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[00:00:00]

Welcome back to the Nobody on a podcast produced by Artie's documentary on one in Ireland and 30 in Denmark. Before we begin, here's a letter we received some time after the original podcast series went out, the letter came to us through the Irish chaplaincy in London who are in contact with Irish prisoners in UK prisons. We put the word out that we wanted to hear from anyone who may have known Kieran Kelly in jail.

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And we received this reply. The text here is read by an actor. August toward 2020, Her Majesty's president, Franklin Durham, Keiran Kelly, I can't remember if I met him in Whitemoor or in Wakefield prison, my mind is blocked on which prison I bumped into him, forced a walk and will say a building.

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The only way I can put it across to use in this way. Over the many years inside prisons across the U.K., we met a few serial killers walking, grouped them into their own groups, forced to have stage one killer. He stone faced with no facial expression and gives nothing away on what's going on inside what he starts, he's quiet and the loner doesn't mix with others and won't speak on the spoken to forced one doesn't know where they stand with this kind of mental killer.

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And then you have the happy go lucky killer always on the move walk with all the what looks to be had laughs and jokes as it gives him an audience. And this is how Mr. Kelly lived his life inside all the prisons he was housed in.

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He needs people around them who he can control and use lives from day to day with no order targets for the next day or week or month or a year. No, tomorrow. Just today, the week will always be his target. But old school inmates like Moussab and others will tell them to Geoghan if he tries his head.

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Games with those serial killers are very hard people to get to know if you are not in that clique, it's very hard to put across.

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What one can say is one will never know what's going on inside their heads, master or people with nothing to live for.

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This one all you can say about them.

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We left you last time with a promise that we'd found more answers and more questions in the story of Karen Patrick Kelly, if you've not heard the previous seven episodes, I strongly recommend you stop here and hear them before you go on and murdered.

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Are you a spy? No, but just drink ready for the permanent. But life is a lot less likely to lead to. Kieran Kelly died in Franklin Prison back in 2001. Franklin Prison houses many of the most dangerous criminals in the UK, the Yorkshire Ripper. Peter Sutcliffe was an inmate, the so-called Dr Death serial killer, Harold Shipman was there and many, many more.

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The letter you heard at the beginning of the program was the first to the man who wrote it, who we can't name has himself been incarcerated in prison long enough to have run into Kelly more than once.

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After we received the first letter, we wrote back and asked if he could remember anything else about Kelly.

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And in October this year, we received this reply.

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October 11th, 2020, Our Majesties President Franklin Durham read about Mr Kelly.

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Kelly would run up to others and stand in front of them before speaking of them, putting fear into others because of his crimes. I first met him at the start of the 1990s and hey, Champ Wakefield, he was pointed out to me by another Irish inmate and the only time I met our Salem was on the way back from warship's.

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I also bumped into him at the weekends at the football field.

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I did notice that most of the times I did see him. He was on his own. I did not know about his crimes until being told by other inmates who warned me about them. They called them. And not the last time I see them.

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His hair was starting to turn gray. I only found out about his death here at Franklin when his name popped up one day when I was having a talk with another inmate at the workshop.

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That letter describes the end of Kieran Kelly's life, a hardened lifer inside with two life convictions, Kelly seemed keen to spread the word around Franklin that he was a dangerous serial killer. Our search for people who may have encountered Kelly during prison time took a more surprising turn when the man who'd actually signed him into jail in 1983 also got in touch.

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This is retired prison officer Joseph Tyler.

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Join the prison service. In 1982, now living in Ireland, Joseph was listening to the radio when RTG broadcast the Nobody on back in March, Isiah's suddenly pricked up when he heard who the story was about.

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I heard that program with a blow and I thought, God, I couldn't believe it, you know, because Kieran Kelly, Kieran Kelly was a name he remembered because Kieran Kelly was in Brixton prison while he was on remand and during the time he was on trial back in 1983, it faces still sort of there in my memory and how it sticks out.

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After all those years, Joseph worked at Brixton receiving new prisoners and getting them registered and so on.

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It was a Saturday afternoon. And what we used to do, we'd taken prisoners from the police in the morning, OK, them after we'd strip search them and taken, you know, all the possessions away, all locked up, all signed. And the governor walked into the reception and he said to me, can you come to the gate with me? We've got a prisoner coming in from the police.

