Anthony Arkwright | |
---|---|
Born | 1967 (age 56–57) Wath upon Dearne, South Yorkshire , England |
Nationality | English |
Years active | 1988 |
Known for | Murder Spree killing |
Criminal charge | Three counts of murder |
Criminal penalty | Life imprisonment (Whole-life tariff) |
Criminal status | In prison |
Anthony Arkwright is a convicted British spree killer who, over the course of 56 hours in August 1988, murdered three people in Wath-upon-Dearne, South Yorkshire. Arkwright is also suspected of murdering a fourth person during his killing spree, the charge of which Arkwright's trial judge ordered to lie on file. Arkwright was 21 years old at the time of the killings and was 22 when he was convicted, making him the youngest person in the UK to be subject to a whole-life order. [1] He is currently still serving a whole-life tariff.
Anthony Arkwright was born in the mining community of Wath-upon-Dearne, in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire. [2] He is one of five siblings who were abandoned by their mother at an early age; his father was a miner. Arkwright spent most of his childhood in care homes and performed badly at school, drifting into a life of crime and a sentence in a borstal. Rumours persisted that he was the product of an incestuous relationship between his mother and his grandfather. [3] By the time he was 21, Arkwright was working for scrap merchants in Mexborough, South Yorkshire, but he was sacked on 27 August 1988 for a poor attendance record. It was after this sacking that the 56-hour killing spree began.
Following his dismissal, Arkwright returned to Adwick road in Mexborough, where he stabbed his grandfather, 68-year-old Stanislav Pudoikas, at his allotment. This resulted in Pudoikas suffering paralysis. [4] Arkwright then dragged Pudoikas into a shed and used a 14-pound (6.4 kg) lump hammer to crush his skull. [5] After killing his grandfather, Arkwright went on a pub crawl in Mexborough and dropped hints about the murder, saying things such as, "It's been murder on the allotment today." [6] It was believed that Arkwright's second victim was his grandfather's housekeeper, 73-year-old Elsa Kronadaite, [7] whilst he was in the process of taking his grandfather's savings of £3,000. The bodies of both Pudoikis and Kronadaite lay undiscovered for six days.
The next to be killed was Arkwright's neighbour Raymond Ford, an unemployed former teacher who was already being bullied by him. Arkwright had also stolen items from Ford's flat and Ford reported him to the police for the thefts. Arkwright knew this and wanted revenge. At 3 am on 28 August 1988, he entered Ford's flat completely naked apart from a devil mask. Arkwright stabbed Ford between 250 and 540 times and draped his entrails around the room that he had been murdered in. He then went home to shower off the blood and at 7 am, the police came to arrest him for burgling Ford's flat, completely unaware that Ford lay dead next door. [8] After being interviewed for three hours and then released on police bail for a court appearance the following week, Arkwright went out for another drinking session, amazed at being a murderer allowed to walk free from a police station.
On 29 August, early in the morning, Arkwright entered the specially adapted bungalow belonging to his other next-door neighbour, Marcus Law. [9] Law, who was 25 at the time, was in a wheelchair after a motorbike accident. In what Arkwright would describe as a punishment for all the cigarettes that Law had scrounged off him, he stabbed Law at least 70 times, before trying to gut him. When this failed, Arkwright inserted one of Law's crutches into a gaping wound in his stomach. He also gouged out Law's eyes and inserted cigarettes into his eye sockets, ears, and mouth. [10]
Law's mother found her son's body. Police arrested Arkwright, who confessed to four murders, which meant that searches for the bodies of his other victims had to be organised hastily. It was suggested that when shocked police had found the three remaining bodies, Arkwright felt that he was losing control, and so invented a fifth victim, leading to further searches of lakes and drainage ditches. [9]
Whilst at HMP Hull awaiting trial, Arkwright smeared the walls of his cell with excrement in a dirty protest at not being recognised and revered as he believed he should be. After convincing prison doctors that he was insane, he was transferred to Rampton Hospital in Nottinghamshire. Psychiatrists there determined that he was sane and fit to plead, with one doctor commenting that Arkwright was "the sanest person in the building". [11]
At his trial in Sheffield Crown Court in July 1989, Arkwright pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. [12] It was commented upon that Arkwright was an "evil fantasist" who had a desire to be as famous as Jack the Ripper. [13] The case against Arkwright for killing Kronadaite was unproven and at the trial, the judge ordered the case to lie on file. [14]
In 2003, Home Secretary David Blunkett changed the law so that certain people sentenced to life in prison, would spend the rest of their lives there, with no chance of parole. This was challenged in 2013, when the European Court of Human Rights decreed that whole-life tariffs without the option for a review or parole amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment. [15] However, the Court of Appeal ruled that the whole-life sentences were "entirely compatible" with the European Convention of Human Rights. [16]
The television programme When Life Means Life broadcast an episode about Arkwright in its first series in 2012. [17] Arkwright was the subject of Britain’s Most Evil Killers episode 9 season 4, broadcast 14 April 2020. [18]
Arkwright's case was featured in episode 168 of the dark comedy podcast series, Small Town Murder. [19]
Peter William Sutcliffe, also known as Peter Coonan, was an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering thirteen women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. He was dubbed in press reports as the Yorkshire Ripper, an allusion to the Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper. He was sentenced to twenty concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, which were converted to a whole life order in 2010. Two of Sutcliffe's murders took place in Manchester; all the others were in West Yorkshire. Criminal psychologist David Holmes characterised Sutcliffe as being an "extremely callous, sexually sadistic serial killer."
