Colin Ireland

At age 16, in 1970, Ireland committed his first crime. His general unhappiness with both his schooling and his home life made him decide to run away to London. He needed money to get there and stole the £4 he needed. He was caught, issued with a ‘fit person order’ and sent to Finchton Manor School in Kent. A fee-paying ‘free expression’ school, Finchton only accepted boys who had both intelligence and emotional problems. Ireland’s fees were paid by the local County Council as part of the care order.

Once again, Ireland was teased and bullied and, in a gesture of frustration and revenge, set fire to one of the boys’ belongings. This was his first act of arson but he later admitted to having had an unusual interest in fire from a young age and had recurring nightmares about fire throughout his life. A teacher managed to put the fire out, Ireland was sent away from Finchton Manor with a social worker and no charges were brought against him. He immediately ran away to London once more.

Homeless and with no money, Ireland soon resorted to robbery. At age 17, he was caught and sentenced to spend time at Hollesly Bay. It was a borstal, a British reform school for youths between 16 and 22, providing therapy and vocational training. Ireland hated his time there and early one summer’s morning, managed to escape and run away. It was not long before he was caught by the police and sent to serve the remainder of his sentence, from 1971 to 1972, in the far stricter borstals of Rochester and Grendon.

Released at age 18, Ireland met his first girlfriend but described his mental state at this time as confused and unhappy. He said, “I was entering what I call the lost period, common to those who suffer from psychopathy. …In between custodial periods, a lot of the 70s were a blur. I spent my time detached and wondering.”

In December 1975, age 21, Ireland was found guilty of two counts of burglary, stealing a car and damage to property and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He served 12 months in crowded London prisons before being transferred to Lewes prison. Upon his release in November 1976, Ireland went to live in Swindon where he met his second girlfriend and began his first sexual relationship. She was a black West Indian woman, five years his senior and the mother of four children. They lived together for a few months and planned to marry, although they never did.

In 1977, Ireland was found guilty of ‘demanding with menace’ and sentenced to a further 18 months in prison. It was a pattern that repeated itself and included being sentenced to two years imprisonment for robbery in 1980, two months for ‘attempted deception’ in 1981 and six months for ‘going equipped to cheat’ in 1985. Between his bouts in prison, being unskilled, Ireland took whatever temporary work he could find, including working as a volunteer fireman, a restaurant chef, a volunteer at a homeless shelter and a bouncer at various bars and a gay nightclub.

It was during a stint as a chef in London that Ireland met Virginia Zammit in 1981, at a lecture on Survivalism. She was 36, nine years his senior, had a daughter of five and was confined to a wheelchair after a motor vehicle accident paralysed her at age 24. The couple were happily married in 1982 and Ireland adored his wife and stepdaughter. The family lived in estate housing in Holloway and Ireland was known to the locals as ‘The Gentle Giant’. Unfortunately, the brief happiness and stability was not to last and he was soon back in prison and becoming increasingly aggressive. The couple were divorced in 1987 after Ireland admitted to having an affair with another woman.

In 1989, Ireland met Janet Young, the landlady of the Globe pub in Buckfast, Devon. She had two children, aged 11 and 13, and lived with them above the pub. Within a week of meeting, Ireland moved in with Young and within three months, they were married at Newton Abbot Register Office. Things seemed to be going smoothly, but after only four months of marriage, Ireland took his wife and her children to his mother’s house in Margate for a visit. Whilst there, he took his wife’s car, withdrew money from their joint bank account and disappeared.

By 1991, his second marriage had failed and he moved to Southend-on-Sea, Essex, roughly 40 miles (60km) east of London, on the north side of the Thames estuary. Here he worked at a shelter for the homeless, whilst being homeless himself. He was well liked at the shelter and felt an empathy with the people there. By December 1992, some of the staff began making unfounded allegations against Ireland and he eventually resigned. He was becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of direction in his life and was tired of having to continually seek unskilled work.

