In 1973, a twenty-year-old man committed the murder and mutilation of three young children. To this day, the motives for the crime are still unknown, and the killer has never expressed remorse. Now, after 45 years in prison, David McCreevy is preparing to break out of prison and lead a normal life again.
David McCreevy was 21 when he committed the crime
By the estimation of Clive and Elsie Ralph, April 13, 1973, would have ended like any other day. Clive Ralph was a truck driver and his wife a waitress in a pub and they lived on Gillam Street in Wester with their three children, Dawn, Paul and Samantha, who were respectively four years old, two years old, and nine months old.
McGreevey helped them sometimes, Clive's job was often away from home, and his wife sometimes worked evening shifts. McGreevey was good with the children and seemed to enjoy taking care of them.
Then he went to the basement and brought the ground comb (a tool like shovels) that he used to represent the bodies of dead children. When he finished, he took the small bodies to the garden, where they laid them on the iron fence that separated the garden of the house from the adjacent garden, and then left.
When the Ralphs got home, their children weren't there and blood was splattering all over their two-room house. They searched for the tenant, McGreevey, but he had disappeared, so they called the police.
It was the unfortunate policeman, Bob Reese, who lit the garden with his flashlight and came upon the bleak discovery where the bodies of children were hanging on the iron railing. McGreevey was found lying face down in a nearby street. When he was arrested, he was asked the reason behind everything that happened and he denied any knowledge of the killing. But he returned and admitted the crime of killing children at the police station and explained to the officers how he committed it, but he did not provide the reasons that made him commit it, and he still refuses to reveal his motives to this day.
McGreevey,
an old friend of Clive Ralph, was such a reckless young man that he once proposed to a girl after only a week of getting to know her, and was agitated after drinking but had no indication that he might have committed murder.
He was brought up in a military family that moved frequently with his father holding various posts across Britain and Germany. He joined the Marines but was shamefully discharged after setting a garbage container on fire. Colleagues from that period described him as "arrogant" and said he always insisted on having the last say. He returned from his base in Pemberkshire to live in Wester with his parents where he began doing short-term jobs as a labourer, cook and factory worker. He often lost his job due to his heavy drinking and arrogant behaviour
Robert Booth, who led the investigation at the time, said he could not give people an accurate account of what really happened. “The killing was so terrible and they were killed so brutally.”
Mike Foster, a member of the House of Commons for Leicester from 1997 to 2010, opposed McGreevey's release when the case came up during his tenure as a city representative, and he is still convinced that the McGreevey killer should remain in prison and says: "People still remember the crime. As if it happened yesterday. The nature of the killing and what he did to the bodies of the child victims afterwards will remain a picture in people's minds. There are probably less than ten cases across Britain where people have a unified opinion, such as the Moors murders and Soham crimes, which I put in the same category. When people hear the details They are instantly shocked at how horrible it is."
The chronology of the crime
April 1973: David McGreevey committed the murders of the Ralphs’ children: Paul (4 years), Dawn (two years), and Samantha (nine months) in their home on Gillam Street in Wester.
June 1973: McGreevey is sentenced to life imprisonment.
•1994: McGreevey was transferred from an open prison (class D) before being returned to a closed prison (class C).
2007: One of several parole attempts denied.
2009: McGreevey was told he needed to remain in prison under certain conditions and an order was issued anonymity for his protection.
2013: An order of anonymity was lifted for review of a ninth application for parole.
2016: The Parole Board confirmed that it was considering McGreevey’s request for his release. Later that month, the request was denied.
2018: The way is cleared for McGreevey’s release from Warren Hill Prison in Suffolk.
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