World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 17 - Trevor Hardy - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-July 1975, Manchester, England. A young woman's body is found buried in rubble,
her face shattered beyond recognition. 18-year-old Wanda Skala's injuries shocked even the most experienced detectives.
-I probably haven't seen injuries to that extent on anybody in my total service.
-Her killer, later dubbed "The Beast of Manchester," sparked fear across the city.
-His mother was afraid of him. His father was afraid of him. Most of the community was afraid of him.
This is a complete sociopath who's out of control. -This beast was 30-year-old Trevor Hardy.
He got kicks from killing, then return to mutilate his victims over and over again.
-There was no other word for that than evil. It's depravity at the highest possible level.
-He slaughtered three teenage girls for his own gratification and was one of the U.K.'s longest-serving prisoners
for his depraved crimes. For that reason, Trevor Hardy became known as one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Manchester. Between 1974 and 1976, Trevor Hardy terrorized the city's northern suburbs.
Not only did he stalk the streets as a prolific and violent housebreaker, he brutally killed three teenage girls
in the prime of their lives. -He doesn't seem affected by the fact that he's just taken somebody else's life.
He just goes about his business as usual. -The community lived in fear of the volatile and unpredictable Hardy.
-Hardy was branded "The Beast of Manchester," and that's because of the ferocity of his attacks.
And the impact on the local community was immense. These were these young women out having fun with their friends,
with their boyfriends. One day they're here. One day they're not. These women were mercilessly plucked off the streets.
-Ian Kirkpatrick was a young detective working for Greater Manchester Police in the early '70s.
He investigated some of Hardy's brutal killings. -I feel he was an extremely dangerous human being.
He was an animal, very cruel, manipulative man. He was notorious, violent. He was not one to be liked, not one to be trusted.
-People didn't feel safe in their own homes. This is a situation of a person who fits almost a stereotype of a sociopath.
He wants everything that he wants now. He's willing to use any level of violence
possible in order to get what he wants now, and he has no remorse or concern about the consequences
of what he does to get what he wants. -He was simply a monster. He was the most awful, terrifying man to deal with.
-This killer's story began towards the end of the second world war. Trevor Joseph Hardy was born on the 11th of June, 1945,
in the working-class suburb of Newton Heath, North Manchester. It was the beginning of a troubled childhood for Trevor.
-Hardy's father was quite strict. He has some quite rigid rules around morality and that kind of thing.
And if you look at Hardy's behavior, he starts misbehaving quite early on. He starts rebelling against those rules,
against those boundaries. -It is in that background -- poverty. He got a reputation.
He was -- although he was short, he was nevertheless afraid of no one and would fight anyone.
-At the age of just 8, young Hardy first started getting into trouble at school.
His teachers wrote damning reports to his mother about him bullying his fellow classmates.
Even at home, Hardy was an unruly child. He often escaped the family house to roam the streets.
-So, he's bullying. He's intimidating other children. He's being violent towards others,
so right from the outset, from a really early age, he is breaking the rules. So here was somebody who was pretty feral, to be honest.
-This was a kid who, from the earliest moments, was showing signs of a complete lack of connection
with other human beings and a complete lack of connection with the concept of social right and social wrong.
-Hardy's mother believed she had an explanation for her son's violence and aggression.
In his early years, he suffered a life-changing blow to the head. -A sliver of bone was broken off from his skull
and moved nearer to the brain itself. And she suggested, and other people have suggested over the years,
that that could have had an impact on his violence and his violent temper. -His family certainly thought that when that sliver of bone
from his skull had pressed on his brain, it altered his behavior. It made him more aggressive.
Certainly damage to the brain can alter behavior, often quite radically. -By his teens, wild child Trevor Hardy
was racking up an extensive criminal record. At the age of 15, he was arrested for theft and burglary
and convicted for a string of more than 20 offenses. The judge who presided over his case ruled that,
despite his age, he should receive a 12-month jail term in a bid to protect the public.
-He was the youngest person ever to be sent to prison. He was estranged when he was at 15.
That is a kind of unruly, uncontrollable young man he was. Violent man. Worrying, really that he could get through the system
and up it like he did. -Well, it's no question that Hardy as a young man terrorized his local neighborhood
by simply the weight of burglaries that were going on, and they all knew it was him.
