Britain's forgotten serial killer: 'Beast' who bit off young girls' nipples then filed his teeth to evade capture
Britain's forgotten serial killer: 'Beast' who bit off young girls' nipples then filed his teeth to evade capture
Trevor Hardy is an almost forgotten serial killer who terrorised a British city in the 1970s with a string of horrific sexually motivated murders of young girls
Four decades ago Trevor Hardy had a thirst for violence and an appetite for murder that was never quenched.
His hideous crimes terrorised the city of Manchester and left three families completely bereft. The extraordinary lengths he went to to evade capture are the stuff of nightmare.
Yet today the 'Beast of Manchester' is one of Britain's lesser known serial killers. The misery he inflicted has been eclipsed by other monsters casting longer and deeper shadows.
There are some, however, who cannot forget. They live with the loss of three young girls who Hardy butchered without hesitation or remorse before their lives had really begun.
In 1972 and aged 31, Hardy was jailed for five years for wounding a man with a pick-axe. The judge told him he was a menace to society but could not have predicted how terrible a menace he would become.
He walked out of the Isle of Wight's Albany Jail on November 18, 1974. Within weeks he had committed his first murder.
In prison he had brooded on revenge and earmarked two people for death. The first was his ex - pa1 Stanley O'Brien, whom he suspected of doublecrossing him. The second was 14-year old Beverley Driver.
She had been a girlfriend, but while Hardy was in jail she found a boy of her own age she had written to him in jail because she was sorry for him but her family ordered her to stop and that put her on Hardy's list.
Hardy told police later: "I sat on the train saying 'O'Brien and Beverley' again and again."
He was shattered when he got to his parents' home in Moston, Manchester, and they told him O'Brien had died.
THE TRAGIC VICTIMS
Hardy went to Beverley's home and threw an axe through a window. But he did not see Beverley. Instead, he spotted 15-year-old Lesley Stewart walking to meet her boyfriend.
He stabbed her in the throat and buried her in a nearby claypit.
For weeks afterwards he kept returning to the makeshift grave at night to cut up Lesley's body and bury the parts in other places.
Her head was tossed into a lake.
Police listed Lesley as a missing person. It was twenty-one months before they learned her fate from Hardy's confessions.
Hardy removed Stewart's ring and gave it to another girl as a "love token".
He then killed 18-year-old Wanda Skala in July 1975.
The part-time barmaid was murdered 400 yards from her home in Moston.
Hardy battered her with a brick, then strangled her with her own tights after tearing off her clothes.
Before burying her on a building site he bit off one of her nipples.
Hardy had also kept Wanda's blood-stained clothes and her handbag as "grisly trophies".
Next came 17-year-old Sharon Mossoph who was on her way home from an office party and witnessed Hardy attempting to burgle a shopping centre at night
She was strangled, stripped naked and tossed into a canal 300 yards from her home. Continue reading

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