World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 7 - Stephen Griffiths - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-In the West Yorkshire city of Bradford in 2010, one man's desire to stand out from the crowd
was about to take a macabre turn. Captured on CCTV, student Stephen Griffiths arrives home with a young woman, but just seconds later,
she's seen running away from his flat. Griffiths, armed with a crossbow, chases after her and shoots her from behind.
She's dragged back inside, never to be seen alive again. -It was absolutely astonishing,
very seldom is murder captured on camera. -A psychopath with a history of violence,
Griffiths confessed to the murder of two other local women, and even claimed to have eaten parts of his victims.
-He's dismembered the bodies. He's taken pictures of them. This is somebody who is quite comfortable around death.
-The concept that he gave himself a nickname, he wanted the celebrity of being a serial killer.
-Stephen Griffiths, the self-proclaimed Crossbow Cannibal, had emerged as one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It was a case that shocked the nation. 40-year-old Stephen Griffiths, a serial killer obsessed student with a history of violence,
admitted to murdering and mutilating three women in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The killings took place across a 10-month period
between 2009 and 2010. Shocking CCTV footage captured the final moments before he executed his last victim.
-This is the flat where Griffiths lived and killed. He described it as his slaughterhouse.
-But Stephen Griffiths' story begins 40 years before. Griffiths was born on Christmas Eve 1969
in the town of Dewsbury in West Yorkshire. -There doesn't appear to be anything really out of the ordinary in terms of the family
that Stephen Griffiths comes from. -He had two very caring, loving parents, a stable marriage, and they were moving up in the world,
you know, good, solid Yorkshire folk, but then it all went pear-shaped, now, I think that happened when Stephen's parents,
Moira and Stephen Sr., split up. -Griffiths had always been close to his father and he didn't react well to the breakup.
-We know from listening to some of the reports of people he went to school with, his peers,
they reported that he was a bit of an oddball. He was slightly strange. He would collect hunting knives, and he would talk about violence
in a way that other children wouldn't. -He became very, very withdrawn, very, very difficult to get on with, very disengaged,
but also he was observed being sadistic towards animals, in the back garden of the house
they lived in in Wakefield, neighbors saw him shooting birds and dismembering them.
-When we look at serial killers who have been abusive towards animals when they were children,
that is indicative, to me, of somebody who is trying to gain control, so they turn their attentions to creatures
that they can wield power over, and often that's small animals. I think those early indicators were there, but he certainly
didn't come from the hugely dysfunctional background that we see other serial killers come from.
-Despite his unruly behavior, Griffiths had a high IQ, and his dad worked hard to send him
to a 9,000-pounds-a-year grammar school in Wakefield. -He went to private school,
and I think that gave him a kind of veneer of respectability. Had he been a young lad at a badly performing school,
you know, in a deprived area, I think, perhaps his behavior would have been problematized much earlier.
He would have been on the radar of police and social services and agencies like that much earlier,
but I think social class and middle class-ness provides a bit of a protective layer
for some people who go on to commit murder and serial murder because we don't want to think of middle-class kids
to go on and do things like that. -In 1986, at the age of 16, Griffiths dropped out of school,
and it wasn't long before the troubled teenager had his first brush with the law.
-Stephen Griffiths started getting into trouble with the police at the age of 17.
He was trying to steal some goods from a supermarket in Leeds. When the supermarket manager tried to stop him,
he produced a knife and slashed him across the face. The wounds were so severe that the victim needed 19 stitches.
-Griffiths was arrested and spent a year in a juvenile custodial unit. When he was released, age 19, he wanted to make a fresh start
and enrolled in a psychology course at the University of Bradford, but he was soon in trouble again.
In 1989, Griffiths was arrested for possessing an offensive weapon, an air pistol,
and sentenced to 100 hours of community service. -He got into further trouble when he felt he'd been slighted
by some fellow students, female students, at the college he studied at. He went up to them, four girls, produced a knife,
held the knife to the throat of one of the young girls, and asked her very menacingly
what she thought she was laughing at. Understandably, the girl was terrified. He didn't actually attack her,
but it was clearly a serious offense. -This time, the authorities had had enough.
