Planning a complicated scam or actively stealing jewels
and antiques was always his greatest aphrodisiac. He was the first to admit that he was addicted to the adrenalin rush he got during a theft.
In contrast, Michael Kitto does not appear to have been an adrenalin junkie. Indeed, he insisted on driving hundreds of miles during the couple’s exploits, refusing to let Roy take the wheel as he was such a poor driver. Rather, Kitto craved oblivion and often drank heavily – on the night of Dorothy Scott-Elliot’s murder he claimed to have had twenty vodkas, an amount which would have floored a normal man.
Michael Kitto had a minor record for violence before meeting Roy Fontaine, but he might not have committed murder if he hadn’t entered the Scott-Elliots’ lavish home and suddenly found his drunken self being confronted by the lady of the house. He probably wanted to impress his new friend with his ability to control the situation, grabbed the woman too firmly – and the rest is history.
It seems that Kitto was less keen to kill than Fontaine was. He promised to kill Mary Coggle but didn’t follow through, so the butler took over planning her homicide. Similarly, Fontaine signalled to Kitto when it was time for Mr Scott-Elliot and Donald Hall to die. The younger man would later say that he feared the butler would take his life, but it’s clear that the mistrust was mutual. The men had a rifle but made sure that one of them kept the bullets whilst the other kept the gun.
Michael Kitto was a weak man with a criminal record who was initially impressed by the well-spoken and comparatively wealthy Roy Fontaine. He wanted similar treasures and for a short time he had them whilst both men lived illegally in the Scott-Elliots’ palatial home. Roy
seemed to offer travel opportunities and a salubrious hotel-based lifestyle. Kitto followed willingly, a path which took him all the way to a life sentence in jail.
Roy had hoped at the start of his murder sentence that he might eventually be released, telling friends that they’d have a celebration dinner at The Savoy. But he ultimately accepted that he was going to die in prison and urged other potential prisoners not to follow the path he’d taken, writing ‘Think again. In the final analysis my life is an impoverished nightmare.’ His best friend in his final years was a cockatoo.
On 16th September 2002 he suffered a stroke in his cell at Portsmouth’s Kingston Prison. The inquest ruled that he had died of natural causes, his death far less frightening than the suffocation, strangling and bludgeoning deaths he forced his victims to endure.
Sheilagh Farrow (like Myra Hindley) didn’t actually murder her lover’s victims. But by covering up two of the three brutal murders that her common law husband committed, she ensured that he was free to kill again. If she had gone to the authorities after he bludgeoned and mutilated his second Manchester victim, the third murder would not have occurred. Sheilagh Farrow does not fit into the ‘couples where one is exonerated’ chapter as she was given immunity.
Trevor Hardy’s family life was unstable so he was familiar with violence from an early age. By eight he’d become a bully and eventually ended up in the approved school system. He
regularly ran away from its brutal regimes, only to be sentenced to further punishment. He took to hanging about with much younger children as this made him feel important, the leader of an undemanding pack.
Whilst still in his teens, Hardy took to burglary. He was caught and, age fifteen, sent to an adult prison. Doubtless this showed him an even less palatable side of the world. He liked to dress up in women’s clothes – and men who have come from cold, unloving backgrounds are more likely than others to have this particular fetish. But others described his relationship with his mother as abnormally close. His relationship with his siblings wasn’t close, for they feared his temper. He was habitually drunk and full of rage.
In November 1974, he left prison after serving a two year sentence for wounding a man during a drunken altercation. He’d soon kill for the first time.
In the early hours of 1st January 1975, Trevor Hardy saw a young girl getting out of a taxi. She was a stranger called Lesley Stewart, but he’d later tell prosecutors that he believed she was a girl who’d rebuffed him years before.
Hardy approached the fifteen-year-old and she warily asked him ‘What do you want?’ In answer, he punched her to the ground, kicked her, then knelt by her side with his knife and cut a major blood vessel in her throat. He watched as she clutched impotently at the wound, as she lost consciousness. He’d later say that ‘I didn’t give a damn after what I’d been through.’
