It seems like ages since I’ve done one of my indispensable Cardiff lists. So here, for some meaty holiday reading on the beach, is a grisly catalogue in alphabetical order of just a miniscule few of the city’s many murder victims.

NADINE ABURAS (1986-2014): Having met student Nadine on MuslimMatch.com, American control freak Sammy Almahri courted her for two years before travelling to Cardiff and strangling her to death in the Future Inn budget hotel in Hemingway Road down the Bay. He faked a suicide note, stole her car, drove to Heathrow and fled to Tanzania, but was eventually caught, extradited and sentenced to 17 years minimum.

ARTHUR ALLEN (1902-1940): At his Kent Street lodgings in Grangetown, George Roberts broke his friend’s skull with an iron bar then dumped the still-alive body in nearby Bradford Street, all for the sake of a few quid. Allen, home on leave from the navy, took two months to die in Cardiff Royal Infirmary. The charge of wounding was then upgraded to a charge of wilful murder and 29-year-old Roberts was promptly executed.

DORIS APPLETON (1903-1921): Lester Hamilton, a Jamaican marine fireman, shot his ex-girlfriend in the face when she answered the door of her house in Cwmdare Street, Cathays. He then went back out into the street and shot himself in the head. Doris died, but he didn’t. Paralysed down his left side, he had to be carried to the noose.

JOHN ARMSTRONG (1921-1979): Having responded to a radio call to take a fare to Cowbridge from The Fairwater pub in St Fagans Road, taxi driver ‘Jack’ Armstrong was robbed and beaten to death. His body was dumped on Cowbridge Common off the A48 and the blood-soaked taxi abandoned in a country lane 11 miles west at Treoes. Despite all the subsequent advances in forensic science the killer has never been caught.

XIXI BI (1992-2016): Chinese-born student Bi died in hospital after being savagely beaten up by her boyfriend Jordan Matthews, 24, in the flat they shared in Ely Road, Llandaf. The pathologically jealous, selfish and paranoid Matthews, a black belt in karate, inflicted over 40 injuries on her. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 18 years.

JULIAN BIROS (1891-1913): Spanish seaman Biros, one of thousands of casual labourers of no fixed abode looking for work in Cardiff docks, had a dagger plunged into his heart alongside Roath Dock by another labourer, Hugh McLaren. The men knew each other: they were among many who slept rough in the Crown Patent Fuel Works nearby and used an abandoned railway carriage as a kitchen (an area now occupied by the BBC’s Roath Lock studios). The argument had been about a packet of tea. Unrepentant McLaren was hanged in Cardiff prison’s execution chamber five months later.

HENRY BLATCHFORD (1836-1900): Retired Canton widower Blatchford was blown away by a shotgun at point blank range by 16-year-old Tommy Sweetman in the back yard dairy at the Sweetman’s home in Conybeare Road, where Henry did odd jobs for Sweetman’s father. Bipolar, epileptic Tommy had previously been released from a mental asylum against the advice of his doctor – the mistake wasn’t made again.

COLIN BLOOMFIELD (1965-2000): Since it opened in 1832 HMP Cardiff has been the scene of myriad unimaginable horrors, few worse than the murder of Bloomfield by his cellmate Jason Ricketts. Prison officers entered the cell to find a blood-bath: Bloomfield had been strangled and his liver, spleen and left eye cut out with a specially sharpened toothbrush and a plastic spoon embedded with razor blades. This happened in the supposedly safe Vulnerable Prisoners Unit. Ricketts was sent to a secure psychiatric unit without time limit and the six officers who witnessed the nightmare scene were awarded a total of £1million in compensation for their trauma.

MARY BRYANT (1888-1917): Hacked to death and horribly mutilated in her Tiger Bay lodgings in Sophia Street (demolished 1962), Mary was a prostitute known as Polly Bryant. A blood-stained razor and items of male clothing were found by her body and neighbours gave a detailed description of a ‘Scandinavian or Russian’ man who had been seen hurriedly leaving her house the night before, but perfunctory investigations soon petered out and whoever murdered her was never discovered.

JOAN CANHAM (1932-1951): Office worker Joan was stabbed on the doorstep of her Gelligaer Street home in Cathays by rejected ex-boyfriend Donald Bowling from Percy Street in Grangetown. Despite the fact that he had bought a large sheath knife for this purpose earlier in the day, Bowling got off lightly with five years for manslaughter.

JEAN CHALLENGER (1924-1956): Newlywed Jean from Roath had cycled out to then rural Llanedeyrn and was blackberrying among the fruit-laden hedgerows of Peggy Giles Field on Llwyn-y-Grant farm (near today’s Park Inn on Circle Way East) when she was bludgeoned to death by an onslaught of powerful blows to the head. She was so disfigured her husband could only identify her body by the clothes. The finest brains in Cardiff City Police (founded in 1836, absorbed into South Wales Constabulary in 1969) never found the culprit.

