As police forced the door of the apartment in Battersea, London they were confronted by two dogs who led them to a bedroom where their master lay naked, sprawled across his four-poster bed. His head was covered by a plastic bag tied securely round his neck and his wrists and ankles tightly bound.
Colin Ireland dreamed of becoming a serial killer, aware that to earn this title he would have to kill a minimum of four people. Born on 16 March 1954, Ireland suffered the embarrassment of extreme poverty and the label of ‘bastard’ in his early years. His mother was only seventeen years old when she fell pregnant and, having been abandoned by her lover, decided to leave the father’s name blank on Ireland’s birth certificate. Immature and unsure of how to look after her new baby, Ireland’s mother went to live with her parents in Myrtle Road, Dartford. By the time Ireland was five, his mother felt she was mature enough to look after him by herself and decided to make her own way in the world. But life was a struggle for a single mum with no work and they were forced to live in a humble camp for homeless women and children, which in many ways was little better than life in a prison.
By 1961 the young Ireland had a father-figure in his life and his future didn’t appear as bleak. Ireland found school difficult, because he had moved homes so many times he had never settled into a routine or made any real friends. He recalls being subjected to verbal and occasional physical abuse due to his dishevelled appearance. To avoid being bullied, Ireland started to play truant, and as punishment he was frequently subjected to the cane. A person who has lacked power early in their life often seeks to control others when they reach adulthood, and this is exactly what happened to Colin Ireland, the boy who had always been the ‘odd one out’.
His vulnerability as a child must have been as obvious as wearing a label on his forehead, because on several occasions he was approached by strange men to perform perverse acts. Always the victim, Ireland came to believe that these paedophiles had a bizarre power over other people and these experiences had a profound effect in his later life. As an adult he preyed on homosexuals, gaining notoriety as the ‘Gay Slayer’ or the ‘Fairy Liquidator’.
Ireland did not commit his first crime until he was seventeen years old. Having been unhappy at home and at school for many years, he decided to steal some money and run away to London. However, his plans went awry when he was caught and, as part of a care order, he was sent to Finchton Manor School in Kent. Here, once again, he became the subject of ridicule. When he eventually left Finchton Ireland fulfilled his original plan and ran away to London where he quickly became a part of the ‘Playland’ scene. It was an area rife with paedophiles and drag queens, where boys would often sell their bodies just to get a bed for the night. Forced into a world he didn’t understand and with nowhere to live and no money, it wasn’t long before Ireland was once again in trouble. Although his offences were quite trivial, he was forced to spend time at Hollesly Bay, an open borstal, where he remained until he was eighteen years old.
On his release, Ireland had his first relationship with a woman, but the experience was not a happy one due his confused state of mind. He explained this time in his life as the ‘lost period’ often wandering about in a state of complete numbness, having neither the willpower or the integrity to change his way of life. By the age of 21 he was in more serious trouble with the police and spent a spell in Lewes prison, where for the first time in his life he felt secure.
Always in and out of trouble, in 1981, Ireland now aged 27, met his first wife Virginia Zammit. Virginia was nine years his senior with a five-year-old daughter, and initially they were very happy together. However, she soon tired of her husband’s aggression and frequent spells of incarceration and divorced him in 1987. Two years later, Ireland met Janet Young, the landlady of The Globe in Buckfast, Devon. Ireland moved into the pub and within three months they were married but this marriage was also doomed. Within four months of being married Ireland drove his wife and her two children into town, dropped them off and then disappeared with the car and some money from the pub takings, having first cleared their joint bank account.
For a while Ireland worked at a shelter for homeless people in Essex, but he was not a very popular member of staff and was forced to resign. Ireland’s frustration reached a peak and, unsure what direction to take in his life, he headed once again for London in March 1993. For some reason, something which Ireland himself couldn’t explain, he found himself drawn to The Colherne, a pub on the Brompton Road in West London. It had a reputation as being a place where homosexuals went to find a partner for the night. Ireland was wound up like a coiled spring and he felt an inexplicable urge to kill. In a way he hoped that no one would approach him, but sadly he met 45-year-old Peter Walker when he accidentally spilt his drink over Ireland’s shirt. Walker urged Ireland to punish him, an invitation which he found very hard to turn down especially as he had entered the pub with his very own ‘murder kit’ – a knife, some rope, a pair of gloves and a change of clothes.
