# The ‘Gay Slayer’ Mass Murderer

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 16 Jun 2025, 1 h 49 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO6631950750.mp3

A note for listeners: I’ve had to be on voice rest this past week so instead I’m bringing you an older episode from our archives! I’ll be back next week with a brand new Outlore Episode! London, 1993: A man called Colin Ireland made it his New Year’s Resolution to murder as many gay men as possible, and as soon as he began, widespread fear across the capital’s gay community could be felt. He’d stake out at gay bars, waiting and scouting for his next victim… Then, desperate for fame and notoriety, Colin would call the police on himself, teasing them with his horrific crimes, leading them down a cryptic path of clues. Resources: Galop is a charity that supports LGBTQ+ people who have experienced abuse & violence - https://www.galop.org.uk/ https://linktr.ee/eleanornealeresources Watch OUTLORE Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@EleanorNeale Follow Me Here for Updates & Short Form Content: Instagram TikTok

## Transcript

[0:00] Hello and welcome to Outlaw Podcast.
[0:02] I'm Ellen O'Neill and today we're in London in 1993 where
[0:07] the cities gay scene was being terrorized by a serial killer
[0:11] known as the Gay Slayer. Just a little disclaimer before
[0:15] we get any further, I actually lost my voice this week so I was
[0:20] unable to record a new episode for you.
[0:22] So we have dug into the archives of my YouTube channel and pulled
[0:26] out this episode from a couple of years ago.
[0:29] So if you watched it back then and you're listening again
[0:31] today, first of all, that means the world to me.
[0:34] Leave a comment and let me know how much of it you remember.
[0:36] But hopefully for many of you Outlaw listeners, this can tide
[0:39] you over until next week's episode when I'll be back with a
[0:43] fresh case for your ears. Before I start the story though,
[0:46] you already know it's super important for us here at Outlaw
[0:48] to raise awareness for important causes in line with each
[0:52] episode. So I wanted to talk to you about
[0:54] an amazing LGBTQ plus charity that actually was at the
[0:57] forefront of helping the gay community in the aftermath of
[1:01] today's case. They're called Gallup, and for
[1:04] decades they have been huge advocates.
[1:07] Gallup was established in 1982 in response to the abuse and the
[1:11] violence that the gay community were experiencing that the
[1:14] police were failing to even help with, let alone stop it.
[1:18] It was originally Gallup's mission to expose systematic
[1:22] harassment and expose police failings, which they
[1:25] successfully did. Then over the years they have
[1:27] grown and expanded, and today they're still doing amazing work
[1:32] helping LGBTQ plus victims and survivors of abuse and violence
[1:37] here in the UK. They also have national
[1:39] helplines dedicated to hate crimes, conversion therapy,
[1:43] rape, sex, sexual abuse. There are so many helpful
[1:46] resources on their website as well.
[1:48] So of course the link to that will be in the podcast
[1:51] description along with our usual link tree.
[1:54] Of course, if you know someone that could use Gallup's help or
[1:58] if you yourself need it, please do reach out.
[2:01] They are so happy to help you. We are huge fans of Gallup here
[2:05] at Outlaw. And with all that being said, I
[2:08] hope you enjoy this week's throwback episode.
[2:16] The Gay Slayer was a serial killer terrorizing the City of
[2:20] London, specifically the gay scene in London in the early
[2:23] 1990's. The killer would make frequent
[2:26] calls to the police and to newspapers letting them know
[2:29] where they could find his next victim, all whilst being very
[2:32] cryptic about his own identity. And his ultimate goal was simply
[2:36] nothing more than he wanted to be an infamous.
[2:39] Serial killer he. Liked the idea of infamous for
[2:42] me and being hated and feared. And so one year he made it his
[2:46] New Year's resolution to become a serial killer.
[2:49] And that is why we're talking about him today.
[2:54] So today's video is going to be another solved true crime case.
[2:58] Today we're going to be discussing the gay Slayer Colin
[3:01] Ireland, a serial killer from here in the UK.
[3:04] Just a couple of content warnings before we get into this
[3:06] case. Today we are going to be
[3:08] discussing themes of paedophilia, sexual harassment,
[3:11] bullying, homophobia and the murder of an animal.
[3:14] So if any of that is something that you don't want to hear
[3:16] about right now, I completely understand.
[3:18] Click out this video, go look after yourself.
[3:20] Hopefully, I will get to see you some other time with a different
[3:22] case. But for now, with all that said,
[3:25] let's get into the case. So today's case actually takes
[3:28] place in London, England, in the 1990s, like I said.
[3:31] But first, let's take it back in time to when our serial killer
[3:35] was first born. Colin Ireland was born on March
[3:38] 16th, 1954, in Kent in southeast England to very, very young
[3:43] parents. His mother was only 16 years old
[3:46] when she caught pregnant with Colin, and then she was 17 by
[3:49] the time that she gave birth. And I think his father was
[3:51] around the same age. And his father actually walked
[3:55] out on the family pretty much as soon as Colin was born.
[3:58] In fact, it was so soon that the birth certificate hadn't even
[4:01] been filled out yet. And so when it came to filling
[4:03] the certificate, the mother didn't even acknowledge the
[4:06] father on it. She just left the father bit on
[4:09] the birth certificate blank. So Colin never knew who his
[4:12] father was. He was never told anything about
[4:14] his father. So now it's just this 17 year
[4:17] old girl all on her own trying to look after a newborn baby.
[4:20] And she just couldn't do it alone, both financially and also
[4:24] so just the constant stress of child care and having to try and
[4:28] support herself and her baby at the same time, it was too much.
[4:31] And so Colin's mother went and moved back in with her parents.
[4:34] And of course, she took Colin with her.
[4:36] And so for the first four years of his life, he lived with his
[4:39] grandparents and his mother so that they could help, you know,
[4:42] support them and look after Colin.
[4:44] It seemed that this time in his life was pretty normal, pretty
[4:47] happy and stable and nice. However, when he was four years
[4:51] old, he and his mother moved out of their grandparents House of
[4:55] Colin's grandparents house for the first time.
[4:57] And after that point they didn't stop moving.
[5:00] So they moved out and then they were constantly just all over
[5:03] the place. They moved 9 * / a span of six
[5:06] years, which is so turbulent for a child that young.
[5:09] Like he never gets to lay down any any groundwork anywhere.
[5:14] He never gets to establish any friends.
[5:16] He doesn't get used to his surroundings before he's like
[5:18] picked up and whisked off to another place.
[5:20] I can imagine that feels really uncertain at all times.
[5:24] It's quite anxiety provoking. He had no constant anything in
[5:28] his life. The only constant thing that he
[5:30] had at all times was his mother. The reason for a lot of their
[5:33] moves was actually that his mother always had a new
[5:36] boyfriend. And so she was always like
[5:38] moving in with a boyfriend and then they'd break up.
[5:40] So they'd have to move out and then she found another boyfriend
[5:42] and then she'd move in with him and then they'd break up and
[5:44] then have to move out. This was happening so many times
[5:47] and sometimes in between boyfriends, they would have to
[5:49] go and stay at like women's shelters or homeless shelters
[5:52] because they didn't have enough money need to like be able to
[5:55] move out and rent on their own. They struggled terribly when it
[5:58] came to finances because his mother just couldn't afford to
[6:01] go out and get a job because she had to care for her newborn baby
[6:05] boy. Like she couldn't afford
[6:06] childcare so she couldn't afford to send him anywhere during the
[6:10] day. She had to be the one to look
[6:11] after him. But that also meant that she
[6:13] couldn't work. It was just a vicious cycle that
[6:15] she couldn't get herself out of. Sometimes it was so bad that she
[6:19] couldn't even afford to feed them.
[6:20] They would go hungry, they would have to skip meals.
[6:23] They became very vivid, visibly malnourished, they looked sick,
[6:27] they looked pale and thin and ghostly and actually Colin would
[6:32] get bullied at school for this. The main thing was that they
[6:35] would make fun of his legs because they were super skinny
[6:38] and they were also kind of bored and they would like take the mic
[6:41] out of how he walked and things like that.
[6:42] It was awful and the bullying got so bad that Colin would try
[6:46] to avoid school in any way that he possibly could.
[6:49] He would like fake sick and see if his mum would let him stay at
[6:53] home or if she did force him to go go to school, he would just
[6:55] like bunk off for the day and just like run off into town.
[6:58] And whenever he did show at school, he was always getting
[7:01] punished either for his absences or for being late or something
[7:05] or other. And this was back in like so
[7:08] like the 50s. And that was when physical
[7:10] punishments were allowed in schools.
[7:13] They would get like caned and whipped and all sorts.
[7:15] I cannot believe that that was ever a thing.
[7:17] By the way, growing up in like my day and age, you couldn't
[7:20] imagine being hit by one of your teachers.
[7:22] That's crazy. But that's that was the thing at
[7:26] the time. And so Colin was even more
[7:29] scared to go to school now because every single time he
[7:31] would go, he would get caned by his teachers.
[7:34] It was awful. If anything that deterred him
[7:36] from going to school even more because if he was on his way to
[7:39] school and then he realized that he was going to be like 5
[7:42] minutes late, he would just bunk off instead because he would
[7:44] rather pretend to be ill for the day and try and get the whole
[7:48] day off rather than go in late and get punished.
[7:50] So again, this is another one of those vicious cycles which means
[7:54] he's never going to school, so he would be getting punished.
[7:56] So he doesn't go to school so he won't get punished.
[7:58] You know what I mean? And this led to a lot of
[8:01] negative consequences for Colin Ireland.
[8:03] It meant that his social skills were really crap because he
[8:07] wasn't socializing with other kids his age.
[8:09] He wasn't making friends. He wasn't, you know, he wasn't
[8:11] getting that same development that the other kids his age were
[8:13] getting. Also, he just wasn't getting an
[8:16] education. He wasn't learning how to read
[8:18] and write and do maths, you know, all these valuable things
[8:21] that humans kind of need in this society.
[8:24] He wasn't learning any of that because he wasn't going.
[8:26] When Colin was about 10 years old, his mother went through
[8:28] another breakup and they were struggling so badly this time,
[8:32] like financially, that they were in another woman's shelter.
[8:35] And they decided that they had to go and move back in with
[8:38] Colin's grandparents. And soon after this, this
[8:41] Colin's mum finally found Mr. Right.
[8:45] She'd kissed a lot of frogs in her time.
[8:47] And now she had found a Prince. Finally, she had found a man
[8:50] that seemed actually genuinely nice, a man that she could be
[8:54] with. So she married this guy and he
[8:56] became Colin's new stepdad and supposedly he was great with
[9:01] Colin. I sounded like that tiger from
[9:03] the cereal and didn't know that tiger from the cereal, is it
[9:06] Frosty's? Anyway, he was really, really
[9:08] good with Colin and actually this, this is Mr. Ireland.
[9:12] I don't know his first name, but this is where Colin gets his
[9:15] surname from. I don't know what surname he had
[9:17] originally when he was born, but his mother fell so head over
[9:21] heels for this man that she changed her name.
[9:23] She changed Colin's name and Colin adored him as well.
[9:26] Not long after the marriage, Colin's mother fell pregnant and
[9:30] everyone was so excited. This meant there was going to be
[9:32] another baby, they were going to be a family of four.
[9:35] Everyone was so happy until reality set in and they realized
[9:39] that another child meant a huge financial burden on the family.
[9:44] They could barely even support themselves as is as a family of
[9:48] three. Sometimes they were missing
[9:50] meals because they couldn't afford food.
[9:52] So they definitely wouldn't be able to afford to bring another
[9:56] human being into this family. But what are they going to do?
[9:59] Like she's already pregnant. What?
[10:01] Like they don't want to get rid of the baby.
[10:03] They want to be able to have this baby together as a family.
[10:05] And that was when they came up with an idea.
[10:07] Their solution was to have this baby.
[10:10] But send Colin into foster care because they knew that they
[10:14] could only care for one child and they chose the newborn of a
[10:18] Colin, and Colin was put into foster care from that point on.
[10:22] Which like, I don't want to make any judgments against the mother
[10:26] because honestly, I do think she made the right decision here.
[10:28] She couldn't. They couldn't afford to look
[10:31] after either of these two children.
[10:32] And Colin would have had a much better life in foster care where
[10:37] he had a guaranteed roof over his head every night, guaranteed
[10:40] food on the table every day by a family that could support him.
[10:43] He would have had a better life there than he would have at
[10:45] home. But just because it was for the
[10:47] best doesn't change how awful this situation is and how
[10:51] traumatic that would be for a child in Collins situation.
[10:55] His parents, his mother that he has been raised by his whole
[11:00] life, and now his new stepdad that he loves and adores.
[11:03] I've just given him up to him. It probably felt like they
[11:06] didn't want him anymore, like they were choosing this new baby
[11:09] over him. He'd been replaced.
[11:12] So yeah, Colin gets sent off to foster care.
[11:14] He's there for a good while, his mom has the baby.
[11:18] They kind of get back on their feet a little bit, and then they
[11:21] go and get Colin back. So it was only temporary.
[11:23] They didn't want to give Colin up forever.
[11:25] And now they had him back. And they really hoped that they
[11:28] were going to be able to make this work now.
[11:30] But of course, adding another human being to the mix put even
[11:34] more strain on the family. And with all the financial
[11:37] burdens and the childcare burdens, it was really putting a
[11:40] strain on his mother's marriage with his stepfather.
[11:44] They were arguing a lot, they were fighting, and in the end,
[11:47] the dad said that he just couldn't do this anymore.
[11:49] So now things are a million times harder for his mother
[11:52] because she's in the exact same situation that she was in
[11:55] before, but now she's got two kids, a newborn and an older
[11:59] child that she is trying to provide for, care for, make sure
[12:03] that they're eating three meals a day.
[12:04] This is so hard for her. At this point, they're back in
[12:07] another homeless shelter and Colin's mother realizes that one
[12:11] of her best chances of being able to get these children
[12:14] financial support and childcare support is to marry again by
[12:18] literally inviting another human being into their family to share
[12:22] the burden of these children. The burden, maybe I don't mean
[12:25] burden, but to share the workload and the final financial
[12:28] load of these two children. And so for that reason, Colin's
[12:32] mother set out to marry again, not because she was looking for
[12:35] love, but because she was looking for a partner to, to
[12:39] care for these kids with. She meets another suitor rather
[12:42] quickly. He, he seemed like an all right
[12:44] guy for the job. And she married him when Colin
[12:47] was about 12. She moved him in and he was his
[12:49] new stepdad. But Colin wasn't best pleased at
[12:52] this point. He liked the last one.
[12:54] He had a really good like bond with the last one and I don't
[12:58] think it was anything personal against this new one, but I just
[13:01] think he was just angry at his mother at this point for for
[13:04] losing the last one and always having new boyfriends.
[13:07] And I don't know, he's a he's a kid and he just wasn't happy
[13:10] this time. Colin refused to change his
[13:12] surname along with his mother's. He wanted to stay Colin Island.
[13:16] He missed his old stepdad, to be fair.
[13:18] So at this point in time, Colin is just entering his teenage
[13:21] years and he is quite a loner. Of course, he's never been in
[13:26] the same place for long enough to make a group of friends.
[13:28] So every single time he moves is always the new kid.
[13:31] And then just as he starts to get friendly with some people,
[13:33] he's picked up and whisked away. So he he doesn't have any
[13:38] friends. He doesn't have a social group.
[13:41] So to fill his free time, Colin would just take himself on
[13:44] walks. He would go and explore by
[13:46] himself. He picked up a part time job
[13:48] because like, what else has he got to do?
