World's Most Evil Killers - Season 2, Episode 12 - Steven Grievson - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-In February 1994, a badly burned body of a teenager was found on an allotment in Sunderland, in England.
It was the third similar death in three months. Pathology reports gave the police no reason
to treat the deaths as suspicious, but they were dealing with a sadistic serial killer.
-He knew that he got sexual excitement from killing them. He knew that he wanted to destroy evidence
of the strangling by setting fire to them. -The murderer was a 23-year-old man named Steven Grieveson.
The papers had begun to call him the "Sunderland Strangler." -He's making a decision
to take someone's life time and time again. He's somebody who has chosen to do evil things,
and in that way, he is a classic psychopathic serial killer. -It would take the efforts of one detective
supported by the stoic family members of Grieveson's victims to finally bring the killer to justice.
-Steven Grieveson is the most evil man I've heard of. Horrible. Just can't understand how someone could be like that.
-Steven Grieveson, the Sunderland Strangler, had been revealed as one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It was a case that almost went unsolved. For 3 months in the early 1990s,
there was serial killer on the loose in the Sunderland in the northeast of England.
The deaths of three teenagers -- Thomas Kelly, David Hanson, and David Grieff --
were all initially believed to be mysterious but not suspicious. Pathologists had ruled out murder.
It would take a new detective to finally uncover the truth and bring justice upon the 25-year-old local man
named Steven Grieveson. -As the guilty verdicts were read out, there were loud cheers from the public gallery.
Handing down three life sentences, the judge described Grieveson as evil and dangerous.
-When the body of 18-year-old Thomas Kelly was found in a fire on November 26, 1993,
the police came to the conclusion that the death was solvent-related. Local journalist Nigel Green covered the case.
-I don't recall there being any great fuss after the first death, and it obviously makes you think what would have happened
if Grieveson had just killed the first lad, presuming he would have got away with it,
and it would have just been dismissed as some poor lad who died glue sniffing. -It wasn't until in November 1995
that Grieveson was finally charged. Nicknamed the Sunderland Strangler, he was eventually found guilty of a fourth murder
at a second trial in October 2013. -I still remember this case as if it was yesterday.
It's still fresh in my mind, even 20-odd years on, and I would imagine it's still similar
for the other people of Sunderland. -This killer's story begins over 45 years ago.
Steven Grieveson was born in Sunderland on the 14th of December 1970. He grew up in a large family,
but his parents were reportedly violent towards one another. -You are molded by the environment you live in.
It's a fact. Everybody knows this. So if you grow up with violence, you tend to be more violent
than people that don't. -Grieveson appears to show some psychopathic traits in childhood.
Some of his old school reports are looked at by a psychologist at his trial, and within these reports,
they talk of his lack of empathy, about his callousness, about his real lack of emotion towards other people.
I think there are a few red flags in Steven Grieveson's childhood, but they're not necessarily red flags that say to me,
"This person's going to turn into a murderer." They are red flags that say, "This is somebody who perhaps needs some help,
needs some support, you know, later on in childhood and in their teenage years."
-Growing up, Grieveson was often in trouble, and in 1982, he was arrested for shoplifting.
-He opened a pack of nails inside a shop. He didn't take the whole pack. He took one nail and he got caught.
And obviously, the owner of the shop didn't like that very much, and he actually went to court for stealing one nail.
One nail, not a pack of nails. One nail. But he was only 11 years old. -Extraordinarily, he was taken in front of the magistrate.
Now, for most 11-year-old boys, that would be the most terrifying experience imaginable,
and they would certainly not dream of doing it again, even though it was in many ways
an absolutely irrelevant tiny crime, certainly not punishable by anything significant.
But it's interesting that Grieveson didn't take that experience as any kind of lesson.
He simply brushed it off, water off a duck's back. He simply went on and did what he wanted to do.
♪♪ -At the age of 13, Social Services made the decision to remove Grieveson from the family home.
-Well, when he was an adolescent, he was taken into the residential care system,
and he ends up at a children's home in Carlisle. -Grieveson's troubles continued through his adolescence.