Griffiths was sentenced to 2 years in prison. During this time, he spent 8 weeks
at Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire, where the psychology student's behavior
was assessed by a professional. -The psychiatrist described him as a sadistic schizoid psychopath.
He said, "He seemed to relish the very idea of killing and maiming people" and really made it absolutely clear
that he had a personality disorder which would make him a very, very dangerous man indeed.
-Psychopaths are people who are essentially emotionally empty. They don't have the same range of complex feelings
that the rest of us do. They tend to lack remorse. They have a shallow affect, kind of a shallowness of feeling.
They are prone to boredom. There's a need for kind of stimulation all the time. They can't feel real empathy for other people,
so there's an inability to put themselves in someone else's shoes, so it's that kind of coldness,
that kind of detachment from feelings and from empathy, really. -After his short time in Rampton,
Griffiths was moved to Leeds Prison, where reportedly he openly talked to his fellow inmates
about murder. -Griffiths was a troubled young man. He certainly had a very active fantasy life.
He confessed that he fantasized about killing and that he was sure he was going to kill numerous times before he was 40.
-Griffiths was released and continued with his psychology degree, and despite his ongoing criminal problems,
the 24 year old graduated in 1993. Now in the outside world, he continued to display signs
that he wanted to stand out from the crowd. -He had this habit of dressing up rather like a cinema villain with a large,
dark leather trench coat, and he walked a pet lizard on a lead. He was not exactly a commonplace figure in Bradford,
which I think rather appealed to him. He was a vain man as well as being deeply troubled.
-Stephen Griffiths had a fair number of girlfriends and female acquaintances who initially were taken in by his charm,
quite liked the way he looked, quite liked the fact that he appeared quite clever, quite well-educated,
but eventually they would get tired of him because, you know, he was very much a controlling character.
-In 1998, age 29, Griffiths met a new girlfriend, Zeta Pinder. -Me and me friend was looking through a lonely hearts column.
She said, "Ah, let's just see if we can find you another one." I'm like, "No, because it's full of psychopaths."
There were an advert saying, you know, "20-odd-year-old male, learning to be a counselor,"
and I thought, "Ah, fine. I'll give him a ring." -Unaware of his previous convictions and violent history,
Zeta decided to meet Griffiths in a pub. -It looked like goth. He had really long black hair,
all greased up, really long black leather jacket, and he gave me a photograph of himself
which I thought, "What a bit of a poser." And he talked a lot about himself. The time that I went out with him he was really kind
and caring, very loving, wanted to hold me hand when we went out, very tactile, just, yeah, really loving.
-Zeta's opinion on Griffiths changed when she found out he'd been lying to her. -Later, like 2 years down the line,
we were in Bradford having a drink, and he said, "I'm just going to nip to me flat for something,"
and I was like, "What do you mean you're going to nip to your flat for something? You live with your mum and dad."
It was like he'd got himself in a corner, and he went, "Oh, yeah, I've got a flat,"
and I'm like, "Oh, well, let's go see it," so he's like, "All right," so we finished his drinks,
and then it was just right literally around the corner in, like, this big complex.
I mean, why would you say, "Oh, I live with me parents," when you've got a flat?
-Zeta Pinder was about to meet the real Stephen Griffiths. -I never felt threatened until I went in his flat.
While he was opening the door, his exact words were, "Oh, next door, we'll walk around next door," and I'm like, "Why?"
He said, "Oh, because a woman got killed outside there." I said to him, "Oh, my God. How can you live there
when a woman has been killed there?" and he's just like, "Oh, it's fine. It's fine."
I just remember he had a little side table with a little white kettle on it, and he's like, "Oh, sit down. I'll make you a cup of tea,"
and I sat down, and I saw this big, huge bookshelf, and it was just rows and rows of, like, horror books.