[13:50] I think he worked at an arcade for a while.
[13:52] He would go to this one particular arcade in Kent quite
[13:55] a lot. It was quite a hot spot for
[13:57] young kids and it was also quite a hot spot for paedophiles.
[14:01] Obviously the paedophiles knew that that was all the kids
[14:04] favorite place at the arcade and so that is where they would hang
[14:06] around to spy on these boys. And Colin Ireland was sexually
[14:11] harassed by paedophiles on 4 separate occasions as a child.
[14:16] As far as I could tell he was never like physically touched or
[14:19] assaulted or anything like that. It did just seem to be like
[14:23] verbal harassment, stalking, following other awful awful
[14:26] things. Don't get me wrong.
[14:28] So he was, as far as I could tell, never physically touched
[14:30] by these men. So on one of these occasions, he
[14:33] was followed by this older man who came over to him, tried to
[14:36] strike up a conversation and offered him this really
[14:39] beautiful women's necklace that he could take home and give to
[14:42] his mother. But he would only give him this
[14:44] necklace on one condition that Colin perform a sexual act and
[14:49] this man and of course, Colin said no, run away.
[14:52] Another one of these incidents actually happened in the public
[14:54] toilets up around the arcade. Colin went in, went into one of
[14:58] the cubicles, started using the bathroom, and then a man came
[15:02] into the stall next to him, stood up on the toilet seat and
[15:06] peered over the top of the toilet cubicle and watched Colin
[15:12] as he finished peeing. The third incident actually
[15:15] happened at the cinema, and this was with someone that Colin knew
[15:18] prior to this incident. It was his optician.
[15:21] His optician had gone to the cinemas, seen Colin, recognized
[15:25] him, approached him, and I don't know how this could possibly
[15:28] come up in conversation between an optician and a child, but at
[15:32] some point he asked Colin to perform a sexual act on him and
[15:35] Colin said no. The optician then kind of
[15:37] stormed off in a hoof. He seemed like really angry at
[15:40] Colin and he just stormed off out of the cinema.
[15:42] This kind of thing was the main form of harassment that was
[15:45] taking place by these paedos at the arcade and in just that
[15:48] general area of Kent. It was more so harassment, them
[15:51] asking the boys for sexual favours or offering sexual
[15:54] favours. It wasn't just happening to
[15:55] Colin, it was happening to most of the young boys that went
[15:58] there, but it happened to Colin four times.
[16:01] So at this point in his life, Colin's like a young teenager
[16:05] and of course his family is still struggling really badly
[16:08] financially and he wants money. Of course, of course you need
[16:13] money to do things. He needs money to be able to
[16:15] like go places and buy food and support his family.
[16:18] And he does have a part time job, but it's not enough.
[16:22] And so he starts turning to petty crimes like theft to be
[16:27] able to make a little bit of money.
[16:28] He was caught for it a good few times, but because he was so
[16:31] young and the police could tell that he was in poverty, they
[16:35] just kind of let him off with a warning a lot of times because
[16:38] they took pity on him. But every time that he would get
[16:41] caught, the warnings and the the consequences would get more and
[16:44] more severe because they have to, police have to be seen to be
[16:48] punishing people. Even if they understand why he's
[16:51] stealing, you're still not allowed to steal.
[16:53] So yeah, there was one particular time where Colin
[16:55] stole 4 lbs and managed to get well.
[16:59] Was planning to go from Kent to London I think on like a bus or
[17:03] a coach but he was caught before he could get on the coach
[17:06] because he'd stolen this 4 lbs and so police ended up taking
[17:09] him back to his mother's. At this point police knew that
[17:12] they kind of had to do something about this kid.
[17:14] As much as they felt sorry for him and they understood why he
[17:17] was stealing, they can't let him keep doing it.
[17:18] Like it's a he's a menace to society when it comes to theft
[17:22] so they need to punish him but like they can't lock him away
[17:26] because he's a kid. So instead they send Colin
[17:29] Island to a special boarding school for troubled young boys
[17:32] like himself. It was called finched and Manor.
[17:35] It was usually a private school that you had to pay for, but
[17:38] because Colin Island was sent there by a court order, because
[17:41] he'd been caught stealing and sent to court and the court had
[17:44] gone send him to that school, he was managing to go for free,
[17:48] thank God, because his mum would have never been able to afford
[17:50] that. And at this school, Colin Island
[17:52] became so badly behaved. I don't really know what went on
[17:56] but for some reason when he moved there he literally just
[17:59] became like a devil child. He was causing issues every damn
[18:02] day. To be fair, I think some of it
[18:04] was a response to being bullied by the other boys.
[18:07] Colin was kind of teased and picked on no matter where he
[18:10] went and sometimes it was a lot more severe, sometimes it was
[18:12] like full on bullying. He was always the outsider in
[18:16] all these different schools. He was always the loner that
[18:18] didn't have friends and he was an easy target for bullies.
[18:21] There was a lot to pick on Colin about.
[18:23] So now I just need to give you a little bit of pretext before I
[18:27] continue on with the rest of this story.
[18:29] So one thing about Colin Island, he likes fire.
[18:32] He's a proper like pyromaniac. He had always just been
[18:36] interested in starting fires and watching fires.
[18:39] He would do it by himself myself, like in the woods
[18:41] sometimes dangerous that by the way.
[18:43] But yeah, he he just really liked fire.
[18:46] He liked starting them and watching them.
[18:48] And then on one particular day, Colin was being bullied again by
[18:51] these boys. And at this point he had had
[18:53] enough. And so he stormed inside,
[18:55] stormed into the dorm rooms. He went into his bullies bedroom
[18:59] and set all of his belongings on fire.
[19:03] He just set fire in his bedroom. He was immediately kicked out of
[19:06] the school following this and he was just sent back home to live
[19:08] with his mother. And now that he was back home,
[19:11] he started committing crimes again.
[19:13] Although now it was much more than just these petty little
[19:16] crimes. It was more than shoplifting and
[19:18] theft now. It was a lot more aggressive
[19:21] now. It was like robbing people in
[19:23] the street, like stopping them and mugging them.
[19:25] It was home invasions where we would break into people's houses
[19:28] in the middle of the night and burgle them like it was proper,
[19:31] proper serious. And he kept getting caught for
[19:33] this as well, like quite often. And it got to the point where
[19:37] he'd been caught so many times that he knew the consequences
[19:39] would be quite serious the next time he got caught.
[19:42] And so he ended up running away to London to just escape from
[19:46] the investigation. And not long after arriving in
[19:49] the capital city, Colin Island committed one of his worst
[19:52] robberies yet. He stormed into a cinema,
[19:55] grabbed the manager, tied him up with rope and demanded all of
[19:59] the money in the tail. He was 17 years old at the time
[20:02] that he committed the. This offence and so he was still
[20:04] a child. So instead of sending him to
[20:06] prison, of course he still went through the whole court trial
[20:09] and everything. They then sentenced him to go to
[20:12] a bar still, which is like similar thing to last time but a
[20:16] bit more like a prison. Last time it was literally more
[20:19] like a boarding school but a bar stool.
[20:22] So bar stools aren't a thing anymore as far as I'm aware.
[20:25] I don't think. No, they are.
[20:26] They got abolished. And if that doesn't tell you
[20:28] everything you need to know about bar stools, then I don't
[20:30] know what will. Well, no, I will.
[20:32] I'm going to, I'm going to tell you about bar stools.
[20:34] It's supposed to be like half a boarding school to kind of teach
[20:38] the boys like skills and, you know, school them, educate them
[20:41] because they are still kids. But it is like half a juvenile
[20:45] detention center at the same time.
[20:46] It's like a mix. But the main idea of a bar still
[20:49] is to reform these kids and get them set up for a successful
[20:53] life. Once they leave the bar still,
[20:55] because they're obviously there because they're causing issues,
[20:58] they're committing crimes, they're being naughty at that
[21:01] age, they give them like vocational courses to be able to
[21:04] learn how to become like a mechanic or a plumber or an
[21:06] electrician, valuable skills that they can then go out into
[21:09] the real world and apply and then get a job.
[21:12] So then they don't have to like steal for money for the rest of
[21:15] their lives. It's supposed to be a good thing
[21:17] in the long term. But bar stools were known back
[21:20] then for being quite like abusive, You know, when they had
[21:23] all these physical punishments. Well, bar stools took it above
[21:26] and beyond because because they could, you know, because they're
[21:29] meant to be there to like punish the boys.
[21:31] But apparently they were awful, awful places to go.
[21:33] They had like a really strict regime in bar stools, you know,
[21:37] kind of like in the army where they make them wake up at a
[21:39] certain time and they've got to do this and then they've got to
[21:41] do that. And Colin absolutely hated it at
[21:44] this bar stool. Pretty much all the boys did.
[21:46] Bar stools were hell for every person that went to him, but
[21:49] even worse for Colin because not only was he in a bar stool, but
[21:52] he was getting bullied in the bar stool.
[21:54] All the other guys were ganging up on him as they had everywhere
[21:58] that he'd ever been in his life because he was quite an easy
[22:00] target. He was quiet, he was awkward,
[22:02] weird, shy, like he didn't make friends very easy.
[22:06] So he was the outsider everywhere he went.
[22:08] He hated it so much at this bar stall that one night in the
[22:11] middle of the night, he ran away.
[22:14] He escaped and ran away. But like, obviously he's there
[22:17] on a court order. So this is essentially like
[22:20] escaping jail, but like not as serious.
[22:22] So they still needed to get him back.
[22:24] They still need to sort of locate him and bring him back to
[22:26] the bar stall. He was tracked down by police
[22:28] and arrested and they decided to send him now to a different
[22:31] barstool with higher security because obviously he has proven
[22:35] himself to be a flight risk. And for the rest of his time at
[22:37] this other barstool, he just survived.
[22:41] He didn't, he didn't do much. He just kind of got on with it
[22:44] and got out of there as quick as he could.
[22:47] That being said, he didn't try at any point, you know, like
[22:50] with his vocational courses or his education that they were
[22:53] trying to give these boys. He didn't try, he didn't care.
[22:56] He actually left that ball stall with 0 qualifications, which is
[22:59] against the whole point of the bar stool because they try and
[23:02] give these boys like prospects for the future.
[23:05] But Colin didn't care and so he didn't get any.
[23:07] And it's no surprise that as soon as he was released from
[23:10] this bar stool at the age of 18, he went right back to his life
[23:13] of crime. I mean he did pick up odd jobs
[23:16] here and there but because he wasn't qualified in anything he
[23:19] found it really hard to like apply for proper jobs and get
[23:22] hired by an employer. So instead he would just pick up
[23:25] like random little manual labour jobs in the town, you know,
[23:28] whatever people needed doing. He was willing to try and do it
[23:32] if they were going to pay him. You know, as a young adult,
[23:34] Colin Island really started to live a life that was very
[23:37] similar to his mother's when she was his age.
[23:39] He was constantly moving around. He was always getting new
[23:42] girlfriends and then losing them very quickly.
[23:44] He spent most of his early 20s in prison actually.
[23:47] So that was while he was out of prison, but most of it was
[23:49] actually behind bars for things like robbery.
[23:52] He stole cars, he like burgled people's homes.
[23:55] He was always getting like a few months at a time and then
[23:57] getting let out again, doing it again, getting sent back.
[24:00] He never had like a good chunk of time out of prison throughout
[24:03] pretty much his whole 20s. But when he was about 2728 ish,
[24:07] Colin started to settle down because at this point he'd
[24:10] actually met a woman. This woman was a decent amount
[24:13] older than him. She was about 9 years older than
[24:15] him. So she kind of had her life
[24:17] sorted. Her name was Virginia Zamit, she
[24:20] had a daughter of her own, she had a House of her own, and she
[24:23] was a really grounding energy for Colin Island.
[24:27] She was a really good influence on him.
[24:29] She was sensible. She had her shit together.
[24:32] And it influenced Colin to kind of, I don't know, settle down,
[24:35] chill out a bit. And it did really seem to change
[24:38] Colin as a man. He kind of dropped his life of
[24:41] crime, not completely, because like a tiger never changes its
[24:44] stripes, but he wasn't doing it as often.
[24:46] And I think one of the main reasons for this, so I believe
[24:49] Virginia was in a wheelchair. I think she was paralyzed.
[24:52] And so she was in this wheelchair.
[24:54] And this really brought out a really caring and protective
[24:58] side of Colin. His friends said that they saw
[25:01] him be an absolute Angel to this woman.
[25:04] He wanted to do everything for her.
[25:05] He couldn't have done a better job of being this woman's
[25:08] husband if he tried in the beginning.
[25:10] Anyway, Colin and Virginia got married and they ended up
[25:13] getting an apartment together in Holloway in London.
[25:16] And for the first time in Colin's life, pretty much, he
[25:19] was happy. Things were stable, things were
[25:22] calm, everything was nice. Finally, he found someone who
[25:25] actually genuinely loved and accepted him, and someone that
[25:29] he could talk to and confide in. Someone that he could give his
[25:32] love to as well, because he'd never had that before.
[25:35] Really, everything was just going so well for Colin Ireland
[25:39] until he ruined it, because they always do in these cases, don't
[25:43] they? He was arrested and found guilty
[25:45] of going equipped to cheat. And when I tell you I have tried
[25:50] my best to find out what that phrase means and I swear they've
[25:53] made it up, I swear I'm joking. I'm joking, but I still don't
[25:57] fully know what it means. I can try my best.
[25:59] So I think he got caught on his way to burglar house and he was
[26:04] going equipped to burgle. He had like the intention of
[26:09] going burgle in a house, but he was caught before they did it.
[26:12] So then they couldn't exactly like find him guilty of burgling
[26:14] a house because he hadn't got there yet.
[26:16] So they worded it like this. He was going equipped to cheat.
[26:19] I think if I've got that wrong, let me know, but I tried.
[26:22] I don't think that's really a phrase that they ultimately use
[26:25] anymore. This was like the 19, 80s.
[26:28] When was this? The 80s?
[26:30] Yeah. Anyway, for that, Colin Ireland
[26:32] was sentenced to six months in prison.
[26:34] But when he got out, he went to go home to his wife and his
[26:38] stepdaughter, and he found that they were gone.
[26:41] While he'd been behind bars. Virginia had found out that her
[26:45] husband had had an affair with another woman before he went
[26:49] into prison. I don't know how she came across
[26:51] this information, but she found it out while he was gone.
[26:53] And instead of, you know, kicking up a scene or anything,
[26:56] she decided to just quietly leave him.
[26:59] She was going to get rid of their house that they had
[27:01] together. She was going to take her
[27:02] daughter, and she was going to leave.
[27:04] And she was going to file for divorce from afar.
[27:06] She never wanted to see Colin Ireland again.
[27:09] And she didn't. From that point on, Colin came
[27:11] out of prison and his wife and stepdaughter were gone.
[27:14] And Colin was really, really upset by this.
[27:16] Like he was going through quite a visceral breakup.
[27:20] And he did that typical thing where people go through a
[27:22] breakup and they're like, I just need to like, go somewhere and
[27:24] like discover myself. So he went to Devon, which is on
[27:28] the South Coast of England. He so he was really into
[27:31] survivalism, which I think is really interesting.
[27:34] You know, like all that Bear Grylls stuff where they're like
[27:36] living off the land and like sleeping outside and stuff like
[27:40] that. I don't know, I'm not into it.
