Stephen Port was born in Southend on February 22, 1975, and worked as a chef in a bus depot canteen. He lived in a flat on Cooke Street in Barking and used dating apps and websites to meet young men, whom he gave GHB, a colourless 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 and lying to police, and given a suspended sentence, and released. 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 flat. Whitworth was found holding a note, which Port had written, confessing to accidentally killing Kovari and apologising. 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 recognise 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 December 2021, after a nine-week hearing, an inquest jury found that failures by the Metropolitan Police probably contributed to three of the four deaths. Seventeen officers were investigated by the police watchdog and none was dismissed. The families' central charge, that the deaths of four gay men were not taken seriously, has been made and largely conceded.