So when he went into jail, they could open their doors again because he was just a prolific burglar,
and everybody knew who he was. -But Hardy, the teenaged tearaway and housebreaker,
would soon tread a more sinister path of crime. -One of the characteristics of many serial killers
is they begin by a petty crime, and it escalates. I think he was set on murder from an early age.
-After spells in juvenile-detention centers, approved schools and then prison, Trevor Hardy returned home to North Manchester.
His passion for extreme violence was to be fueled by a love of alcohol. As a regular in local pubs and working-men's clubs,
he was feared for his capacity to drink and fight. -The quantity of alcohol that Hardy drank
is only consistent with alcoholism. -Boy, oh, boy, did Trevor Hardy have an appetite for alcohol.
And at one point, his younger brother, Colin, tried to suggest that it was only when he drank too much that his brain expanded
to hit the sliver in his skull, which made him aggressive. -He was not a large person,
and yet, he would get in a fight with somebody who was manifestly stronger and larger than him.
And of course, his capacity to win those fights arose from one simple fact. He was a beast.
-Hardy's behavior had been escalating for quite some time. He was seen as a bit of a tough character,
and often, when we see men in these circumstances, these situations, it's what we call honor contest violence.
So any kind of slight, any kind of insult will result in a violent confrontation.
-In 1972, a volatile 26-year-old Trevor Hardy got into an argument with his friend,
Stanley O'Brien, over who would buy the next round of drinks. Onlookers were shocked to see what he did next.
-And he'd actually ended up attacking a friend of his with a pickaxe, so here's somebody
who is using violence as a way to get control, as a way to get even, as a way to maintain his honor
and a sense of respect from other people. -Hardy hammered O'Brien over the head repeatedly.
Well, not exactly one-sided, but pretty nearly. O'Brien never worked again. Well, if there was anything that could be said
to have started Hardy's descent into a serial killer, it was probably that. -On February 7, 1972, Trevor Hardy was convicted
and sent down for five years for the brutal pickaxe attack. But instead of mending his ways,
it whetted his appetite for killing. -He said he sat in his prison cell, and all he wanted to do was kill the man
who he'd received the conviction for. Unfortunately, and to his annoyance, the victim of his attack with the pickaxe died
before he was released. -Soon, the Beast of Manchester would be released on bail
and out once again onto the streets. 18th of November, 1974. An angry and vengeful 29-year-old Trevor Hardy
was released on parole from a 5-year jail sentence. This followed a frenzied attack with a pickaxe
on his so-called friend, Stanley O'Brien. Hardy wanted revenge, as he'd ended up doing time for it.
-O'Brien, he thought, had stiffed him one way or another, and he should have finished the job.
You can almost see Hardy thinking to himself, "I should have killed him. I should have killed him."
-While in jail, he also became increasingly obsessed with a girl he and O'Brien knew, 14-year-old Beverley Driver.
He'd been hoping that when he was released, he could take their relationship further.
-While he's in jail, she makes the mistake, or perhaps she does the right thing, and writes to him saying,
"I don't want anything more to do with you. I don't want to be with anyone like you."
Now he's fixated on taking his revenge on her as well as Stanley O'Brien. -On the train home to Manchester
from prison on the Isle of Wight, Hardy was muttering two names over and over again
to himself -- O'Brien and Beverley. -He formulates a plan to kill her so intense
that all he can think about on the train home from prison is killing her. -Back on his home turf of Manchester, Hardy finds out
that he won't be able to confront O'Brien. -He discovers that O'Brien has died of his injuries.
I would have thought that would have brought a smile to Hardy's face, a positive glow.
What about Beverley? Well, he goes 'round to her house and throws an axe through the window.
-With Beverley not at home, Hardy then prowled the streets, looking for his teenaged target.
-He then went and decide to trace and kill this girl. He says he went out on New Year's Eve.
He took a large knife. Whilst walking, he saw a young girl. -Now, she's getting out of the car,
and she's in good spirits. She's chatting to the driver, and she's making her way towards her destination.
-Half-drunk and armed with his knife, Hardy grabbed his victim, whom he believed was the girl who spurned him.
-And at that point, Hardy cuts her throat effectively and then proceeds to attack her, and he killed her.
