“They should be the most innocent members of society, but children can be capable of the most sadistic, premeditated, and brutal murders.”
“They beat him and hit him with a bottle. One of them stabbed Jay straight through the heart.”
“What drives these kids to kill men, women, friends, family? She was determined that her mother had to die. Even their teachers.”
“This was the first occasion upon which a teacher had been killed in class in the course of conducting a lesson.”
“Could they be born evil? It did have a weird, dark sense of humor. He was a little bit different to most of the other kids. He was aggressive, threatening, and dangerous. Or are they victims of their environment? There was a lot of gangs. There was a lot of violence, a lot of drug abusers with exceptional access to real police tapes.”
“The voices are talking to me. You need to make a sacrifice. We’re going to come and get you. You need to do it.”
“And interviews with those closest to the victims and the perpetrators.”
“A red mist had simply descended.”
“We reveal what made them such savage killers.”
“In March 2014, the body of a man was found stabbed to death in Colchester’s Castle Park.”
“The day Jim died is the day I died.”
“3 months later, a university student was brutally murdered in broad daylight.”
“He came from behind and launched his knife attack on her.”
“With a serial killer on the loose, the town was gripped by fear.”
“The whole community were just scared to go out.”
“After a 14-month manhunt, the killer was finally caught while he lay in wait for his third victim.”
“She said that she saw pure evil in his eyes.”
“Shockingly, the person responsible was a 15-year-old school boy, James Fairweather.”
“He was a deeply disturbed young man. But what turned a boy once described as well-behaved, kind, and sensitive into a murder-obsessed teen, now dubbed Britain’s youngest serial killer?”
“We were alerted to a major incident and there was a real sense at this point that something, something bad’s happened.”
“In the early hours of the 29th of March 2014, Colchester in Essex was rocked by a shocking murder, brutal and tragic murder. The family have been left devastated. James was murdered.”
“He was attacked frenziedly by James Fairweather to the point there were more than 100 stab wounds. Some of these stab wounds were really vicious, including stab wounds to the eye. And that was one of the real standout details.”
“The victim of this deadly attack was James Attfield, a 33-year-old father of four, known as Jim by his friends and family.”
“Smashing smile, cheeky grin, just all-round funny guy really.”
“Jim had suffered a brain injury in a traffic accident affecting his mobility and reasoning. Several years on, he’d made huge progress in his recovery and was just getting his life back to normal.”
“He always had a little joke on hand and things like that. He loved his karaoke. He used to get on his chopper bike and he used to race around with me on the back and stick his bum out so I’d fall off. So yeah, it was a good childhood.”
“I was due to meet Jim that night, but he cancelled. I don’t know why. I remember actually messaging him and saying how upset I was. I wish I hadn’t now, because see what happened to him that night, I can never take those words back.”
“Jim Attfield had been on a night out in Colchester as he often did. He went for a few drinks by himself, and he was making his way home. James decided to walk through Castle Park that night, which was a shortcut.”
“Stopped halfway to have a cigarette. Obviously must have dozed off at some point during the evening, and then that’s when he got attacked.”
“This vulnerable, slumbering person was then set upon for no apparent reason and with no motive, and violently killed.”
“Jim was actually still alive when he was found. He must have laid there in pain and just bleeding to death. It’s the sort of thing you really don’t want to imagine, let alone live.”
“What was particularly scary was that James Attfield was such a vulnerable man who had no beef with anyone.”
“We had extensively covered the initial murder. We’d run a lot of appeals, including with Jim’s family. And at the time, the coverage was starting to fall away a little bit.”
“So we got a call to say there’s a lot of police activity in this particular area along Salary Brook Trail, just, just outside the Grimstead estate.”
“We had been told that every entrance into Salary Brook Trail had been blocked off by police cars.”
“Just 3 months after Jim Attfield’s death, a second frenzied knife attack struck Colchester. The victim was 31-year-old student, Nahid Almanea, from Saudi Arabia.”
“Nahid Almanea was on her way to the University of Essex campus, where she was studying an English course, and she was stabbed on the Salary Brook Trail.”
“Nahid had come to the UK to study English as part of her PhD. She’d moved over with her brother and had only been in the country for 6 months.”
“She always walked to and from the university with her brother, and people were wondering why, on that particular day, had she walked by herself.”
“The morning her brother hadn’t been there to chaperone her to university was the same morning the killer had been lying in wait for his next opportunity.”
