Explore the sinister side of the British seaside as true crime writer Jeffrey Wantel delves into the chilling story of Steven Grieveson, the notorious Sunderland Strangler. Grieveson’s gruesome crimes unfold against the backdrop of seemingly innocent coastal towns, revealing a pattern of abuse, murder, and mayhem. From his troubled childhood to the calculated killings of young boys, each crime unfolds with shocking details. Grieveson’s concealed homosexuality and the gruesome aftermath of his murders add layers of horror to this coastal nightmare. Join us on a journey to Cliff’s Edge, where the sea meets a dark underworld of serial killers.
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Explore the sinister side of Britain’s picturesque seaside towns in Murder by the Sea. Uncover chilling tales of murder, mystery, and mayhem that have unfolded against the backdrop of sandy beaches and salty breezes. From grand hotels harbouring ruthless killers to seaside promenades haunted by the darkest of serial murderers, this series delves into some of the most bizarre and terrifying crimes in British criminal history. Discover the secrets hidden beneath the sun-soaked facades of these coastal resorts.
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[Music] what is it that makes the British Seaside [Music] Sinister why does it seem to attract so many killers is it the fact that the tide washes away their sins is it the fact that it’s the end
Of the line there’s nothing overly frightening about a big wheel or a carousel but what is undeniable is that the BR Seaside attracts and has always attracted death and [Music] murder hello I’m Jeffrey wantel I write about crime True Crime and in this new series I want you
To join me on a journey to the Cliff’s Edge where land meets the sea and where life meets death [Music] for make no mistake there is something sinister about our British Seaside towns on the surface they’re all funfairs candy floss and Breezy promenades but by digging a little
Deeper in the sand we uncover an underworld of Misfits and misant murder and Mayhem and reveal the dark lives of the most deadly Coastal Killers to ever stalk our [Music] Shores [Music] Sunderland is probably not synonymous in many people’s minds with the seaside it’s more famous perhaps for manufacturing or its football team but in fact it was home to a notorious serial killer Steven grieveson who believe it or not went to work as a fairgr worker
Steven grieson had been born and brought up in sandland in a troubled family but by the age of 20 he had killed for the first time he was to go on to kill relentlessly and earn himself the nickname of the Sunderland Strangler he was in almost every respect an utterly ruthless and principled
Killer Brady hinley Rose West and Fred West we know those names they’re in our DNA our criminal DNA but grievson who’s heard of grieson not very many people at all yet he’s one of the most disgusting and V serial killers this country is known my feeling would be this
Is the kind of behavior I would expect from a psychopath this total lack of any U moral values um no no concern about what he’s done um no no taking responsibility this a sense of lack of
Emotion a lack of guilt lack of responsibility those are the signs I would expect to see in a psychopath it’s curious as to why Grievous’s case wasn’t more in the public eye U why isn’t more known about it perhaps this is one of those cases where something was tucked away near
The coast out of sight and out of [Music] mine Steven grieson was in many ways an archetypal serial killer he had a monstrous childhood one of seven children when his father left his mother admitted that she couldn’t really cope with him and she preferred going to the
Bingo by the time he’s 18 he’s a glue sniffing rent boy who is used to being abused by older men for money and who has no concept immorality whatever grievson was an explosion waiting to happen Steven grievson did not have one of the best of starts in life his parents split up they
Were abused Ive to each other whil they were together and he was kind of like the product of this um he went seriously off the rails at the age of 11 and began kind of very petty theft Etc
Um this kind of progressed because he was sent to a children’s home um he was being brought up by a single parent she wasn’t by her own admission the best of mothers at that time and he kind of
Like brought his career life into Focus through the kind of lens if you like of a children’s Home it suggested that he would been physically and sexually abused in care [Music] this may have completely changed a normal child into someone who was more FAL he may have been subjected to abuse he may have subjected others to abuse this was kind of like a learning
Cycle and he would not have picked up good career motives here he would be picking up more Criminal Intent um it could also be that as a chicken in an egg situation that he was kind of like attracted to this that he was actually thrived in this environment he could have had pre-existing