DUNCAN CLARKE (1960-1994): Clarke, originally from Lancashire, was working as a security guard at the Littlewoods store in Queen Street (now Next) when he was stabbed to death by 19-year-old Cardiffian Thomas Hughes when trying to prevent him stealing a £5.99 Lego set. The paranoid schizophrenic spent 17 years in prison before being released in 2012. But UK prisons don’t rehabilitate, they just make people worse. Hughes added neo-Nazi white supremacism to his CV while doing time and, having committed numerous offences following his release, he was eventually detained indefinitely in a secure psychiatric unit in 2021 after threatening to blow up the Fairwater block of flats where he lived.

JORDAN CODY-FOSTER (1990-2021): Steven White, 44, had just been released from prison to a life of homelessness, poverty, drugs and petty crime – a life he found so demanding and dreadful that he stabbed his fellow-homeless acquaintance in the neck up to the hilt in order to get back into jail as soon as possible and for as long as possible. Cody-Foster, who lived in a tent outside the Huggard Centre for the homeless, bled out in Hansen Street (formerly West Wharf Road). White got his wish. After buying a radio and a Lee Childs potboiler Better Off Dead, he flagged down a police van and told the officers what he had done. When they arrested him on suspicion of murder White replied “It’s not suspicion, I fucking did it!” With that sharp wit and facility with a one-liner he’s going to make an amusing cell-mate during his 26-year stretch.

RICHARD COOK (1928-1963): After moving from Cardiff to Stockton-on-Tees in northern England garage-hand Cook had a brief extra-marital affair with the wife of Edgar Black, a neighbour in Stockton. His wife forgave him and they moved back to Cardiff to put it behind them, but Black could not forgive or forget. He travelled to Cardiff, called at Cook’s home in Llandudno Road, Rumney, and shot him on the doorstep at point-blank range with a sawn-off shotgun. Cook died of his injuries in Cardiff Royal Infirmary. Black was quickly caught and, after being found guilty of murder at Swansea Assizes, the 37-year-old was sentenced to death. Campaigners against the death penalty and notable public figures appealed for mercy, but right up until the date set for the execution Black seemed certain to become the first person hanged in Cardiff prison since Mahmood Mattan in 1952 (see Lily Volpert, below). Then, at the 11th hour, the authorities bowed to public pressure and backed down. Black was moved to a prison in England where he was held for 20 years before being paroled.

JOYCE COX (1934-1939): Nobody was ever caught for the sexual assault and murder of four-year-old Joyce, found near Coryton station in the cutting of the Cardiff Railway. More than 80 years later, the police still refuse to release their files on the case because to do so would be “unfair” to a mystery suspect.  One can only presume he’s a VIP.

GLENYS DARLING (1951-1977): James Darling moved to Cardiff from Yorkshire with his new wife to take up a position as assistant verger at Llandaf Cathedral. The “committed Christian” killed her eight months later by dropping a plugged-in electric fan-heater into the water while she was taking a bath in their delightful grace-and-favour cottage on The Green. She was three months pregnant. Found guilty of murder, he did 12 years in prison before being released in 1990. In 1998 he committed suicide in a Halifax canal.

RHYS DAVIES (1991-2009): 17-year-old Rhys from Tredegar died of head injuries inflicted by a group of assailants outside Ladbrokes on St Mary Street. Investigations collapsed for lack of evidence, prompting the question: what then is the point of all those battalions of CCTV cameras that monitor every square inch of Cardiff city centre?

HONORA DUTCH (c1815-1865): Alcoholic Honora was kicked to death by her abusive husband John Dutch in the back yard of their tenement (demolished 1902) on Gray Lane, Canton. Neighbours who had come out to investigate the commotion stood and watched. Endorsing the then routine idea that a husband could do what he liked to his wife, the court was lenient. It was judged to be manslaughter and John Dutch got 10 years hard labour.

PHILIP EVANS (1645-1679) & JOHN LLOYD (c1640-1679): Before most public executions were moved to the exterior of Cardiff’s first purpose-built prison in St Mary Street in 1700, they used to take place at grim Cae Budr and Plwcca Halog fields on the outskirts of the town (today’s equally grim City Road/Albany Road/Richmond Road/Crwys Road/Mackintosh Place junction). Here was the scene of numberless barbaric lynchings – none more infamous than when these two harmless, gentle Catholic priests were hanged, drawn and quartered at the height of Catholic persecution in the reign of Charles II (1630-1685). Their skeletons and entrails were left to decompose on the gibbet for years – pour encourager les autres. They were canonised as martyrs by Pope Paul VI (1897-1978) in 1970.

HAROLD FISHER (1918-1972): Harold was stabbed to death and robbed in broad daylight outside the Avana Bakery in Pendyris Street (opened 1901, demolished 2003, now student flats). His killer remains at large.

