Detectives investigating the alleged murder of three vice girls by “Crossbow Cannibal” Stephen Griffiths last night confirmed they are probing possible links with the unsolved murders of two more prostitutes. Stephen Griffiths, 40, has been charged with killing three women who vanished over the past 11 months.

Stephen Griffiths is charged with the murder of Ms Blamires, Susan Rushworth and Shelley Armitage, all of whom worked as prostitutes in the Yorkshire city. Now detectives fear the crimes could be linked to the murders of Michaela Hague, 25, and 19-year-old Dawn Shields, who vanished from Sheffield’s vice zone 50 miles away. Street walkers befriended by Griffiths as they plied their trade near his flat have told detectives he was a regular visitor to red-light districts in South Yorkshire. He even offered to accompany one prostitute to other towns where he told her she could make extra cash because there were more men there. The 35-year-old said she was stunned when Griffiths – who was doing a Bradford University PhD on serial killers – appeared in court on Friday, introducing himself as “the Crossbow Cannibal”.

“I can’t believe he’s the same man who was like a brother to me for years. He fed me, washed my clothes and took me in when I was on the streets and had nowhere else to go. He never harmed me and even offered to protect me while I was out on the streets. He told me I’d do much better business if I went with him to Sheffield, Barnsley and Doncaster. He said he went regularly to red-light districts there and there was more cash to be made than in Bradford.”

Griffiths was arrested last Monday after a caretaker in the block of flats where he lived in Bradford discovered shocking CCTV footage of Suzanne Blamires being beaten by a man who then fired a crossbow into her skull. Her dismembered body has since been recovered from the River Aire four miles away in Shipley. Police are also probing claims that part of her body may have been eaten by her killer. They are still searching for the remains of the other two women.

While searching the perimeter detectives have also found a “Ripper kit” of knives and hacksaws stashed inside a bag and dumped in a river. Inside were the razor sharp blades which may have been used to dismember the street-walker victims. Human tissue may also be inside but police are waiting for the bag to dry to avoid damaging DNA evidence before opening it. It was pulled from the Aire in Shipley, West Yorks – four-miles from self-proclaimed Crossbow Cannibal Stephen Griffiths’ flat.

Griffiths is on suicide watch in a single cell in a health care unit in the “Mansion”, a top-security Wakefield, West Yorks, which houses some of Britain’s most notorious serial killers and sex offenders. “Crossbow Cannibal” Stephen Griffiths said he had a vision that he would be locked up in the jail dubbed “Monster Mansion”. A prison insider revealed: “He said he used to look up at the high walls and bars over the windows and think what it would be like to be inside. Griffiths said the last time he walked around the jail was about three weeks before he was arrested. He said he had a sort of vision that he would be locked up in Wakefield very soon.”

-Griffiths will next appear before Bradford crown court, via videolink, on 7 June.-

-articles from skcentral.com rewritten and adapted by admin-

A former public schoolboy studying for a PhD in criminology was charged yesterday with murdering three prostitutes. Stephen Griffiths, 40, faces charges over the death of three sex workers who disappeared over an 11-month period in the red-light area of Bradford and was arrested on Monday.

Mr Griffiths, who was brought up in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, was educated from 1983 to 1986 at the town’s fee-paying Queen Elizabeth Grammar School. He later gained a degree in psychology at the University of Leeds. For the past six years he has been studying at the University of Bradford, he was comparing modern policing methods with investigations by detectives in the 19th century.

Stephen Griffiths, described as a model student by those who knew him at Bradford University, was charged yesterday with the murders of Ms Blamires and two more women, Shelley Armitage, 31, and Susan Rushworth, 43. He was arrested on Monday after police obtained CCTV footage of one of the alleged murders as it unfolded in the block of flats where he lived on Thornton Road, in the heart of the red-light district.

