Coming To Age
Stephen Port was born in 1975 in Southend, UK. When he was only a toddler, he and his family moved to East London. Since college was too costly for his parents, he trained to become a professional chef and landed on his first kitchen work when he was only 18.
Port moved out of his parents' home in his early 20s, around the same time in which he came out. He rented a small flat in Barking, very close to the area where he had grown up. From the moment he he had his own flat, his lifestyle radically changed.
Party Animal
With no one to boss him around any longer, Port would throw parties almost every week and many of his guests would sometimes spend the night.
He developed unrestrained sexual behaviors as he started dating multiple men simultaneously, working as a male escort, and even acting as a pimp to other men. However, his life radically changed once again when he discovered social media...
Fake Profiles
Port joined several social networks, including Facebook as well as various gay dating apps. For some reason, he would use different names and sometimes he'd even create fake identities.
He would usually seek out sex dates with young-looking men in their late teens or early twenties, typically known as "twinks". It was only a matter of time before he started making some of his darkest fantasies come true as well...
Terrifying Date
It all began when he met a teenage college student on Grindr in early 2012. As the student recently told the press, he actually had a good first impression of Port: "He was quite polite, friendly, nothing that would ring any alarm bells to me". However, everything changed the day Port invited him over to his flat for the first time.
Port treated him to a glass of wine, but the young boy realized something was off when he started feeling "very dizzy and tired". He fell asleep almost instantly and when he woke up, he found himself being raped by Port. He set himself free and left the flat immediately, but he was too scared to report to the police. Sadly, he wasn't the only man to fall into his trap.
History Repeats Itself
In early 2014, a man in his early 20s met Port on a dating site named Fitlads. He went to Port's flat five times, but while everything went smoothly the first four times, things took a darker twist on his fifth visit.
Port pressured his date into inhaling popper – a recreational drug which is legal in some countries – and gave him a glass of transparent liquid which he claimed was water. "As soon as I drank it, I went unconscious. The next thing I remember I was on the floor screaming and shouting", the man said. What happened next?
Set Free
Port took his date to the train station. "He was kind of dragging me along and holding me up", the man said, and he recalls shouting along the way. Eventually, the British Transport Police showed up and called him an ambulance.
The young man, however, didn't want to get the police involved, fearing that his Muslim parents would find out that he had been on a date with another man. Therefore, when Port told the police that the boy had shown up at his place in that state, he didn't dare say otherwise and they were both set free. This, however, was only the beginning...
Emergency Call
Two weeks later, on June 19, 2014, the ambulance received a call reporting an accident on Cooke Street, Barking, just a few feet away from Port's flat. "There's a young boy, looks like he's collapsed outside. He had a seizure or something, or just drunk", the caller said.
When the paramedics arrived, they found a young man lying against a wall, but he was already dead. There weren't any signs of injury, though the police realized that his top was pulled up, as if he had been dragged. Inside his bag was a small bottle containing some unidentifiable liquid and his phone was gone. Who was he and what had happened?
Mysterious Death
It happened to be that the man who had called the ambulance was Stephen Port. In a witness testimony, he told the police that he had arrived home at 4 AM and found a young man lying in front of his home half-asleep.
"I tried to rouse him by slapping his face", he told the police. Since the boy wouldn't react, Port allegedly propped him against the wall, called the paramedics, and then went inside and fell asleep. Of course, Port was blatantly lying...
A Pack Of Lies
After doing some research, the police discovered that the late boy was a young student named Anthony Walgate and that he had recently been hired as an escort by Port.
Luckily, out of precaution, Walgate had messaged his friends telling them he had landed a job in Barking and he had even sent them a picture of Port. But why did Port lie to the police? Had he had any connection to Walgate's death?
Changing The Facts
As soon as the police discovered Port's connection with Walgate, they had him arrested and he was charged on the grounds of perverting the course of justice by making a false statement. On top of that, he was suspected of having stolen his phone.
During the next interrogation, Port stuck to his initial statement but it was only a matter of time before he started altering the facts. "Can I just say for the scenario - if it was an accident, and if he did have a fit in my place, is that still my fault?", he suspiciously asked his interrogators.
The Suspect's Version
Port soon changed his narrative and admitted that he had hired Walgate as an escort through an online site. According to his new story, Walgate had shown up drugged on the night prior to his death. Worried about his state, Port allegedly invited him to sleep over at his place.
The following day, Port supposedly headed to work and left Walgate sleeping in his bed. When he came back, he was still fast asleep, but he panicked when he woke up at 3 AM to find him rigid. He allegedly dragged Walgate outside, fetched his bag and called the paramedics. But how much of this was true?
Case Cleared
Believing Port to be the killer, the police searched his flat, seized his laptop, and took samples of his DNA. The urine and blood samples showed low levels of GHB, a drug usually linked with overdoses.
In spite of the complaints filed by Walgate's friends and family, Port's computer was never examined and Port was eventually bailed out of jail after a week behind bars, his charges still pending. Had the police done its job and searched his laptop, they would have found some pretty alarming evidence...
Port's PC
Port first entered Walgate's escort profile on June 14, 2014. A few minutes later, he conducted a few searches on Google, including search terms like "unconscious boys", "taking date rape drug", and "gay teen knocked out raped".
