Stephen Griffiths: loner with a Ripper obsession

'Oddball' student's arrest came after CCTV at flats caught gruesome murder of woman with crossbow.

By John Bingham, Paul Stokes and Gordon Rayner
Published: 11:23PM BST 27 May 2010

As he began his shift on Monday morning, the caretaker of the Holmfield Court flats in Bradford settled into his office chair to review the weekend's CCTV footage.

He fast-forwarded the recording, looking out for evidence of vandalism or petty crime. Instead, he found himself witnessing cold-blooded murder.

In a corridor of the flats, a man chased and grabbed a young woman before knocking her unconscious. The attacker then disappeared from view, only to return moments later with a crossbow which he used to fire a bolt into her head.

The man could then be seen dragging the body out of view, and later going backwards and forwards with bin bags and a rucksack.

The caretaker reached for the phone and dialled 999. Within hours West Yorkshire Police, for the second time in its history, was investigating whether a serial killer had murdered at least three prostitutes in the Bradford area.

At the time of Stephen Griffiths's arrest on Monday, detectives had found no physical trace of three prostitutes reported missing over the previous year. But on Tuesday, the police received another call from a member of the public, this time reporting the discovery of female body parts in the River Aire in nearby Shipley. The dismembered corpse, which included a head found in a rucksack, was later identified as the remains of 36-year-old Suzanne Blamires, who had not been seen since last Friday.

It was quickly linked to the disappearance of two other prostitutes, Shelley Armitage and Susan Rushworth, echoing the case of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who stalked some of his 13 victims in Bradford in the late 1970s.

Meanwhile, police had begun searching Mr Griffiths's one-bedroom flat and delving into the background of the suspect, a 40-year-old criminology PhD student at Bradford University who had a special interest in Jack the Ripper.

Mr Griffiths, they discovered, was a loner with a history of mental health problems who had spent time in Rampton Special Hospital in Nottinghamshire.

He had set up his own website, using the pseudonym Ven Pariah, on which he wrote: "I am a pseudo human at best. A demon at worst … what will this pseudo human do, one wonders?"

The web page, on which he gave his age as 99 and listed his mood as "evil", also included a quotation from the book of Ezekiel – "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides" – and listed his academic interests as "aggregate homicide, multiple homicide, capital punishment and targeted political homicide".

In keeping with his university studies, he had posted pictures on his website of serial killers including Fred and Rose West, and Myra Hindley and Ian Brady.

He also used the internet to try to find a girlfriend, and had joined The Guardian's Soulmates dating site in December 2008, exchanging emails with one woman.

Inside his cluttered rented flat, where he lives alone, detectives found two large monitor lizards that Mr Griffiths kept as pets.

Rachel Farrington-Naylor, a neighbour who once went inside the flat, told The Daily Telegraph that Mr Griffiths bred rats to feed to the lizards, keeping up to 100 rodents at a time in a large trunk.

She said: "He used to let the lizards walk up and down the corridor. My grandson said to me one day, 'There's a crocodile'."

Mr Griffiths kept irregular hours, she added. "We used to hear bumping and banging, we used to think he was moving furniture around at 5 o'clock in the morning."

Mr Griffiths, who grew up in Wakefield, was "a tearaway" as a boy, according to family friends, and went to live with his father, also called Stephen, and his younger sister Caroline when his parents split up. His brother Phillip, however, lived with their mother, Moira.

A former family friend said: "They were an odd family, real oddballs. They were loners. As a child, Stephen and the others never played out with other children."

Neighbours in Wakefield said Mr Griffiths had been in trouble with police as a boy for stealing from a garage, but matured into a diligent schoolboy, attending Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield before completing a degree in psychology at Leeds University.

But at about the time he left university, he began suffering from mental health problems and in December 1991 he was sent to Rampton Special Hospital for assessment. He later recovered, though he told neighbours he suffered from depression.

For the past six years he had been studying for his PhD in the history of homicide in 19th century England from 1847-99, comparing Victorian investigative techniques with modern policing methods.

His 61-year-old mother, who lives in Dewsbury, was convicted of benefit fraud in 2007 after falsely claiming £8,500 in housing and council tax benefits, despite having £55,000 in savings.

Mr Griffiths told neighbours he had a girlfriend in Shipley, and one said a brown-haired woman had visited him several times last year.

Mr Griffiths, who almost always wore a long black leather coat, round sunglasses, black trousers and black boots, was nicknamed "Penfold" after the bespectacled character in the children's television series Danger Mouse.

One neighbour said: "A couple of weeks ago he kept going downstairs to turn off his smoke alarm at the main box. That prevents the signal going to the fire brigade. It was strange but he just said he kept burning toast."

Mr Griffiths often posted comments on various social networking sites. One message, to a woman called Jacqueline, said: "Hope you have a nice day as well – lots of them, in fact. Glad you could see past the scary image I generally project to the world in general. Thought I'd add a picture of a stylish young 19-year-old to your page – poor thing, she never made it to 20." The message referred to a black and white image of a young woman leaning against a car.

He has lived alone in his £275-a-month flat in the heart of Bradford's red light district for 13 years.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7774349/Stephen-Griffiths-loner-with-a-Ripper-obsession.html