1) Stuart Hazell
Stuart Hazell has been jailed for a minimum of 38 years for killing his partner's granddaughter, Tia Sharp.
The 37-year-old had denied murder, but on the fifth day of his trial at the Old Bailey he changed his plea.The court heard Hazell sexually assaulted and murdered Tia, 12, at her grandmother's house in south London.
Hazell hid Tia's body in her grandmother's loft in New Addington last August.
The prosecution claimed he had a sexual attraction to the schoolgirl.
Jurors were shown an explicit image of a child, alleged to be Tia, which was said to have been taken in the early hours of 3 August 2012 when prosecutors say she died.
In a letter to his father, written while he was on remand in Belmarsh Prison, Hazell said the police were trying to make it sexual, a claim he denied.
However, jurors were told a sex aid with Tia's blood on it was found in the house.
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| Tia Sharp |
Hazell had also taken videos of Tia asleep and of her putting cream on her legs.
Mr Edis told the court: "Why is he taking these clips for? Did he have a sexual interest in young girls and Tia?"
The court also heard Hazell's semen was found in the room Tia used as a bedroom and on a pair of shorts Tia had worn.
The court had been told Hazell would claim Tia accidentally broke her neck falling down the stairs and that he panicked and hid the body in the attic.
A post-mortem examination did not show any evidence of a broken neck.
In an unexpected move, Stuart Hazell finally admitted murdering his step granddaughter, 12-year-old Tia Sharp.
After
overwhelming evidence against him was presented in court last week, the
37-year-old abandoned his claim her death was an accident.
Stuart Hazell, the man standing trial for the murder of schoolgirl Tia Sharp, speaks to the press days before she was found dead.
2) Mark Bridger
Mark Bridger was an alcoholic paedophile who was infatuated with young girls and who lived out violent sexual fantasies through the internet.
On a chilly autumn evening last October, shortly after going to a parents’ evening at his daughter’s school which she attended alongside his victim April Jones, he took the trusting youngster into his Land Rover and made the evil fantasy a reality.
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| Mark Bridger |
He murdered her and disposed of her body. So effective were his efforts at concealing the five year old’s remains– either by incinerating them in the wood-burner at his whitewashed cottage just a few miles from April’s home, or hiding her in the rugged hills and streams of the surrounding mid Wales countryside, that she was never found, despite the largest search operation ever mounted in British policing history.
His claims that she had died in a road traffic accident with his Land Rover Discovery and that fuelled by panic and alcohol he was unable to recall what he had done with her body were as risible as they were calculated. Bridger’s distinctive vehicle had been spotted by April’s friend on the night she went missing. Her blood was discovered throughout his home, mainly concentrated in front of the stove where fragments of a child’s skull were also recovered, along with a charred boning knife.
Although he was to prove every parent’s worst night mare, the powerful, six-footer with a snake tattooed on his arm, was a trusted figure on the Bryn y Gog estate where he had had relationships with at least two women and used to invite children over for sleepovers at his house.
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| April Jones |
On the day of the killing, as he sent angry text messages to an ex-girlfriend and tried to arrange dates with a number of other women who he hit on at random, he spent time viewing his collection of child pornography.
The disturbing cache included 65 criminal-standard abuse images. Carefully categorised into separate folders were pictures of Soham murder victims Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and British schoolgirl Caroline Dickinson who was raped and killed on a school trip to France in 1996.
The illegal pictures were kept away from holiday snaps in anonymous files including one marked “Z0” that contained obscene imagery of child abuse.
Another was marked “clothed” and the other bore the name of April’s 16-year-old half-sister who he had described as “beautiful” and an “up and coming model”. She had earlier refused a Facebook request to befriend the 47-year-old on the advice of her mother. Bridger meanwhile set his own Facebook settings to maximum and concealed his age.
The files contained photographs from the social networking site including a number of April which were downloaded just eight days before her murder. There were also pictures of a teenage daughter of one of Bridger’s friends and a number of other young girls from the town.
Among the search terms allegedly typed into his computer were “naked young five-year-old” whilst the computer picture library was found to contain pictures including one of a pregnant eight-year-old girl as well as sexually explicit cartoons.
Bridger insisted throughout that he was not a paedophile, claiming he was impotent as a result of anti-depressants and alcohol abuse – telling the court he drank up to 25 cans of cider and a bottle of wine a day.