There was not one nice book, not one, and just all on, like, mass murders, Yorkshire Ripper,
and above the bookshelf was, like, two Samurai swords, one going that way and then one going that way,
and on the floor, he had, like, crossbows, and he's like, "Oh, I'll make you a cup of tea,"
and I'm like, "Actually I feel a bit sick. I may just go home. Can you just take me home? I just feel really sick."
-Zeta was shocked by the discovery of Griffith's hidden life and left the flat. The following day, she ended the relationship.
Zeta had had a lucky escape. By 2010, the man she'd been dating had become a serial killer,
and Stephen Griffiths' eerie flat had played host to the most brutal of murders.
By 2004, Stephen Griffiths, a diagnosed schizoid psychopath, was well-know to the police.
He had three convictions for causing grievous bodily harm, a fray, and possessing illegal weapons.
He was fascinated with crime and murder. -I think Stephen Griffiths, you know, picked the most bizarre role models.
I mean, most young men will be looking to actors of footballers or musicians, but Stephen Griffiths was looking to Peter Sutcliffe,
the Yorkshire Ripper, and I think it was the notoriety attached to Peter Sutcliffe
that Griffiths found quite appealing. This was somebody who already had a taste for violence,
a taste for cruelty. -Despite his criminal misdemeanors, 35-year-old Griffiths continued on from his degree in psychology
by enrolling in a PhD course at the University of Bradford. -I think for Stephen Griffiths, being a PhD student
offered him the ideal cover to basically talk about and research and get obsessed with the things that he was obsessed with.
I think it gave a kind of veneer of legitimacy and respectability to something that was highly dysfunctional.
-His thesis title was "Homicide in an Industrial City," and he specialized on lethal violence
in the late Victorian period, but at the same time in his home he had this library of books, magazines,
videos all about murder, torture, mass killings, anything really which fed that obsession
he had with violence and killing and maiming people. -I think it was because he didn't have very much
in the way of boundaries around that type of behavior, and he just wanted to absorb himself in it.
For Griffiths, it was very much about him. It was very much about what he could achieve by it
by doing this sort of thing, so he was kind of an apprentice serial killer. -And the apprentice was ready to make the step up.
On June the 22nd, 2009, a local Bradford woman, 43-year-old Susan Rushworth, had just been reported missing.
-She had three children. She had grown up locally with a very respectable, very loving, family,
but like a lot of girls who end up working the street, she'd somehow become involved in drugs.
The suggestion was that she'd had a marriage split. She'd suffered depression, and she'd got in with the wrong crowd.
Before long, she was taking heroin. Before long after that, the only way of paying for the heroin habit
was to sell her body on the streets. -Susan was trying to break free from her drug addiction.
-She was still in touch with her family. They loved her. They looked after her. She was still in touch with her children,
and, you know, there were often signs that she was turning a corner. One Monday, June 2009, she was due to meet a friend,
and she just did not turn up, and the family waited however long it was respectable,
you know, it was worthwhile waiting before reporting it to the police. The police made an appeal for information.
They found out nothing. They scoured everywhere. They checked CCTV footage. They tried to find her mobile telephone.
They found not a trace. -Records showed that Susan's bank cards hadn't been used
since the day she disappeared. Her family launched a public appeal without success.
Police scoured the local area, including Susan's last known address, Oak Villas in Manningham, but it seemed like
she just vanished off the face of the Earth. Ten months passed. Susan Rushworth was still nowhere to be found.
-A missing prostitute is not particularly unusual. It happens a lot. They disappear to other cities.
They give up. There's no reason why particularly they should be traced. -Then on the 26th of April, 2010,
a very similar missing-persons report was filed in Bradford. -This time it's Shelley Armitage.
She's 31. She's a very pretty-looking girl. She had aspirations to be a model. She had lots of friends.
She had a boyfriend who loved her. She grew up locally with a family, you know, who very much loved her.