She never arrived at the party, and her parents reported her missing. Agony for them.
Disappears into thin air walking through Manchester. -Even more tragically, she wasn't even his intended target, Beverley Driver.
Hardy's first killing was, in fact, a local Rose Queen, Janet Lesley Stewart. Her friends called her Lesley.
Hardy had mistaken this innocent 15-year-old for the girl who'd rejected him. Police at the time were mystified
by Lesley's disappearance. -She had no problems at home. There was nothing to suggest that she was
any way mentally disturbed or anything along those lines. It was just a nice, young lady
who disappeared off the face of the Earth. -Despite desperate pleas from Lesley's parents
for information, inquiries hit a dead end. -She went missing for months, and I know that the divisional police,
detectives dealt with it as a murder. She wasn't expected to be found alive, and the extensive inquiries went on.
I can remember the posters being in shop windows. The press covered it to no avail.
-Only Hardy knew his dark secret. He'd had his first taste of murder, and he seemed to relish in it.
He buried Lesley's body in a shallow grave at a nearby clay pit. Then, over the next few months,
he embarked on a grotesque ritual. -Well, essentially, he returns to the body after the murder.
He decapitates the body, throws the head, I believe, in a lake, mutilates the body.
Contrary to the people who examined it at the time, it's not my sense that he got sexual pleasure out of this.
I think he was destroying evidence. -He pulled his victim apart, limb by limb. The sadistic Trevor Hardy had descended
into new depths of depravity. -Decomposition is physically unpleasant. The body feels damaged.
It smells appalling. It's something that, as a pathologist, we have to deal with.
But to choose to go back to a body like that and immerse yourself in that smell and that feel
and then further mutilate it is such a perverse decision as to show something about the mind of the person who does it.
-But the depravity didn't stop there. By now, Hardy had found new love with a woman 10 years his senior -- Sheilagh Farrow.
He adorned her with trophies he took from his victim's decomposed corpse. -Trevor Hardy took some of his victim's jewelry
and gave it to his girlfriend. This is a behavior that we quite often seen in serial killers
because this is something that is going to be reminding them of their crimes. He hasn't just killed this young woman.
He owns her. He possesses her. He can do with her what he wants. -Now Hardy had enjoyed his first blood, he wanted more.
His time would come again seven months after his first killing. 20th of July, 1975, 18-year-old Wanda Skala
was making the short walk back to her house in Moston after finishing her evening shift
as a barmaid in the local Lightbowne Hotel. Hardy sprung his surprise attack barely a mile from Wanda's home,
but his method was different from his first victim. -This time, it wasn't a knife.
This time, Hardy hit her, I suspect, from behind, with a brick. -She'd been hit with a brick. It was awful.
Somebody took pleasure in inflicting that kind of -- totally unnecessary, really.
Hardy said that it was a robbery, but no. That was more than a robbery. It was a horrendous, brutal attack on a young female.
-After strangling Wanda, Hardy subjected his victim to yet more gratuitous violence.
-He began to mutilate her body. In particular, he bit off her right nipple before he dragged her onto a building site.
-Biting is often another act of cruelty. It's not related to the death. I think it suggests a degree of rage.
It's purely orientated towards the sexual aspects of the body. And to actually bite someone's nipple off,
the amount of force you have to put on your teeth is incredible. This is a huge amount of violence for violence sake.
-Hardy had now joined the ranks of other sadistic killers throughout history, including Neville Heath --
a 1940s murderer he'd read about in prison. He, too, had bitten off the nipples of his victims.
Police were alerted early next morning to Wanda's body, half-buried on the building site.
They were baffled by the depraved nature of her injuries. -We knew that she had had her right nipple bitten off,
which was, most certainly, an unusual form of injury for any kind of murder. -He hadn't just done that.
He hadn't just hit her once with a brick and strangled her, 'cause he'd also then proceeded to absolutely
to destroy her face, to crush it, so that her jaw was dropping off. She was utterly destroyed.
-Police felt this was the work of a monster. Not only had she been sexually assaulted,
the frenzied blows to Wanda's head had shattered her skull. Even experienced murder detectives were shocked
by the brutal nature of her injuries. -Horrific head injuries on Wanda Skala. She was -- her private parts had been kicked.