Psychopathic traits that developed when he became an adolescent and this was part and parcel of the kind of life that he would have enjoyed it’s difficult to say which way but we do know the outcome very often when you get people like Steven grievson a serial killer they go through quite a
Few different homes and there is evidence when you start looking through their background and antecedence you find evidence of abuse within the system if you like and he certainly claimed quite a lot of abuse as a child and growing up into his his his teens of abuse and witnessing
It and he was also practicing it himself you know it wasn’t just a point that he was a victim he’d actually turned into an abuser himself and there was issues around his own behavior that had to
Be addressed as well which weren’t he did have a disturbed childhood um and from his background was very poor in many ways he didn’t have the the warm nurturing cultured family that his victims had his victims were by far very much sexually innocent boys on the edge of sexuality and he clearly had
Actually targeted them for his own sexual [Music] gratification something that made grievson unusual amongst serial murderers was that he targeted teenage boys who had all been pupils at the same school a school which he had never attended at the time I was head teacher of a school called
Mona School in uh leafy suburb of sundland um it was a school that had a good reputation it was a school where the children seemed to enjoy coming um it was a school that I thoroughly
Enjoyed working at um I moved on to another school later but I still have a lot of affection for Mona’s School Steven grieson was a was a homeless individual once he started life on the street he would fixate he would actually live and monitor children from the same school walking up
And down on the way to school and on the way home he started recognizing them he started looking at the uniforms he started almost Obsession becoming part and parcel of that their lives and wanting to engage with them wanting to be their friend and wanting obviously to carry out his sexual
Deviant acts on them by the age of 19 grievson was out of control but he was also a repressed homosexual he wasn’t happy to admit it and in May 1990 he encounters a 14-year-old boy called Simon Martin started playing football with a 14-year-old Simon Martin um he then seems to have en vagled
Him into a sort of secluded spot and he says that a sex act to took place between [Music] them he then ended up uh I think strangling and then sort of beating the poor boy with uh a piece of [Music]
Rubble grieveson committed his first murder as a progression from his sexual acts with a young boy um this was something he needed to cover up and he threatened the boy he put his hands around the neck and he slowly but surely progressed into strangling the boy
He then cemented this by picking up a large Rock and smashing the guy’s head in he then transported him to a safer area and then set fire to his body this is a a man who knows enough about crime to not leave evidence undetermined enough not to be caught
We don’t know too much about his early sexuality and but we can assume that he is brought up in a in a heterosexual matro male atmosphere that’s the role he’s designated to play for him unfortunately he was bisexual and he was giving into his homosexual uh Tendencies but
Feeling guilty afterwards rather than coming out and saying okay he he’s gay and full stop he was trying to hide his sexuality and hide what he was doing but I would see that very much within
The 1990s culture of men being men and and so the early days before um men were allowed to be gay it was clearly something he wanted to prevent his his mother knowing about even though she
Was quite aware of it um he he wanted to kind of hide this at all costs and that cost actually ran to being someone who killed to keep people quiet he would start by threatening an individual that
They revealed his sexual nature that uh you know he would come and get them but this progressed into actually um killing them eventually with a ligature um and this was something that he’ repeated again and [Music] again in May 1990 head teacher Jim FY was informed by the authorities
That one of his pupils was missing it would proved to be the first of many such worrying visits that would lead to news of a tragic outcome for the boys in question I first learned about Simon Martin in the fact that uh he was missing and and uh that’s all it was at
That time a young lad had gone missing Simon was just a very ordinary lad nobody that would been concerned about that school and to begin with it was just oh he’s probably gone to a friends
Or he’s gone somewhere but eventually when I was informed that had been found faced down in a in a derck house uh he’ he been hit on the back of the head um and just left in this direct house to
Die as a head teacher you do lose pupils pupils had killed in accidents and so but when you’re informed that he’s been murdered the cloud that comes over the school Community is is very very Different thus grievson was looking forward if you like to a life whereby each kind of sexual act um with a stranger would be something that ended in Murder he was going to be a serial killer um by definition um it would be inevitable um because it wouldn’t be just a one-off killing