That said, she was also a heroin addict. She'd also ended up selling her body on the streets
in order to pay for her habit. She arranges to meet a friend one night in Rebecca Street,
which is a street in Bradford's red-light area. They have a bite to eat, a drink.
They go their separate ways, and then Shelley just vanishes off the face of the Earth like Susan before her.
-Detectives conducted a detailed search of Bell Dean Road near Shelley's home, but they found no clues.
They did, however, discover CCTV footage of Shelley walking along Sunbridge Road
in the heart of the red-light district filmed on the night she went missing, but the police had no leads
on either the disappearance of Shelley or Susan Rushworth. As they continued to investigate,
in May, a third woman disappeared -- 36-year-old Suzanne Blamires. -Her father was a local businessman.
She went to a good school. Basically she had everything going for her. She took A levels.
She wanted to build a career in nursing, and everything was going very, very well
until, like the two other women who had vanished before her, she became involved in the drug scene.
She became hooked on heroin, and eventually she resorted to prostitution to pay for her habit.
She was working the patch in the early hours of Saturday, May the 22nd, 2010. A few of the women were aware of the fact that she was there.
Friends knew that she was there. Friends expected her to return home, you know, after work in the early hours of Sunday morning,
but again, she vanished. -But this time, the police didn't have to wait long for a lead.
Just two days after Suzanne's disappearance, they receive news of some horrific footage
captured on a CCTV camera in a nearby block of flats, the home of Stephen Griffiths.
-So everything becomes clear less than 48 hours after Suzanne's disappearance when the caretaker of Holmfield Court,
the block of flats where Griffiths lives, is reviewing the CCTV footage for the weekend.
He's looking at the footage taken from the camera outside Griffiths' flat. It's a Monday morning.
Like any other Monday morning, he's just sort of sleepily winding his way through this film,
and then all of a sudden he sees this figure emerging from Griffiths' flat, running,
pursued by this figure, which he immediately recognizes as Griffiths, carrying what looks like a crossbow.
-The girl captured running for her life was missing woman Suzanne Blamires. -He took her to his flat.
She quite quickly, I think, realized that she was in grave danger and ran out. -You see Griffiths chasing after her.
You see him shooting at her with a crossbow. You then see him dragging her back into his apartment
by her legs, and that wasn't where it ended because afterwards he comes up to the camera.
He sticks his middle finger up to the camera, and he brandishes the crossbow. -In a kind of defiant, angry gesture towards the camera
and anybody else who might be looking at him. -On May the 24th, 2010, after viewing the footage,
police immediately race to the scene of the attack, hoping that Suzanne Blamires may still be alive.
-Armed police officers turn up at Holmfield Court. They storm up the stairs, storm into Stephen Griffiths'
flat expecting, really, some resistance. Stephen Griffiths just gives himself up meekly
and tells police somewhat inexplicably that he's Osama bin Laden. -Griffiths was immediately arrested
and taken to Halifax Police Station. Suzanne Blamires was nowhere to be seen. The following day, a member of the public
made a grisly discovery that would shock the nation. On the 24th of May, 2010, in Bradford,
40-year-old Stephen Griffiths had been arrested. CCTV footage showed him shooting 36-year-old Suzanne Blamires
with a crossbow outside his flat before making an obscene gesture to the camera.
-Oh, it was absolutely astonishing. Very seldom is murder captured on camera in the way it was captured here, and it was particularly shocking
because of the enormity of the case and just the sheer gruesomeness of it. -For some observers, the sheer audacity
of the notoriety-obsessed Griffiths to commit such a heinous act on camera was no surprise.
-I would say the reason Griffiths was perfectly prepared for his actions to be caught on camera
was that he actually wanted to be caught. He actually wanted the celebrity that he'd been seeking all along,
and after all, if he hadn't been caught on camera, he could perfectly well have gone on killing
other prostitutes in Bradford and concealing their bodies. -With Griffiths in custody, West Yorkshire police
began to search the crime scene and surrounding area for any clues leading to the location of Suzanne's body.