She had horrendous injuries. I've seen photographs. Just beyond belief, really. -The community was shocked and horrified
by Wanda's brutal death. Many young women were now living in fear. In the days that followed, the police ran appeals in the press
for information to help catch the killer. Details of the crime scene were reported in newspapers.
Wanda's handbag had been taken. Police revealed that one of her shoes was missing,
believed stolen by her murderer. Hardy began to enjoy his newfound status as a killer
and decided to get involved in the investigation in his own sick way. -Hardy actually takes one of Wanda Skala's shoes back
to the crime scene. Now, he's having fun here. He's playing with the police. And you often find this with individuals
who have psychopathic traits and behaviors. They like messing with people. -This is play. This is taunting the police.
This is -- this is saying to the police, "I'm in control of this situation. You'll get and see what I choose that you will see."
Bizarre. -As Wanda's killing became the talk of the town, her killer, Trevor Hardy,
found it hard to keep his sordid secret to himself. -At this point, Hardy and his brother, Colin,
go for a drink together. Shortly after the body's been discovered, and there's a lot of -- it's big news in Manchester.
A lot of people talking about it in the pub. A few drinks are had, and Hardy makes the mistake
of saying to his brother, Colin, "I did it." More vanity, you know, as if, "I could do what I like.
I can get away with it, no trouble." -And as calmly as telling him he had a bunion on his foot,
he says he killed this woman. -Mm, well. Now, Colin is clearly taken aback by this.
-Shocked by his wild brother's revelation, Colin made his excuses and walked home.
Trevor made sure he walked with him. -I don't think this was so much a confession.
It was more of a boast. He was saying, "Hey, look at me. Look what I can do." And I think he -- he got a little bit beyond himself.
He went a little bit too far in his showing off and realizes, "Wow, my brother knows about this,
so I need to do some damage limitation here." -When they arrived at Colin's door,
Hardy decides he has no choice but to take immediate action. -He absolutely batters his brother, Colin,
in the wake of the confession. He batters him relentlessly and then leaves him, prostrate on the floor.
Goes out for two minutes, comes back, and tells his girlfriend to cook him baked beans.
-After calmly eating his beans, Trevor Hardy finally left. In shock, Colin's girlfriend tended to his injuries.
Next morning, Colin went straight to the police. -He reported the assault and reported that his brother had confessed.
That should have triggered, given the gravity of the crimes that he'd committed, an investigation
that most certainly would have stopped him. -Following the violent assault on his brother
and the reported confession, Trevor Hardy was finally arrested. Now safely under lock and key,
Colin was certain his monster brother could do no more harm. Three months after the brutal killing
of 18-year-old Wanda Skala, serial killer Trevor Hardy was finally in custody on suspicion of murder
and assault on his brother, Colin. Colin Hardy was relieved that his dangerous brother
was safely off the streets, but Trevor had cunning plans to stay ahead of the police.
Forensics had taken a swab of the killer's saliva on Wanda's body. This was found near the right nipple,
which had been savagely bitten off. Hardy was ordered to provide a sample of his saliva for comparison.
He went to extreme lengths to eliminate himself from becoming prime suspect. -It is rumored that whilst waiting to give
the sample of saliva, he ate half a raw onion, which he had been told brought down the enzymes in the saliva
to prevent it being traced. -Despite this attempt to foil the scientists, it was later proven Hardy's saliva sample did,
indeed, match the killer's blood group. But Hardy had another ploy to throw the police off the scent.
-What Hardy does next is pretty shocking. He's well aware that there is going to be
some evidence in this case. He's bitten off the nipple of his victim, and there is a bite mark on her breast,
which the police are able to match up if they have a forensic odontologist involved.
-With plans afoot for police to take a dental impression of Hardy's teeth, the cunning killer managed to get a nail file
smuggled into his cell. He began to file his teeth down in order to change his bite imprint.
-To actually file your own teeth is both painful and, in many ways, incredibly foolish.
It's simply making your mouth more noticeable. It's making the fact that your teeth are abnormal a characteristic.
-After taking an imprint of Hardy's teeth, experts could not make a conclusive match
when comparing Hardy's dental impression and the victim's bite mark. Police believed they did not have
enough evidence for a murder charge. Once again, Hardy had evaded justice. The only charges he now faced were for the assault
on brother Colin. -Trevor went to court and was given a suspended prison sentence.
