World's Most Evil Killers - Season 2, Episode 1 - Stephen Port - Full Episode | Forensic Files

♪♪ -On September the 14th, 2015, 25-year-old Jack Taylor was found dead in the graveyard
of St. Margaret's Church in East London. Jack's devastated family immediately suspected
he had been murdered. -We'd said to each other that, "If that's where Jack has been found,
someone has put him there because Jack would never go and sit anywhere like that.
He's not like that." -And their suspicions were right. An active serial killer was on the loose in London.
-Young men in their 20s had been murdered in East London, and their bodies had been found in unexplained circumstances,
all within a few hundred yards of each other. -The killer was a 40-year-old loner named Stephen Port.
He'd lured four young men to their deaths using online dating sites and went to great lengths to cover up his crimes.
-I suspect he would've gone on killing without any hesitation for as long as he could've got away with it.
-Stephen Port had been unmasked as one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪
It was a crime that shocked the nation and left Britain's LGBT community devastated.
In 2014, the 40-year-old Stephen Port killed three young men in Barking, East London.
All the bodies had been found within yards of one another, and it was initially thought that no foul play was involved,
but the discovery of a fourth victim in September 2015, 25-year-old Jack Taylor, led the police to the killer
who had poisoned his trusting victims. On the 13th of September, 2015, Jack had arranged to meet a man he'd been chatting to
on the gay-dating mobile phone app Grindr. He was never seen alive again. It was a day that his family would never forget.
-We know that Jack hadn't come home, so we was all worried, and we was all trying to get ahold of him, wasn't we,
and chasing up his friends and stuff. We'd always hear from Jack. He'd always let my mom and dad know if he wasn't coming home
or... And he hadn't. -Two days after reporting Jack missing, the family received the news they'd been dreading.
-Mom had called me to say that Jack still wasn't home, and then all of a sudden, a police car pulled up outside,
and then the next thing, she said that the officers were coming towards our door,
and all I've heard is, "Are you Jack's mom and dad?" and, obviously, they said, "Yeah," and the officer said,
"Jack is dead," and you just heard Mom scream. More of a scene, now, well, that scream is.
-Jack's body had been discovered propped up against the outside wall of the graveyard
of St. Margaret's Church in Barking, East London. Police found drug paraphernalia,
including a small bottle containing the party drug GHB. He had died from an overdose.
However, Jack's family was certain that his death wasn't self-inflicted. -Jack was very antidrugs, so that didn't make sense.
You just get this gut feeling that something is not right. -The family were determined to find out the truth,
and a fortnight after Jack's death, the police showed them some revealing footage.
-And we found out two weeks later that they had seen CCTV footage of Jack meeting a man at Barking Station,
which we felt was very bizarre and very strange, and at that time, in the moment as well,
we just thought, "Well, who's this man?" -The man in question was a local chef named Stephen Port.
The story of this elusive killer begins over 40 years ago. -Port was born in Southend-on-Sea
in February 1975, left Southend by the age of about one, and his parents moved to Dagenham in Essex.
-He seems to have come from quite an average working-class background, which was, to all intents
and purposes, relatively normal from the outside. He seemed to be a boy who was quite quiet.
He was quite awkward. He wasn't somebody who was a great conversationalist, and it's been said that when he was at school,
some people thought that he was deaf because he was that detached and that disengaged from other people,
so he's always been very insular and very introverted. -After taking his GCSEs, Port enrolled into art college
but had to drop out because his family couldn't afford the fees. -He had to basically choose something else,
so he went on and trained to be a chef, so I think he's always got that sense of frustration
and that sense of entitlement. I think he has this idea that, "I have this talent.
I have this skill. I should be able to develop that, and I'm not able to because of other people,"
so I think that stays with him for quite a long time. -Age 30, Port moved out of his family home
and into a flat on Cooke Street in nearby Barking, East London. One of his new neighbors was Ryan Edwards.
-I first Stephen when I moved to Barking and in April 2005, and I lived in a first-floor flat,
and it overlooked where I would discover Stephen lived. As a young gay man myself,
I didn't know anyone gay in the local area, so it didn't take me long, really, to introduce myself to him.
