Life Means Life Page 17

  A community worker named Stephan, who had worked with Nottingham’s homeless for six years, told the Nottingham Evening Post: ‘Word soon got around from different organisations who work with the homeless that he was a psychopath. Here was a potentially dangerous character who should be watched closely. Homeless people have to give off a lot of bravado to survive, but Martin was talking about how he was going to make a name for himself, that he was dangerous and was going to hurt people. We got the sense that there was something else; that he was capable of serious violence and that it wasn’t just bravado.’

  On 29 December 2004, Katie Baxter, 18, vanished. She was last seen alive leaving her sister Charlene’s house in West Bridgford. Katie had been living on the streets for about a year but managed to hide it from her family, with whom she regularly attended Nottingham Panthers ice hockey matches. When she failed to show up to the fifth game in a row, they reported her missing.

  Two days after Kate vanished, Zoe Pennick, 26, disappeared. Her father had last seen her when she called at his home in Derby a fortnight earlier to collect some clothes. She had lived by herself in the city’s suburb of Littleover and had taken to the streets after failing to hold down a job. Since becoming homeless, she was a regular sight in Nottingham city centre and was last seen alive on New Year’s Eve. Zoe had a seven-year-old son, looked after by her father, who said she always got on well with people but had found it difficult to settle down. He said she had been homeless, on and off, for about six years.

  A derelict warehouse off Great Northern Close, near London Road was a lonely spot by the railway tracks. But it was a favourite shelter among the city’s homeless and rumours started to spread that there were bodies there.

  On the afternoon of Friday, 11 February 2005, a police cordon appeared around the warehouse. At 11am that day, a police dog discovered the decomposing remains of Katie Baxter near a wall heater, underneath ‘carefully placed’ pieces of soil, bricks and debris. Five days later, while searching the building for forensic evidence, police found Zoe Pennick’s body. She was buried under rubble, less than two metres from where Katie was discovered.

  Post-mortems revealed that both women had been beaten and strangled. Police linked the deaths to that of another homeless woman, Ellen Frith, who was found on 24 January in a burning squat in Marple Square, in the St Ann’s area of the city. The 25-year-old mother-of-two had also been beaten and strangled.

  After the discovery of Ellen’s body, police interviewed scores of homeless people in Nottingham and kept hearing the same name, ‘Reds’, who had been staying at the Marple Square squat. One detective who worked on the investigation said: ‘Martin had been boasting to people that he was a violent man, who was capable of killing. He was a bully with a short fuse and there was barely a homeless person in Nottingham who did not have a bad experience to tell about him. Nearly everyone we spoke to pointed the finger at him.’

  Martin was arrested, along with his homeless associate John Ashley, 34, and within hours both men were charged with Ellen Frith’s murder. When the crudely buried remains of Katie Baxter and Zoe Pennick were found, police set about building a case against Martin and Ashley for all three murders. Detectives learned that both women had links to the men, and that Katie had once had a relationship with Ashley.

  Inquiries among the homeless community turned up the names of Martin and Ashley, time and time again. One homeless man, who was interviewed by police, later told reporters: ‘If you heard Reds was on one side of town, you would go to the other. He used to draw on porno magazines to show what he was going to do to women.’

  But it turned out the police did not need such testimonies to secure Martin’s conviction – he was doing a good job of that himself while on remand in prison. After his arrest for Ellen Frith’s murder and before the discovery of the other dead women, he borrowed a book from the prison library called Rats and Reptiles. He told fellow inmates that he wanted to know how much meat rats could consume and therefore how quickly they could eat ‘the other bodies’.

  Of the witnesses who heard Martin’s grisly boasts, an inmate who shared a cell with him proved to be the star witness when the case came to trial. Martin told the witness, who was allowed to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals inside: ‘I’m going to be Nottingham’s first serial killer. If you’ve killed one, you might as well have killed 21.’ In a sworn statement, the witness said it was this boast and his repeated threats to ‘kill his baby’s mother’ that compelled him to testify against the thug. But he was so scared of Martin that police spent two weeks persuading him to come to court. The witness said: ‘Katie scratched him [Martin]. He burnt her fingers because he wanted to get rid of the evidence. He said he picked her up and took her down the factory [the warehouse] because she fancied him. They were chatting and went into his tent. Then he just snapped and strangled her. He dragged her out of the tent, into the factory and buried her with debris.’

