John Straffen

Common card · No. 217180

John Thomas Straffen (27 February 1930 – 19 November 2007) was an English serial killer who committed the murder of three prepubescent girls between the ages of five and nine in the counties of Somerset and Berkshire, England, between 1951 and 1952. All three of Straffen's victims were murdered by strangulation. His first two victims were murdered in Bath, Somerset, in the summer of 1951. Arrested shortly after the murder of his second victim, Straffen denied any sexual or sadistic motive for the murders, which he insisted he had committed to simply "annoy" the police, whom he blamed for most of his problems. Tried before Mr Justice Oliver at Taunton Assizes in October 1951, Straffen was found unfit to plead on the grounds of diminished responsibility and committed to indefinite detention within Broadmoor Hospital. He briefly escaped from this facility in April 1952 and murdered a third child in the village of Farley Hill, Berkshire, in the four hours he remained at liberty prior to his...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Booking photograph taken by Avon and Somerset police officer. August 1951., Public domain