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Stephen Griffiths: Mike Tindall And Police Fail And Prostitutes Don’t Matter

by | 22nd, December 2010

STEPHEN Griffiths: The so-called Crossbow Cannibal has been jailed for life. He will die in jail. The papers round-up the story of a man who murdered three women.

The story begins in June 2009. Susan Rushworth goes missing. She works as prostitute. She has epilepsy. She is addicted to heroin. Police say she is “high-risk”. High risk of what? Is she high risk of committing a crime? The police are not social workers – they are thief takers.

The Story:

On April 28, Shelley Armitage, was reported missing. she worked in Bradford’s red light area. She was a prostitute. She had not been seen since April 26.

On May 22, caretaker Peter Gee, the caretaker at the Holmfield Court flats in Bradford, where Griffiths lives at number 33, sees the killer firing a crossbow bolt into Suzanne Blamires’ head. She has been reported missing. She also worked as a prostitute. Griffiths raises a finger to the camera.

Says Detective Chief Superintendent Andy Brennan:

“I think we would have been knocking on Griffiths’s door. but he wasn’t one of the first people we approached… There was no intelligence linking Griffiths to sex workers but, eventually, I think we would have found him a long way into our inquiry because of his previous conviction.”

Yeah, eventually. The Indy tells us:

The former public school boy even told one probation officer that his murder career would begin “in his early 30s”.

Here’s what the Express says about the killer who killed on camera:

CRAZED Stephen Griffiths was set free to kill after being branded a “sadistic schizoid psychopath” who was a “highly dangerous man” ¬during an in-depth psychiatric assessment, it emerged last night. Medics at Rampton Secure ¬Hospital decided that although Griffiths posed “a serious danger to others” he was “untreatable” because he was not mentally ill.

The Mail (front page): “WHY DID NO ONE STOP THE CROSSBOW CANNIBAL?”

This is an easy question to answer: because the victims are women – women who work the streets and who are made vulnerable by a law that means prostitutes are criminals.

The Express lists the names of a few more women who have gone missing:

Yvonne Fitt, 33 – a single mother working as a prostitute whose remains were found in a shallow grave outside Otley, West Yorkshire in 2002.

Rebecca “Becky” Hall, 19 – body found in an alleyway behind a Bradford car park in April 2001.

Michaela Hague, 25 – killed in a Sheffield car park in 2001.

Dawn Shields, 19 – Her remains were found buried at Mam Tor in Derbyshire back in 1994.

No-one has been arrested for their deaths.

The Sun (front page): “CROSSBOW CANNIBAL: I’VE KILLED LOADS MORE”

This is a boast by a man who know his moment in the news has come. But the shock is not in that he might have killed more women – it is that we find it easy to believe he killed more women.

Howe many?

The Star (front page): “CANNIBAL KILLER ATE 9 GIRLS”

He ate nine girls? To begin with he murdered three women. No he has eaten nine girls. The man has become a monster. What are the facts? Well, the express tells us:

The monster, who ate his victims’ flesh, was yesterday told he will die in jail…

Griffiths made a video of himself with Shelley Armitage body. He daubed “MY SEX SALE” on her back. He stated:

“I’m Ven Pariah. I’m the Bloodbath Artist. Here is a model who is assisting me.’’

Stephen Griffiths is vain:

He then left the phone with the video on a train, hoping it would be found by somebody sick enough to post the footage on the internet.

But back to the Star’s front page… Did he eat nine girls?

Well, we have no idea. The Express tells us:

Prosecutor Robert Smith revealed Griffiths used power tools to cut up his first two victims but dismembered Suzanne by hand into 81 parts in little more than 24 hours.

Back to the Star:

Police believe he could have eaten up to nine girls in his reign of terror over prostitutes in Bradford, West Yorks.

Believe. Could. When you see those two words in one comment you know the Star has strayed from fact into fantasy.

He confessed he skinned them, used knives and power tools to carve up their bodies, then ate parts of them, boiling the first two and chewing the third raw.

But he never ate them all.

Police think he also fed human remains to pet lizards in his flat that he took for walks on leads.

The crossbow cannibal is not much of cannibal. Although Krissy Storrar salivates in the Mirror:

The self-styled Crossbow Cannibal skinned his victims, chopped up their bodies and cooked them before gorging on their flesh. He also ate some parts raw.

The Mirror says nine victims might be too many. It settles on six:

EVIL Stephen Griffiths taunted police he may have killed SIX women saying: “Think of the number four, maybe add a couple more.”

And did he kill these? … Rebecca Hall, left, Yvonne Fitt and Gemma Simpson,” ask the Sun.

“These”? Not these women. Just “these”. Touching stuff in the Sun.

But what do we know about him. Well, at 17 he stabbed a security guard. He then threatened two students at higher education college with a knife. (Did the police know that this man also hired prostitutes and lived in the area where women were going missing?)

But what we want to know is: is there a celebrity connection? The Yorkshire Post has news:

In his teens, he attended Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, a top independent school whose stated aims include “to encourage high standards of personal behaviour and the development of moral and spiritual values”.

Extraordinarily, he is not the first serial killer to have been educated there. John George Haigh, better known as the “Acid Bath Murderer”, won a scholarship to the school before he killed six people between 1944 and 1949.

Haigh, who claimed to have killed as many as nine, was hanged in 1949.

Managers at the school, whose more creditable alumni include rugby star Mike Tindall, fiancé of Princess Anne’s daughter Zara Phillips, confirmed that Griffiths had been a pupil for three years until 1986.

Photos:

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Posted: 22nd, December 2010 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink