The Met’s Five Year List of Murders

The Metropolitan Police recently agreed to release details of all ‘murders’ (actually all homicides, including manslaughter) in the last five years following a Freedom of Information request.

There are a few discrepancies with our own list of murders but these actually illuminate how the Met records each homicide. The Met already releases monthly totals and a breakdown for each borough via its website but gives no other details to allow easy comparison.

First thing to note is they are only giving the name, age, recorded date and borough, but the Guardian has been able to use the data for its own map. The pdf released by the Metropolitan police has been deleted from their website.

Other findings:

  • The ‘recorded date’ does not refer to the date of the attack or death of the victim, but to the date the Met recorded it as a murder. For example: Eric Mills was attacked in January 2008 and died in December 2009. The Met’s date of August 4, 2011, refers to the day the suspect was charged with murder.
  • The spellings of victims names differ from those given previously by police or heard in court. Others are known by different names, such as Nazarine Samuel, also known as Beryl Gilchrist, June 25, 2010.
  • There are some cases that appear never to have been reported in the media, or publicised by the Met, which remain unsolved/undetected (updates in italics):
  1. Andrew Isles, 30, June 26, 2011, Enfield – according to the Met this case is officially classified as ‘unexplained’.
  2. Michael Porter, 56, June 8, 2011, Southwark – no details held by Met press office. Likely to be historical. Further FOI request needed to seek details.
  3. Joelle Ayinla Munroe, 1, April 18, 2011, Lambeth – police press release issued without name of child, a two month old boy who died after suffering head injuries. Man and woman arrested but later released without further action. No further details available from Met, suggesting case closed.
  4. Michael Winn, 12, March 4, 2011, Camden – no details given by Met press office at time of writing, but the case eventually came to court in July 2014.
  5. Keith Needell, 84, January 31, 2011, Haringey –  Press release issued in August 2011, suspect charged with attempted murder, police awaiting further postmortem. (Case went to court in March 2012)
  6. Twelve year-old girl and ten year-old boy (names anonymised at request of family), November 1, 2010, Ealing – actually relates to a historical case. An open verdict was returned at an inquest into their deaths in June 2001.
  7. Jack Vincent, 1, July 7, 2010, Havering – victim’s mother, a member of MPS staff, pleaded guilty to child cruelty in February 2011. Her sentence was later cut on appeal to 16 months.
  8. Stephen Holmes, 46, April 14, 2010, Haringey – historical case dating back to 1970s – this is said to be the first victim of Dennis Nilsen, who was 14 when he disappeared.
  9. Chelsey Butcher, 30, October 2, 2008, Hounslow.
  1. Manji Hirani, 48, December 10, 2009, Brent. The suspect was charged with manslaughter and acquitted.
  2. Seamus Gill, 50, December 10, 2009, Ealing. The suspect was charged with murder but acquitted of both murder and manslaughter.
  3. Tom Hoyne and Chelsea Wright, March 18, 2009, Bexley. A suspect was charged with manslaughter but only stood trial on a health and safety charge. Tom Hoyne survived, which may explain why the ‘count’ column in his case reads ‘0’.

Some conclusions:

Not all of the cases listed are murder cases. A couple every year are manslaughter cases, while a small number are not officially homicides at all (i.e. unexplained deaths).

The practice of using a ‘recorded date’ and the method of adding historical cases does skew the statistics slightly but as this happens every year it is probably not signficant.

Having said that, it appears that five out of the 94 cases listed for 2011 (up to September 7) could be removed from the list, either because they relate to a different year or are not true homicides. Which means I could improve the figures by 5.3 per cent just by changing how they are recorded. Tempting, eh?

Hacking scandal’s first victim?

While the hacking scandal is dominating the news, it’s worth remembering a gruesome south London murder 24 years ago.

Daniel Morgan, a 37 year-old private investigator, was hacked to death with an axe in the car park of the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham. His brother Alastair believes that Daniel was killed to stop him exposing significant police corruption.

One of the suspects in the case was Morgan’s business partner Jonathan Rees, who exploited a network of police officers to sell stories to tabloid newspapers about the activities of celebrities, politicians and royalty. It is thought he was also able to hack into bank and phone accounts. It has even been suggested he commissioned burglars to gather material for scoops.