Of course, this was hardly a coincidence, but the worst was yet to come. Sadly, more lives would be taken before the police seriously started investigating the case. In June 2014, barely two weeks after Port was bailed out of jail, this happened...
Gruesome Discovery
Two weeks later, on the morning of August 28, 2014, a woman named Barbara Denham was walking her dog when she came across a young man man sitting against a wall in the corner of St. Margaret's graveyard. It was the dead body of a 22-year-old gay escort named Gabriel Kovari.
Three weeks later, on September 20, the same lady was walking her dog around the same corner, when she found another corpse on the same spot and in the same position. It was 21-year-old gay escort Daniel Whitworth. Both murders were nearly identical, except the police found a very suspicious suicide note on this man's left hand...
The Suicide Note
In the suicide note, Whitsworth took the blame for Kovari's death. "I am sorry to everyone, mainly my family, but I can't go on anymore, I took the life of my friend Gabriel, we was just having some fun at a mate's place and I got carried away and gave him another shot of G", the note read.
"BTW Please do not blame the guy I was with last night, we only had sex then I left, he knows nothing of what I have done", the letter concluded. For some unexplainable reason, the police never investigated Whitworth's last movements prior to his death nor did they track down who "the guy I was with last night" was. If they had, they would've unmasked the killer...
Case Dismissed
Port had actually met Whitsworth on the Fitlads website that August. After exchanging some messages, Port invited him over for dinner. "Just so you can get to know me a bit so you know I'm not some psycho", he texted him. Whitsworth visited Port's flat for the last time the night before he was killed.
When Whitworth's body was found, Port's DNA was all over his clothes and on the sleeve where the note was found in. By that time, the police already had Port's DNA on their database. However, Senior detective Tony Kirk claimed that the boy's death was "not suspicious". How many lives would be taken before they realized there was a common pattern behind the killings?
Fourth Victim
On March 2015, Port pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice by lying in the statement in Walgate's case. Even though he was sentenced to 8 months in jail, he was released with an electronic tag two months later.
Three months later, on September 2015 at 2 AM, Port sent a message on Grindr to a 25-year-old truck driver named Jack Taylor. The two decided to meet at Barking station at 3 AM, just a few blocks away from Port's flat. 36 hours later, Taylor's body was found dead lying against the opposite side of the graveyard wall where Kovari and Whitworth had been found.
Self-Inflicted Overdose?
Taylor's shirt was pulled over his stomach and he had a syringe and a tiny brown bottle in his pockets. Since he had high levels of GHB in his blood, the police didn't deem the death as suspicious, but considered it as a case of self-inflicted overdose. Refusing to accept their conclusion, Taylor's family launched an investigation of their own.
"We went through where Jack had been all weekend, who was the last people he was with, the area in which he was found", said his friend, Donna Taylor. A few days later, they were told by the police that there was a CCTV video of Jack just a few hours before his death.
Crucial Footage
In the video, Jack was seen walking along the street together with a skinny, blond man near Barking station. A couple of days later, a Barking and Dagenham police officer noticed that the blond man was someone they already knew: it was no other than Stephen Port.
The following morning, on October 15, the police broke into his flat and arrested him for being the prime suspect of the deaths of the four young men. That same day, a team of detectives led by Tim Duffield took on the case. Port's days of freedom were counted...
Killer On The Spotlight
Port was interviewed over the course of the next four days. He denied having met anyone except for Walgate or ever using GHB. He also made up an unusual story about having met Whitworth at sex parties held by a drug dealer.
On October 18, 2015, Port was finally charged with four counts of murder. However, once his case received widespread media coverage, eight other men came forward with allegations of having been drugged and sexually assaulted at his flat after meeting him online.
Endless Victims
The accounts of the victims were all very similar: Port had injected a clear substance on their drinks with a syringe, causing them to pass out. At the trial, Port was convicted of sexual assault against seven of these men, including three counts of rape.
Apart from that, a calligraphy expert compared the suicide note with Whitworth's handwriting and determined he had not been the author. They soon proved that the handwriting was actually Port's, and that the blue sheet that Whitworth was found in came from Port's bed.
Ghastly Evidence
As regards Kovari, the police discovered that Port had contacted him using a fake Facebook profile under the name of John Luck. To make matters worse, one of his former cell phones contained 83 homemade sex videos in which he was having sex with unconscious men.
In spite of the undeniable evidence, when asked about those videos in court, he claimed they simply showed "the end of quite a few hours of normal sex". His chronicle of the events involving the deaths of the four men also suggested a distortion of reality. For instance, he claimed that even though he had written the suicide note, Whitworth had dictated it to him.
A Manipulative Criminal
According to the victims' friends, the flaws of the initial phases of the investigation can be explained by the incomprehension of the lives of gay men. Duffield himself admits that the killer could've been stopped way earlier and 17 Met Police officers are currently under investigation.
As to Port, he's now serving life sentence. As Duffield concluded, "He's a voracious sexual predator who appears to have been fixated, obsessed, with surreptitiously drugging young, often vulnerable men for the exclusive purpose of rape. This is a highly devious, manipulative and self-obsessed individual".