WINIFRED FORTT (1897-1917): Greek sailor Alex Bakerlis swung from the Cardiff scaffold in 1918 for his frenzied knifing of one of the daughters of the owner of the house in Bute Street where he lodged between ocean voyages. Impossibly jealous and possessive, 25-year-old Bakerlis killed Winifred on the Bute Street bridge over the Junction Canal (filled in, 1964).

MICHAEL GAYLE (1966-2020): 21-year-old Garvey Gayle stabbed his father Michael 17 times with a kitchen knife in the family home at Cypress Drive, St Mellons. He was soon arrested at the nearby petrol station on Newport Road, yelling “I am Jesus Christ” as he was taken away to be detained indefinitely at the Caswell Clinic – a Mental Health Unit within Glanrhyd Hospital, Bridgend.

STEPHEN GILBERT (1894-1936): Mutilated beyond all recognition in the stockroom of his greengrocer’s shop on the Croft Street/Clive Place corner in Roath, Gilbert bled so extensively that it seeped through the floorboards and formed a pond in the cellar below. Investigations focused on his gambling and sexual predilections but drew a complete blank.

CARRIE GILMOUR (c1875-1907): Big-hearted Carrie Evans from Llanelli married badly, escaped to Mary Ann Street in Cardiff and slid into alcoholism and prostitution. A policeman on early morning patrol came across her lying in a pool of blood on West Canal Wharf, her face slashed and her windpipe severed, surrounded by her empty purse and a few pathetic halfpennies. Local residents had heard her screams in the night but went back to sleep. Psychopathic sailor Patrick Macdonald confessed the next day, was sentenced to life imprisonment and died behind bars in 1934.

LAUREN GRIFFITHS (1998-2019): After sullen, self-obsessed Madog Rowlands strangled his devoted girlfriend to death in their flat in Glynrhondda Street, Cathays, the 23-year-old control-freak wrapped her in cling-film, scored drugs, set up a Netflix account and ordered takeaway food. Having worked out a feeble alibi, he called 999 a day later claiming he had acted in self defence. The jury at Cardiff Crown Court didn’t fall for his lies and he was sentenced to 18 years minimum.

MABEL HARPER (1890-1943): Beaten to death, sexually assaulted and strangled, Mabel was found on a grass verge by the side of Western Avenue near the Taff bridge. The case was a low priority in the flux and chaos of WW2, got lost in a pending tray and has not been subsequently solved.

LUKE HIGGINS (1980-2023): One punch from David Smith was enough to kill Luke Higgins in Hansen Street, outside the Huggard Centre where both the homeless men stayed. Violent bully Smith, who had 54 previous convictions, was angry because he thought Higgins had nicked a bag of his ‘bath bombs’. It was deemed manslaughter and Smith got six years

CLAIRE HOOD (1979-1995): Only 15, Claire was mitching off school when she was raped and strangled in Cath Cobb Woods in St Mellons. House-to-house DNA testing on the St Mellons estate identified her near neighbour 19-year-old Neil Owen as the killer from his semen. Angry local mobs besieged Owen’s home and the family had to flee the area. He served the full 18-year sentence and was released on licence in 2014.

GLADYS IBRAHIM (1897-1919) & AYSHA IBRAHIM (1919-1919): 23-year-old steamship fireman Thomas Caler from Zanzibar slit the throats of Gladys and her eight month-old baby daughter with a razor at Gladys’s Arab refreshment house in Tiger Bay’s Christina Street (demolished 1968). Post-mortem he raped Caerffili-born Gladys and stole a gramophone and cash. Despite being caught red-handed with a blood-soaked razor and the gramophone, Caler protested his innocence all the way to his appointment with the hangman.

SUSAN INGRAM (1831-1874): James Gibbs, Susan Ingram’s vain, womanising husband, was the butler at Llanrumney Hall, then the country estate of the Williams dynasty. He had abandoned her repeatedly in England, but the deluded woman kept coming back for more, making the fatal mistake of following him to Llanrumney. He beat her to pulp, cut her throat so deeply he almost severed her head and then chucked her in a ditch by Ball Farm (located where Weston Road and Worle Avenue would be built in the 1950s). Sobbing in his hood, Gibbs was hanged at Usk prison.

CHRISTINE JAMES (1950-2016): The authorities had plenty of opportunities to stop horrible sex predator Kris Wade before he savagely murdered 65-year-old Christine in her Century Wharf, Cardiff Bay, apartment (they were neighbours in the oppressive buy-to-let gulag of ‘luxury’ blocks off Dumballs Road). He had been under prolonged investigation for sexually abusing three women patients in his job as a nursing assistant at a mental health unit in Treseder Way, Ely, but the police and Crown Prosecution Service did nothing while employer Abertawe Bro Morgannwg health board, having not carried out any checks when they hired him, just suspended him for years on full pay – time in which he killed Christine James. It is, of course, entirely coincidental that his father, the now retired Stephen Wade MBE, was the very same health board’s Director of mental health services. His son was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 21 years.