  Days later, Martin persuaded Zoe Pennick to go with him to his tent to pick up 2,000 cigarettes that he wanted her to sell for him. Once there, he grabbed her by the throat and strangled her. He then laid her body near to Katie’s and buried her in the same way. Later, he bragged that he had killed Zoe because she left a hypodermic needle in his bed. The witness said: ‘He said he’d sorted her out and he’d “smashed her legs up like biscuits” and “we weren’t going to be seeing her for a while.”’ The prisoner added: ‘He [Martin] said it was hard and she didn’t want to die. He was punching her, kicking her; in the end, he stood on her throat.’ He also revealed that Martin told him he had vomited over one of the girls because she had soiled and urinated herself while being strangled. He had removed the girl’s top, scared that it had his DNA on it from his vomit.

  The accused were joined by another homeless man, 31-year-old Dean Carr, who was also charged with Ellen Frith’s murder. All three denied the charges when their trial began at Nottingham Crown Court on 16 January 2006. The court heard that Ellen went with the men to the squat to smoke drugs. Martin had told Ashley of his plan to kill Ellen and he grabbed her as she bit into an apple in the makeshift kitchen. He pressed his thumbs into her throat until she passed out, then Ashley finished her off. The witness testified: ‘He [Martin] said him and John lifted her up and put her on the sofabed and set fire to the body. Reds was playing with her body, making it look like she was talking. Reds put a needle in her hand and stuck it in her leg.’ Giving testimony, Ashley said the atmosphere in the room became cold when Martin began staring at Ellen. ‘It was the way he was looking and the tension. He was looking at her in a horrible way – evil – it was just a horrible look, a cold look. He was being overpowering with her – really, really overpowering. He went over the line, way over the line.’

  Ashley said: ‘I know it sounds strange, but after Ellen’s murder I went and made something to eat – that’s the only thing I could think of.’ He said he was so scared of Martin that he did nothing to stop him killing Ellen. ‘At least I couldn’t see it,’ he told the court. ‘I heard some weird noises; I think he was pushing down on her chest and it was making a horrible noise.’

  One witness, a homeless man, testified that Martin said to him: ‘You might as well finish her off – she’s almost dead, anyway.’ The witness said that Carr told him how he had walked up to Ellen while her body was still twitching and strangled her. Martin then wrapped up Ellen’s body on the settee, covered her with newspaper and set fire to her. They then left the flat with Martin telling his friends: ‘She’d cook like a bit of bacon.’

  Another witness told the court that he was living at the flats where Ellen’s body was found and that following the fire, he was walking to a late-night garage when Martin called him over to speak to him in an alley. He said: ‘He told me he’d strangled and killed her [Ellen] because she wouldn’t lend him a tenner. He said she wouldn’t die and her eyes kept twitching. He was joking about it, like it was funny.’

  Peter Kelson, QC, prosecuting, asked a witness
who spent time in prison with Martin while he was on remand if he had ever told him the number of girls he had killed. He replied: ‘Oh, five.’ The witness was not told the names of the other two victims, but said Martin told him that he had fed them to pigs at a farm in Leicester (a claim that was never substantiated). He also told the court that Martin complained that he did not have pictures of the bodies to prove he had done it.

  Martin ‘seemed to be glorying in his notoriety’, said the prosecuting counsel. ‘He was relishing the prospect of being known as Nottingham’s first serial killer. He seems to have had a fascination with violence against women, and the crimes he committed and the suffering his victims endured.’

