The Camden Ripper
In December 2002, fifty-one-year-old Tony Hardy’s life had spiraled into an abyss of deviant sex, drugs, alcohol, and depression, but it hadn’t always been that way.
Born in 1952, Tony was raised in a lower-middle-class family with his four siblings. His father had spent his life working in the gypsum mines of Staffordshire, England, and Tony was expected to do the same. At an early age Tony knew he was different. He knew he was destined for greatness and had a deep burning desire to make much more of himself than just a lowly laborer like his father.
Tony started off on the right foot. He knew that he would need to study hard if he wanted to make a better life for himself. He buried his nose in his books, excelled in school, and by his late teens was admitted to the Imperial College London. It was an elite school located just around the corner from Kensington Palace and Royal Albert Hall in the center of London, and is still considered one of the top universities in the world.
While attending college, Tony realized he was smarter than most of the other students: Much smarter. He believed that there were very few people that could match his intellect, and certainly not the police. However, he did meet a girl that he thought matched his intellect. Judith Dwight worked as a secretary at the school, and in 1972 they were married and immediately started a family, eventually having two girls and two boys.
While living in London, only a few miles from Whitechapel, Tony developed a fascination with the stories of Jack the Ripper, reading every book he could find about the notorious killer. Jack the Ripper was believed to be responsible for eleven heinous murders of prostitutes in the late 1800s in Whitechapel and was never caught. Hardy admired his ability to evade police and often thought Jack the Ripper must have been extremely intelligent as well.
His close friend Maureen Reeve later recounted his obsession with Jack the Ripper, "Anthony was obsessed with serial killers and we talked about them on several occasions. We had long discussions about Jack the Ripper, and Anthony thought he had a brilliant mind. He reckoned Jack the Ripper was a very clever bloke because he murdered all those prostitutes and never got caught. I never thought anything of it."
After graduation, Tony landed a high-paying job with British Sugar, one of the largest food manufacturers at the time, working as a mechanical engineer. He excelled at his work and quickly moved up the corporate ranks.
For a time, Tony and Judith had a normal happy marriage. They had their kids, but Tony needed more. He had an obsession with sadomasochistic and violent sex, and that was something that Judith couldn’t provide for him. His extreme fetish led him to have affairs, but he eventually realized that it was much easier to just hire prostitutes.
In the mid-70s, the UK had a severe economic downturn and Tony lost his high-paying job. This was a severe blow to his already inflated ego. In his mind, someone of his superior intellect just didn’t lose their job. This loss was hard on him and he fell into a deep depression suffering from severe mood swings and violent outbursts. Psychiatrists diagnosed him as bipolar and put him on medication, but his mental illness would dominate his life from that point forward.
By the late 70s Hardy got a new high-paying engineering job in Tasmania, Australia. This was exciting for him and his family, but it didn’t solve any of their problems. Now in his late twenties, he was still suffering with his disorder as well as his desire for more and more violent sex.
In 1982 the economy was in a recession and Hardy was let go from his job once again due to job cuts. This news ignited his anger, and he began to unleash his violent behavior on his wife and kids.
At the height of his depression, but still knowing he was much more intelligent than law enforcement, Hardy believed he could commit the perfect crime. He wanted to get rid of his wife, but didn’t want to go through the hassle of a divorce. He filled a two-liter plastic bottle with water, put it in the freezer and let it turn into a solid block of ice. He then took the rock-hard piece of ice and beat his wife over the head with it while she slept. Hardy believed it would be the perfect weapon. Once thawed, the murder weapon would completely disappear.
But murder was a lot more difficult than he expected. He planned on beating her unconscious and drowning her in the tub to make it look like she slipped in the tub, hit her head, and drowned. But he didn’t count on her staying conscious. Not only did she stay conscious, she fought back. Hardy only stopped when one of his children came into the room and started screaming.
Police arrested Hardy, but domestic violence was looked upon differently in the eighties. Despite openly admitting that he was trying to kill his wife, in Tasmania the offense was not considered attempted murder, but only a domestic abuse issue. Regardless, the offense still required a jail sentence.
Hardy convinced authorities that, because of his mental illness, he should be locked up in a mental hospital rather than a jail. He later told friends that it was all an act to avoid a jail term. While in the psych unit in Queensland, Hardy played the game and cooperated with hospital authorities and was eventually released.
