On May 24, 2010, the caretaker of Holmfield Court, a block of flats off Thornton Road in Bradford, West Yorkshire, went through the footage from the building's security cameras and saw a tenant chasing a woman along a corridor and shooting her with a crossbow. The man came back into view and raised a bottle to the camera. The woman was Suzanne Blamires, thirty-six, who had disappeared on May 21, and the tenant was Stephen Shaun Griffiths, forty. Parts of her body were found in the River Aire at Shipley on May 25. He was arrested on May 24, and at the magistrates' court he gave his name as the Crossbow Cannibal.
Griffiths was born in Dewsbury on December 24, 1969. At seventeen he was sentenced to three years for an unprovoked knife attack on a supermarket manager, and in custody he said he saw himself becoming a murderer. In 1991 a psychiatrist diagnosed him as a schizoid psychopath, and the next year he got two years for holding a knife to a girl's throat. In 2009 he was admitted to the University of Bradford to write a PhD in homicide studies. Police had been watching him for two years before the killings and had already seized hunting weapons from him; when he was seen reading books on dismemberment they alerted the housing association that owned his flat, which fitted better cameras in anticipation. They had no evidence for an antisocial behavior order.
All three women worked as prostitutes in the streets around his building. Susan Rushworth, forty-three, disappeared on June 22, 2009; no remains of her were ever found. Shelley Armitage, thirty-one, disappeared on April 26, 2010, and human tissue found in the River Aire was later shown to be hers. Then came Suzanne Blamires. He was charged with all three murders.
On December 21, 2010, at Leeds Crown Court, he pleaded guilty to all three, and Mr. Justice Openshaw sentenced him the same day to life with a whole life order, so that he will never be eligible for parole. He has tried to kill himself several times in prison, and in 2011 he went on a hunger strike lasting 120 days. The new prime minister, David Cameron, called the murders a terrible shock and said the decriminalization of offenses related to prostitution should be looked at again, before his aides stressed tougher action on curb-crawling and drug abuse.
When he was first questioned, Griffiths told officers he had killed five women in Bradford. After his conviction he refused to talk to the police again. Detectives questioned him about the 2001 murder of Rebecca Hall, nineteen, a Bradford sex worker found in a car park about 870 yards from his flat, whom he knew and who often visited him; he would not answer. His former partner said he had once excitedly taken her to the spot where Hall's body was found. The criminologist David Wilson linked him to the Hall case in a 2013 documentary. The killer John Taylor was also a suspect, and in 2019 police arrested a woman who had been nineteen at the time and released her under investigation. No one has been charged.