He was a very tall man, sort of a towering physical presence, and he actually walked with almost like a bit
of a lumber-stroke lurch. He was very much a man of few words, so when he used to talk to me,
he often didn't give eye contact. He would bow his head, and he would often give one or two-word answers.
-And it wasn't long before Ryan started to notice some strange behavior from his new neighbor.
-I think there was something stunted about Stephen's mental development. I remember something a bit peculiar.
I was going to host a party. I was just putting some rubbish out, and there was a toy truck there,
and I thought, "Stephen will love that," and I was with a friend at the time. He said, "You can't give a grown man a toy truck,"
and I was like, "Yeah, but, you know, from what I knew of Stephen, "I think he'd really like it."
And so at the party, I gave him the toy truck, and lo and behold, he was absolutely overjoyed with it.
He then sat cross-legged on the floor and starting pushing the toy truck up and down,
and he was obviously in his complete own world while the party was going on around him.
-He retains quite a childlike quality to him, even as an adult, so he collects children's toys,
and he plays with those toys almost like he's a child, so the idea of the judgment of other people
and what others would think of his behavior really doesn't impact upon him in the same way
that it does the rest of us. -Port's awkward demeanor made it difficult for him to meet men in person.
He was far more comfortable with online dating. -I think Stephen Port was somebody
who did lack those basic social skills, so I think he'd find social media incredibly attractive.
He's able to spend time thinking about the types of things to say on his profile,
and he'd have real trouble meeting people in a face-to-face situation, but the Internet removes a lot of that.
-This was his form of communication. He wasn't a man, for example, to go out to the pub or to the bar at night.
This was a man who lived in his own fantasy, created with the help of his Internet connection.
Port created several profiles across many different sites. -He claimed to have been in the military.
He claimed to have graduated from Oxford University. At other times, he'd claimed
that he was a special-needs teacher, and that's the thing about social media. It enables us to present a whole range
of different identities to people, and I think what he was essentially doing here
was trying on different identities because the self that you create on social media,
you can be whatever you want to be. -Stephen's rate of going through and meeting new guys
was prolific, so it was quite, you know, not unusual that there'd be a new guy every day.
Even on the first time he'd met them, he would then announce to me, via text message normally,
that, you know, "I've got a new boyfriend. Come around and meet my new boyfriend."
-The Stephen Port that he presented to the world was somebody who looked younger than he was.
He would often use pictures that were taken many years ago. He doesn't feel that the real Stephen Port
is actually enough to actually get the attention of others and to have others interested in him.
-It was clear that Port was attracted to younger men. -There's a really clear reason for that because here,
we've got somebody who really has a lot of problems relating to people of his own age,
so I think he's always going to be attracted towards people who look younger because he feels like he's more in control.
-He was a kind of praying mantis figure, quite thin, pale-faced, uncomfortable in lots of company,
much happier when he was alone with the young men. He had an appetite for vulnerable young men,
certainly younger than 25, and he was interested in control. It's about the power, and for Port, it was all about power.
-Stephen would quite often deposit the boyfriend in my company, and so I would end up getting to know these guys,
and they rarely had a good word to say about Stephen. They would often say that he was mentally abusing them.
He was very argumentative, very manipulative, very controlling. Though what was strange really is that
if Stephen was such an awful person, they were still sticking around, and so again,
was there some sort of control that Stephen was exhibiting to make these guys, you know, not run for the hills?
-As well as the volatile relationships, Port had become immersed in a world of drug-fueled sex parties,
but his wild behavior was beginning to spill over into his everyday life. -He led me through to the kitchen and the living room,
and I was absolutely taken aback when I looked at the coffee table, and the whole circumference was filled up
with a clear plastic box, and in that container were lots and lots and lots of vials of clear liquid
and bags of white powder. I obviously quickly realized that this is a huge amount of drugs,
so then that's when I pretty much took a step back, and that was one of the last times
I actually went around Stephen's flat. -There was nobody there putting the brakes on his behavior.
There was nobody holding him accountable for what he was doing, so when one relationship ended,
another one would begin, and it would be a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more violent than the one before.