  It took the jury almost a week to deliver its verdicts. As Martin stood impassively in the dock he was unanimously convicted of murdering the three women. Mr Justice Butterfield told him: ‘These murders were committed by you because you positively enjoyed killing. You took the totally innocent lives of these women for your own perverted gratification. You have devastated the lives of those who loved them and have shown not a moment of remorse. You have revelled in the macabre details of each senseless, brutal, callous killing. The facts of the offences are so horrific and the seriousness of your offending is so exceptionally high, you are to be kept in prison for the rest of your life.’

  Ashley, who had a previous conviction for wounding, was cleared of Zoe Pennick’s murder, but was jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum of 25 years for his part in the murders of Ellen Frith and Katie Baxter. Dean Carr was also jailed for life, to serve at least 14 years, for his involvement in Ellen’s killing.

  From a young age, Martin had been strange and twisted. His childhood heroes were serial killers and gangsters rather than footballers or pop stars. He idolised Moors Murderer Ian Brady and revered ‘Black Panther’ Donald Neilson, who slaughtered five people. His best friend at school, Gareth Moyes, remembers thinking something was deeply wrong with Martin. He said: ‘I once saw him try to smother a baby because it was crying and I just shouted at him, “What are you doing?”’

  Gareth added: ‘When we were 15 or 16, we started doing cannabis and speed together and that made him worse. He became more and more aggressive towards the females. Mark would hit them and swear at them. He said his dad was in prison with Ian Brady; he would say he had respect for him and that he admired the Black Panther; he said we would be the next Kray Twins. He was deadly serious about it, so I would just humour him. Mark’s dad died when we were younger, but when Mark told me he was laughing. I thought that was weird. When your dad dies, you don’t laugh about it.’

  Martin had also written a letter to a probation office, asking: ‘How long till I kill someone?’ In it, he complained that he would have liked a probation officer who wanted to help him and that he had a ‘real bad temper’. He added: ‘Everything that moves gets hurt – it could be a lady, it could be an animal. It was so sweet and nice until my dad died and now I’m evil.’

  ‘THE BEAST OF MANCHESTER’

  ‘He’s one of the strangest, coldest men I’ve ever met. Physically, he’s like a whippet – small, but tremendously tough, and completely unemotional.’

  Detective Chief Inspector John Bennion

  Name: Trevor Hardy

  Crime: Triple murder

  Date of Conviction: 2 May 1977

  Age at Conviction: 31

  On New Year’s Eve 1974, 15-year-old Lesley Stewart set off to meet her boyfriend at the Phoenix Hotel in Moston, Manchester. She never made it. When Lesley – a former Rose Queen at her local church – failed to return home the next day, her frantic parents reported her missing. By 3 January 1975, hundreds of locals joined police with tracker dogs in the search, but no trace of the pretty, dark-haired schoolgirl was found.

  Seven months later, shortly before midnight on Saturday, 20 July 1975, barmaid Wanda Skala, 18, went missing on her way home from work at the Lightbowne Hotel in Moston. The following day, police found her partially-naked body on waste ground. Wanda’s clothes had been ripped off and her face was so badly beaten that her jaw hung loose. Her killer had tried to rape her, her right nipple had been bitten off and her socks were tied round her neck. Repeated blows from a paving stone had shattered her skull.

  Local thug Trevor Hardy, 32, was drinking with his brother Colin as news of the brutal murder buzzed around the pub. Unable to resist, he drunkenly boasted to Colin that he was the man the police were after. Colin had no reason to disbelieve his deranged sibling, who had been jailed three years earlier for attacking a man named Stanley O’Brien with a pickaxe.

  He recalled: ‘We were having a few pints and the question of Wanda Skala came up. Then he suddenly said: “I did it! I didn’t mean to kill her – I was going to mug her. I only wanted her handbag. I hit her with a brick; she must have had a thin or weak skull.’ Colin replied: ‘I don’t believe you.’ But Hardy insisted: ‘It’s true. But I didn’t touch her sexually. I got £48 from her – I’ve still got the handbag.’

