 |
Michael Swindells | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Hyde, Greater Manchester, England |
| Died | 21 May 2004 (aged 44) City Hospital, Birmingham, England |
| Police career | |
| Department | West Midlands Police |
| Service years | 1990–2004 |
| Rank | Detective Constable |
| Awards | Queen's Gallantry Medal |
DC Michael Swindells, QGM was a British police officer who was stabbed to death on 21 May 2004 in Birmingham whilst attempting to arrest a suspect who had earlier threatened members of the public with a knife.
Swindells lived in Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire but was originally from Hyde, Greater Manchester. He was a former Royal Engineers lance corporal who had served with West Midlands Police for 14 years until his death. [1]
Swindells was stabbed once in the chest, penetrating his heart, while pursuing a suspect, known to be armed with a kitchen knife, on a towpath of the Tame Valley Canal underneath Gravelly Hill Interchange in Aston, Birmingham. [2] The suspect had used the knife earlier in the day to threaten a carpenter carrying out routine repair work on a garden gate outside his council house, which led to Swindells and some of his colleagues later encountering the suspect on a park bench then pursuing him down the towpath for over half-a-mile (800 m). The officer's colleagues administered first aid after the stabbing but were unable to save him; the suspect was arrested later in Witton Cemetery, three miles (4.8 km) away, by armed police. [3]
Glaister Earl Butler, a 48-year-old with paranoid schizophrenia who resided in a council-owned maisonette in Nechells, Birmingham, was convicted of Swindells's manslaughter. He had been charged with murder but the jury accepted his defence of diminished responsibility. He was detained indefinitely in a secure psychiatric hospital. [4] [5]
The jury in Butler's trial heard how he suffered intermittently with paranoid schizophrenia for between 15 and 20 years and had been treated in hospital, sometimes against his will, on more than one occasion in the previous four years, most recently in October 2001. [6] The actions of Butler's treatment staff were criticised in an independent inquiry by Robert Francis, QC, in 2009. A total of 432 doses of the medication prescribed to Butler for his mental disorder were discovered unused in his home; he was allowed to get into financial difficulty by not renewing his housing benefit and owed rent money to the housing authority; and workers, including a consultant psychiatrist, visited Butler's residence only weeks before Swindells' death and observed a large knife on the sofa and damage to a door, but they accepted Butler's explanation that this was caused by martial arts practice and concluded wrongly that there was no cause for concern. Before the attack on Swindells the mental health services were called by police enquiring about Butler's condition and how dangerous he should be considered if officers encounter him, but staff were unable to give full and accurate details due to the poor state of the records. [7]
Swindells was awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal posthumously. The Police Memorial Trust erected a stone memorial to him in 2008 at the location of the incident ( 52°30′42″N1°52′00″W / 52.5116692°N 1.8666267°W ). The memorial was unveiled by the Trust's founder and chairman Michael Winner. [8]
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."
Keith Henry Blakelock QGM, a London Metropolitan Police constable, was murdered on 6 October 1985 during the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham, north London. The riot broke out after Cynthia Jarrett died of heart failure during a police search of her home, and took place against a backdrop of unrest in several English cities and a breakdown of relations between the police and some people in the Black community.
The 1998 United States Capitol shooting occurred on July 24, 1998, when Russell Eugene Weston Jr. entered the Capitol and fatally shot United States Capitol Police officers Jacob Chestnut and Detective John Gibson.
Pedro Luis Medina was a Cuban refugee who was executed in Florida for the murder of a 52-year-old woman in Orlando. The circumstances of his execution elevated objections to the use of electrocution as a means of capital punishment. During his execution, Medina's head burst into flames, filling the death chamber with smoke. An autopsy later revealed that the current had destroyed Medina's brain, killing him instantly.
On April 23, 2005, Fred Fulton, 74, and Veronica "Verna" Decarie, 70, of Minto, New Brunswick, Canada were stabbed to death, with Fulton also being decapitated with a homemade sword. On March 5, 2008, their neighbour, Gregory Allan Despres, was found guilty for the murder, but not criminally responsible for his actions at the time due to having suffered paranoid schizophrenia-led delusions.
The Maharishi University of Management stabbing occurred on March 1, 2004, when without provocation, a university student Shuvender Sem fatally stabbed a fellow student, Levi Butler, after Sem had attacked another student earlier in the day. The event occurred at Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, Iowa, United States, and attracted attention partly due to the university's practice of "yogic flying," which proponents say reduces violence in the surrounding area. Sem was found not guilty due to insanity. A lawsuit against the university that had charged negligence was settled out of court.