-Stephen Port's violent behavior would only intensify as his appetite for young men
and drug abuse would spiral out of control. He was living alone in a flat in Barking, East London,
and his Internet search history was becoming more and more perverse. -He was trying to satisfy his desire
by searching the Internet, which a lot of people do. The difference, that some of them get satisfied
only by looking at pictures and watching films on the Internet, and some of them, that will not be enough.
They will want to move on, which, unfortunately, was this case. -And it wasn't long before he would act
upon these depraved urges. On the 15th of June, 2014, Port contacted 23-year-old
fashion student Anthony Walgate through a mail-escorting site. He offered to pay Anthony £800 to spend the night,
and they agreed to meet 2 days later on the 17th of June. As a precaution, Anthony texted friends about the arrangement,
but just 2 days later, he was found dead outside Port's flat. The police received an anonymous 999 call
from Stephen Port himself. When the paramedics arrived, Anthony was found slumped against a wall
with his bag beside him. Inside was a bottle of the date-rape drug GHB. He had died of an overdose.
-Walgate had turned up at his flat, and there is no doubt that he was rapidly subdued
with the use of GHB and other drugs. Now, there is an argument which suggests that perhaps something went just a bit too far,
as far as Walgate was concerned and that the drugs had too great an effect. It could be that he got the dose wrong.
It could be that this was something new that he was trying out. We don't know, but what we do know
is that Anthony Walgate died at Port's hands. -Port told the police that he found Anthony outside his flat
on his way home from work. His death wasn't treated as suspicious. It was devastating news for his mother, Sarah Sak.
-When I had this made, it says on it, "Anthony. It's all about me," because to me, that was...
That summed up Anthony. It was always all about him. I've always said to friends and family,
"Now, you need to get pictures. You never know what's going to happen." The last time I had any contact with Anthony
was the 15th of June because it was my birthday on the 17th of June, and I said to him, "I'm going on holiday.
I'll see you when I get back," that sort of thing, and of course, I never did get to see him again.
It was the Sunday before I was due to come home, and I turned my phone back on. There was 50-odd missed calls or texts,
hundreds and hundreds of messages coming through, that, "You need to ring home," you know,
"Something has happened," so I called my son, and he had to tell me over the phone
that Anthony had been found dead. To be honest, it was just a bit of a blur. It was so fast, and I don't even really remember much about it.
I was just in shock that it could happen. You know, you really don't expect this to happen.
You go on holiday for your birthday, et cetera, and then find out one of your children had died.
-Sarah approached the police for some more information about her son's death. -Anthony was found dead in the street.
So I said, "Well, you know, was he stabbed, shot, beaten? What?" No, nothing. Not a mark on him, "And we don't know why."
They'd done a postmortem the Friday before, and nothing had come up and shown, so I said to him straightaway then,
"Something's not right." -Anthony's friends told detectives that he'd arranged to meet up with a man on the night he disappeared.
The police soon realized it was the same person who dialed 999, Stephen Port. On the 26th of June, he was arrested.
He laptop was seized and his DNA taken. -It starts to unravel, and the police do start to put the pieces together
and figure out that he is connected to this in some way, so Port's story changes.
He continues to lie, and I think he's sailing quite close to the wind with this particular case.
-Port told detectives that Anthony had taken drugs and fallen asleep after they'd had sex.
He said he then left the 23-year-old in the flat, and when he got back from work later that day,
Anthony was dead. Port said he panicked and carried the body outside before calling the police.
The investigators believed him. -And I think he feels quite relieved when he gets away with it because I think that once he was
in the police station, once he was being questioned, he probably did think the game was up,
and I don't think he could quite believe his luck when he walked away from it. -The police have missed an opportunity to capture Port.
He would go on to kill three more young men. Human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell believes
all the deaths could've been avoided if communication between the authorities and the public were improved.
-One of the problems the gay community and police face is that many crimes linked to dating apps are not reported.
There is, in general, a very significant underreporting of homophobic hate crime,
but there appears to be a particular underreporting of crimes linked to Grindr and other social dating apps.
-On June the 26th, the police charged Port with perverting the course of justice
and set a trial date for March 2015. He was immediately released on bail. -Astonishingly, they did no further serious
probing of Stephen Port, including his searches on his laptop and including his phone records.
Those searches might have much earlier on shown a spotlight on Stephen Port as a potential killer.
