In November 1828 the Crown in Edinburgh held four people on suspicion of murder, one body, and not enough evidence to convict any of them. It solved the problem by making a bargain with one of the four. William Hare, who by the confession of his partner had helped to kill a string of Edinburgh’s poor and old, was offered immunity if he would give evidence against William Burke. He did, Burke was convicted and executed, and Hare walked out of prison in February 1829 and vanished from the record.
These cases come from Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and they cover almost two centuries. None of them belongs to the Republic of Ireland. The Irish threads run through men who were born there and killed elsewhere: Burke, from County Tyrone, and Hare, from near Newry, in Edinburgh; Kieran Kelly, from County Laois, in London; and a Scottish delivery driver, Robert Black, whose conviction for the murder of a nine-year-old girl in County Antrim came before a court in Armagh. Wales supplies one case, a cinema owner in the north of the country. Scotland supplies the rest, along with a legal story that runs through several of them: a judge who ended a murder trial in 2007 only for a new law to allow a second one in 2014, a reservation of charges by the Crown in 1828, and a series of three Glasgow deaths that no court has ever resolved.
William Burke was executed in Edinburgh on January 28, 1829, for the murder of an elderly Irishwoman, Margery Campbell or Docherty. That was the only killing a jury heard. In statements he made after his conviction, Burke said that in 1828 he and another Irish laborer, William Hare, had killed sixteen people, most of them poor and old, and sold the bodies to Dr. Robert Knox, who ran a private school of anatomy in Edinburgh. Hare never stood trial. The case gave English a verb, "to burke," and according to the Dictionary of Irish Biography it also helped bring about the Anatomy Act of 1832, which regulated how the medical schools obtained bodies.
The Dictionary of Irish Biography says Burke was born about 1793, probably at Urney, near Strabane in County Tyrone, the son of a laborer; the University of Edinburgh gives 1792. He served in the Donegal Militia, crossed to Scotland in 1818 to work as a laborer on the Union Canal, and later earned his living mending shoes in Edinburgh. Hare, the Anatomical Museum says, was born near Newry and came to Scotland as a laborer on the same canal; it describes him as uncouth, illiterate and quarrelsome. By 1827 Hare and his wife kept a lodging house in the West Port, and Burke and his partner moved in. The first body the two men sold was that of a lodger, an old army pensioner named Donald, who died of natural causes in late 1827 owing Hare rent. Knox’s assistants, Burke said, made it plain that they would be glad to see the two men again.
Almost everything known about the individual deaths comes from Burke, in two confessions made after he had been sentenced. The Caledonian Mercury printed them on January 5, 1829. Burke said he could not give the days or the names of all the victims, because he and Hare were usually drunk at the time. By the version he dictated and corrected for the Edinburgh Evening Courant, the first killing came on February 12, 1828, and the victim was Abigail Simpson, a woman from Gilmerton. Others were never named: an Englishman from Cheshire, an old woman who lodged for a night, and an old woman who came from Glasgow with her grandson, a boy of about twelve. Mary Paterson, whom the indictment called Mary Paterson or Mitchell, was a young woman of eighteen or twenty. James Wilson, called Daft Jamie, was 18, a familiar figure who entertained local children, according to a broadside printed after his death. Burke’s two accounts of Wilson’s death differ on who did what, but both put Hare in the room. Burke insisted that Hare was his only accomplice.
The National Library of Scotland explains why bodies were scarce. Dissection was essential to medical teaching, the only legal supply was the bodies of executed criminals, and the schools relied on "resurrection men" who supplied bodies by illegal means. Knox, the University of Edinburgh’s Anatomical Museum says, was a freelance teacher who ran private classes in competition with the University’s own.
The last death came on October 31, 1828: Margery Campbell or Docherty, an elderly woman from Innishowen, Burke’s own part of Ireland. It came to light in Edinburgh the next day. The University of Edinburgh dates the arrest of Burke to November 1 and Hare’s to the day after, and the National Library of Scotland says all four were detained on November 3. Burke, his partner, Hare and Hare’s wife were charged with murder after specialists examined the body.
The Crown had one body and little evidence of how the woman had died, and both the University’s Anatomical Museum and its medical college say there was not enough evidence to convict. The Lord Advocate, Sir William Rae, decided that one of the four had to give evidence against the others. He chose Hare, who was to be "turned King’s evidence" and was offered immunity from prosecution if his evidence would lead to the conviction of Burke and Burke’s partner. Hare’s wife could not be compelled to give evidence against her husband. The Faculty of Advocates says that because the Crown might not otherwise have proved its case, both Hare and his wife were invited to turn King’s evidence.