Albeit, at that stage, the saliva test had proved that his blood group was the same as the one on Wanda Skala.
The fact that, when interviewed regarding the Skala murder, Trevor had said he'd been at home,
and his girlfriend, Sheilagh Farrow, corroborated his story and gave him a complete alibi.
-So now Hardy has an alibi, and all you really have is Colin's confession or reported confession that Hardy made "while he was drunk."
-Well, what makes this an especially sad story is the police essentially took his confession as insufficient.
-To Colin's horror, Hardy was released from custody, and the Beast of Manchester was, once again,
free to rove the streets. Five months after battering his younger brother, Trevor's addiction to violence would rear its head again.
On the 5th of March, 1976, Hardy accosted a 21-year-old woman in a pub toilet. -He tried his hand with her. He put his arm between her legs.
She resisted, and then he put his arms around her throat and began to throttle her.
-He grabs her around the throat so viciously that she bites part of her tongue off.
But he's clearly intent on killing her but is disturbed and runs off, flees. -Police now had an accurate description of the attacker
from fellow pubgoers and wanted posters were circulated. Although they were trying to establish his identity,
it seemed the net was now closing in on Hardy. But not in time for 17-year-old Sharon Mosoph.
On the 9th of March, 1976, she was walking home after an office party. -She'd asked her mum and dad, "Which night bus should
I get from Manchester to nearby?" They said, you get the 98. So she gets off the 98 and encounters Hardy.
-She's walking past her workplace, Marlborough Mill, when she notices Hardy trying to break in,
and he has a screwdriver on him. And he turns around and attacks Sharon with this screwdriver.
-After stabbing 17-year-old Sharon, Hardy then strangled her with her own tights.
-It's heartbreaking. It's absolutely tragic. An entirely innocent young woman walking home from a works party
comes across a monster in Manchester who kills her, takes her clothes, and then dumps her in the Rochdale Canal.
-It's brutal. Again, he bites off a nipple. It seems to be done on impulse. It's hard to believe that anyone would perpetrate a crime
like this who doesn't at their core hate women. There are just too many women victims
to conclude anything else. But what we don't know is we don't know why he would hate women.
-Hardy raced home from the murder scene to his lover, Sheilagh Farrow, and persuaded her to cover for him once again.
-He then went home to his girlfriend, and it is said that his clothing was wet, and that she actually dried them by ironing the jeans.
Subsequently, when the iron was examined, there was algae from the -- same as that in the canal found on the iron.
-I think he has somebody who is quite dependent upon him. He has somebody whose identity he's probably chipped away at
until she feels absolutely worthless, so he's able to manipulate her in this way
because she's useful to him. -Concerned about another bite mark that could be used in evidence against him,
Hardy went back to the Rochdale Canal a second time. He dived into its icy waters,
then scratched over Sharon's bite mark 64 times, using a rivet from his jacket to obliterate all proof of his guilt.
-So, here's an offender that is learning, that's learning the things that he needs to do to cover up
after his crimes, and he's not appalled. He's not disgusted by the mutilation of a dead body.
This is a very, very dangerous man. -Hardy then went on the run and lay low, sleeping rough.
When Sharon's body was found next morning by a passerby, police opened a murder inquiry.
-Sharon was found in the canal completely naked, but a ligature around her neck of her own tights.
Her clothing had been placed in her topcoat and folded and thrown into the canal.
The water was at a freezing point. The body was frozen, hard, at least extremely cold,
and had to be recovered by the diving team. So I think he must have been rather chilled
by the time he dived in there to mutilate the wounds he's caused to Sharon's breast.
-Sharon's funeral was held on the 14th of April, 1976. Detectives investigating her murder had begun to make links
between her death and Hardy's other victims. The discovery that his victim had her nipple bitten off,
just like the previous killing, meant Hardy was now becoming a prime suspect. To add to that, he'd also now been identified
as the man wanted in connection with the violent sex attack in the pub. -Well, now Manchester police have a much clearer idea
of what's going on. Now this puts Hardy firmly in the frame for the murder, and Hardy disappears.