-In fact, Port was ready to strike again. Just 2 months after Anthony Walgate's death,
he was back on the dating mobile phone app Grindr and began messaging 22-year-old Slovakian Gabriel Kovari.
On the 23rd of August, Gabriel moved into Port's flat. -He seemed like a very nice guy, very articulate, intelligent,
well-spoken who had a passion for art, and he was very much an aspiring artist. -Ryan invited the couple into his flat for a coffee.
-So Stephen brings him over, and when Stephen goes to the toilet, Gabriel then says to me in sort of hushed tones,
"Ryan, Stephen is not the man you think he is. He is a bad man," and it didn't take me long to realize
that Gabriel was not happy living with Stephen." -I think Stephen Port would have really had a bit of a shock
with Gabriel Kovari. I think he would've felt incredibly threatened by him because here is a young man
who is everything that Stephen Port isn't. He's somebody who's ambitious. He's somebody who's going somewhere in his life,
and I think Port will feel incredibly resentful towards him. -He was strikingly different to the guys
that Stephen would normally hang around with, and so for that reason, he piqued my interest really,
and so I thought, "Oh, well, actually, I'm going to keep in touch with Gabriel,"
and so we then started to swap some messages on social media. -But all of a sudden, the messages stopped.
-And so I raised this with Stephen about, you know, "Why has Gabriel stopped, you know, communicating?
Where is he?" and then Stephen told me that, "I'm not sure where Gabriel has gone.
He's just disappeared," and then it was... It changed after a few days to, "Gabriel has met up and gone out with an army guy,"
and it changed again to, "Actually, I'm worried about Gabriel's safety," and then it was about a week after that,
that I got this really eerie message from Stephen, a long, long message saying, "And I've got some really sad news,
but I've heard from Gabriel's friend that he's gone back home, and he picked up a mysterious illness and has died."
-On the 28th of August, 2014, just 5 days after he moved into Port's flat on Cooke Street,
Gabriel Kovari was found dead. A woman walking her dog in the graveyard of St. Margaret's Church
found his lifeless body propped up against a wall. -It was an awful, awful realization,
you know, that he was... You know, he seemed like such a nice, pure person, and, you know, coming to this country,
and, you know, what a way to be welcomed by this country, to end in such, you know, awful circumstances.
-It's appeared that he, Gabriel Kovari, had died of a drugs overdose, but the shocking reality
was that Stephen Port had drugged and killed him, just as he did with Anthony Walgate
2 months previously. Port had now killed two men. His urges were only intensifying,
and in less than a month, another man would be dead. The police had arrested and charged him
on perverting the course of justice after he failed to correctly report the death of his first victim, Anthony Walgate,
but they had no idea that Port was actually a killer. -I think the key thing about Stephen Port
getting away with murder is, there's not that connection between actions and consequences.
He can take somebody's life, and nothing happens, and he continues to get what he wants.
He continues to be able to assault his victims and to dispose of their bodies and in the most obvious way,
and I think he does feel incredibly untouchable at this point in time. -While still out on bail, Port killed for a third time.
On the 18th of September, he contacted 21-year-old chef Daniel Whitworth through an online gay dating site,
and the two decided to meet. Two days later, Daniel was found dead. His body was discovered in the graveyard
at St. Margaret's Church in the same spot as Port's second victim, Gabriel Kovari,
extraordinarily, by the exact same dog walker. -I've come through, and I've seen somebody else,
a different boy, sitting in exactly the same position, leaning up against the exact same wall,
and I thinking to meself, "Please, God, no, please, not another one." -On the news of his death, Daniel's stepmother,
Mandy Pearson, was completely heartbroken. -Well, this is my memory box for Daniel.
It's got a lot of things in there, just things that I'm still finding. Anything that I come across that reminds me of him even,
I'll just put in there. Adam, Daniel's father, really did adore his boy. You know, he was going places, and Daniel's dad was very proud
of that, extremely proud of that. -But on the 20th of September, 2014, the family's lives changed forever.
-I opened the door to the police who immediately removed their hats, and that was when time stood still for me, really.
I thought, "They're not here with good news. They just aren't over here with good news."