When Hardy was released from the psychiatric hospital, he was deported back to the United Kingdom. He had attempted to kill his wife, but was now still a free man, which reinforced his belief that he could outwit anyone. Just like Jack the Ripper.
His wife and kids had already moved back to the United Kingdom, and Judith had filed for divorce. This infuriated him.
Hardy had gone from a well-paid executive to a homeless alcoholic sleeping in various hostels throughout the London area. He was obsessed with his now ex-wife and stalked her, even planting microphones in her home so he could listen to her conversations.
Judith pleaded with police that her ex-husband was endangering the lives of herself and her children, and she was granted a restraining order. But a piece of paper didn’t stop Hardy. He quickly broke the restraining order, which landed him with a short prison sentence.
After Hardy was released from prison, he moved to the Camden area of London so he could be near King’s Cross Station. The King’s Cross area was known throughout the nineties as a red-light district of London with plenty of pimps, pushers and prostitutes.
Hardy frequently hired prostitutes from the streets of King’s Cross, looking for vulnerable women to satisfy his deviant sexual needs. He was known among the regular girls in the area for his need of violent sex as well as his stench. Hardy rarely bathed or changed his clothes.
In 1998, a sex worker accused him of rape, claiming he was trying to kill her. Unfortunately for the girl, rape is hard to prove when the claim comes from a prostitute that’s being paid for sex. Her claims were ignored by police, and Hardy had once again evaded arrest. Though his life had been in a constant downward spiral, he still believed himself to be invincible.
Hardy was known by his neighbors as the local nut case. His neighbors knew he would often bring prostitutes to his home, and they were aware of his addictions and mental issues. They were also aware of his obsession with Jack the Ripper—Hardy would constantly talk about him. But for the most part his neighbors thought he was just annoying, strange, and a bit mentally ill, but overall harmless. None of them imagined he would be capable of murder.
In January 2002 Hardy had a dispute with his upstairs neighbor. He claimed that her shower was leaking water into his flat, but she refused to do anything about it, Hardy took matters into his own hands. While the woman was away from her home, he painted “Fuck you Slut” on her front door. At the bottom he signed it with the letter “T.” He then poured battery acid through the mail slot in the door, spilling it all over the door and the ground outside.
As he left the scene, Hardy stepped in the spilled battery acid. It didn’t take much for police to find him. They simply followed the footprints straight to Hardy’s door.
When police confronted him, Hardy invited them into his home; he was nonchalant and unapologetic. He freely admitted that he had graffitied her door and poured the battery acid so police arrested him for the vandalism. As the officers looked around his cluttered, unkempt apartment, they noticed a locked bedroom door and asked him to open it. Hardy claimed he couldn’t, that it was the door to his roommate’s bedroom, and he didn’t have the key.
His roommate, thirty-one-year-old Sally Rose White, was a developmentally challenged young woman with a history of running away from home. She was working as a prostitute in the King’s Cross area to pay for her crack cocaine addiction.
As police were taking Hardy into custody, they told him to grab his coat. Before allowing him to put on the coat, police searched the pockets and realized Hardy had lied to them. Inside his coat pocket, they found the key to the locked room.
When police opened the bedroom door, they were shocked to find the naked body of a deceased woman lying on the bed—it was his roommate, Sally Rose White. There was damage to the top of her head, blood on the sheets, and on the floor was a hoodie with a large blood stain inside the hood. A trail of blood was on the wall at the head of the bed, as if her head had slid down the wall. Her face was covered with a cloth, and there was a bite mark on her right thigh.
Sally’s body had been posed near a rubber Satan mask, several crucifixes, and a single black high-heeled shoe; a dildo was protruding from her vagina. Photo equipment was set up around the bed as if in preparation for a photoshoot. Near the door was a bucket of soapy water with a sponge. The water in the bucket was still warm.
In Hardy’s living room, police found three televisions and several stacks of VHS porn tapes totaling over seventy, mostly of sadistic porn that depicted simulated rape.
Hardy denied knowing anything about Sally’s body and why it was there, but it was clear to the police what had happened and they arrested Hardy on suspicion of murder.
After his arrest, Freddy Patel, an experienced pathologist, performed the postmortem examination. To the frustration of police, Patel found that Sally Rose White had died of congenital heart failure, not from the wound on the top of her head.
Despite the wound on her head, the blood trail down the wall, the blood-soaked hoodie that had been removed after death, the positioning of the body with a satanic mask, the insertion of a dildo into her vagina, the photographic equipment, her head being covered, and the bucket of warm soapy water, the pathologist still insisted that no crime had been committed. Investigators demanded that Patel re-examine her, but even after he had performed a second postmortem examination, Patel insisted she had died of natural causes.
