Stephen Shaun Griffiths was born in Dewsbury on December 24, 1969. He had convictions from his teens, including one for slashing a supermarket manager with a knife at seventeen, for which a psychiatrist described him as a schizoid psychopath with an interest in murder. He took a degree in psychology and then enrolled for a PhD at the University of Bradford, on the history of criminality and murder in the West Yorkshire area, and told people he was studying to become a serial killer.
He lived in a flat in Holmfield Court in the Thornton Road area of Bradford, at the centre of the city's street prostitution. Between June 2009 and May 2010 he killed Susan Rushworth, Shelley Armitage and Suzanne Blamires, all of them women working there with heroin addictions. He dismembered the bodies and put remains into the River Aire, and claimed to have eaten parts of them.
He was caught by the building's own security cameras. The caretaker at Holmfield Court reviewed the footage on May 24, 2010, and saw Griffiths chasing Suzanne Blamires through the corridor and shooting her with a crossbow, then returning and raising a bottle to the camera in salute. He took the tape to the police.
Asked his name at Bradford magistrates' court he said he was the crossbow cannibal, which is what the papers ran. He pleaded guilty at Leeds in December 2010 and was given a whole-life order.