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The prisoner they were expecting that day was a so-called cat, a category, a prisoner, the category reserved for the most serious and dangerous criminals.

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And this one was expected to be a big fish, a multiple murderer, special delivery directly from the police with blue lights flashing, a man who'd murdered another man in the police cells.

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So the prison governor himself gets Joseph to come along and take care of things. But to their surprise, the man the police dropped off was someone they already knew, Kieran Kelly.

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And he said, oh, gosh, you know, that's what they say. Hello, guv.

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The governor, he was shaking his head because he knew Kelly. And he said, what if he had done what you've been up to? And, you know, it was quite funny, really, because he was then he was telling us what he'd done, you know, push you onto the train. And he was, you know, just rattling on about it. And I couldn't believe it because he didn't look capable, you know.

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The list of murders that he had quoted, he was saying that we know murdered so and so and so and so, and I can't remember it individually, but he just kept on talking about who and where he had done it, just blurted it out.

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The fact that the governor of Brixton prison knew Kelly so well and was so surprised to see the little man with the big nose suddenly admitting to multiple murders is down to the fact that Kelly was a regular.

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He'd been in and out of London prisons for years.

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And in fact, he'd only recently been released from Brixton after his trial for the attempted murder of a man called Francis Taylor.

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I know it's hard to keep up with all the names and dates in the nobody's zone, but Francis Taylor was a man who was pushed in front of a train by Kelly in August 1982. He survived, but Kelly was charged with attempted murder. The charges were eventually dropped and Kelly was released.

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Previous to that, and here's another thing about why the governor never really thought of Kelly as much of a killer. He'd also been in Brixton because he'd been put inside for stealing 10 pints of milk. After he got out for that, he was arrested yet again for pushing another man, Jock Gordon, this time at Oval Station on the underground.

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Gordon had also survived unscathed and the charges again were dropped.

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In that case, Kelly had only been out of prison just a few weeks before the day he went to Clapham Common, attacked a pensioner and stole his ring and got arrested yet again.

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Then and only then, when Kelly murdered William Boyd by strangling him with his socks, did the confessions begin and the charges finally stuck.

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He was in Brixton and he was quite well. Nobody was never any trouble. He just beforehand about, you know, just sort of just he was like a flyweight, a little tiny man, and the meeting with him that night, something that I've never forgotten, the picture of Kieran Kelly waltzing back into prison with a cheery hello gov fits very well with the man Ian Brown remembers from the interviews at the time.

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As Ian Brown pointed out previously in this podcast, prison was just part of the routine for Kelly.

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I think it went through his mind, you know, having a bed every night and a pillow and a blanket and the mattress and food and going to be such a bad thing. It's actually a big improvement on what I've got now.

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And I think it was, you know, some of it was relief that I'm going somewhere safe.

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We've said a few times during the series that the men and women who inhabited the nobody zone with the kind of people no one really missed and that no one really cared about. But the next person who got in touch with us after hearing the podcast actually did care. My name is John and I'm a nurse.

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This is Anna Dillon, who is presently working in Cork but has worked in the past in South London during the 1980s.

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Anna is now a clinical nurse manager at the Clinical Decision Unit in the Emergency Department of Cork University Hospital, just like Joseph Taylor. Anna also had to stop up and listen when she heard mention of Kieran Kelly's name on the radio, because that was a name that was often spoken about back in the 1980s when Anna was a nurse working in St George's Hospital in Tooting South London.

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The reason I contacted the show was because it brought back a huge amount of memories for me. Things that I this is well over 30 years ago that I had actually forgotten about. And I brought back a whole part of my own life history and journey at that time in London, at that time in London.

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And I worked closely with the homeless, the people who knew Kelly, nor was he.

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Kelly would have been obviously what he was referring to in the documentary. But like the boys used to call him Psycho, they used to see Psychocandy, and that's the way they referred to him on the streets. And I don't mean to offend anybody by saying that, but that's that they referred to him as that the boys.

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And he's referring to whether a predominantly Irish homeless men were treated on a daily basis at the hospital, together with her colleagues who took it upon themselves to make sure they had a safe place to come and get medical treatment.

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To offer a familiar voice to talk to, sometimes even a shoulder to cry on, Anna and nurses like her were a very rare source of kindness and compassion in the tough lives of these rough sleepers. And I was moved to get in touch with us because of one man in particular.

