Crossbow Cannibal: 'He killed because it was easy' Serial Killer Documentary
Stephen Griffiths, the self-styled 'Crossbow Cannibal', knew the perfect place to find victims and escape detection. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy visit Bradford's red-light district – a magnet for vulnerable women and violent, predatory men
Donna and Louise know a thing or two about scouting for punters. Their beat on City Road, a major artery moments from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/bradford city centre, is a strategic choice. "If the vice squad stops [the punters], they can say they're heading home," Donna explains. The nearby backroads, on the other hand, lead nowhere in particular – and it is there, amid condemned terraces, that the most desperate girls can be found.According to Donna and Louise, up to 100 women tout the streets around them. "Sharon, Tessa, Tracy and Cindy…" Their list peters out. The two women have smoked the last of their crack, injected their last spoon of heroin, and they know the "rattles" of withdrawal will soon overtake their bodies. "And there's worse than the rattles," Donna says, looking increasingly desperate as the cars drive past.
Here, just moments from Centenary Square, with its opulent Venetian-style City Hall, the only rule is "don't poach trade from other girls".
"Now and again someone gets a slap," says Donna, who lost her front teeth in a row over territory and never got around to replacing them. These days there are no pimps to settle a score. "Crack is the pimp," says Louise, identifying one of the most radical changes in the oldest of businesses. The women working here are controlled by nothing other than their addictions. And there are no conditions too rough, or warnings too stark, to preclude a night working for money to buy the drugs on which they depend.
Showing us around this dark quarter of a grand old industrial city, an area dominated by the textile mills that once brought prosperity and pride to the West Riding, Donna and Louise identify another critical change. Even though Bradford is, according to West Yorkshire police, one of the most pervasively monitored cities in Britain, the women are alone and out of sight. Venom, West Yorkshire police's pioneering CCTV street surveillance and car number plate recognition system, is a network of more than 100 cameras. It was this initiative that helped catch the killers of PC Sharon Beshenivsky in November 2005. But six years on, and with a serial killer only recently removed from these streets, the red-light district is still a collective blind spot.
According to police chiefs, the situation in Bradford is not unique. A raft of new legislation has served only to shunt thousands of women like Donna and Louise out of well-lit, residential locales and into desolate, semi-industrial wastelands.
"Our foolish laws mean that while prostitution is not in itself illegal, working in a brothel is," says Max McLean, who has served in West Yorkshire CID for almost three decades and recently retired as detective chief superintendent. "This gives a clear message to those who work in prostitution: you're on your own, and out on the streets."
It is a message that has reached other quarters as well. According to criminologists and detectives who studied the case, it was this realisation that first brought self-styled "Crossbow Cannibal" Stephen Griffiths to this area of Bradford. For more than a decade he roamed Bradford's grid, befriending its sex workers, even moving to a top-floor flat in a converted Victorian textile factory on Thornton Road so he could be at the heart of the action. Noting how poorly monitored the area was, and witnessing the increasing disconnection and desperation of the women working there, he began to plot his crimes.
In June 2009, the criminology student, who was researching a PhD entitled Homicide In An Industrial City, started hunting the grid's workers with a crossbow, before dismembering them in his bath. Some parts he cooked. Others he ate raw. Fragments were bagged and dumped in the river Aire. In the winter of 2006, lorry driver Steve Wright had embarked on a similar spree in Ipswich, murdering five sex workers in an industrial dead zone. "Griffiths and Wright consciously zeroed in on these voids and the invisible women society had pushed between the cracks," says David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University. "They knew they could do whatever they pleased. They killed because it was easy."
By the time Griffiths appeared in court last December, the body of his first victim, Susie Rushworth, had still not been located. Of his second victim, Shelley Armitage, only the shoulders, vertebrae and connective tissue had been found. Suzanne Blamires, his third victim, had also been dismembered, with police able to recover only 81 fragments of her corpse.
In both cases, it was the serial killers who became the main focus of the story. Little attention was paid to the women who had died, or to those left behind.
