Michael Stone

Michael Stone (born Michael John Goodban in 1960) is a British man who was convicted of the 1996 murders of Lin and Megan Russell and the attempted murder of Josie Russell.

He was sentenced to three life sentences with a tariff of 25 years for the Russell killings.

Stone maintains his innocence and continues to contest his conviction.

His legal team argues that the serial killer Levi Bellfield could possibly be the true perpetrator of the attack.

In February 2022, Stone's solicitor said that Bellfield had confessed to the murder of both Lin and Megan, although the truthfulness of the confession remained in doubt and Bellfield later claimed that he had confessed for a cash payment.

In July 2023 the Criminal Cases Review Commission declined to refer Stone's case to the Court of Appeal, saying that it had "identified no credible new evidence or information".

Stone was born as Michael John Goodban in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent in 1960, one of five children.

Although the name of his father was registered, and therefore given on his birth certificate, as "Ivor Goodban", there was uncertainty over the true identity of his father and Stone regarded a different partner of his mother, Peter Stone, as having been his father.

Both men denied that he was their son.

Stone had a turbulent childhood, suffering domestic violence in his family home before he was placed in a care home, where he was abused.

As a boy, he had also been beaten with a hammer, and witnessed his mother's former partner attack another man with a meat cleaver in his home.

He was known to be prone to uncontrolled outbursts and aggressive mood swings.

From the age of nine, he began using drugs and committing crimes.

Stone's police record dates back to 1972 at the age of 12 and continued into adulthood.

Once leaving the care system, Stone began using heroin, and soon developed a £1,500 a week heroin addiction.

Police suspect Stone may be responsible for an unsolved murder that occurred in Maidstone in 1976, and prior to the Russell murders he had spent time in prison for violent assaults and armed robbery.

Police suspect Stone of having killed Francis Jegou, who was found stabbed to death in a park in Maidstone in 1976.

Jegou was a 65-year-old Guernsey man who was a former special constable.

He served three prison sentences in the 1980s and 1990s for robbery, burglary, grievous bodily harm and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

He was known to carry weapons, including knives and guns, and would also attack victims with ammonia squirted from a Jif lemon bottle.

He became a figure in the criminal underworld of the Medway towns of Kent.

Stone was sentenced to two years' imprisonment in 1981 for attacking a man with a hammer during a robbery.

He then received a four-and-a-half year sentence for stabbing a friend while he slept in 1983, an attack that penetrated the friend's lung and nearly killed him, and he tried to wound a police officer in the eye after this arrest.

When he was sentenced for this crime, the sentencing judge remarked that Stone's violent nature could lead to him killing someone in the future.

He was then sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for two armed robberies in Maidstone and Brighton respectively during the same week in 1986.

The first robbery was at Maidstone's Hazlitt Theatre, and the second was at the Leeds Permanent Building Society branch in Brighton, where he stole £577.

Throughout his criminal career, Stone would steal from garden sheds, taking anything he could sell, and would mug people at cash dispensers, in part to fund his heroin addiction.

In prison, he attacked various prison officers.

Stone was known to have been violent towards his partners.

His former girlfriend, Rachel Marcroft, recounted that he had once beaten her so badly that she went to the police, who took photos of her injuries as evidence, although the charges were later dropped as she refused to give evidence against him.

She had received two black eyes, a swollen mouth and heavy bruising from where he had held her down, injuries which the police later said bore a striking resemblance to those on the bodies of the Russells, whom he was later convicted of murdering.

Marcroft said that the way the Russells were tied up was similar to how she was tied up by Stone.

She said that whenever he was violent towards her, Stone would not afterwards remember what he had done.

Stone was released from prison in 1993.

Prior to the murders, he had received support for his drug addiction and mental health problems and was under the supervision of the National Probation Service.

He had a history of severe mental illness.

Stone had been sectioned to a mental hospital in Hull in 1994, and was diagnosed with personality disorder and paranoid psychosis.

His conditions were controlled by regular injections of medication, but his treatment was affected by his overuse of heroin.

The hospital at which he was detained had to pass him into the care of another health authority as they found him "too dangerous".

It was then that he was passed into the care of West Kent health authority.