This infuriated investigators, but they had no choice. If the pathologist said there was no murder, there was nothing to investigate. They had to drop the charges. They charged Hardy for the vandalism, but again he convinced authorities that his mental illness was to blame and he spent time in a hospital rather than jail.
Hardy was sectioned under the Mental Health Act to St. Luke’s Hospital near Camden. Again, he cooperated with doctors and psychiatrists, but didn’t let them know of his true sick desires.
During his stay in the mental hospital Hardy’s psychiatrists wrote six warnings that he was vulnerable to relapse, posed a high risk of violence, and that women and prostitutes were at a particular risk. The doctors wrote that Hardy had a personality disorder that had not been treated, claiming, “There is strong evidence of risk of re-offending and he is likely to cause others serious physical or psychological harm.”
Despite all the warnings, in November 2002, after only eleven months in the hospital, a panel of three released him. The panel argued that Hardy was "mentally ill", but had a "natural human right to be treated in the surroundings which will encourage and support his own efforts.” Additionally, the Mental Health Trust didn’t alert the police or his neighbors of his release. He was once again a free man, reinforcing his belief that he was invincible.
During his stay in the mental hospital Hardy had become even more obsessed with drugs, alcohol, porn, and prostitutes. His behavior after his release became increasingly strange. He began writing letters to prostitutes asking for dominant sex, claiming he was independently wealthy and looking for a “special relationship.”
He was also known to take photos of women in Camden bars and would lick the leather of sofas and chairs where the women had been sitting. In late December he walked into a church and asked members to pray for his immortal soul. But most disturbing of all, he had an overwhelming need to emulate his hero, Jack the Ripper.
* * *
Elizabeth Valad was a stunning brunette with a half-Iranian background. While in her early teens, Elizabeth started hanging around the wrong crowd and by the time she was sixteen she had dropped out of school and moved to London. She often told her mother she was working as a secretary, but in today’s terms she would be known as a “sugar baby.”
Elizabeth met a multi-millionaire in his seventies who kept an upscale flat for her in Chelsea, one of the most expensive areas of London. For ten years she lived off of the generosity of her benefactor, often referring to him as her “meal ticket.” He supplied her with designer clothes, a new Mercedes, and they often dined together at the Ritz Carlton.
By 2001, however, Elizabeth was twenty-nine years old and her meal ticket had run out. She was on her own, and it wasn’t long before she became addicted to drugs and resorted to street prostitution in the King’s Cross area.
Just before Christmas 2002, Elizabeth Valad took to the streets of London and was never seen alive again.
* * *
On December 30, 2002, at about 3:00 a.m. a homeless man was rummaging through a dumpster behind a pub in Camden when he felt something cold and slimy inside a plastic garbage bag. He described it as feeling like two filets of salmon. When he opened the bag, it took him a minute to realize what he was looking at. What he had felt were the calf muscles from two female lower legs. Someone had sawed the legs off at the knees. When police arrived, they found a second garbage bag in the same dumpster containing a partial female torso.
Investigators taped off the area behind the pub and began searching the rest of the dumpsters in the immediate area, but found no more body parts. At dawn they began searching the dumpsters and drains of the entire surrounding area.
After searching for almost three days, in another dumpster less than 100 yards away they found more green garbage bags with female body parts, plus another partial torso, a right arm, a left arm, a foot, and a bloodstained bra. This second location served as the dumpster of the building where Anthony Hardy lived.
As the days went by, police widened their search around Camden and continued to find more garbage bags with more body parts. The Regent’s Canal was also nearby. That was where the body of Paula Fields had been found the prior year. (See “The Canal Killer” in True Crime Case Histories Volume 3)
From the parts they had found, they knew there were two female victims, but the heads and hands of both were still missing. Police arranged scuba teams to dredge the canals looking for more parts, but found nothing.
There was also the possibility that trash collectors may have already picked up some parts from dumpsters and taken them to the landfill. A team of eighty officers would spend the next three weeks searching through endless tons of rubbish at the landfill, but again found nothing.
It was only a matter of time before police realized that some of the body parts were found at the same building that they found a dead body less than a year prior. Tony Hardy immediately became suspect number one. It had only been seven weeks since they had released Hardy from the mental hospital.
