It was not that he could not ignore the urge to kill instead, he chose to do so, the court heard. Griffiths, who had never held down a full-time job despite an extensive education, suffered from a complex and untreatable personality disorder, it was claimed. "It is one thing to terrorise and kill a victim but to terrorise, kill, dismember and then eat parts of a victim is to take the exercise of power to another level," the judge said, adding that Griffiths had shown no remorse or any compassion for the families of those he killed. Imposing a whole life tariff on the 40-year-old, Mr Justice Openshaw said it was apparent Griffiths received sexual gratification from his killing spree. The prosecution read out details of how he dismembered the women with power tools, turning his bathtub into a "slaughterhouse". In an emotionally charged hearing at Leeds Crown Court in which the rage and anguish of his victims' friends and relatives repeatedly spilled over in a angry confrontations with the gaunt figure in the dock, Griffiths was given three life sentences for crimes described by the trial judge as "wicked and monstrous". Yesterday the criminology PhD student, whose murder weapons of choice were a powerful crossbow and a knife, was told he would never be released from jail after admitting killing and eating body parts from three vulnerable sex workers, Suzanne Blamires, Shelley Armitage and Suzanne Rushworth, who plied the streets close to his flat on the edge of Bradford's notorious red light district. In the end he waited until shortly before his 40th birthday to indulge his fantasies of control and power over terrified women.īut Griffiths took even this twisted desire to the "ultimate level", planning the deaths of three women, cannibalising and dismembering them before painstakingly trying to cover his tracks. The former public school boy even told one probation officer that his murder career would begin "in his early 30s". It was a revelation that he shared with the psychiatrists he saw regularly since his teenage years. Stephen Griffiths had long been aware of his compulsion to kill.
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