The trial opened on December 24, 1828, before the High Court of Justiciary, and ran through the night; the verdict came on Christmas morning, just under 24 hours later. The indictment charged three murders: Mary Paterson or Mitchell, James Wilson, and Margery Campbell or Docherty. Only the third went to the jury, and the Crown reserved the others and never proceeded with them. The jury convicted Burke. He was sentenced to death and was executed at the head of Libberton’s Wynd in the Lawnmarket on Wednesday, January 28, 1829.
Hare was released from prison on February 5, 1829, after being held for his own protection. Within days a crowd threatened him at Dumfries and he was taken out of the town under guard. The record ends with him on the way to Carlisle. A private prosecution for the murder of James Wilson failed. The University of Edinburgh and other institutions describe the two men together as having killed at least sixteen people; those are the judgment of later institutions and Burke’s own statements, not a finding by any court about Hare.
Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel was executed at Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow at 8 a.m. on July 11, 1958, after a jury at the High Court in Glasgow convicted him of seven murders. The killings ran from January 1956 to the first days of 1958. His victims, The Scotsman has reported, were male and female and ranged in age from 10 to 45. In January 1958 he gave police statements confessing to eight killings, and he was also the chief suspect in the death of a taxi driver, Sydney Dunn, near Newcastle upon Tyne on December 8, 1957. He was never tried for Dunn’s death.
The case is remembered for three things: the length of time he went uncaught, the innocent man who was charged with three of the murders, and the trial at which Manuel dismissed his lawyers and defended himself. The press named him the Beast of Birkenshaw, after the Lanarkshire village where his family settled.
Manuel was born in Manhattan in March 1927; the Glasgow Police Museum gives the date as March 15 and says he was the second of three children of Scottish parents, who brought the family back to Scotland in 1932. They lived in Motherwell, then in Coventry from 1937. By his own account in the police museum’s record, he stole an offertory box from a chapel in 1938, and from then on he was repeatedly in trouble and was sent to approved schools and borstals. On February 16, 1946, he broke into a bungalow in Sandyhills, Lanarkshire. Detective Constable William Muncie, who would rise to become Assistant Chief Constable of Strathclyde Police, arrested him; he would meet Manuel again twelve years later. Manuel was sentenced to eight years in Peterhead Prison for housebreaking and assaults, with other charges, and the judge praised the way he had conducted his own defense. He was released in the summer of 1953, at 26.
The victims were Anne Kneilands, 17, in East Kilbride in January 1956; Marion Watt, her daughter Vivienne, 16, and her sister Margaret Brown, in Burnside, Rutherglen, on September 17, 1956; Isabelle Cooke, 17, of Mount Vernon, Glasgow, in December 1957; and Peter Smart, 45, his wife Doris and their son Michael, in Uddingston, about January 1, 1958. Detective Chief Superintendent James Hendry of Lanarkshire CID led the Kneilands inquiry. A constable told detectives about a Gas Board worker named Manuel with a criminal record and fresh scratches on his face; his father gave him an alibi, and he was questioned and not charged. Manuel refused to speak to detectives after the Burnside killings.
Suspicion for Burnside fell instead on Marion Watt’s husband, William Watt, a former War Reserve policeman who had been away on a fishing trip in Argyll. A ferry master and another motorist picked him out at an identity parade, and he was charged with the three murders and held in Barlinnie. Manuel was in Barlinnie at the same time and approached Watt, claiming he knew who the real killer was. Watt’s solicitor, Lawrence Dowdall, became convinced that Manuel himself was responsible. After 67 days in custody the case against Watt collapsed and he was released.
The break came after Uddingston. Chief Inspector Muncie remembered the young housebreaker he had arrested in 1946, and banknotes taken from the Smart family were traced to Manuel’s spending in local pubs. Manuel was arrested and charged with the Smart murders on January 14, 1958. The next day he asked to see Inspector Robert McNeill of the Lanarkshire force, and offered to confess on condition that his father, who had been arrested for reset (the Scottish offense of receiving stolen goods), was freed. He then made a series of confessions covering Anne Kneilands, the Watt household, the Smart family and Isabelle Cooke. The police museum’s account calls him the most prolific multiple murderer Scotland had known.
The trial opened at the High Court in Glasgow on May 12, 1958, and lasted 14 days. Manuel maintained that he was innocent, and at points in police interviews he explained his detailed knowledge of the crimes by claiming that he had spoken to the "real" murderer, according to an account published by the Boston public broadcaster GBH in 2019. During the trial he dismissed his lawyers and conducted his own defense, and GBH reported that he kept notebooks in which he planned it. The jury took two hours and 21 minutes and convicted him of seven murders. According to the police museum, he was sentenced to death at 4.45 p.m. on May 26, 1958. His appeal failed. He was 31. The Scotsman has described him as the second-to-last person executed at Barlinnie.