I really don't recall what I actually said next. I cried, and so then, one of us asked, "How?"
and they did lower their heads and say, "Well, it looks like he took his own life."
-Just like his other two victims, Port had poisoned Daniel with a toxic amount of GHB.
He then placed his body in the same place as Gabriel Kovari's. In a bizarre move to try and evade capture,
Port then wrote and planted a fake suicide note, which claimed that Daniel had killed Gabriel
just 3 weeks earlier. -Adam and I actually managed to see the letter in its entirety.
There wasn't a thing in that letter that spoke to us about Daniel. There were no names.
He was talking in the wrong kind of context. It was like, "I didn't tell my family where I was going."
Well, you wouldn't say that to your family, and at that point, I said, "Who is this addressed to?
Because it's not addressed to us. Is it?" -Something else in the letter aroused Mandy's suspicions.
-There was, "Don't blame the guy I was with last night. It was only sex," and obviously, the first question then was,
"Who? Who was this man?" -The fact that Stephen Port wrote the fake suicide note,
it does seem completely incredible. Doesn't it? But by this point, he thinks he's invincible
because he's gotten away with murder before, and he sailed quite close to the wind that time,
so he wants to be careful that he doesn't get caught again, and I think because he is quite childlike,
because he is quite immature, he doesn't see how absolutely incredulous this should appear to be.
-News of the death of the three young gay men began to spread through the LGBT community.
A friend of Gabriel Kovari, John Pape, approached human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell.
-I was immediately shocked that the police had issued no public appeal, and there seemed to be no ongoing investigation.
That prompted me to ask John Pape to contact Galop, the police-monitoring group,
and PinkNews, the main gay website. I asked him to try and get them to press the police for answers.
Both Galop and PinkNews did go to the police but were reassured that there was nothing suspicious
or unusual about the deaths. -Port had managed to evade capture for a third time.
However, his killing spree was about to temporarily halted. On the 23rd of March, 2015, Port pleaded guilty
to perverting the course of justice during the investigation into Anthony Walgate's death.
He was sentenced to 8 months in prison but only served 2 of them. On the 4th of June, he was released.
Port was free to kill again. -I never really understood the circumstances at the time
of why he was in prison, but I did ask him, obviously, when he got, via text message, "What was that all about?"
You know, "Why were you in prison, you know, for a couple of months?" and eerily, he said to me on text message,
"It was a 90-second mistake, Ryan, that cost me several months of my life in prison,"
and I never really understood what he meant by that, but looking back, it's kind of a bit chilling.
-Just 3 months after being released from prison, Port struck again. On the 14th of September, 2015,
almost exactly a year since the last murder, the body of 25-year-old forklift driver Jack Taylor
was found in the same churchyard as Gabriel Kovari and Daniel Whitworth. -Well, I think the graveyard
became a kind of favorite disposal site for him because it served two purposes. It got the bodies out of the way,
but it also created a bit of narrative for anybody coming across these individuals.
This graveyard was the place where often homeless people, people who were down on their luck would hang out,
and that creates a little bit of a story in the beginning, when the bodies are discovered.
-Jack's family were devastated but began to question the circumstances surrounding his death.
-We know Jack, obviously, and Jack is very particular. He didn't like the dark, didn't like it at all,
first off, and second of all, Jack wouldn't just walk in a park area, let alone a cemetery or anything like that, you know?
I mean, he wouldn't. -And it doesn't make sense to leave the house at, like, half 2 in the morning,
3 o'clock in the morning to go stay over at a park. -Yeah. -That doesn't even make sense.
-He was just an absolute joy to be around. -Loving, caring, always there for other people.
-Determined to find out more, the Taylor family asked to see the CCTV footage of Jack's last-known movements.
It showed him walking with a tall blond stranger. In October 2015, the police put an appeal to the public,
and it was soon confirmed that the mysterious man in the footage was Stephen Port.
-In the end, it was the determination of Jack Taylor's family to pursue the police.
That eventually led them to take Port seriously. I believe had that not happened,
Port might well have got away or got away with it. -On the 15th of October, 2015, Port was arrested on suspicion
of causing the deaths of all four young men. The police had a serial killer in custody,
one that had previously slipped through their fingers. The police had originally believed that the deaths
were all self-administered drug overdoses. They were determined to find out the truth.