He claimed he had been conducting research into his own teenage daughter’s physical development, or had been keeping the pictures to complain to publishers after happening across them during a search for SpongeBob Squarepants.
Mark Bridger had been watching an horrific rape scene from a slasher film “not long before” April Jones was murdered, it can be reported for the first time today.
When police searched Bridger's cottage they found that he had been watching a brutal rape scene from the 2009 re-make of the slasher film, The Last House on the Left. Bridger, a man who a hoarded hundreds of images of child pornography on his laptop, had recorded the scene where a young teenage girl is raped by the leader of a gang in front of his watching gangmates, some of whom help to hold the victim down while she is being attacked.
Police then discovered that the murderer recorded the rape scene for a second time when the film was repeated on a +1 channel an hour later.
When the scene was discussed in court, Bridger's own barrister Brendan Kelly QC described the scene as “distressing”.
Elwen Evans QC, for the prosecution, said given what happened in that room the discovery was “significant” and Bridger must have watched the scene “not long before” whatever happened to April took place.
She added: “This is not just the playing of a rape scene on television. That particular rape scene had been recorded twice. A deliberate action to capture the most distressing aspect.”
3) Roy Whiting
1995 conviction and imprisonment
On 4 March 1995,
Whiting abducted and sexually assaulted an eight-year-old girl on the
Langley Green estate in Crawley. He was arrested a few weeks later after
a man who knew Whiting came forward after hearing that the abductor's
car had been a red Ford Sierra. Three months later he admitted to the
charges of abduction and indecent assault and was sentenced to four
years in prison.
The maximum sentence
would have been a life sentence for the crime, however his sentence was
reduced because he had admitted the crime. A psychiatrist who assessed
Whiting after his conviction said that he was likely to re-offend once
he was released.
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| Roy Whiting |
Release
Whiting was released
from prison in November 1997, having serving 2 years and 5 months of his
4-year sentence, and was one of the first people in Britain to go on the
sex offenders register. Whiting, knowing that he would not be welcome
back in Crawley, moved some 25 miles (40 km) away to Littlehampton on
the West Sussex coast where he rented a flat in St Augustine's Road. He
lived at the flat for two years before moving into another flat in the
same road.
On 2 July 2000
officers from Sussex Police visited his flat making inquiries into the
disappearance of Sarah Payne.
Sarah Payne disappeared on 1 July
2000 from a cornfield near the home of her grandparents
(Terence and Lesley Payne) in Kingston Gorse, West
Sussex, England, where she had been playing with her
brothers and sister (aged between five and 13 at the
time). A nationwide search was under way within 48 hours,
and Sarah's parents made numerous television appeals for
her safe return. On 2 July 2000, officers from Sussex
Police visited Whiting's flat making inquiries into the
disappearance of Sarah Payne.
On 17 July, a girl's body in a field
near Pulborough, some 15 miles (24 km) from the village
of Kingston Gorse (near Littlehampton) where Sarah had
disappeared. The following day, forensic science tests
confirmed that the body was Sarah's, and the Sussex
Police began a murder investigation.
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| Sarah Payne |
On 21 July 2000, Whiting took to the road
in a stolen Vauxhall Nova car and was pursued by police
at speeds of up to 70mph before he crashed into a parked
vehicle and was arrested on dangerous driving charges.
He was remanded in custody until 27 September 2000, when
he admitted taking the car and driving dangerously. He
was jailed for 22 months.
When Whiting began his jail term for
the car theft, detectives were able to carry out
forensic tests on his F-registered white Fiat Ducato
van, which he had bought on 23 June 2000. On 6 February
2001, following a police enquiry, Roy Whiting was
charged with the murder of Sarah Payne. By 6 February 2001, Sussex Police had
found enough evidence to charge Whiting and he appeared
at Lewes Crown Court on charges of abduction and murder.
He denied the charges and was remanded in custody to
await trial.
On 12 December 2001, Whiting was
convicted of the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne,
and he was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment.
The trial judge, Richard Curtis, said that it was a rare
case in which a life sentence should mean life.
The Sarah Payne murder, and many
other cases of killings committed by serial sex
offenders before and since, has led to continued calls
from the public for the wider use of life sentences for
child sex offenders.