He takes off, realizing that this is gonna be the police's view. -With Hardy now on the run, police made desperate efforts
to track him down, but he had vanished. Weeks later, though, there was a breakthrough in the hunt for Hardy.
Detectives had a tipoff that his girlfriend, Sheilagh Farrow, was signing on for welfare benefits at a job center
near Hardy's home. By tracing his lover, police hoped she'd lead them to the killer.
-Sheilagh Farrow signed on at the social at Failsworth. I think it was Thursday.
After we learned -- it was actually the following day she was signed on, so a rather rushed surveillance operation was put together.
And we phoned and traced Sheilagh to the place. -Hoping to follow her to Hardy, police kept a close watch
on Sheilagh and tracked her every move. -We then followed her to Stockport. And she went into a house on Wellington Road.
And we surrounded it. -Believing they'd finally found his hiding place, it was now or never for Ian Kirkpatrick
and his team of detectives. Trevor Hardy had brutally killed three young woman, and he was wanted for the violent attack on another.
Police had to make their move and fast before the Beast of Manchester broke loose once again.
With no time to lose, police entered the building. They had a surprising helping hand from the woman
who'd been protecting him. -Sheilagh Farrow -- when questioned, "Have you seen Trevor?"
She's saying, "No, he's not here." But she was, in fact, pointing to the -- the hole in the roof, basically, the loft,
and she kept saying, "No, he's not here," but pointing upwards at the loft. And we went up, and the loft was opened, and up there was Trevor.
-As police blocked the attic, he had nowhere left to run. Trevor Hardy was finally once again within their grasp.
-That is probably the highlight of my career was we looked at the trap door, and somebody shouted,
"Come down, Trevor," and he said, "I'll come down if you don't hit me." For somebody who was so violent towards females, beyond belief.
-With Hardy safely back in jail, his lover seemed happy to tell all. -Hardy's story begins to unravel when Sheilagh Farrow,
his girlfriend, tells the police that actually, he wasn't in bed with her when Wanda was killed,
nor could she give him an alibi for the night that Sharon Mosoph was murdered, the girl that's just been killed.
So effectively, Hardy now, he's clearly looking at a very long period of imprisonment.
-Trevor Hardy was charged for the murders of Wanda Skala and Sharon Mosoph, though he denied any involvement.
But in August 1976, whilst on remand in Strangeways Prison, he dropped a bombshell.
He confessed to the killings. Hardy also had another surprise up his sleeve. He admitted to murdering another girl two years earlier.
15-year-old Janet Lesley Stewart had been an unsolved missing person case that police had never been able to crack.
-He told the officer where she was buried, which resulted in the skeleton or what was left of the skeleton being found.
-And Lesley's body, of course, is in parts. Her head in the lake, feet one place,
feet another, hands another. Astonished, the police realize that they really do have a beast on their hands,
which leads the local paper to dub him the Beast of Manchester. -Detectives were puzzled
at Hardy's additional murder confession. -He's already got two murder charges that he's facing.
Why add a third one? Well, to be perfectly honest, he's getting bored. He's been inside prison for some time now.
He's missing having control, having power over people. He's missing pulling people's strings,
and he wants a bit of excitement in his life, and it really is as simple as that.
-Trevor Hardy finally faced justice on the 20th of April, 1977, at Manchester Crown Court.
In a packed courtroom filled with victims' families, police, and the press, he was up on three charges of murder for the killing
of Janet Lesley Stewart, Wanda Skala, and Sharon Mosoph. Even though he had previously confessed,
a manipulative Trevor Hardy taunted the authorities once again. -Trevor Hardy pleads not guilty,
and this is because he wants to have people running around. He wants to see people inconvenienced.
He wants to be the puppet master, pulling everybody's strings. -Five days into his long-awaited trial,
Hardy had more surprises in store. He decided to change his plea. -He was pleading guilty to manslaughter on the grounds
that he was insane. He then sacked his counsel and said he would do his own defense.
-A so-called "friend of the court" was appointed to advise Hardy on the finer points of law.
-There are a few cases of serial murder where the defendant has sacked their legal team
and decided to defend themselves, and I think that this shows the utter arrogance of these individuals.
That actually, my legal team is not good enough for me. Move over, everybody, and let me get on with this.