GARY JENKINS (1966-2021): Today, nobody is safe from random violence as what’s left of society reaches new depths of insane depravity. Gary Jenkins, a creative, intelligent, good guy who did vital work as an NHS consultant psychiatrist at Hamadryad Hospital, was mercilessly murdered in Bute Park at night by three disgusting pieces of homophobic pea-brained human detritus – parasitic serial thief Lee Strickland, 36, sordid Scouse scumbag Jason Edwards, 25, and smirking sadist bitch Dionne Timms-Williams from Creigiau, 17. They laughed and joked as he pleaded for his life while they viciously kicked him to death for 15 minutes – all recorded on audio by CCTV at the nearby Summerhouse Cafe. All three got life sentences: a minimum of 33 years each for the ‘men’ and 17 years for her. For these three there can be no rehabilitation: throw away the key.

SEAN KELLY (1980-2017): In the middle of the night 18-year-old Aaron Bingham and Nicholas Saleh, 46, chased Sean Kelly on their bikes through the back streets of Splott and Adamsdown before catching up with him in Theodora Street. Bingham then viciously knifed him in the leg while Saleh looked on. Bingham got life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 18 years and Saleh nine years for manslaughter. No motive was established; the best Bingham’s defence could come up with was that the poor dab suffered from ‘ADHD’.

ASIM KHAN (1998-2019): Years of Council whoring to the dregs of the ‘hospitality industry’ and the ‘night-time economy’ mean that Cardiff city centre at weekends is now a by-word for dangerous drunkenness, sordid debasement, rampant anti-social behaviour, destructive vandalism and incredible quantities of litter  – all in a nasty atmosphere of threatening, barely-suppressed violence. In this context, incidents like the knifing to death of Asim Khan by 28-year-old Gambian Momodoulamin Saine outside McDonald’s in St Mary Street, all because Khan had accidentally knocked over his drink in Soda Bar, are inevitable. Saine was sentenced to 24 years imprisonment in 2020.

MARK LANG (1969-2023): Parcel delivery driver Lang was horrifically killed by his own van in Laytonia Avenue, Gabalfa. 32-year-old Christopher El Gifari from Llanrumney stole the vehicle when Lang got out for a few seconds to make a delivery and then just ploughed into him as he drove away. Mark Lang was trapped underneath the van and carried for nearly half a mile down North Road before El Gifari abandoned the vehicle and made a run for it. Serial offender El Gilfari was arrested the following day at his parents’ home in Aberdâr while Lang died in hospital 18 days later of multiple injuries. El Gilfari was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, with a minimum tariff of 32 years before he can be considered for parole.

DAI LEWIS (1896-1927): Ex-boxer, heavy drinker and small-time thug Dai paid the ultimate price for trying to muscle in on the lucrative protection racket the Rowlands gang operated at Ely racecourse: he was knifed to death outside the Blue Anchor in St Mary Street (now Be At One). John Rowlands admitted manslaughter in self-defence (it was Lewis’s knife) but he, brother Edward and Danny Driscoll were all found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Then John went berserk in custody and was sent to Broadmoor for life while the two who didn’t do it were both hanged in 1928.

DAVID LEWIS (1968-2014): 28-year-old heroin addict Gareth Wyn Jones robbed and then attacked vulnerable alcoholic David Lewis from Ystrad Mynach with rocks and a broken bottle under Penarth Road Bridge on the Taff Embankment before strangling him and dumping him in the river. Jones was on probation having just been released from prison after serving half of a six-year sentence for stabbing his girlfriend. This time he got a minimum 20 years. In response, the overworked, understaffed and under-resourced probation service of ‘England and Wales’, privatised by the UK Tory government in 2015 with disastrous consequences for the once efficient and effective service, held a whitewashing internal inquiry.

PETER LEWIS (1944-2012): William Jones from Adamsdown is currently serving a minimum of 22 years for the meaningless stabbing of Peter outside his flat in Claude Road, Roath. Tooled-up Jones encountered the vulnerable pensioner with learning difficulties while hunting down an ex-girlfriend.

RONALD LEWIS (1911-1947): The matey Morganstown railwayman drowned after being beaten unconscious and thrown in the Taff at Sophia Gardens one night. It’s another unsolved case.