[27:41] I don't. They kill their food and eat it,
[27:43] don't they? Like they go out and kill in the
[27:45] forest? Anyway, he was really into that
[27:48] and Devon was quite a good place for it.
[27:50] Apparently there was like quite a few hotspots where loads of
[27:53] people that were into survivalism used to go.
[27:56] So he was going through this breakup and he was like, you
[27:58] know what, I'm going to go to Devon.
[28:00] I'm going to be a survivalist. I'm just going to go like find
[28:02] myself after this breakup. And there in Devon, Colin Island
[28:06] very quickly found his next lady because even though he was on
[28:09] this like, survivalist like retreat thing, he was still
[28:12] going to the pub. Like he was going to like camp
[28:14] out for a bit during the day and then go to the local in the
[28:17] afternoon. And it was actually the landlady
[28:19] of the local pub in Devon where he used to go that he fell for.
[28:24] Her name was Janet Young. And she said that from the
[28:27] second Colin Island walked into her pub, the two of them locked
[28:30] eyes and that was it. The two of them like pretty much
[28:33] fell in love. It was love at first sight.
[28:35] And then he came over to her, started flirting with her,
[28:37] started charming her, and that was it.
[28:40] She was obsessed with this man, and he was obsessed with that.
[28:42] And this was one hell of a whirlwind romance.
[28:45] Serial killers tend to do that, don't they?
[28:47] Has anyone else ever noticed that pattern?
[28:49] I feel like I'm always saying that in videos where I'm like.
[28:51] And after three months, the two of them were married.
[28:54] But yeah, after three months, the two of them were married.
[28:57] He ended up moving into the flat above the pub where Janet lived
[29:00] with her two young sons to a previous marriage.
[29:03] However, Colin wasn't the same lovable, caring husband, family
[29:09] man that he was in his first marriage with Virginia.
[29:12] Absolutely not. In fact, he was the complete
[29:14] opposite. Now, he was rather abusive
[29:17] towards Janet. Now, I couldn't find any
[29:20] evidence or reports of physical abuse.
[29:23] So as far as I'm aware, I think it was just emotional kind of
[29:27] psychological manipulation that he would do with Janet.
[29:30] But it was really truly awful and he didn't care who saw as
[29:33] well. He would do these awful things
[29:35] in front of her children. So the things that he would do,
[29:38] like I say, he would like outwardly like punch her and
[29:40] stuff like that, but he would like push her out of the bedroom
[29:43] door and then close it and lock her out all night.
[29:45] And so she wouldn't be able to sleep in her bed.
[29:47] She would be forced to like go and sleep on the sofa, things
[29:50] like that, things to make her life hell, abusive things.
[29:54] But he wasn't technically like, you know, hurting her, to be
[29:58] fair. It was more so like the drama
[30:01] and the arguments and the shouting that Colin got a kick
[30:04] out of. And Janet learnt that after a
[30:07] point. And so there was one particular
[30:09] night where, again, he kicked her out of the bedroom and she
[30:12] was going to like, she was forced to go and sleep on the
[30:14] sofa. And usually when this would
[30:15] happen, they would have like, a screaming match through the door
[30:18] and she'd be like, let me back in.
[30:19] And he'd be like, no. But this time she decided to
[30:22] stay quiet. She wasn't going to give him
[30:24] that reaction. She got pushed out the door and
[30:26] she was like, fine. She just went straight into the
[30:28] living room, laid on the sofa and was about to go to sleep.
[30:31] And Colin, meanwhile, is back in the bedroom being like, where's
[30:35] all the drama? Where's the argument?
[30:37] Why is she just accepting the fact that I've made a sleep?
[30:39] On the surface, he hated this so much that he got up out of bed,
[30:43] ran into the living room and actually smashed the light bulb
[30:47] in there so that she couldn't see.
[30:49] And so now the room is pitch black and that both of their
[30:53] eyes are still kind of adjusting.
[30:54] You know, when the light goes off and it feels like pitch,
[30:57] pitch black, even though it's not really, but your eyes just
[31:00] can't comprehend anything. It was kind of like that.
[31:03] And he decides that he is going to start taunting Janet.
[31:07] So they're there in the absolute pitch black.
[31:09] And he starts moving around the room going, Janet, I'm over
[31:12] here. And then he'd like move and he'd
[31:14] be like, I'm over here now. And she was really scared
[31:17] because, yeah, he'd never hurt her before.
[31:19] But what's to say that he wasn't going to start now?
[31:21] He was clearly a very aggressive man, so he could have.
[31:25] She was terrified at what he could do to her.
[31:27] Like I say, I don't think he did anything to her.
[31:29] I never actually read anything of physical abuse in this
[31:32] relationship. But it was just, he was always
[31:35] just trying to scarer and not only was he scaring her all the
[31:38] time and being like emotionally abusive and stuff like that, he
[31:40] was also stealing from her, stealing from her and her pubs.
[31:44] So the way that their marriage eventually came to an end,
[31:47] surely you guessed it was going to come to an end at some point.
[31:50] So the way that it happened, it was on Easter weekend and Janet
[31:53] decided to take her two sons to London because they have family
[31:56] over there. She was taking him there for a
[31:58] long weekend over the bank holiday and she had left Colin
[32:01] Ireland in charge of the pub while she went.
[32:04] This was a huge mistake. When Janet and her two kids
[32:07] returned home to the pub after that weekend, Colin Ireland was
[32:11] gone and so were most of their belongings.
[32:15] He had decided to leave Janet, leave Janet and the kids, but he
[32:19] didn't want to tell her that. He had decided to do it in the
[32:22] most sleazy and cowardly way possible.
[32:25] He'd just run off while they were gone.
[32:27] He'd completely ghosted her, never got in contact with her
[32:31] ever again, never explained anything, and on top of all of
[32:34] that he'd stolen half of their things.
[32:37] He'd pretty much sold everything that was of value or like pawned
[32:41] things off like her jewelry and her kids toys and stuff.
[32:44] They really didn't have much left in that pub at all, and
[32:47] he'd stolen all the money out of the till in the pub as well.
[32:50] They were really, really going to struggle after this.
[32:53] He'd taken pretty much everything they had.
[32:55] But Janet's first reaction to seeing this, to going home, to
[32:59] noticing that her house was ransacked and half of the things
[33:02] were gone and her husband was missing, she didn't immediately
[33:05] think that Colin was the one that had done all of this.
[33:08] Her first thought was, Oh my God, Colin's missing.
[33:11] What if he's in trouble? What if he's been kidnapped or
[33:13] killed? Or you know, despite him being a
[33:16] very aggressive and abusive person throughout this whole
[33:18] relationship, it still didn't cross her mind at this point in
[33:21] time that he could be capable of something like this.
[33:24] Something so horrific to like ruin her life and her kids lives
[33:28] like this. But as the days went by and she
[33:30] couldn't find him, she couldn't get in contact with him.
[33:33] No one had heard from him. Janet started to realize that
[33:36] she had been conned by a con man Colin Ireland had come into a
[33:41] life and ruined everything, taken everything away with him
[33:45] and she was never going to hear from him again.
[33:47] After that, the family struggled really badly financially, like
[33:50] like you would imagine, half of their money was gone.
[33:53] I think they actually ended up having to give up the pub,
[33:55] although I'm not entirely sure. I know they were staying in a
[33:58] shelter for a period of time, so that tells you how bad their
[34:01] financial situation was. Colin Ireland had taken
[34:04] everything from this family and he'd gotten away with it as
[34:07] well. So now Colin Ireland is out in
[34:09] the world alone once again, but this time he actually had enough
[34:13] money that he'd stolen from his wife to be able to set himself
[34:17] up a new life. So he travels to the complete
[34:20] opposite side of the country and he goes to South End, which is
[34:23] in Essex. Here he got himself a little
[34:25] rented accommodation and he bounced between a few different
[34:28] jobs. He could never hold down a job
[34:30] for too long and I couldn't find out why.
[34:32] I don't know if he was getting fired or if he was just like
[34:34] leaving because he was bored or like sick of the job or
[34:37] whatever, but he was a chef for a little while.
[34:39] He was a bouncer at a gay club for a bit, which I found and
[34:42] very interesting considering what he went on today.
[34:45] I wonder if anything happened while he worked at that gay club
[34:48] that could have potentially influenced his later actions.
[34:51] Who knows. The same thing that was
[34:53] happening with his jobs was also happening with his apartments.
[34:55] He could never hold an apartment down for long either.
[34:57] He was always getting evicted for different things, you know,
[35:00] like wrecking the apartment or like not paying his rent on
[35:03] time. And it's not even necessarily
[35:05] that he didn't have the money for rent.
[35:07] I mean, he wasn't well off by any means, but he could have
[35:10] afforded to pay his rent if he wanted.
[35:12] But I think he just liked trying to get away with not doing it.
[35:16] I don't know, He just liked being a in the arse, I think.
[35:19] So now that he's kind of setting up this new life for himself in
[35:22] South End, he's he's putting his conman past behind him, or at
[35:26] least on the surface, that's what it looks like.
[35:29] He decides to like start building this nice guy
[35:32] reputation. He wants to be liked in his new
[35:35] community. And so he starts volunteering at
[35:38] a homeless shelter. And a lot of the volunteers from
[35:41] this shelter have so many differing opinions on Colin
[35:44] Island, which I find really, really interesting.
[35:47] That seems to be a pattern throughout out his whole life.
[35:49] Colin is an entirely different Colin depending on who he's
[35:53] interacting with. So like to Virginia and her
[35:56] daughter, they were married for ages and from what I could tell
[36:00] he was nothing but lovely to her.
[36:02] There were never any reports of him being a bad guy or abusive
[36:04] or anything. But then you see him in his next
[36:07] marriage and he's awful and then he cons her at the end of it and
[36:10] like goes to steals all the money.
[36:12] Like he is such a flip floppy person.
[36:15] And he was like that with the other volunteers at the Homeless
[36:18] Shell. Some of them hated him.
[36:20] They thought he was the most arrogant, like horrid, entitled
[36:23] man because he ended up like working his way up in the
[36:26] homeless shelter. He became like deputy manager at
[36:29] one point. So he was a bit big for his
[36:31] boots. And some of the staff saw that.
[36:33] But other members of staff loved him.
[36:36] They thought he was so funny. He was so personable, like he
[36:39] loved his job. He seemed really, really
[36:41] passionate about his work with the homeless.
[36:43] In fact, there were a couple of members of staff that he
[36:45] actually confided in saying, well, I did rather vaguely
[36:49] saying that he'd, like, done some bad stuff in the past.
[36:53] And, you know, he had a shady history, but he'd put that
[36:56] behind him. And now he was trying to do good
[36:58] in the world to make up for it. That's why he was volunteering,
[37:00] because he felt like he owed the world, you know, reparations
[37:05] kind of for his previous actions, although he never told
[37:08] any of the volunteers what those actions were.
[37:11] He was at that shelter for about 6 months and like I said, people
[37:14] always had differing opinions of him.
[37:17] But over time more and more people started to catch on to
[37:20] the negative side of Colin Island.
[37:23] He started to make random odd little homophobic comments which
[37:28] seemed to have come out of nowhere.
[37:29] They said never like come out of Colin's mouth at the shelter
[37:32] before. And then all of a sudden there
[37:34] was a frequent amount of homophobic comments.
[37:38] It actually got so bad that some of the staff at the at the
[37:41] shelter would warn the LGBT patrons that would come in to
[37:46] stay away from Colin to just stay out of his way.
[37:48] Which makes me so freaking mad. Like why were they talking to
[37:52] the victims and telling the victims to to stay away?
[37:55] I'm not Colin. Why?
[37:56] Why aren't you just sacked Colin?
[37:57] To be fair. But no, they didn't talk to
[37:59] Colin. They talked to the victims and
[38:00] told the victims to watch out. His lack of empathy was really
[38:04] starting to shine through now, which was a really big surprise.
[38:07] It caught a lot of people off guard, obviously the ones that
[38:09] liked Colin, because he did seem so passionate about that job.
[38:13] He seemed like such an empathetic person.
[38:15] But now he couldn't keep up this facade much longer.
[38:19] And at one point he said something like really bold, like
[38:22] really bad. This one time they had this,
[38:24] like, rather troublesome guy staying at the shelter.
[38:27] And I think he was a regular and I think he was always causing a
[38:30] bit of trouble. He was an alcoholic.
[38:32] He never really had the money to to pay for his stay.
[38:35] He would always try not to pay or to underpay.
[38:38] He was trouble in every sense of the word.
[38:39] And the staff at the shelter didn't really like him.
[38:42] But at the same time, you work at a homeless shelter, you've
[38:44] just got to accept everyone and get on with it and be polite and
[38:48] nice. But on this one particular day,
[38:51] he was doing that thing again where he refused to pay for his
[38:53] stay. And all of the staff were in the
[38:55] backroom and they were kind of brainstorming how they were
[38:58] going to deal with this. How were we going to get the
[39:00] money out of this guy? And then Colin says that he has
[39:02] an idea of how they can get rid of him.
[39:04] Colin said loudly and confidently that they should
[39:08] just shove snooker balls down his throat until he chokes and
[39:12] dies. What the deputy manager of a
[39:16] homeless shelter is saying, you know, we should just murder him
[39:20] and and that way we don't even need to get the money out of
[39:22] him. What what is going on there?
[39:24] And he wasn't even sacked for that.
[39:26] He just kept doing and saying awful shit and was never given
[39:31] any consequences for it. That was until around the six
[39:35] month mark when he was working at this homeless shelter.
[39:38] Multiple of his female Co workers came forward to the
[39:42] higher ups and said that Colin Ireland was sexually harassing
[39:46] them in the workplace and immediately he was sacked.
[39:49] Nothing ever really lasted all that long for Colin Ireland
[39:52] because he couldn't keep up a nice guy persona for that long.
[39:56] He was just not a nice person and it would always shine
[39:59] through somehow. So now that he was sacked from
[40:02] his volunteer job, he had a lot of free time.
[40:04] Time on his hands and he starts filling it with like, his other
[40:07] interests. He starts doing like normal
[40:09] people things, like reading. He was very interested in true
[40:12] crime. There was one book in particular
[40:14] that Colin read around this time that he himself has said
[40:18] influenced him a lot. It was a book by a former FBI
[40:21] agent named Robert Ressler, who was like one of the top dogs in
[40:25] the FBI in the 1970s. And he worked specifically
[40:29] trying to track down serial killers.
[40:32] And that's what this book was all about.
[40:33] It was all like his different stories from all the different
[40:36] cases he'd worked on, like the huge cases like Ted Bundy, John
[40:39] Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, so many other huge names that you
[40:43] would know as well. He was part of every single one
[40:45] of those cases. In fact, Robert Ressler was that
[40:49] much of an OG in the like serial killer solving scene that he has
[40:54] actually been credited with coming up with the term serial
[40:57] killer. Apparently it stems from a
[40:59] German word, something along the lines of SAR Serian Mordor.
[41:03] I'm not German, sorry, but yeah. So, yeah, Robert Wrestler has
[41:07] written quite a few books about his time, you know, doing his
[41:10] job. He's got a really, like,
[41:12] fascinating job, so no wonder. But it was this one particular
[41:15] book. I think this is his most popular
[41:16] book that Colin Ireland came across, and he loved it.
[41:20] He read it back to front multiple times.
[41:22] But one particular thing that Colin really clung to from this
[41:25] book was when Robert Wrestler says that the FBI's
[41:28] classification for a serial killer is that one must kill 5
[41:32] people on five separate occasions.
