Stephen Port was born in Southend on February 22, 1975, and worked as a chef in a bus depot canteen. He lived in an apartment on Cooke Street in Barking and used dating apps and websites to meet young men, whom he gave GHB, a colorless liquid sedative, in doses he knew to be dangerous.
Anthony Walgate, a twenty-three-year-old fashion student, died in June 2014. Port propped the body outside his own front door and rang 999 anonymously. He was arrested, and told police he had found Walgate collapsed. He was charged with perverting the course of justice for lying to the police. The London press called him the Grindr Killer, after the app he used to meet the men.
While he was on bail, Gabriel Kovari, twenty-two, died in August 2014 and Daniel Whitworth, twenty-one, in September. Both bodies were left in the graveyard of St Margaret's church, a short walk from his apartment. Whitworth was found holding a note, which Port had written, confessing to accidentally killing Kovari and apologizing. Police accepted it. They did not test the handwriting. Jack Taylor, twenty-five, died in September 2015 and was left in the same graveyard.
Four young men in fifteen months, three of them found dead in the same churchyard, and the Metropolitan Police treated each as an unrelated drug death. The families said repeatedly that it made no sense: that Whitworth's family did not recognize the handwriting, that Taylor's sisters had to push for the CCTV that eventually identified Port walking with their brother. It was that footage, obtained after the families pressed, that led to his arrest in October 2015.
He was convicted at the Old Bailey in November 2016 of four murders, four rapes and ten counts of administering a substance with intent, and given a whole-life order. In 2018 the police watchdog, then the Independent Police Complaints Commission, examined seventeen officers; sixteen gave only written accounts, nine were found to have performance failings, none was disciplined, and five were later promoted. The families pressed for fresh inquests, and in December 2021, after a hearing of about two months, the jury found that all four men had been unlawfully killed and that fundamental failures by the Metropolitan Police had probably contributed to the deaths of Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor. Basic checks had not been done and crucial evidence had not been sent for forensic examination. The jurors were told not to consider whether homophobia had played a part, after the Met resisted it, and the families' lawyer, Neil Hudgell, called the case one of the most widespread institutional failures in modern history.
The inquest evidence led the Independent Office for Police Conduct to announce in June 2022 that its original investigation had been materially flawed and that it would reinvestigate. That year the Met settled civil claims by the families of Anthony Walgate and Gabriel Kovari and by Daniel Whitworth's partner. In November 2023 the watchdog said that eight current and former officers were under investigation for gross misconduct, over possible breaches of standards including equality and diversity and honesty and integrity. Port remains in prison under the whole-life order.