Original subtitles

- [Ian] He Just leapt up and pushed him

and the train came in.

[tense music]

- [Rob] Keiran Patrick Kelly, he'd been killing people

by pushing them in front of tube trains.

- [Kelly] And then you've been captured for a while

so what do you think you do then.

- [Officer] You tell the truth is what you're saying,

you then tell the truth about everything.

- [Ian] We were expected to believe he got away

with all these crimes because no one noticed them happening.

I just don't believe that.

- [Nicola] Psycho Kelly.

They were very vulnerable sleeping rough

on the streets in London.

- [John] When they had nothing left they had would

go out and rob others in the street.

- [Officer] You were caught bang to rights.

You know there is no way out of that,

you then decide to come clean

and tell us all the truth.

No one had heard of Kieran Kelly.

- [Nicola] I don't think he's lying.

I think he genuinely believes that he's done this.

- [Ian] He was like a stick of dynamite,

once you lit the fuse there was no stopping him.

[dramatic music]

[tense music]

- Was the underground once stalked by a serial killer,

who push people from tube platforms to their deaths

and then got away with it?

This former detective says yes.

Astonishing claims that you're making.

Why do you think that this is the case,

that there was an actual serial killer on the underground?

[tense music]

- He just leapt up and pushed him.

And the train came in.

There's a pit, and he fell into that and the train went

over the top of him.

[tense music]

- A man was arrested for robbery on Clapham Common.

He was taken to the police station,

detained in one of the cells.

- [Officer] And that's the man you pushed?

- [Kelly] I didn't push him.

- Well- - I gave him a wallop.

- [Officer] Why was that?

- [Kelly] And I caught him on one of the shoulders.

and he went, gone, and I wasn't worried whether

there was a train coming in or not.

- Another one he'd thrown in front of a tube.

- He'd admitted to the police

that he actually killed all these people on the Underground.

- He was like a stick of dynamite.

Once you lit the fuse, it would go,

and there was no stopping it.

[tense music]

- [Announcer] This is an emergency.

Please evacuate.

[tense music]

- In the early summer of 2015,

I was actually on a job in London Bridge,

and a colleague of mine in Ireland just sent me a link

to a newspaper article, about an Irish guy,

who, you know, according to the report that he sent me,

you know, had committed multiple murders

in London all the way back to the 1950s

and just said,

you know, you've been in London a few years,

did you ever hear of this guy pushing his victims onto

in front of trains and from the tube lines?

[tense music]

The initial headline was a former cop who claimed

that he was on the Case.

He was revealing the crimes of a then unknown serial killer.

- My name is Jeff Edwards.

For 35 years I was a Fleet Street crime reporter.

I saw those 2015 headlines, and I thought to myself

at that time, I don't know who this guy is: Keiran Kelly,

who was being called a serial killer,

and he was called the London Underground Killer

because he allegedly pushed a lot

of people in front of tube trains

on the London Underground Network.

[tense music]

- The police prepared a report which was submitted

to the Home Office and to the Director

of public prosecution to decide

what charges were appropriate.

As a result, the Home Office got back

and instructed the police that the story was not

to be released to the Metropolitan Police Bureau

or to the media direct.

- Society had to be protected from this maniac

or people just wouldn't use the trains, the Underground

if they knew the truth of what was happening.

- People would simply say, I'm not going on the tube.

If, if there's a, you know, if there's a lunatic

at large, it's just not conceivable.

- I think the fact is there was a chance

of mass hysteria there was also a chance

that people might not go to work.

- We did contact the British Transport Police,

they said today that they know about the claims.

They they said it's difficult to substantiate

your claims because of the passage of time.

We're talking about something that happened in the '70s.

- This was an exceptional story

that I'd never heard anyone share in all those years.

So, I guess, you know, the story arrived

like a bolt out of the blue like that,

I guess you were just kind of interested,

intrigued, you know,

why they never heard of this story before.

Was it true?

- Was this a serial killer hiding in plain sight?

[tense music]

[train rumbling]

[tense music]

- [Ian] I'm Detective Inspector Ian Brown,

at Clapham Police Station,

today is the 17th of August, 1983.

I broke serial number HGG702 on a new tape.

The time is now 3:56, and the machine will remain on.

[tense music]

The unique thing about this case is the fact

that there's actually tapes of the interview

still surviving some 40 years later.

There were originally three tapes, but one of them

is the only one that I've got left.

The other two were lent and never returned.

My name is Ian Brown.

I'm a retired detective superintendent

from the Metropolitan Police.

I was detective inspector

at Clapham Police Station in South London.

A role that I certainly wasn't happy with

because I'd always been active and now,

I was sitting behind a desk telling other people

and checking on other people's work.

And then along came Kieran Kelly.

[tense music]

How are you, Kelly? - [Kelly] All right.

- Do you want a cup of tea? - Cup of tea please.

- Cup of tea, one sugar?

- One sugar, please.

- This, of course, is the only picture

of the infamous Kelly.

And I don't think you really need to be a genius

to look in those eyes and realise

that there's not a lot there.

He's somewhere else,

or they're looking straight through you.

I mean, there's just certainly a look of

somebody that could easily be a killer.

- Kieran, Patrick Kelly

- Never heard of Kieran Kelly,

so never knew a word about him growing up.

- He's not somebody I knew about at all.

- [Ian] What I wanted to do was go through a few things

with you again.

Because what we're both after is the truth.

- You got the truth as far as I'm concerned.

- Psycho Kelly or Mad Kelly.

- A couple of years.

Like I heard, heard about,

something appeared in the papers or something.

That was the first I heard of him.

- This is the most bizarre story I've ever heard

in my career.

Do you mind if we go through it just a few points again?

- Ask the points. - Okay.

Fair enough.

And hopefully this will be the last time we speak to you.

A lot of what Kelly is alleged

to have done happens down the tube station.

Well, if you're homeless and a drunk, alcoholic.

It's raining, it's cold, where are you going to drink?

- When he was apparently murdering people,

this was in the period, sort of in the early 1980s

when I was at my, you know,

in the heyday of my career, in fact, 1983,

I was the crime reporter on the News of the World.