[41:35] I don't think that is the classification, at least here in
[41:38] the UK. I think it's three or more
[41:41] murders with a cooling off period in between that
[41:44] classifieds you as a serial killer now, or at least here in
[41:47] the UK. That's always the, that's what
[41:49] I've always thought anyway. And I've been doing this job for
[41:51] years. So that's really challenged my
[41:53] thoughts. I'm pretty sure it is just three
[41:55] now. But the FBI standard is
[41:57] different and therefore Colin Island's standard was also
[42:01] different because he like worshipped this book so much.
[42:05] The word in that book was gospel.
[42:07] And so to Colin Island, you needed to kill five people to be
[42:10] a serial killer. And that is when Colin got an
[42:13] idea, and I think you know exactly what that idea is going
[42:16] to be. At this point in his life, he
[42:18] was so effing bored. He was reaching 40 and he
[42:22] honestly had nothing to live for.
[42:25] That sounds awful, but he didn't.
[42:27] He had no family, he had no friends really.
[42:31] He didn't really have a job. Like he had nothing going on.
[42:34] He had no excitement in his life and he desperately wanted
[42:38] excitement in his life, but he couldn't get it because he
[42:40] wasn't a nice person and people didn't want to stick around with
[42:43] him that long. So he was thinking to himself as
[42:45] he was reading this book for a bit of excitement in his life,
[42:49] why not just become a serial killer just like the ones that
[42:52] he's reading about? Why not?
[42:53] Why not do what they're doing? It was coming up on the new year
[42:55] of 1993. It was like December time.
[42:58] And that was when Colin Ireland made the New Year's resolution
[43:01] to himself that in 1993 he was going to become a serial killer.
[43:06] And he didn't want to just be any serial killer.
[43:08] He wanted to be an infamous, evil, feared serial killer.
[43:13] He wanted all those, you know, those little quirks and gimmicks
[43:17] that they throw in their cases, you know, when they call up the
[43:19] police and they leave clues and little, you know, he wanted to
[43:22] be one of those. He wanted to be a dramatic,
[43:25] theatrical serial killer. He wanted to kill at least five
[43:28] people because obviously that was the standard that he'd read
[43:31] in this book. That was the standard that he
[43:32] was going to live by. And he already had his victim
[43:35] type in mind. Colin decided that he was going
[43:38] to kill exclusively young gay men.
[43:42] And as I was researching this case, I found a lot of reasons
[43:46] as to why this might be. A lot of different people have a
[43:49] lot of different theories on why he went for gay men
[43:52] specifically. So the main theory obviously
[43:55] being homophobia. Maybe he just didn't like gay
[43:57] people and simply wanted to kill them because they were gay.
[44:01] The 1990s was still a fairly homophobic time, especially in
[44:05] London. Like there was a lot of stigma.
[44:09] It was like just coming out of the AIDS epidemic as well.
[44:12] So like, you know, chances, chances Larry could have been
[44:15] homophobic. But there's another theory, and
[44:18] I am slightly more inclined to believe this one, that it could
[44:21] have been internalized homophobia.
[44:23] So Colin always maintained, always, always, always, until
[44:26] the day he died that he wasn't gay.
[44:29] He was straight, straight, straight, straight.
[44:30] He never wanted to have sex with a man.
[44:32] He never saw men in that way. He was like, he was so adamant
[44:37] that he was straight that I don't know, maybe Colin himself
[44:43] liked men but didn't allow himself to like men.
[44:46] He suppressed that feeling inside him.
[44:49] And this might have manifested and internalized homophobia.
[44:52] He might have seen gay people that are out of the closet and
[44:56] living their lives and having relationships with other men.
[44:58] And he might have been jealous and like started to resent them
[45:02] and, and hate gay people for living the life that he inside
[45:07] really wished he could live. Maybe he was just scared to come
[45:10] out at the time because of all the stigma and the and the AIDS
[45:13] epidemic. People were still having these
[45:15] awful like views and beliefs around that despite things being
[45:19] disproven at this point. But like I said, Colin always
[45:22] was adamant that he was straight and he never felt that way
[45:25] towards a man before, which also in itself when someone protests
[45:30] something a lot, that sometimes means that they're trying to
[45:32] hide something. I don't know, I don't want to
[45:34] speculate about his sexuality too much, but I think those are
[45:37] two very interesting theories and I think one of them, one of
[45:41] them is probably right. He does go on to make some quite
[45:43] homophobic comments throughout this case.
[45:45] And of course, he had been making them at the shelter
[45:47] before. There's no way of really knowing
[45:50] where it came from. But bottom line is he was a
[45:52] homophobe and he did say these things.
[45:54] Whether it was because he himself was gay and he he didn't
[45:57] want to accept it, or whether he was straight and just a Dick, we
[46:00] don't know. Either way he was.
[46:02] Another thing that people talk about that could have influenced
[46:05] why he chose gay men is potentially his childhood trauma
[46:09] from the sexual harassment that he faced as a child at the
[46:12] arcade. These older male predators had
[46:16] made him feel so uncomfortable and so violated as a child that
[46:20] maybe now as an adult he associates all these negative
[46:24] feelings with gay men. Undeserved, of course.
[46:28] Being gay doesn't equal paedophile predator.
[46:31] There's no correlation between those.
[46:33] It just so happened that the paedophiles that were praying on
[46:37] him as a child were men. They weren't interested in 10
[46:40] year old Colin because he was a boy and they were gay.
[46:43] They were interested in 10 year old Colin because he was a child
[46:46] and they were a paedophile. But in Colin's head, this is how
[46:49] this theory goes. Anyway, in Colin's head, maybe
[46:51] all of that was messed up and he couldn't like, you know, he
[46:55] couldn't tell himself that he just blamed gay men for the
[46:59] trauma that he'd faced as a child.
[47:01] And now maybe he wanted revenge. But another factor, this is the
[47:06] last factor I think in as to why he might have chosen gay men is
[47:10] actually because of the AIDS epidemic.
[47:12] I think at this point in like 1993, we were just coming out of
[47:16] it. The UK was definitely still on
[47:18] the back end of like all the misinformation and the fear
[47:22] surrounding AIDS. This was still a time when
[47:24] people were still kind of scared to shake hands because they
[47:27] feared it could be passed through just touching someone
[47:30] that's infected. Well, actually, I think people
[47:32] might have been a little bit more educated by the 90s, but
[47:35] people were still hesitant to be in contact with potential
[47:38] carriers, which sadly made the gay community very, very
[47:42] stigmatized around this time. And some people think that this
[47:44] is exactly why Colin targeted the gay community, because maybe
[47:48] police would be less willing to investigate the murder of a gay
[47:54] man, less willing to kind of go elbows deep with like forensics
[47:58] and stuff like that because they were scared of catching AIDS.
[48:02] If this theory is correct, then maybe Colin kind of hoped that
[48:06] the fear surrounding AIDS would prevent a proper investigation
[48:10] being done on his murder victims, and therefore certain
[48:13] pieces of evidence wouldn't be picked up.
[48:15] It would just be a lot easier for him to get away with murders
[48:18] if police weren't looking into them quite as closely.
[48:21] And honestly, I do kind of believe this.
[48:24] I do because Ellen. So at this point, he'd already
[48:27] made the New Year's resolution. He knew that next year he was
[48:30] going to become a serial killer. But for the rest of this year,
[48:32] in 1992, he was going to do his research.
[48:36] He was going to go in depth. Oh, God, he wanted to make sure
[48:39] that he was going to be a successful serial killer.
[48:42] And he was figuring out all the little tips and tricks, and he
[48:45] was figuring out all the police's methods on how they do
[48:48] things and how they investigate things so that he knew how to
[48:50] get around it. And honestly, that's why I think
[48:53] that theory makes sense that he chose gay men because of the
[48:57] AIDS epidemic, because he'd kind of research police and he knew
[49:00] that they still weren't properly, you know, treating gay
[49:05] cases the same as straight ones. Some of the other things he was
[49:08] researching were like criminal profiling, geographical
[49:11] profiling. If you don't know what profiling
[49:13] is, it's a technique used by police where they can basically
[49:17] look at like a crime scene or whatever when they don't have
[49:21] any suspects and they can deduce from the crime certainly things
[49:25] about the killer based on how they went about it.
[49:28] So say, for example, a murder victim is killed by someone's
[49:31] bare hands. Police could look at that and
[49:34] think, right, well, their killer is probably bigger than them,
[49:37] stronger than them, heavier than them, probably a male.
[49:40] More often than not, if someone's killed with bare
[49:42] hands, it's a male that's done it.
[49:43] So, you know, they can kind of, you know, take all these little
[49:46] clues from how the crime was carried out and they can figure
[49:50] things like that out. But Colin knowing about this
[49:53] technique meant that he could think, think ahead and think,
[49:56] okay, well, I won't commit crimes in my town because then
[49:59] they'll think it's someone from the town.
[50:01] He decided that he was going to travel to commit his murders.
[50:05] He was going to travel all the way to London, the capital city,
[50:08] where there's the most people in the whole of England.
[50:10] So that, I don't know, hopefully he could fly under the radar
[50:13] there. And it was far enough from his
[50:15] home that it likely wouldn't be traced back to him.
[50:18] You know, he thought this was a great idea because that way he
[50:20] could just like dip in and out of London whenever he wanted to
[50:23] commit a crime. And then he could travel back to
[50:26] Essex and leave London police to just be like scurrying around
[50:30] the city trying to find a killer, not knowing that he's
[50:33] 4050 miles away on the coast. So Colin got researching and he
[50:37] found a pretty famous gay venue in London at the time in the
[50:40] 90s. It was called the Colhern Pub in
[50:43] Knightsbridge. The Colhern Pub have been going
[50:45] for quite some time. It wasn't always a completely
[50:48] gay bar in it started in the 60s, and this was back when it
[50:53] was like still illegal to be like.
[50:56] And so this pub was like one of the only places in London that
[51:00] was accepting and even like marketing themselves as LGBT
[51:04] friendly. They had two separate rooms in
[51:06] the Colhern back in the 60s. This wasn't in the 90s, but I
[51:09] thought this was interesting. They had two different rooms,
[51:12] one for straight people and one for LGBT people.
[51:15] And then over time, the pub got so popular with the LGBT
[51:19] customer base that they had to say goodbye to the straight room
[51:22] and make the whole club just a gay club.
[51:24] And that's what it was in the 90s when Colin Island stumbled
[51:27] upon it. The club had a lot.
[51:29] It's not a club, it's a pub. I'm sorry if I call it club, but
[51:32] it had a lot of character, I'll tell you that.
[51:34] Like the patrons used to turn up, like it was pretty much all
[51:38] gay men that would go there. There were really any gay girls
[51:41] that went, but the men would turn up in like full leather
[51:45] outfits and harnesses. It was really big in the BDSM
[51:48] community was the Colhern Pub. It was somewhat of like an
[51:51] unofficial sex club. Not that like people would.
[51:55] No, sometimes people, people would have sex there at the pub.
[51:57] Everyone kind of knew why you were going to go to the Colhern.
[52:00] If you go into the Colhern, it's because you're trying to pick
[52:02] someone up and take them home. That was the vibe which as soon
[52:05] as Colin found that out, he thought, perfect, that's exactly
[52:09] what I want. I want to just go somewhere,
[52:11] find someone and have an excuse to leave and go somewhere
[52:14] private and kill them. These men were turning up at
[52:18] that pub with the intention of leaving with a stranger at the
[52:21] end of the night, so it was going to be dead easy for Colin
[52:23] to be able to him alone. These men would just wander
[52:27] willingly into his trap. Something interesting about the
[52:30] Colhern pub, Well actually I presume this was done throughout
[52:32] the whole Gear community at the time, but this was how it was in
[52:35] the Colhern. They had what they call the
[52:38] hanky system and I really. Like this?
[52:40] I think this is really cool. Basically all of the men that
[52:42] turned up at the pub would be wearing a handkerchief and
[52:45] depending on where they were wearing this handkerchief on
[52:48] their body and what colour the handkerchief was, it signaled
[52:52] different things about what they were looking for in a partner.
[52:54] So they would more often than not wear their handkerchief in
[52:57] one of the back pockets of their jeans.
[52:59] If they wore it in the left back pocket, that meant they were
[53:02] submissive, and if they were in the right back pocket, that
[53:04] meant they were dominant. And that was how the tops and
[53:07] the bottoms could identify each other.
[53:09] The colors of the handkerchiefs meant different things as well.
[53:11] So green meant that you were into bondage, black meant that
[53:15] you were into like full BDSM, the whole 9 yards.
[53:18] Light blue was just oral sex, Navy blue was anal sex.
[53:23] Black and white checkered meant that you were only interested in
[53:26] safe sex, and white with a Red Cross on it meant that you were
[53:30] HIV positive. I think there's a lot more like
[53:32] colors and codes than that, but we could be here all day.
[53:35] Those are the more common ones. And in Ireland, once he figured
[53:38] out this hanky system, he decided that he was going to go
[53:41] ahead and wear a black hanky in his right pocket, meaning that
[53:46] he was a dominant into the whole 9 yards of BDSM.
[53:50] That way he would be attracting the perfect kind of murder
[53:53] victim, someone who is submissive, someone who is into
[53:56] BDSM. So gonna volunteer to be tied
[54:00] up, I guess gonna like, you know, want to be restricted or
[54:04] handcuffed. And that's exactly what Colin
[54:06] wanted to do to his victims. Colin's plan was coming together
[54:09] quite quickly. He already had a venue in mind,
[54:12] a victim type in mind. So now with all of that ready to
[54:15] go, he starts researching the finishing touches, you know,
[54:18] like time, train timetables, what tube he was going to get
[54:22] from the train station to the Colhern pub.
[54:24] He got everything mapped out and ready.
[54:27] He was ready to go out and become a serial killer.
[54:31] But before he left the house, Colin Island packed himself a
[54:35] murder kit. And if you rent a true crime,
[54:37] you already know what's going to be in a murder kit.
[54:39] We hear about this all the time. It had a knife.
[54:42] It had gloves in it. It had cleaning products in it
[54:45] so that he could clean up after himself, make sure he didn't
[54:47] leave any evidence. Of course, he had a load of rope
[54:50] and cords, and sometimes he would take handcuffs.
[54:52] I don't know if he had handcuffs all the time, but he had a lot
[54:56] of tying up things, what things that he could tie people up
[55:01] with. And now, finally, just over two
[55:03] months after making that New Year's resolution, Colin Ireland
[55:06] was ready to go out and kill his first victim.
[55:10] March 8th, 1993 was the day that Colin first set out to kill.
[55:14] He hopped on the train from South End all the way to London
[55:17] and headed to the Colhern pub with his black hanky in his
[55:20] right back pocket. And much to Colin's surprise, he
[55:23] really didn't have to put in that much work.
[55:26] He just walked into the pub, went over to the bar, got a
[55:28] drink and literally within two minutes of being in there, a man
[55:32] had already approached him, a very eager seeming man.
[55:35] His name was Peter Walker. He was 45 years old and he
[55:39] worked on the West End. He was a choreographer, a
[55:41] director, he'd been openly gay for quite some time.
[55:45] He lived in London and he was a regular here at the Colhern pub.
[55:49] And of course, this was the first time he'd ever seen Colin
[55:51] Island and he liked what he saw. So he immediately went over and
[55:55] struck up a conversation. The two of them went to go and
[55:57] sit at a table alone for a while and just chat.
[56:00] And they were there. They were getting on whatever,
[56:02] whatever. And then Colin accidentally
[56:05] spills his drink all over Peter Walker's pants at the front.
