim was thrown out before trial. In 2004 the Daily Post refused an advertisement in which he appealed for witnesses to help overturn his convictions. At Wakefield Prison he befriended Harold Shipman, whom he called "the Doctor," and was one of the last people to speak to him before Shipman killed himself in January 2004; he was called to give evidence at the inquest. A report in October 2011 that he had died at Broadmoor Hospital that July was denied. He has also claimed to know who the unidentified man found buried in Clocaenog Forest was; police discounted it, because the dead man's clothing had been made after Moore was already in custody.