serial Killers

Summer of the Strangler

The summer of 1986 saw London’s elderly living in fear as a burglar graduated to assault and murder

His left hand clamped over her mouth, stifling her cries for help, suffocating her. His knee was firmly planted on her chest, pinning her to the bed, his weight holding her frail body in place. His strength far outmatched hers, rendering her struggles ineffectual.  His right hand clutched her throat, grip tightening, cutting off her airway, starving her body and brain of oxygen.  As she finally slumped, unbreathing, her life passing from her abused body, he carefully laid her down and pulled the bed sheets around her, leaving her looking as if she had passed away peacefully in her sleep.
Unconsciousness and death may have come mercifully quickly, or he may have drawn out the suffering, prolonging the terror and enjoying the control he held over another’s life. However it happened that April night in Wandsworth, London, Eileen Emms would go on to be considered the first in a string of elderly victims of Kenneth Erskine, a deeply disturbed, homeless addict who was driven to harm others by a voice inside his head. This was a man the press would go on to call ‘the Stockwell Strangler’.
Eileen’s death was initially written off as exactly what it appeared to be – an elderly lady, finally overcome by time’s ravages, dying peacefully in her sleep. Somewhat tragically, even the signs of bruising located around her throat and on her chest where Erskine’s knee had held her down went unnoticed by the doctor that attended after her home help found her on the morning of 9 April, 1986. It wasn’t until it was noticed that a television had gone missing that the police were called and the first suspicions that something more sinister had occurred began to form. Scouring the scene for clues, the police found little evidence to help them identify the killer; only a short hair thought to have originated from the head of an Afro-Caribbean person. It wasn’t much to go on, but the police began their investigation in earnest.
A retired teacher who lived alone in an untidy basement flat, Eileen’s death marked Erskine’s transition from mere burglar to full-blown murderer, though the 24-year-old from Putney was certainly no stranger to irrational, violent urges. Hindsight suggests that Erskine had begun to tread the dark path of a serial killer many years before claiming his first victim; as a child, his parents and teachers often had to deal with him threatening or attacking them, his siblings, or other children. As his behaviour worsened into his teenage years, his family cut him loose, no longer willing or able to cope with his violent tendencies. Rejected by his family and with no friends to turn to, Erskine became a drifter, addict and thief, though a string of minor convictions and time spent in jail suggested that he was in fact far from the most masterful of criminals.
At 18, the urge to harm surfaced again, and Erskine stabbed his boyfriend of the time without warning or provocation. The young man survived, though the incident was not reported to the police. Perhaps the voice that Erskine later claimed urged, threatened and cajoled him into killing had been there from the very beginning, a constant companion that remained with him throughout his life, an ever-present devil on his shoulder.
A beast unleashed
It was two months before another, similar attack was reported – this time the victim was 67-year-old widow Janet Cockett. Like Eileen before her, Janet had been strangled in her bed, ribs bruised and broken where her attacker had pinned her to the mattress with his knees, but this time the killer had gone much further: Janet had been sexually assaulted, her night gown torn from her before being neatly folded and placed beside the bed. It seemed Janet’s attacker had experienced some form of internal conflict whilst carrying out her murder – family photographs on a nearby mantelpiece had been turned away or placed face-down, as if Janet’s abuser had on some level realised the shameful nature of his acts even as he performed them and couldn’t bear the thought of being witnessed. This time partial palm prints were found by the police – one on the bathroom window, thought to have been left open on that warm, summer night, and a second on a plant pot.
Janet was the first victim to live in Stockwell, the area  with which Erskine would later become forever associated. Details of Eileen’s and Janet’s murders were compared by the police immediately, but with two months and five miles separating the crimes and little common evidence, they couldn’t be certain this was the work of the same man. Even with the palm prints, the detectives were no closer to identifying the killer – unlike with fingerprints, there was no digital database of palm prints available to compare against at the time.
On 27 June, just 18 days after Janet Cockett’s murder, there was another attack, just west of Stockwell in Clapham. Seventy-three-year-old Fred Prentice awoke to find an intruder entering his room in the care home he lived in. Fred managed to turn on the bedside light as the man attacked, wrapping his hands around the pensioner’s throat as he hissed the words “Kill…kill… kill” over and over. During the struggle Fred was able to activate a silent alarm, and the man fled, leaving Fred with the dubious honour of becoming the only victim to survive an encounter with the Stockwell Strangler. For the first time since the attacks began, the police had a witness that could describe Erskine’s face, though they still had no name. The evidence was beginning to gather, but it was a race against time to capture him before he struck again. Erskine didn’t give them much of a chance – presumably unfulfilled and frustrated by the interrupted attack at the residential home, he found a new target the very next night. Or rather, targets.
Crossing back to Stockwell, Erskine broke into another care home, this time attacking two men, neighbours Zbigniew Stabrava and Valentine Gleim. Both were strangled and sexually assaulted in their beds. The police were called when staff spotted him stalking the corridors, but by the time they arrived he had made his escape. The police stepped up their investigation, determined to catch this as-yet nameless killer as soon as possible, drafting in extra officers and posting overnight vigils on a number of residential homes for the elderly in South London.
Despite the increase in police activity, Erskine had been bitten by the killer bug and more victims followed – William Carmen, a widower living in Islington, was found strangled in his bed on 8 July, the sheets pulled up to his chin just like those of Eileen Emms three months earlier. His flat had clearly been ransacked and several hundred pounds in savings taken. Trevor Thomas’ body was found in his bath in Clapham on the 12th, though it was clear he had been dead for some time and any forensic evidence present was too deteriorated to prove useful. Nonetheless, it seemed likely, and is thought by many to be another of the Strangler’s vicious attacks.
Finally, William Downes, resident of the same Stockwell estate that Janet Cockett had lived on, was found strangled and sexually assaulted in his home on 20 July. Once more, Erskine had left partial palm prints at the scene. For the first time, the detectives had solid physical evidence linking some of the murders.
Staking out the Strangler
Then finally the investigators got a result, and months of painstaking and intense work paid off. Years of arrest records of burglars and thieves caught in the local area had been manually searched through and compared, and a match was found for the palm prints lifted at Janet Cockett and William Downes’ homes. The police finally knew the name of the man they sought, but with Erskine having no fixed address, actually finding and apprehending him was going to be far from straightforward.
As the police made desperate enquiries at hostels and squats across South London, Erskine claimed a final victim – 80-year-old Florence Tisdall, found on 23 July abused and murdered in the Strangler’s now all-too-familiar style in her flat near Putney Bridge.
It was the discovery that Erskine had been claiming benefits from the Department of Social Security that ultimately provided the break the detectives needed, and the opportunity to finally end Erskine’s murderous spree. Knowing their man was due to collect his next unemployment benefit payment from the Department of Social Security’s Keyworth House office in Southwark on 28 July, detectives staked out the building, waiting for Erskine to deliver himself into their hands. Sure enough, a young man of Afro-Caribbean descent, the man first described to them by Fred Prentice, joined the queue of claimants. Cuffed quickly and without so much as a struggle, Erskine was calmly led away to face judgement for his evil acts.
After months of instilling fear into the heart of the capital’s senior citizens, the Stockwell Strangler was finally caught and the elderly residents of South London could once more sleep safely in their beds.

