Killing of Richard Whelan

Last updated

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. [1] [2] [3] [4]

Contents

Background

On 18 May 2005, Anthony Joseph was arrested by Merseyside Police in North West England for burglary. [2] He was charged and bailed by Liverpool magistrates to live at his Islington, North London address. [2] On 10 June, he was arrested by Surrey Police for abduction and unlawful sex with a 15-year-old girl. [2] He was charged and remanded to Forest Bank Young Offender Institution in Pendlebury, Greater Manchester. [2] He should have been at a hearing in Liverpool in relation to the burglary, but arrangement had not been made for him to attend. [2] The court issues a warrant for his arrest and the hearing was rearranged for 3 August. [2] The abduction and unlawful sex charges are dropped, and he was mistakenly released at 1:45pm on 29 July by Forest Bank staff who were unaware of the burglary case. [2]

Stabbing

At 9:45pm on 29 July 2005, 28-year-old Richard Whelan and his long-term girlfriend boarded a N43 bus on Holloway Road, Islington. [1] [2] [4] They and 20-year-old Joseph, who was under the influence of crack cocaine, had boarded the bus at the same stop, were on the top deck when, very soon after, Joseph threw chips at another female passenger, then at Whelan's girlfriend. [1] [2] [3] [4] After Whelan told Joseph to stop doing that, Joseph stabbed him seven times. [1] [2] [3] [4] Joseph walked off along Holloway Road. [1] Whelan died of his injuries in Whittington Hospital in Archway. [1]

Trials

Joseph was tried at the Old Bailey in Central London for Whelan's murder twice in 2007. [2] [3] [4] The jury at both trials failed to reach a verdict, so prosecutors accepted his plea of guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. [2] [3] [4] He has paranoid schizophrenia and was sentenced to an indefinite term at a mental health unit. [2] [3] [4] In 2008, the Home Office carried out an inquiry into why Forest Bank released Joseph when there was a warrant for his arrest. [2]

See also

Related Research Articles

A home invasion, also called a hot prowl burglary, is a sub-type of burglary in which an offender unlawfully enters into a building residence while the occupants are inside. The overarching intent of a hot prowl burglary can be theft, robbery, assault, sexual assault, murder, kidnapping, or another crime, either by stealth or direct force. Hot prowl burglaries are considered especially dangerous by law enforcement because of the potential for a violent confrontation between the occupant and the offender.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Jessica Lunsford</span> Murder and rape of young American girl

Jessica Marie Lunsford was an American nine-year-old girl from Homosassa, Florida, who was murdered in February 2005. Lunsford was abducted from her home in the early morning of February 24, 2005, by John Couey, a 46-year-old convicted sex offender who lived nearby. Couey held her captive over the weekend, during which she was raped and later murdered by being buried alive. The media extensively covered the investigation and trial of Couey.

Brian Mark Blackwell is a British man who, aged 18 years old, killed his parents by stabbing and beating them with a carving knife and claw hammer in their home near Liverpool, England on 25 July 2004.

Anthony Delano Walker was a Black British student of Jamaican descent who was murdered with an ice axe by Michael Barton and Barton's cousin Paul Taylor, in an unprovoked racist attack on the night of 29 July 2005 in Huyton, Merseyside. Walker was eighteen years old and was in his second year of A-levels. He lived with his parents, Gee Walker and Steve Walker, his two sisters and one brother.

Manuel Benitez, who went by the stage name Mark Everett, was an American child actor in Hollywood films and a fugitive wanted by the FBI for the murder of his girlfriend in 2004. On December 23, 2008, he was shot and killed by police officers responding to a hostage situation in El Monte, California.

Levi Bellfield is an English serial killer, sex offender, rapist, kidnapper, and burglar. He was found guilty on 25 February 2008 of the murders of Marsha McDonnell and Amélie Delagrange and the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, and sentenced to life imprisonment. On 23 June 2011, Bellfield was further found guilty of the murder of Milly Dowler. On both occasions, the judge imposed a whole life order, meaning that Bellfield will serve the sentence without the possibility of parole. Bellfield was the first prisoner in history to have received two whole life orders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Billy Ray Waldon</span> American inmate formerly sentenced to death

Billy Ray Waldon, also known as Billy Joe Waldon or Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi Sequoyah, is an American former fugitive, American Indian Movement activist, and Esperantist who in 1986, became the 399th fugitive listed by the FBI on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. Waldon was convicted of the murders of three people during a crime spree in 1985.

Henry Louis Wallace, also known as the “Taco Bell Strangler”, is an American serial killer who killed eleven black women in South Carolina and North Carolina from March 1990 to March 1994. He is currently awaiting execution at Central Prison in Raleigh.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Ray Hatcher</span> American serial killer

Charles Ray Hatcher was an American serial killer. He was convicted in Missouri of one murder, has been linked to four others in Illinois and California, and confessed to having murdered a total of 16 people between 1969 and 1982.