GBH reported that Muncie had pursued Manuel for twelve years, and that Manuel often sent the detective birthday and Christmas cards. The same report said that documents about the case were closed until 2033. The number of people Manuel killed is not settled: he was convicted of seven, he confessed to eight, and the full number of people he assaulted is unclear, The Scotsman has noted.
Three young women were killed in Glasgow between February 1968 and October 1969. Patricia Docker, 25, died in February 1968, Jemima McDonald in August 1969, and Helen Puttock, 29, on the last night of October 1969. All three were mothers. Each had spent the evening at the same dance hall in the east end of the city, and police and the press have linked the deaths to one unknown man. Former senior detectives who reviewed the files have said publicly that they do not believe all three were the work of one person.
The third killing produced the only witness. Helen Puttock had gone to the dance with her sister, and the two women spent the evening with two men who both said their name was John. One said he came from Castlemilk and worked as a slater, and at the end of the night he walked off alone to catch a bus. The sisters and the other man took a taxi west. On the journey he talked of a strict religious upbringing. "I don’t drink at Hogmanay, I pray," he said, as The Scotsman quoted it, and he called the dance hall a place of sin, an "adulterous den of iniquity" in STV’s account. Helen’s sister was dropped off first. She described him as tall and slim, well dressed, polite and well spoken, with reddish or fair hair, and she recalled that he gave his name as John Templeton or Sempleson. The Sunday Post reports that a journalist coined the name Bible John in 1969, and the police went along with it.
At about 1:30 that morning a witness saw a well-dressed young man matching the sister’s description walking toward the ferry across the Clyde. Police were never able to trace him, STV reported. The man from Castlemilk was never traced either. Helen’s sister never discussed that night in public; she died in 2010, aged 74.
The inquiry was the largest Scotland had seen. More than 100 detectives took more than 50,000 statements in door-to-door inquiries, STV reported. VICE, citing accounts of the first year of the hunt, says police interviewed about 920 doctors and dentists, more than 400 barbers and hairdressers and 260 tailors, and that golf clubs handed over lists of members who had scored a hole in one. Men who were questioned and cleared were given cards stating that they were not Bible John.
The first death was not at first connected to any other. Patricia Docker went dancing in February 1968 and her death came to light on February 23, according to STV. There is an early confusion in the record about where she had spent the evening: The Scotsman’s 2010 account places her at a different ballroom, while STV and later accounts place her at the east end hall where the other two women were seen. Jemima McDonald, known as Mimi, a mother of three, went to the same dance hall in August 1969. Her age is given as 32 by STV, The Scotsman and most press accounts, and as 31 by the Sunday Post. STV reported that witnesses said she left at around midnight with a tall, slim young man with red hair. Her death produced more leads than the first, and for the first time police released a description of the man they wanted to trace.
Helen Puttock’s death came on the night of the taxi ride. In 2010 her husband told The Scotsman that he believed his sister-in-law when she said she would never forget the face of the man in the taxi, but added: "Now Jean has gone and more time passes, it will never be solved."
Police Scotland said in 2018 that the cases are never closed, STV reported. In October 2023, Greatest Hits Radio reported, the force said it was assessing claims made in a BBC Scotland podcast with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. Joan McAlpine wrote in the Sunday Post in December 2022 that it was still not too late to deliver justice. No one has ever been charged.
Archibald Hall spent most of his adult life as a thief who passed himself off as a gentleman. Born in Govan, Glasgow, in 1924, the son of a postman, he gave himself a new name, Roy Fontaine, taught himself the manners and knowledge of the households he meant to rob, and took jobs as a butler to wealthy families. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, The Scotsman wrote in 2005, he was either in prison or living that second life. He received his first prison sentence at 17. Prison became his school: Stephen McGinty wrote in The Scotsman that Hall studied Burke’s Peerage and Who’s Who in his cell, took elocution lessons to lose his Glasgow accent, and became "a self-taught authority on antiques." Roy Fontaine was a tribute to two stars, Roy Rogers and Joan Fontaine, and under that name he posed, The Scotsman wrote, "as an aristocrat or a wealthy American."
In 1977, after his release from his latest prison term, the thefts turned into killing. Hall took a post as butler to Lady Margaret Hudson at Kirtleton House, near Waterbeck in Dumfriesshire. He had planned to rob her but, McGinty wrote, grew so fond of her that he changed his mind. The arrangement was upset by David Wright, a former fellow prisoner who knew enough about Hall’s past to threaten to expose him. Wright’s death was Hall’s first killing; The Scotsman’s 2005 article places it after Hall’s release in 1977, while McGinty’s 2012 article places it in 1976.