[56:10] He is absolutely soaking wet. Anyone would be extremely
[56:13] uncomfortable in soaking wet pants.
[56:16] And this was exactly Colin's plan.
[56:18] This gave them the perfect excuse to leave the pub and go
[56:21] back to Peter's house where he could dry off and get changed
[56:24] into some clean clothes. Of course that wasn't going to
[56:27] happen. Peter thought they were going to
[56:29] have sex. Colin knew that they weren't.
[56:32] So they get the tube back to Peter's apartment in Battersea,
[56:35] and as they were on the tube there, Colin gets the gloves out
[56:39] of his bag and puts them on before they before they even get
[56:42] to Battersea. And I don't know what Peter
[56:44] thought of this. I wonder if he noticed.
[56:46] I wonder if he thought anything. So either way they get back to
[56:48] Peter's flat and things start getting hard and heavy and Peter
[56:53] actually had two big dogs and so before they headed up to the
[56:55] bedroom he went and like locked the dogs in the living room so
[56:58] they were out of the way, they wouldn't disturb them.
[57:01] So they go to the bedroom and of course it was pre established
[57:04] based on the handkerchiefs in the pocket that Colin was going
[57:07] to be the dominant one, Peter was the submissive 1.
[57:09] And Peter immediately got into position, like he, he ripped his
[57:14] clothes off, got on the bed, and he was ready to be tied up.
[57:17] So Colin did it. He got out the cord.
[57:20] He tied Peter to the bed. I think it was a situation where
[57:23] it was like wrists up their ankles, you know, tied to each
[57:26] post of the bed. He gagged him.
[57:28] And then once Peter was restricted, unable to move or
[57:32] talk or scream, the mood in the room quickly switched.
[57:36] Colin reached to the ground and grabbed the belt that Peter had
[57:39] just taken off. And he started playfully
[57:43] whipping him with it. And at first, Peter's going with
[57:46] it, You know, this is all, this is all part of what he'd signed
[57:48] up for. But over time, Colin is getting
[57:51] harder and harder with these belt whips, to the point where
[57:55] it was now, like, excruciating for Peter.
[57:57] Peter was practically begging him to stop.
[58:00] He was just saying, I don't want to do this anymore.
[58:02] I don't want to go through with this anymore.
[58:04] But Colin ignored every single plea.
[58:06] And eventually, when he was bored of the belt, he moved on
[58:09] to his next torture method. He got out lighter and began
[58:14] burning Peters pubic hair with it, demanding that he give over
[58:18] the pin number to his bank card, which Peter did very quickly.
[58:22] So Colin dropped the lighter and left the room for a minute or
[58:25] two, leaving Peter still tied to the bed and when he returned
[58:30] Colin had a plastic carrier bag in his hand.
[58:33] As soon as he walked in the room he launched himself at Peter,
[58:36] threw this carrier bag over his head, tightened it and wouldn't
[58:40] let him breathe. Peter was gasping for air, he
[58:42] was suffocating inside that carrier bag, and just before he
[58:46] was about to pass out Colin would lift the bag a little and
[58:50] let some air in and let Peter get his breath back slightly
[58:54] before shoving the bag back over his head.
[58:56] And he did this a few times. He would.
[58:58] He would bring him right to the brink of passing out, and then
[59:02] he would allow him a little bit of oxygen just to keep him
[59:05] alive, just so that he could torture him for that bit longer.
[59:08] He was honestly putting him through hell until the very last
[59:11] time he lifted the bag off Peter's head.
[59:14] He leaned down to him and told him that this time he was going
[59:17] to die. And then he put the carrier bag
[59:19] over his head one last time and didn't let go until Peter had
[59:23] gone fully limp. He had suffocated to death.
[59:27] And Colin Ireland had claimed his first murder victim much
[59:31] later on in this case. When Colin looked back at his
[59:34] first murder, he, he, he almost like reminisces on it.
[59:38] It's a really good memory for him.
[59:40] He enjoyed the adrenaline buzz that he got from his first
[59:43] murder. He likened it to the feeling of
[59:45] losing your virginity. So now Colin is standing there
[59:49] in the bedroom. His first murder victim is
[59:51] laying on the bed, and he sets about cleaning up the crime
[59:54] scene. Remember, he brought all that
[59:55] infectant and stuff with him in his bag, and he'd been wearing
[59:58] the gloves this whole time, by the way.
[1:00:00] So this was just extra precautions.
[1:00:03] He was going to make sure that he hadn't left any prints or DNA
[1:00:06] or anything anywhere on anything he touched.
[1:00:09] And once everything is clean, Colin packed all his bag up.
[1:00:12] He united the the corpse that was laying on the bed, packed
[1:00:16] all his bag up. And just before he left, he
[1:00:19] decided that he wanted to stage the crime scene a little bit.
[1:00:23] He wanted this to be a shocker. When police walked in and saw
[1:00:27] it. So he grabs a wad of condoms out
[1:00:29] of his bag and he starts draping them on Peter's face.
[1:00:34] He was like shoving them up his nose, shoving them in his
[1:00:36] throat. And then he grabbed 2 teddy
[1:00:38] bears and positioned them in a 69 position on Peter's chest.
[1:00:44] Now this was something that Colin wanted to do at the scene
[1:00:47] of every single murder. This was supposed to be like his
[1:00:50] signature, he said. But actually, it doesn't end up
[1:00:54] being his signature because he, like, for a couple of his
[1:00:57] victims, he just couldn't find toys in their house.
[1:01:00] Like, he was going to try and position stuffed animals or toys
[1:01:03] in sex positions on his victims, but he only managed to do it
[1:01:08] like, once or twice. But yeah, after that.
[1:01:09] So he's staged this whole crime scene.
[1:01:11] He's packed his bag and he's ready to leave, but he doesn't
[1:01:14] leave just yet. He decides to linger about.
[1:01:17] He just like sits about with with this corpse, by the way, he
[1:01:21] he's like sat with it. His reason being that Colin
[1:01:24] thought that if he left in the middle of the night and he was
[1:01:26] just like walking the streets in the pitch black and trying to
[1:01:29] get to South end and like imagine if the police like
[1:01:31] pulled him over and checked inside his bag and found a knife
[1:01:34] and rope and stuff like that. He just thought that he looked
[1:01:36] way more suspicious leaving the house in the middle of the night
[1:01:40] than if he just like, waited it out until the morning when the
[1:01:42] sun came up. Then he could leave the next
[1:01:44] morning. It would look like any other
[1:01:47] regular hookup that he was just like leaving the next day.
[1:01:50] And that way he could like, easily slip into the the busy
[1:01:54] London like rush hour of everyone trying to get to work
[1:01:57] first thing on the morning. So yeah, he waited until about
[1:01:59] 7:00 AM the next morning and then he left Peter's apartment.
[1:02:03] But before he left London as a whole, he went to an ATM and
[1:02:06] drew out £200 in cash from Peter's card.
[1:02:09] He then somehow ditched the card, hopped on a train back to
[1:02:12] South End and waited. He was really excited to see his
[1:02:17] murder that he committed on the news.
[1:02:19] That's like the first thing he did as soon as he got back to
[1:02:21] Essex. He like put the TV on and he was
[1:02:23] waiting for them to report on this crazy murder that had just
[1:02:26] happened in London where this guy was found with like condoms
[1:02:29] shoved in his nose and his throat and these bears were
[1:02:32] found 69 in on him like. But that news report never came.
[1:02:36] And that's because police had actually already found Peter
[1:02:39] Walkers body at this point in time.
[1:02:42] They had found this dead body, but they didn't think it was a
[1:02:45] murder. Why?
[1:02:47] Why? He had condoms literally shoved
[1:02:49] in his throat and in his nose. But for some reason they didn't
[1:02:52] think this was a murder. They thought that this was just
[1:02:55] BDSM sex gone tragically wrong and someone had lost their life
[1:02:59] as a result of it. And maybe the the other sexual
[1:03:02] partner panicked and ran away didn't want anything to do with
[1:03:06] this. That's kind of what the scene
[1:03:07] seemed like to police. But that frustrates me because I
[1:03:11] think they were way too quick to rule it that way.
[1:03:13] I mean, the guy had condoms shoved up his nose and, and down
[1:03:16] his throat for goodness sake. And like, I get some people do
[1:03:20] have like crazy fetishes, but I've never heard of that one
[1:03:22] before. And I can understand where the
[1:03:24] police are coming from because it is very clear that this man
[1:03:27] had died in some kind of sexual interaction.
[1:03:29] So I don't know who was to say that the condoms in his throat
[1:03:34] wasn't consensual. I don't know.
[1:03:36] Like that would kill someone, surely.
[1:03:38] Surely that's not consensual. I don't know why it was ruled as
[1:03:41] accidental, honestly. I mean, the condoms in the
[1:03:43] throat is kind of the only suspicious thing about it
[1:03:46] because everything else about it did seem like kind of just like,
[1:03:49] you know, regular fetish, like BDSM stuff, the burning of the
[1:03:52] pubic hair, the ties on the wrists, like people be doing
[1:03:56] that, you know, so I can I can't I can understand why it was
[1:03:59] ruled accidental. And again, something else that
[1:04:01] backs that theory is that there were no signs of forced entry on
[1:04:03] the home. It didn't look like anyone had
[1:04:05] like broken in with intent to murder him.
[1:04:08] Maybe he had genuinely brought back a hookup, allowed them into
[1:04:12] his house, you know, willingly, voluntarily, and then this had
[1:04:15] happened. The hookup guy panicked and then
[1:04:18] just ran away. So like I said, Colin is back
[1:04:20] home in South End. He is watching the news intently
[1:04:23] for like to hold it after the murder and still nothing is
[1:04:27] coming on the news. And he he's getting impatient
[1:04:30] because remember what he wants from this.
[1:04:32] He wants the infamy, he wants the attention, he wants the
[1:04:35] manhunt, he wants the fear, he wants media coverage.
[1:04:39] And that's exactly what he's not getting right now.
[1:04:41] Honestly, it seemed like no one even cared.
[1:04:44] He had gone out and committed his very first murder that he
[1:04:47] was very proud of, and no one cared.
[1:04:49] So Colin was like, Nah, not having this.
[1:04:51] If they're not going to report on it, I'm going to get the word
[1:04:54] out there myself. So he decided to call up The Sun
[1:04:57] newspaper, which is everyone's favorite newspaper here in the
[1:05:01] UK. It's the worst one.
[1:05:03] But he calls up The Sun newspaper and he tells them that
[1:05:08] there are two dogs locked in an apartment somewhere in Battersea
[1:05:12] and they need rescuing. And this guy on the phone from
[1:05:15] The Sun is like, you know, that's really sad.
[1:05:19] But this isn't a story for the Sun.
[1:05:20] Like, we're not the kind of people that you need to be
[1:05:22] contacting about this, you know? And so Colin tries to say it
[1:05:25] like, a few more ways. He's trying to be like, cryptic
[1:05:27] about it. He basically is just trying to
[1:05:29] tell them about the dogs so that they go to the apartment and
[1:05:31] then they find the murder victim.
[1:05:33] And it's such a huge shock. He doesn't want to give over the
[1:05:35] fact that there's a murder victim there on the phone.
[1:05:38] But this guy from The Sun is just not having it.
[1:05:40] He's like, this isn't a story for the Sun.
[1:05:42] You're calling the wrong people. And so in the end, Colin just
[1:05:45] had to be like, look, the reason that those two dogs are locked
[1:05:48] in a room is because I killed their owner.
[1:05:49] So immediately this journalist is like, oh, and he realized
[1:05:55] that if this was true, like there's a good chance that this
[1:05:58] could have been a hoax. But if this was true, then this
[1:06:02] journalist now kind of had the responsibility to try and pry
[1:06:05] this story out of this man who was claiming to be a murderer.
[1:06:09] So the journalist starts asking him questions.
[1:06:11] Colin went on to say in this phone call, it was my New Year's
[1:06:14] resolution to kill a homosexual. He was a homosexual and into
[1:06:18] that kinky sex. You're into all that stuff,
[1:06:20] aren't you? Don't really know what that last
[1:06:22] bit was about. But anyway, Colin quickly put
[1:06:25] the phone down on this journalist as soon as he got his
[1:06:28] point across. He wasn't there to Babble.
[1:06:30] He was given just enough take information to kick up this
[1:06:33] investigation and start the, you know, to put a flame on the
[1:06:38] police's asses. And it worked.
[1:06:39] So this journalist got in contact with the police and
[1:06:42] basically told them this whole phone call.
[1:06:44] And immediately police believed the caller.
[1:06:46] They didn't think this was a hoax at all, mainly because this
[1:06:50] murder or this death hadn't been reported in the media at all
[1:06:54] because they thought it was accidental.
[1:06:55] So there was no need to really report on it.
[1:06:58] So who else other than the killer would have known exactly
[1:07:02] what had happened in that bedroom?
[1:07:04] You know? So police tried their best to
[1:07:06] trace the phone call that the son had received, but it turns
[1:07:08] out it was done from a payphone. So of course it couldn't be
[1:07:11] traced back to the individual caller.
[1:07:13] And other than that, police had no leads to be able to try and
[1:07:17] find this anonymous caller. The only thing that they could
[1:07:19] really do at this point was just appeal to the public and and beg
[1:07:24] if anyone had any information to bring it forward.
[1:07:26] They were specifically asking within the gay community in
[1:07:29] London because they knew that Peter was openly gay and
[1:07:32] therefore probably his killer was, you know, if if he died in
[1:07:35] a sexual situation, it was probably another gay man.
[1:07:38] And, you know, maybe people within the gay scene would know
[1:07:41] something, but no one really did.
[1:07:43] Barely anyone came forward with any information for police.
[1:07:46] And people think that this is simply because the gay community
[1:07:49] didn't really like the police at this point in time.
[1:07:52] They didn't have much confidence in them.
[1:07:54] The main reason for this being the way that the police were
[1:07:57] kind of treating the gay community as a whole coming out
[1:08:00] of the AIDS epidemic. Well, it was still kind of in it
[1:08:03] at this point in time. That being said, I'm pretty sure
[1:08:06] it had been proven at this point that you couldn't catch AIDS
[1:08:08] just through like skin on skin contacts, just like shaking
[1:08:11] hands with someone or something. But the police, when they raided
[1:08:15] a gay bar in London not long before this, they went in with
[1:08:19] full like, protective gear, like gloves on, masks on, which is so
[1:08:23] dramatic considering it had literally, I'm pretty sure, been
[1:08:27] proven that that's not how you spread it.
[1:08:29] The police were just ignorant, I think, at this point in time.
[1:08:32] And the gay community didn't appreciate it.
[1:08:35] They didn't appreciate that police weren't even trying to
[1:08:37] understand them. And so when this case came
[1:08:39] about, gay people are thinking, why would I voluntarily walk
[1:08:43] into that police station and sit and talk to police for a while?
[1:08:46] And like, it was also, I think it was also illegal for gay men
[1:08:51] to engage in BDSM sex at this point in time.
[1:08:55] Why that was ever made a law, I don't know.
[1:08:57] Like, why do people why, why do lawmakers care?
[1:09:00] Like I don't, I don't get it. But I think that was actually
[1:09:03] illegal at the time, which was another thing, stopping gay
[1:09:06] people like going forward to the police because they didn't want
[1:09:09] to be risked being prosecuted themselves just for simply
[1:09:12] having sexual relationships. Two whole months went by and
[1:09:16] Colin Ireland was still getting away with the murder of Peter
[1:09:19] Walker. Police had made very little
[1:09:21] progress, if any in this whole case.
