The Boardmans had been married twenty-seven years and were known up and down the Fylde coast; Eric, a former electrician, had run pleasure boat trips off the beach at Blackpool. On October 30, 1998, one of their daughters let herself into their house on Seafield Road, in Bispham on the North Shore, and found them both dead. Joan, seventy-four, who had throat cancer, had been strangled and left on the living room floor, and a basket of washing had been emptied over her. Eric, seventy-seven in most reports and seventy-six in others, had been beaten about the head, neck and face and lay in the hallway under a toppled wardrobe. Beneath his body was a bloodied cosh made of batteries bound together.
Two days later, on November 1, police charged Stephen Akinmurele, a twenty-year-old barman who lived nearby, with both murders. He had been born in Nigeria on March 16, 1978, to a Nigerian father and a white British mother, and had come with his mother to the Isle of Man in 1988 before moving to Blackpool to work behind bars in the town's clubs. He had a history of mental illness and, according to the police, of offenses against old people going back to the age of eleven. His girlfriend, Amanda Fitch, later said that when he lost his job at one club in October 1997 he tried to kill himself.
The Boardmans were not the first. Within weeks he was also charged with the murder of Jemimah Cargill, seventy-five, his former landlady, who had died in a fire in her Blackpool flat earlier that October, before the Boardmans were killed, a death that had not been treated as murder. A joint inquiry by the Lancashire and Isle of Man police then went back over deaths in Ballasalla, the village in the south of the island where he had grown up. In November and December 1998 he was charged with the murders of Dorothy Harris, sixty-eight, partly blind and partly deaf, found after a fire at her home in February 1996, and Marjorie Ashton, seventy-two, found in her home in May 1995. Accounts differ on how Ashton died, some saying she was strangled and others that she too was found after a house fire.
Mick Gradwell, the head of Blackpool CID, described the young man he arrested as capable and composed, but with something missing from his eyes. The lead investigator spoke of a pathological hatred of old people, and the papers called him the Cul-de-Sac Killer for the quiet residential streets where his victims lived. Detectives on both sides of the Irish Sea reopened other house fires and sudden deaths among the elderly.
In custody he confessed to three more killings, among them a rambler on the Isle of Man whom he said he had shot and buried on a cliff above the sea. Manx police found a gun bearing his fingerprint and dug extensively, but found no body. The detectives came to believe that these confessions were false, offered to hide what they saw as his real motive, the hatred of the old.
The two Isle of Man charges were dropped on a technicality, and he was left to face trial on the three Blackpool murders. A prison doctor, Andrzej Rozyki, later said Akinmurele had told him he lay in bed at night thinking about killing. He had tried twice before to take his own life, and Amanda Fitch had warned the prison authorities that he was a danger to himself.
On August 28, 1999, weeks before the trial was due to open, he was found hanged by a ligature from the window of his cell in Manchester prison, the former Strangeways. He was twenty-one. A note was found in his pocket, addressed to his mother in most accounts: "I couldn't take any more of feeling like how I do now, always wanting to kill." It went on to say that what he had done was wrong, that he felt for them, and that this did not mean he would not do it again. An inquest jury in Manchester returned a verdict of suicide.
Because he died untried, none of the five charges was ever put to a jury. The case against him on the Blackpool deaths rested on the evidence the police had assembled and on his own admissions; on the Isle of Man deaths it was never brought to court at all.