The second and third victims were an elderly couple in London, Dorothy and Walter Scott-Elliot. The History of Parliament gives Walter Scott-Elliott’s birth date as October 9, 1895, and records that he was educated at Eton, worked as a company director, and belonged to the Labour Party and the Fabian Society. He won Accrington for Labour at the general election of July 5, 1945, and held the seat until Parliament was dissolved on February 23, 1950. Its note on his death reads: "Murdered by his butler, together with his second wife." Parliament’s historic Hansard record and the History of Parliament both give the date of his death as December 14, 1977. McGinty wrote that Dorothy Scott-Elliot overheard Hall planning a robbery with an accomplice, Michael Kitto.
The fourth victim was a woman named Mary Coggle, whom McGinty spells Coggles, who had helped Hall and Kitto. The last was Hall’s half-brother, Donald. Donald had recently been released from prison, and Hall hated him, McGinty wrote, believing him to be the child of their mother’s adultery. In January 1978, in Cumbria, Donald began asking too many questions, according to The Scotsman.
Hall was arrested in North Berwick, on the East Lothian coast, in January 1978. Under questioning he confessed to all five killings. He was jailed for life: The Scotsman’s 2005 article says so in those words, a short Scotsman report of May 1, 2012, gives the year as 1978, and McGinty’s article describes natural-life imprisonment "for killing five people" but gives 1977. Which charges were tried at which court has not been reported. Kitto received four life sentences.
Hall spent the rest of his life in prison. In 1992, McGinty wrote, he telephoned Paul Pender, then a script editor at BBC Scotland, and told him he was "the man to tell my story." Pender made eight visits to Full Sutton prison in Yorkshire over the following year to prepare a six-part drama. The visits went wrong: Hall pressed Pender to smuggle money into the prison, threatened to have him killed when he stopped, and sent unsettling postcards; Pender moved house, later moved to Los Angeles, and published his account in 2012 as The Butler Did It. Asked his view of Hall, Pender said: "He was evil." Hall also wrote about himself. The Scotsman quoted his 1999 book, A Perfect Gentleman: "There is a side of me, when aroused, that is cold and completely heartless." He died in prison in 2002, at Kingston Prison in Portsmouth, aged 78.
On the night of Saturday, October 15, 1977, Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, both 17, were out for the evening in Edinburgh. Their deaths came to light the next day in East Lothian. For almost 30 years no one was charged. When a man finally stood trial in 2007, the judge stopped the case at the end of the prosecution evidence and acquitted him.
That man was Angus Robertson Sinclair, born in Glasgow on June 7, 1945, who had already killed a seven-year-old girl as a teenager, had been serving a life sentence for offenses against children since 1982, and in 2001 had been convicted of the 1978 murder of another 17-year-old, Mary Gallacher. In 2011 the Scottish Parliament passed the Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act, which allowed an acquittal to be set aside where new and compelling evidence emerged. In 2014 Sinclair became the first person in Scotland retried under it. A jury at the High Court sitting in Livingston convicted him of the murder of both girls, with other charges, and the judge, Lord Matthews, set a minimum term of 37 years, the longest a Scottish court had imposed. He died in prison in 2019, aged 73, without admitting the crimes.
A 2007 Scotsman profile described Sinclair as the youngest of three children in a fairly typical working-class upbringing. In January 1961, at 15, he was convicted at Glasgow Sheriff Court of an offense against a young girl and put on probation for three years. Later that year, at 16, he killed Catherine Reehill, 7. He was charged with murder, and prosecutors accepted his plea to culpable homicide. On August 25, 1961, at the High Court in Edinburgh, he was sentenced to 10 years' detention. The sentencing judge, Lord Mackintosh, called him "callous, cunning and wicked," The Scotsman reported in 2007. He was released in 1968 or 1969. On August 31, 1982, at the High Court in Edinburgh, he was convicted of offenses against young children and sentenced to life imprisonment. Press reports describe the victims as children aged six to 14, assaulted between 1978 and 1982.
Christine Eadie was born on February 21, 1960, and Helen Anne Scott on July 5, 1960. Both had recently left school and started work. When Lord Matthews sentenced Sinclair in 2014 he described Helen as shy and retiring and Christine as more outgoing. Helen wanted to be a children’s nurse, the court heard. Lothian and Borders Police issued descriptions of two men and later a photofit. Over the years the inquiry took witness statements from more than 20,000 people in Britain and Europe, interviewed Scottish trawler crews in Plymouth, and questioned Peter Sutcliffe. Sinclair’s name did not feature in the investigation at any of those stages.