Detectives searching Port's flat had ceased his laptop and mobile phone. They interrogated him about his search history,
which included, "boy drug raped." His hard drive also contained videos of him having sex with unconscious men.
Under questioning, Port admitted that he'd met his third victim, Daniel Whitworth, at a sex party,
but he knew nothing about his death. He also claimed that he hadn't administered drugs
to anyone and denied killing the four young men. -He's quite well-spoken. He appears to be quite reserved.
I think what we're seeing here is a bit of a veneer that he's crafted to present to the rest of the world.
You wouldn't think that this is the type of person who could do this kind of thing.
-But the police weren't falling for it. They could link Port to all four of his victims.
On the 18th of October, 2015, he was arrested and charged with the murders of Anthony Walgate,
Gabriel Kovari, Jack Taylor and Daniel Whitworth. -I was told via the phone. The liaison officer that we had previously,
he phoned with the opening line of, "Don't build your hopes up, but we've arrested someone,"
and I said, "Right. This is just too huge for me to deal with, and I need to speak to Adam, so I'm going to let you go."
To try and explain to you how that was, the surreal situation that we were in, also included the emotion of comfort
because we thought he wasn't in that dark place. He didn't take his own life. He wasn't angry with any of us. He wasn't upset.
He wasn't in this awful place where we couldn't reach him, where he didn't come to us, where...
And for that split second, you're comforted by the fact that your son has been murdered, which is bizarre.
It's bizarre. We had a sigh of relief, and that was quickly followed by anger. It was just incredible.
We didn't know where to go from there. -The day I actually got the phone call to say
that they'd arrested him for the four murders, I actually -- I didn't even feel glad.
I felt like I'd been shot, to be quite honest, straight pain to me chest, and I sat on the stairs.
It was awful. -Yes. -I couldn't believe it. -It's, like, it's one thing, putting everything together,
what me and Jen did and believing that we are right, that somebody has done something to Jack,
but when you're told it, and it becomes official, it's awful. It is awful. -And it wasn't long before the story
of the shocking murders hit the headlines. -A friend of mine had sent me a link to a news article online,
and I clicked on it, and kind of like an icy dread sort of went over my body, and I sat upright in bed where it was like,
"Local man Stephen Port arrested on suspicion of four murders," and then I looked through the names,
and I saw Gabriel being one of them. -As the story broke, more men came forward claiming that
they, too, had been drugged and sexually assaulted at Port's flat after meeting him online.
-I think there was a very clear reason why Port chose to use GHB. I think that he was tapping into the stigma
and that the lifestyle, or the perceived lifestyle, of young gay men. I think he realized that, you know,
"If this does go too far, if somebody does have too much, and they don't survive,
then I'm going to be able to present it in a particular way that people aren't going to ask questions."
-I was very surprised what an ugly person he is, and I think the only way he could get these young attractive boys
was to drug them because nobody would've looked at him twice. He was a very ugly person inside and out
and a sad, lonely bald old man, and I don't think he's very bright, and he literally thought he was God,
that he could just get away with it. -In July 2016, Port was charged with the rape
of eight more victims between 2012 and October 2015, the month he was finally captured.
-The single most shocking thing about Stephen Port is that a monster can prey on innocent young men
in absolutely plain sight in the East End of London in 2015, and no one seems to pay any attention at all.
-When his trial began at the Old Bailey on the 5th of October, 2016, Port was faced with 29 separate charges of rape, sexual assault,
administering a substance with intent and with murder. The 41-year-old pleaded not guilty.
This meant the family of the victims would have to face the man responsible for killing their loved ones.
-And we walked in. I knew I was going to look at him, and he was up there behind glass,
and he was looking down when we came in. I wanted Stephen Port to give me some eye contact.
That was a need in me. I was just looking for any, any small sign of human emotion
from this thing, this thing with two arms and two legs that was apparently human.
I wanted something from his eyes, and I never got that. I didn't. I didn't get that.
-For 4 weeks, the jury were presented with evidence to prove that Port was a killer.
Investigators had found his DNA on Gabriel Kovari's sunglasses and Daniel Whitworth's clothes.