-He's had a real sense of shame instilled in himself at this point in his life. This is the point where many people are
realizing things about their sexuality, experimenting with their sexuality, and at the same time when people should have
the freedom to do that, he's been experiencing abuse and violence and neglect, and all of this is fueling a sense of shame.
-Grieveson struggled with his homosexuality in an environment designed to quash it.
-I think that the context of the 1970s, 1980s northeast is another factor in the Steven Grieveson story.
This is an area of tough working-class masculinity, of mining, of shipbuilding, of those kind of jobs
that make men masculine men. So there'll be very much a culture of what a man should look like, how a man should behave,
and for Steven Grieveson, for somebody who realizes that he's gay, this is another way in which he's not going to fit in.
He's not gonna be accepted. -People that grew up in an environment where it's a macho environment, it's like,
"Oh, no. You have to be a man. "If you were born a man, you have to be a man. "You have to play football. You have to do this.
You have to go and drink with the lads." Suddenly, you start having all these, you know, affections
or feelings for another male, is a very common thing for people to be a little bit ashamed,
and go, "What's going on? This cannot be." And they will lie to themselves. And that's --
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happened with Grieveson. -Grieveson didn't fit into the world around him,
and by the age 19, he'd become a social outcast. -By 1990, Steven Grieveson had been convicted
of around about 38 different offenses. So he was in and out of prison, and it's this very typical revolving door
that we see with kind of low-level crime, property crime. It's a way of life for some people.
-In May of the same year, 1990, Sunderland was rocked by the murder of a 14-year-old boy
called Simon Martin. He had been found semi-naked and bludgeoned to death in a derelict building
after running away from home just days before. -I remember the Simon Martin murder very well.
We had five murders in less than a week in Sunderland, and in hindsight, looking back,
whether that was putting extra pressure on the police with a given murder inquiry
involving 40, 50 police officers, a hell of a lot of police resources, and whether that would have put strain
on the Simon Martin murder at the time. -The police initially thought they had quickly solved the crime
after arresting a local teenager. -He was 16. He lived nearby. He was a respectable lad from a good family from memory,
and he had been playing in that building with others, and they found his fingerprints in the building.
There was blood in the building as well, and they found his fingerprint in blood,
which was just coincidence. -All charges against the 16-year-old boy were eventually dropped.
The murder of Simon Martin would remain unsolved for 23 years. But during the original investigation in May 1990,
police had also spoken to a local 19-year-old man named Steven Grieveson. -He's somebody who had a reputation in the local area
for hanging around with people younger than him. I think when you've got somebody who's trying
to get a sense of control, get a sense of power, you often feel that they hang around with people
who they see as slightly inferior to them. -Grieveson was questioned by the police
in the wake of Simon Martin's body being discovered, and Grieveson said, "Yes. Certainly, I saw him, but he was fine when I left him."
-Grieveson was released without charge. Three years later, the discovery of the body
of 18-year-old Thomas Kelly would trigger a series of similar deaths that would spread fear across the whole of Sunderland.
By the winter of 1993, 22-year-old Steven Grieveson had built up a reputation as a troublemaker.
In November of the same year, Thomas Kelly, an 18-year-old student, had gone missing from the family home
he shared with his parents and his sister, Lyndsey. -My brother, Thomas, was just a normal boy for the time,
just kind, helpful. He would do anything for anybody. Loved life. We wouldn't go to bed on the nighttime
without saying we loved each other. He used to call me "Pins" instead of "Lynds,"
which was...a bit strange, but that was the way we went on. We argued quite a bit, as brother and sister do,
but never went to bed without making up. We were very close as brother and sister.
We were close as a family. We didn't have loads of money, nothing like that, but...
we went out and done things together, silly things like willick picking and, you know, we'd just...
Very close family, I'd say. -Lyndsey vividly remembers the day her older brother disappeared.
-I went to school. Me mum went to work, and then Thomas had left for college, and that was the last time we had seen him.
It was actually a bit strange that morning because we were very close as brother and sister,
but that morning he was standing by the fireplace in me mum's house, and, um... as we said bye, he walked forward
and grabbed me hand and squeezed me hand. -On November 26, 1993, the emergency services
were called to a burning shed on an allotment near Monkwearmouth Hospital in Sunderland.
