Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (7 page)

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Colin Ireland

fight for breath, removing the bag just before Peter Walker lost consciousness. When he removed the bag, Mr Walker gasped

‘I’m going to die, amn’t I?’ and the sadist agreed that he was.

We’ll never know how long Ireland toyed with Peter Walker, but eventually he left the bag in situ and his victim suffocated. He then held his lighter to the dead man’s pubic hair. He would later tell police that he only did this out of curiosity, but, given that he went on to torture a later victim by holding a lighter to his testes, it’s likely that testicle torture comprised part of his fantasy.

Searching through the man’s personal papers, he found proof that Peter Walker was HIV positive and was incensed – after all, Walker had planned to have sex with him.

Colin stayed in the flat all night, then went home and watched the news but didn’t see details of the killing. Disappointed, he phoned the
Sun
newspaper and told them that he’d carried out his new year resolution to murder a man. He also phoned the Samaritans and asked them to feed Peter Walker’s two dogs.

Further madness

Ironically, the following day the Law Lords ruled that sadomasochistic practices between
consenting
adults could lead to them facing lengthy jail sentences. This made it impossible for the consensual adults who’d been in the Coleherne to come forward and tell the police who Peter Walker had left the pub with. After all, they themselves might now face prosecution.

It also made British law look increasingly ridiculous for it was legal – at the time – for a man or woman to beat their vulnerable child yet they faced imprisonment for chastising their sexually-submissive partner for their erotic pleasure.

The second murder

March and April passed with Ireland happily reliving the murder, then on 28 May he struck again, returning to the same 57

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pub as before and engaging 37-year-old Christopher Dunn in conversation. The librarian admitted that he was submissive and they went back to his flat in Wealdstone, London where they watched a sadomasochistic video as foreplay and shared a meal. Later Ireland handcuffed his naked and willing victim.

It was only after he’d cuffed Mr Dunn’s wrists and tied his feet that he demanded the librarian’s bank card number, which Christopher Dunn gave to him.

Ireland later claimed that he’d had to torture this information out of Christopher, which seems unlikely – but what’s definite is that the killer burned his victim’s testicles with a cigarette lighter and beat him with a belt before suffocating him to death.

He stayed in the flat until daylight, then merged with the people going to work. He also used Christopher Dunn’s bank card to withdraw £200.

Two days later the body was found by a friend. Unfortunately, the police thought that Dunn had died during an act of auto erotic asphyxiation or a consensual sex game gone wrong so they didn’t connect his death with the murder of Peter Walker.

(Consensual gay sadomasochistic sex tends to be more severe than consensual heterosexual sadomasochistic sex so the police didn’t associate the man’s burns with a criminal act.) The third murder

Only six days passed before Colin Ireland returned to the BDSM pub. This time he met up with Perry Bradley III, a sales director from Texas. The two returned to Bradley’s flat in Kensington but he initially refused to be tied up as he was aware that there was a bondage killer on the loose. The two men enjoyed a meal together and a couple of drinks and Mr Bradley suggested they have vanilla sex. Colin Ireland demurred, explaining that he could only get off on BDSM, so the businessman eventually agreed.

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When he was trussed up on the bed, Ireland said that he only wanted the PIN number of his bank card. Perry offered to go with him and withdraw the cash, but Colin said that he didn’t want to be seen acting suspiciously in the early hours of the morning.

The businessman gave the criminal the number and tried to be as helpful as possible in a desperate attempt to save his own life.

Colin Ireland waited until the man was asleep – or pretending to be – then strangled him with a rope, enjoying his terrified struggles. Afterwards he put a doll on the body because he hoped this would demean his victim further. Again he spent the night with the corpse and left the following day.

The fourth murder

The need to kill was accelerating, so Ireland returned to the Coleherne on 7 June and chatted up 33-year-old Andrew Collier, the warden of a sheltered housing complex. They returned to his flat in Dalston and were having a drink when there was an altercation in the street. Both men hurried to the window – and Colin Ireland unwittingly left his fingerprint on the window sill.

The men then went over to the bed and Ireland handcuffed Andrew Collier’s wrists and bound him to the bed. Eventually he strangled him with a rope. He then went through the man’s wallet looking for cash, only to find a card stating that he was HIV positive, Ireland’s second such victim. Enraged, he singed part of the corpse with his lighter, and, determined to wreak further havoc, strangled the man’s cat. He put its mouth around Collier’s condom-clad penis and put its condom-clad tail in Collier’s mouth. Remaining with the bizarrely-posed body for the next few hours, he left in the morning, taking away the crockery he’d used.

In the days which followed, he boasted to acquaintances that he’d be famous one day, that he’d done something remarkable.

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But he’d lied about being in the Foreign Legion so they didn’t pay much attention to his boasts.

He also phoned Kensington police and anonymously admitted all four killings and warned them he’d kill another man. Shortly afterward he phoned Battersea police station and asked them if they were still investigating Peter Walker’s death. In his own mind Ireland was now a powerful figure – but to the rest of the world he was a twice-divorced, unemployed and uncharismatic man.

The fth murder

Back for a fifth time to the Coleherne on 12 June, Ireland picked up 41-year-old Emanuel Spiteri. He’d been born in Malta but now worked in London as a chef. Ireland himself had been a chef ’s assistant and this made it easy for the men to find common ground. Mr Spiteri lived in Hither Green so they had to travel via Charing Cross Station. Unknown to Ireland, they were caught on the security camera there.

Back at Emanuel Spiteri’s flat, Colin Ireland bound him and tortured him, but he refused to reveal his PIN number. Ireland eventually strangled him with a nylon rope. He set fire to the bedroom before he left, but the flames quickly went out.