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There was one particular guy and his name was No Logan. He was an amputee. And I was standing in my kitchen and I was listening to the show as it went on.

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And I thought, oh my God, all those years of disbelieving look and all those years of disbelieving Logan because Logan told her what Kieran Kelly had done to him, I was kind of going, you know, in the bath or in the shower and cleaning up.

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And you're like, no, how would you lose the leg? So I called Kelly, shoved me under under the tree, and I couldn't get to the end of the platform fast enough. You remember going under the train and waking up minuses like. Logan didn't just mention this once. It was a story he told consistently over and over again over many years.

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Ah, you said it to my colleagues and they said, Nana going to make that up. That's all in his head. That's the drink. But no, he was very adamant. He was absolutely adamant that diagnosed was shoved him under the tree. And every new nurse that had come along, a new doctor, would come along to all get the same story. So, you know, the way something kind of you just go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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You know, so everyone is that true? Know, I don't think so.

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And I felt her heart sink when she heard about Kieran Kelly on the Nobody Zone.

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And I felt so bad for Logan that I had, you know, I hadn't believed him, even though we always looked after him really well and made sure that he was OK. And I couldn't for the life of me all these years on until that Sunday, I understand why a guy would have jumped on the train, lost his leg. I, like I said, if it were a suicide attempt and to continue on life around to sing on crutches with one leg and getting a new shoe every other week from whichever shoe shop put out there, I choose the right foot shoes.

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One legged, no.

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Logan, a familiar face on the streets around tooting in South London, known along the High Street for stealing single right foot shoes from shoe shop displays and much loved by the nurses at St George's, where as an amputee, he was a regular client.

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Nor was a rogue, a rogue. Even when he was drunk, he was a rogue. You couldn't bottle all of them. We had a huge affection and a soft spot for Logan over all of them. And that's why he's the one that stood out in my mind. Very intelligent man. Noel always got fresh clothes and a bath and we'd bring in clothes from home. I had an awful argument with him. One day he was being really, you know, a bit belligerent when it came to harsh words.

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So I told him, clear, get out. I said, when you're coming back, the next time I said, Logan, you better bring the roses right out. About two or three days later, he arrives back, apologising would a big bunch of flowers that he robbed out of someone's Garden of Thrones. And you kind of go what you say. He was a good soldier, but he's that's the reason why I contacted you. I'm sorry that I didn't believe you.

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Very sorry. Kelly didn't mention Logan on his confession tape, and Logan's story about being pushed under a train by Kelly doesn't appear anywhere on Kelly's long rap sheet. He would have been charged with attempted murder for that one. But then none of this is altogether surprising. The Irish homeless didn't expect much from the police in London in those days other than a possible beating, according to Anna Dillane, so they usually just avoided them at all costs. Logan never laid charges, nobody at the hospital thought to do so, either on his behalf because nobody believed him.

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In the nobody's zone, things just flew under the radar. But Anna Dillon did know about Kelly, she heard about him often, I never met him before. I knew all about him. In fact, a lot of people knew about Kelly, the one she said the boys called Psycho.

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They used to say, like, you would feel him before you would see him. They knew he was in the vicinity, but they all were afraid of him.

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It wasn't just the other homeless who avoided Kieran Kelly. His picture was pinned up on the wall inside the hospital itself. We had a spreadsheet of troublemakers, people who caused trouble or who are a danger to us, photographs, mug shots of people, and he was on us on a number of others, like of other nationalities, which as well as well as mental health patients, that when they came in, they would be a threat to us as staff.

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Anna recalls that Kelly's face was on top of that list even long after he'd been sent to prison, just in case he came across very well in the documentary that, you know, the guy in the cell was snoring and it irritated him.

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So he went for him. And that was basically if something irritated him, he went for them. And you needn't have been drunk for that, so he seemed to have been that kind of schizoid personality kind of thing. He could flip like that. He was known for that. The people who knew him, sadly, are not with us, that my nursing colleagues and they would have been the ones that would have been able to tell you a whole lot more.

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But I do know one thing. They didn't like him. And I think it was the only one of the lads they didn't like. He just wasn't a nice person.

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And also recalls a significant drop in injuries showing up at the emergency room after Kelly's arrest.