Forensic scientists kept the girls' clothing. In 1988 samples sent to a laboratory could not be profiled. In 1998, according to the Edinburgh Evening News, a male profile was obtained, and police tested about 400 men, every result negative. Retesting later showed DNA from two men but no database match. In April 2004 scientists tested another part of the same stain and obtained a match to Sinclair, with odds of a billion to one against the DNA coming from anyone else. Sinclair’s brother-in-law, by then dead since 1996, was linked through the DNA of his relatives. The same year police began a review of seven unsolved killings of young women; the Sunday Post reported in 2019 that it linked Sinclair to four killings in Glasgow in 1977, as well as to the deaths of Christine and Helen. He was never charged over those four.
Mary Gallacher, 17, was killed in Glasgow in 1978. Advances in DNA work on material from her case linked Sinclair to it, the Scotsman reported, and on June 4, 2001, a jury at the High Court in Glasgow convicted him of her murder. He received a second life sentence with a punishment part of 15 years. The judge was Lord Carloway, who later sat on the appeal bench that considered whether Sinclair could be tried again; the court rejected Sinclair’s request that he step aside.
Sinclair appeared on petition for the 1977 deaths on March 31, 2005, while serving his life sentence. The trial opened in 2007 and ended on September 11, 2007 when the judge, Lord Clarke, ruled that there was no case to answer. Under the 2011 Act, the High Court released its ruling allowing a retrial in November 2014, as the Law Society of Scotland reported. The second trial ended on November 14, 2014 with the guilty verdict. Sinclair dropped an appeal against conviction in August 2015, and on March 24, 2016, the appeal court, in an opinion delivered by Lady Paton, refused his appeal against the 37-year term. He died on March 11, 2019, at HMP Glenochil, in Clackmannanshire. The family of Catherine Reehill had greeted his release in 1968 with dismay, her cousin told STV, and feared he would kill again. The journalist Russell Findlay, writing for STV in 2020, called Sinclair "Scotland’s luckiest serial killer."
Peter Tobin was convicted of three murders in three years. In May 2007 a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh convicted him of the rape and murder of Angelika Kluk, a 23-year-old Polish student in Glasgow, who had been working at a church there in September 2006. A police inquiry into his past, called Operation Anagram, then led investigators to a house he had rented in Margate, Kent, in 1991. In November 2007 the deaths of two teenagers came to light there: Vicky Hamilton, 15, from Redding, near Falkirk, in February 1991, and Dinah McNicol, 18, from Tillingham, Essex, in August 1991. Juries in Dundee in 2008 and in Chelmsford in 2009 convicted him of both murders. He never admitted any of the killings, and police who investigated him said they believed there were other victims.
Tobin was born on August 27, 1946, according to the record of the inquiry into his death, in Johnstone, Renfrewshire. The Scotsman reported in 2022 that as a teenager and young man he served prison terms for burglary, forgery and conspiracy. The Edinburgh Evening News reported that he married his first wife in 1969, was divorced in 1971, married again in 1973, and moved to Bathgate in 1990 with his third wife, who left him that year. All three former wives said he had assaulted them repeatedly, according to The Scotsman. Police said he used at least 40 aliases. Tenancy records read to the jury in 2008 showed that he lived in Margate from March 25 to December 15, 1991.
In August 1993 Tobin was living in Hampshire, and on May 18, 1994, at Winchester Crown Court, then 47, he pleaded guilty to offenses against two 14-year-old girls, both of whom survived. Mr. Justice Waterhouse sentenced him to 14 years in all, saying the girls' prospects in life might have been "gravely and permanently impaired." He was released in 2004 and placed on the sex offenders register. He moved to Paisley, left after a complaint in 2005, and a warrant was issued in November 2005 after he moved without telling the police, as the register required.
By September 2006 he was working at a Glasgow church under the name Pat McLaughlin. Church staff did not know about his record. When police spoke to him about her he gave his false name, and then he left Glasgow. He was admitted to a hospital in London under the name James Kelly, and a member of staff recognized him from the media coverage. On October 9, 2006, he appeared at Glasgow Sheriff Court charged with her murder. The trial at the High Court in Edinburgh ran for six weeks, from March 23 to May 4, 2007, before Lord Menzies. The advocate depute Dorothy Bain, who later became Lord Advocate, prosecuted; Donald Findlay QC led the defense. Tobin received life with a minimum of 21 years, plus 30 months for breaching the sex offender register.
Vicky Hamilton’s family spent 16 years not knowing what had happened to her, the Falkirk Herald wrote, and her mother died in 1993, still hoping that her daughter would come back. He was charged over Vicky in July 2007. At the High Court in Dundee in December 2008 a jury convicted him of her murder, and his minimum term was raised to 30 years. Dinah McNicol’s murder conviction followed at Chelmsford Crown Court on December 16, 2009, with a life sentence reported as a whole life order. The Scotsman reported in October 2010 that he dropped an appeal over the Hamilton sentence.