In 2000 Rees was arrested and jailed for six years for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice following a plot to plant cocaine on a model called Kim James. What happened when he was released from prison in 2004? He went to work for the News of the World, which was then edited by Andy Coulson.

Andy Coulson resigned in 2007 after the Royal Editor at the paper was jailed for hacking into the phones of the staff of Princes William and Harry. He then went to work as a ‘spin doctor’ for Prime Minister David Cameron until he was forced out in January 2011 because of new revelations about phone hacking.

There have been five investigations into the Daniel Morgan murder. It has now been admitted that the first was damaged by police corruption. The last one collapsed in March this year. The case remains unsolved.

Now that the Prime Minister has ordered public inquiries into the hacking scandal, we think it’s time one was ordered into the Daniel Morgan case.

At the Scene of a Murder

The murder scene is now a stock image of TV and film. A dishevelled detective arrives, crouches down over a dead body, spots something everybody else missed and then makes a smart comment to amuse the audience. With the viewer hooked, the music kicks in and it’s on to the title sequence. You don’t really have time to think about the person who has died, let alone feel anything.

This doesn’t apply to real life murder scenes. The first one I remember seeing in London was just down the road from my house. There was no body visible, just a forensics tent on the pavement. These tents, usually white and yellow, are well known to the public through media reports. When you see one you know what it means, even if you don’t know what has happened. In that particular case it was another nine months before the case reached the Old Bailey and I found out that a teenage boy had stabbed his stepdad to death.

Once erected at the scene, the tent can remain in place for up to 48 hours as paper-suited investigators search for evidence. With advances in DNA and other forensic techniques, the smallest find can be crucial. But even when the tent has been packed up and taken away a few signs still remain. Leftover police tape fluttering from lampposts and fences. Discarded medical equipment and wrapping. Discoloured sand, scattered around to soak up any pools of blood.

Some scenes – usually those involving young victims killed on the street – are marked by temporary shrines made up of flowers, candles and stuffed toys, often attached to personal messages of love, grief and despair. Others return to normality almost straight away, as if nothing had ever happened. Many are permanently out of view inside private bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms.

It is this variety that the photographer Antonio Olmos captures in his project The Landscape of Murder. The idea is simple but time-consumingly ambitious – photograph every murder scene in London in one year. He’s been going for eight months now. Eight months and nearly eighty homicides across the capital, from Croydon to Enfield and Harlington to Romford, building up an alternative picture of ‘Austerity Britain’.

Last week it was the turn of Ilford in east London. Kelvin Chibueze, 17, had been stabbed to death in the early hours of Monday 15 August, the ninth teenage homicide victim of 2011. The details were vague, but he had been found injured in a car park following a clash between two groups of between 15 and 20 people.

It turned out the car park, for customers of Lidl, Fitness First and Farmfoods, was almost directly opposite the police station. Officers had rushed out on hearing shouts and bottles smashing and found Kelvin lying with a stab wound to the chest. He died in hospital at 1pm.

Two days later, only a few hours after the forensics officers had left the scene for good, the area was relatively busy for a Wednesday afternoon. It was cloudy but bright and warm. Vehicles drove in and out, families did their shopping, passers-by passed by.

It was no doubt a coincidence that the car parking space where Kelvin Chibueze bled to death was empty. At one end was a dark patch of ground which could have been mistaken for an oil leak. A few yards away a short piece of torn police tape had been left attached to a steel barrier.

There were no flowers at the scene but around the corner a group of Kelvin’s friends had gathered around a bench with their bouquets. They were clearly distrustful of the media and photographers, particularly if they were from the tabloids. Later they were to shout at and confront one of these ‘snappers’ who tried to take sneak shots of them from a distance.

Friends of Kelvin Chibueze pay their respects at the scene in Ilford

By contrast, Antonio – who works for the Observer – won them over by being open, straightforward and polite and asked for permission. After discussing it among themselves, and seeing examples of his previous work, they agreed to let him take photographs as they stood in silence, hugging each other, talking quietly, cradling flowers. This wasn’t staged – there were no directions or pleas to look at the camera. They were left to pay tribute in their own way while Antonio stood by his tripod for just over an hour, waiting for the scene to arrange itself.