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A lot of people just come in, beaten up and brought into hospital and they'd say it was Kelly after he went to prison. All that's that kind of it just seemed to stop. It was more they were what we used to call for peaceful over. We were seeing after that.

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And I remember the fallout of London's nobody sound from her own experiences there, the desperation and the hopelessness that it caused.

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I learned an understanding of life on the streets, living homeless from that period in London and from learning from no Logan and the rest of the lads and the dangers that they faced every day and the strategies they put in place.

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And they are no different now than they were then. But I have an understanding of thanks to know Logan. I know the Kelly and all the lads that we looked after in South London in the eighties and nineties. Finding contemporaries of Kieran Kelly, who would have actually lived on the streets of London when he was around, proved to be a difficult task. Men like, no, Logan did not live into old age. But journalist Robert Mulhearn did manage to meet up with author John Healey.

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John Helis autobiographical book The Grass Arena, which has since been made into a film, was based on his time as a homeless alcoholic living rough on the streets of London in the 1960s and 70s. John Healey is what you might call the real deal. And while Healy never met Kelly in person, he is without doubt an expert witness in nobody saw him.

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The way I mind the sort of expert who's written a book on this sort of thing so I can qualify.

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Kelly, Rob and Healy went for a walk on Clapham Common, one of Kelly's old haunts, and Rob kicked off by asking about the violence inherent in the lifestyle with violence, with violence, the overriding kind of equaliser.

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Yeah, it was a currency. It was it was always there, ready to erupt over paranoid. The British were corrupt. The British would figure out then, I think, beat you up. So there was paranoia. So I when the drink kicked in and it was bad drink cheap rotgut stuff that drive you crazy, they would flag things up more. If it really got out of hand, it would be broken bottles we used. It refers to a broken bottle.

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Yeah. Were you ever in that situation. You were. I was, yeah.

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Yeah. I was often in that situation. Yeah. I got a bottle stubbed at my face somewhere and I put my finger on the problem and upsy and Nuku there she has come back from punching.

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John Healey bears the scars of a life on the streets, what he calls in his book, A Life in the y'know, jungle.

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It's a life that nearly always began with the bottle, many different routes to ending up in a war in a jungle. But they all involved drink. And then days there was it was illegal to drink on the streets. So you would be herded into parks or out of the way places disused graveyards, I mean, to call them parks. It's been very light. You couldn't just walk in. There was a you had to have a pass and the pass would be money or alcohol.

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But I had to leave the park during the day to commit petty crime to get the money for the drink. So they'd need to try shoplifting or or mugging or whatever. Well, if a mugging goes wrong, it can turn into a murder. The term for them was predatory felons. You mean Kelly would have come under that. And at first I can see the term ring correct for him.

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He explained one of the dubious advantages of the homeless life that meant avoiding prosecution was sometimes relatively easy.

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If they arrested you for that, they wouldn't know who you were. You could give any name. They wouldn't have your fingerprints. If they sent your fingerprint, they couldn't just mess around. It'd take days or a week to come back with the fingerprints. I wouldn't know who you were. You could give them any name you liked. And so a man like Kelly moving around all over the place, they will know who he was. You wouldn't know if we know if one knows if it was the real name or a nom de plume because they'd be Scotch Jack or Iris Jim or Cockney Freight or Maltese John.

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But you never know their first names or really their last names or their story. And even if they told you a story, it probably would be all lies. I mean, I've done it myself. You go to court and I'll give them Paul Newman once. And they believed it, you know. In the last episode, we met Detective Superintendent Gary Richardson from the British Transport Police and we heard that interested parties had contacted the inquiry. Iran looking for answers in connection with the deaths of loved ones on the London Underground in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

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Deaths usually recorded as suicides or accidents. The suicides in particular raised big concerns, of course, because families simply couldn't accept that explanation sometimes, but accidents were also hard to understand or believe that people just fall in front of oncoming trains. Since the podcast went out, this same concern led to a number of people getting in touch with us. Now, to be clear, all we do know is that Kelly did push some people in front of trains.

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It was part of what he did. We know now that there were at least three, two of which he was charged with, Taylor and John Gordon. And now we know about the testimony of Noel Logan. But the question is, are there more? He was under attack. He was killed on attacks in that situation, and he I don't know why you don't know him as far as we know, but the police said drawing all of us are fast.