This gon’s first victim was 14-year-old Simon Martin he abused him he had sex with him and he strangled him without a moment’s compunction that was clearly to conceal his own guilt at his homosexuality grieveson was a murder machine waiting to happen he was not to kill again for
A number of years he lay dormant but when he awoke he became a fully fledged serial [Music] killer Steven grievson by now had already killed but there was no stopping him he had been abused as a child and felt angry with himself because of his own confusion about his
Sexuality he wanted to conceal the fact that he was gay and yet couldn’t conceal it from [Music] himself he commits another murder another boy in a andon house in Roa Terrace ironically and Incredibly a house which had been a children’s home
In which almost certainly boys had been abused as he’d been abused as a boy Gon’s second victim was another much-loved young teenager Thomas Kelly police would eventually find his body dumped in a glass house yeah when I when I was informed about Thomas it it was exactly Deja Vu but the thing that I remember mainly about this was that uh Thomas was allowed
That had gone through school he was not trally academically bright but he gone through school um and was was friendly with a lot of people he was a sort of lad that got on with most people and
Staff his body had been burned there was evidence that he’ been found with a plastic bag over his [Music] head he’d manipulated the crime scene he made made it look like there was solvent abuse and solvent abuse that had gone wrong so you may well have had somebody sniffing glue for example
Setting fire to the can and and the can exploding so there was this kind of crime scene that wasn’t really viewed by the police at the time as a crime because it was seen as accidental death by substance abuse grierson’s victims were all young males usually ones that had been
To the same school in fact um his Target group basically meant that he was looking for people who were not just sort of of the age group but he was looking for people who would be easily taken away from social View and into places of seclusion quite easily and voluntarily was
Very calculated very deliberate he knows having committed one murder as a result of not wanting to be detected he then knows that he goes out to commit another murder and he knows knows he’s going to do a murder I suspect there may have been other sexual um behavior in between
But he goes out to have sex and then he knows he’s going to have to kill afterwards and he does that in a very very organized manner of actually disposing the body by burning [Music] them it was quite clever because of the plea didn’t pick it up as a sexual murder the murder
Was originally thought to been teenagers playing with drugs uh inhalants and things like that and one of them unfortunately setting fire to himself if you were sniffing petrol sniffing glue then he could have caused a fire the police asked me if I knew what a glasow hood was and I had no clue
What they meant by a Glasco hood and asked if I could um find out from some of the the P pupils so I spoke to several pupils who I thought might have some idea what was meant by that it was
Wasn’t one single pupil said that they knew what I was talking about they never heard of it all it was described to me was that they um put a plastic bag over their head and and somehow put butane gas up inside I did find it strange that two people from the
Same school would be murdered although it was 3 years apart but you don’t want to believe that it’s it’s it’s the same uh the same method of murder if you like and it was slightly different so I suppose we were just thinking well you know it’s unfortunate
That two people from the same school have been murdered in in what seemed to be two different ways even though they had two dead teenagers on their hands the police did not believe that they were the victims of any crime leaving grievson to go undetected and allowing him to kill again I mean
The thing that links all of them that they were ordinary boys boys that that sometimes were very funny they were there were boys had a good sense of humor um no indication that they were nothing
In school certainly that led us to believe that they could be taking any sort of drugs whether it was a Glasco hood or anything else but the thing that the the police seemed to latch on was that
The the house in which uh David Hansen was found his body was found that there were some butane gas cylinders lying on the ground in the same room and that confirmed in their minds that that it
Was some sort of drug related cuz he had was found with a a some sort of plastic bag again over his [Music] head gon’s third victim was David Hansen once again he lured the innocent teenager to a lonely place I mean the big problem that the police always have with