While being interviewed, Griffiths told detectives that there were deep issues inside of him.
He admitted killing Suzanne Blamires. However, he refused to tell the police what he'd done with her body.
But they soon found out. On May the 25th, the day after Griffiths' arrest, a member of the public found a rucksack in the River Aire
in nearby Shipley, just 5 miles from Griffiths' home. -He looks inside the rucksack, and he finds a woman's head.
-Suzanne Blamires' head still had the crossbow bolt embedded in it. -Obviously he's terrified, calls police.
Police go along, recover the bag, conduct a further search of the river, find other body parts.
They turn out to be those of Suzanne Blamires. -Once remains are found, if the case appears suspicious,
as a dismembered body in a bag would be, then the area is cordoned off. The scene-of-crime team come in.
The detectives come in. Quite often, at that point, the pathologist is called to come
and give an initial assessment. -Police divers also found a makeshift tool kit that could have been used to dismember the body.
News of the gruesome discovery soon broke across the nation. -The suitcase containing the tools was discovered
just over there some 200 yards from where Suzanne Blamires' remains were found, and all weekend police divers, as you can see,
have been scouring this riverbed searching for clues that could help this investigation.
-The police were able to piece together exactly what had happened to Suzanne from the evidence found in Griffiths' flat.
After killing her, Griffiths dismembered her body in his bathroom. He then placed the remains in a rucksack and left his flat.
-There were also some clothes belonging to Suzanne which were found in a bin a short walk away from Holmfield Court,
and there was extensive CCTV footage of Stephen Griffiths making a journey with holdalls,
which he admitted were full of body parts, to the nearest railway station, and he then caught the train up to Shipley,
and it was there that he dumped the body parts in the river. -As the search of the River Aire continued,
back at Halifax Police Station, detectives had another breakthrough during their interviews with Griffiths.
Without prompting, he brought up the names of missing prostitutes Susan Rushworth and Shelley Armitage.
-He says he's killed all three missing women plus a number of others, but although he admits the crimes,
he's, you know, less than fulsome in the detail that he gives them, and they're left feeling confused
as to whether they should believe him or not. -I think he was confessing to the murders
that he admitted to because that was also part of his performance. At this point in time, he's playing the role
of this damaged perpetrator, and he's really aware of serial killers. He's read about a lot of them.
He's read about the types of things that are going to get them what they want when they are caught,
so I think he's giving a little bit in order to get something back for himself. -It's very difficult to understand
precisely the horrific fantasy that he was living out. It was clearly to do with control.
It was also clearly to do with his own obsessions. -Griffiths idolized serial killers,
especially the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who was convicted of bludgeoning 13 women
to death with a hammer in the 1970s. Just like Sutcliffe, Griffiths targeted prostitutes.
The local sex workers were shocked to hear that Griffiths could be responsible for killing all three of the missing women.
-A lot of girls knew him, you know, like, I passed him every day, night in the street, on Corridor.
"It's all right," lit up a smile, seemed right warm, welcoming, and just polite in general.
-He used to, like, come up to us, talk to us, say that he'd been out for drinks at student nightclubs,
offer cigarettes. He was nice to me, really, never wanted business. I asked him for business, never wanted business
or anything like that. -I think there were multiple reasons for Stephen Griffiths
targeting sex workers. They will willingly go with you. They will go to your house.
They will get into your car, so they were easier prey for Stephen Griffiths because he was essentially a predator.
-Stephen Griffiths was charged for the murders of Suzanne Blamires, Shelley Armitage,
and Susan Rushworth on the 27th of May, 2010. Although Griffiths bragged to detectives
that he'd killed loads more, they didn't believe him. Now investigators needed to build a case against him.
As divers continued to search the River Aire for more evidence, they found a further 81 body parts.
Locals were stunned. -It's so close, only 12 foot away, just bringing things up, and not seeing too much,
but knowing that there were bits that shouldn't be in that river. -DNA tests later reveal that some of the remains
did not belong exclusively to Suzanne Blamires. Parts of human tissue belonged to Shelley Armitage.