At some locations he has spent the better part of a day waiting for a shot. Often people approach to ask what he is doing, question him about the murder or even offer an opinion. Their reactions are as varied as the scenes themselves. A few yards from a teenage stabbing in Welling he witnessed a brief scuffle between rival gangs. Two youths even flashed their knives. Once he was approached by the mother of a boy who had been killed in the same area a few years earlier. At another scene in south London local shopkeepers told him the victim was a known thief, while in Ilford a man wanted to know the colour of the victim.

Murdered teenagers like Kelvin make bigger headlines, and for good reason at a time of growing concern for the future. But there are many more who go unremembered, unnoticed by the media and represented only by Home Office statistics. One of the ideas behind murdermap was to record and remember every victim, regardless of the ‘story’, and by doing so illuminate the hidden, darker sides of London. The photographs that make up ‘The Landscape of Murder’ do the same thing in a different way. And maybe, as the cliche goes, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

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Antonio Olmos, whose other work can be seen on his website antonioolmos.com, has written about his project in the Observer – ‘When the city streets are visited by death‘ – July 10, 2011.

A slideshow of pictures from The Landscape of Murder can be seen on the Radio Netherlands website.

Mapping the Ratcliffe Highway Murders

This year is the 200th anniversary of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, when seven people were killed in a gratuitous frenzy in the space of 12 days. But while 19th century Londoners would have recoiled at the mention of John Williams and his crimes, they probably mean little to the city’s present day inhabitants.

Likewise the scenes of the murders are vastly different to how they were in December 1811. At that time, Ratcliffe Highway ran east from Tower Hill through Wapping and Shadwell to Limehouse. To the south were the docks where ships brought in tobacco, tea and sugar (and sailors), while to the north was the church of St George’s-in-the-east, Cable street and Whitechapel.

In those days the highway was lined either side with shops, pubs, tenements and narrow, dark alleyways. The expansion of the docks and the blitz did their part to reshape the road and now it is known simply as ‘The Highway’. The cramped dwellings have been replaced with trees, small industrial units, grassland, a building site, and a warehouse dating from 1882, now converted into flats. To the south lies the fortress of News International, former home of the now-defunct News of the World.

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Ratcliffe Highway in the late 19th Century, when it was known as St George’s Street
Ratcliffe Highway looking east
It is now known simply as ‘The Highway’ (looking east from the junction with Artichoke Hill)
The Highway

The scene of the first murder was the home and business of linen draper Timothy Marr at number 29 on the south side. The numbering of the street has changed with the name but the road roughly opposite the location, Betts Street, remains. At the time of the publication of P.D. James’ book about the murders, Marr’s house had been replaced by a block of flats. It seems the site of Marr’s shop is now a Saab dealership.

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Approximate location of the murders of Timothy Marr, his wife, their baby and servant boy, at 29 Ratcliffe Highway

The second murder scene, at which a husband and wife and their maid were battered to death 12 nights later, was at the King’s Arms pub at 81 New Gravel Lane. This road, which is further east down the Highway, is now called Garnet Street.

Garnet Street / King's Arms
The King’s Arms would have been on the right hand side of the road as we look at it, where the old dock wall still stands.

The King’s Arms would have been somewhere on the west side of Garnet street (pictured above, heading south). It was knocked down in the 1830s for the extension of London Dock. The dock wall remains today, but behind it you now find blocks of post-war flats.

Heading down Garnet Street takes you towards Wapping and the site of the Pear Tree lodging house which became the centre of the police investigation. It was there where a bloodied knife was found hidden in a closet. The carpenter’s maul used by the killer had also been previously kept there in a locker.

Pear Tree Alley, which was said to run off Cinammon Street, no longer exists but seems to have run parallel to what is now called Clegg Street. In the 1960s it was still a derelict bomb site but it is now the site of a small block of flats and a children’s playground.

Pear Tree Alley?
The view from Cinammon Street at what would have been Pear Tree Alley. Clegg Street can be seen on the far left. To the right is Hilliards Court.
Pear Tree Alley?
The view from the bottom of Clegg Street towards Hilliard’s Court.

There is however a ‘Pear Tree Lane’ which it is claimed was named after the pub, located to the east of St Paul’s Shadwell and the west of Glamis Road and the Shadwell Basin.

The final location to visit is the burial site of John Williams, who committed suicide before facing trial. He was dumped in a hole at the crossroads of Cannon Street Road and Back Lane (now Cable Street). His body was dug up again 100 years later by workmen installing new mains. According to legend the skull was kept by the owner of the Crown and Dolphin pub at the corner.