“She had done that walk many times. It’s a lovely walk, which is a local nature reserve.”
“He came from behind and launched his knife attack on her. He took off her sunglasses in order to stab her in the eye. And during the course of the short but brutal assault, he stabbed her more than 30 times.”
“The family had been left devastated by the terrible murder of Nahid. Nahid was a remarkable and gentle person who was loved for her kind and caring nature.”
“In the first murder, what we see is the use of extreme violence. There’s 102 knife wounds, and many of them are what we call knife-tip wounds. They’re not going to kill the victim. They’re purely done to cause pain.”
“In the second murder, what we see is a reduction in the number of knife wounds, but he still keeps the knife-tip wounds. So it’s almost like he’s honing his technique. But the most striking similarity in these two murders is the stabbing of the eye.”
“In the first murder, we see the victim has been stabbed in the eye, but we don’t know at that point, was it planned? So it’s really chilling that then we see the second murder where the killer actually planned to stab the victim in the eye. And we know this because he removed her sunglasses in order to stab her in the eye.”
“What we’re starting to see here is emerging MO. It’s almost like the killer wants that to be the feature of his murders.”
“The police were careful not to release the stabbing of the eyes linking the murders. Yet with two brutal stabbings that happened just months apart, fear gripped the community and people had begun to make their own connections.”
“Many people were looking at the two attacks as looking very similar and ultimately related. So the talk in the town, and of course the talk through the papers, was that there could be a serial killer on the loose.”
“The whole community were just scared to go out because nobody knew who the person was that done it.”
“I was walking around in Colchester with my sister one evening, and I remember saying to her, ‘We could have walked past him.'”
“I think James Fairweather committed these murders because he was a deeply disturbed young man.”
“However, there was clearly something there in his environment, in the material he was viewing, that all combined to create someone that ultimately went on to kill twice and potentially could have killed again.”
“In the judge’s summing up in this case, he talked about how James Fairweather wanted to carry out his sadistic, violent fantasies and how he was obsessed with other serial killers.”
“Peter Sutcliffe, he stabbed his victims in the eye, and it’s said that he did this because the eye remained open and he got some kind of pleasure from doing that.”
“And Fairweather purposely stabbed his victims in the eye. So it’s almost like he wanted to emulate the serial killers that he was so obsessed with, and the notoriety that comes with that would have been something he desired.”
“But could the authorities have picked up on Fairweather’s dangerous obsessions before they went too far?”
“I was quite angry when I heard that he had already caused upset by holding up a shop at knifepoint. And to find out that he only got a slap on the wrist and was then allowed to walk free and just a few months later, then go on to kill, despicable, really.”
“I think Jim’s death could have been prevented. Because if James Fairweather had been given a harsher sentence for carrying a weapon in the first place, then he may not have been out there to have committed the crimes he committed.”
“It was a unique case. My understanding is that James is the youngest person in this country to have been convicted of two separate murders. The ferocity of them makes them unique in my view, given his young age.”
“The minimum term that the judge set in James’s case was 27 years. That is for a boy of that age a very long minimum term indeed. Fairweather will be in his 40s before he can even be considered for release by the parole board.”
“Given his disputed mental health, does this teenage boy deserve life in prison?”
“One of the difficulties with the jury’s finding of murder rather than manslaughter is that James will be kept in a normal prison. There isn’t the medical and psychiatric support that there would be in a psychiatric unit had he been convicted of manslaughter.”
“The judge could have made what’s called a hospital order, which has pretty much the same effect as a life sentence, except the decision as to release is made when a panel of psychiatrists felt that he didn’t present a danger to the public, rather than the parole board, which is made up of non-specialists.”
“The James Fairweather case is a case that no one involved with it will ever forget.”
“One can’t help but wonder whether if his autism had been diagnosed at a much earlier stage and a suitable support system put in place, including input at home from his parents, whether with greater supervision and with more assistance for his difficulties which were undoubtedly there, he may not have carried out these killings.”
“That’s a question that’s impossible to answer, but one can’t help speculating on whether actually failure of that diagnosis meant that the system let him down.”
“James Fairweather was bullied. He had been targeted because of his physical appearance. He had been vulnerable because of his autism, because of his potential developing personality disorder, and because of the question mark over whether he was in a psychotic episode or not, and he carried knives.”
“That says to me that there were signs there. And if he had got help younger, maybe we could have prevented these terrible murders occurring.”