Today, Angela Williams is superintendent for Bradford South and the operational chief responsible for the grid. But when she first started as a PC in the vice squad in Chapeltown, Leeds, two decades ago, it was a different scene entirely. In those days, Williams recalls, the sex workers had "nice houses, nice possessions and nice clothes. They worked from 7pm to 12am, for their pimps and to put food on the table. Then they went home." In Bradford, they gathered on Lumb Lane, then the centre of the city's red-light district, where a close-knit local community afforded them some protection.
But even then, they watched their backs. A few streets away had lived Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who had begun targeting local sex workers in 1975. By the time he was caught, five years later, he had killed 13 women and injured seven more, most of them sex workers. Searching Griffiths' flat last summer, police found material suggesting he had come to lionise Sutcliffe, and was obsessed with carrying out a similar series of killings.
By the mid-1990s, West Yorkshire police – dogged by criticism that they had failed to catch the Ripper in time, despite having interviewed him on nine occasions – were further barraged by complaints from Lumb Lane residents about the kerb crawlers and used condoms. Gradually, the sex workers were moved into industrial areas. "The same was happening all over the UK," McLean says.
The women's new beats were more remote. They attracted violent, predatory men. Among them was Kenneth Valentine, a loner who moved into Soho Mills, a converted factory on Thornton Road, and rented his bedroom to sex workers forced out of Lumb Lane, for £5 a session. Valentine secretly watched through a hole drilled in the wall, until one night in 1996, when he raped and killed Caroline Creevy, a 25-year-old sex worker who rejected his direct advances.
Unlike Sutcliffe, who during his trial was diagnosed by four psychiatrists as being a paranoid schizophrenic, Valentine, who had previously been convicted of the manslaughter of a girl he had sexually assaulted in 1991, was described by police as a "dangerous man" who killed because he had an opportunity. Creevy was also a new kind of victim. She had no pimp. She worked alone and out of sight. All she cared about was drugs.
One of the few who had been closely studying Valentine was his neighbour Stephen Griffiths, who had also moved into Soho Mills before the murder and would remain there after it was renamed Holmfield Court, to shake off the stigma of the killing. Creevy's murder was a precursor to the killing and dismemberment Griffiths would later carry out in the same building.
At the time, though, there was little impact in the grid. The street workers, including Donna, moved a few blocks north-west to City Road, Rebecca Street and Chain Street.
Then, in April 2001, Becky Hall, a 19-year-old sex worker with a heroin habit, vanished. She was found after 13 days, naked and bludgeoned behind a low wall at the back of an unlit car park in Thornton Street, her child-sized C&A clothes scattered around, along with used condoms. Donna was working nearby. "We heard Becky drowned in her own blood, and we continued to work a few paces away," she says. "Getting the rattles was too much to bear. The beating, rapes and killings increased, and we just accepted it."
They tried to judge which punters might be dangerous, Donna says. But, as Bridget Farrell recalls, Griffiths did not look like a killer. Bridget sometimes worked the City Road beat, and Griffiths had cooked her dinner, washed her clothes and let her sleep on his sofa when she had nowhere to go. "He was like a brother to me," she says. Donna knew him, too. "At the time, we thought he was just a numpty," she says. "Quite a lot of girls took advantage of him, robbing him when he offered to score for them." He never talked to them about his past: his early childhood in Dewsbury, his upbringing in Wakefield and his public school education – and certainly not the petty crimes and fits of violence that followed.
By 2008, Donna was running out of steam. Since being pushed into the grid, she was being raped at least once a month, hit weekly and threatened daily, as were most of the women working there. "We had become punchbags," she says, "but then I really got fucked over." A Toyota people carrier stopped for her, its driver negotiating the rate, while three others hid beneath seats in the back. She was gang-raped and robbed before being smashed over the head with a beer bottle and thrown out of the speeding vehicle. "Now I just couldn't go out," she says. "I started shoplifting instead, anything to get
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