John Thomas Straffen was a British 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.
53 Facts About John Straffen
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2.
John Straffen 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 recapture.
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John Straffen was brought to trial for this third murder at Winchester Assizes in July 1952; he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to death, although his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment by the Home Secretary.
4.
John Straffen remained incarcerated until his death within HM Prison Frankland in November 2007.
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John Thomas Straffen was born on 27 February 1930 at Bordon Camp in Hampshire.
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John Straffen was the third of six children born to John and Elizabeth Straffen, with one older brother and sister, and three younger sisters.
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At the time of John Straffen's birth, his father served in the British Army, and his mother was a homemaker.
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When John Straffen was two years old, his father was deployed overseas and the family spent six years in British India.
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Shortly thereafter, John Straffen began to exhibit traits of antisocial behaviour.
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Shortly after his family returned to England, John Straffen began committing acts of petty theft in addition to frequently truanting from school.
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John Straffen was referred to a child guidance clinic for this behaviour in October 1938.
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Eight months later, John Straffen first appeared before a juvenile court for stealing a purse from a young girl; he was sentenced to two years' probation.
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John Straffen's assigned probation officer discovered that he did not understand the general difference between right and wrong, or the meaning of probation.
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John Straffen would remain at St Joseph's until 1942, when he transferred to Besford Court School in Defford, Worcestershire.
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John Straffen would remain at this facility until March 1946.
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John Straffen was released from Besford Court School shortly after his sixteenth birthday; he returned to live with his family in Bath.
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Shortly thereafter, John Straffen began to enter unoccupied local homes and steal small items; he is not known to have taken these stolen artifacts home or given these items to others, but instead typically hid or discarded them.
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John Straffen was isolated from other inmates at Horfield and well-behaved.
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However, John Straffen was considered sufficiently rehabilitated to be allowed short periods of unsupervised home leave.
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John Straffen used the time to obtain a job at a market garden as an odd-job man using the skills he had honed while residing in Winchester.
21.
News of John Straffen independently obtaining employment greatly impressed Hortham officials, and he was allowed to keep his horticultural job.
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Shortly thereafter, staff authorised John Straffen to be returned to the care of his family, who by 1951 resided in Fountain Buildings, Bath.
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John Straffen's family disputed the outcome of this assessment and appealed the decision.
24.
Shortly thereafter, 10 July 1951, the Medical Officer of Health for Bath re-examined John Straffen and found an improvement in his mental age to ten years; he recommended that John Straffen's certificate of mental deficiency be renewed only for six months with a view to discharge at the end.
25.
John Straffen's route took him past 1 Camden Crescent in Bath, where 5-year-old Brenda Constance Goddard lived with her foster parents.
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John Straffen did not make any attempt to hide the body and simply continued to the cinema to watch the film Shockproof, after which he returned home.
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John Straffen then walked home, purchasing fish and chips en route.
28.
John Straffen was a bright little girl and we were talking together in the downstairs seats.
29.
John Straffen was dead when I left her but you cannot prove it.
30.
John Straffen willingly confessed to the murder of Brenda Goddard, stating: "The other girl, I did her the same".
31.
When questioned as to why he had killed the children, John Straffen stated he had committed both murders to give the police "something to really do" as opposed to continually pursuing him for relatively trivial offences.
32.
John Straffen was formally charged with the murder of Cicely Batstone the following day.
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John Straffen formally appeared at the Guildhall in Bath on 24 August 1951, charged with both child murders; he pleaded not guilty to the charges on this date and was remanded in custody until 30 August.
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John Straffen stood trial at Taunton Assize Court on 17 October 1951.
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John Straffen was ordered to be detained at His Majesty's pleasure at Broadmoor Hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire.
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Shortly after arriving at this 40-acre institution, John Straffen was assigned work as a cleaner.
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John Straffen was briefly unsupervised at the time of climbing onto the slate roof after the sole guard assigned to supervise his work detail left him unattended as he oversaw the cleaning work of other inmates.
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John Straffen then scaled the remaining eighteen inches to the top of the perimeter wall and lowered himself to the ground.
39.
John Straffen's escape was quickly noticed, and local police notified.
40.
The final reliable eyewitness sighting of the child alive occurred at approximately 5:50pm Shortly thereafter, Linda Bowyer was lured to a nearby field and manually strangled to death before John Straffen walked to a nearby household to ask the occupant, a Mrs Loyalty Kenyon, for a glass of water and directions to Wokingham.
41.
Shortly thereafter, John Straffen thumbed a lift from a female motorist, requesting she drive him to the Bramshill Hunt bus stop.
42.
John Straffen was observed talking to several young children in a lane some 150 yards behind the pub minutes later; he was arrested in a field at 6:40pm following a brief chase and struggle.
43.
News of John Straffen's escape and the fact he had committed a third child murder prior to his recapture sparked intense public outrage, with security within the facility subject to particular scrutiny.
44.
John Straffen appeared at Reading Magistrates' Court the following day to be notified of this formal murder charge and was detained in the hospital wing of HM Prison Brixton to await trial for her murder.
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John Straffen's escape and further murder inspired the implementation of the activation of a system of warning sirens around Broadmoor to alert staff and the public alike upon the event of an inmate's escape from the facility, with the sirens tested on a weekly basis.
46.
John Straffen was brought to trial at Winchester Assizes for the murder of Linda Bowyer on 21 July 1952.
47.
Manningham-Buller further informed the jury a reconstruction of the movements from where John Straffen had been observed sitting and watching Linda ride her bicycle to the copse where her body was discovered revealed the route would have taken him approximately six minutes and thirty seconds to walk.
48.
Teare further testified that, having studied post-mortem photographs and the autopsy reports of the two children John Straffen had confessed to murdering in Bath, he had noted "many similarities" in the method of strangulation applied to Brenda and Cicely that had been applied to Linda.
49.
John Straffen has been certified as a mental defective and when you look at all the medical evidence on both sides, no witness has said that, even within the meaning of medicine, this man is insane.
50.
John Straffen appealed his conviction, contending his trial judge had prejudiced the jury by allowing into admission the evidence of his two previous murders as similar fact evidence, and that his verbal statements to investigators on the morning after the Linda's murder were wrongly admitted because they had been made before he was formally cautioned.
51.
Two years later, in May 1968, John Straffen was transferred to HM Prison Durham, where he was incarcerated in a high-security section of the prison.
52.
At the time of these developments, John Straffen was incarcerated at HM Prison Long Lartin.
53.
John Straffen died of natural causes within the health care centre of HM Prison Frankland following a brief illness on the morning of 19 November 2007.