Colin Ireland

Colin Ireland (16 March 1954 – 21 February 2012) was a British serial killer known as the Gay Slayer, because his victims were gay.

Criminologist David Wilson believes that Ireland was a psychopath.

Ireland suffered a severely dysfunctional upbringing.

He committed various crimes from the age of 16 and had served time in borstals and prisons.

While living in Southend, he started frequenting the Coleherne, a gay pub in Earl's Court, London.

Ireland sought men who liked the passive role and sado-masochism, so he could readily restrain them as they initially believed it was a sexual game.

Ireland said he was heterosexual: he had been twice married to women and that he pretended to be gay only to befriend potential victims.

Ireland claimed that his murders were not sexually motivated.

He was highly organised, and carried a full murder kit of rope, handcuffs and a full change of clothes to each murder.

After killing his victim he cleaned the flat of any forensic evidence linking him to the scene and stayed in the flat until morning in order to avoid arousing suspicion from leaving in the middle of the night.

Ireland was born in 1954 in Dartford, Kent, to an unmarried teenage couple.

Shortly after his birth, his father left him and his 17-year-old mother.

His father is not named on his birth certificate, and Ireland did not know his identity.

He was raised in poverty by his mother; they moved many times.

In the early 1960s, she married.

When she became pregnant, she put Ireland into care; he later returned to her.

During the 1960s in Sheerness, Kent, Ireland was propositioned on three occasions and spied on once by men who were paedophiles.

In his mid-teens, he was sent to borstal for theft, and whilst there, deliberately set fire to another resident's belongings.

At age 17, Ireland was convicted of robbery.

He escaped and was returned to borstal.

In 1966 she married another man.

In the attempt to make ends meet, Ireland had a series of manual jobs, then in December 1975, he was convicted of car theft, criminal damage and two burglaries, for which he was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment.

Ireland was released in November 1976 and moved to Swindon, Wiltshire.

He lived with a woman and her children for a few months.

In 1977, he was convicted of extortion, for which he was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment.

In 1980, he was convicted of robbery, for which he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment.

In 1981, he was convicted of attempted deception.

In 1982, Ireland married Virginia Zammit; the couple and their daughter lived in the Holloway area of London.

In 1985, he was convicted and sentenced to six months for "going equipped to cheat".

He divorced in 1987, after his wife discovered he had committed adultery.

In 1989, in Devon, he married Janet Young; he was violent towards her and stole from her.

In the early 1990s, they separated; she and her children became homeless.

He moved to Southend-on-Sea, where he became homeless and lived in a hostel.

He later moved to his own flat.

Whilst living there, he travelled to the Coleherne Arms, a gay pub in Earl's Court, London, where he first met his victims.

Peter Walker, a 45-year-old choreographer, took Ireland back to his flat in Battersea.

There he was bound, and ultimately suffocated by a plastic bag being placed over his head.

Ireland placed two teddy bears in a 69 position on the body.

He left Walker's dogs locked in another room.

Ireland was sentenced to five counts of life imprisonment for the murders on 20 December 1993 and remained imprisoned until his death on 21 February 2012, at the age of 57.