THOMAS LEWIS (1818-1848): The knifing to death of Thomas Lewis of David Street by Irishman John Connors outside the newly-built St David’s Catholic church at the corner of Stanley Street and Whitmore Lane (Bute Terrace) unleashed a week of appalling violence in 1848 – Cardiff’s first race riot. 10,000 wretchedly poor Irish immigrants had recently been shipped to Cardiff by the Butes at the height of the Great Famine in order to work for peanuts building docks and railways on the cheap, thereby undercutting wages, depriving locals of employment and virtually overnight altering the entire culture, language and demography of the town. The exploited Irish were forced to live in indescribably overcrowded and filthy conditions and ravaged by cholera outbreaks – still a step up from starving in Connemara – and their exploitation was at the expense of the Welsh, driven to the workhouse or effectively turfed out of their home town. This was an old ploy: set Celt against Celt, worker against worker, divide and rule. It worked too: Cardiff has not had a Welsh-speaking majority, a pro-Wales majority, a radical majority or a high wage economy ever since. Connors was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder, but suffered a fate worse than death: he was transported to the hell on earth of the Botany Bay penal colony and died in Australia. The Motorpoint Arena now covers the site of David Street, Stanley Street and the church.

KARINA MENZIES (1981-2012): Psychotic Matthew Tvrdon went berserk in a white van, using it as a weapon and ploughing into pedestrians at random along Cowbridge Road East. He injured 17 and killed Karina Menzies of Ely, who died after throwing two of her young daughters to safety outside Ely Fire Station. Tvrdon admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and is being detained indefinitely in a high-security hospital for the criminally insane in England. A violent paranoid schizophrenic, he had been sectioned four times in the past and his parents had pleaded for him not to be released from a secure psychiatric unit just the week before he went on his rampage, unmonitored and unmedicated. For this scandalous negligence Cardiff & Vale University Health Board received a gentle slap on the wrist but otherwise were completely exonerated of serious failings when Health Inspectorate Wales issued its report two years later.

ZOE MORGAN (1995-2016) & LEE SIMMONS (1983-2016): 21-year-old Andrew Saunders of Castleton, near Newport,  ambushed and knifed to death Zoe and Lee in Queen Street early in the morning as the courting couple turned up for work at Matalan. Another useless, over-entitled, inadequate male unable to take rejection, Saunders was sentenced to a minimum of 23 years.

MAUD MULHOLLAND (1894-1913): After shop assistant Maud of Theobald Road in Canton ended her relationship with the boy next door – needy, controlling, insurance agent Edward Bindon – he bought a revolver and shot her six times at point blank range in Denton Road one Sunday evening. Bindon gave himself in and at first acted cocky and satisfied. But the 20-year-old wasn’t so sanguine four months later when dragged weeping and whimpering to the prison gallows.

AUSTIN O’REILLY (1946-1999): Grangetown man O’Reilly was attacked late at night outside a petrol station in Penarth Road. He died of a fractured skull. Two unidentified teenage boys who stood trial for his murder in 2000 were acquitted, and since then the file has gathered dust in South Wales Police’s ever-mounting stack of ‘cold cases’.

GERALDINE PALK (1964-1990): Shipping clerk Geraldine was found face down in an open culvert behind Fairwater Leisure Centre, yards from her home in Bracken Place. She had been violently raped, had sustained over 80 stab wounds and her skull had been crushed. A 12 year police investigation, including appeals and reconstructions on Crimewatch, got nowhere, but advances in forensic technology eventually solved the mystery when random DNA testing fingered Mark Hampson, doing time in Dartmoor for a separate offence. The sadist was jailed for life in 2002 and died in Wakefield prison in 2007.

RUSSELL PEACHEY (1980-2015): Grangetown born and bred Russell Peachey was found dying in a pool of his own blood in North Street in the early hours of the morning. He had been brutally attacked with a hammer. Four men were charged with the murder but three were acquitted and only 31-year-old James Williams of no fixed abode was found guilty. He was jailed for life at Cardiff Crown Court in 2016 with a minimum term of 20 years.

DIC PENDERYN aka RICHARD LEWIS (1808-1831): The 1831 Merthyr Rising, in which at least 24 unarmed men, women and children were shot dead by British troops on the streets of the iron town during perfectly reasonable protests against wage cuts, oppression, evictions and starvation, was a pivotal moment in Welsh history. The rebels inflicted unprecedented defeats on the military over a week of heroic resistance, for the first time ever the red flag was raised as a symbol of revolt, and the events were central to the emergence of the Welsh working class. After the sheer might and shoot-on-sight policy of the British forces prevailed, the Whig government in London decreed that someone, anyone, should be hanged as an example. Almost at random young Dic Penderyn was hauled out of the crowds and chosen by the authorities. On trumped-up charges of wounding a soldier he was summarily tried, convicted and then publicly hanged outside the gaol in St Mary Street where the Central Market now stands (public executions were abolished in the UK in 1868). Cardiff was chosen as the location for this state-sanctioned assassination because the compliant, conservative population could be relied on not to protest. In 1874 Welsh American Ieuan Parker, on his deathbed in Pennsylvania, confessed to a priest that it was he who had injured the soldier. Dic’s last words, “O Arglwydd, dyma gamwedd” (O Lord, what an injustice), would make a fitting motto for the city. PS: my pen-name is an homage to him.