Griffiths had already confessed to her murder, but this was the first physical evidence
that linked him to her death. As the media broke the news that Stephen Griffiths would be charged
with three counts of murder, one viewer was left completely stunned. -I was up watching television with me husband,
and I just saw his face on the telly, and I was like, "I know him," and Dave is like, "No, you don't."
I'm like, "Yeah, I do. I know him. I used to go out with him." I'm like, "Oh, God, has he died?" you know?
And then when they had said what he'd done, I just got physically sick. -Years earlier, Zeta had found out
that Stephen Griffiths had a dark side, but now the world was learning about him
and his online alter ego Ven Pariah, who he described as a misanthrope who brought hate into heaven.
It was revealed that just hours before murdering Suzanne Blamires, Griffiths had written on his social media feed,
"Ven Pariah has emerged into this world." -Stephen Griffiths was very much a narcissist,
and he wanted to perform this very kind of exaggerated persona online, Ven Pariah,
and it's something that indicates to me this is somebody who is using this as a performance prop essentially.
We can be different people online and offline, but for me what I found in my work
is there's much more continuity than there is change when we look at people's behavior online and offline,
so I think this was an indication this was somebody who wasn't quite normal. -Real serial killers are often mundane, commonplace men.
They do not like to draw attention to themselves. They don't care to be apart from the crowd.
They want to merge in with the crowd. Griffiths is a single exception to that rule.
-Despite having found remains belonging to Suzanne Blamires and Shelley Armitage,
police had found no evidence of Susan Rushworth. In a cold-blooded act, Stephen Griffiths,
although admitting to her murder, refused to tell police what he'd done with her body.
-Griffiths took some pleasure in leading the police a little bit of a dance, which was also designed, of course,
to make him more famous. -Forensic teams painstakingly searching Griffiths' flat
did eventually make a breakthrough. Blood found in the bathroom belonged to Susan Rushworth.
It's believed Griffiths killed her using a hammer, the preferred weapon of his idol, Peter Sutcliffe.
-The fact that the final victim was identified through bloodstain shows how meticulously these crime scenes are dealt with.
It would be very easy based on the fact that we knew that somebody had been killed with a crossbow to assume
that that blood related to one of those two people, but these cases are examined in such detail
that this extra blood spot was identified that came from a third person. -On May the 28th, 2010,
Griffiths appeared before magistrates, and just when it seemed that he couldn't cause
any more suffering to the victims' families, he left the entire courtroom in shock.
In Bradford, serial killer Stephen Griffiths had confessed to murdering three women --
Susan Rushworth, Shelley Armitage, and Suzanne Blamires. The brutal murder of Suzanne had been captured on CCTV.
On the 28th of May, 2010, Griffiths was at Bradford Magistrates' Court for his arraignment.
Even from the dock, the fame-hungry killer continued to torment the family of his victims
with his thirst for notoriety. -And when Stephen Griffiths was brought into the dock,
the court clerk says to him, "What's your name?" Everybody expected him to say Stephen Shaun Griffiths.
-But Griffiths' answer to the simple request completely stunned the courtroom. -He describes himself as the Crossbow Cannibal
with an utter contempt for his victims, their families, the justice system, the police, but with a considerable amount
of adoration of himself. -Of course, this causes a stunned silence in the courtroom.
That remained the case for about 30 seconds, and then I think one of the families started weeping,
and all the journalists, they're looking at each other in disbelief, asking each other whether he really did just say that.
-Well, I think Stephen Griffiths felt the need to give himself a brand because I think his crimes were performance crimes.
They were crimes that were enacted for the camera, and the fact that he imposed this name on himself
rather than the media labeling him the Crossbow Cannibal is really significant. -We have a man who is deeply, deeply narcissistic
and sees himself as the center of the universe and sees nothing else at all except his own vanity,
and that vanity is the hallmark of Stephen Griffiths' character, that extraordinary, overweening vanity.
