Crossbow Cannibal

Top journalist Cyril Dixon - who attended the hearing - tells the chilling story of how an attention-seeking oddball fashioned himself into a serial killer for the sole purpose of becoming famous.

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During Midsummer 2009, Susan Rushworth, a mother, grandmother and former grammar school girl, went missing. She was followed ten months later by Shelley Armitage, a one-time wannabe model. Four weeks on it was Suzanne Blamires, who had been a trainee nurse. All three sold their bodies for sex to fund their drug habits. All three vanished as if the cobbled backstreets had opened up and swallowed them in. And who could know many how more there were? Stephen Griffiths was a shy, eccentric student of criminology who always had a word of cautious advice for the working girls. He wandered the same bleak landscape, dressed in black, hair slicked back with baby oil, happy to chat and share a cigarette. Here, surely, was someone they could trust...