Cold hearted killers and how their webs of lies finally unravelled – Liverpool Echo

These evil killers struck fear into the hearts of people across Merseyside – but their crimes finally caught up with them and they all ended up behind bars.

This week, the ECHO reported on the case of Mitchell Quy who chopped up his wife’s body and hid it across Southport amid reports his parole hearing is due to take place in two months.

His horrific crimes left the whole of our region reeling as details emerged of the calculated way he went about covering up his wife’s murder.

READ MORE:Liverpool’s most notorious gangland nicknames and where they come from

Amid the news of Quy’s upcoming parole board hearing, we revisited the stories of some of Merseyside’s most feared killers.

Despite many of these monsters making efforts to cover up their heinous crimes, they were all eventually found out by detectives who were able to pick apart their web of lies.

Whether they were caught by DNA advances or developments in forensic science, or “grassed on” by a former trusted friend, they all came unstuck in the end.

Some of these killers are feared for their position within a criminal underworld that fosters a “wall of silence” from terrified witnesses, while others create fear through the sheer savagery and inhumanity of their crimes.

We took a look back at some of Merseyside’s most feared criminals and the men behind some of our region’s most notorious crimes.

These are the stories of their crimes and how they struck fear into the hearts of their communities.

We also explored how each of these cruel killers was caught and the tireless investigative work that went into bringing them to justice.

Robert Maudsley

Liverpool “cannibal” killer Robert Maudsley is spending his prison sentence alone and entombed in an underground glass box.

The murderer, from Toxteth, is believed to be so dangerous that he is no longer allowed to associate with other prisoners or even guards.

According to Mirror Online, Maudsley is held in the deep bowels of Wakefield Prison which is also known as ” Monster Mansion “.

Maudsley, who committed his first murder when he was just 21, has been in jail since 1974 and will never be released from custody.

He is expected to die in the tiny see-through room that has been his home for decades.

The cell was constructed specially for Maudsley in 1983 before being dubbed the glass cage as it was so similar to the prison Hannibal Lecter was kept in in Silence of the Lambs.

It’s just 5.5 metres by 4.5 metres and has huge bullet-proof windows, which prison officers watch Maudsley through.

In a desperate attempt for company, in 2000 Maudsley begged for the terms of his imprisonment to be relaxed.

He asked for a pet budgie and then, if that was refused, for a cyanide capsule so he could end his life.

His requests were denied and Maudsley will spend the rest of his life, alone, in his glass box underneath Wakefield Prison.

The only furniture is a table and a chair, which are both made of compressed cardboard, while his toilet and sink are bolted to the floor.

Maudsley’s bed is a concrete slab and the door is made of solid steel, which opens into a cage just inside.

The cage is encased in thick, see-through, acrylic panels and has a small slit at the bottom, through which guards pass the serial killer his meals and other items he needs.

Maudsley is locked in the cell for 23 hours a day, only being freed for an hour of exercise.

He is escorted to the exercise yard by six guards and is never allowed any contact with other inmates.

Maudsley fled home at 16 but soon became trapped in a spiral of drug abuse and funded his habit through sex work.

One of his clients, John Farrell, was the first man he murdered in 1974.

Maudsley garrotted him after he showed him photographs of children he had sexually abused.

Maudsley was jailed for life with the recommendation that he should never be released and sent to Broadmoor Hospital, which housed some of the country’s most dangerous prisoners.

For several years, Maudsley kept himself out of trouble but in 1977 he and fellow prisoner, David Cheeseman, barricaded themselves in a cell with convicted child molester, David Francis.

It was reported at the time that Maudsley rammed a spoon through his ear and into his brain, earning him the nickname Hannibal the Cannibal, although an autopsy report later showed that the story was incorrect.

When guards finally broke the door down, Francis was dead.

Maudsley was then moved to the maximum security Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire but a year after he killed Francis his murderous rage returned.

On July 29, 1978, he garrotted and stabbed wife killer Salney Darwood in his cell and hid the body under the bed.

Maudsley then stalked the prison wing for his next victim and attacked Bill Roberts, who had been jailed for sexually assaulting a seven-year-old girl.

He stabbed Roberts to death before hacking at his skull with a makeshift dagger.

When Maudsley was certain Roberts was dead, he calmly walked up to a prison guard and told him there would be two less for dinner that night.

Mark Fellows – ‘The Iceman’

“The Iceman” assassin who shot John Kinsella and Paul Massey “melted” in the dock when told he would die in jail.

Mark Fellows executed “gangland enforcer” Kinsella, three years after shooting dead Kinsella’s close friend Massey, aka Salford’s ‘Mr Big’.

He shot Everton-born Kinsella four times in front of his pregnant partner Wendy Owen, 41, who claimed he also shot at her.

The contract killer grinned when found guilty of the “cold-blooded assassination” of the two “notorious” underworld figures although he was cleared of trying to murder Ms Owen.

But when he was handed a whole life sentence in January 2019, the previously calm and collected shooter completely lost his cool when faced with the reality he would never be released.

Detectives had 112 names of possible suspects for Paul Massey’s murder but faced a wall of silence as people were terrified to speak out, reports The Guardian.

But the breakthrough came when detectives investigating the Kinsella murder found a Garmin watch used by Fellows for long-distance running.

Fellows’ watch had actually recorded him carrying out a “reconnaissance run” just before Massey was killed.

The data found on the watch matched hundreds of hours of CCTV and phone data.

Steven Boyle, who was also found guilty of the murders of John Kinsella and Paul Massey, “grassed” on trusted friend Fellows in court for murdering John Kinsella.

There were gasps when Fellows’s associate, Boyle, broke the wall of silence and told jurors it was “more than likely” his former friend had done it.