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And it just kind of struck me he still was predicated on the outcome, of course, but he was definitely under threat. And I just wonder, is there any chance this caller was asking if a man called Peter Kelly from Galway was on any sort of list?

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We had a few inquiries of this sort, but there was just no way we could track any of them down or verify them. The names we were given certainly did not figure on any of the lists we had connected to Kelly. And we can't connect Kieran Kelly to every death that happened on the underground just because we know he pushed three people. We did find a case that did point towards Kieran Kelly, but this case had a very different character. It happened 12 days after Kelly had murdered Hector Fisher on Clapham Common.

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Here's Kelly talking about that on the interview tape back in 1983. All right, I want you to move on now and talk about Patricia. Would you tell me again how you did in the general election, and I, I. I don't think the worst. I'm not sure. But how many times did you stab him? You don't know? I had a drink on me. And what did you get him on? It was a big thing.

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And in big beginning, it was a heavy one.

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Detail of that crime that sticks out is that Kelly said he had cut his hand when he used a sharp weapon on Fisher.

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How many times you hit him on hit him once and game. But I missed him.

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I went beyond the second to 12 days after the fisher killing. A 17 year old girl, Wendy Hall, was attacked by what the newspapers later described as a knife wielding madman. She was brutally attacked on an overground train coming into tooting station in south London, not tooting again.

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Her assailant attacked her, stabbing her wildly with a knife around the neck, the same kind of stabbing that had killed actor Fisher. As the train pulled into the station, she jumped out and collapsed on the platform and didn't see her attacker had stayed on the train or jumped off. But she did say that the man who attacked her had a bandaged hand. In the newspapers at the time, Scotland Yard appealed to the public for help to find Hall's attacker.

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They said they were looking for a possible link between the attacks on Hall and Fisher. In fact, there had also been yet another stabbing attack on Clapham Common that happened between Fisher and the attack on Wendy Hall. This is a report written in The Daily Mirror on the 8th of August 1975 under the headline In The Shadow of a Mad Knife Killer. It reads as follows. Two other recent stabbings bear his hallmark. Three weeks ago, pensioner Hector Fisher was stabbed to death in a churchyard at Wandsworth.

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That's actually wrong. He was stabbed on Clapham Common. But anyway, I continue. And last week, 41 year old William McSweeny was seriously hurt by a knife man at a club. A senior detective said these attacks may all have been the work of one man who's been affected by the long spell of hot weather. He must be caught before there are more victims. No one was ever arrested for the attack on Wendy Hall, and Kelly was never charged with the killing of Fisher until eight years later.

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It was at that time the police showed a picture of Kieran Kelly to the now 25 year old Wendy Hall for identification, but she failed to identify Kelly. In fact, she maintained that her attacker was a tall man with light coloured hair.

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She made no mention of a big nose or anything like that. There was also a police artist's impression made at the time of the attack based on her description. But it bears no resemblance at all to Kelly. The case of the stabbing against Wendy Hall remained unsolved. So let's move on because it's time to tell the story of a woman called Kitty Kelley. No relation. Back in March of this year, when the podcast was still underway, we recorded a phone conversation with a woman called Elisa Upchurch.

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Lisa is talking to Liam O'Brien from the dock on one team here. The lady in question is Kitty. Who will be your grandmother? Yes, Katherine.

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Katherine Kelly. We found at least through a family member that had posted online about the nobody's own podcast, we found out that Elisa had been in touch with the British Transport Police back in 2015 when the story first hit the headlines. But the British Transport Police had never gotten back to her. So we got in touch. Elisa was concerned about her grandmother, Katherine, or Kitty Kelley, who come over to London while Elisa's mother was pregnant with her. So she was over in London helping me Monday because it was on with me, I'll see.

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And she was going down to the church for the day, which was George's Cathedral assessment cabinets and Social Security. There was not one stop laughing. And she obviously had that was and they said she had jobs or she was pushed or said fell onto the tracks.

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Elisa had heard the story going around the papers about Kieran Kelly back in 2015, and it struck a chord mostly because of where her grandmother had died.