And I thought, if this is all true,

how come I don't remember this chap

- He was taken out of the cell,

he was loaded with testosterone and adrenaline,

he was really fired up he started unloading.

- [Kelly] You put yourself in my shoes, right?

- [Ian] Yeah.

- [Kelly] You go and kill a geezer, right?

And years go by.

Jumps and you do another few.

Right.

And you're not captured.

Right?

And then you're captured for one.

So what do you do?

Think.

What do you do then?

- [Ian] You tell the truth, is what you're saying.

- [Kelly] That's it.

- [Ian] You then tell the truth about everything.

[tense music]

- Kieran Kelly was essentially, you know,

in part pushing his victims on the tube.

I think in the beginning it was north

of a dozen murders that Kieran Kelly was being, you know,

then reported to have committed.

Who were these victims?

Who was Kieran Kelly?

What can we find out?

And I guess, I suppose like any story,

you begin by asking questions and trying

to find the people who might have answers

to those questions.

- There were so many stories that were incapable

of being substantiated, and yet there were

so many stories that were so accurate, but no proof.

- The real reason I think that he never, ever emerged,

you know, until almost 20 years after he was, you know,

at his most active apparently, is because,

I think there's real doubts about, you know,

how much of a serial killer he really was.

- It was really difficult to find people

who knew Kieran Kelly or were familiar with the story.

[tense music]

- I mean Kelly's life at times was half normal.

Two children, a wife, looking after another five kids.

He would get day's work as a building labourer,

and apparently, I'm told he was very,

very good when he was sober.

But the minute he got a drink on him,

he changed personality and completely.

I know he worked for a few builders,

but only on a daily basis

and certainly not for more than a couple of days

before he went back on the booze.

And then he basically stopped working

and took to the road as they say.

There's no record of him ever having worked again.

He just purely led that life of a petty thief.

[dramatic music]

Come clean and tell us all the truth.

- [Kelly] Yeah.

- And that is right, is it? - That's right.

And that's what I've done.

- It wasn't frustrating because it was something

that I'd never experienced before.

And in actual fact, I most probably enjoyed it

because it became a game of who's telling the truth

and who can get the truth.

A cat and mouse game more than anything else, really.

[recorder clicking]

[siren wailing]

[tense music]

- We're stood in Clapham common in southwest London.

The commons today, like many commons in London,

are used, I guess as recreational spaces for sports,

for picnicking families, whatever.

But back during Kieran Kelly's time in the 1970s

and early 1980s, the commons were places

that street drinkers like Kieran Kelly

and his cohorts would retreat into to feed their habits.

[tense music]

- My name's Andy Baker.

I was a detective sergeant at Clapham Police Station

from 1981 to 1984, and I worked with Ian Brown,

who was a detective inspector there.

The CID office at Clapham dealt with

about 15 burglaries a day, every day at Clapham.

Two or three robberies.

Nothing really unusual occurred two or three murders a year,

some domestic, some on the street,

but nothing more than that back in 1983.

[tense music]

- Members of the public had long,

the parks had long ago ceased to be places of recreation.

The public didn't go there anymore for relaxation.

- You had to be living in 1983 to understand this community

of misfits of people who were all alcoholics

and wanted to live on the streets or they didn't want homes.

Clapham, Balham, Tooting, Kennington,

all that sort of South London area was their home.

That was their home.

[dramatic music]

- I am Benjamin, former homeless and yeah,

a former addict.

I grew up around this area, it was an environment I knew

and Clapham Common,

it's not a park, it's common land,

so you can get away with sleeping rough there.

So I started sleeping rough on Clapham Common.

It's easy to tell a homeless person

'cause they've got the fullish rucksack,

they've got their whole life in the rucksack you know,

and that's how you live.

You live in a bag and that's your life.

[dramatic music]

- I'm Dr. Nicola Davies.

I'm a behavioural scientist

with a special interest in criminal behaviour.

I think you can tell a lot about human nature

from analysing the extreme ends.

Homelessness is a whole new subculture.

It's kind of under the legal radar, under the moral radar,

it's a totally different environment.

- Clapham had its fair share of homeless people,

street drinkers, they would drink in church yards,

on the Common, on park benches.

The street drinkers, considered their park bench,

their property and they'd protect it,

they would fight for it as well.

- Wino jungle was a place where chronic alcoholics used

to be congregate in the parks.

These parks were small little parks.

They were stretched from John O'Groats to Land's End,

and the police used to pen the winos in these parks.

- They all knew each other,

but they didn't know their names.

There was no need to know their names.

The only thing they needed to know was did he have a drink?

[tense music]

- I'm John Healy, I started to drink when I was about 15.

Of course, it's nothing now, but them times.

And it went from bad to worse, you know, the drink.

But I was boxing at the same time.

I became a junior ABA champion.

I was frequently turning up drunk for a training session.

So I sold all my cups and medals and that for drink.

And just ended up, on the street.

I started drinking worse.

And then I ended up in the winos jungles.

We weren't able to do anything except drink

or fight for the drink.

And the drink was cheap.

South African red, it was the dregs

of South African wine.

Well no one cared about winos.

I mean, why would they care about winos?

They were sort of the scum of the earth.

And that was it.

No one cared about them.

I mean, why should they care about them?

Who'd care about winos?

[dramatic music]

- An awful lot of them were from Ireland

because it was at a time when the Irish immigrant society

was very, very big coming into England

and a lot of them couldn't find jobs and resorted to drink.

- Most of the wealth of this country is in London.

Most of the opportunities is in London.

And London's always been cosmopolitan, always.

And not just in wealth, the different blue-collar,

rich, working class, homeless,

there's always been these subcultures.

So, it's just which one you fall in.

- I am Pauline McKeown, Chief Executive

of Coolmine Therapeutic Community,

and that's a national drug and alcohol treatment centre

here in Ireland.

As I worked with the homeless Irish community in London,

I quite quickly realised that whilst there was alcohol

and other drugs sometimes featuring for people,

everyone had a backstory.

They'd left Ireland at a time

where there wasn't many opportunities.

There wasn't, work a plentiful.

So going over to London or to Manchester or anywhere,

they very much were hoping for a better future.