♪♪ -The fire attracts attention, inevitably, and the body of Thomas Kelly is found.
♪♪ It's hard to imagine what it must have been like for whoever arrived on that allotment
to confront the sight of a burning body in a burning building. It is gruesome. -When it came on the news, I wasn't listening to the news.
I was sitting in the house, and I had seen me dad cover his face, and I went, "What's wrong?"
And he went, "There's a body been found." And they say parents get a feeling. I don't know whether he got a feeling at that point.
-Thomas' badly burned body had seemingly destroyed any possible evidence, and senior detectives at Northumbria Police
were not convinced that he been murdered. -They were treating it as mysterious but not suspicious.
They didn't quite know what had went on with Thomas. We had told them that everything was out of the ordinary.
Thomas wouldn't be in an allotment like that or a place like that normally unless he'd went with somebody.
♪♪ -Drug and solvent abuse were prevalent in working-class areas at the time, and detectives were keeping an open mind.
-It's very hard for the police at that point to know quite what had been going on.
Solvent was found in the area, but they weren't certain. -I think there was a real stigmatization
of young men in this area during the 1980s, the 1990s. It was a period of industrial decline.
There were a lot of social problems often in some of the deprived communities in this part of the U.K.
So it was very easy to attach a particular story to a situation. -Initial pathology reports on Thomas' body
were also inconclusive. -The question is whether the death is suspicious or not,
in the era when solvent abuse was common, young lads found dead in an allotment, evidence of fire.
If you're not thinking dirty, you're not seeing what it may be. It's the initial assessment,
and if that misses what it's likely to be, then the whole investigation goes down the wrong route.
-And that's exactly what happened. Because of a lack of pathological evidence, the police had ruled out murder, but they were wrong.
Thomas Kelly had been strangled to death with his own bandana after bumping into
a local 22-year-old man named Steven Grieveson. ♪♪ -I think they probably knew each other or at least met,
perhaps at football. -Grieveson reportedly revealed his homosexuality to Thomas Kelly,
and it is assumed that he killed the 18-year-old to cover his secret. ♪♪ -He then decides to burn Kelly's body
in an effort to disguise what has gone on. It is merciless. It is without possible explanation.
Why would you set fire to the body of a boy unless within you there is some kind of lack of conscious?
It is a monstrous act. There's no two ways about it. -Detectives had questioned known troublemaker Grieveson
about Thomas Kelly's death, but they had to reason to arrest him. It was a grave mistake.
-Thomas Kelly was killed at the end of November. By early February, just literally a few weeks later,
he had abducted or persuaded another young man called David Hanson to go with him to a derelict building.
-On February 4, 1994, Grieveson strangled the life from 15-year-old David Hanson
before setting his body alight. Once again, he was questioned about the death, but released without charge.
-So now Grieveson's starting to be calculating. He starts to realize that he can actually get away with things
by getting rid of the evidence. By burning the victim, you get rid of all the circumstantial evidence
and all the evidence that he could have left on the body. -With another inconclusive report
from a different pathologist, detectives rule that David Hanson had not been murdered
despite the similarities between his and Thomas Kelly's death six weeks earlier.
-I remember speaking to one police contact on the case telling me that it didn't add up that it was murder,
and it didn't add up that it was solvents. I didn't get into the precise details of why that was,
but I remember him telling me that, as they say, the first one was just deemed to be a tragedy.
The second one was deemed to be a coincidence. And officers said to each other at the time,
"As long as we don't get a third one," and they did get a third one. ♪♪ -Just a few weeks later, the end of February '94,
Grieveson persuades another boy -- David Grieff, also 15 -- to go to another allotment.
Grieveson kills him, strangles him and does set fire to him again. ♪♪ Grieveson has now killed three young men
in the space of literally 3 months. -Steven Grieveson is escalating his offending,
and for somebody with psychopathic traits, it's not unusual for them to get bored easily,
and that applies to their offending as it does to their life in general. They've got a need for simulation.
They've got a need to up the ante and experience that kind of thrill again and again.