Police brought a large team of officers to Hardy’s flat intending to break the door down, but there was no need. The door was slightly open, and they simply walked in, but there was no sign of Tony Hardy.
Inside Hardy’s flat, the cement floors, walls, and doors were painted with nonsensical graffiti. The second bedroom where the body had been found before was again closed and locked. Hardy had wedged a gray set of tracksuit bottoms into the gap underneath the door. Investigators soon realized that the tracksuit was there to keep the smell of decomposition from escaping.
On the floor of the bedroom, investigators found a large black plastic garbage bag wrapped in twine. Inside the bag was a dismembered female torso. A hacksaw and three knives had been arranged neatly on the top of the bag. Small bits of flesh still hung from the teeth of the hacksaw blade. Police also found rubber gloves and an electric saw. There was also evidence that someone had taken photos at the scene.
Though it was obvious that he had dismembered the bodies there, police still used Luminol to document the presence of human blood. Luminol is a chemical that when sprayed upon a surface will react with the hemoglobin in traces of blood causing it to glow, even after attempts to clean the blood. When police sprayed the Luminol, Hardy’s entire apartment lit up like a Christmas tree, particularly around the bathtub.
Fifty-one-year-old Tony Hardy always said he would be famous, and now he was. Police alerted the media that they were looking for him; they distributed photos and a description. The media dubbed Hardy the Camden Ripper.
When questioning neighbors, many recalled hearing sounds of an electric saw and the smell of incense coming from Hardy’s apartment, but at the time they dismissed it, thinking their crazy neighbor was doing construction work in the middle of the night.
Hardy was on the run, but he didn’t venture very far. Police received several reports that people had seen him around the Camden area, doing very little to disguise his appearance. Inside his flat they found his diabetes, bipolar, and manic depression medications. Hardy needed seven different kinds of medication and they knew he couldn’t survive for long without it, so they alerted the nearby hospitals to be on the lookout for him.
Detectives then sifted through hours of security camera footage from the Camden area. On several cameras throughout the city, they could see Hardy opening dumpsters and casually throwing bags in. In some videos Hardy would look directly into the camera, as if he believed it was impossible for him to get caught.
Investigators also found that Hardy regularly used a loyalty card at the local Sainsbury grocery store. The security cameras from his local store showed him using his loyalty card when buying the garbage bags that were used to deposit the body parts.
On January 2, 2003, an off-duty police officer spotted Anthony Hardy at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. When Hardy realized someone had spotted him, he ran. Two police officers gave chase and caught up with him, but Hardy was a very large man and fought back. He stabbed one officer in the hand and punched him, dislodging an eye from its socket. He punched the second officer and knocked him out completely. They called more police in to help, who pinned him down and apprehended him.
During the analysis of the female torso that had been found on the floor of the bedroom, they found that the victim had both breast and butt implants. Using the serial number on the butt implant, investigators identified her. It was twenty-nine-year-old Elizabeth Valad.
On January 3, using DNA, police were able to identify the second victim as Brigette MacClennan. Bridgette was a thirty-four-year-old mother of two, who was also a habitual drug user and a prostitute who worked the streets near King’s Cross station.
Detectives interrogated Hardy for seventy-two hours, but he was defiant and said nothing other than “No comment.”
It was clear from items in the bedroom that Hardy had taken photos of the killings, but they had no idea where the photos were and Hardy wasn’t about to tell them. A few weeks after his arrest, a nearby photo processing center alerted police that they had two rolls of film that Hardy had dropped off for processing. Hardy had told the processing center that it was pornographic with consenting adults, but the photos clearly were more than that. Pathologists confirmed that the victims in the photos were dead when the photos were taken.
In over forty photos Hardy had covered the victim's face with the red devil mask and his New York Yankees baseball hat—the same hat he had been seen wearing in several of the security camera videos and on the day he was arrested. He had posed the bodies in pornographic poses with crucifixes and a dildo in their vaginas.
Before the trial Hardy refused to answer any questions at all. The only question he answered was where he had put the heads and hands of the girls. His reply was that he was too drunk and couldn’t remember where he dumped them.
Hardy pleaded not guilty and was due to stand trial in November 2003 at the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court in London. The witnesses were prepped, and evidence was ready to present to the court. Then, on the first day of trial, Hardy suddenly changed his plea to guilty to all three counts of murder.