But when they arrived, they realised that they had

to make their own way.

And there was loneliness.

And there was isolation featuring.

And for a crutch and to enable them to participate

in any way in daily life, drinking, alcohol,

going to the pub, then onto street drinking became a very,

very natural way of life.

They were very vulnerable, sleeping rough

on the streets in London.

[tense music]

- It's impossible to say for certain,

to kind of measure Kieran Kelly's decline

as to kind of why he ended up in this space.

But you know, the considered context

I guess would've been his alcoholism.

He was obviously a heavy drinker and, you know,

by his own admission alcohol was something

that drove him and was an addiction that needed to be met.

- When you are on the street with addiction,

your mindset is just set.

The most important thing is your addiction.

It becomes the most important thing

because it's the tool that you use

to escape the immediate environment that you're in now.

And your life quickly comes down to just

living a day-to-day existence anyway.

- Alcohol really is a blessing and a curse

to homeless people, and it definitely was for Kelly.

Alcohol can become a bit of a barter system.

It can propel you to the top of the social hierarchy.

It might allow you to enter a particular social circle,

and if you can supply alcohol, you're going

to be the favoured one as well,

- I mean, the drinks and food would be shoplifted.

And their method is that if they go in absolutely drunk

and collapse on a few tins or something,

they can slip a few in their pocket and walk out again.

But of course, they always managed to collapse

and fall on bottles of booze.

- It was very difficult to shoplift

'cause you smell and stank.

People would smell you if they couldn't see you.

And so a lot of violence,

then the winos were termed predate felons,

predatory felons.

And because of the way

they would attack people for money.

That's why the violence was so bad.

[tense music]

- It was just another day at Clapham or another night

when two young police officers were patrolling

and found a well-known man of the night,

a guy called William Boyd.

- He was laying on a bench in the edge of Clapham Common,

and these two young officers came across him

and for some unknown reason,

decided that they would arrest him.

- William Boyd had been picked up for,

I guess being homeless and just, I guess, you know,

being on the streets

or because somebody complained about him.

I guess William Boyd had, essentially, been brought in

to Clapham Common Police Station to sleep off the drink.

- If they fancied it, they'd nick you for nothing.

Just suss.

[tense music]

- In that society.

They were quite happy to be arrested.

They weren't sleeping outside.

They have a cell, even if it was a floor or a mattress

to sleep on, perhaps a blanket to keep them warm.

This was luxury.

So William Boyd was quite happy.

He went to the cell and layed on the floor

and started snoring.

He would be there until he'd sobered up,

which might be tomorrow afternoon.

[door clicking]

[tense music]

- The day after William Boyd

was picked up, two homeless street drinkers,

Kieran Kelly and Paul McManus approached a man

who was sitting on a bench here in Clapham Common

and mugged him, took a ring off him,

took some money off him.

[tense music]

- Luckily, there were local police walking the streets

and they arrested both Kelly and McManus.

They took them to Clapham police station,

so there were only three cells at Clapham police station,

and he decided that it would be wise

to put all three together in the cell.

It would save contaminating the other two cells.

And so at two o'clock in the afternoon,

that's exactly what happened.

The three of them were put in the cells.

[tense music]

At about five o'clock, I decided it was time to go.

I walked out, and as I got into the yard,

a young constable ran out and shouted, "Governor, Governor,

quick down the cell."

McManus was banging on the door, screaming to get out.

[door banging]

So I turned and went down the cell, opened the door,

and there before me was William Boyd laying on the floor,

prone on his back and a young police sergeant

giving him the kiss of life.

[tense music]

Round his neck was a pair of socks

that had been knotted together,

and he'd just been strangled.

I looked round and sitting in the corner was Kieran Kelly,

sitting on the floor cross-legged with no socks.

Now we now have a situation where we have a murder

in the cells at Clapham Police Station.

[tense music]

- Now I haven't heard of Kieran Kelly until now.

But unfortunately, that's the way of the world

and that's been going on since before society

that we know anyway.

There's good and bad people in the world.

If we want to do something,

well we can be really good at that want.

It's just that want, knowing what you want.

Life is choice.

You could choose to be good or you can choose to be bad.

[tense music]

- Keiran?

We didn't know much about Kieran.

He lived in London.

I met this girl across the road.

She knew him in London and,

didn't have much to say about him, really.

[soft violin music]

- Kieran Kelly was born in 1930.

He was born in a small village, in the Midlands

in Ireland called Rathdowney.

[gentle orchestral music]

- My name is Michael Ryan We're in the town of Rathdowney,

a small town in Southwest Laois Midlands of Ireland.

It's a wonderful town, wonderful people,

growing up in Rathdowney was lovely.

We had our primary school, it was very,

you know, there was no social distinction whether you were,

any way well healed or on the poverty line.

[gentle orchestral music]

Kieran Kelly's father owned a small shop in Rathdowney.

At another time, his father was in the Irish Police Force.

He had brothers and sisters and yeah,

I guess had an unremarkable childhood, really.

[gentle orchestral music]

- There's no date in this old photograph,

but it's about I'm guessing 1900, give or take.

The men typical at clothing, three-piece suits,

caps, so I suppose his parents

could well be standing there if one thinks about it.

[gentle orchestral music]

- The house I lived in,

where I was reared to the house,

who Mr. Kelly was reared in as well.

My family wouldn't really have known him very well.

There are Kellys here around Kelly's

down the road with no relation to that at all no.

- Kelly is a common enough name.

In fact, I think it's maybe the second

or third most common name in Ireland.

[clapboard clicking]

- My name is Mary Delaney.

Well, I have lived in Rathdowney 60 years now.

You probably heard there was a brewery here for a long time.

A lot of people were employed there.

A lot of men were employed in the brewery for years.

My husband worked there for, until they closed down.

And that was really, oh yeah,

there was a textile factory up here as well.

Yeah.

It employed a lot of people as well.

And that was about all there was here, and 17 pubs.

- 17? - Yes.

It was 17 pubs here at one time.

[soft violin music]

- We don't know much about Kieran Kelly's childhood.

We know from some sources

that he was maybe a little bit insecure.

We know his father started off as a policeman,

to an insurance broker, to a labourer.