[1:09:24] They were no closer to finding Colin, which he was happy about.
[1:09:27] He didn't want to get caught because of course he wants to
[1:09:29] stay a freeman in order to become a serial killer, to kill
[1:09:32] more people. So that bit he was happy about.
[1:09:35] But what he wasn't happy about was how quiet the media were
[1:09:39] about this. He wanted to be infamous and and
[1:09:42] feared and and talked about in the media.
[1:09:44] He wanted his cases covered and they just, it seemed like
[1:09:48] they've been forgotten about. And so Colin decides he's going
[1:09:51] to give them something else to talk about.
[1:09:53] He starts planning his second murder and he was going to use
[1:09:57] pretty much the same same entire method as last time.
[1:10:00] He was going to go to the call him pub, pick up some random
[1:10:03] guy, go back to his place, kill him there and then get the train
[1:10:07] back to South end. For someone that had researched
[1:10:11] serial killers so much in advance, he does a lot of like
[1:10:14] stupid giveaway things throughout this case.
[1:10:17] Like he goes back to the exact same place to pick up victims
[1:10:20] every single time. Which like maybe at this point
[1:10:23] that would be fine, but as you get into like your 4th, 5th
[1:10:26] victim, like that's a pattern, then you're showing the police a
[1:10:30] pattern. I don't know.
[1:10:32] He won't, he won't that smart, he really won't.
[1:10:33] But either way, he gets himself down to London on May 28th and
[1:10:37] heads to the Colhern pub. And just like last time, he
[1:10:40] didn't have to do much work, he just walked in, ordered a drink
[1:10:43] and someone approached him. 37 year old Christopher Dunn was a
[1:10:47] local librarian that took a huge liking to Colin Ireland, so much
[1:10:52] so that he invited him back to his place within like an hour of
[1:10:55] meeting him. So the two of them went back to
[1:10:57] Christopher's apartment in Harrow and when they got there
[1:11:00] he put on an SM tip for the two of them to watch and then they
[1:11:04] both like sat there and watched it together.
[1:11:06] And then Christopher turned to Colin and asked him to tie him
[1:11:09] up. So Colin made him undress
[1:11:11] completely and lay face down on the bed where he then grabbed
[1:11:15] his arms behind him and handcuffed them behind his back.
[1:11:17] And just as he had done to his last victim, he starts whipping
[1:11:21] Christopher. And at first it seems playful.
[1:11:24] It seems in keeping with the tone that they had set.
[1:11:28] But as it's going on, it's getting harder and harder and
[1:11:32] less consensual. Soon Christopher starts asking
[1:11:34] him to stop, and then Colin starts demanding that
[1:11:37] Christopher give over the PIN card for the pin number for his
[1:11:41] bank card. And as soon as Christopher gave
[1:11:43] over that information, Colin had gotten everything he wanted to
[1:11:47] get out of this man. And so he put a rope around his
[1:11:50] neck and strangled him to death again.
[1:11:52] He cleaned up the crime scene and then just sat with his
[1:11:56] murder victims cops until the sun came up and he could blend
[1:12:02] in with the London crowds and get his ass back to Essex.
[1:12:05] Christopher Dunn's body was found later that same day.
[1:12:08] He was completely naked, wearing nothing but a leather harness
[1:12:12] that Colin must have put on at some point throughout this.
[1:12:15] It's very clear to us objectively looking at this
[1:12:18] case, that these two murders are very, very similar.
[1:12:21] These two men had been found in almost identical situations.
[1:12:24] They were both young gay men that frequented the Colhern pub.
[1:12:28] To anyone looking at this, they're connected, but to the
[1:12:32] police at the time. So both of these men were killed
[1:12:35] in separate areas of London. And because the first one had
[1:12:38] been ruled an accident, there hadn't been like a load of
[1:12:41] commotion about it. A lot of people hadn't heard of
[1:12:43] it. So then when police found this
[1:12:45] second murder in Harrow, they hadn't heard of the first one.
[1:12:49] So there were no connections to really be made.
[1:12:52] If one of them's ruled as an accident, the second one is also
[1:12:54] likely to be ruled an accident because there's no pattern.
[1:12:58] Again, police just assumed this to be a case of BDSM gone
[1:13:03] horrifically, terribly, fatally wrong, so not much of an
[1:13:06] investigation was done into the second murder either.
[1:13:08] And Colin Island is now getting away with two murders.
[1:13:11] His confidence is growing by the week.
[1:13:14] He's proved to himself now that he can do it consistently and he
[1:13:18] can get away with it. And he was still aiming for that
[1:13:21] goal of five kills. He was two in, and he wasn't
[1:13:24] going to waste anytime finding his next victim.
[1:13:26] Just six days after the last killing, Colin returns to the
[1:13:30] Colhern Pub on June 4th, 1993 to claim his 3rd victim. 35 year
[1:13:36] old Perry Bradley the Third was originally from America, but he
[1:13:40] was over here in London on like business.
[1:13:42] Like I said, he was Perry Bradley the Third.
[1:13:44] He was from a long line of Bradley's.
[1:13:46] His family was a very wealthy, successful, powerful family back
[1:13:50] over in America. I believe his father was a
[1:13:52] Congressman. So somehow Colin and Perry cross
[1:13:54] paths in the Colhern pub and the two of them get talking.
[1:13:57] But Perry is a little bit more reserved than Colin's first two
[1:14:01] victims because Perry wasn't actually out of the closet at
[1:14:04] this point in time. For that reason, he was a little
[1:14:07] bit harder to convince to go back home, you know, because he
[1:14:13] was just scared of being seen and then outed, and he was
[1:14:16] scared of what that would mean for his family and his father's
[1:14:19] career. Like it was all quite deep for
[1:14:22] him. And so he wasn't so willing to
[1:14:25] go back with Colin at first. But after a few more drinks, he
[1:14:29] decided to take Colin back to his place.
[1:14:31] So when they got there, Colin starts getting his rope out of
[1:14:34] his bag and he's like, right, can I tie you up?
[1:14:36] And Perry wasn't really down for that.
[1:14:39] He was like, oh, that's not really my thing.
[1:14:41] I'd rather just like do it without.
[1:14:44] So Colin tried a few times and he was like, look, come on.
[1:14:46] Like this, this is my thing. Like, I don't, I don't know if
[1:14:49] I'll really be able to like perform if I don't tie you up.
[1:14:53] Eventually, Perry obliged and let Colin tie him up, and as
[1:14:57] soon as he was bound and couldn't move, Colin Island
[1:15:01] switched once again. He reached down into his bag,
[1:15:03] grabbed another cord, tied it into a noose, and then put it
[1:15:07] around Perry's neck and slowly started tightening it as he was
[1:15:11] demanding that he give over his PIN code for his card.
[1:15:14] Of course, Perry did it very quickly.
[1:15:16] He didn't want him to tighten this noose around his neck and
[1:15:18] kill him. When Perry gave over the PIN
[1:15:20] code, Colin did drop the noose, like he left it around Perry's
[1:15:24] neck, but like he wasn't tightening it anymore and he
[1:15:27] just turned around and started ransacking the house.
[1:15:30] I think he was looking for other things to steal or like if there
[1:15:33] was any cash laying about. At one point he turned to Perry,
[1:15:36] who was obviously still tied up on the bed and he was like, you
[1:15:39] might as well go to sleep. Like this is going to be a long
[1:15:41] night. I plan on being here ransacking
[1:15:43] your house for a while, so you might as well get some sleep if
[1:15:46] you can. And Perry did.
[1:15:48] He fell asleep there still tied up, while this, this strange man
[1:15:53] that's just robbed him is now lingering around his house.
[1:15:56] And this proved to be a fatal mistake for Perry Bradley
[1:15:59] because, well, actually Colin Ireland had been cleaning up
[1:16:03] this whole time. And he packed his bag.
[1:16:05] And then he looked at Perry asleep on the bed, still tied up
[1:16:08] and, and the thought actually crossed his mind at this point
[1:16:11] in time to just leave Perry alive.
[1:16:14] Like Colin could just leave the house at this point in time.
[1:16:16] He'd got like quite a bit of cash out of Perry.
[1:16:19] He'd also got his card PIN number so he could go to the
[1:16:21] cash machine. And he was just looking at Perry
[1:16:24] peacefully asleep. And you know, the thought did
[1:16:26] cross his mind, but it was very fleeting.
[1:16:29] At the end of the day, Colin Ireland was here for one reason
[1:16:31] and one reason only. He wanted to become a serial
[1:16:34] killer. So why would he leave a
[1:16:36] surviving victim? And besides, Perry's was very
[1:16:39] rich, very powerful, and Colin knew that Perry had already seen
[1:16:42] his face, so he would be able to give a good description to
[1:16:45] police. He would likely get caught and
[1:16:47] Perry's family would get him put away for a long, long time.
[1:16:50] He didn't want to risk any of that.
[1:16:52] So Colin Ireland walks over to where Perry is still asleep on
[1:16:55] the bed. He grabs hold of this noose and
[1:16:58] just throttle tightens it around his neck, which pretty much
[1:17:02] killed him instantly because he was asleep.
[1:17:04] That means he would have, I don't know the science behind
[1:17:07] it, but I did see this in a documentary.
[1:17:08] It means he would have died really quickly.
[1:17:11] And Colin said that. He said he barely struggled,
[1:17:14] like he didn't at all. So Colin Ireland has officially
[1:17:17] claimed his third victim and by today's standards are Eleanor
[1:17:21] Neil standards. He is now a serial killer, but
[1:17:24] not by his standards. Not by the standards he'd read
[1:17:26] in that book anyway. He wasn't willing to stop until
[1:17:30] he had reached 5 kills. Because that's what it takes to
[1:17:33] be a serial killer on the FBI's list.
[1:17:35] Anyway, as with his previous 2 kills, Colin just lingered about
[1:17:39] in the house with with the cops. This time he actually sat next
[1:17:43] to Perrys dead body on the bed and he was just listening to the
[1:17:46] radio as if there wasn't a dead body next to him.
[1:17:50] And he said that he could see Perrys body like physically
[1:17:55] changing in front of him, you know, as it enters like rigor
[1:17:58] mortis. Is that the stage that it's in
[1:17:59] right now? It's not decomposing yet.
[1:18:01] But basically Colin said that he saw like blotches appear on his
[1:18:05] skin. He was going super pale, almost
[1:18:07] like bluey tinted as he became cold, like as the heat left his
[1:18:12] body really, really eerie to even think about nevermind like
[1:18:15] picture. And he'd seen this three Times
[1:18:17] Now. He'd sat with three separate
[1:18:19] victims and watched this process happen.
[1:18:21] And he said he really didn't like it.
[1:18:23] He he hated being in there with those corpses.
[1:18:26] He would have left immediately if he could, but he felt like he
[1:18:29] couldn't. So the next morning when the sun
[1:18:31] comes up, Colin leaves Perry's apartment and before he hops
[1:18:34] back on the train to Essex, he went to an ATM, drew out some
[1:18:37] cash and then ditched Perry's card somewhere.
[1:18:39] Perry's body was found very quickly after the murder and
[1:18:42] again it was categorized as just an accidental death from like
[1:18:46] BDSM sex gone tragically wrong. Infuriating.
[1:18:50] It's so frustrating that these cases were not getting linked.
[1:18:53] This many just suspicious and tragic sex deaths don't happen
[1:18:57] in such a short space of time. I don't.
[1:19:00] Well, maybe they do, I don't know.
[1:19:01] But I don't know. It just seemed silly at this
[1:19:03] point that you found three men, three young gay men of all the
[1:19:08] same, you know, like victim type dead in very similar situations.
[1:19:13] If they'd have just looked into this a little bit more, they
[1:19:16] would have found that all three of these men went to the Colhern
[1:19:18] pub on the night that they died. That is such a link between
[1:19:22] these three. But they didn't.
[1:19:23] They didn't really look into any of these cases because they just
[1:19:26] wrote them off as accidents as soon as they saw them.
[1:19:29] A lot of people think that this could be down to homophobia
[1:19:33] within the police force. And I have to say there's I
[1:19:37] don't, I think so too. They knew that there was a
[1:19:40] possibility of foul play, and I think they just didn't care to
[1:19:44] look into it that much. They just kind of wanted to get
[1:19:46] these cases over and done with as quickly as they could.
[1:19:49] And there was reasonable grounds to think this could have been
[1:19:52] all these deaths could have been accidental.
[1:19:54] So that's just what they ruled it as just to like, get it out
[1:19:56] of the way. At least that's what I think
[1:19:58] personally. And the reason I think this is
[1:20:00] because had this been three women, three young women that
[1:20:03] were found in the exact same circumstances, they'd all been.
[1:20:07] Killed in some kind of BDSM sex gone wrong in such a short space
[1:20:10] of time. You know damn well police would
[1:20:13] have connected all of those by now.
[1:20:14] There'd be a citywide search for a serial killer had that been
[1:20:18] three women. That is just my own personal,
[1:20:21] personal opinion though. I think that probably was a
[1:20:24] factor. I think it was.
[1:20:26] But I think another factor in this case specifically of the
[1:20:29] murder of Perry Bradley, I think a lot of it had to do with his
[1:20:33] father and his family and stuff like that.
[1:20:36] His case wasn't looked into and and covered that much because as
[1:20:41] soon as his family found out the circumstances in which he died,
[1:20:45] they were so shocked because they didn't know that he was
[1:20:47] gay. He'd never once like hinted or
[1:20:50] come out to anyone. He had always been too scared to
[1:20:52] be himself at home with his family.
[1:20:54] I don't know whose idea this was.
[1:20:56] And I can't say for certain that this did happen because this is
[1:21:00] just rumored on the Internet. And that is the Perry's family,
[1:21:04] you know, with his father being a congressman.
[1:21:06] They specifically asked the British police not to really
[1:21:11] talk about Perry's murder that much and specifically not to
[1:21:14] disclose his sexuality if they do talk about it.
[1:21:18] And the police obliged. Well, that's that's the theory.
[1:21:20] That's how the theory goes that that conversation was had and
[1:21:23] that was why Perrys sexuality wasn't spoken about at all in
[1:21:28] relation to this case. Which again, I think hindered it
[1:21:30] because the fact that they were all young gay men at the Cole
[1:21:34] Herm pub, which is a really big, a really big gay spot in London,
[1:21:38] I think that's like, that's an obvious connection between all
[1:21:41] these three dead bodies. Yet they're taking that
[1:21:43] connection away from Perry. It wasn't common knowledge that
[1:21:46] Perry was gay. And so I think that really threw
[1:21:50] off the future of this investigation because it didn't
[1:21:53] look like that case was directly linked to the other two.
[1:21:56] Had people known that Perry was gay, then they might have
[1:21:59] connected the three a bit quicker.
[1:22:00] So yeah, still no links are being made.
[1:22:03] Colin Island has now killed 3 people and he's still getting
[1:22:06] away with it. He is continuing to murder
[1:22:08] people right under police's noses.
[1:22:10] And Colin is getting more and more frustrated by the day
[1:22:15] because he wants to be known and he is literally going out and
[1:22:18] killing more and more people. He's like fine, maybe with this
[1:22:21] next one they'll report on it and he gets so home and they
[1:22:24] don't report on it. This has happened three Times
[1:22:26] Now. Three times they've just
[1:22:28] considered these deaths accidental and not once reported
[1:22:31] on them. He feels like he is failing at
[1:22:34] his quest to become a serial killer.