In early 1993, at age 39, a fraught and rage-filled Ireland who had, until this point in his life, only committed minor offences, made a New Year’s resolution to become a serial killer. He was fascinated by serial killers and had spent many hours meticulously studying them. He was aware of Geographic Profiling that helps investigators locate the killer, who usually commits the crimes in a certain radius (about 7 miles) from where they live. For this reason, Ireland chose London as his ‘murder ground’, deliberately misleading the police and keeping them far away from his Southend-on-Sea home.

The Coleherne pub in Brompton Road, West London had a reputation in the gay community as a place to easily find a partner for the night. Punters would wear colour-coded handkerchiefs to indicate their sexual proclivities, making cruising easy and avoiding misunderstandings. Ireland said, “I went to the Coleherne that evening and I felt that if I was approached by one of the group that tended to trigger feelings in me – masochistic men – I felt there was a likelihood I would kill.”

Ireland began frequenting the Coleherne and on 8 March 1993, he was posing as a ‘top’ (S&M master/dominant partner) when he met his first victim, 45-year-old choreographer Peter Walker. Walker, a ‘bottom’ (S&M slave/submissive partner) had approached Ireland in the pub and the two left together, heading off to Walker’s apartment in Battersea. Walker willingly allowed Ireland to gag him with knotted condoms and bind him with cord to the four-poster bed, for what he thought was some foreplay but which soon turned excessively violent. Ireland had come prepared with a ‘murder kit’ containing some cord, a knife, a pair of gloves and a change of clothes. Once his victim was helpless, Ireland used a dog lead, a belt and his fists to administer a vicious beating and then at the height of his fury, pulled a plastic bag over Walker’s head and killed him by suffocation.

After burning the dead man’s pubic hair (he wanted to know what it smelled like), Ireland spent time cleaning the apartment and removing any items that may have connected him to the crime. It was whilst he was looking through Walker’s personal effects that he found out Walker was HIV positive. The discovery so incensed him that he pushed a condom into the dead man’s mouth and another into his nostril. He also left two teddy bears in an approximation of a ‘69’ position on the bed next to Walker’s body.

Worried that he would raise suspicions with the neighbours, Ireland remained in Walker’s apartment until the following morning. He then travelled home to Southend on public transport, blending in with the early morning rush hour commuters. He disposed of his clothes, gloves and shoes from the crime scene by throwing them out of a train window, within the boundaries of the London transport system, something he was to do with all his murders. Ireland had locked Walker’s dogs in one of the rooms of the apartment before the murder and later that day, he called the Samaritans to tell them where the dogs were, in order for them to be released. It was later surmised that this call was made to indirectly lead authorities to Ireland’s first victim.

The police soon discovered Walker’s body but had little evidence with which to proceed. They assumed it was an S&M sex game gone too far and turned to the gay community. They were not forthcoming, for two main reasons. Firstly, the police did not have a good reputation with them, often ignoring gay-related abuse and crime. Secondly, the day before Walker’s body was found, a new ruling had been passed, making S&M between consenting adults illegal. No gay man wanted to come forward with information, lest they be prosecuted themselves.

After a two-month break, Ireland felt the need to kill again and returned to the Coleherne pub on 28 May 1993 to search for his second victim. The man was 37-year-old librarian Christopher Dunn, who told Ireland he liked to be dominated and invited him back to his flat in Wealdstone. After watching an S&M video, Ireland told Dunn to go and get ready. He found Dunn in the bedroom, naked except for a studded belt and a body harness. The modus operandi was roughly the same as before. Making Dunn lie face down on the bed, Ireland tied his feet together and handcuffed him. Once again he beat and tortured his victim, holding a lighter flame to Dunn’s testicles, before suffocating him to death by stuffing pieces of cloth into his mouth.

This time, Ireland decided to reimburse himself for expenses incurred for the murders, as he was unemployed and living on state benefits. Prior to the murder, he forced Dunn to hand over his bank cash-card and PIN (Personal Identification Number). After cleaning up the crime scene, he stayed until he felt it was safe to leave. He then got rid of the gloves and shoes he had worn and went to Dunn’s bank and withdrew £200 from his account. Two days after the murder, a friend discovered Dunn’s body, on 30 May 1993. Once again, the police assumed a sex game gone wrong and did not immediately link the Dunn and Walker deaths.