-I don't know. I look back on it, and I sometimes wonder if Grieveson had some kind of almost desire
to see how far he could push it without being caught. It's hard to say. It's speculation, but it seems...
strange use of the words, almost reckless from the killer's point of view to repeat a similar murder in a similar area for a third time.
-The police spoke to Steven Grieveson for a third time, and for a third time, they let him go without charge,
much to the frustration of the families of the three deceased teenagers. -Steven Grieveson was interviewed.
We didn't know this at the time 'cause the police were saying that it was drug abuse.
It was afterwards that we realized that he was arrested and interviewed at the police station,
only later to be let out and murder again. -Well, I think Steven Grieveson felt absolutely invincible.
He was picked up by the police, yet after each of these boys' deaths, but they didn't connect him
to the actually murders until much later. So it really did kind of shore up a sense in which he felt,
"I can do this again because the police have talked to me. "They clearly haven't joined up dots.
I'm getting away with this." So he feels absolutely invincible. -But less than a month after the death of David Grieff,
Grieveson was finally in police custody. He was arrested and charged with robbery
after forcing staff at a local fish-and-chip shop to empty the till. Although sentenced to 18 months in prison,
investigators still weren't considering charging Grieveson with murder because three reports from three different pathologists
had failed to linked the deaths. All of them were being treated as solvent-related.
-We didn't understand where the idea of drugs came from. There was no evidence on any of the boys to say
that they've taken anything. No matter what the families were saying and telling the police what these boys were like,
it felt like no one was listening. People were grabbing hold of a story that wasn't true,
and I think to drag three boys' names down, it was awful. It was just... They didn't deserve it.
They didn't deserve it, and they only had us to defend them, that they weren't here to defend themselves.
-Even at the time, you could look back and think that police should have looked on that
as being suspicious that they were apparently glue sniffers and the fires. They should have realized from day one there
was something not right. -But time was running out for Grieveson. Investigators believed the deaths were suspicious,
but so farm no one had been charged with murder. The families of the victims were far from satisfied.
-I think before the three families had met up and got together, we were all fighting from separate corners.
We wouldn't let anything lie. We were trying to get information from everywhere.
And I think when the families did come together, the police knew that we were a stronger force,
and we weren't going to back down. Didn't matter what, we knew that these boys were murdered.
-By the time of the third death, the families were starting to kick up a fuss, and the media were quite rightly paying attention.
One of my colleagues, Paul Watson, went down to see the families, and I remember him coming back quite vociferous
that there was something in what they were saying 'cause obviously there could be a cynical approach
that the families of glue sniffers are going to try and make it look like their sons
hadn't got involved in that kind of thing and that there was some more to it, but he came back very convinced.
I also went up to see the families, and I remember coming away thinking, "Yes, what they said."
There is something definitely in what they say that way too much coincidence, way too many things that were wrong.
-Months passed as the families and local press continue to pressure the police to change course.
-You got to look at the sheer weight of the pressure the families brought, the campaigning that they did
that they were convinced from day one there was something not right about it. -All the families of the victims were really close.
We needed each other. We stuck together, and that's what we needed. We were no one alone, but to have those people
who understood what you were going through around you made a difference. -Finally, the families got their wish.
A new detective, Dave Wilson, had taken over the case. He wanted to re-examine the evidence
gathered by three separate pathologists. -Some causes of death are simply more difficult
to identify than others, particularly if there's been postmortem changes in the bodies.
Pathologists are human. People make mistakes. What you need is a new person, a new way of thinking, like the officer David Wilson,
in this case who comes in and says, "What about thinking about it differently? What about these factors? Let's look at it again."
And that's the sort of thing that can often just kick-start an investigation into the right frame of mind.
-David Wilson was a different person altogether, a different detective. He wanted to find out what happened.
He thought could there be a sexual motive, which it would have been locked in straightaway
if they were girls who had been murdered. And he went down that route, and it really helped.
We felt like someone was listening to us, and someone was fighting with us rather than against us.
You could say David Wilson, he was hungry to get this person off the streets and get this person convicted.
He wasn't going to just lie back and leave it. He was looking at everything, everything again.
He looked in at the boys. He looked in all the evidence, and he wasn't going to give up until he got his man.