WILLIAM PERRY (1836-1873): Deranged Wharton Street pork butcher John Jones (real name Benjamin Swann from Wolverhampton) committed the ultimate crime in the now closed Westgate Hotel: he killed a cop. In the pub’s entrance lobby he plunged a fearsome cleaver deep into old acquaintance PC Perry of Heath Street in Riverside, and then did the same to himself. Perry died instantly on the Cowbridge Road pavement; Jones six days later in the Infirmary, tearing open his wounds and howling in agony.

MARJORIE PITMAN (1919-1965): In 1964 Marjorie Pitman’s life was ruined when she fell and broke her hip badly. After eight weeks in Rhydlafar Hospital and the insertion of a pin and plate, she had to give up her job, was in increasingly agonising pain and couldn’t sleep without sedation. Deeply depressed, unable to walk and confined to a wheelchair, she got progressively worse and faced further major surgery to try to fix the problem with no guarantee it would succeed. Her loving husband and partner of over 25 years, Peter Pitman, had to give up work to care for her and was devastated by her misery. With financial problems mounting and unable to bear seeing her endless suffering, he tried to gas himself before deciding it was wrong to run away and leave Marjorie on her own. The following night he smothered her with a pillow when she had fallen asleep at their home in Pantbach Road, Rhiwbina. Then, at four in the morning, he walked sobbing into Whitchurch police station and confessed. If ever there was a ‘mercy killing’ this was it, but the odious legal authorities held him in custody and took six months to decide not to pursue a charge of murder. Eventually he was found guilty of manslaughter instead and given three years probation. To this day, unlike in civilised countries, euthanasia is a criminal offence in the hateful, ignorant UK.

KAREN PRICE (1966-c1981): In 1981 15-year-old Karen disappeared from local authority residential care in Pontypridd. With no stable home life and a troubled background Karen had often run away, but this time she did not return of her own accord and was never found. For eight years she was registered as a missing person until in 1989 a group of workmen renovating terraced houses at Fitzhamon Embankment in Riverside found the skeletal remains of a young woman with a plastic bag over her head, wrapped in a carpet and buried in a shallow grave in the garden of number 29. The body was only identified thanks to the new method of forensic facial reconstruction when a man called Idris Ali responded after the case featured on the BBC programme Crimewatch. Investigations discovered that Karen and others in the care home provided sexual acts for men in Cardiff for money – one of whom, Alan Charlton from Bridgwater in Somerset, then aged 21, lived in the very basement flat where Karen had been found. Further information suggested that Idris Ali, then aged 16, also had sex with Karen and was present when Charlton had raped, killed and buried her. In 1991 Charlton and Ali were imprisoned for murder. Both appealed in 1994; Charlton’s appeal was rejected but Ali was given a new trial at which he was cleared of murder and convicted of manslaughter, meaning he was immediately released for time already served. Charlton, doing life, again appealed in 2014 on the grounds of the corrupt reputation of South Wales Police, made common knowledge by the notorious Phillip Saunders and Lynette White cases (see below). Ali also appealed, trying to clear his name entirely, by claiming his confession of involvement was simply to get out of prison. The Court of Appeal in London rejected both appeals. Such legal rigmarole is the inevitable result when trust in the police has been destroyed.

PHILLIP SAUNDERS (1952-1987): Any faith in British justice and policing was tested to destruction after the gruesome murder of newsagent Phillip Saunders. He was ambushed late at night for the takings from his Wood Street kiosk and attacked so severely with a shovel in the back yard of his Anstee Court home in Canton that his skull shattered into innumerable fragments. The ‘Cardiff Newsagent Three’ (Darren Hall, Michael O’Brien and Ellis Sherwood) were wrongfully convicted of the murder in 1988 thanks to fabricated and suppressed evidence and spent nearly 11 years in prison before the convictions were quashed in 1999 after one of the longest and most celebrated of all miscarriage of justice campaigns. South Wales Police deigned to re-open the case in 2003 and eventually concluded in 2015 that there was “insufficient evidence” to charge anyone with the crime (a nicety that hadn’t mattered back in 1988). The police have paid out over £1 million in compensation to the three men for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution, but have made no apology, accepted no liability or any wrongdoing, refused to re-open the murder investigation and taken no action against any of the 40 officers involved in the case. O’Brien’s brilliant 2008 book The Death of Justice is essential reading.

MARGARET SENNETT (1945-1969): Single mother sex worker Margaret, who lived in Grangetown, was strangled, set alight and dumped in an outhouse at the back of St Mary’s church in Bute Street by screwed-up Royston Slater of Splott. Soon nabbed, he pleaded insanity and ended up in Rampton.