Serial killer crimes is simply realizing that there’s a serial killer at work and and in the case of Steven grievson once again they they just didn’t spot the pattern um they they just could not see that there was somebody committing this series of crimes and so it took
Them a long time to sort of join the dots and eventually see the pattern and realize that they had somebody a fairly sort of calculating figure who was behind this series of horrific murders Grievous’s sexual Adventures continued soed the deaths and each one following the same
Pattern where he isolated the person took them to a a quiet place and committed the sexual act and then was strangling them with his hands and with a ligature a finality he then would try and set fire to whatever evidence was left the body or even an entire
Building I remember particularly at the funeral of uh David Hansen when I was walking out and two detectives pulled me to one side and said you need to know we found another one last night I mean that was just just so so shocking and and and that’s when I thought is this going
To go on is this going to go on this can’t be accidents anymore this is not an accident that this is happening to all of these boys um and it was I think the most horrific period of time
After that when every time I got a call from the police you’re wondering is this another is this happening again I think one of the problems that the police felt was that the use of solvent abuse you know was quite common and sometimes no criticism intended by any structure of the
Imagination but sometimes we can have a thought about an investigation that becomes the thought and the thought was that these were all young boys experimenting with solvent abuse well maybe one or maybe two but three young boys boys start to think well hold on a minute there
Must be something kind of more to this this is more than a coincidence the national press in particular had headlines uh murdered boys from drug school and first of all for the parents to read that about their their old children must have been um Soul destroying but again from a
Professional point of view as a head teacher of a school that is labeled and having the uh cameras from um TV companies outside with cherry pickers filming with closeup inside the classrooms was uh was so difficult for us to manage we had several police officers in in school detectives
Had to allocate rooms for them parents had to either sit with the child or have a member of Staff or myself in local parental to sit with a child um and and questions all the time about uh
Who else is on drugs and how many pups have you got on drugs and thankfully it was the judge in in leads in the the Crown Court who actually held the newspaper up and said uh this is a
Very good school the ofstead reports are excellent uh and people got to stop labeling it so but they never ever said that for the families let’s not label the boys it was uh about about the school [Music] what made gon’s crimes so
Horrific was that he often set fire to his victims not an unusual characteristic in serial killers quite often you find in an effort to conceal what they’ve done they set fire to the body but grievson was also trying to conceal his own conflict over his homosexuality those two concealments made grievson
Very uncomfortable and yet if you met him in the street if you’d seen him in the supermarket you would have thought him extraordinarily unremarkable he was by no means a man with a horns a tail and a black cloak there is no doubt that by the time the third
Body was discovered that the police realized that they had a serial killer on their hands the difficulty they had was they had no obvious suspect gavon was nothing if not Inconspicuous early in February 1994 he killed David Hansen who was 15 but it did not quell the glue sniffing drug using sexually abused grievson he was to kill again before the end of February the next victim was another boy from monou school by now grievson had
Developed a signature as a serial killer and his final victim David grief was murdered in the same penous fashion as his previous killings this time he again strangled and burnt the body that is three murders within a space of a very short
Time it would appear that a sexual drive was the motivating factor he wanted to have sex but wasn’t willing to accept his uh homosexual tendencies so would then have to protect himself what I find interesting is the gap and whether he was actually engaging in in sex with a male
Somewhere else maybe he he was working away from home maybe was had opportunities to have sex safely but when he engaged with the young boys he was very risk behavior very very risky Behavior because he knew there was a risk if they weren’t homosexual themselves of them
Complaining to the police or parents or school so there was a risk there initially the police felt that the three deaths were not connected or in fact were only connected through solvent abuse and it was only 7 months later when a new senior investigating officer was brought in to