Operation Anagram also examined unsolved killings across Britain. The Scotsman reported in December 2009 that dozens of murders were being re-examined, and in 2022 that the full extent of his crimes might never be known. Police looked at the Bible John murders of 1968 and 1969 and reported no evidence linking him to them. In May 2022 an inquest into the death of Jessie Earl, who had died in 1980, concluded that she had been murdered by an unknown third party; the Edinburgh Evening News reported that DNA did not match Tobin. Louise Kay, in 1988, was another case reviewed and never charged against him. Tobin died on October 8, 2022, at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, aged 76, from bronchopneumonia following a broken hip, with vascular disease and prostate cancer, as the fatal accident inquiry determined. His ashes were scattered at sea.
Robert Black was a delivery driver who carried posters for a London firm to towns across Britain and to Northern Ireland. He was convicted of kidnapping and murdering four girls between 1981 and 1986: Jennifer Cardy, 9, in County Antrim; Susan Maxwell, 11, at Coldstream on the Scottish border; Caroline Hogg, 5, in Edinburgh; and Sarah Harper, 10, in Leeds. The cases against him were circumstantial. They rested on his employer’s records and his own fuel receipts, which placed him on the routes near each girl at the time, and on the pattern of his other offenses.
He was caught by a neighbor. On July 14, 1990, a retired sub-postmaster named David Herkes alerted police in the village of Stow, in the Scottish Borders, to the abduction of a six-year-old girl. Black was arrested the same day and later pleaded guilty at Selkirk Sheriff Court to abducting her, with other charges. Four years later an English court convicted him of three of the murders. A fourth conviction followed in Northern Ireland in 2011. He died in prison in January 2016, weeks before, police said, he would probably have been charged with the 1978 death of a 13-year-old Devon girl, Genette Tate.
Black was born in 1947 near Falkirk, to a single mother who worked in a factory, according to a Press Association profile published on the day of his death. Within weeks she had placed him for fostering at Kinlochleven, in the West Highlands. Both foster parents had died within 11 years, and he was moved to a children’s care setting in Falkirk and later to one in Musselburgh. In 1963 he was convicted at Greenock Juvenile Court, and in 1967 at Oban Sheriff Court of offenses against girls; he was sent to borstal training. The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland later summarized his record as two convictions for "interference with a girl," the first at 16 and the second at 19. That was the last conviction on his record until 1990, and it was for police purposes nearly invisible. Andrew Watt, the former chief superintendent who led the national investigation after 1990, said in 2011 that the records of his teenage offense in the old Argyll and Bute police area had been lost when police and courts were reorganized in the 1960s and 1970s. "It was a different era," Watt said.
In 1976 he took a job as a van driver with a London delivery firm, Poster Despatch and Storage Ltd, known as PDS. For more than a decade he delivered posters across Britain. The firm also ran deliveries to Northern Ireland, using a van that went over on the Liverpool to Belfast ferry, according to the Court of Appeal, with a bonus of 50 pounds for drivers who made the Ireland run. Black later accepted in interviews with police that he had been a regular driver on that run. The firm kept his delivery schedules and the fuel receipts he signed, and those papers would one day place him, by date and time, near each girl.
Jennifer Cardy, 9, of Ballinderry, County Antrim, was killed on August 12, 1981. No one was charged at the time, and the investigation was reopened only in 2002. Susan Maxwell lived on the family farm near Cornhill-on-Tweed; she was killed on July 30, 1982. Twenty years later her father wrote an article that began, "Life continues, but the pain of loss never fades." Caroline Hogg, 5, of Portobello, Edinburgh, was killed on July 8, 1983. Tom Wood, later deputy chief constable of Lothian and Borders Police, said officers quickly saw "abundant similarities" with the Maxwell case of a year before, and that the killing "knocked the area on its head." Sarah Harper, 10, of Morley, Leeds, was killed on March 26, 1986.
The Maxwell and Hogg cases were joined. Hector Clark, then assistant chief constable of Northumbria Police, led the joint inquiry, with incident rooms in Northumberland and at Leith; Caroline’s case was among the first featured on the BBC’s Crimewatch program. Over the years the Black inquiry gathered 189,000 witness statements, The Scotsman reported. The Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court convicted Black in 1994 of the kidnapping and murder of the three girls and of an offense against a 15-year-old girl in Nottingham in 1988. Mr. Justice Macpherson imposed life sentences with a minimum term of 35 years.
In December 2009 RTE reported that Black had been charged with the murder of Jennifer Cardy. The trial at Armagh Crown Court ended on October 27, 2011, with a jury verdict of guilty. On December 8, 2011, Mr. Justice Weatherup imposed life for murder with a minimum term of 25 years from October 27, 2011, and a discretionary life sentence for kidnapping. The Court of Appeal in Northern Ireland dismissed the appeal on June 27, 2013. Pathologists at the trial disagreed over the cause of her death; the judge made his own finding.