A series of uncoordinated mass stabbings, hammer attacks, and cleaver attacks in the People's Republic of China began in March 2010. The spate of attacks left at least 90 dead and some 473 injured. As most cases had no known motive, analysts have blamed mental health problems caused by rapid social change for the rise in these kinds of mass murder and murder-suicide incidents.
PC Jonathan Charles Henry was a British police officer who was murdered in Luton, Bedfordshire, whilst on duty and responding to reports of a stabbing in the town centre.
DC Stephen Robin Oake, was a police officer serving as an anti-terrorism detective with Greater Manchester Police in the United Kingdom who was murdered while attempting to arrest a suspected terrorist in Manchester on 14 January 2003.
WPC Nina Alexandra Mackay was a police officer serving with London's Metropolitan Police Service who was fatally stabbed on 24 October 1997 by a man with paranoid schizophrenia she was attempting to arrest. She is the only female police officer in Great Britain to have been stabbed to death while on duty and her killing was the first of a female officer since the murder of Yvonne Fletcher in 1984.
Nicola Edgington is a British double killer who also attempted to murder a third person. Having killed her own mother in 2005, she attacked two strangers in the street in Bexleyheath in 2011, killing one. She was convicted of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility, attempted murder and murder.
On April 15, 2014, Matthew de Grood, son of Calgary Police Inspector Doug de Grood, stabbed five young adults to death at a house party in the Brentwood neighbourhood of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The party was several blocks away from the University of Calgary campus, and held to mark the end of its school year. It was Calgary's deadliest massacre.
On September 25, 2014, Alton Nolen attacked two employees at the Vaughan Foods food processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma, United States, with a knife. He beheaded Colleen Hufford, and also stabbed another employee, Traci Johnson, who was critically injured. Nolen, whom the plant had fired prior to the attack, was shot and wounded by Vaughan Foods chief operating officer Mark Vaughan. The attack came to national attention due to its gruesome nature, which followed a well-publicized recent series of beheadings carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Barry Kenneth Williams, known since 1994 as Harry Street, was a British spree killer. A foundry worker who lived with his parents, he shot eight people in the English Midlands towns of West Bromwich and Nuneaton in little over an hour on 26 October 1978, killing five. Following a high-speed car chase, he was arrested and in 1979 was convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He was detained in high-security hospitals under mental health legislation.
Paranoid is a British crime drama, which began broadcasting on ITV on 22 September 2016, and streaming internationally on Netflix in 2016. The eight-part series focuses on a group of UK detectives working for the fictional Woodmere police force attempting to solve the murder of a local doctor who is stabbed at a children's playground. During the course of their investigation, the detectives discover the murder has links to a German pharmaceutical company and they enlist the help of their German colleagues in Düsseldorf to find the killer. Indira Varma, Robert Glenister, and Dino Fetscher star as main protagonists DS Nina Suresh, DC Bobby Day, and DC Alec Wayfield, respectively.
On the night of December 28, 2019, the seventh night of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, a masked man wielding a large knife or machete invaded the home of a Hasidic rabbi in Monsey, Rockland County, New York, where a Hanukkah party was underway, and began stabbing the guests. Five men were wounded, two of whom were hospitalized in critical condition. Party guests forced the assailant to flee by wielding chairs and a small table. Three months after the stabbing, the most severely injured stabbing victim, Rabbi Josef Neumann, aged 72, died of his wounds.
The Gresham cat hostage taking Incident occurred on August 21, 1994, and involved an emotionally disturbed 28-year-old woman named Janet Marilyn Smith, who took her own pet Siamese cat hostage in the Fred Meyer store at 2497 East Burnside Road in Gresham, Oregon, United States.
The 2020 Knox County stabbing occurred on April 7, 2020, shortly before 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, when Idris Abdus-Salaam stabbed to death three women and injured a fourth at a Pilot truck stop a few miles east of Knoxville, Tennessee, located at 7210 Strawberry Plains Pike. Abdus-Salaam was then shot and killed by a responding police officer on the scene.
Joseph Martin Danks, known as The Koreatown Slasher, is an American spree killer and serial killer who killed six homeless men in January 1987 in Los Angeles' Koreatown neighborhood. Convicted of the six killings and sent to serve his life sentence at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, he was sentenced to death in 1990 for the murder of his cellmate, 67-year-old Walter Holt.
On 29 July 2005, Richard Whelan was stabbed to death in Islington, London, United Kingdom, by a man who had been mistakenly released from custody that day.