Daniel "Danny" Harold Rolling, known as the Gainesville Ripper, was an American serial killer who murdered five college students in Gainesville, Florida over four days in August 1990.
A thrill killing is premeditated or random murder that is motivated by the sheer excitement of the act. While there have been attempts to categorize multiple murders, such as identifying "thrill killing" as a type of "hedonistic mass killing", actual details of events frequently overlap category definitions making attempts at such distinctions problematic.
Robert John Maudsley is an English man convicted of multiple murders. Maudsley killed four people, with one of the killings taking place in a psychiatric hospital and two in prison after receiving a life sentence for a murder. Initial reports falsely stated he ate part of the brain of one of the men he killed in prison, which earned him the nickname "Hannibal the Cannibal" from parts of the British press and "The Brain Eater" amongst other prisoners. National newspapers were advised that the allegations were untrue, according to the post-mortem report. Maudsley is the longest-serving British prisoner in solitary confinement.
Wath upon Dearne is a town south of the River Dearne in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, 5 miles (8 km) north of Rotherham and almost midway between Barnsley and Doncaster. It had a population of 11,816 at the 2011 census. It is twinned with Saint-Jean-de-Bournay in France.
Mark Richard Hobson is a British spree killer who killed four people in North Yorkshire, England, in July 2004. He was arrested after an eight-day nationwide manhunt involving more than 500 police officers and twelve police forces, during which time he was Britain's "most wanted man".
Peter Hardy, Baron Hardy of Wath was a British Labour Party politician.
Thomas Lee Dillon was an American serial killer who shot and killed at least five men in southeastern Ohio, beginning April 1, 1989 and continuing until April 1992. He was nicknamed "Killer" for boasting about shooting hundreds of animals.
Gary Lee Sampson was an American bank robber and later spree killer who killed three people and was sentenced to death by a federal jury in Massachusetts.
Keith Hunter Jesperson is a Canadian-American serial killer who murdered at least eight women in the United States during the early 1990s. He was known as the "Happy Face Killer" because he drew smiley faces on his many letters to the media and authorities. Many of his victims were sex workers and transients who had no connection to him. Strangulation was Jesperson's preferred method of murdering, the same method he often used to kill animals as a child.
Ramón Bojórquez Salcido is a Mexican convicted spree killer who is currently on death row in California's San Quentin State Prison. He was convicted for the 1989 murders of six female family members and one male supervisor at his workplace. His victims included his wife and two of his daughters, four-year-old Sofía and 22-month-old Teresa. A third daughter, three-year-old Carmina, was left lying in a field beside the bodies of her sisters for thirty-six hours after being slashed across the throat by her father but was eventually rescued.
Mark Martin is a British serial killer who has been dubbed the 'Sneinton Strangler' in the media. He was issued with a whole-life tariff. Two accomplices, John Ashley and Dean Carr, helped him in two murders and they received 25-year and 14-year minimum sentences respectively.
Nathaniel White is an American serial killer. Active in the Hudson Valley region, in and near Orange County, NY during the early 1990s, White confessed to beating and stabbing six women to death while on parole.
The A6023 road runs for 5.5 miles (8.9 km) from Conisbrough to Wath-upon-Dearne via Mexborough and Denaby Main. In the east, it starts at, and passes Conisbrough Castle.
Patrick Tracy Burris was an American spree killer responsible for at least five known murders in Cherokee County, South Carolina in 2009. Over a span of six days, he shot and killed five people. His final known victim died of her injuries in the hospital on July 4, 2009. On July 6, 2009, police shot and killed Burris during a shootout in Dallas, North Carolina. His gun was matched by ballistics tests to the bullets used in the murders.
The Bradford murders were the serial killings of three women in the city of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England in 2009 and 2010.
The murder ofCarol Wilkinson, a young woman from Bradford, West Yorkshire occurred on 10 October 1977. Anthony Steel spent 19 years in prison for the murder, before having his conviction quashed in 2003. Steel died shortly after in 2007 at the age of 52.
Rotherham shoe rapist is a media epithet given to convicted British serial rapist James Desmond Lloyd from Rotherham, a metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. After attacking his victims, Lloyd stole their footwear and jewellery to keep as trophies. Lloyd was known to be active between 1983 and 1986 when his offending suddenly stopped. He was arrested in 2006 after a familial DNA profile linked him to the crimes. He pleaded guilty to four rapes and two attempted rapes, and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
This is a list of wemen who were murdered in the United Kingdom.