At 2:17pm on 3 April 2010 Maden, who had an
"obsessive interest" in pornography relating to paedophilia, rape and
torture, telephoned Rigg's mother and asked for Tia to go to his home
in Dalmain Close, Cheetham Hill in order to babysit his ten-year-old
daughter. When she arrived at 3:00pm he drugged her with Olanzapine,
an antipsychotic tranquilizer that he had been prescribed.
He then inflicted a "horrific catalogue of sexual
injuries" on her before stabbing her and strangling her with a
ligature made from a guitar string. At 3:45pm Maden telephoned the 999
emergency services number and said: "Hi, I would like to report a
murder." He then gave his name and address and when asked by the
operator what had happened he replied: "My niece has been murdered by
me ... I have just finished killing her now." Asked why he had killed
her he answered: "Because I felt like it" and terminated the call.
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| John Maden |
Police officers from Greater Manchester Police
arrived at the address two minutes later. Maden opened the door to the
officers, who described him as "chillingly calm", and directed them
upstairs. They found Rigg's body face-up on the floor of a spare
bedroom, naked except for her socks, with the ligature still fastened
around her neck and her hands tied behind her back with shoelaces.
Next to the body were two knives, a broom handle and a sex toy, all of
which were stained with blood.
An autopsy found that Rigg had suffered severe
blood loss from her stab wounds and internal injuries but the primary
cause of death was ligature strangulation.
Maden was tried at Manchester Crown Court on 4
October 2010. Prosecutor Gordon Cole QC told the court: "In the year
or so prior to April this year, the defendant had developed what can
properly be described as an obsessive interest in images and
literature relating to paedophilia, rape and torture. He had an
extensive library of such materials which included literature dealing
with methods of killing."
Police had found "hundreds of extreme images of
child abuse and violent pornography" on Maden's laptop, plus more
material on his mobile phone in folders named "snuff", "snuff stories"
and "brutal rape". Detective Chief Inspector David Warren, who led the
investigation, revealed that Maden refused to explain his actions and
had never shown remorse for the killing.
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| Tia Rigg |
After pleading guilty to rape and murder, Maden was
sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he should
never be released. Passing sentence, Mr Justice Keith told him: "It is
inescapable that Tia Rigg died because you decided to realise your
fantasies about torturing and killing a young child. It is difficult
to know how long Tia's ordeal lasted. The terror, the unimaginable
pain you inflicted on her, the indignities you subjected her to while
still alive. It was planned, it was premeditated and her agony must
have been prolonged. This is one of those exceptional cases in which
the only just punishment requires you to be imprisoned for the rest of
your life."
Maden had become obsessed with violent porn he downloaded from the internet, the court heard.
Members of Tia's family sat in the public gallery, yards from Maden in the dock as Gordon Cole QC, prosecuting, opened the case. "In general terms this murder was premeditated," he said. "It was murder purely for his sexual gratification – it had a sexual motive. The facts reveal clearly features of torture, rape, physical abuse and the ultimate murder of a child.
"In the year or so prior to April this year, the defendant had developed what can properly be described as an obsessive interest in images and literature relating to paedophilia, rape and torture. He had an extensive library of such materials which included literature dealing with methods of killing."
Cole continued: "This material and the subsequent discovery of Tia reveals that this defendant was acting out a long-held fascination with rape, torture and abuse of children."
5) Stuart Campbell
A convicted sex offender with an obsession for teenage girls was jailed for life yesterday for the murder of Danielle Jones, his 15-year-old niece.
Stuart Campbell, 44, developed a fixation with Danielle and murdered her at his home in Essex after their relationship soured. He hid her body, which has never been recovered.
Danielle vanished while walking to catch a school bus near her home in East Tilbury, Essex, on 18 June last year. Yesterday, a jury at Chelmsford Crown Court found Campbell guilty of kidnapping and murdering her.
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| Stuart Campbell |
After the conviction, police officers disclosed that the builder from Grays, Essex, a fitness fanatic, had a history of sex offending involving teenage girls. He was given a 12-month suspended prison term in 1989 after holding a girl aged 14 at his home and photographing her in a karate suit. Campbell was originally accused of abducting the girl and taking indecent pictures of her but the charge was dropped after he admitted to an offence of taking a child without lawful authority.
"Having kidnapped your niece, probably on the pretext of taking her to school, you took her to your home. There you murdered her and somehow disposed of her body without trace ... Your particular perverted interests focus on schoolgirls in the 14 to 15 age bracket. You are quite unable to control your impulses in this area."
