When she left him, he hunted her down (despite court orders to stay away from her), slashed the tires of her car, and daubed the wall outside her apartment with the word “slag.” He was convicted of harassment in 2009. One girlfriend-whose legs he had cut with broken glass, whose nose he had broken, and whom he had knocked out-later told a reporter that he would attack her if she so much as looked at another man. Other girlfriends went to the police but were too terrified to testify in court, knowing that he would receive a short sentence at most. He managed to convince a jury that he was innocent of the charge of pouring boiling water on, and badly burning, a sleeping girlfriend who had decided to leave him. He was then sent from prison to Rampton, a high-security mental hospital but again, the doctors diagnosed him as a psychopath for whom they could do nothing, and after two months they returned him to prison, from which he was soon-much too soon, as it turned out-released. Shortly after his release from prison, Griffiths committed more violent acts, including holding a knife to a woman’s throat, and wound up imprisoned once more. In prison, doctors reported, Griffiths had a “preoccupation with murder-particularly multiple murder.” They diagnosed him as a violent psychopath that is, he had an intractable personality development that made him likely to commit new violent offenses. At 17, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for cutting the throat (not fatally) of a supermarket security guard who tried to arrest him for shoplifting. He has never worked and has always lived at taxpayers’ expense. He himself used methods more reminiscent of the fourteenth. thesis at the University of Bradford, the subject of his thesis being the methods of homicide used in the city during the nineteenth century.
#Crossbow cannibal killer serial#
A man with a long history of criminal violence became a serial killer while working on a Ph.D. But this is precisely what a British university did recently. If a satirist had come up with the idea of a violent criminal who had spent time in an asylum being admitted by a university to its doctoral program in “homicide studies,” thereafter turning into a serial killer, that satirist would have been denounced for poor taste.
The results, however, are not always funny. Sometimes reality is far in advance of satire when it comes to absurdity. Satire is also dangerous and perhaps even irresponsible, for no idea is too absurd, it seems, for our political masters and bureaucratic elite to take seriously and put into practice-at public expense, of course, never their own. This makes effective satire difficult because reality so soon catches up with it. In some modern societies-and certainly Britain is one of them-satire is prophecy. The Sun/Sipa Press Serial killer Stephen Griffiths
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