-This is somebody who wanted to be unique, wanted to stand out amongst other serial killers,
and that was what that name was about. -Griffiths had achieved exactly what he'd set out to do.
With his self-proclamation, the case had now picked up immense media attention, and the nation was in shock.
-Can you confirm your name to the court, he was asked. Barely audible, a psychology graduate
believed to have been studying criminology, replied, "The Crossbow Cannibal." -After he announced himself as the Crossbow Cannibal,
of course there was only one story that the whole media were talking about, and that was it.
It just took over. I was just sitting there speaking to a colleague. We said, "Have you seen this? Can you believe that?"
At that time, we'd never seen anything like it before. Most of the time, these courtings are kind of
stare-down affairs, but there this guy had, you know, stood up and announced himself as this,
you know, self-confessed serial killer, and really we were just flabbergasted. -But could Griffiths really have eaten his victims,
or was this just more bravado from the macabre showman? -I think, looking at did Stephen Griffiths
cannibalize his victims, I think it's a possibility because this is a guy who really didn't appear
to have any boundaries around his killing behavior, but at the same time, he's aware of the power of that statement,
the impact that saying he's done that will have on his reputation, and he'd come up with that moniker, the Crossbow Cannibal,
so he had to claim that he'd done that, even if he hadn't. -Evidence found in Griffiths' flat suggests
that he may actually be telling the truth. -There was a certain amount of DNA evidence
on Griffiths' cooker which, of course, you know, sort of tends to back it up, but also I think it's a case of there
being no real reason to disbelieve him, and Griffiths, in his interviews with the police,
was more or less truthful. He was incomplete, but he was truthful, and I think as far as they knew,
he didn't make up any outright lies, and if you think about Stephen Griffiths and what he tried to do,
achieve notoriety by somehow concocting or contriving this series of very unpleasant,
very gruesome, very shocking murders, then the idea of cannibalism would fit into that kind of jigsaw.
-I think when we look at the amount of time that Stephen Griffiths has spent with the bodies of his victims
and what he's done with those bodies, he allegedly cannibalized some of the victims.
He's dismembered the bodies. He's taken pictures of them. This is somebody who is quite comfortable around death,
around dead bodies and the various things that come along with that. Other serial killers are more repulsed,
you know, by dead bodies, so it's the crime itself. It's the act that's important for some,
whereas I think it's the process that was important for Stephen Griffiths. -On the 16th of November, 2010,
a pre-trial hearing took place at Leeds Crown Court. Even more horrific details of the murders emerged.
Griffiths had filmed and photographed himself at work. -I think Stephen Griffiths' ongoing propensity
to document things is what's going on when we look at him keeping pictures of the bodies.
He's keeping these mementos because it's a way of proving what he's done. I think it's demonstrating, "Look at me.
Look at how sadistic I am." I think it's part of the performance. -There was a picture of Shelley bound naked in the bath.
There was some spray-paint writing on her back, and there was a voice-over in which Griffiths is heard
describing himself as this alter ego he has, Ven Pariah. -On December the 21st, 2010,
the hearing began at Leeds Crown Court. Seven months after calling himself the Crossbow Cannibal,
Griffiths had yet to make a plea. Cyril Dixon was in the courtroom. -He's brought in by prison van, but at this stage nobody knows
whether he's going to plead guilty or not guilty, so that adds a kind of an extra frisson of tension
about the proceedings. It's also quite tense because it's the last court day before Christmas, and it's one of those days
where people want to get things out of the way. -After his previous performance in court,
no one quite knew what to expect from Griffiths. -The atmosphere was highly charged,
and you had a packed press bench. You had a large room of family, friends of victims.
You had a lot of general members of the public. All the senior police officers were there.
It was one of those cases which had really roused a lot of passion in the local community.
-But this time, there were no theatrics. Griffiths pleaded guilty to the murders of Suzanne Blamires,
Shelley Armitage, and Susan Rushworth. He was sentenced to a whole-life tariff by Mr. Justice Openshaw on the 21st of December, 2010.
-I'd like to say that I'm extremely pleased with the conviction of Stephen Griffiths
for what can only be described as horrifying crimes. He's a heartless, controlling individual
who takes advantage of the vulnerable. -Stephen Griffiths was immediately sent to Wakefield Prison.
He will never be released. During his time there, Griffiths has reportedly gone on a hunger strike
and even attempted suicide numerous times. -When we look at what serial killers do
once they are behind bars, what most of them will do is continue to try and exert power and control.
Now, their options are much more limited when they're in prison, so we see them doing things like hunger strikes, self-harm,
that type of thing because that's something they have control over. They still have control over their own bodies,
and that's something that they'll use to their advantage. -There's every indication that his behavior
was just as outrageous and extravagant and attention-seeking as it had been, you know, in those distant years when he used to dress up
in a long leather coat and leather boots and put baby oil on his hair, you know,
just to make himself look more interesting than everybody else. -Despite many pleas from her family,
Stephen Griffiths has never revealed where the body of Susan Rushworth is. For the families of all his victims,
life will never be the same. The lives of their loved ones were taken too soon by a deadly psychopath with a hunger for popularity.
-I think Stephen Griffiths was absolutely after 15 minutes of fame, and you could see that he'd been his own marketing manager.
He'd got a brand identity. He was the Crossbow Cannibal, and I think he thought that he was going to get an awful lot more attention
that would last for much longer than it actually has, so if you look at who his idol was, Peter Sutcliffe,
we still talk about Peter Sutcliffe today. -What struck me as particularly unpleasant
about Griffiths was the fact that he was able to choreograph everything he did. Many killers, you know, even serial killers,
act upon urges which they can't control. With Griffiths, although he had that urge,
he was controlling it, and he was kind of embellishing the kind of story he was trying to write about himself.
-Stephen Griffiths is one of the rare British serial killers who, I think, could truly be called mad.
He's certainly not criminally insane. On the contrary, I don't think he would pass
any judgment of that, but his view of the world is so bent, so deranged, if you like, that he fails to see
that he doesn't fit in within any other civilized action. -So if we're looking at
the psychopathic traits and characteristics as being inherently evil, then, yes, he is.
He's somebody who lacks empathy. He's somebody who shows no remorse. He's callous. He doesn't take responsibility.
The murders that Stephen Griffiths committed were choices. Yeah, he chose to lure these women back to his flat.
He chose to kill them. He could equally have chosen not to. -Stephen Griffiths killed three women
for his own self-satisfaction. He's never revealed why he murdered Susan Rushworth,
Shelley Armitage, or Suzanne Blamires, but he has seized numerous opportunities to talk about himself.
His pure lust for infamy and notoriety without regard for others is what makes him one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Stephen Griffiths, the self-proclaimed Crossbow Cannibal, had always fantasized about murder. In 2009, he acted on his murderous instincts and killed three women.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Stephen Griffiths, the Crossbow Cannibal, murdered three women in Bradford, seeking notoriety and infamy through his gruesome acts.

Key points

The Crossbow Cannibal. Stephen Griffiths, known as the Crossbow Cannibal, became one of the world's most evil killers.
Zeta Pinder's Lucky Escape. Zeta Pinder's relationship with Griffiths ended after she discovered his dark secrets.
Griffiths' Disturbing Obsession. Griffiths' fascination with violence and murder was evident in his studies and personal life.
Griffiths' Arrest. After a shocking CCTV revelation, police arrested Griffiths, who bizarrely claimed to be Osama bin Laden.
Shocking CCTV Footage. CCTV footage captured the horrifying moment Griffiths chased and shot his victim.
The Gruesome Discovery. Police divers found a makeshift tool kit that could dismember a body.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This is somebody who is quite comfortable around death.

1:02WatchJul 8, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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