Later that day, Baker and O’Reilly met former South African President, Nelson Mandela, who had agreed to make a pan-African appeal for information about the London child murder they were attempting to solve. Read More→

The Juju angle certainly took Scotland Yard by surprise. They weren’t used to the occult as a motive for murder – money, jealousy and sheer viciousness made more sense. This was why, six months after Adam’s torso had been discovered, detectives investigating the case had flown 7,000 miles from London to South Africa. One of locations they visited was a “muti” or medicine market in downtown Johannesburg. Read More→

As it was, the Thames Torso case didn’t shock the nation as much as it might have. The story got overshadowed by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September, 2001. People the world over were reeling at the sheer audacity and enormity of the attacks – not to mention the massive loss of life. And the media naturally ran the ins and outs of that fateful day for weeks to come. So the Adam story pretty much came and went. But every now and again a report would appear – mainly because a handful of reporters on a few of the national newspapers took an interest in the case and followed developments. Read More→

After leaving Labady, I headed over to Alexandra Palace, the majestic Victorian exhibition center which lies close to Wood Green in north London. It’s somewhere I used to go to relax, partly because – being set in nearly 200 acres of parkland – it is one of London’s main green lungs, and also because it offers views right across the city.

You can sit back and lose yourself in the sheer size of the metropolis and muse on what the millions of people are doing. Some will be successful and wealthy, others poor and needy, the majority somewhere in between. Some will be cruel and violent, others kind and considerate. And some will be killers who have never been caught. Read More→

Horrific stories of human sacrifice, and official figures showing its prevalence in Africa, India and other developing world countries, made it a distinct possibility that Scotland Yard was correct in thinking Britain had got its first definite case (in modern times, at least) of ritual human sacrifice. Read More→