Steven John Grieveson was born in Sunderland on December 14, 1970.
He killed four teenage boys between May 1990 and February 1994. Simon Martin was fourteen, and his body was found at a derelict property, Gillside House in Roker, on May 26, 1990. Thomas Kelly was eighteen and was found on November 26, 1993. David Hanson and David Grieff were both fifteen; Hanson's body was found on February 8, 1994, and Grieff's on February 25.
He was called the Sunderland Strangler for the city and for the method, ligature strangulation. The three later victims were burned afterwards, which the trial judge treated as deliberate: he told Grieveson he had found an efficient and effective way to kill Thomas Kelly and conceal the evidence by setting fire to his body, and that far from being appalled at what he had done, when the opportunity arose to repeat the experience he did it again.
Accounts of the case describe him targeting vulnerable youths, several of them solvent users, and staging the scenes to look like accidental deaths from glue sniffing or from fire. That staging worked for a time. Reviews of the case have pointed to investigative failures in the early enquiries, and in particular to the deaths not being connected despite the similarities between the victims and the circumstances.
He was arrested on March 11, 1994 and convicted of three murders at Leeds Crown Court on February 28, 1996, receiving three life sentences with a recommendation that he serve at least thirty-five years before release could be considered.
The fourth case took another seventeen years. Detectives questioned him about Simon Martin at Full Sutton in November 2000 and he denied it. In June 2004 he wrote to the Victim Liaison Service admitting the three murders of 1993 and 1994, and left Simon Martin out; he was not charged then. He was charged on November 22, 2012. On February 11, 2013 he admitted responsibility for the boy's death but denied murder, and at trial he ran diminished responsibility, saying the killing was not premeditated. The jury convicted him on October 24, 2013 after a nine-day trial at Newcastle Crown Court, and he received a fourth life sentence.
Simon Martin's father read a statement outside court for his family, his wife, his son, and his son who is not alive. Speaking for the families, he said their sons had been taken from them by a cruel man whose actions cost four boys their lives, and that these were innocent boys whose own actions led in no way to their deaths.
On February 20, 2014 Grieveson was arrested on suspicion of the 1992 murder of Nikki Allan, a seven-year-old girl found stabbed to death in a disused warehouse in Sunderland. No further action followed. That case was resolved in 2023 with the conviction of another man.
He is held at HMP Full Sutton in the East Riding of Yorkshire.