  By the time the brothers got to Colin’s flat, Hardy, by now sobering up, regretted his revelation and decided a beating would secure his brother’s silence. Colin said: ‘We went back to my flat and then the next thing I knew he was beating seven bells out of me. He ripped the clothes off me, battered me with a telephone and finally left me senseless and covered in blood on the stairs. There was blood everywhere – even on the ceiling. He wouldn’t let my wife call for an ambulance, or help me in any way. Then he walked out… and returned ten minutes later, as calm as anything, and ordered her to cook him beans on toast.’

  The attack left Colin and his wife petrified and they turned their home into a fortress using bolts, padlocks and bars. But Hardy still came round most nights, smashing windows and yelling threats through the door that he would kill them both if they breathed a word about Wanda’s murder. Despite the threats, Colin decided he was safer with his brother off the streets and he told police about his confession.

  Hardy was arrested and police demanded an impression of his teeth to compare to the bite mark found on Wanda’s breast. Hardy agreed, but filed his teeth to points to change their shape. He later wrote: ‘I had a file brought in on a visit to cells and used it to change teeth to beat check.’ Hardy also convinced his girlfriend, Shelagh Farrow, to say they had been in bed together when Wanda was killed. Police had to release him without charge.

  On 6 March 1976, Hardy attacked 20-year-old Christina Campbell in the ladies’ of the King’s Arms in Hollinwood, gripping her throat so tightly that she bit off part of her tongue. Before he could finish her off, he was disturbed and he fled the scene, later claiming that he ‘throated’ the girl because he caught her in a lesbian embrace with his girlfriend.

  Three days later, on 9 March 1976, Sharon Mossoph, 17, left a work party at the Pack Horse Hotel in Bolton to catch the night bus home to Failsworth, 18 miles away. She called home at about 11pm and spoke to her stepmum, Jackie, to let her know she was on her way. Sharon caught the number 98 bus, which dropped her off less than half a mile from her home.

  Early the next morning, dark-haired Sharon was found by a man taking a short cut to work across the Rochdale Canal. Her naked, strangled and mutilated body was floating face down among rubble and debris of the disused lock. Her tights were tied round her neck, she had been stabbed in the stomach with a screwdriver and her left nipple had been bitten off. Her attacker had tried to disguise his bite marks by slashing at the wound 64 times.

  Police sealed off the area, just 30 yards from a discount wallpaper shop, where Sharon had just started work as a cashier. One of her workmates gathered at the scene said: ‘The party had been fixed because we had all done so well. Sharon had worked with us for just three weeks… she was a lovely and very happy girl.’ Later that day, the Manchester Evening News nicknamed her killer ‘The Beast of Manchester’.

  The similarities to the Wanda Skala murder meant Trevor Hardy was the only suspect. Police, already hunting Hardy over the incident in
the King’s Arms, tracked him down to a hideaway flat in Stockport. He was arrested for both murders and held on remand in Manchester’s Strangeways Prison awaiting trial.

  On the night of Monday, 27 August 1975, while Hardy was in custody, Detective Chief Inspector John Bennion received a surprise call saying that the suspect wanted to meet with him. Hardy handed him a 40-page handwritten statement confessing to three killings – the two murders with which he was already charged, and also to the slaying of missing Lesley Stewart, about whose disappearance he had earlier been questioned. Of the confession, DCI Bennion said: ‘It went into incredible detail, with carefully and precisely drawn maps of what had happened where; it told of his past, other crimes he’d committed, even about his childhood. Obviously he thought that if he was going to confess, he might as well do it properly.’

  Hardy’s statement said that while serving his prison sentence for the pickaxe attack on Stanley O’Brien, his young girlfriend Beverley Driver had written to him to end their relationship because she was now going out with a boy of her own age. She said in her letter: ‘I don’t want to waste my life on someone like you.’ Hardy wrote in his statement: ‘I sat there with the letter in my hands, shaking, with tears running down my cheeks. From that day I gave up the fight with my demons; no one gave a damn.’ He was determined to see his former girlfriend dead. On his release, he revealed: ‘The man they had protected society against was out, a bigger danger than when he went in. I had one reason to live: to kill her.’