Handwriting experts also confirmed that Daniel didn't write the suicide note found alongside him.
Ryan Edwards testified against his former neighbor during the trial. -So I did my evidence, and as I was leaving,
and I couldn't help but kind of quickly glance at Stephen because I had to walk quite near past him as I was leaving,
and chillingly, he kind of gave me a crooked half smile, almost like a mischievous grin that a child would give
when they've been caught out doing something they know is wrong, and that was eerie.
-On the 25th of November, 2016, the jury convicted Port of a total of 22 offenses against 11 men,
including the four murders, four rapes, four sexual assaults and 10 counts of administering a substance with intent.
Mr. Justice Openshaw sentenced Stephen Port to a whole life tariff. He was immediately sent to Belmarsh Prison.
He will never be released. Justice had finally been served. -That sick, twisted scumbag will never be able to hurt
or destroy anyone else's family or life. Our Jack can finally rest in peace. We will always be completely heartbroken as a family.
-Since Port's incarceration, police are re-examining as many as 58 unexplained deaths involving the drug GHB.
-There are almost certainly many, many more young men who were assaulted one way
or another by Stephen Port. The only thing we can be grateful for is that Port was eventually stopped.
He was, in every respect, a most terrifying figure. -In October 2016, the Metropolitan Police
referred themselves to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The IPCC launched an independent investigation into 17 officers
who handled the response to the four deaths. The investigation continues. Despite the internal police review and Port's incarceration,
nothing can bring back the four young men that lost their lives. -We've got to make room for this to run parallel
with the life that... I'm not going to use the word destroyed because he's taken our boy, and he's not taken anymore.
We do reminisce. We do reminisce about Daniel, and, you know, some of the things we did when we were out and about,
and, you know, that's becoming easier to do. -No. It still isn't getting easier over time.
He used to say, "You know, if I'm..." Being in early teens, he called me Sessa. He never called me Mom, and he always used to say,
"You know, Sessa, one day, I'll be famous. Everybody will be talking about me," which they are, but, obviously, for the wrong reasons.
-We haven't had time to grieve. Have we? -No. We still have days now where we'll just get a pass
for what we call a normal day, and we don't feel like anything is normal anymore.
Do we? But a normal day, and all of a sudden, we say, "Oh, my god," like... -He's not here.
-Jack is not here, and then you'll have another day where you actually think, "Jack was murdered."
Watching your mom and dad every day, every single day, fall apart... -Right, and there's nothing you can do about it.
-Because, you know, like everybody in the world, if your mom and dad are upset, or, you know, something is wrong, you try and fix it,
and there's nothing we can do, and that is hard, very hard. You know, watching the fact that they fell apart.
They've aged, and they're people we've always known. They're not the same people anymore.
That is hard. It's hard for all of us. Ain't it? -Yeah. -Stephen Port affected the lives of so many people,
not just those he killed and those he raped but also all of their friends, family
and the entire LGBT community as a whole. He murdered his victims for his own sexual gratification,
and it's a tragedy that he was able to get away with it for so long. When he was finally captured,
his horrific crimes were brought to light, but now, we should forget the name Stephen Port
and celebrate the memory of Anthony, Gabriel, Daniel and Jack instead. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Stephen Port callously killed four young men between 2014 and 2015.

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 Port murdered four young men in East London, using online dating to lure them, before being arrested and convicted.

Key points

The Discovery of Jack Taylor. 25-year-old Jack Taylor was found dead in a graveyard, raising suspicions of murder.
The Serial Killer Unmasked. Stephen Port, a 40-year-old loner, was revealed as a serial killer targeting young men.
The Tragic Death of Anthony Walgate. Anthony Walgate was found dead after meeting Port, leading to a police investigation.
Gabriel Kovari's Mysterious Death. Gabriel Kovari was found dead just days after moving in with Port, raising alarms.
Port's Third Victim: Daniel Whitworth. Daniel Whitworth was found dead in the same spot as Gabriel, highlighting Port's pattern.
Heartbreaking News. Mandy Pearson reflects on the devastating moment she learned of Daniel's death.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It was a crime that shocked the nation.

The impact of the murders on the community.

1:36WatchJul 20, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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