Erskine was a troubled youth, a time bomb waiting to explode into acts of violence that would shock Britain

Kenneth Erskine

ABOVE Erskine’s victims were all pensioners, too weak to defend themselves against his savage attacks

Janet had been strangled in her bed, ribs bruised and broken where her attacker had pinned her to the mattress with his knees

Keyworth House in Southwark, where Erskine was finally arrested whilst waiting to claim unemployment benefit

Despite the increase in police activity, Erskine had been bitten  by the killer bug and more victims followed

The Strangler’s victims all lived within a few square miles, with four of his seven murders taking place in Stockwell

Erskine was tried in 1988 and found guilty of seven counts of murder and one of attempted murder

Dealing with the disturbed

Considered to have a mental age of 11, Erskine proved difficult to interview, often staring out of the window or giggling during questioning. He admitted to stealing from the homes of his  victims – police found that he held multiple bank accounts into which he had deposited the proceeds of theft and burglary over the years, including money paid in on the day of William Carmen’s murder – but initially claimed to remember nothing of the murders, insisting at one point that someone must have followed him, entering the properties after he left and killing the occupants. Later, he conceded that perhaps he had committed the murders, though without realising or remembering, telling detectives  about a woman’s voice that haunted him, urging him to kill.  His limited reasoning ability and unwillingness to admit responsibility for the murders suggested that obtaining a full confession was unlikely.
Erskine’s palm prints found at the scene had tied him to two of the murders, and Fred Prentice picked him out of an identity parade as the man that had tried to strangle him, but police still needed more to secure convictions for the other deaths that summer. They turned to the press, releasing a photo of Erskine and asking for information from the public. Diane Keena came forward, identifying Erskine as a man she had seen acting strangely on Putney Bridge just an hour after the murder of Florence Tisdall. With the rest of the evidence gathered against him, it proved enough to convict him, and after an 18-day trial in January, 1988, Erskine was found guilty of seven murders and the attempted murder of Fred Prentice, and sentenced to a minimum of 40 years in jail. Erskine, judged after his trial to be suffering from serious mental disorder, is now being held at Broadmoor Hospital, his murder convictions reduced to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, where his mental state continues to deteriorate.

Erskine was moved to Broadmoor Hospital after psychological assessment concluded that he was mentally disturbed

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