Peter Moore – ‘The Man in Black’

One of Britain’s most twisted serial killers is now two decades in to a life sentence for murdering and mutilating four men “for fun”.

On the surface Peter Moore was an upstanding business owner, running a chain of cinemas in North Wales – but under his veneer of respectability he was a sadistic killer who butchered his victims in a series of horrific crimes.

Dubbed the “Man in Black” for his dark leather clothes, Peter Moore claimed four lives in a horrifying four-month spate of killings.

While Moore was from Rhyl, his victims came from across Merseyside and North Wales.

During a terrifying period in the winter of 1995, four men were murdered and mutilated after being targeted by the Nazi-obsessed killer.

Moore’s brief reign of terror struck fear in the hearts of Merseyside’s gay community, as he chose victims in gay bars and cruising spots before carrying out his sick crimes.

St Helens -born Moore murdered Edward Carthy – a 28-year-old man from Birkenhead who had fallen into drug and drink addiction.

Although Mr Carthy is thought to have been Moore’s second victim, his body was the last to be found – with his killer drawing a diagram to help police find where he was buried in dense forest near Ruthin.

After meeting in a gay bar, the pair drove to North Wales where Mr Carthy was stabbed to death.

Blood found on on Pensarn Beach in Abergele after the murder of Moore’s final victim, Tony Davies, was matched by DNA profile to the killer.

This allowed murder detectives to finally close the net around a serial killer who had evaded them for months.

Shaun Walmsley

Killer Shaun Walmsley spent 18 months on the run after being sprung from custody by armed thugs who burst into action while he was on a hospital visit.

Walmsley’s bid for freedom is one of the most notorious cases Merseyside Police detectives have been landed with in recent years.

Before his first capture he was a key figure in a Walton Vale-centred gang known as the Vale Heads.

Walmsley and his associate Christopher Kenny plotting an attack that saw Anthony Duffy lured to Aintree and stabbed to death – and in 2015 both were jailed for a minimum of 30 years for the murder.

After an appeal against the severity of his sentence was refused in 2016, Walmsley’s imagination sprung into overtime.

He lost a significant amount of weight to both change his appearance and fuel his claims of a serious illness.

His plan came to a head while he was on a visit to Aintree Hospital on February 21, 2017.

Returning to a taxi, flanked by prison guards, two men approached Walmsley’s group and secured his escape.

The masked men were armed with an automatic machine pistol and a machete and they fled, with Walmsley, in a gold Volvo.

His escape sparked an international manhunt that included police raids, huge cash seizures and other criminals being captured as detectives hunting Walmsley stumbled across other leads.

There were dawn warrants executed in Liverpool, prison cell raids and intelligence-sharing exercises with foreign forces.

Walmsley’s time on the run eventually ended in Yorkshire in August 2018.

Armed police swooped on a car in the Harehills area of Leeds in a joint operation by Merseyside Police and West Yorkshire Police that ended one of the UK’s biggest manhunts of recent years.

The network that helped him escape custody – then evade those chasing him – remains under scrutiny, however.

And while Walmsley may have been back in jail for fifteen months, earlier this year Merseyside Police confirmed its detectives were still keen to bring them to justice.

Mitchell Quy

Calculating killer Mitchell Quy horrified Merseyside with the remorseless cover-up of his wife’s murder.

In 2001, he was sentenced to a minimum of 17 years in prison, for strangling and then dismembering his wife Lyndsey’s body.

However for almost 18 months, after her disappearance came to light, he maintained a callous pretence that she had left him for another man.

Quy had in fact killed his wife downstairs, in their Southport home, as their two young children slept upstairs.

But it was not until the following February, after the December killing, that she was reported missing.

And even then it was not her husband who came forward.

Instead social workers reported their concerns because they had not seen her for so long.

For the next 18 months Quy, who was arrested by police but released without charge, repeatedly made statements to the press and went on television denying any wrongdoing.

He claimed he was the victim of a “whisper campaign” and even allowed a documentary team to follow him around while the hunt for his wife continued.

In one interview he was asked: “Did you kill Lyndsey?” and after smirking he answered: “Wait and find out.”

But the net started to close in on Quy, with police determining money withdrawals had been made from Lyndsey’s account since December 14.

And when he was arrested for a second time Quy cracked, after intense questioning, and admitted to strangling and dismembering his wife’s body.

He drew police a map of where he and his brother Elliot, a butcher, had dumped his wife’s body parts.

Her hands and head have never been found.

Quy has twice been denied parole previously and therefore remains behind bars in a category A prison.

Ian Simms

Ian Simms murdered 22-year-old Helen McCourt – and despite being locked up for his crime he continued to torment her loved ones by refusing to say where her body was buried.

The former pub Landlord of the George and Dragon pub – now known as the Billinge Arms – was sentenced to a minimum of 16 years for the killing in 1988.

However, Simms has always protested his innocence and never revealed where he hid Helen’s body.

In court he claimed he had been framed for the murder of Helen, who was abducted after getting off a bus just 500 yards from her home.

In his defence the killer told the jury how someone must have broken into his pub, murdered Helen, while wearing his clothes and then stole his car to dispose of her body.

But his version of events were rejected by the jury who found him guilty.

The case of Ian Simms is a rare example of a case where a murder conviction is obtained without the presence of a body.

The case was also one of the first in the UK to use DNA fingerprinting.

Police were able to bring Helen’s killer to justice after DNA evidence including Helens hair that was found in his pub – which police believed he lured her into and her blood was found on his clothing- which he dumped near the banks of the river.

An earring of Helen’s was also found in his car.

Helen’s mum Marie has never stopped searching for her daughter.

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