On July 19, 1975, Wanda Skala, seventeen, was walking home along Lightbowne Road in Moston, north Manchester, from the hotel where she worked behind the bar. She was struck on the head with a brick, robbed and sexually assaulted, and her body was left half buried on a building site. Trevor Joseph Hardy could not keep it to himself. He bragged about the killing to his younger brother, and the police arrested him. Then they let him go. His partner had given him an alibi they had worked out together, and she had smuggled a file to him in custody so that he could grind down his teeth until they no longer matched the bite marks on Wanda's body. Six months after his release he killed again.
Hardy was born on June 11, 1945. Before the first killing he had been in prison for beating a man with a pickaxe and had been released on parole. On New Year's Eve 1974 he stabbed Janet Lesley Stewart, fifteen, to death and buried her in a shallow grave in Newton Heath; he had mistaken her for a schoolgirl he was infatuated with. He took her ring and gave it to another girl as a love token. For more than a year and a half her family knew only that she was missing.
In March 1976 Sharon Mosoph, seventeen, was walking home from a staff party when she saw him trying to break into a shopping center at night. He stabbed her, strangled her with a pair of tights and dumped her in the Rochdale Canal at Failsworth. The bodies of Wanda and Sharon had both been stripped and mutilated. At the height of the hunt twenty-three thousand people were stopped and searched.
He was arrested in August 1976 for the murders of Wanda Skala and Sharon Mosoph and confessed to both, and to the killing of Janet Stewart, whose death nobody had yet been able to establish. Among his things were Wanda's bloodstained clothes and her handbag. At his trial he dismissed his Queen's Counsel and tried to plead guilty to manslaughter. The plea was refused, and he was convicted of all three murders; the verdict is dated to 1977 in some accounts, and on May 2, 1978, at Manchester Crown Court, he was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment with a minimum of thirty years.
In later years he maintained his innocence and wrote to Sharon Mosoph's relatives blaming his parents. In February 2008 The Times listed him among the roughly fifty prisoners in Britain on a whole life tariff, and in June 2008 the High Court confirmed that he would never be released. People in Manchester had long suspected him of the 1971 murder of Dorothy Leyden, seventeen, and in 2004 her family asked Greater Manchester Police to look at the evidence again. DNA tested more than thirty years after her death did not match him, and the detectives concluded that it cleared him.
He spent his last years at Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire, where he was said to have a good work record. On September 23, 2012, he collapsed in his cell with a heart attack, and he died in the hospital two days later, aged sixty-seven, after thirty-five years in prison, one of the longest-serving prisoners in England and Wales.