Trevor Hardy went home to mother, but left the house
again in the early hours of the morning and returned to the body to bury it. Later, he dug it up, allegedly to remove the hands, feet and head which might aid with the cadaver’s identification. But psychologists have privately speculated that he also returned to the body out of lust or rage. As the body decomposed over the next few weeks, he sometimes put his knives aside and rent the limbs apart with his hands, taking away the right thighbone. He threw the decomposing head into a nearby lake.
Trevor hadn’t been a hit with the ladies so far, but now found himself a girlfriend, Sheilagh Farrow. She was ten years older than him, a divorcee, who would later be described as a pitiful creature. She said nothing as her new beau went out at night – presumably she had no idea that he was returning to the putrid corpse of Lesley Stewart, whose remains still hadn’t been found. Trevor even removed jewellery from Lesley’s body, washed it and gave it to the morally-bankrupt Sheilagh as a gift. By now the couple were cohabitating in a flat in Newton Heath, but love had done nothing to quell Hardy’s violence. In July 1975, six months after the first murder, he had a row with Sheilagh and stormed out in a rage, ready to kill again.
This time Wanda Skala was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The innocent young woman was on her way home after a work night-out when Hardy pounced, battering her head in with a stone until she collapsed on the ground. He kicked her again and again in the vagina and tried to
strangle her with her own socks, and when this failed he hit her in the face with a brick. This murder also involved mutilation as he bit her right nipple off.
Hardy went home covered in blood, but Sheilagh Farrow’s only response was to swiftly launder his clothes, and when the police came round (checking out all the usual suspects) she told them that he’d been with her all evening. They had no option but to let him go.
Thankfully, one of Hardy’s younger brothers had more of a social conscience. He told the police that Trevor Hardy had privately admitted – indeed, boasted – that he was responsible for the murder, so the police arrested him again.
By now it had occurred to Trevor Hardy that his teethmarks had been left in Wanda’s breast when he bit off her nipple – so he asked Sheilagh Farrow to smuggle a file into prison, explaining that he wanted to change the shape of his teeth. There could have been no doubt in her mind by now that he was the killer who the police and community so desperately sought. Nevertheless, she brought him in the file and, alone in his cell, he filed his teeth to points. Odontologist tests couldn’t prove that he’d been the man who bit Wanda – so he was set free to kill again. The police were privately convinced that they’d had the right man in custody, but Sheilagh Farrow’s actions ensured that they had to let him go.
In March 1976 he attacked another girl in a pub toilet, strangling her so viciously that she bit through her own tongue. Thankfully others came to her aid before he could kill her, and he fled.
Three days later he was trying to break into a factory when a seventeen-year-old girl walked past. Sandra Mosoph was on her way home from a party in the early hours of the morning when Hardly lunged at her. She fought desperately to escape, but he stabbed her in the stomach with a screwdriver and choked her, finishing her off by removing her tights and pulling them forcefully around her neck. He also bit her left nipple off.
The triple-murderer threw the body into the river, went home – then calmed down and realised that he’d again left his bite mark on a visible victim. Returning to the scene, he entered the river and used his knife to slash dozens of times at the girl’s already mutilated breast.
The mutilations to Sandra’s body were so similar to Wanda’s that the police arrested their prime suspect Trevor Hardy again. This time they leaned harder on Sheilagh Farrow and she admitted that her lover had committed both murders. And, once imprisoned awaiting trial, Hardy confessed to Lesley’s murder as well as the other two. He also tried to implicate Sheilagh Farrow, saying that she’d been with him when he’d murdered Wanda. He claimed
he’d only planned to mug the girl, but had thought she recognised Sheilagh so had panicked and killed her to prevent being identified.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, Sheilagh Farrow now provided the police with evidence against her lover, given on the proviso that she herself earned immunity. The victim’s relatives were understandably outraged, wanting her to be prosecuted for harbouring and aiding the murderer. But the authorities knew that her statement would help keep her partner behind bars.