[1:22:37] Very frustrated with the lack of coverage, Colin Ireland goes out
[1:22:41] to kill again just three days after the last, June 7th 1993.
[1:22:46] He heads back to the Colhern pub and is very quickly approached
[1:22:50] by a 33 year old man named Andrew Collier.
[1:22:52] Andrew was very forward with Colin and almost immediately
[1:22:57] asked him to go back home with him.
[1:22:58] And Colin was like, yeah, sure, you know, job done.
[1:23:01] So they get the tube back to where Andrew lives in Dalston.
[1:23:05] And the whole time Colin is running through his regular MO
[1:23:09] in his head and he knows the way that this is going to go.
[1:23:12] He gets there, he ties him up, he tortures them until they give
[1:23:15] over the pin code and then he kills him.
[1:23:17] And then he cleans up and he waits and then he leaves.
[1:23:19] You know, he's got his method sorted, but this one wasn't
[1:23:22] going to go quite to plan. Colin got to the to the torture
[1:23:26] point. He he was torturing Andrew,
[1:23:28] trying to get the pin code out of him, but Andrew wasn't giving
[1:23:31] it up like he was keeping his mouth shut.
[1:23:33] And Colin was trying a lot of different torture methods.
[1:23:36] He was burning his skin with a lighter.
[1:23:38] He tried burning his pubic hair again.
[1:23:41] He was, he was doing all sorts, beating him with a bell.
[1:23:43] And Andrew wasn't giving over his pin code.
[1:23:45] And then Colin got an idea, because he knew that Andrew
[1:23:49] Collier had a cat. Now, if you don't want to hear
[1:23:52] this, skip forward. You know what's about to happen.
[1:23:54] He went and grabbed the cat, took it over to Andrew and made
[1:23:58] him watch as he strangled his cat to death.
[1:24:03] But still, Andrew wasn't giving over that pin code.
[1:24:05] He still wasn't talking. Colin had tried pretty much all
[1:24:07] he could at this point, and it was pretty clear that Andrew was
[1:24:11] going to take his pin code to the grave with him.
[1:24:13] And so Colin decided it was time to just kill him.
[1:24:16] He grabbed a condom from his bag and shoved it down Andrew
[1:24:19] Colliers throat, choking him to death.
[1:24:22] But he wasn't done there. Andrew then went and grabbed
[1:24:25] another wad of condoms, started unwrapping them.
[1:24:28] He put like a few of them on his face again I think.
[1:24:31] And then he put one on Andrew's penis, one on the cat's tail,
[1:24:37] and then he positioned Andrew and his cat in a 69 position.
[1:24:42] He even. This is literally one of the
[1:24:44] most disgusting things I've ever heard.
[1:24:46] He even put Andrew's penis inside the cat's mouth and close
[1:24:52] the cat's mouth and then put the tail inside Andrew's mouth.
[1:24:56] This was the most sinister and disgusting and sick crime scene
[1:25:00] Colin Island had left so far. And that was exactly why he did
[1:25:04] it. Because if police weren't
[1:25:05] reporting on his crimes, he thought he had to do the
[1:25:08] absolute most to be able to get their attention.
[1:25:10] He hoped that if he did something as heinous as this,
[1:25:14] post his murder victim in a sexual position with his
[1:25:18] murdered cat, there is no way that the media wouldn't report
[1:25:22] on that. So once he'd finished
[1:25:23] positioning this crime scene again, he planned to linger
[1:25:26] until the sun came up, but he actually fell asleep.
[1:25:29] And then he was awoken a few hours later to a lot of
[1:25:32] commotion outside. There was shouting, like a few
[1:25:35] people shouting. And immediately, Colin actually
[1:25:38] panicked because he thought that this could have been the police,
[1:25:41] like they could have been on to him, They could have followed
[1:25:43] him to the house and this could be him being caught.
[1:25:46] He very quietly crept up to the window and pressed himself
[1:25:49] against it to listen to what was going on outside.
[1:25:52] And that was when he realized it was just like a street fight.
[1:25:55] It was it was completely irrelevant to him.
[1:25:58] And so he went back inside the apartment and fell back asleep
[1:26:01] until the sun came up. And then he left the next
[1:26:03] morning. Police found Andrew Collier's
[1:26:05] body a few days later. And finally, this was the first
[1:26:08] one of the deaths to not be ruled an accident.
[1:26:10] They immediately thought foul play, obviously, because of the
[1:26:14] way that the cat had been killed and positioned and everything.
[1:26:16] But there was also something else that stuck out to police,
[1:26:19] and that was the strange use of condoms.
[1:26:22] This was something that they recognized.
[1:26:24] They'd seen this before just a few months ago with the death of
[1:26:28] Peter Walker. He too was found with condoms
[1:26:32] shoved down his throat. And this isn't something you see
[1:26:34] often. And so immediately they start
[1:26:37] making vague links between at least those two cases anyway.
[1:26:41] So one of the first things police did now that they were
[1:26:43] considering this a murder, this was the first one that they'd
[1:26:46] actually considered a murder. So this was the first
[1:26:48] investigation that they were doing on one of Colin Island's
[1:26:51] victims. So the first thing they did,
[1:26:53] they brought in the forensic teams to have a look for like
[1:26:55] DNA, hairs, fingerprints, anything like that.
[1:26:58] And for a while, they were really losing hope because it
[1:27:03] was obvious that the killer had cleaned up after himself.
[1:27:05] Like there was nothing to be found.
[1:27:07] That was until they did the fingerprint tests and nothing
[1:27:11] was found anywhere near the body.
[1:27:12] Like I said, they were losing hope.
[1:27:14] And then randomly on the other side of the room, they found one
[1:27:19] singular fingerprint that seemed to be the killers.
[1:27:23] It was on the window pane. Remember, Colin had heard that
[1:27:26] street fight in the middle of the night gone and pressed
[1:27:28] himself against the window to listen.
[1:27:30] And then when he cleaned up, he must have forgotten that he
[1:27:33] touched the window. So now police had a fingerprint
[1:27:36] of their killer. And at this point in the case,
[1:27:39] it really wasn't that useful because I don't think the
[1:27:42] fingerprint database was a thing yet.
[1:27:44] And if it was, Colin Island wasn't on it because the crimes
[1:27:48] that he committed in the past weren't done while the
[1:27:52] fingerprint database was a thing.
[1:27:53] So basically, Colin had never had his fingerprints taken.
[1:27:56] So if the database was a thing, he wasn't on that.
[1:27:59] But police knew that this fingerprint from the crime scene
[1:28:01] would be useful at some point, because at some point during the
[1:28:05] case, if they get a suspect, they'd be able to test their
[1:28:08] fingerprints against the crime scene fingerprint.
[1:28:11] And then if it was a match, they'd know that they had their
[1:28:13] killer. So maybe it wasn't completely
[1:28:15] useful right now, but they were going to cling onto it because
[1:28:17] they were hopeful that it would be useful at some point.
[1:28:20] A few days went by after Andrew Collier's murder, and there was
[1:28:23] still no talk of Colin Island's murders in the media whatsoever.
[1:28:28] Because actually, with this case, police had decided to keep
[1:28:31] it quite private, quite secret, because it was so heinous that,
[1:28:35] like, I don't know, there's certain things that the public
[1:28:38] just don't have to hear. They don't have to hear about a
[1:28:40] cat being found like that, you know, And there certainly wasn't
[1:28:43] talk of a serial killer because police hadn't connected any of
[1:28:47] these 4 yet. So there wasn't any media
[1:28:49] coverage. And Colin was came really,
[1:28:52] really pissed off. Man, he was getting so
[1:28:54] impatient. He had done this four Times Now
[1:28:57] and he wanted to be an infamous serial killer and no one cared.
[1:29:01] No one was paying him any attention.
[1:29:02] And so he was thinking, right, well, I'll have to do something
[1:29:06] about it myself. Then he took matters into his
[1:29:08] own hands. He went down to a phone box and
[1:29:10] called the police and anonymously and just straight up
[1:29:13] told them I'm a serial killer. I have killed four people in
[1:29:17] previous months. And he he gave over the full
[1:29:20] names of all four of his victims.
[1:29:22] Of course, he didn't allude to his own identity at all.
[1:29:25] This was all anonymous. And he even gave police on the
[1:29:28] phone details that clearly had never been released to the media
[1:29:32] because the media wasn't talking about any of these cases.
[1:29:35] He told them things about the cat and things about the the
[1:29:39] dogs, how the dogs were locked in the room in the first murder.
[1:29:41] So police are listening to this anonymous man on the phone and
[1:29:46] they believe that he is a serial killer.
[1:29:48] How else could he know all of this information?
[1:29:50] Colin told them on the phone that he planned to kill more
[1:29:52] people. So if they were going to catch
[1:29:54] him, better be quick. I have a short section of the
[1:29:56] call transcript here. The operator says why are you
[1:29:59] doing this? And Colin replied, I've read
[1:30:02] several books on serial killers, and I wondered if it could
[1:30:05] possibly be done and gotten away with.
[1:30:07] What was your aim in all of that?
[1:30:09] Just to see if it could be done. All right, so I'll leave you to
[1:30:12] get on with it. Bye, bye.
[1:30:13] He then hung up and immediately called up a different Police
[1:30:16] Department, specifically the Police Department that was
[1:30:20] dealing with Peter Walker's death, the first death.
[1:30:23] And he called them to ask why they'd stopped looking into
[1:30:26] Peter's death. He said, doesn't the death of a
[1:30:28] homosexual man mean anything? Again, these police kept calling
[1:30:33] on the phone for a little bit longer.
[1:30:34] They were asking him more questions and they got him to
[1:30:36] admit again to being a serial killer, albeit anonymously.
[1:30:40] The police on the phone asked him why he was specifically
[1:30:43] killing gay men, and he responded.
[1:30:45] They keep their mouths shut and don't tell police things.
[1:30:48] They're respectable. That, and I don't like them.
[1:30:51] Following these phone calls that Colin Island made, it was
[1:30:54] officially established that all four of these deaths were
[1:30:57] connected. They were all murders and that
[1:30:59] London had a serial killer terrorizing the gay community.
[1:31:03] And all these huge announcements were made on the radio, on the
[1:31:06] TV, in the newspaper papers, literally saying please be
[1:31:10] careful if you are a gay man, don't go on like hookups right
[1:31:14] now. Don't go home with strangers.
[1:31:16] It's not safe. You don't know who's out there.
[1:31:18] Everyone was so scared knowing that there was a serial killer
[1:31:21] at large, the public, even the police, and they knew they
[1:31:24] needed to do something about it. But it was tricky for a number
[1:31:28] of reasons. First of all, none of the first
[1:31:30] 3 deaths had been treated as murders, had they?
[1:31:33] They'd all been treated as accidents.
[1:31:35] So there were no crime scene investigations done.
[1:31:37] They'd collected no evidence. All the bodies, well, most of
[1:31:41] the bodies had been released to the families for like funerals
[1:31:44] or cremations or burials. Like they, they hadn't treated
[1:31:48] this as if it was a murder case at all.
[1:31:51] It was as if they had this serial killer case and they just
[1:31:53] binned 80% of the evidence, like the first 80% out of the window
[1:31:57] because they only had the evidence from the most recent
[1:32:00] one to go off. It was going to be really hard.
[1:32:02] And this meant that Colin was still getting away with
[1:32:05] everything for months. He was, and long enough for him
[1:32:08] to be able to try and claim his fifth victim.
[1:32:11] And now this one would be the one that officially made him a
[1:32:14] serial killer by his own standards, by the FBI's
[1:32:17] standards. That is what his New Year's
[1:32:19] resolution was. It all came down to this one
[1:32:22] last murder. June 12th, 1993.
[1:32:25] He heads back down to the Colhern Pub and there he meets a
[1:32:29] Maltese chef, 41 year old Emmanuel Spiteri.
[1:32:32] Literally within their first conversation that these two men
[1:32:36] had. Emmanuel told Colin that he
[1:32:38] liked to be tied up during sex and that was all Colin needed to
[1:32:41] hear. He immediately suggested that
[1:32:44] they go back to Emmanuel's place.
[1:32:46] Once they got back there, he handcuffed Emmanuel, bound him
[1:32:49] with rope. All of that was consensual, but
[1:32:51] once he was tied up, Colin switched and immediately started
[1:32:55] torturing him for the pin number of his bank card.
[1:32:58] This eventually ended the same as the other murders had.
[1:33:00] He ended up strangling Emmanuel to death and then lingering in
[1:33:03] the apartment for hours until leaving the next morning.
[1:33:06] But before he did again, at the scene of this crime, he wanted
[1:33:10] to make an impact. He wanted to make a statement to
[1:33:13] police because so far they're not been reporting on him, have
[1:33:16] they? I think this case is the only
[1:33:19] other one where he managed to like, position some stuffed
[1:33:21] animals. I don't know much about it in
[1:33:23] this instance, but I think he only managed to do that twice
[1:33:25] out of the five victims. But he wasn't done there.
[1:33:29] He then started to make a pile of things in the living room.
[1:33:33] So like, he pushed all the chairs together, he got all the
[1:33:35] pillows and cushions and blankets, everything that he
[1:33:38] could find, and then he set it on fire.
[1:33:41] He wanted to, well, his actual intention was to try and burn
[1:33:45] Emmanuel's whole apartment building to the ground because
[1:33:48] he lived in a block, so he could have easily killed everyone in
[1:33:52] that apartment block. So Colin quickly lit this fire
[1:33:55] and then got the hell out of there.
[1:33:56] He got on the train back to Essex and he was expecting that
[1:34:00] by the time he got home and flicked on the news he might see
[1:34:03] something to do with the murder that he just committed.
[1:34:06] But as with all the other ones, no he didn't.
[1:34:09] So again, if police aren't going to find it, he's going to lead
[1:34:12] them to it. He went and anonymously called
[1:34:15] the police once again and taunted them saying that he was
[1:34:18] a serial killer that had just claimed his fifth victim.
[1:34:21] So police asked him, well, where can we find this 5th victim?
[1:34:24] And he said in a house fire in Catford.
[1:34:27] And this really confused police because there'd been no reports
[1:34:31] of a house fire in Catford, not a single one.
[1:34:33] Colin ended up putting the phone down quickly after.
[1:34:36] He really didn't give much more information than that.
[1:34:38] And police were forced to take this phone call seriously, of
[1:34:41] course. So they start looking into
[1:34:43] potential house fires in Catford and they'd actually been 0
[1:34:46] reports. So they're calling around all
[1:34:48] these different places for hours and hours and hours.
[1:34:50] And then eventually they get a call themselves from a woman
[1:34:54] from a landlady saying that she had just found one of her
[1:34:57] tenants dead in his apartment. And it looked as though someone
[1:35:01] had tried to start a fire in there too.
[1:35:03] It turns out that the fire that Colin had set in Emmanuel's
[1:35:06] apartment had just like burnt itself out.
[1:35:10] So he made one fatal error, the exact same error that Zachary
[1:35:14] Davis made in a video that we covered the other day where he
[1:35:17] set this house fire. And then he closed the door
[1:35:20] after him, which meant that this fire was contained to just this
[1:35:23] one room. And actually, the door was
[1:35:26] pretty airtight. And so there was there wasn't
[1:35:28] any oxygen getting in this room. The window wasn't open.
[1:35:31] And so eventually the fire ran out of oxygen and it just died
[1:35:34] out. It looked like nothing more than
[1:35:35] just like a bit of a bit of a bonfire in the middle of the
[1:35:38] room, like it really hadn't spread anywhere.