-Detective Wilson was certain that all three deaths were linked. Not only were the crime scenes extremely similar,
all three boys had attended the same school -- Monkwearmouth Comprehensive. In August 1994, Wilson asked for a second postmortem
to be carried out on all the bodies by a senior pathologist. -You don't just call a friend, say,
"Can you re-examine the body?" No, you have to get, you know, court orders and judges
and everybody involved, and this detective was relentless. He went after it, and he got the court order that was needed.
This was a detective that he knew that something was wrong. You know, when you read a case and you just --
Maybe it's a gut feeling or there's something there, you go, "Okay. This cannot be like this."
-On closer inspection, all three teenagers appeared to have died in the same way.
-So in Grieveson's case, the most important factor was that the ligature marks are then identified.
We're now moving from three similar but apparently discreet incidents all involving three young boys from the same school
to three potential homicides from the same school the same way. Now you're almost looking towards a serial killer.
-I think that the fact that Steven Grieveson killed his victims by strangulation
is very significant because it's one of the most personal forms of killing. You are watching the life drain out of the them.
He's probably feeling more in control at the time he's killing his victims than he's ever felt at any point in his life before.
So I think it's a very deliberate choice of method. -I think they were groomed, encouraged,
cajoled, or perhaps even threatened by Grieveson, and they paid the price with their lives.
♪♪ -I remember the day very well. I was on the Sun when Northumbria Police revealed that they were treating the deaths as murder.
And tragic as it was, the family would have seen that was a victory and that finally something was happening.
-Detective had found fingerprints and a footprint belonging to Grieveson in the derelict house where David Hanson was murdered.
They were from a burglary Grieveson had committed months before, but proved he had access to the property.
And by September 1994, Wilson had retrieved some conclusive evidence. Semen found in the stomach of the third victim,
15-year-old David Grieff, was a DNA match for Steven Grieveson. -If you burn the outside of the body,
then you can lose injuries if you lose the skin and the soft tissues beneath it.
There's going to be less and less that you can see, but it can be surprising what you can still identify,
particularly if the area is protected from the fire. You can still see maybe stab wounds.
You can see all sorts of things that many people who try to dispose of a body by fire think will be gone.
-Grieveson was already in prison for robbery after holding up a fish-and-chip shop.
-Steven Grieveson was a bully. He wasn't nice. He used to go around picking on lads and taking stuff off them.
He picked on teenage boys, old women, anybody that was smaller than him, I think.
He was a troublemaker, someone to keep away from. When Grieveson was arrested for the murder,
we weren't shocked at all 'cause it was what we were fighting for, for months. We knew it was him.
We knew that those boys had done nothing wrong. We knew that someone had done that to them.
-Grieveson's trial was set for January 1996. He was going to plead not guilty to the murders of Thomas Kelly,
David Hanson, and David Grieff. -I think Steven Grieveson maintained his innocence
for quite a while initially because he thought that he was going to get away with it
because he had come on to the police radar several times and had gone off it again,
and now he finds himself charged with these murders. I think he's just chancing it.
I think he's just pleading not guilty and saying, "I'm not responsible," because he thinks there is actually a chance
that he's going to get away with this. -He is a man who wishes to conceal the darkness in his soul
and will go to any lengths to do so. He absolutely refuses to accept that he could have played any part
in the deaths of these three innocent young men and fronts that lie without any possible flicker of doubt
throughout his 6-week trial. -The parents of the three murdered teenagers arriving at court,
where today they listen to details of how, according to the prosecution, their sons were killed.
-During the trial at Leeds Crown Court, Grieveson showed complete contempt for the families of his victims.
-I was 17, I think, at the time, and it was a hard thing to take in, not just for me, for all the families.
None of us were used to being in a court surroundings or anything like that. We didn't know what normally went on in court.
What made it worse was Grieveson sitting at the dock sticking his fingers up at us,
just goading us, pulling faces, laughing at us. It wasn't nice. -The evidence against Grieveson was compelling.
He had left prints at the house where David Hanson was murdered and his DNA on the body of David Grieff.
The jury took just 4 hours to find him guilty. When Steven Grieveson got convicted,
we all erupted, the public gallery, the family. Everyone had jumped up off their seat.