Ireland’s thirst for murder was becoming stronger and a mere six days after the Dunn killing, he returned to the Coleherne for his third victim, on 4 June 1993. The man was 35-year-old Perry Bradley III, the son of a serving US congressman and himself, a businessman from Texas. Ireland accompanied Bradley to his Kensington apartment and soon suggested tying Bradley up as foreplay. Bradley was reluctant, as he was not into S&M, but relented when Ireland told him it was a necessary element in his own arousal. Ireland tied Bradley, face down on the bed, and placed a noose around his neck. He then demanded Bradley’s cash-card and PIN, threatening to torture him with a cigarette lighter if he did not comply. Frightened, Bradley offered to accompany Ireland to the cash point but he refused, making Bradley give him the PIN and telling him to go to sleep, which surprisingly, he did. Whilst he was asleep, Ireland killed him by slowly tightening the noose. He then placed a doll on Bradley’s dead body.

After conducting his usual and thorough search and clean up, Ireland left the apartment the following morning with £100 he had found and went to the bank to withdraw a further £200 from Bradley’s account. Once again, the police investigating the murder did not link it to the Dunn or Walker killings.

Ireland was becoming frustrated at the failings of the police to link his first three murders and the lack of publicity they were getting. He sought fame and only three days after his last murder, Ireland decided to kill again. On 7 June 1993, he returned to the Coleherne where he met his fourth victim, 33-year-old Andrew Collier who worked as a warden at a sheltered housing complex. They returned to Collier’s Dalston flat, where he consented to being bound to the bed and handcuffed. Once again, Ireland demanded his victim’s bankcard and PIN and when Collier refused, strangled him with a noose.

In the search and clean up, Ireland discovered that Collier was HIV positive and hadn’t told him. His fury led him to burn various parts of Collier’s body and to strangle his cat. In an act of humiliation, he put a condom on Collier’s penis and another on the cat’s tail, positioning the cat so that its mouth was around Collier’s penis and its tail was in Collier’s mouth. Ireland took the mug he had used and £70 he had found in the flat and left the next morning during rush hour.

Police finally linked two of the murders, those of Walker and Collier, due to the similarities of the scenes, as well as the strange use of condoms. They were beginning to suspect the work of a serial killer and had started to collate information on similar murders in the London area. They had also lifted a set of fingerprints from a window frame in Collier’s flat that they later discovered were Ireland’s.

On 12 June 1993, Ireland called the Kensington police, claiming he had killed four men and they had to stop him from killing again. He then called the Battersea police, asking them if they were interested in the murder of Peter Walker and why they had stopped the investigation. He told them he would kill again, as he had always dreamed of committing the perfect murder.

Ireland’s fifth and final victim was 41-year-old Maltese chef Emanuel Spiteri, who enjoyed dressing in leather. On the night of 12 June 1993 they met at the Coleherne and then went, via a series of trains, to Spiteri’s flat in Catford. Immediately upon arrival, Ireland bound Spiteri to his bed, handcuffed him, put a noose around his neck and demanded his cash-card and PIN. Ireland then strangled Spiteri with the noose. He cleaned up and watched television until he felt it safe to leave the following morning. Before leaving however, he attempted to set fire to the flat. He hoped the whole block would catch fire, but in fact the fire went out in Spiteri’s bedroom, where it had been started.

He had now killed four times in 17 days and on 13 June 1993, Ireland rang the police, telling them to look for a body at the scene of a fire in south London. He also told them he had read many books on serial killers and that to reach a ‘serial’ classification by the FBI, the killer had to have five victims. He said he could now stop, as he had killed five times, adding he just wanted to see if it could be done and would probably not do it again. On 15 June 1993, Spiteri’s landlady called the police to report his death.