It's commonly said that those who represent themselves have a fool for a client,
and that is very true in the case of Trevor Hardy. -Despite his pleas of insanity,
the evidence from three different psychiatrists refuse to back it up. They concluded that even though he had psychopathic tendencies,
Trevor Hardy was just plain evil. -This was a case that, I think, many people struggled to make sense of.
Because if you look at some of his offending behavior, biting off the nipples of his victims,
revisiting their dead bodies, surely, people thought at the time, this could only be the work of a madman.
But he wasn't mad. -With his insanity pleas rejected, time had run out for Trevor Hardy.
On the 2nd of May, 1977, after 70 minutes of deliberations, the jury of six women and six men reached a verdict
at Manchester Crown Court. They found him guilty on three counts of murder. He was given three life sentences
and five years for the attack on the young woman in the pub. For the relatives of victims
such as Lesley Stewart's mother, Margaret, it was some relief for the grief Hardy had wreaked on them.
-I think there was a sense of relief, definitely around Failsworth, Newton Heath areas.
I am sure a lot of the population suspected Trevor. He was notorious, violent. -Despite the depravity and extreme violence of his crimes,
Hardy became known as the "forgotten serial killer." He was overshadowed by the likes of Peter Sutcliffe,
the Yorkshire Ripper, who grabbed the media spotlight around the same time. -Part of the reason why Trevor's case is not more memorable
to a lot of people is because the number of actual murder victims compared to other serial killers is relatively small.
So, in the statistics book, he doesn't look as evil as he really was. -But the barbaric nature of his killings still deemed him wicked
in the eyes of the authorities. When Hardy tried to appeal his sentence after 30 years behind bars,
the judges ruled there could only be one sentence -- a whole life term. -That was exactly what it was to prove
because in September 2012, Hardy had a heart attack in prison in Wakefield and died two days later.
He was 67. For the last 15 years of his life in prison, he did not receive one single visitor.
Everyone had realized just what a beast he was. His brother, his former girlfriend,
and certainly everyone else. -After becoming one of Britain's longest-serving prisoners in history,
no one mourned the death of the Beast of Manchester. In fact, some of the local community and victims' families
even celebrated his passing. -I think he shattered that innocence of the early 1970s.
These were the years where -- where women did feel safe out on the street. Stranger danger really wasn't a thing,
and I think this was the beginning of that starting to crumble apart. -He preyed on the young.
He preyed on those who couldn't fight back very easily. And his acts were calculated.
He deliberately mutilated bodies after death for his own gratification. -There was something about his eyes, I would say,
he was definitely different, definitely evil-looking. To pluck a young girl off the street who he didn't know,
to kill her, bury her, say it was a mistake, and then dismember a body? That is just one evil person.
-Hardy brutally slayed and mutilated three young women with their whole lives ahead of them,
and those who knew him suspect there could be more. He reigned terror on the streets of Manchester,
attacking anyone who crossed his path, including a girl of just 15 who he barbarically dismembered.
And that makes Trevor Hardy one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

30-year-old Trevor Hardy, known as The Beast of Manchester, killed three teenage girls in a series of brutal attacks in the mid to late 1970s and was one of Britain’s longest-serving prisoners.

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

Brief Summary

Trevor Hardy, the Beast of Manchester, murdered three teenage girls in the 1970s, instilling fear in the community with his brutal acts.

Key points

The Beast of Manchester. Trevor Hardy, known as 'The Beast of Manchester,' terrorized the city with brutal killings.
A Troubled Childhood. Trevor Hardy's violent tendencies began in childhood, influenced by a strict upbringing.
First Taste of Murder. Hardy's first murder was a tragic mistake, killing an innocent girl instead of his target.
Confession and Assault. After confessing to his brother, Hardy violently attacked him to cover up his crime.
Cunning Plans. Hardy attempted to evade capture by altering his saliva and filing his teeth.
The Beast of Manchester. Trevor Hardy, a notorious serial killer, evaded justice multiple times before being caught.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He was not one to be liked, not one to be trusted.

Describing Hardy's reputation.

3:03WatchAug 3, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

More from True Crime Files

Solve the Crime

Read a real case one clue at a time, then see how your call held up against the investigators.