By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 10:32 AM on 28th May 2010
'Crossbow cannibal': Stephen Griffiths has been charged with murdering three prostitutes
A criminology student who appeared in court today charged with the murders of three prostitutes told the hearing his name was 'the crossbow cannibal'.
Former public schoolboy Stephen Griffiths, 40, is accused of killing Suzanne Blamires, Shelley Armitage and Susan Rushworth, who all went missing in Bradford.
Griffiths, who was wearing a black shirt and navy blue jeans, appeared at Bradford Magistrates' Court and was remanded to appear at the city's crown court later today.
Asked to confirm his name he said 'the crossbow cannibal'.
Police are understood to be investigating CCTV footage showing a man aiming a crossbow at a woman believed to be one of the victims.
Relatives of some of the victims stared intently at Griffiths, who was flanked by guards in the dock of the court.
He stood to give his 'name' at the end of the brief hearing.
At other times he sat, fidgeting and touching his head, or staring silently at the floor.
Some relatives wiped away tears at the start of the proceedings.
It emerged yesterday that Griffiths benefited from a high quality education at a £9,000-a-year day school and went on to a top university.
Despite a fine start in life, the criminology student soon became obsessed with the history of serial killers and descended into a seedy, internet-addicted existence in a housing association flat.
In addition, his parents split when he was young.
Today, salesman’s son Griffiths, 40, will appear before magistrates accused of the murders of former nurse Suzanne Blamires, 36, Susan Rushworth, 43, and Shelley Armitage, 31.
Police sources confirmed they are investigating at least three other unsolved murders of prostitutes in West Yorkshire.
But last night, in a dramatic widening of the inquiry, it emerged that two decades of files on women who have either vanished or been attacked in red light districts in Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester are being checked for possible links to the case.
Even as the charges were being announced, an exhaustive investigation was already under way into Griffiths’s life and dealings with prostitutes.
A source linked to the inquiry said: ‘We are concerned there is more to this investigation than meets the eye. It may not be just about Bradford.’
Griffiths was arrested on Monday after police were handed graphic CCTV footage showing a prostitute being killed.
Body parts of missing prostitute Suzanne Blamires, 36, were later found dumped in bags in a river and yesterday a major police operation was continuing to find the remains of the other women Susan Rushworth, 43, and Shelley Armitage, 31.
Last night there were claims that aleast one other set of remains has been located, near to those of Miss Blamires.
Missing: (from left) Suzanne Blamires, Shelley Armitage and Susan Rushworth all worked as prostitutes in Bradford and have vanished over the last year
A still from CCTV footage of sex worker Shelley Armitage on Rebecca Street in Bradford City Centre in April, just before she went missing
Crime analysts and specialist search advisors are helping murder squad officers build up a profile of Griffiths’s lifestyle, movements and regular travel patterns.
Details of the charges were announced yesterday afternoon after Griffiths was interviewed by police for three days.
More...
Although West Yorkshire Police have yet to find all of the bodies Peter Mann, a senior Crown Prosecution Service lawyer, said there was ‘sufficient evidence’ to charge Griffiths with three counts of murder.
Extraordinary details have emerged of how the death of a woman, understood to be Miss Blamires, was captured on CCTV inside a block of flats.
The footage showed the woman being attacked and apparently knocked unconscious.
Extensive: Forensic teams scour the area around Griffiths's flat, which is close to the red light district
Meticulous: A female officer carries a bag of potential evidence away to be analysed (left) while forensic officers continue to work on site (right)
The shocking incident took place over the weekend and police were called in when the footage was seen by the building’s caretaker.
Armed police raided Griffiths’ flat on Monday and he was handcuffed and arrested in front of shocked neighbours.
The human remains were spotted by a member of the public five miles away in the River Aire in Shipley the next day.
Although Griffiths was widely regarded as a ‘weirdo’ and loner, he benefited from a public school education and has spent the best part of a decade at university.
The son of a frozen food company rep and a telephonist, Griffiths spent three years at the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
It is not known if his parents, who are not wealthy, paid the full fees or if he benefited from a subsidised place or a scholarship.
Fingertip search: Police were still scouring Griffiths's flat at Holmfield Court flats in Bradford today after his arrest on Monday
Serial killer John Haigh – known as the ‘acid bath murderer’ – also attended Queen Elizabeth Grammar School. He was hanged in 1949 after confessing to nine murders in London and Sussex, dissolving the bodies in concentrated sulphuric acid.