So, he somehow went down the status.

We don't know a lot, and we usually do look at the childhood

to understand how someone's behaving as an adult.

It doesn't give us the entire answer

'cause we're the product of nature and nurture.

But it does give us some indicators.

[soft music]

- He joined the Army at 18 and was out by 19.

He got kicked out of the army.

- I guess Kieran Kelly only really pops up in terms

of official marking of his life

in court records in the early 1950s when he begins

to be picked up for petty crimes, stealing, theft,

housebreaking, public order, that type of thing,

and then comes to England in the 1950s.

[grand orchestral music]

- An awful lot of young people, at that time

who went over to England.

An awful lot of them stayed there

for their, most part of their lives.

[dramatic music]

- Someone like Kieran Kelly coming from Ireland to London,

it would've been very daunting for him.

If you think of London, just how busy the hustle

and bustle of it compared to Ireland.

He's trying to find his place and his place was London.

[train horn blowing] [soft music]

- I'm Anna McGuire.

I'm lecturer in public history at University College London.

So if you were arriving into London on the train

in the 1950s, you could've encountered a city

of contradictions and kind of tensions.

Bomb damage would still be evident.

There'd be houses that are crumbling around you,

different parts of the city that are still

in that kind of post-war recovery.

- I must say that most Irish people did very well over here.

Well, they did okay.

They settled down, had families,

but the ones we're talking about are people

who never get that opportunity.

My name is Alex McDonald, I'm the coordinator of the

Aisling Return to Ireland project, which works with

homeless vulnerable Irish people

in London who've lost contact with their families

and their homeland.

[train clacking]

- When they got there, that work wasn't there for them,

and they didn't have any money.

So when you don't have any income,

your choices are pretty limited,

your choices are pretty limited,

and that would've led to the rough sleeping

and the homelessness on the streets as well.

[wind whooshing]

- We see so many different sides to Kieran Kelly,

depending on who you ask as well.

What was he like?

You're going to get a different story

from past employers, family, children.

- Obviously, we know that Kelly was a father.

He was married for a period of time,

he was a hard worker and he was also kind of popular

with his workmates, but also feared, gregarious, you know-

- So thinking particularly about work on building sites

in this period, high rates of injury, really high risk.

Being paid in cash, kind of like danger money

that they used to call it.

That would be great if you could get it.

But knowing that you have no backup plan

if you get injured or if something goes wrong.

- Working in the rain and digging trenches in the rain

and the rheumatism sets in and they go straight

in the pub when they get off the lorry

to dry out and 'cause they've got nowhere

to sleep and or if they've got a room, it's got no heating.

- There was a thing called the Lump,

which meant you got paid cash,

and typically you'd get paid in the pub,

there'd be a gang man.

And he'd pay people in the pub

and he'd have an arrangement with the landlord

of the pub that he'd keep the lads in the pub

as long as he could before he paid them.

So [laughing] by that time, they'd run up a big tab.

[all chattering] [lively music]

It was like a conspiracy to keep people drinking.

And you can see how sort of casual life became for people.

- That kind of chimes

with Kieran Kelly's personal experience

where he would've worked in construction.

He would've had, you know, multiple addresses in London,

you know, kind of a transient lifestyle around South London.

[tense music]

- The men from the second World War, they were disturbed

and they would rob their own kind.

And when they had nothing left, they would go out

and rob others in the street.

So there was a lot of mugging going on.

That's the whole truth about it,

because there was no other way.

[tense music]

- Kieran Kelly had been brought in for the theft of a ring,

and now there's a body, a dead body inside in the cells

in the police station.

Ian Brown is thinking, who is this guy

that's just committed this terrible,

brutal murder inside in the cells?

- Round his neck was a pair of socks

that had been knotted together,

and he'd just been strangled.

I looked round and sitting in the corner

was Kieran Kelly sitting on the floor cross-legged

with no socks.

[dramatic music]

Now, I'm not the best detective that there's ever been,

but I managed to solve that crime.

Kelly's moved to another cell, the coroner is called,

and Boyd is declared dead at the scene.

- Kieran Kelly knew what prison life was like.

He was in and out of it most of his adult life.

And I suspect that by the time we get to William Boyd

and killing him in that prison cell,

[dramatic music]

perhaps he had come to the realisation that life

might be better and easier in prison with a roof

over his head with food, with a bed,

because clearly he was going to get caught for this one.

[dramatic music continues]

- I get Kelly's file, and before we ever interview him,

we want to know what we're dealing with,

and I sit down and read Kelly's file.

- Kieran Kelly, the man who just confessed

to murdering somebody in the cells,

had been acquitted on a murder charge from years previous

of another man called Edward Toal.

[tense music]

- Toal was another one of the Vagrant society

who was sleeping on a tomb.

That community was very, very protective of its,

what they called their skipper,

the place that they slept.

If it was a tombstone,

nobody would dare sleep on that tombstone,

or they did so at their own risk

because the person who slept there would make sure

that they were evicted and usually violently evicted

because violence was never very far from the surface

as alcohol was the main purpose in life.

[dramatic orchestral music]

- There's certain nights of the week that you know,

you're more at risk like a Friday or a Saturday night

because a lot more people are intoxicated.

And when you're intoxicated, you're not right in your mind.

Most of the time they're hurting themselves, they're not,

they're just lashing out and hurting themselves.

But you constantly feel like you know,

you need to be ready for something.

You never relax, you never feel comfortable.

[tense music]

- Edward Toal not dissimilar to Boyd,

had been strangled to death.

Kelly was picked up for that.

It went to court, but by the time it went to trial

Kelly had been remanded in prison

for a number of months.

He hadn't had a drink.

He was well dressed, he was fresh,

he'd kind of had months of sleep, he'd months without drink,

and the two key witnesses who were there

to testify against him were basically pulled off the street,

still in the grip of addiction.

- If there is a murder, they'll have

to gather enough evidence.

And the homeless community closes up shop, they don't talk.

You don't talk because you ain't going to survive

if you're grassing on fellow people.

So how could they put any more resources

into a place where no one willingly wants that to be solved?

- If I witnessed something like that, I'd be reporting it.

