Akinmurele was born in 1977 in Nigeria to a Nigerian father and a British mother and was brought up on the Isle of Man and in Blackpool. He worked in bars and hotels.
Between 1995 and 1998 five elderly people died: Jemmimah Cargill, seventy-five, and Dorothy Harris, sixty-eight, and Marjorie Ashton, seventy-two, on the Isle of Man, and Eric Boardman, seventy-seven, and his wife Joan, seventy-four, in Blackpool. They were beaten or strangled in their own homes and the deaths were made to look like accidents or robberies; several were initially recorded as accidental.
He was arrested on November 1, 1998 after the Boardmans were found. He was charged with five murders and remanded.
On August 28, 1999 he hanged himself in his cell at Manchester prison, weeks before his trial was due to begin. There was therefore no trial, no verdict and no judgment.
He was said by police to have expressed a hatred of old people, and the count of five rests on the charges brought rather than on anything proved. The entry should be read as a prosecution that was never tested.