AAMIR SIDDIQI (1993-2010): Low-life thugs Jason Richards and Ben Hope both got a minimum sentence of 40 years for ferociously stabbing talented schoolboy Aamir to death when he answered a knock at the front door of his family home in Ninian Road, Roath. They had been paid £1000 each to carry out murder by Mohammed Ali Ege, but the thick junkie retards called at the wrong house and killed the ‘wrong’ person. Ege fled to India and was arrested and awaiting extradition when he escaped from custody by climbing through a toilet window. He remains on the run.

PATRICIA SIMPSON (1943-1963): Patricia from Warrington in Cheshire lived in Adamsdown and plied her trade in the oldest profession on the streets of Tiger Bay. She was found seven miles north at the bottom of a 250ft deep disused mine shaft in Pentyrch, strangled with a chiffon scarf. For 40 years this was just another dead prostitute, another unsolved case, until a 73 year-old man in jail in Israel confessed, giving details only the murderer would know. He was not extradited or named and the case was closed.

KAREN SKIPPER (1962-1996): Walking her dogs in Horses Field aka Birdies Field, a meadow on the Fairwater side of the River Ely, Karen from Mill Road in Ely was cruelly drowned in the river, her wrists tied together with the dog leads so she could not swim to safety. John Pope from nearby Cherwell Close in Fairwater comfortably evaded capture for 11 years, despite supposedly exhaustive local house-to-house enquiries, and was only eventually fingered thanks to forensic advances. Even then, legal palaver meant it wasn’t until 2011 that he was convicted and imprisoned at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

KATHERINE SMITH (1991-2017): Having conned her into a meeting on the ‘dating’ website Plenty of Fish, repulsive Anthony Lowe, who had 142 previous offences, stabbed lonesome Katherine 33 times in her Heol Trelai flat in Caerau, stole her car and fled to Weston-Super-Mare, where he went straight back on the website looking for more sordid, exploitative fucks. He’s doing 18 years minimum so might be out by the time he’s 64.

HARRIET STACEY (1855-1904): Unstable, diseased Harriet from Hereford was found strangled and tied to her bed with a washing line in Saltmead (now Stafford) Road, Grangetown. Detectives were baffled by her secretive and complicated private life and whoever killed her got away with it.

CAROL ANN STEPHENS (1952-1959): Having popped out to run an errand for her mum, six-year-old Carol from Malefant Street was abducted in broad daylight in what was then a quiet, residential zone of northern Cathays. Two weeks later, her dead body was found 60 miles away in a gully at Horeb, near Llanelli. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Big name detectives from Scotland Yard were brought in to help Carmarthenshire Police, but all investigations led nowhere and, sixty years on, the monstrous culprit has never been caught.

DARREN THOMAS (1969-2014): HMP Cardiff has a maximum capacity of 800 yet permanently holds more than 1,000 inmates. That’s why Thomas, serving a 12-week sentence for breaching an Asbo, was made to share a cell with deranged arsonist Colin Capp, originally from Inverness. In the absence of alternatives, the menacing hulk in the middle of the city centre is required to lock up the poor, the addicted, the mentally ill, the illiterate and the plain unlucky as well as the genuinely criminal – and that’s why Capp got the chance to stab his cellmate in the neck 100 times with a ballpoint pen. He’s now a lifer.

DAVID THOMAS (c1840-1885): If a spur-of-the-moment murder is bad, how much worse is capital punishment; a calculated, cold-blooded, merciless murder by the state? A classic example of its insane inhumanity is the 1886 execution of David Roberts in Cardiff prison for the ferocious murder of Cowbridge farmer David Thomas. Because the hangman miscalculated Roberts’ weight and the drop ratio, the condemned man wriggled, twitched and heaved for breath for fully 10 minutes before he died, to the mounting consternation of those present. As a result, the Home Office issued new, mathematically precise hanging guidelines. Capital punishment for murder was abolished eventually in the UK in 1965 but it wasn’t until 1998 that the death penalty was abolished altogether – and now the  Tory government in London is trying to sneakily normalise and thus reintroduce it by allowing extradition of UK subjects to backward countries like the USA where executions (usually of poor black people) still take place.

LILY VOLPERT (1911-1952): Volpert’s throat was cut from ear to ear in her pawnbrokers and general outfitters shop at 203-204 Bute Street. In an outrageous and brazenly racist miscarriage of justice, Somali merchant seaman Mahmood Mattan (1924-1952) was arrested, tried, convicted and executed for the murder within six months, solely on the testimony of one unreliable witness. He was the last of the total of 20 people who were hanged at HMP Cardiff. The conviction was quashed 45 years later in 1998, the first ever ‘cold case’ to be referred to the Court of Appeal by the newly-formed Criminal Cases Review Commission. Mattan’s son, Omar, was found drowned on a remote Scottish beach in 2003.