The investigation that he asked two two eminent Pathologists to reexamine the burnt bodies of the victims David was uh was found in the in the same um allotment as Thomas Kelly um just round from the uh the hospital on Newcastle Road um again he’s the same plastic bag and a burn body
The pathologist discovered that these young men had all been strangled and burnt after death and it was at that point that the new senior investigating officer thought well hold on a minute this is nothing to do with solvent uh abuse this is something to do with one killer
Being responsible for the these three deaths it was perhaps Grievous’s brutality that allowed him to evade capture for so long um the fact that he was so thorough in destroying evidence he made it very difficult for the police to actually piece together um a series of crimes it was
More difficult if you were to gather any physical evidence uh of one single person committing these acts um so griev if you like became almost invulnerable having gotten away with three murders grievson must have believed himself to be beyond the reach of the law and he remained set
On targeting innocent teenagers no one can say why but what is not in doubt is that boys from monk we mouth School became the hunting ground for Steven gson the man who was to become known as the
Sunderland Strangler one of the easiest things to say about Steven grion if you look at the original photographs going back to the crime the days when he committed his crime he actually looked like one of the school boys himself almost Angelic very innocent very young very naive and you can see
Why children school children would look at him and think he’s probably the same age group as us so they would actually put their trust in him and have that confidence that it wasn’t going to
Be anything bad or wasn’t going to do anything nasty to them so he was able to win them over not only by his charm but also by his looks which he used to his own purposes I’m not sure
Um whether he chose a school for any particular reason or whether it was just coincidental that all the victims came from the same school but I imagine it’s the age group that he was interested in rather than the school he wasn’t one of my pupils I didn’t know Steven grievson he was
Um he attended another local sundland school but he it wasn’t his reputation as um a bit of a bad lad I guess was known around the area which came out but you know when I was told Steven grievson
Um a vaguely knew of the grievson family but I didn’t know Steven griefs and I couldn’t have even told you what he looked [Applause] like grievson was now absolutely Carefree he thought he could get away with absolutely anything and he set out to do so and yet when he was first
Arrested by the police it had nothing to do with the killings it was simply a matter of a burglary a Burg y ironically in the very house that David Hansen his victim in February had been found but the police never connected the dots there was no connection in their
Mind even grievson came to my attention when we were always asking youngsters if they heard anything they if they didn’t want to go to the police they could come to see me or or one of
Their favorite teachers and this young lad came to me one day and said um I don’t know whether this is of any use but on Friday night we were walking um along the road called Newcastle Road by the
Hospital and the friend I was with said take your baseball cap off Steven grieson is at the bus stop and uh he said well who’s Steven grievson he says oh he’ll probably pinch a baseball cup so he says
I stuck at the inside my sweater and we walked we walked past him but he was standing beside the bus stop just around the corner from the allotments so I spoke to one of the detectives
And gave him the information like I’d done all all along and uh the police took the issue from there following the community’s sharing of information with the police grievson soon found himself firmly on the police radar he was questioned and eventually
Arrested on suspicion of the murders of Thomas Kelly David Hansen and David grief and eventually he would confess to killing another innocent young boy Simon [Music] Martin when Steven grion is finally brought to trial in 1996 he pleads not guilty
Presumably because he wants the publicity there could be no doubt that he is as guilty as Sin but he puts the relatives of those three young men those innocent teenagers through the horrors of a trial and the details of the way they died in the most horrifying
[Music] fashion grieveson had been been charged with the murders of Thomas Kelly David Hansen and David grief but the murder of Simon Martin remained unsolved even though there were chilling parallels to the deaths of the other boys that grievson had killed it
Seems the pathologist missed the strangulation marks on uh Simon Martin’s neck um so once again this looks like an occasion where a ailla has has has committed his first crime and then developed a kind of technique for for committing further crimes later on because
