Colin Ireland Case Study

According to Converse (y5, May,2008, P.13) Colin Ireland, was born in a single parent family who had his chaotic childhood with his mother. He was a well known mission-type serial killer in the United Kingdom , who intentionally killed homosexual male victims, including

Peter Walker, a 35- year old director and choreographer, (8th March1993);

Christopher Dunn, a 37- year old librarian (28th May 1993);

Perry Bradley, a 25- year old businessman from Texas (4th June 1993);

Andrew Collier, a 33 year old warden at a sheltered housing complex (7th June 1993);

Emanuel Spiterii, a 41-year old Maltese Chef (12 June 1993)

Colin Ireland met all his victims in the Coleherne pub, a gay bar located in the West London. His initial modus operandi was to

When Ireland had killed his target, he always cleaned up the crime scenes after killing the victims, this type of crime he committed which is known as “ Organised Crime “. In the organised crime scene, offenders usually tidy up the crime scenes by removing or replacing the furnitures or other items around, some may even use bleach or chemicals to destroy the evidences in order to hide the traces that one has left. In the first few murder cases that Ireland had committed, he had left no fingerprint nor traces in the scene that could link to him. Therefore, the police could only look for the other types of evidences such as the fibre exchange between suspects’ and victims’s clothes, hair samples, swabs from the body skin on the floor or bed, etc. But those types of evidences were still yet sufficient enough to show that Ireland was the offender, therefore the police couldn’t make further progress during the investigation. Apart from organising the crime scene, the organised killer always well prepared in choosing victims, planning tool used, and so on. Because of the above reasons, the police could hardly lock on the killer or even in categorising the

As the murders in this case were carried out in the victims’ homes, which located in different areas of England. It is known that the police system back in the United Kingdom is decentralised, which different counties or areas have different police forces. Under such system the information transfer between different counties’ police departments is rather less efficient than centralised system. In this case, when one county’s police force discovered one of the murder committed by Colin Ireland, shortly after that, another county’s police force also noted for the other murder case which was done by Ireland too, but due to the system’s drawback, investigators from two sides could hardly link those cases together. In addition, as police forces from different area have different approach and methodology in investigation and regulations, therefore, upon this case, frequency of miscommunication between different counties’ police forces did also stand a relatively high chance in failing to gather intelligences and evidences in assisting the