We didn't think that we were going to get that because of the lack of evidence on some of the boys,
and when he got convicted of Thomas first, we knew that he would get convicted of the other two.
-On February 28, 1996, Judge Mr. Justice Holland described Grieveson as plain evil as he handed out three life sentences
to the 25-year-old. He was sent to Full Sutton Prison in Yorkshire. -I mean, nothing is going to bring these poor lads back,
and the pain is going to be with the families forever, but at least in finding out what happened to their sons
and finding out that they weren't just glue sniffers who died in a burning building,
that they were innocent victims of a serial killer and the truth finally coming out
would hopefully alleviate some of the pain for the families. -In December 1997, Northumbria Police apologized
to the families of the three boys for the distress caused to them during the initial investigation.
-I think if the police had done a better job and looked into this properly, maybe listen more to the families
about what kind of boys they were, they would have took him off the streets a lot earlier
and maybe could have saved a lot of lives. -But the police weren't done with Steven Grieveson just yet.
Northumbria Police were convinced that he was also responsible for a death that preceded all of his other victims --
the murder of Simon Martin in May 1990. The body of the 14-year-old schoolboy had been found half-naked in a derelict house.
-Grieveson clearly decided that he didn't want this little boy to tell anyone what had happened,
and so he decided that he would silence him, and he hit Simon Martin with some of the rubble
in the house, persistently around the head. Later, he was to claim, "I just flipped."
No, Grieveson didn't just flip. He decided that he didn't want anyone to know what had happened,
and the easiest way of doing that was to kill the boy because he couldn't tell anyone.
Therefore, this was a little boy who was being killed to keep him quiet. -However, the murder didn't match Grieveson's usual M.O.
-Simon Martin was not strangled to death by Grieveson, nor was he set on fire. But at the time of Simon's killing in 1990
when Grieveson was only 19 and a half, he hadn't yet refined the method that he wanted to use to kill.
He was still working out in his own mind, I suspect, what gave him the most satisfaction.
Martin was, if you like, a prototype. Kelly, Hanson, and Grieff were the finished article.
-Simon's murder predated the others by 3 years. -I think the thing that I'd say with this case
is that we have quite a significant gap between 1990 and 1993. I'd be really interested to know what Steven Grieveson
was doing during that time period because often when somebody commits a murder and enjoys committing a murder,
they often don't wait years until they commit another one. So that gap is quite a problem for me.
-Just as before, Detective Dave Wilson had re-examined Simon's case and discovered some DNA belonging to Grieveson
at the scene of the murder. In November 2000, he was arrested in his cell at Full Sutton Prison and questioned by detectives.
-There's no doubt that he had attacked and killed Simon Martin. Grieveson denies any knowledge of it,
flatly refuses to say anything. -Without a confession, the police decided they couldn't
charge Grieveson with Simon's murder. -Serial killers keep secrets because it gives them power,
and it also gives them power to torment the families of their victims. Simon Martin's father, who had been in the army,
launched a great appeal to find his missing son. These were...real, ordinary, decent people
whom Grieveson took inordinate pleasure in tormenting. -But over a decade later, out of the blue,
Grieveson finally confessed. In a series of interviews with detectives in February 2013,
he admitted that he was responsible for Simon Martin's death, but he still denied murdering the 14-year-old schoolboy.
-When we find out that Grieveson had admitted to killing Simon Martin, none of us were surprised.
We always knew, and we always wanted justice for Simon as well as ourselves. -So Steven Grieveson said that he was haunted about Simon.
This is something that had troubled him during his time in prison, and all of this apparently from a man with no conscience,
with little empathy for other people, somebody with significant psychopathic traits.
I'd be quite cautious about this statement because it suggests to us, doesn't it, that he had some empathy,
that he has some remorse, that he's feeling bad. But this is somebody who's been in prison
for a significant amount of time. He's been learning about other people's emotions
while he's been in prison. He's been learning what other people want to hear, what they need to hear, and also the kind of things
that you need to say to make your own situation better. So I'd be cautious about attaching any real meaning to that.