If I saw someone struggle with somebody as an assault,

I think I'd raise my voice at least,

depending on how brave I felt or how capable

I would try and intervene

if I felt it was safe to do so.

Not everybody's like that though.

People will turn a blind eye and look the other way,

feel threatened themselves by witnessing something like that,

thinking that someone's going to come after them.

- Obviously some sort of violence would be,

some sort of revenge would be enacted after,

but inherently in themselves they wouldn't do that.

That's informing.

They wouldn't do that.

And What would you care?

Why would you want to track 'em down?

You want to get a drink.

You're not worried whether they're dead or alive.

- Any witnesses he did have were seen as unreliable

by the police, and they probably were unreliable because

of drugs and alcohol.

- Kelly was subsequently acquitted.

[tense music]

- In the file in front of me was this story of murder.

And before I went into interview Kelly, I thought,

I wonder now he's caught bang to rights for murder

in the cell.

I wonder if he'll actually tell the truth

and admit that he killed Toal.

I questioned him about why he did the thing to Boyd

in the cell, and he said, "He was snoring, he was loud,

he ain't now," and that was Kelly's attitude.

He'd done it.

So, he was quite happy.

You're caught bang to rights with Boyd.

You know there's no way out of that.

You then decide to come clean and tell us all the truth.

As far as the police were concerned,

that was still an unsolved murder.

So, I won't mention it, but I'll just say,

what about the others?

[tense music]

He said, "You're talking about Fisher, aren't you?"

Fisher?

I didn't have a clue who Fisher was.

[tense music]

Would you tell me again how you did him?

- [Kelly] I give him a whallop.

And I cut him, I don't think they were stabs.

I'm not sure.

[tense music]

- And he said, "I was too clever for you, wasn't I?"

I said, "Yep."

I didn't know anything.

And winked at the sergeant who flew out the door to find out

who Fisher was.

- We see a big kid here, he's very childish

and very emotionally immature in this sense.

It's kind of, yeah, I've got one over you.

He's playing with them.

He's goading them.

Yeah, and we see him thriving from doing that.

[Kelly laughing]

[tense music]

- In 1975, a businessman called Hector Fisher,

his body was found on a park bench behind me here,

stabbed and beaten.

[siren wailing]

- Nobody had ever been arrested.

It was just another murder by some vagrant.

- So I said to Kelly, "Okay, let's talk about Fisher.

What happened?"

Now, funnily enough, Hector Fisher

was not actually part of that society.

He had a house, I think he had a pension.

[tense music]

- His business failed.

He fell on hard times, and he found himself

in the company of homeless people like Kelly.

- They'd drunk together on numerous occasions.

How many times did you stab him?

- [Kelly] I don't know.

I was, I had a good drink on me.

- He said, "Dirty bugger wanted my arse.

So I cut him, I cut his bollocks.

So then I stabbed him, and then I hit him

over the head with a brick."

He said, "But you never knew it was me."

I said, "No, I didn't."

[dramatic orchestral music]

He said, "I robbed him as well."

I said, "Oh, did you?"

"Yeah."

He said, "He had a wad of money in his pocket,

and I took it all except for 40 quid,

and I left the 40 pounds, two 20 pound notes, it was,"

he said, "And I left them in his pocket."

We look at the report from the pathologist who went

to the scene, and sure enough,

inside Fisher's pockets was two 20 pound notes.

Nobody could have known that,

it had to be right.

[dramatic orchestral music]

- All of the details match that he would do that apart

from one, he says that he cut in his word,

his bollocks, which wasn't found to be the case.

I think this is just a simple embellishment.

He embellishes, that's Kelly to a T.

He's got to tell a story.

He's got to do his performance.

- Ian and I conducted the first few interviews

with Kelly when he was arrested at Clapham Police Station.

Kelly told us that he was actually interviewed.

He must have been a person of interest at that time,

or a suspect.

- So Brown now has a file in front of him

that Kieran Kelly, the man who just confessed

to murdering somebody in the cells,

had been acquitted on a murder charge

from years previous of another man.

He subsequently confessed

to murdering Hector Fisher here in Clapham Common.

[dramatic orchestral music]

- I said, "Okay, when did it all start, Kelly?"

He said, "Coronation."

[grand orchestral music]

I said, "What do you mean?"

"1953," he said.

"Baker Street Tube Station."

Suddenly you're sitting there thinking,

I had a simple murder here, one person dead in the cells.

And suddenly I haven't got a clue what I've got.

[dramatic orchestral music]

- [Announcer] And with what pride shall those who watch

recall in after years, "I saw the queen on Coronation Day."

[crowd cheering]

[dramatic orchestral music]

- [Rob] Brown says, "Okay, Kelly, when did this all start?"

And Kelly says, "It started in 1953

when I pushed my friend in front of a tube train

at Baker Street Tube Station."

[dramatic orchestral music]

- He said, "I came over from Ireland

with a friend of mine, Christy Smith, and two tongs,

two prostitutes.

One was Kathleen, and that was Christie's girlfriend,

the other one," he said, "I can't remember her name,

but I didn't want anything to do with her."

- They had travelled to London for the Queen's coronation.

And after a day on the town in London,

they're in Baker Street Tube Station.

- [Officer] Alright then-Mr. Brown's gonna ask you now

about Christy Smith and go over that again.

- [Ian] Yeah.

It's interesting Kelly that when we talk to you,

you usually come back to Christy Smith

'cause that's where it all started.

- [Kelly] Well yeah, that was,

I would've never mentioned none of them.

- According to Kelly on this particular day,

they were had a good drink and they were

at Baker Street Tube Station when Christy Smith

called him a queer.

And Kelly got upset and threw him under the tube.

[train whooshing]

Now that's Kelly's story.

Did it happen?

We'll never know, but there's no record anywhere

of anybody being killed

at Baker Street Tube Station in 1953.

- Kelly says he killed Christy Smith.

And he absolutely believed that he killed Christy Smith.

[tense music]

- The London Underground Network it's a big system.

It's one of the biggest systems in the world,

and it's very busy.

It's carrying literally millions of people every day.

and of course, death on the London Underground

is quite a common event because unfortunately,

it's the method of choice for a lot of people

who decide to end their own lives.