Aware that there was a security camera at the front of the pub, Ireland led Walker out using the side door. They walked back to Walker’s flat in Battersea where he led Ireland into his bedroom after first shutting his two dogs in the kitchen out of the way. The bedroom was quite plush with a four-poster bed covered in luxurious satin sheets. Walker started to undress and told Ireland that he liked to be bound and gagged because he said he found it sexually exciting. Once Ireland had rendered his victim helpless his excitement grew into a frenzy as he suddenly realized he had total power for the first time in his life. After beating Walker with his fists, a dog lead and then a belt, he took a plastic bag and tied it securely over his head, revelling in the God-like power he was experiencing. Not quite ready to finish his perverse game, Ireland removed the bag for a couple of minutes and Walker looked pathetically into his eyes and said ‘I’m going to die’, to which Ireland replied, ‘Yes, you are’. When his victim had breathed his last, for some peculiar reason Ireland had the urge to burn Walker’s pubic hair and later told the police that he was curious to see what the smell was like. When the evil deed was done, Ireland set about meticulously removing any trace that he had been present in the flat and then, worried that he might attract too much attention leaving when the roads were so quiet, decided to stay until morning. He watched television for a while but then got bored and started looking through some of Walker’s personal items. He discovered to his horror that Walker was HIV-positive from some papers found in a drawer and this made him angry because he knew that Walker had intended seducing him without warning him of his condition. He was so disgusted that he grabbed some condoms and stuffed several in Walker’s mouth and up his nostrils before leaving the flat. As he walked away from the scene of his first murder he wondered whether anyone could tell from the expression on his face that he had just killed someone. He returned home on a crowded commuter train, waiting for the opportunity to throw the contaminated evidence (latex gloves, change of clothes etc.) out of the window.
Two days after his first murder, Ireland made a call to the Samaritans in which he said he was concerned about Peter Walker’s dogs, telling them that he had killed their owner after locking them into a room. However, his strange behaviour did not stop at one phone call, he then went on to phone The Sun newspaper, telling them, ‘It was my New Year’s resolution to kill a homosexual. He was a homosexual and into kinky sex. You like that stuff, don’t you?’ The police had believed that Walker had died when a sex session had gone horribly wrong, but this was not the case if the anonymous phone caller was telling the truth.
Ireland wanted to repeat the excitement of that night but decided he would wait until the heat had died down a little before making his next move. Two months later he returned to The Colherne to seek his next victim – 37-year-old librarian Christopher Dunn. The couple went to Dunn’s flat in Wealdstone where he told Ireland that he loved to be dominated. Immediately the excitement rose in his blood and Ireland told him to go and get himself ready. When Ireland walked into the bedroom, Dunn was already naked except for a body harness and a studded belt. Ireland told him to turn over and handcuffed his hands behind his head and tied his feet together. Before killing him, Ireland demanded the PIN number of Dunn’s cash card so that he could later reimburse himself and restock his ‘murder kit’. After beating Dunn, he held a lighter flame to his testicles and then suffocated the life out of him by placing a noose around his neck.
Only six days later, Ireland picked up a third man from the same pub. His next victim was 35-year-old Perry Bradley, a businessman and son of a US congressman. Bradley lived in Kensington in a luxurious apartment but nearly ruined Ireland’s plans when he told him that he liked to be the ‘dominator’ when having sex. Ireland explained that he would find it impossible to get aroused if he could not be the dominant partner, and Bradley reluctantly – and foolishly – agreed. His life ended with a noose around his neck.
At first the police had not made a connection between the murders because they had all been allocated to different stations. They were struggling to find any leads as there was no evidence, no witnesses and no one had remarked upon the similarities between the three cases. It took another two murders before the police realized that there were common factors in all the deaths.
Ireland listened intently to the news on the radio and television and became angry that he had received no publicity whatsoever. He returned to the pub and picked up 33-year-old Andrew Collier, a housing warden. It was this murder that gave the police their first link because he stuffed a condom in his victim’s mouth when he learned he was also HIV-positive. He also killed Collier’s pet cat because he wanted to dispel any rumours that he was an animal lover, after his initial phone call to the Samaritans regarding Walker’s dogs.
His fifth and final victim was 41-year-old Emanuel Spiteri, a chef from Malta. After cleaning up as normal after the event, Ireland decided to set fire to Spiteri’s apartment and it would appear that after five murders his desire to murder was beginning to wane, or perhaps Ireland’s lust for publicity had finally overcome his urge to kill. The following day he phoned the police to tell them to look for a body at the scene of a fire in South London. However, unbeknown to Ireland the fire had fizzled out and the body had already been reported by Spiteri’s landlady.
At last the police had some clues, not only had Ireland been careless in wiping his fingerprints off the windowsill at Spiteri’s apartment, he had also been spotted on a security camera at Charing Cross station. However, despite having an artist’s impression of the suspected murderer the police got nowhere with their investigations. However on 21 July a burly man, over six feet tall and assessed to be in his thirties walked into a lawyer’s office in Southend-on-Sea. He told the receptionist that he needed a legal representative, that his name was Colin Ireland and that he was the man the papers had branded as the ‘Fairy Liquidator’.
Ireland pleaded guilty to all charges when his case came to the Old Bailey on 20 December 1993. Mr Justice Sachs suggested that he should spend the remainder of his life behind bars, adding: ‘To take one human life is an outrage; to take five is carnage!’ Ireland smiled as the judge read out his sentence, happy that he had achieved notoriety as a serial killer at last.