Yesterday former neighbours described Griffiths’ family when Stephen was a child as ‘very weird.’
He shared a council semi in Wakefield with his two siblings and mother Moira. The children never played outside and were considered ‘nerds’.
Stephen was once seen out in the garden killing and dissecting birds.
Griffiths went on to take a degree in psychology and developed an obsessive interest in serial killers.
For the past six years he has been a mature student at Bradford University taking a PhD in criminal justice studies and specialising in homicide. The university authorities refused to confirm details of his course.
The three ‘murder victims’ were all prostitutes struggling with a drink and drugs habit. They were also friends and lived closed to each other.
Miss Rushworth, a grandmother, vanished last June, then a month ago Miss Armitage disappeared. Miss Blamires, who lives just three streets from her, went missing last Friday.
Griffiths is due to appear before Bradford Magistrates this morning and will be remanded in custody to appear before a judge at the city’s Crown Court in the afternoon.
Bradford 'Ripper' suspect: The loner who created a dark and disturbing alter ego in cyberspace
By Paul Harris
The cosmopolitan bustle of a city such as Bradford could easily have allowed Stephen Griffiths to enjoy an ordinary, comfortable life. He could have got a job, found some friends, and slipped quietly into everyday anonymity.
But Stephen Griffiths was not interested in being ordinary. And, as we now know, he certainly didn't want to be anonymous.
Outwardly, he was a 40-year-old oddball - an unmarried, unattached, ex-public schoolboy and perpetual student who never really grew up. In his mind, he was 'Ven Pariah', the confident, dominant character of his disturbingly dark alter ego.
Parallel life: Stephen Griffiths, who is charged with murdering three prostitutes, in a photograph taken from one of his web pages
Through the unbridled freedom of the internet, he created a sinister parallel life - 'the scary image I generally project to the world', as he phrased it.
Pariah was a figure obsessed with crimes and those who commit them. His publicly declared heroes were terrorists, Nazis, outlaws and murderers.
So yesterday - as police faced the prospect that a serial killer might have murdered at least three missing prostitutes, plus others who vanished more than a decade ago - the central question was whether the fantasy world of Ven Pariah had somehow become reality for Stephen Griffiths?
There was certainly a dramatic contrast between the online character and the real thing. Locked in the seclusion of his shabbily kept third-floor flat, Griffiths would spend hours at the computer, sometimes surfing the web until well into the early hours.
The only regular company he reportedly kept there were his pet lizards - plus the mice he bred to feed them.
Griffiths lived in a converted former mill between the city centre and its red light district, where once-proud industrial buildings lie either derelict or are being turned into apartments.
A neighbour who directly overlooked his main window said Griffiths was 'always on the internet, 24/7'. Another said he was 'baffled' as to why a 40-year-old man would spend so much time indoors.
Yet it wouldn't have been difficult for anyone to make the link between Ven Pariah and Stephen Griffiths, the 6ft figure who could occasionally be seen around the cobbled backstreets.
Simply putting his name into a search would bring up a string of pages which Griffiths had created, as well as a trail to those on which he had left messages or images.
Police have shut down many of the sites as they begin to scrutinise every part of their suspect's life.
Looking deeper into the web, however, a startling insight into his dark thoughts emerges.
Moira Griffiths, mother of suspected Yorkshire serial killer Stephen Griffiths. After his parents split up, Griffiths lived with her
On Amazon, for example, he built a wish list of books and DVDs. Most were about real-life crime. They include boxed sets entitled Notorious Killers, Mass Murderers and Britain's Bloodiest Serial Killers.
Also featured are the film Ravenous, whose theme involves vampire cannibals, and David Lynch's horror movie Eraserhead.
On another web page, a line that looked as if it might have come from the Book of Ezekiel could have suggested at first glance that Griffiths had an interest in the Bible.
But the quotation - 'The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides' - was actually an infamous line spoken by Samuel L Jackson in Quentin Tarantino's ultra-violent movie Pulp Fiction.
Last December he reviewed a book entitled Women And The Noose, a history of female criminals and their execution. He gave it a five-star rating and wrote that author Richard Clark did a 'competent job' - and branded a previous reviewer as 'a complete imbecile'.
Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Fred and Rose West, gangsters Bonnie and Clyde, Arab terrorists and Nazi war criminals all featured on his pages.
He joined online groups calling for independence for Yorkshire, and complained to one that Bradford was being 'over-run by chavs'.
No one seemed to recall yesterday if he ever had a full-time job after leaving school. Certainly he has spent a great deal of time in education. It is understood he did a psychology degree at Leeds University, and spent the last six years doing a PhD in criminology at Bradford.
Bradford confirmed yesterday he was a student in the Department of Social Science and Humanities, which runs criminology undergraduate courses, but declined to elaborate.
Griffiths himself had no such reluctance. He once summarised his course to a neighbour by saying he was studying Jack the Ripper and doing 'a PhD in murder'.
But if he could justify his interest in serial killers as purely academic, it appears to have become blurred by the macabre presence of his alter ego.
As Ven Pariah, Griffiths used two main images of himself, one a self-portrait taken bare-chested as he stared into a mirror. He assigned himself the age of 99 and trawled internet sites to hook in like-minded correspondents. Most of them were women. The tone of the exchanges suggests he didn't meet them face to face.
Indeed, it appears he may have watched some of them from afar. Last night it was claimed he sent 'unnerving' messages to a woman he watched leaving a yoga class that she had been conducting.
She didn't report it to police but told fellow yoga teacher Steven Johnson.
He said: 'She'd never met him or knew who he was, but got a message through MySpace saying "I saw you coming out the yoga class. You know you look all right".
She didn't reply and he didn't seem to like that so he sent another message. The messages weren't threatening or sexual. I think he was trying to be friendly, but she found it unnerving.'
At Bradford University, just a short walk from his home, Griffiths was a mature student who found himself surrounded by people half his age.
He didn't make friends easily - and nor did his fellow students try too hard to befriend him. They called him 'the weirdo' and rarely socialised, unless it was to chat about a mutual interest in music. Perhaps surprisingly, his favourites included bands such as Hot Chocolate and Queen.
Extensive: Forensic teams scour the area around Griffiths's flat, which is close to the red light district
He also listed reggae, punk, rap and heavy metal among his tastes, and took a keen interest in the local music scene.
The silent, solitary figure in the audience was a familiar sight at some of the venues where he indulged that interest. Often it would involve walking through the red light district on his way home - he lived less than a mile away from where girls touted for trade.
They knew him, of course - because he had started chatting to them almost as soon as he moved into the area in 1997. But he never wanted sex.
He was happy to share a cigarette with them, and would often hang around with them. One of the girls, Sarah, remembered him from as far back as 2000.
'He would always be hanging around us,' she said. 'He always told us he was gay.'
In his long, dark, leather coat, often dressed in 'Goth' style, the 40-year-old seemed at ease with them. As a child, however Griffiths was awkward and aloof.
His mother was a telephonist and his father, a frozen food company rep when Stephen was born in 1969, was often seen in a suit and tie. It wasn't that common in the area of Dewsbury where he spent his first years.
His parents split up while he was young and he lived with his mother Moira, and a brother and sister, in a council semi in Wakefield.
A neighbour who remembers them well said: 'They were odd, all of them.'
Moira didn't officially work and was believed to be on benefits. Perhaps significantly, neighbours widely believed she had a secret night-time existence.
'She used to go out most nights at 11.30 or midnight, and always seeing different men who would come and go from the house,' said the neighbour.
She vividly recalled the one and only night she agreed to go out socially with Moira. They went to a nightclub and Moira 'immediately began snogging men'.
The neighbour described Stephen and his brother Philip as 'nerds'. 'They never went out, mixed with other children in the street or played outside.'
Stephen's enthusiasm for knowledge helped to earn him a place at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, a prestigious independent school which boasts that it 'exists to nurture respect, responsibility and the achievement of excellence'.
Fees are now more than £9,000 a year and alumni include England rugby star Mike Tindall.
The school confirmed yesterday that Griffiths attended for three years until 1986, making him a few months short of his 17th birthday when he left.
His mother, now 61, lives in a run-down block of flats behind Dewsbury station.
A neighbour there said Stephen used to visit often. 'He's a bit strange but I always thought he was harmless,' the neighbour said.
'Once I invited him to share a can of lager with me on the grass outside and it was suddenly like he was my best friend. He seemed quite lonely.'
Additional reporting by Chris Brooke and Dan Newling
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