The film is understood to show Suzanne Blamires, 36, being murdered by a man who attacked and knocked her to the ground before using a crossbow to fire a bolt into her head. He then dragged her from view. A man was later seen carrying bin bags and a rucksack from the block of flats. Parts of Ms Blamires’ dismembered body were found on Tuesday, floating in a river three miles away. Further body parts were recovered in the last few days.

“An examination of human remains recovered from the River Aire have confirmed a positive match to Suzanne Blamires,” a police spokesman said. “Inquiries into the incident remain ongoing and a 40-year-old man remains under arrest in custody. He is being questioned on suspicion of the murder of Suzanne Blamires, Shelley Armitage and Susan Rushworth.” Detectives questioning Mr Griffiths are initially focusing on those three cases but intend to include further unsolved murders of sex workers in the area dating back several years. These include the cases of Rebecca Hall, 19, the mother of a four-month-old son, whose badly-beaten body was found in an alleyway near Holmfield Court in April 2001, and Yvonne Fitt, 33, who was last seen alive in Bradford before she was found stabbed to death in 1992.

Neighbors described Griffiths as a loner. He is thought to have regularly posted on web forums under the name “Ven Pariah” and to have posted pictures of himself on social networking sites. On one social networking site, which has been taken down since his arrest, he described himself as “the misanthrope who brought hate into Heaven”. In a separate posting, he wrote: “Humanity is not merely a biological condition. It is also a state of mind. On that basis I am a pseudo-human at best.” The web page, on which he gave his age as 99 and listed his mood as “evil”, also included a quotation from the book of Ezekiel – “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides” – and listed his academic interests as “aggregate homicide, multiple homicide, capital punishment and targeted political homicide”.

Stephen Griffiths has been under arrest for 24 hours and is due to appear before Bradford magistrates this morning and at the city’s Crown Court later.

For more details about this case, visit a DailyMail article I am the crossbow cannibal’: ‘Ripper’ suspect charged with murder of three prostitutes in extraordinary court appearance.

-articles from various sources combined by admin-

New Evidence suggest that notorious serial killer, Jack The Ripper, who stalked London’s East End, butchering prostitutes and terrorizing the population, might have been a woman. This story first appeared on May, 2006, but now there is more reason to believe those speculations are true. His victims were all prostitutes, murdered and mutilated in the foggy alleyways of Whitechapel. By the surgical nature of the wounds, the killer was assumed to have some surgical knowledge.

An Australian scientist has used swabs from letters supposedly sent to police by the Ripper to build a partial DNA profile of the killer. The results suggest that the person who murdered and mutilated at least five women from 1888 onwards may have been a woman.

Ian Findlay, a professor of molecular and forensic diagnostics had developed a profiling technique that could extract DNA from a single cell or strand of hair up to 160 years old, while conventional DNA sampling methods required at least 200 cells.

He examined the material, which was kept by Scotland Yard until 1961. It includes letters sent to police at the time, some of them signed “Jack the Ripper”. Most are believed to be fakes, but a handful are thought to have been written by the killer. Dr Findlay took swabs from the back of stamps and from the gum used to seal envelopes, and possible bloodstains. He took his haul back to Brisbane, where – concentrating on swabs from the so-called “Openshaw letter” (click on the picture for the full size view of the letter), the one believed most likely to be genuine – he extracted the DNA and then amplified the information to create a profile. The results were “inconclusive” and not forensically reliable, but he did construct a partial profile and based on this analysis, he said, “it’s possible the Ripper could be female”.

The chief suspects were all man, and only Frederick Abberline, the detective who led the investigation, thought it possible the killer was a woman. This was because the fifth victim, Mary Kelly, was “seen” by witnesses hours after she was killed. Abberline thought this was the murderer running away, in Kelly’s clothes.

The only female suspect was Mary Pearcey, who was convicted of murdering her lover’s wife, Phoebe Hogg, in 1890 and hanged. She apparently employed a similar modus operandi to the Ripper.

-article by Kathy Marks, rewritten and addapted by admin-