Black died at HMP Maghaberry on January 12, 2016, aged 68, and an inquest jury returned a finding of cardiac arrest on December 7, 2018. Devon and Cornwall Police said in 2016 that he would in all probability have been charged in the Tate case, and in April 2016 a file was passed to prosecutors. His ashes were scattered at sea.
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 in Clapham that he was sharing with Kelly. 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. A detective on the 1980s investigation estimated five or six. None of the deaths beyond the two in 1984 was proved in court.
Kelly was born in Rathdowney, County Laois, in 1929, according to Mulhern’s book extract in the Leinster Leader, and spent most of his youth in Dublin. His time in uniform is reported two ways: coverage of the RTE podcast and television series said he joined the British Army at 18 and was dismissed in 1951, while The Irish Post’s 2015 summary of Platt’s account said he served in the Irish Army. He married twice, once in Dublin and once in London, and worked as a laborer, chiefly in building. A builder who had employed him as a casual laborer for several years knew nothing of any killings but was wary of what he called Kelly’s "explosive temper," the Leinster Express and Midlands 103 reported. The Irish Post put his arrival in London in 1953; Mulhern’s account says the 1960s. By the early 1980s he was living rough, and its 2016 report called him a vagrant with a long history of violence, theft and alcoholism.
Kelly had faced earlier prosecutions that did not lead to convictions. Mulhern said his research showed Kelly was acquitted of another London murder in 1977 and that two charges of attempted murder against him were dropped in 1982. Platt’s account, as The Irish Post summarized it, adds that records released in 2013 showed Kelly had been charged with eight murders before Platt became involved and acquitted of all of them. Mulhern’s published findings do not match every part of it, and the differences have never been settled.
In 1983 Kelly was arrested in south London over the theft of a wedding ring. Mulhern said the interviews that followed were recorded, and the RTE documentary team that made the 2023 television series had access to 120 minutes of the police audio. In those recordings, he said, Kelly admits to many more killings than the two for which he was convicted. The counts vary: upwards of 10 (The Irish Post, 2019), 16 (2015), 18 (Scripps News, July 2015), and in Mulhern’s phrase in 2016 numbers ranging from 12 to 14 to 18 and up to 31. Several of the deaths he described were said to have happened on the London Underground. 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 first death in his account, coverage of the 2020 podcast and the 2023 series said, was that of a man named Christie Smith in 1953; no charge was ever brought over it.
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."
Peter Howard Moore, born in 1946 and from Kinmel Bay on the North Wales coast, owned a small chain of cinemas in Bagillt, Denbigh, Holyhead and Blaenau Ffestiniog. Local reports describe him as a softly spoken film enthusiast who always wore black, and Bangor University says that earned him the nickname "the man in black." Between September and December 1995 four men died in Anglesey, Denbighshire and on the coast near Abergele. Henry Roberts, 56, died near Caergeiliog on September 23. Edward Carthy, 28, of Liverpool, died near Ruthin on the weekend of October 7. Keith Randles, 49, died on Anglesey on November 30, according to the European court’s summary, though North Wales reports place it in November. Anthony Davies, 40, died at Pensarn, near Abergele, shortly before Christmas, which local reports date December 18, 1995.
Police arrested Moore two days after the death of Anthony Davies, according to a 2020 account. On December 21, 1995, he telephoned Dylan Rhys Jones, an Abergele solicitor then aged 30, who had acted for him on his late mother’s will, and asked him to act for him. In the early hours of December 24, at Llandudno police station, Moore confessed to two North Wales Police detectives in an interview that lasted about 45 minutes, with Jones beside him. He admitted the two deaths on Anglesey, the death at Pensarn, and a fourth that police knew nothing about, that of Edward Carthy. The next morning he withdrew the confession. He said he had made it to protect a friend he called "Jason," a name Jones linked to the killer in the Friday the 13th films that Moore had screened in his cinemas. Jones has said that he has often asked himself whether the confession was true or a performance, and that Moore "changed his tune repeatedly" over the years. Moore later claimed to have assaulted "many men" in the Conwy Valley over about 20 years, often while dressed as a police officer or in a Nazi-style uniform, according to Jones’s account published in 2020; those claims were never the subject of a charge.
Moore pleaded not guilty. His defense was that someone else had committed the murders, although he admitted being present at all of them except the second, the European court’s summary records. He told the jury that a man he called "Jason" was responsible. The prosecution was led by Alex Carlile. On November 29, 1996, after a trial in the Crown Court, Moore was convicted of four counts of murder. The European Court of Human Rights gives the court as the Crown Court at Chester; North Wales reports from 2020 say he was sentenced at Mold. The trial judge recommended that he never be released; the Lord Chief Justice recommended a minimum of 30 years; and on September 27, 2002, the Secretary of State set a whole life tariff.