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But then when I heard that he was pushing people onto the tracks of that line in Northern Line, which is continued station Kennington Tube Station was a place we know Kelly often frequented all the stations up and down the South London section of the northern line over Kennington Clapham Tooting feature in this story as regular haunts of Kelly and Adele, and confirmed that the lads on the street never knew where he was going to show up. But it was always along the northern line.

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You might be able to remember the churchyard murder of a toll which Kelly was tried and acquitted for. That happened in a churchyard. Kennington Mickey Dunn, who he claimed to have poisoned, died at Tooting Frances Taylor, who he pushed onto the tracks. He pushed at Tooting and Jock Gordon was pushed by Kelly just a few stops away at Oval Station. Alice's mother never believed for one minute that his death could have been suicide. It just didn't make any sense.

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Kitty had been on her way to mass at St. George's Cathedral on an ordinary Monday morning. Yeah, she was a typical old Irish lady, devoted religious Catholic lady. You know, that's why we know she would never have never not leaving my mom in a situation she was in. Israel should never dream. And she wasn't in a frame of mind to do that sort of thing just to help him up.

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There was another detail that never made sense to the family to. Witnesses, they also said to my mother there was witnesses and one of them was it was a relative. My mom couldn't figure out who the oldest relative was because she was on her own. And it wasn't until later one that we heard that I seemed to put together because his name was Kelly. Also, wasn't it the guy this you and Kelly?

[00:35:19]

We know that Kelly did sometimes hang around the scene of a crime so the police could possibly have talked to him at the time and written his name down and then just assumed that he was related. Same name. Elisa suggested this to the police back in 2015.

[00:35:38]

When I spoke to the police, they all said that he couldn't have done it. He wasn't in the area at the time and stuff like that. And then I spoke to another guy that said, well, there is a possibility that he could have done it. And we're not going to say yes and we're not going to say no. One thing, however, speaks strongly against Kelly being involved here, the fact that he should have been locked up at this time.

[00:36:04]

Apparently he was in court last year at the time. Yeah. I mean, so we don't even want to get into that situation.

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We talked about Kelly's time in Broadmoor. Back in Episode four, Kelly had committed an aggravated robbery, forcing his way into a house in south London with a knife in 1969. He was committed under the Mental Health Act and spent two years at Broadmoor before they let him go.

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Now, this ought to rule him out until you consider two things. Number one, at that time, inmates of Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital could relatively easily, it turns out, be granted day or weekend release time.

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They were simply allowed out.

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Sometimes this was something that caused a huge stir in the 1970s as the whole system seemed to be fairly arbitrary and a number of inmates ended up committing violent crimes while they were on short term release from Broadmoor. So the practice was eventually stopped. But this brings us to the second thing, the date on which Kitty Kelley died, March 16th, 1970.

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It's a strange coincidence because March 16th, the day that your unan died, that's all. That's also the, say, the birth date of Kieran Kelly. Oh, sorry.

[00:37:40]

Kieran Kelly will be 90 years old today if he was still alive.

[00:37:45]

Jesus Christ. Creepy and absolutely creepy. So.

[00:37:56]

March 16th, 1970, was Kieran Kelly's fortieth birthday. Could Kelly have been on a weekend pass from Broadmoor set free to celebrate his fortieth birthday? There are no records anyone can access from Broadmoor.

[00:38:14]

They're not public. Even a record of this kind of temporary release was ever kept. Could Kieran Kelly have bumped into Kitty Kelley, a kind and helpful woman, just the sort of person who might lend a helping hand to someone in trouble down on the tube at Kennington?

[00:38:34]

Did they strike up a conversation? Kitty Kelley was from Dublin. A familiar accent, perhaps.

[00:38:42]

I'm assuming that he was going to say when he heard her accent and she was Irish, maybe. I don't know.

[00:38:49]

Elisa doesn't know what happened. The police don't know what happened, and neither do we. In the last episode, you might remember when we were looking for files on Christie Smith, we discovered that many of the coroner's records from this period have been destroyed.

[00:39:06]

We searched for Kitty Kelley's coroner's report and confirmed that those files no longer exist. So we'll never know if Kieran Kelly's name was included as a witness to Kitty Kelly's death. But Kensington Tube Station, which means that there's practically zero chance of ever finding out exactly what happened down on Kennington Tube station that day 50 years ago.