Burial site photo
The crossroads in 2011. The Crown and Dolphin was closed in 2002 and converted for residential use.

Sam Hallam: A Miscarriage of Justice?

There’s a famous quote from the film Shawshank Redemption, when the main character Andy Dufresne tells another prison inmate: ‘Everybody in here’s innocent. Didn’t you know that?’

So when a young man convicted of murder steps forward and strongly protests his innocence, it’s often hard to keep an open mind. It’s still harder to accept that there has been a miscarriage of justice. We’d all like to think that juries, with their 12 independent, educated minds, can see through prosecution hyperbole and defence obfuscation to the truth.

Obviously there have been glaring examples of where this hasn’t happened. The Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, Colin Stagg. But in the new millennium, with its CSI forensics, highly-trained police officers and professional lawyers?

The case of Sam Hallam (the murder of Essayas Kassahun) demonstrates how many things have changed, even in the last five years. CCTV is much more prevalent. Mobile phone evidence, showing who phoned who, at what time and at what rough location, is more precise. Scientists use new techniques to get DNA from much smaller samples than have previously been possible.

But eyewitness accounts and identification of suspects have been the basis of court cases for centuries. It’s also long been known that human memory is fallible, and that this has an impact on the legal process. We all have experience of its effects – ask 20 people at a football match about a goal or a tackle and you’ll get 20 different versions of the same event. But it may be that with the ‘CSI effect’ juries are now unwilling to accept witness evidence without backup from another source.

Even more ‘dangerous’ is the interaction of witnesses after the event, particularly when rumour comes into play. They may change their account – sometimes without realising it and sometimes out of a misguided attempt to achieve justice for the victim.

Having looked into reports of Sam Hallam’s trial in 2005, it’s clear that there wasn’t a great deal of interest in the case at the time, for whatever reason. There are limited reports on the BBC online, the Camden New Journal and Islington Gazette. The Press Association and the Central News court reporting agency filed short pieces on the opening of the case, the conviction and the sentencing hearing. The most detailed account found online was at the Sam Hallam Campaign website (now defunct), which appears to make use of court transcripts.

In Sam’s case there were two key witnesses who identified him as being present at the scene (although neither did in their initial statements to police). One of them, a 20 year-old man, said he saw Sam standing over the victim with a baseball bat. He said he had been ‘reminded of his name’ by they other key witness, a 19 year-old girl. This girl also identified Sam Hallam, saying she had heard a rumour that a ‘Sam’ was involved in the murder, although she did not state exactly how he was involved.

These are only a few of the inconsistencies, but sadly they are not unusual ones in a murder case. Witnesses are often unwilling to provide names straight away, either because they don’t want to ‘grass’ or because they fear retaliation. It’s also worth pointing out that the 20 year-old was treated as ‘hostile witness’ in court because he effectively withdrew his identification of Sam Hallam. This meant that his identification in his second police statement could be provided to the jury anyway.

It’s impossible to know how the jury reached their verdict, but it’s likely they would have had to decide whether the two witnesses genuinely identified Sam Hallam but felt uncomfortable doing so, were mistaken about their identification, or were trying to cobble evidence together out of rumour.

What Sam Hallam lacked in this situation was a provable defence (although by law he does not have to offer one). He did not answer questions in interview (lawyers almost always advise their clients not to) and his friend contradicted his claim to have been playing football.

But that was it. No forensics, or CCTV footage or phone evidence linking him to the murder. It’s no surprise many feel passionately that he has been wrongly convicted.

Sam is now 24, having served half of his minimum 12 year sentence. During his incarceration his father Terry has died but his family and friends have kept the campaign going. It is a tribute to their hard work and belief that his case was last week referred to the Court of Appeal due to the ‘real possibility that the Court of Appeal would quash the conviction.’

If they do, the court could then order a retrial. The prosecution would then have to assess if they have enough evidence against Sam Hallam to mount a case. It may be some time yet before Sam Hallam is freed.

The Sam Hallam campaign is holding a public meeting to discuss their next steps on Thursday 4 August 2011 at 7.30 pm in the Arden Estate Community Hall, Regan Way, Hoxton, north London.

UPDATE: On May 18, 2012, the prosecution withdrew their opposition to the appeal and the following day the murder conviction was quashed. His acquittal came after spending seven years behind bars.