On June 12, 2008, the High Court, on Moore’s application for a review under the Criminal Justice Act 2003, declined to adopt the 30-year recommendation. It held that the case called for a whole life starting point because it involved two or more murders and a substantial degree of premeditation, identified no mitigating features, and made a whole life order. On February 26, 2009, the Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal, holding that the High Court had been not only entitled but plainly right.
He took the case to the European Court of Human Rights, where it was joined with the applications of Douglas Vinter and Jeremy Bamber under the name Vinter and Others v. the United Kingdom. On January 17, 2012, a Chamber of seven judges ruled against them by four votes to three, finding no violation of Article 3 in Moore’s case. In July 2013 the Grand Chamber ruled that the British system of whole life orders, as it then stood, breached Article 3 because it offered no clear prospect of review. The ruling changed nothing for Moore’s release, but it began a legal argument between the British courts and Strasbourg that ran until 2017, through R v McLoughlin and R v Newell in the Court of Appeal in February 2014 and Hutchinson v. the United Kingdom in January 2017. He was held at HMP Wakefield in 2013 and reported there as a Category A prisoner in September 2020, when, Deeside.com reported, he threatened legal action to block a new book about his crimes.
The courts in these cases ended the same kind of case in very different ways. Burke was executed after a trial on one count, and the Crown reserved the rest. Manuel was convicted of seven murders in a trial he conducted himself, and executed six weeks after sentence. Hall was jailed for life after confessing. Sinclair was acquitted in 2007, convicted in 2014 under a law passed in between, and given the longest minimum term a Scottish court had set. Tobin and Black were each convicted in separate trials in different countries, with the inquiry into their pasts producing the later cases. In Wales the question that outlived the trial was not guilt but whether a sentence with no prospect of release could stand. Two of the files never reached a verdict at all: Hare was released in 1829 without a trial, and nobody has ever been charged as Bible John. Kelly’s claimed thirty years of killings reached a court only twice.
The numbers in these cases are rarely settled. Burke said sixteen; Manuel was convicted of seven and confessed to eight; Kelly was said to have admitted anything from five or six to thirty-one. Each figure comes from a confession or a police estimate, and the courts convicted on what they could prove. The three Glasgow women are still counted as three, though the detectives who reviewed the files do not agree that one man was responsible.
• February 12, 1828: First killing in Burke’s confession; October 31, 1828, Margery Campbell or Docherty, the killing for which he was convicted.
• December 24 to 25, 1828: Burke convicted in Edinburgh; Hare gives evidence for the Crown.
• January 28, 1829: Burke executed; February 5, 1829, Hare released.
• January 1956 to January 1958: The Manuel killings, in East Kilbride, Burnside, Mount Vernon and Uddingston.
• January 14, 1958: Manuel arrested and charged; May 1958 convicted; July 11, 1958, executed.
• August 25, 1961: Angus Sinclair sentenced for culpable homicide.
• February 1968 to October 1969: Three Glasgow women killed; the Bible John inquiry begins.
• 1977 to January 1978: Archibald Hall’s five killings; arrested in North Berwick in January 1978.
• October 15, 1977: The Edinburgh deaths later attributed to Sinclair.
• August 12, 1981 to March 26, 1986: The four killings for which Robert Black was convicted.
• 1983: William Boyd dies in Clapham police custody; Kieran Kelly confesses.
• 1984: Kelly convicted at the Old Bailey.
• July 14, 1990: Black arrested at Stow.
• 1991: The Margate house later linked to Peter Tobin.
• 1994: Black convicted of three murders at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court.
• September 23 to December 1995: Four men killed in North Wales; Peter Moore confesses December 24.
• November 29, 1996: Moore convicted of four counts of murder.
• 2001: Kelly dies in prison.
• June 4, 2001: Sinclair convicted of Mary Gallacher’s murder.
• May 4, 2007: Tobin convicted of Angelika Kluk’s murder.
• September 11, 2007: Sinclair’s first Edinburgh trial ends in acquittal.
• June 12, 2008: Whole life order made for Moore.
• December 2008: Tobin convicted of Vicky Hamilton’s murder.
• December 16, 2009: Tobin convicted of Dinah McNicol’s murder.
• October 27, 2011: Black convicted at Armagh of the murder of Jennifer Cardy.
• July 9, 2013: Grand Chamber ruling in Vinter and Others.
• November 14, 2014: Sinclair convicted at the retrial.
• January 12, 2016: Black dies at Maghaberry.
• March 11, 2019: Sinclair dies in custody.
• October 8, 2022: Tobin dies in custody.