Campbell had tricked teenagers into posing for him, falsely claiming he was a "glamour" model photographer, the jury had been told. Jurors heard from a number of young women who said Campbell had approached them in the street and sometimes persuaded them to return to his home and be photographed in various states of undress.
Since the start of the trial, six more women have contacted police to report that Campbell tried to photograph them when they were teenagers.
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| Danielle Jones |
A bag containing girl's underwear was found in Campbell's attic. Blood-stained stockings in the bag were matched with DNA from Campbell and Danielle.
Orlando Pownall, QC, prosecuting, said Mr Campbell was fascinated with pornographic websites with names such as Young Lolita Beauties and described as "100% free Japanese schoolgirl dirty pics".
He said when the police searched Mr Campbell's home they found a handwritten list of teenage websites.
Mr Pownall said: "This defendant had an abiding passion for girls in school uniform."
6) Ian Huntley
Ian Huntley was today given two life sentences after being convicted by an Old Bailey jury of murdering Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells.
Huntley's co-accused and former girlfriend, Maxine Carr, was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail after being found guilty of conspiring with Huntley to pervert the course of justice. She was cleared of two counts of assisting an offender in relation to the murder of the girls.
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| Ian Huntley |
As he handed down the sentences, trial judge Mr Justice Moses told Huntley: "You murdered them both, you were the only person who knows how you murdered them ... in your lies and manipulation up to this very day you have increased the suffering you have caused the two families."
The jury of seven women and five men returned 11-1 majority decisions on the guilty verdicts after 17 hours of deliberations.
The jurors rejected 29-year-old Huntley's testimony that the schoolgirls died accidentally at his home, 5 College Close, in Soham on August 4 last year.
Huntley, the caretaker at Soham Village College at the time of the murders, told the court that the 10-year-olds went inside the college-owned three-bedroom detached house because Holly had a nosebleed.
He tried to convince the jury during more than two days in the witness box that Holly had slipped into the bath and drowned, and that he killed Jessica when he placed his hand over her mouth to silence her screams.
The jurors knew Huntley had once been charged with raping a teenager - a charge that was later dropped. But it emerged today that he had also been accused of indecently assaulting an 11-year-old and having sex with other schoolgirls in his native Grimsby, allegations that could not be revealed during the course of the trial.
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| Holly and Jessica |
He found the ten-year-olds "too tempting" after they turned up on his doorstep, the prosecution alleged. First he took them on a "sightseeing tour" of his house, Richard Latham QC claimed. Then he drowned Holly and smothered Jessica when they were "no use any more" to him.
The suggestions were strongly and sometimes fiercely denied by the 29-year-old school caretaker, who insisted that Holly died by accident and Jessica suffocated as he tried to stifle her screams. At one stage he lost his temper and snapped angrily at the barrister.
But he admitted he never gave Jessica "the slightest chance" to live. And he agreed he had been "cold and ruthless" in dumping the bodies in a ditch before setting fire to them to conceal his tracks.
'Tailored his version'
The cover-up was likened to a military operation by the QC. Then, in the months before the trial, Huntley cold-bloodedly tailored his version of events to dodge around the evidence in a desperate attempt to get away with the killings, it was claimed.
The allegations were made as Huntley's account of what happened was challenged point by point for the first time in public, with the claim that he had told a succession of "bare-faced lies".
Holly's father and Jessica's parents sat silently towards the back of the court as the truth according to Ian Huntley was tested.
Later, Les and Sharon Chapman watched as he mimed for the court how he had killed their daughter. Then, in a matter-of-fact tone, he told in graphic detail how he got the girls out of the house.
He "bent their legs slightly" to cram them into his car boot and drove them to a woodland ditch. He took a can of petrol, bin bags to protect his trainers from the mud and a pair of rubber gloves.
There, he cut off their clothes because he was worried that fibres from his house would link him to their deaths if they did not burn properly.
Then he sprinkled petrol over their naked bodies and set fire to them, he said.
My nightmare at hands of child killer Huntley
Read more at: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/my-nightmare-at-hands-of-child-killer-huntley-1-2374010
Read more at: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/my-nightmare-at-hands-of-child-killer-huntley-1-2374010
My nightmare at hands of child killer Huntley
Read more at: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/my-nightmare-at-hands-of-child-killer-huntley-1-2374010
Read more at: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/my-nightmare-at-hands-of-child-killer-huntley-1-2374010
