The names Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor will not be familiar to most but they represent one of the most damning cases of Metropolitan police incompetence in living memory. On Friday, a jury at Barking Town Hall found that officers’ failure to properly investigate Anthony’s murder contributed to the subsequent murders of Gabriel, Daniel and Jack. While the men and women tasked by the coroner with weighing up nine weeks of evidence in the inquest accepted that police were burdened with a ‘heavy workload’, they concluded there were ‘fundamental failings in these investigations from the beginning’ which ‘cannot be overlooked’.
It would be impossible to overlook the failings considering how many there were, the egregiousness of their nature, and how they allowed a serial killer to get away with murder again and again. That killer was Stephen Port, variously branded the ‘Grindr killer’ and the ‘chemsex killer’ for his modus operandi of meeting young men on gay hook-up sites, giving them GHB and raping and murdering them.
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