TOMASZ WAGA (1997-2021): Having travelled to Cardiff from London in order to break into a cannabis factory in a house on Newport Road, Roath, Polish-born Waga was intercepted at the property by a gang and beaten to death with a baseball bat and bricks before his corpse was casually chucked away in nearby Westville Road. The three perpetrators fled to their Albanian homeland but after a lengthy, complex investigation across Europe were arrested and extradited. Josif Nushi and Mihal Dhana were convicted of murder and sentenced to life while Hysland Aliaj got 10 years for manslaughter.

LYNETTE WHITE (1967-1988): The savage murder of sex worker Lynette in a squalid room in James Street, Butetown, is notorious in the annals of crime. It featured the longest murder trial in British history up to that point (at Swansea Crown Court) and a famously grotesque miscarriage of justice that saw three mixed-race men spend three years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit before their convictions were overturned on appeal. The campaign to free the ‘Cardiff Three’ (Yusef Abdullahi, Stephen Miller and Tony Paris) was one of the most high-profile of its kind, with TV documentaries on Channel 4 and the BBC, and marked a turning point in the fight to hold the police to account. South Wales Police at first refused to re-open the case, implying the men were still guilty, but in 2002 had to admit they were wrong when new DNA technology led to the real killer, reclusive security guard Jeffrey Gafoor. The Cardiffian was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2003 – the first time in UK criminal history that someone else was convicted after a murder conviction had been overturned. He received a shorter minimum tariff than had been given to the wrongfully convicted men. But the case was far from over. An interminable review by the Independent Police Complaints Commission eventually resulted in the jailing of three of the original prosecution witnesses for perjury, the arrest of 13 former and serving police officers and the largest police corruption trial in British criminal history – but that collapsed in 2011 because the defence claimed key files had been destroyed (they had not; the files were found the following year). This outcome was labelled “the biggest scandal in the history of British justice” by respected investigative reporter Tom Mangold, who had covered the case for Panorama, and “a very sad day for justice” by journalist Satish Sekar, who wrote the definitive account of the shameful deeds, Fitted In: The Cardiff 3 and the Lynette White Inquiry. To compound the injustice, all the officers involved were allowed to retire and then eight of them sued South Wales Police for damage to their reputations! These civil actions failed but did succeed in delaying a new inquiry, announced by then Home Secretary Theresa May in 2015, into “the unresolved questions surrounding the reasons why no-one was found responsible for this appalling miscarriage of justice”. When the enquiry was eventually published in 2017 Richard Horwell QC concluded that the outrageous multiple injustices were all the fault of “human failings” rather than systematic police corruption and wickedness. Surprise, surprise. Desperate, pimped, trapped, mutilated Lynette has not been silenced yet.

NORA WILFRED (1939-1972): Viciously knifed in Bute Street late at night, Nora was poor and underprivileged so not many resources went into the murder inquiry and the killer remains out there.

HANNAH WILLIAMS (1820-1900): Widow Hannah Williams lived with her niece in what was then the rural arcadia of St Mellons at Mullen Cottage (long since demolished, it was located where Began Road forks to Cefn Mabli). She was beaten to death with a coal hammer while her niece was at Cardiff market selling their home-grown vegetables and fresh eggs. The cottage had been ransacked in a search for valuables. Morris Evans, a worker on the Cefn Mabli estate of the Kemeys-Tynte dynasty, was charged with the murder on the flimsiest of grounds and then acquitted early in 1901 by the jury at Monmouth Assizes. The case was closed and, notwithstanding the corny and inept efforts of amateur internet sleuths, this is now a murder that will never be solved.

THOMAS WILLIAMS (1850-1869): After a night on the tiles 19-year-old apprentice ships pilot Thomas was knifed outside the Rothesay Castle pub in Bute Street (demolished 1971, now the site of repurposed shipping containers used as ‘temporary’ housing for the homeless). The blade completely opened up his abdomen. Gallono and Pietro Gastro, Italian brothers on shore leave, were executed for this trademark Tiger Bay murder – one among countless in the 19^th century to involve sailors, alcohol, knives and convenient ‘foreign’ scapegoats.

RHODA WILLIS (1863-1907): Sunderland-born Willis (aka Leslie James) was hanged at Cardiff jail on her 44^th birthday for “baby farming”, the lurid phrase that referred to the widespread practice, before adoption and fostering laws were introduced, of being paid to take in unwanted babies – usually those of rich women seeking to avoid the scandal of an “illegitimate” baby in a censorious, moralistic era. Poor Willis, who rented rooms in Splott’s Portmanmoor Road, was brutally murdered by the state, the last woman to be hanged in the UK for the offence and also the first and last woman ever hanged in Cardiff.