[dramatic orchestral music]

- I'm John McDermott and I was homeless in the '80s,

never really settled down for more than five years anywhere.

There were people who basically lived down

underground really, and they knew there was passing traffic.

They knew they could blag a 10p or whatever.

Back in those days, it was like for a cup of tea

or something, so they could pass the day.

It was reasonably safe.

It was dry.

It was frightening being in a packed tube station waiting

for a tube coming in at 20 miles an hour even.

Somebody who's malicious, who's psychopathic,

sociopathic, yeah, sure.

Yeah, I can imagine that would be ideal opportunity

to go and hurt someone.

Yeah, I mean, there's some horrible, nasty people out there.

[tense music]

- Kelly never, ever showed emotion except for one thing.

And that was Christy Smith where it all started

and it's on your mind.

He said so many times it's on your mind.

Not all the time, but it's on your mind.

I don't think he had regret, but it was one

that kept coming back to him

because he was actually a friend.

- Had he not murdered Christy Smith,

his life may have gone down another road

than the road of murder that he ultimately travelled.

- That time period when Christie Smith died

had some significance for him,

and that's why it's become ingrained in his memory.

We know Kelly liked to tell a story.

We know he liked to perform.

So, I believe he's been telling people,

probably homeless people to boost his status.

He's been telling them

that he did this Christy Smith murder,

and after 30 years of telling that story mixed with alcohol,

mixed with loads of other violent crimes and other murders,

he genuinely believes he did it.

- [Kelly] But I want, I just wanted to [indistinct].

- [Ian] You really want to get Christy Smith off your mind,

don't ya?

- [Kelly] I wanted to get 'em all out my mind, right?

Yeah, but that's the first- that's the big one.

- [Kelly] That was the one that started it, yeah.

[tense music]

- Could it be that Kieran Kelly heard somewhere

down the line that Christie Smith died under a train

and thought that maybe he was responsible

and that it happened at Baker Street

and that he didn't have all the details of the story.

[tense music]

- In 1983, we didn't have ticket gates on Tube Stations,

so it was easy to pass without being checked.

And a lot of the street dwellers drinkers, homeless people,

would go down the underground, the tube,

to keep warm and out of the rain.

- It was a case of surviving out in the elements,

knowing that you're going to wake up relatively dry

or safe and not so cold as you were the night before.

- There's a lot of violence in this world.

I guess it naturally follows with Kelly

that they get into an altercation on the tube train.

This is something that he did on more than one occasion.

[tense music]

- When you are down a tube station,

they run every two minutes and you are going

to have a fight, the likelihood

is that somebody will finish up under the train.

And I think that that is purely and simply the facts

of Kelly's life.

If somebody tried to steal his drink, he'd hit him,

he'd assault him, he'd push him, he'd shove him.

Well, if there happened to be a train going by, well,

so what, didn't matter.

[tense music]

- Millions of people use the London Underground every day.

probably lots of people think,

somebody could push me in front of that train

if somebody was deranged, was standing behind me.

But you know, it could happen.

- I honestly don't think he said, "Oh, this is fun.

I'll push people under a train."

I mean, he said about Jock Gordon,

"I just gave him a whack."

Why did you?

- [Kelly] I told you I was sitting on the station waiting

to get the tube.

Had no ticket, right?

- [Ian] Yes.

- [Kelly] And he came along and he was a bit drunk.

He wasn't really drunk, but he had the drink on him.

He said, "Hello there, you any drink?"

I said, "No fucking drink.

I am waiting on the tube."

And he said "You must have."

And I said, "Fuck off."

And I'm sitting down.

He came by me.

He told me, "What did you say?"

So I let fly at him, but I missed him.

I caught him on the-

- Shoulder? - On the shoulder,

and he went, gone.

And I wasn't worried, if there was a train coming in or not.

- Fair enough.

[dramatic music]

If he got into a fight, he wouldn't care

whether there was a train going by or not.

10 fights, three people finish up under a train.

It's just law of averages they've got to.

[tense music]

- We've got this perfect storm here

where you've got a violent man living

in a subculture where he could get away with that violence.

[tense music]

- I really couldn't see that it was possible for anybody

to commit that number of murders

on the London Underground Network, and nobody noticed.

'Cause that's what we were expected to believe,

that he got away with all these crimes

because no one noticed them happening.

I just don't believe that.

[tense music]

- Kelly confessed to killing another homeless man in 1976,

in a squat used by Kelly and other kind of homeless people,

or kind of people looking for somewhere

to kind of bed down for the night.

The man was called Patsy Waters.

- [Ian] So you knew Patsy Walters.

Is that Correct?

- [Kelly] Pardon?

- [Ian] Come on, you're laughing again.

Come on, Kelly.

You told me that you didn't know who the man was.

Now I've just said to you, was Patsy Walters there?

And you said yes, he was there, haven't ya?

Now, you knew Patsy Walkers, Kelly.

Come on now.

Will you tell us the truth?

- So when Kelly described the murder of Patsy Walters,

he described it in detail of how they were in this skipper,

as they call them, place to sleep.

It was a derelict building.

Patsy Walters had upset him, how?

We don't know, but Kelly had a bottle of whisky.

- [Kelly] That one photograph you just shown.

- [Ian] The photograph, yeah.

- [Kelly] That's the man I done.

But I didn't know who he was.

[tense music]

- Kelly said he killed Patsy Walters

by force-feeding him a bottle of whisky.

He sat across Patsy Walters when he was drunk

on the floor and essentially stuffed a bottle

of whisky down his throat and that Walters

was bringing up and kind of essentially choked

on his own vomit.

- [Ian] The way you described to me that you killed him before

when you, remember you got down

on your knees in this office,

and you showed me with the towel.

- [Kelly] Yeah.

- He demonstrated how he got down on his knees,

put his head between his legs, pulled his chin down

and poured the whisky down his throat.

- When he's explaining that he's very graphic

about putting a towel or some kind of fabric

around the neck, up to the ears, pouring the drink down,

hearing the man gurgling.

[Patsy coughing]

- [Ian] Patsy Walters died in exactly the way

that Kelly said he did.