[00:39:31]

We don't know what happened to that, and we'd like to know what happened to that. But, you know, I'd like to know if he did it again. I mean, because it's not like not knowing what happened to him. Never nonetheless question what happened, you know, I mean, she was very upset by how long she got the light years to get over that. She always thought something was up by something wasn't right.

[00:40:01]

The whole Broadmoor episode is maybe the most telling part of the whole tragedy behind the Kieran Kelly story.

[00:40:09]

After everything we've heard during the series about Kelly's behaviour, his wild temper, his crimes, his drinking, the way he preyed on vulnerable people around him, everything points to something. I really don't think anyone needs to be a psychiatrist to figure out. Kieran Kelly had serious mental health issues, very serious. He was a danger to society and even a danger to himself for most of his adult life. So why did doctors at the Broadmoor High Security Psychiatric Hospital ever let him out?

[00:40:44]

Robert Mulhearn called up Kelly's former solicitor, John Slater, because he remembered him mentioning something about Broadmoor.

[00:40:53]

I think he was in for more foreign affairs. Yeah, but he was in and out of there for a different period.

[00:41:01]

And my recollection is that Broadmoor refused him permission to him on the basis he was plainly incorrigible and medically untreatable.

[00:41:13]

Really? Yeah, yeah. That's what I always recall that because something to be refused admission to Broadmoor on that basis.

[00:41:24]

And how would what does that mean in layman's terms?

[00:41:27]

What it means that I mean, Broadmoor, the hospital, so as to treat people who've got mental illness and have committed crimes. I mean, the doctor came to the conclusion that he was medically unfit, so the system simply didn't want him around.

[00:41:48]

He was sent back onto the streets for the police to deal with. Our journey into the nobody's zone has to end now.

[00:41:59]

That's all the new information that's come to us since the podcast went out. There's no doubt more to discover, but we have to stop soon, just before we do. Robert Mulhearn got back in touch with retired Detective Superintendent Ian Brown just for one last time to put a few last questions to him. In the light of everything that's been talked about in this series and everything we've discovered since. Rob really just wanted to ask him if in the light of what we now know, he would have done anything different if you knew then.

[00:42:38]

But I've given you now same relation to Smith even and some of these other cases.

[00:42:45]

Do you think it would have changed anything at the time had I have had that at that time?

[00:42:51]

The records that we would have needed would be fresh and might well have got records from Broadmoor to know whether he was out on that on his birthday, then that's another one that would have been chased to the degree.

[00:43:05]

But was it the case that the reason he tied off the Kelly case when he did and how he did was because there wasn't a commitment to provide for the resources to go and follow up with other admissions? So is that right? No, I don't think that's absolutely right.

[00:43:24]

What I think is that once you've got a conviction which sends somebody away for life, other than clearing it up for the benefit of the relatives, in that there isn't the same incentive to chase another 10, 20, 50 murders, whatever it is. And you rely on the the logic of probability. So almost certainly he committed that murder. But do we need to prove it? Do we need to spend lots and lots of resources to prove a murder that isn't going to benefit us or anybody?

[00:44:02]

It becomes a matter of manpower.

[00:44:05]

And what I have to mark this, would you like this might come across as being unpalatable? Now, if I have to put my kind of critical heart and take a contrary view of the investigation, I might say, well, take Dennis Neilson, another prolific British serial killer. Would the investigation team have just stopped at two or three there when they actually kind of got they did.

[00:44:28]

They stopped at a certain point.

[00:44:30]

There was certainly one murder that could definitely have been proved. And they actually turned around to the wife and said, well, I'm sorry about that, love, but the indictments already written up, we won't be pursuing that one. So, again, you're going back to that, that those days, I mean, the flack that those detectives got for trying to prove one more and one more on one more, they were told repeatedly, we've run out of money you can't do anymore.

[00:44:58]

You've got seven Wigo, right. It's enough.

[00:45:02]

And whether it's right or wrong, that is the fact of police in those days within the Yorkshire Ripper.

[00:45:12]

They would have it would have been wouldn't have been the case that they would have stopped with the attacks there.

[00:45:18]

You're talking you're right. You've got a Yorkshire Ripper.

[00:45:21]

What you're talking about in the Yorkshire Ripper, Yorkshire Ripper was a complete mess because there were no computers connecting each station. So stations next door to each other investigating murders and not talking to each other. The Yorkshire Ripper should have been stopped ages before because it was all the information was there. But one bit was in one place station. One of was in another room. One bit was in. Had they have been put together, they just said, oh, big, oh, this is car number seven.