-On the 14th of October 2013, at New Castle Crown Court, Grieveson was back in the dock, charged with a fourth murder
that had taken place 23 years beforehand. ♪♪ -When the Simon Martin trial came up,
we all went to court every day, the same as we did the first time, stuck together at the three families or the four families,
which it had become. It was just as hard as the first trial. We learned a lot of stuff about our boys
that we got told wrongly at the beginning. There was lots of stuff that we didn't know came out.
So it was just very hard. It was difficult. -The jury did not believe that Simon's death was an accident,
and on October 24, 2013, Grieveson was found guilty of murder. -It was good news. It was good news for Sunderland.
It was good news for the family that this unsolved murder could finally be laid to rest,
and that would ease some of the pain not only for the family of Simon Martin but also for the family of the boy who was wrongly arrested
and wrongly charged with the killing. -It was revealed during the second trial that Grieveson had written to all three families
of his initial victims asking for forgiveness. In extracts from a letter to the family of Thomas Kelly,
he wrote, "I know you think I am evil, horrible. "I should never have done what I did.
"I never ever intended to take Thomas away from you. "I am sorry I destroyed your son's life, your family's life.
"I wish I could turn the clock back. "I hope one day you will find it in both of your hearts
to forgive me." -Those letters meant nothing to me, nothing at all. And I think he wrote them to wind us up.
It was his way of getting to us again. -There's several levels of psychopath. The top level is when you have zero, zero emotions.
There's other levels that you will have certain emotions but not other emotions towards people.
But in his case, one thing I have seen in other psychopaths and people who have been to prison is that
they like the limelight, and once the limelight starts to die down, they will find something else to bring the limelight.
So it could have been that that's the reason why he wrote the letters. -In respective of his motive
for writing the letters of forgiveness, nothing will bring back the four boys who Grieveson heartlessly murdered.
-I think about Thomas every day, many times in that day. He's always on me mind and he's always there.
He's probably the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing I think about when I go to sleep.
It doesn't just go away. It doesn't. It's hard. -The man who brought Grieveson to justice,
Detective Superintendent Dave Wilson, passed away in 2011. He was 64 years old. The shadow of the Sunderland Strangler
still looms over the city today, a man who killed young boys just to keep them quiet.
-Many people struggle with their sexuality, but very few of them are going to go on and harm other people,
let alone kill them. I think in the case of Steven Grieveson, what we've got is a unique toxic combination of factors.
We've got a disruptive childhood. We've got a lack of acceptance within a community.
So we've got all of these things coming together to almost create the perfect storms.
That's a horrible way of describing it, but that's what we have in this case. -I look back on it now, and I thank God
that the families did do what they did and that the media and the journalists at the time did what they did
and really pushed for the truth to come out. -We will never forgive Steven Grieveson.
Never forgive him. He said it was too much, and to be honest, if I was to find out he died in prison tomorrow,
wouldn't bother us one bit. -Grieveson was a troubled man with a troubled childhood,
but this can be no excuse for callously taking the life of four young boys. His capture was all down to the passion and hard work
of a detective spurred on by the victims' families. Together, they finally brought about the downfall
of Steven Grieveson, one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

The Sunderland Strangler, Steven Grieveson, killed four teenage boys in the early 90s.

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

The episode details the murders by Steven Grieveson, the Sunderland Strangler, and the families' fight for justice.

Key points

The Sunderland Strangler Revealed. Steven Grieveson, dubbed the Sunderland Strangler, was a sadistic serial killer responsible for multiple deaths.
A Gruesome Discovery. The body of Thomas Kelly was found burned, leading to initial misjudgments by police.
Families Unite for Justice. The families of the victims band together to pressure police for justice after multiple deaths.
Detective Wilson's Relentless Pursuit. Detective Wilson's determination led to a breakthrough in the investigation of the murders.
Grieveson's Conviction. After a long battle, Grieveson was convicted of the murders, bringing relief to the families.
Grieveson's Confession. Years later, Grieveson confessed to the murder of Simon Martin, shocking the community.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This killer's story begins over 45 years ago.

Setting the stage for the background of Steven Grieveson.

3:41WatchJul 20, 2021

Tension

80/ 100High tension

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