But according to the records, Kelly was in prison

at the time of that death.

- Even if he didn't do that, this is something,

I believe he had done in the past.

So even if it wasn't that particular man,

he has killed someone this way, I suspect before.

This is the whole Kelly Case to a T.

Just utter chaos.

He doesn't even remember who he's killed.

- [Ian] But you were in prison when Patsy Walters died.

- [Kelly] Then that's not the same one.

- [Ian] But you, see you're playing a game with us Kelly.

You're laughing again.

And you're playing- - That's it.

Right?

I could go make a fella.

He could turn around and say I'm Paty Walters

and I'd fucking kill him.

Right.

Simple as that.

They don't use all the one.

- [Ian] No, listen, you are laughing.

[tense music]

So if the records are right, he couldn't have done it.

- There's a few instances where Kelly introduces stories

that would indicate he's lying.

I don't think he's lying.

I think he genuinely believes that he's done these.

- Kelly was so drunk for so much

of the time that his recollection can't be pure.

It's got to be alcohol induced or alcohol affected.

So, I don't know if Kelly lied

or if he just didn't know the truth.

[tense music]

- If we think about the Christie Smith case,

he said that that was his first murder.

It was what set him off down this road.

- Ultimately, we traced Christy Smith,

or we traced his family back in Ireland,

and they tell us that yes, Christie did die

under a tube train.

[tense music]

- But it wasn't at Baker Street Station,

and it wasn't in 1953.

- [Ian] Tell us the truth.

Tell us the truth, Kelly.

[tense music]

- He died under a train in Pinner,

where he was kind of working, for a rail company.

And the dates didn't match, and the location didn't match.

- Christy Smith was hit by a train,

so we know that Keiran Kelly didn't do that.

So why is he claiming that he did?

- [Ian] Tell us the truth.

- [Kelly] I'm telling you the truth.

[tense music]

- Alcohol affects the executive function of the brain.

So that's the part of the brain that controls our impulses,

controls our emotions, and helps us regulate our emotions.

It also helps us make decisions.

Alcohol reduces your impulses, and here we've got a man

with impulse control issues.

So once you add the two together,

it's just an explosion waiting to happen.

- The big problem is that you really don't know

when you're talking to Kelly what to believe

and what not to.

[tense music]

- Kieran Kelly was I think primarily intoxicated.

He was drunk more than he wasn't.

So, you've got this boiling pot of a man

with impulse control issues, pouring alcohol and all

of the stresses of homelessness into that boiling pot.

It's a disaster waiting to happen really.

- Kieran Kelly existed in a word where violence

was the currency of justice, Kelly was a violent man

who could kill people when he was rubbed up the wrong way,

I guess, for want of a better word.

- He's a walking contradiction.

So you have some people saying how charming he was,

yet you're seeing this completely aggressive side to him.

In the police interview,

you see a polite side to him.

He's putting in that effort to say, please and thank you.

Yet this is a man who has just strangled someone

to death with his own socks.

It just doesn't match up.

- Kelly always had some kind of love interest.

Granted the relationships didn't last for that long.

- When you're investigating murder,

you have to investigate the victims

as well as the murderers,

and you want to know their life story.

Kelly told us that he, in fact, had married someone

who had five children before he married her.

- So Kelly would've spent

a lot of time in and out of prison,

most of his adult life in and out of prison.

So, he would've been on a constant rollercoaster

of intoxication and coming off alcohol.

And we do hear reports of Kelly being a lot nicer

when he's not on alcohol.

So not as impulsive, not as aggressive,

and also quite charming.

[dramatic music]

- [Ian] It appears that for a few years,

Kelly seems to have gone fairly straight.

- His rap sheet kind of pauses in terms of the offences

that he'd been getting picked up for by the cops

in Ireland and England.

He was busy with his family.

He was working.

I'm guessing, you know, things were good.

[tense music]

- You might hear people saying, Kelly was charming,

but he had a temper on him, or "I really like Kelly,

but yeah, he's capable of murder."

You've got that constant contradiction going on.

And that's another factor that I think made him

so dangerous as well because he could just snap

at any moment.

[tense music]

So if we think of the intermittent explosive disorder,

which is usually someone being violent

or aggressive when there's something

that has evoked them that's out of proportion.

Imagine living with someone who's like that.

You'd be constantly walking on eggshells.

And I think that's why he couldn't hold down his marriage.

He couldn't hold down his work, he couldn't manage to live

in what we might see as normal society

because his behaviours were just so socially unacceptable.

- Well, the drink and people are disturbed

and paranoia used to set in.

People think someone said something

or someone said something and then it kicks off.

Broken bottles, everything.

Well just broken bottles, fists or broken bottles.

[tense music]

- The next episode in his life is the robbery of a house

where he held people hostage.

And for that, he gets sent away

under the Mental Health Act to Broadmoor

where he spends two years.

[tense music]

- Broadmoor had a notorious reputation then.

I think he may have been there during the same period

as one of the Kray's was in Broadmoor

and other high-profile people in the criminal landscape

in Britain of that period.

- The psychiatric report of those days put him there.

I vaguely remember that he was diagnosed

as incorrigible and untreatable.

I think those were the words on the bit of paper.

- Today there's debate whether psychopaths can be treated,

but we do know it is resistant to treatment

and certainly during the time that Kelly was being assessed,

it would've been seen as untreatable.

- What that means, I don't know.

Well, what it means is that they chucked him

back into society even though he was a danger to society,

but no treatment.

[tense music]

- A lot of mental health issues aren't picked up on.

And it is a factor in homelessness, a lot of people

become homeless because of their mental illness.

Alcohol, drugs can only exacerbate the problem,

make it worse.

And that happens a lot.

A lot of people are undiagnosed with mental illness.

There's a lot of people are schizophrenic.

When you've got no fixed abode, you've got no address,

how do you get treatment from anyone?

How do you even sign on with a doctor?

People would just be surviving,

and it just becomes something you're known for,

you know, being paranoid or being a bit crazy.

[tense music]

- When we were looking for the witnesses

to any of the cases, they were concerned

that they were gonna be safe from Kelly

if he wasn't locked up.

He was labelled Mad Kelly.