Chao Tzee Cheng was a renowned forensic pathologist in Singapore. Chao was respected for solving several notorious crimes in Singapore, and raised Singapore's level of professionalism in the area of forensics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DLASTHR</span> Australian crime gang

DLASTHR is an Assyrian criminal organization that is active in the south western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. The group is said to have originated from another gang, called the Assyrian Kings. The crime gang was formed by Raymon Youmaran who is now serving a 17-year sentence for the murder of Dimitri DeBaz in 2002.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frederick Grant Dunn</span> American bank robber who died under mysterious circumstances

Frederick Grant Dunn (1905–1959) was an American criminal, burglar and bank robber whose career spanned over four decades from 1919 until his mysterious death in 1959. He led a small gang during the 1940s and 1950s, Dunn becoming referred to by the press as "the modern John Dillinger", and whose activities eventually resulted in his being listed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted in 1958.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivan Milat</span> Australian serial killer (1944–2019)

Ivan Robert Marko Milat, commonly referred to in media as the Backpacker Murderer, was an Australian serial killer who abducted, assaulted, robbed and murdered two men and five women in New South Wales between 1989 and 1992. His modus operandi was to approach backpackers along the Hume Highway under the guise of providing them transport to areas of southern New South Wales, then take his victims into the Belanglo State Forest where he would incapacitate and murder them. Milat is also suspected of having committed many other similar offences and murders around Australia.

The Gage Park stabbings refers to the murders of six members of the Martinez family in 2016 in the Gage Park neighborhood of Chicago in the US.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Yingying Zhang</span> American murder case

On June 9, 2017, Yingying Zhang, a visiting Chinese scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was abducted by Brendt Allen Christensen, a Champaign resident and former physics graduate student at the university. Christensen lured Zhang into his car at a bus stop on campus posing as a police officer with the promise of a ride after she missed a bus, but then took her to his apartment where he raped and murdered her while his wife was out of town for the weekend.

On January 26, 2017, Alianna DeFreeze, a fourteen-year-old girl from Cleveland, Ohio, was kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered by Christopher Whitaker. Whitaker, who had a criminal history involving grand theft, burglary, aggravated robbery, felonious assault, and sexual assault, took DeFreeze to an abandoned house, where he raped her. She was found beaten and stabbed to death using a hammer, a screwdriver, a nut driver, a box cutter, and a drill. DeFreeze, who attended school at E Prep & Village Prep Woodland Hills, was reported missing, causing a city-wide search. Her body was discovered three days later.

On August 5, 2016, Jamarion Rashad Robinson, a 26-year-old African American man who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, was shot 59 times and killed in a police raid in East Point, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. The shooting occurred when at least 14 officers of a Southeast Regional Fugitive Taskforce from at least seven different agencies, led by U.S. Marshals, forcibly entered the apartment of Robinson's girlfriend to serve a warrant for his arrest. The officers were heavily armed, including with submachine guns. The warrant was being served on behalf of the Gwinnett County police and the Atlanta Police Department, and authorities said they had sought his arrest for attempted arson and aggravated assault of a police officer. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) stated that Robinson had been repeatedly ordered to put down a weapon and that officers who had been involved in the shooting reported Robinson fired at them three times.

James Otto Earhart was an American murderer, kidnapper and suspected serial killer executed for the 1987 kidnap-murder of 9-year-old Kandy Janell Kirtland in Bryan, Texas. Suspected in at least one more murder during his lifetime, Earhart was posthumously linked to a 1981 murder via DNA conducted by Parabon NanoLabs in 2019, and authorities are investigating whether he can be linked to any other violent crimes committed in Brazos County.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ramon Torres Hernandez</span> Executed American serial killer

Ramon Torres Hernandez was an American serial killer, kidnapper and rapist responsible for at least three murders in Bexar County, Texas from 1994 to 2001, and is a prime suspect in two others. Following his arrest, he admitted to the killings, was sentenced to death and ultimately executed in 2012.

William Dean Christensen, known as The American Jack the Ripper, was a Canadian-American serial killer who killed and mutilated at least four people in Canada and the United States between 1982 and 1983. Suspected in 20 further killings across several countries, Christensen was convicted of two murders in Pennsylvania and sentenced to life in prison plus an additional 40 years in Maryland for rape, but he died three years into his sentence.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Man murdered on bus was mourning friend
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Prison mix-up leaves burglar free to kill bus passenger who asked him to stop throwing chips
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Schizophrenic admits knife death
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Failings over chip death killer