By day he sold cinema tickets. By night he hunted men across North Wales and Merseyside. In the autumn of 1995, cinema owner Peter Moore — the so-called Man in Black — murdered four men in just three months. He later said he did it “for fun.”

Alexander Lawson tells the story of Henry Roberts, Edward Carthy, Keith Randles and Anthony Davies, the investigation that began on Pensarn Beach, the Christmas Eve confession, and the trial that ended with a whole-life sentence.

Content warning: homicide, sexual violence and historic assaults. Listener discretion advised.

If this episode has affected you, Samaritans are available in the UK on 116 123.

In May 2010, a caretaker in Bradford checked the CCTV. A woman ran from a flat. A man followed with a crossbow. He fired — then turned to the camera and raised a finger.

I’m Alexander Lawson. This episode of A True Crime Podcast is about Stephen Griffiths, the criminology student who called himself the Crossbow Cannibal, and about the three women he murdered: Susan Rushworth, Shelley Armitage and Suzanne Blamires.

Between 2009 and 2010, Griffiths lured sex workers from the streets near his Bradford flat, killed them with a hammer and a crossbow, dismembered them, and told police he had eaten parts of their bodies. He was caught because Suzanne Blamires ran — and because a silent corridor camera recorded what happened next. He pleaded guilty. The judge called the crimes wicked and monstrous and gave him a whole-life sentence.

This is not a legend about a nickname. It is the story of three women, a slaughterhouse flat, 81 pieces of a body in the River Aire, and a family still waiting for a grave.

Content warning: graphic violence, sexual violence, dismemberment and cannibalism.

Four young men were found dead within a few hundred metres of the same street in Barking. Police treated the deaths as separate overdoses. Their families knew something was wrong.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor — and of Stephen Port, the man who lived nearby, met victims through dating apps, and walked free long enough to kill again.

This episode looks at the sixteen months of 2014–2015, the forged note, the missed chances, the Old Bailey convictions, and the later inquest finding that police failings probably contributed to three of the deaths. It does not reconstruct how the crimes were carried out.

Content warning: murder, sexual violence, and institutional failure.

In the early hours of 30 December 2002, a man searching bins in Camden pulled out black sacks. Inside were human remains. The heads and hands were never found.

Anthony Hardy — later called the Camden Ripper — was convicted of murdering Sally White, Elizabeth Valad, and Bridgette MacClennan. One of those deaths had already been written off as a heart attack. Weeks after Hardy was discharged from a psychiatric hospital, two more women were killed, posed, photographed, and dismembered in his council flat.

Host Alexander Lawson traces Hardy’s fall from engineer and father to whole-life prisoner, the failures that left him free to kill again, and the three women whose names should not be reduced to a nickname.

Content warning: murder, sexual violence, dismemberment. Suspicion of further victims is discussed as unproven.

New Year’s Day, 1993. Most people resolve to quit smoking. Colin Ireland resolved to become a serial killer.

I’m Alexander Lawson. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, we follow the three-month hunt that began in a leather bar in Earl’s Court and ended at the Old Bailey.

Ireland targeted gay men at The Coleherne, posing as a dominant stranger so they would let him tie them up. Between March and June 1993 he murdered five men in their own homes: Peter Walker, Christopher Dunn, Perry Bradley III, Andrew Collier and Emanuel Spiteri. Then he rang the police to complain they weren’t paying enough attention.

This is the story of a planned killing spree, a city put on edge, a fingerprint he forgot to wipe, and a judge who called five lives carnage.

Listener warning: murder, homophobic violence, and animal cruelty. We name the victims. We don’t mythologise the killer.

February 1949. A widow leaves a Kensington hotel after lunch and never comes back. The man who took her there tells police she no longer exists — destroyed in acid — and asks how you can prove murder if there is no body.

He was wrong.

Alexander Lawson traces the crimes of John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer: six confirmed killings in England between 1944 and 1949, committed for money and hidden in sulphuric acid. From a Chelsea basement and a Crawley workshop to the Onslow Court Hotel, Lewes Assizes, and the gallows at Wandsworth.

The victims: William McSwan. Donald and Amy McSwan. Archibald and Rosalie Henderson. Olive Durand-Deacon.

A True Crime Podcast. Hosted by Alexander Lawson.

Content warning: murder, fraud, execution.

In March 2013 a man texted a friend that life was beautiful. Ten days later three men were dead, two more had been left for dead, and their killer would tell a psychiatrist that murder was “moreish.”

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Joanna Dennehy — the Cambridgeshire woman who stabbed Łukasz Słaboszewski, John Chapman and Kevin Lee to death with a pocket knife, dumped their bodies in ditches outside Peterborough, then drove to Hereford and attacked two dog walkers in broad daylight. One of only a handful of women in the UK ever given a whole-life order, Dennehy laughed in the dock as the judge called her a cruel, calculating serial killer.

This episode of A True Crime Podcast names the victims, follows the ten-day spree from court records and sentencing remarks, and does not treat the killer as a celebrity.

Listener discretion advised. Contains descriptions of violence.

In six weeks in 2006, five women vanished from the same streets in Ipswich. Their bodies were found naked in brooks, ponds and woodland. Two were laid out like a cross. Forklift driver Steve Wright said it was coincidence — until DNA, fibres and blood in his Ford Mondeo said otherwise.

Host Alexander Lawson traces Wright’s 2006 killing spree, the whole-life sentence that followed, and the 1999 murder of 17-year-old Victoria Hall — a case that stayed cold for 26 years until Wright finally said the word he had never said before: guilty.

This episode names Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell, Annette Nicholls and Victoria Hall. Listener discretion advised.

For five years, thirteen women in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester never came home. Police interviewed the killer nine times. They chased a hoax tape from Sunderland while Peter Sutcliffe — a Bradford lorry driver with a wife and an ordinary life — kept walking free.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the story of the Yorkshire Ripper case without turning the victims into a nickname. Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Patricia Atkinson, Jayne MacDonald, Jean Jordan, Yvonne Pearson, Helen Rytka, Vera Millward, Josephine Whitaker, Barbara Leach, Marguerite Walls, Jacqueline Hill — and the seven women who survived.

This is a story about a botched manhunt, Wearside Jack, who counted and who didn’t, and how a region learned to live with fear. Content warning: discussion of serial murder and violence against women. We do not describe the attacks in detail.

On 24 June 1998, 81-year-old Kathleen Grundy opened her door in Hyde to her family GP. He said he was there for a blood test. Within hours she was dead — and he had typed a will leaving her estate to himself.

That clumsy forgery is the only reason Britain discovered what Harold Shipman had been doing for more than twenty years.

In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the story of the GP patients called Fred and the press called Doctor Death: fifteen murders proved in court, an inquiry that put the real total at about 250, lethal diamorphine signed off as “natural causes,” and the systems that let a trusted doctor keep making house calls.

He never confessed. He never explained. He died in Wakefield Prison on 13 January 2004.

Trust is not evidence. A signature is not a cause of death.