Anthony Hardy was given three life sentences. One for each life he took, although it’s speculated that he may have killed more. The hands and heads of Elizabeth Valad and Brigette MacClennan were never found. At his sentencing, the judge told Hardy, “Only you know for sure how your victims met their deaths, but the unspeakable indignities to which you subjected the bodies of your last two victims in order to satisfy your depraved and perverted needs are in no doubt.”
Pathologist Freddy Patel, who twice determined Sally Rose White’s death was due to natural causes, was in the news again in 2009.
During the G20 summit in London, thousands of protesters gathered in the city center while police set up roadblocks to control the crowds. An innocent newspaper vendor and father of nine, Ian Tomlinson, was not a protestor, but only trying to make his way home that evening and police mistook him for a protestor. He was bitten on the leg by a police dog, hit on the back of the legs with a baton and shoved to the ground by a police officer. He later died from an injury he sustained during the fall.
Freddy Patel was the first to examine the body of Ian Tomlinson. Patel’s findings from that examination mistakenly determined that Tomlinson died of a heart attack. Subsequent examinations determined that Tomlinson died from internal bleeding from the injuries inflicted by police. An inquest jury found that Tomlinson had been unlawfully killed.
Patel was charged with sixty-eight failings of the examination. Among those was the fact that he had failed to include information about the internal bleeding. Patel was found to be “misleading, dishonest and liable to bring his profession into disrepute.” He was also found to be “irresponsible” with the postmortem examination of Sally Rose White. In 2012 Freddy Patel was taken off the medical registry for these failures and failures found on three additional postmortem examinations.
* * *
In 2005 through letters written to his friends from his cell at Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire, Anthony Hardy professed that he prays for his own forgiveness and was “finding God” and had “rediscovered Catholicism.”
“I have prayed for forgiveness virtually every day for the past year since my brother died in a car accident in Australia aged 60 on January 20, 2003. God has taken him to be with other members of my family. The chaplain of the prison gave me the news, and we prayed together about Terry (his brother) and myself.”
In another letter Hardy wrote, “Elaine (his lawyer) brought me the news that Harold Shipman had hanged himself on Monday night. I wonder if he redeemed himself before he died (repented?). ‘I am the resurrection and the life for whosoever believes me shall live, even though he dies’ said the Lord! John 11.25. Shipman didn’t adhere to his hippocratic oath, so I leave his fate to the almighty. Amen.”
He continued, “I went to Rampton Hospital between April and July 2003 for assessment and met another wonderful chaplain and went to services when staff allowed me. I wanted to join the choir, but circumstances and my return have prevented it.”
Despite his newfound religion, prison authorities reprimanded Hardy for trying to write the number “666” into his date of birth.
“The ‘authorities’ think I’m behaving badly rather than being ill. I’ve lost all my correspondence due to a flood of biblical proportions which I caused in my cell. There’s a verse in the Bible which says 'and wash away all your iniquities’ and that’s what I did in the flood! The staff were not so forgiving! I’ve become a Catholic since moving to Wakefield but they have no catholic priest to hear my confession, instruct me in the catechism, or help me atone for my sins, so I’m in limbo until September when a priest will be appointed.”
“I’m going to ask Elaine to write to my ex-wife and tell her about my rediscovered faith and assure her that she is safe now. I don’t expect I will ever be released from prison. I’d like to know how many grandchildren I have. I expect there are several.”
“It’s lovely to have someone to write to who is my intellectual equal. There are many asylum seekers in Belmarsh and people who have been persecuted for their beliefs. Several are friends of mine and, of course, I have Christian friends from all parts of the world. Very few have had the benefit of an excellent education, though.”
“I do art here which I find very satisfying. I’m in my Anthony van Dyck phase now. I have his type of beard, but my favourite artist is Salvador Dali. I’ve become a vegan. Can you put me in touch with the Vegan Society? The prison can’t, even though they provide a vegan diet. I’m trying to lose weight by not eating fat in meat and dairy products.”
“I can’t get to education either (High Security Category!) so I write short stories for my own amusement and read psychology, science, and literature when I can. I have been to the gym here and in Rampton, where I played volleyball quite successfully. Rampton had a pool, so when I dived in the water dived out!! Seriously they had a good music system at the pool so I had a good one-hour session once a week.”
“I’m waiting to be given a tariff by the judge which could take months. There are 700 lifer cases waiting to be dealt with.”
In 2012 Anthony Hardy’s sentence was given a whole life tariff, meaning he will never be released from prison, a rare sentence in the United Kingdom.