Seeking publicity

The killer kept watching the news for details of his handiwork, but Emanuel Spiteri’s body hadn’t been found, so four days after the murder he phoned the police again and gave them the details. He also talked about the first four murders, saying that he’d ‘done five now’ so was the serial killer he’d set out to become. He added that he probably wouldn’t offend again.

Keeping control

Colin Ireland now saw that the CCTV photo of himself and Mr Spiteri was in all the papers, which meant that the police could 60

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arrest him at any time and he’d lose control of the situation.

Determined to remain in charge, he contacted them via his solicitor and said that he’d been with Spiteri but had left the man safe and well. It was a calculated bet: after all, he didn’t think that he’d left his fingerprints at any of the murder scenes and he’d even taken away the plates and cutlery he used in the murder houses so that he didn’t leave any forensic clues.

The evidence

But the police were able to link him forensically to Andrew Collier’s flat, thanks to the fingerprint he’d left on an inner window sill. And his voice had been found on a police tape dating back from 1991 when he’d been charged with domestic violence. They were able to prove that it was the voice of the man who had phoned the police admitting to being the gay killer and threatening to ‘kill one a week’.

Ireland was arrested and charged with all five murders but he said nothing in custody, simply folding his arms and regarding officers with a faint half smile.

Confession

He remained silent for the next three weeks then realised that he’d have to talk in order to show the world how clever he’d been. He subsequently confessed to all five of the murders, explaining that he’d bought each pair of handcuffs from a different shop in order to evade suspicion. He’d worn gloves so that he wouldn’t leave fingerprints (barring the one left on the window sill) and had taken all of his personal possessions out of his pockets so that he couldn’t unwittingly leave proof of his identity at a scene. He’d also stayed in the murder houses overnight so that he could merge with commuters in the morning as they went to work.

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Ireland told the police that he thought he’d be better off in a restricted environment such as prison as he’d be unlikely to kill again there, whereas he’d remain a risk if he could still target masochistic gay males in the outside world. He said that he’d taken no sexual pleasure from torturing the men; that they merely disgusted him.

Trial

The trial was held at the Old Bailey in December 1993 and the killer pleaded guilty to all five murders. He remained unrepentant, sending Christmas cards to friends containing messages which urged them to read the papers on 20 December, his sentencing day.

His motive for the five murders was discussed in court.

He’d apparently told the police that he’d read several true crime books and decided that serial killing was something that he could be good at. As he was sadistic – though, he said, not
sexually
sadistic – he wanted the murders to be cruel, and he knew that the easiest victims to ensnare would be masochistic homosexual men. (Psychiatrists still suspect that Colin was bi-curious but in denial about this.)

The defence could offer no mitigating circumstances, simply noting that he’d pleaded guilty to all five murders which saved the nation a prolonged and costly trial.

The judge described the murders as grotesque and cruel and described Colin Ireland as ‘exceptionally dangerous’. He was sentenced to five life sentences with the recommendation that he never be released.

Given his need for notoriety, Colin John Ireland will remain a risk to other prisoners: he has nothing to lose by taking further lives as he’s already been given life imprisonment.

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CHAPTER SIX

SADISTIC DIVERSITY

The British sadists in most of the previous profiles
had distinct sexual preferences – Neville Heath,
active in 1946, liked to whip young females. In
contrast, Patrick Byrne, who murdered in 1959,
fantasised about using a circular saw on girls.

Victor Miller, whose crimes spanned the 1970s and
1980s, preferred to beat his teenage male victims
with a stick, and Colin Ireland, active in 1993,
favoured slow suffocation of homosexual men.

Only the deeply disordered Anthony Anderson
seems to have lacked a signature, using everything
from picquerism (cutting for erotic purposes) to
bludgeoning with a hammer and an axe.

But the following case studies illustrate just
how wide-ranging sadistic fantasies and actions
can be. One sadist maimed and killed his victims
from a distance with nail bombs, another favoured
ligature strangulation whilst a third had a razor
fetish. These cases also show the various mental
disorders which can accompany criminal sadism,
as one was diagnosed as schizophrenic, one was a
necrophile and most were sociopaths.

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PAUL BEART

Convicted of a horrific torture murder in 2002, Paul Beart illustrates the difficulty of treating an adult psychopath.

In 1997, he was jailed for a violent sexual attack on a young woman. Whilst incarcerated, Beart took part in a sex offenders rehabilitation course which he was deemed to have passed with flying colours. Intelligent and well read, a university drop-out, he was bright enough to give the authorities the answers they required.

Beart was freed in 2000 after serving just over half of his six-year sentence, a report saying that he’d ‘addressed his offending behaviour’ and was safe to be released on licence. He would kill within five months.

In April 2001, he left his home in Boston, Lincolnshire and travelled to Newquay in Cornwall, booking in to a beach resort where he knew there would be young women. For the first two days he stalked three such women, and on his third day he assaulted two teenage girls in the street.

Shortly afterwards he saw Deborah O’Sullivan walking home from a nightclub. Pulling her behind a wall, he tortured her for the next hour, burning her with his cigarette lighter and ripping her skin open with his bare hands. The 31-year-old woman begged for mercy but her 26-year-old attacker told her,

‘I’m going to kill you.’ He continued with the attack, sexually assaulting her and battering her with a litter bin. One of the blows broke her arm but the sadist still wasn’t satisfied and attempted twice to strangle her.

Beart then left the unconscious woman and gave himself up to the police saying, ‘I think I’ve killed her. This country should have the death penalty for people like me.’ Having achieved what he wanted from the assault, he was indifferent as to whether his victim lived or died.