In 1977, Hardy was tried for the three murders. At the last moment he changed his plea to guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. But the jury didn’t buy his insanity defence and he was sentenced to life.
Dr Geoffrey Garrett was the home office pathologist who dealt with the first victim – Lesley Stewart’s – remains, being shown various bones and ribs which eventually comprised half of the teenager’s skeleton. The head, hands, feet and right thighbone were missing. I met Dr Garrett when we shared the stage at a crime conference in Manchester, and he still remembered the case vividly. It is overviewed in his fascinating book,
Cause Of Death
, which he co-authored with Andrew Nott.
In February 2004, whilst researching
Couples Who Kill,
I interviewed Andrew Nott about the three murders, asking
him why they hadn’t remained in the public consciousness the way that the Moors Murders had.
‘The case didn’t really grip the public imagination because it wasn’t immediately a serial killer event,’ Andrew – who is crime correspondent with the Manchester Evening News – explained. ‘And with the Moors Murderers the victims were children and the evidence included the tape-recording of Lesley Ann Downey. With the Hardy case the victims were young women and Sheilagh Farrow played a lesser role.’ He also notes that the later finding of two of Brady & Hindley’s victims kept the case in the public consciousness whereas with Hardy & Farrow there was only one trial and she appeared as a witness rather than a defendant, even though she was guilty of helping him escape justice for a time.
The Moors case also had a witness to one of the murders in the form of the terrified David Smith, whereas ‘Hardy’s younger brother told the police that Hardy had admitted to one of the murders but this was just hearsay.’ And the handsome Ian Brady and deliberately-scowling Myra Hindley had photogenic appeal whilst Trevor Hardy & Sheilagh Farrow were seen as lowlife and not particularly interesting in tabloid terms.
Hardy was originally seen as being guilty of two murders rather than three, as ‘police didn’t link one of the murders to Hardy’s other two killings until he led them to the burial site.’ Andrew Nott admits that no one knows why Hardy chose to belatedly admit this murder, that of his first victim Lesley Stewart.
But one possible motive is that the undistinguished killer wanted to be as infamous as possible. He’d even hinted after the second murder that he’d killed other
victims, saying that he’d ‘throated one of them. That usually works.’ Yet he’d stabbed the first victim and bludgeoned the second after failing to strangle her, so throating hadn’t been part of his successful modus operandi at that stage. Andrew Nott sees this as bravado, an attempt to appear like an even more heinous serial killer on Hardy’s part. ‘There are no missing persons from that era – and Trevor Hardy didn’t travel far. He had his comfort zone of Northern Manchester.’ He thinks it more likely that Hardy throated other victims into unconsciousness, stopping short of killing them.
Very little information has been made public about Hardy’s childhood but Andrew says he was from a ‘fairly problematic family.’ He adds ‘most violent drunks like Hardy have a violent past.’ It’s certainly true that all of his violence was drink-related – though alcohol only makes already-disturbed men become violent. ‘He attacked his brother when drunk and murdered the victims whilst under the influence. It’s a pretty safe bet that he hit Sheilagh Farrow when drunk – and she probably hit him as well at times when she had the psychological upper hand.’
So, given that she was ten years older, did Hardy see her as a mother figure? ‘Yes – he’d cry on her shoulder every time that he thought the world was against him, and as he was an inadequate man he spent most of his life believing that the world was against him.’ Not that she was some shining light in his life. ‘She was pretty dim.’
She was also immoral enough to smuggle the file into prison, knowing that this would allow her killer boyfriend to change the pattern of his bite and be set free to kill again. As a result of her actions ‘the relatives of the murdered girls desperately wanted to see her brought to
justice, but she was given police protection and immunity.’
Andrew notes that Sheilagh Farrow disappeared from public life after the case. If she is still alive she will be in her sixties. Meanwhile Trevor Joseph Hardy is incarcerated in a maximum security prison, and, though now in his fifties, is still considered to be highly dangerous.