Crossbow Cannibal: 'He killed because it was easy' Serial Killer DocumentaryStephen Griffiths, the self-styled 'Crossbow Cannibal', knew the perfect place to find victims and escape detection. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy visit Bradford's red-light district – a magnet for vulnerable women and violent, predatory menDonna and Louise know a thing or two about scouting for punters. Their beat on City Road, a major artery moments from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/bradford city centre, is a strategic choice. "If the vice squad stops [the punters], they can say they're heading home," Donna explains. The nearby backroads, on the other hand, lead nowhere in particular – and it is there, amid condemned terraces, that the most desperate girls can be found.According to Donna and Louise, up to 100 women tout the streets around them. "Sharon, Tessa, Tracy and Cindy…" Their list peters out. The two women have smoked the last of their crack, injected their last spoon of heroin, and they know the "rattles" of withdrawal will soon overtake their bodies. "And there's worse than the rattles," Donna says, looking increasingly desperate as the cars drive past.Here, just moments from Centenary Square, with its opulent Venetian-style City Hall, the only rule is "don't poach trade from other girls"."Now and again someone gets a slap," says Donna, who lost her front teeth in a row over territory and never got around to replacing them. These days there are no pimps to settle a score. "Crack is the pimp," says Louise, identifying one of the most radical changes in the oldest of businesses. The women working here are controlled by nothing other than their addictions. And there are no conditions too rough, or warnings too stark, to preclude a night working for money to buy the drugs on which they depend.Showing us around this dark quarter of a grand old industrial city, an area dominated by the textile mills that once brought prosperity and pride to the West Riding, Donna and Louise identify another critical change. Even though Bradford is, according to West Yorkshire police, one of the most pervasively monitored cities in Britain, the women are alone and out of sight. Venom, West Yorkshire police's pioneering CCTV street surveillance and car number plate recognition system, is a network of more than 100 cameras. It was this initiative that helped catch the killers of PC Sharon Beshenivsky in November 2005. But six years on, and with a serial killer only recently removed from these streets, the red-light district is still a collective blind spot.According to police chiefs, the situation in Bradford is not unique. A raft of new legislation has served only to shunt thousands of women like Donna and Louise out of well-lit, residential locales and into desolate, semi-industrial wastelands."Our foolish laws mean that while prostitution is not in itself illegal, working in a brothel is," says Max McLean, who has served in West Yorkshire CID for almost three decades and recently retired as detective chief superintendent. "This gives a clear message to those who work in prostitution: you're on your own, and out on the streets."It is a message that has reached other quarters as well. According to criminologists and detectives who studied the case, it was this realisation that first brought self-styled "Crossbow Cannibal" Stephen Griffiths to this area of Bradford. For more than a decade he roamed Bradford's grid, befriending its sex workers, even moving to a top-floor flat in a converted Victorian textile factory on Thornton Road so he could be at the heart of the action. Noting how poorly monitored the area was, and witnessing the increasing disconnection and desperation of the women working there, he began to plot his crimes.In June 2009, the criminology student, who was researching a PhD entitled Homicide In An Industrial City, started hunting the grid's workers with a crossbow, before dismembering them in his bath. Some parts he cooked. Others he ate raw. Fragments were bagged and dumped in the river Aire. In the winter of 2006, lorry driver Steve Wright had embarked on a similar spree in Ipswich, murdering five sex workers in an industrial dead zone. "Griffiths and Wright consciously zeroed in on these voids and the invisible women society had pushed between the cracks," says David Wilson, professor of criminology at Birmingham City University. "They knew they could do whatever they pleased. They killed because it was easy."By the time Griffiths appeared in court last December, the body of his first victim, Susie Rushworth, had still not been located. Of his second victim, Shelley Armitage, only the shoulders, vertebrae and connective tissue had been found. Suzanne Blamires, his third victim, had also been dismembered, with police able to recover only 81 fragments of her corpse.In both cases, it was the serial killers who became the main focus of the story. Little attention was paid to the women who had died, or to ...
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