[00:45:53]

So that's who's doing it.

[00:45:55]

The one the one thing you cannot do is to judge thirty years ago by today's standards, like someone who might listen to one, to think that a nobody zone, they've listened to our conversations, the, you know, the journey that we've been on to get them to try and get a handle on the numbers game. How many did Kelly kill them? I think OK, from the police point of view, there was an information deficit maybe in relation to Kelly's crimes, but then they might hear Anna Dylan's testimony from the hospital and say, well, hold on a minute.

[00:46:29]

This is here's somebody saying that everybody in the entire hospital knew Kelly. His picture was on the wall. The dogs in the street knew. How did the cops not know about Kelly's reign of terror around tooting and you know, something like that.

[00:46:46]

We've got a situation now where we've got something in society where people are saying black lives matter. Perhaps back in those days, we should have said vagrants lives matter. Yeah, but yes, they were left to their own devices.

[00:47:13]

Just people left to their own devices just before this episode came out, in fact, just last week, we did talk to a living relative of Kieran Kelly, who did not want to take part in the program or be named for reasons we fully understand. In our brief conversations, it was plain to hear that life around Kieran Kelly was hard for everyone. That his violence and his mental illness affected everyone close to him very badly indeed, and that's all we can say about it, really.

[00:47:52]

So a final word on the Kieran Kelly story. Well, we did not prove or attribute beyond doubt one single additional murder to Kelly's rap sheet. We did prove that he did not kill Christy Smith, even though he confessed to doing so. And we did find plenty of supporting evidence to suggest that Kelly was easily capable of committing many of the other murders.

[00:48:19]

He did confess to and which he was never tried for. And I think it's safe to say that we also found evidence that there might well have been more murders, but he never spoke about. But we can't prove any of it. So right here at the very end is one ray of sunshine, you might say, in all the darkness. If you remember in the previous episode, we met Christy Smith, surviving relatives, his brother Nick Smith, and his sister in law, Lily Smith, we found out that Christie's parents had lost more than one of their children in tragic circumstances, not just Christie.

[00:48:58]

So when amateur genealogist Damien O'Sullivan was busy tracing documents around the family, he found a sister of Kristy and Nick Smith called Phyllis. Phyllis had had a twin sister who died as a baby, Phyllis herself had married and moved to Kenya, where the family presumed she'd passed away because she's not been heard of for more than 60 years. Well, it turns out Phyllis is still alive. She's alive and well and living in the United Kingdom. The families have been put back in touch and they hope to meet up again as soon as they can.

[00:49:37]

And so with that, it only remains for me to say thank you to all the people who have allowed us to interview them and everyone who's helped in the making of this podcast series and of course, to you for listening. Young people don't take my advice. Across the ocean, but 32. Because you can't live without love, without love along from the West and nobody's home. The bad guy, the chair, the. Because this. The Nobody Zone is written and narrated by Tim Henman storyline and production is by Tim Henman and Christopher Maltzahn.

[00:50:46]

Original idea research and recordings are by Robert Mulheron, McLean Greer and Liam O'Brien with production assistance from Sarah Blake, Donal O'Herlihy, Tim DesMoines, Roland Kelly and Michael Lawlis. Special thanks to genealogist Damien O'Sullivan and historian Niall Murray.

[00:51:06]

The letter from the prisoner in Heightmap Frankland was voiced by Jill Taylor.

[00:51:13]

The title Music is the song Missing You performed by Crestmore Original Music for the series is by Tim Henman, Graphics, Marketing and Press by John Kilkenny, Laura Beattie, Amy O'Driscoll, Nigel Wheatley, Fredrick Nilbog, Julie Madonna, Ellen Leonard, Brian Murphy and Anna Joyce. Illustrations by Alex Williamson. The Nobody Zone is a collaboration between artist documentary on one in Ireland and Third-tier Productions in Denmark. If you wish to join the social media conversation around this podcast, please use hashtag the Nobody Zone or visit RTG forward, slash the nobody's own.

[00:51:54]

And if you'd like to comment or share any information you might have on the story, we'd love to hear from you. Email us documentaries at RTG. Thanks for listening.