His three subsequent victims were strangled Grievous’s method of killing may have related to sexuality he may have introduced a ligature even during the sexual act um but his burning of the bodies his destruction of evidence may have gone beyond simple forensic awareness he
May have had slight awareness of DNA but I think he was destroying all evidence of the sexual act he wanted it completely raised to the ground 8 years after his conviction grievson finally admitted the killings but he denied forcefully that he killed Simon
Martin still in denial until many many years later when Steven gon wrote to all of the family’s relatives admitting his guilt and saying how sorry he was and asked for forgiveness despite claiming to feel remorse for the deaths of some
Of his victims he still refused to admit his depraved crimes it wasn’t until 2013 the grievson was finally convicted of the murder of the innocent Simon Martin sentencing him the judge had this to say this was an horrendous attack and murder of an innocent young boy lured by you for your sexual
Pleasure and it took 20 years in prison before he finally owned up to killing that boy now is this the classic power and control he knows he’s going to prison for a long time he was senten for 35
Years he knows he going a long time does he keep one of his bodies just to keep him happy and in control and also there’s a psychopathic element of inflicting pain on the family by not telling them
What happened so was he doing that and I suspect he probably was interesting question is then why does after 20 years he owns up is this part of a planned discharge program or am I being syndical and is he actually taken responsibility for what he’s [Applause] done I don’t think he perceived
Himself as a seral killer I think the The Killing was secondary to the sex I think his motive was clearly to have sex with these young school boys and didn’t want to be caught having sex didn’t
Want to be seen to be acting in a homosexual way because he had to keep maintain this Macho male image and the killing was simply to avoid them telling other people I don’t see him planning it
In the same way as other SE Killers do his Target was because of his sexual interest not because of his killing interest you have to put your self in the position of a young boy he’s out playing and
An older boy younger man comes up to him and starts chatting to him the young children are naturally trust him and I suspect that many of these children actually knew who griefs and was and they did trust him and using gar and cunning again he lured that child somewhere some
Were dark some were cold and then the assault started grievson is currently behind bars for the four murders the hope of many is that he will never be released for his crimes this in itself being some small consolation to the families who lost their loved ones in the most cruel fashion
Imaginable ever since if I bump into whether in a professional capacity or otherwise um people still refer to uh or was at the drug school and that still hurts the grievson case is possibly one of the most tragic it involved young boys
Starting their lives and tragically having them ended in quite horrific circumstances he himself had a really bad beginning to life perhaps there was no Ray of Hope in this particular case even his mother had regrets that maybe she could have contributed to this pathway
This is a kind of case where there is no light only dark when you actually profile Steven grievson and you look at the targets that he he actually had and his victims they all went to the same school they all had a uniform they were all smart looking boys tidy
So they were very smart in appearance so everything that he yearned for as a child he wanted to be part of society he wanted to be accepted by his peers he wanted to be seen as
Somebody who could stand out in the crowd if you like but be part of a group to be collectively wanted to be not an outsider not an outcast not somebody who was homeless and living on the streets and and begging he wanted to be those children and that school and the uniforms
And their demeanor the way they interacted with one another laughing joking playing having fun all the things he’d never really had throughout his childhood he wanted and that was why he fixated on that type of [Music] Target I want the boys to be remembered as they were
Ordinary pupils they came to school were not perfect but got through school in a way that I believe made them happy I’m certain that they would have made a good life had they lived Steven grieson was a man who felt he had nothing to live for and so chose
To make it his duty to end the lives of four young men who had everything to live for to my mind that makes him one of the most despicable murderers of recent times Join me Jeffrey wall next time for more murders by the [Music] sea
4 Comments
I lived in Sunderland for years and no way is it or could it be described as a seaside town. It's on the coast and that is as far as it goes.
It's crazy that it's included then.
Perhaps they ran out of murderes literally by the seaside and were clutching at straws!
Not to change the subject but love your voice ❤and your videos 😊
He is one sick puppy.