[1:35:41] Luckily for everyone else in that apartment building, as soon
[1:35:44] as police got this call from the landlady, they immediately
[1:35:47] connected it with the anonymous call.
[1:35:49] And they now knew that Emmanuel was the 5th victim of the gear
[1:35:53] Slayer. So police start appealing for
[1:35:55] information surrounding all the victims, but mainly Emmanuel
[1:35:59] since that was the most recent one.
[1:36:01] They were going down to all sorts of like Pride events
[1:36:04] because this was the summer and there were loads of protests and
[1:36:06] parades and all that kind of stuff.
[1:36:07] They were going down handing out Flyers, like, do you know
[1:36:10] anything about these murders? And soon they had a very useful
[1:36:14] witness come forward. This man came to police and said
[1:36:17] he saw Emmanuel Spiteri on the night of his murder.
[1:36:21] He actually got on the same train as him from Charing Cross
[1:36:25] Station. And Emmanuel was with a man the
[1:36:28] whole time he was going home with a man.
[1:36:30] So this was a huge help to police in two ways actually,
[1:36:33] because this witness had got a good enough look at the man that
[1:36:36] was going home with Emmanuel that he could give a description
[1:36:39] and they could make a police sketch, like an E fit sketch of
[1:36:43] what the killer might look like. And this was also useful because
[1:36:46] now police knew that the killer had been inside Charing Cross
[1:36:49] station and Charing Cross had recently been fit with a load of
[1:36:53] CCTV cameras in 1993. This must have been like one of
[1:36:56] the first train stations in London to be getting like kitted
[1:37:00] out with the whole 9 yards of security footage.
[1:37:03] So they went down and they had a look on the Charing Cross CCTV
[1:37:06] footage and there he was, Emmanuel and a tall man that
[1:37:11] looked a lot like the police sketch that the witness had
[1:37:14] made. So on July 12th, these two
[1:37:16] things, the sketch and the CCTV footage were thrown all over the
[1:37:20] news. The pictures were printed, the
[1:37:22] CCTV was played on the news like everything, and within 24 hours,
[1:37:27] police had over 40 calls of people claiming to have seen
[1:37:31] that man that they believed to be the killer at the Call Hern
[1:37:34] Pub. A lot of the patrons of that pub
[1:37:36] had recognized this man because he was now somewhat of a regular
[1:37:39] and they'd seen him or some of them had even spoke to him a
[1:37:42] little bit. I don't think any of them could
[1:37:44] give over his name. I don't think actually a lot of
[1:37:47] men would give over their names that easy in the Call Hern Pub,
[1:37:50] kind of like an identity protection thing.
[1:37:52] A lot of them were still in the closet.
[1:37:53] It just, you know, a lot of them didn't share names, so a lot of
[1:37:56] them didn't know Collins name. In fact I don't think any of the
[1:37:59] new Collins name. Meanwhile, Colin is back home in
[1:38:02] Essex and he sees the news. He sees his CCTV image plastered
[1:38:08] all over every newspaper, all over the news.
[1:38:11] And panic really starts to set in.
[1:38:14] He didn't know that Charing Cross station had security
[1:38:16] cameras. He didn't know that this was a
[1:38:18] possibility that they could capture his face like that.
[1:38:21] And now he's panicking because his face is all over the news.
[1:38:23] And for the next few days, Colin was very visibly anxious with
[1:38:28] everyone that he was meeting. Everyone that he was talking to
[1:38:30] noted that he will he was acting weird.
[1:38:33] And as the days was going on he was seemingly getting more and
[1:38:36] more anxious and acting weird and weirder.
[1:38:39] By like 1 of the final days he was like mumbling under his
[1:38:41] breath. He was talking in past tense
[1:38:44] like he was just. He was like a nut dog.
[1:38:46] There was one particular night where he was actually like
[1:38:48] freaking his friends out so much that they took him home early.
[1:38:51] Like one of them just gave him a lift home early because he was
[1:38:54] making people feel uncomfortable.
[1:38:55] He was acting that weird. At this point, Colin felt that
[1:38:58] it was only a matter of time until he would be caught and so
[1:39:02] he thought it best to be one step ahead of police officers
[1:39:07] and that was when he got an idea.
[1:39:08] On July 19th, Colin walked into a solicitor's office and said he
[1:39:12] needed help making a statement that he wanted to give police.
[1:39:16] He wanted to say that yes, that was him in the CCTV footage with
[1:39:21] the murder victim and the reason he wanted to make the statement
[1:39:23] was because he had come up with a fake alibi and this statement
[1:39:27] was going to be used to like support his fake alibi.
[1:39:31] So his alibi goes that he was going to admit that he and
[1:39:35] Emmanuel had met at the Call home pub and they decided to go
[1:39:38] home together and that was why he was seen on the train station
[1:39:41] footage. The two of them were going to go
[1:39:43] home and have consensual sex. However, when he arrived there
[1:39:46] at Emmanuel's house, he said that there was another man in
[1:39:49] there and he had no idea that Emmanuel had intended on having
[1:39:54] a threesome. Colin said that he wasn't up for
[1:39:56] that. He thought it was just going to
[1:39:57] be him in Emmanuel. So when he walked into the
[1:39:59] apartment and saw another man there, he was like, you know
[1:40:02] what, this ain't for me, I'm going to go.
[1:40:04] Colin said. He then went home.
[1:40:06] And so whatever happened to Emmanuel after that point must
[1:40:09] have been that other guy in the apartment.
[1:40:11] It's just very convenient in it that there was another man there
[1:40:14] that could have done it. I don't know.
[1:40:15] So, yeah, he went to this solicitor's office and he's
[1:40:18] like, right, help me write this statement.
[1:40:20] And the solicitor's like, yeah, yeah, call one second, I'll be
[1:40:22] right back. He goes in the back and calls
[1:40:23] the police. Right.
[1:40:24] So the police, the police come immediately and they arrest
[1:40:28] Colin Island on suspicion of being the gay Slayer serial
[1:40:32] killer. I found that really funny
[1:40:34] actually, when I read it, that the solicitor, I was like, okay,
[1:40:37] yeah, cool, we can write this statement and like runs in the
[1:40:39] back and calls the police. Yeah, that's fun.
[1:40:42] I don't know what Colin thought that was gonna do.
[1:40:45] I think he thought that, like, he'd be able to clear his name
[1:40:47] before police started suspecting him.
[1:40:49] And then that way he would just look like extra innocent because
[1:40:52] he, like, brought himself forward to police to clear his
[1:40:55] own. I don't know.
[1:40:56] I don't know. But either way, he was arrested,
[1:40:58] bro. So police took Colin down to the
[1:41:00] station and they did the whole usual, you know, DNA,
[1:41:03] fingerprints, mugshot. And that was when they tested
[1:41:07] his fingerprints against that fingerprint found at the scene
[1:41:11] of the crime at Andrew Collier's house.
[1:41:13] And it was a match. They had evidence that Colin
[1:41:16] Island was their serial killer. They finally had this man.
[1:41:20] So they brought Colin in for like a question in an interview.
[1:41:23] And surprisingly, he wasn't really giving much up.
[1:41:26] He wasn't talking. So at this point, police could
[1:41:29] only really charge him with the murders of Emmanuel Spiteri and
[1:41:32] Andrew Collier since they were the only two that they had like,
[1:41:34] actual tangible evidence for. But actually, their choice to
[1:41:38] charge him with just two murders at this point in time was
[1:41:41] strategic on behalf of police. And I love this because they
[1:41:44] knew well that Colin was responsible for all 5 murders.
[1:41:47] Of course he was. And they knew that he would hate
[1:41:50] the fact that he wasn't getting recognition for all five of
[1:41:54] those murders. If he thought that he was only
[1:41:56] going to get charged with two murders, that wouldn't even make
[1:41:59] him a serial killer, not even by my standards, never mind his
[1:42:03] standards of five. And we know that that's what
[1:42:05] Colin Island wants more than anything is to be an infamous,
[1:42:09] evil, feared serial killer. He wants everyone to talk about
[1:42:13] him. He wants the notoriety and the
[1:42:14] recognition and police aren't giving him it.
[1:42:18] And they thought that if they only charged him with two
[1:42:20] murders, Colin might get so frustrated that he might just
[1:42:23] confess to all 5 in order to be known for his murders.
[1:42:29] And police were proved right within less than 24 hours.
[1:42:33] Colin Island's ego got the better of him, and he cracked.
[1:42:37] And he confessed on video to all five of those murders in detail
[1:42:42] as well. He recounted as much detail as
[1:42:44] he could possibly remember. And he was so cold and
[1:42:48] emotionless throughout these clips.
[1:42:50] And he even acknowledges it himself.
[1:42:52] He's like, yeah, I've got a really cold, calculated side.
[1:42:54] And throughout his confession, he like, like explains why he
[1:42:57] did certain things at certain points.
[1:42:59] So like, for example, the whole thing with Andrew Collier's cat,
[1:43:03] which is one of the most disgusting and like, insane
[1:43:06] things, genuinely just insane things I've ever heard in a true
[1:43:09] crime case. He actually had a specific
[1:43:11] reason as to why he did that. He said that he had killed the
[1:43:14] cat and posed it in that specific way in order to degrade
[1:43:18] Andrew Collier for a very specific reason.
[1:43:21] And that was because he was personally angry at Andrew, had
[1:43:26] anything personal against his victims did Colin, it was never
[1:43:30] usually personal. He just wanted to kill just to
[1:43:32] kill. But this time was different.
[1:43:33] He was personally angry at Andrew, but this only came about
[1:43:37] after the victim was already dead.
[1:43:39] So he'd killed Andrew because he didn't give him the PIN code to
[1:43:43] his card. And then after that, Colin just
[1:43:45] starts ransacking the whole house for anything that he could
[1:43:48] steal. He wanted to try and find cash
[1:43:50] or something. And as he was rummaging through
[1:43:52] a lot of stuff, he found a letter from Andrews dot doctor
[1:43:57] that said that the results of his recent HIV test had come
[1:44:01] back positive. Andrew Collier was HIV positive.
[1:44:05] He had a contagious STD that he was gonna willingly give to
[1:44:11] Colin Ireland that night. He had gone to the Colhern pub,
[1:44:15] picked up Colin Ireland with the intention of taking him home and
[1:44:18] having sex with him that night without first disclosing at any
[1:44:23] point throughout the whole night that he had HIV, that he was HIV
[1:44:28] positive. He had not once said that to
[1:44:30] Colin and Colin, even though he had no intention of sleeping
[1:44:33] with this man, he was literally just there to murder him.
[1:44:35] He still felt so incredibly disrespected that this man was
[1:44:41] going to knowingly and silently transmit him an incurable STD.
[1:44:46] And he said that that was why he went the extra mile with the
[1:44:49] aftermath of that murder. And that was because he was
[1:44:52] personally furious with this man.
[1:44:54] He wanted to humiliate and degrade him.
[1:44:57] He wanted him to be found. He wanted his dead body to be
[1:45:00] found in the most humiliating way that he possibly could think
[1:45:03] to do it. So police have listened to like
[1:45:06] his whole confession and at this point, they know his motive.
[1:45:09] They know that he just wants to be an infamous serial killer.
[1:45:12] But what they don't know specifically is why gay men?
[1:45:16] If he himself says that he is straight and he had no interest
[1:45:20] in having sex with these men, why was he specifically going
[1:45:23] for gay men? Well, Colin Ireland said that
[1:45:25] gay men were kind of the easiest targets right now due to them
[1:45:30] being quite a private community. Obviously with their distrust,
[1:45:33] they didn't like the police. They weren't going to talk to
[1:45:35] the police basically is what I'm trying to say.
[1:45:37] And he was proven right with that because the community
[1:45:40] didn't cooperate with the police as well as you would have hoped.
[1:45:44] And there was also the hanky system, which proved really
[1:45:47] useful because it was almost like pre consent to be tied up,
[1:45:52] almost like it was just easy for him to identify the people that
[1:45:55] would be more willing to be tied up, you know?
[1:45:57] And that made his job a hell of a lot easier if the victim was
[1:46:00] literally like willing to jump in the ropes and and go, Yep,
[1:46:04] tie me up. Like, of course, that makes
[1:46:06] Colin Island's job so much easier.
[1:46:08] And there was also the fact that I think he was just homophobic.
[1:46:11] I think he was, whether that was internalized homophobia or just
[1:46:15] like straight up homophobia, he was.
[1:46:17] But basically throughout this interview with police, Colin
[1:46:19] Ireland had three main points that he really wanted to get
[1:46:22] across to the police. One was that he had not been
[1:46:25] under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
[1:46:28] Even at the Cole Herm Pub when he was ordering drinks, he would
[1:46:30] only ever order soft drinks. He was completely sober with
[1:46:34] every murder that he did. Two, he wanted police to know
[1:46:37] that he was not gay. He was not bisexual, he was
[1:46:40] straight. He had no sexual interest in
[1:46:42] these men at all. He'd never intended on having
[1:46:44] sex with them. And also #3 that no part of his
[1:46:48] murders were sexual. There was no sexual assault.
[1:46:50] There was no sexual gratification that he got from
[1:46:52] the murders. There was no sexual element to
[1:46:54] him at all in this. How many times did I say the
[1:46:58] word sexual there? And that's crazy.
[1:46:59] A lot of people don't believe him when he says that, and I
[1:47:02] don't know what I believe, but I don't know.
[1:47:04] I think it's kind of believable. He did seem like he genuinely
[1:47:07] just wanted to be a serial killer, and he put in a lot of
[1:47:10] like, research and thought into how he was going to do it.
[1:47:13] And it kind of makes sense that he would come to the conclusion
[1:47:16] that the gay community is the easiest to target.
[1:47:21] I don't know. I don't know.
[1:47:22] On December 20th, 1993, Colin Island pled guilty to all 5
[1:47:27] counts of murder. For this, he was sentenced to a
[1:47:29] whole life tariff, meaning that he's never going to be eligible
[1:47:33] for parole. He's never going to be allowed
[1:47:35] out of prison. He went on to die behind bars.
[1:47:38] This is a very rare sentence to be given out of here in the UK,
[1:47:42] by the way. It's only for like, really,
[1:47:43] really serious, like repeat offenders, like serial killers,
[1:47:47] serial rapists. Only the worst of the worst have
[1:47:49] ever been given this tariff, and I'm sure you would recognize a
[1:47:52] lot of the names in the list because they're all infamous
[1:47:55] serial killers. And even then, a lot of the time
[1:47:58] when people are given a whole life tariff, it's often served
[1:48:00] in a psychiatric unit because a lot of people that commit crimes
[1:48:05] heinous enough to receive a sentence like this tend to be
[1:48:08] mentally ill. But that's one thing that's
[1:48:09] really interesting about Colin Island is that he's not.
[1:48:13] He's been tested so many times and they really don't think he
[1:48:16] has an ounce of mental illness in him.
[1:48:18] He is completely mentally sane and he was when he committed
[1:48:21] these murders too. Colin Ireland spent most of his
[1:48:24] sentence in Wakefield Prison and died behind bars on February
[1:48:28] 21st 2012, aged 57, from pulmonary fibrosis.
[1:48:33] Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Outlaw
[1:48:36] Podcast. Please rate US five stars and
[1:48:39] leave us a comment. I love reading your comments on
[1:48:41] Spotify and well everywhere honestly.
[1:48:45] I hope you have a great week and I will see you next Sunday.

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