No doubt he deserved that from

what he'd done to people and, and had been seen to do.

Quite a violent person.

[tense music]

- Psycho Kelly or Mad Kelly become his stage name

in so many ways.

I think he crafted that stage name as well

in order to survive homelessness

and in order to get to the top of the pecking order.

Kelly definitely was a performer.

We see him performing in so many areas of life.

His boss said he used to do the Grand National

and football commentating in the pub.

So he liked an audience.

He liked to be having the crowd look

at him and to entertain them.

And I think that's exactly what he was doing

on the streets with his violence and rage.

He was getting his audience, he was performing.

He was a performer.

I think that was building up his ego.

He knows he's good at being violent at scaring people,

and that is why he feeds that into his performance.

And that's why he would often release his rage

in front of people.

He wanted them Chinese whispers to go around

that you don't miss mess with Kieran Kelly.

[dramatic music]

- He had so many strange quirks,

but basically put a drink on him and he was violent,

violent to anybody around him.

And a killer.

[dramatic music]

- You know the more serious crimes happened post him

being sent to Broadmoor.

[car horns honking]

- That become an addiction for him, killing people, no?

If he started doing it

and he'd done it more than once

it become a drug, it becomes a suppressant

for himself really.

So like anything you get good at it, don't you?

And you'll learn how to get away with it.

The main thing really is don't tell anyone,

you'll get away with it, really.

[tense music]

- There is an exception to the chaotic nature

of Kelly's murders, and that is Mickey Dunne.

With Mickey Dunne, this seems much more thought out.

He says that he wanted to kill him slowly.

And the difference here is that Mickey Dunne

testified against him on a different case.

- [Ian] Mickey Dunne.

That's the same Mickey Dunne that gave evidence

against you in that other murder, isn't it?

The Toal murder. - [Kelly] Yeah.

- The story of Mickey Dunne,

again goes back to Toal.

- The murder of Edward Toal, one of the witnesses

who testified against Kelly in the Old Bailey

was Mickey Dunne.

- He said, Toal was sleeping on his tombstone.

The trouble was it was Kelly's tomb.

So, he went over to him, took the rope

from round his trousers, that he kept his trousers up

and put it round Toal's neck and garrotted him.

[Kelly breathing heavily]

As he walked away, another one of the people there said,

"Oh, you might've killed him, Kelly."

And Kelly went back and garrotted him again.

And as he walked away, he said, "I fucking have now."

[tense music]

- But Kelly was acquitted for on the murder charge

of Edward Toal.

Subsequently Kelly finds himself

in the company of Mickey Dunne.

They're in a churchyard in Balham drinking.

Kelly tells Ian Brown

and the other detective that he had a score to settle

with Dunne.

- He said, "Yeah, I got him."

I said, "How did that happen?"

He said, "I got some white spirit

orange juice mixed up a cocktail."

He had held him in a skipper, pinned him down

and poured, a toxic cocktail down his throat.

Did you know that the stuff

that you were giving Mickey Dunne was gonna kill him then?

Or did you hope it would?

You hoped that it would?

- [Kelly] Yeah, I hoped it would.

I killed him slowly.

Didn't kill him there and then.

I gave him a few marks. - A whack?

You cut his face with hits?

By hitting him?

Punching him?

- [Kelly] Huh?

- [Ian] What did you use to cut him with?

- [Kelly] I don't know, like a fucking tin opener

or some fuck...

- [Ian] Did you give him a few whacks as well?

- [Kelly] Yeah.

- [Ian] When you say whacks

with your fists or give him a few kicks or was he down?

- [Kelly] He went down, but he got up.

- So, we checked that one out, and sure enough, Mickey Dunne

had gone to a shelter in Clapham.

He'd staggered in there and immediately been rushed

to St. Thomas' Hospital, where a day later he died

of what was on the death certificate,

was sclerosis of the liver.

But then an awful lot of them died of that.

[tense music]

- We don't see that premeditation with any

of the other murders.

At least he doesn't tell us any of that.

So, this is really a bit of an anomaly

to how he usually does things.

You wouldn't want to get on his bad side.

He could either snap and kill you without meaning to,

or he could make that conscious decision to kill you.

[tense music]

- Kelly kept confessing to more and more murders.

It's so and so, it was him.

It was them, I did it here.

I did it there.

- We were talking, is that it?

And suddenly he said, "Oh,

there's one in the skipper on Clapham Common."

The skipper being where they slept.

He said, "That was a fires I set them alight."

[tense music]

"I watched them go up."

You said one burnt to death somewhere, didn't you?

Or somebody was burnt in a skipper.

- [Kelly] We were the ones in Clapham Common. [laughing]

- [Ian] Clapham Common?

- [Kelly] We were them going up to cunts?

- [Ian] Yeah?

- We were there when. - Was that you?

- Huh? - You're rubbing your hands?

Was that you? - No no.

- Who was it? - I don't know.

- You did it that? - What? [laughing]

Well put them down now, what's then

that's fucking 11 then.

[tense music]

- And he just burst out laughing and rubbed his hand said,

we said, "Well, was it you?"

"Oh, well put it down.

Put it down.

That's 11."

And you think, well, "What the hell is going on?"

[tense music]

- His audience, the detectives are engaged,

he's got to 11 murders.

The more engaged they are,

the more he notches that performance up.

- [Ian] Kelly, have you done anything else you want

to tell us about?

- [Kelly] I forget now, honestly.

- [Ian] Is there that many, Kelly?

- [Kelly] There is boss, but I'm doing the,

my brain has been mithered.

I don't murder, I don't mean murdered but mithered.

- [Ian] By alcohol?

- [Kelly] Yeah, and I go and deal with him-

- [Ian] Well, you haven't had a drink for a few days now.

- [Kelly] I don't give a fuck.

- [Ian] Now, when you've had a drink

you don't give a damn what you do?

- [Kelly] Yeah.

- Could he really have done all these terrible things

that he claims?

Is it credible?

[tense music]

- The impact of drinking alcohol for a sustained

length of time at such a high level,

certainly impacts the memory.

I think whether it's a diagnosed psychosis

or the long-term impact from that,

memory recall can very much be impaired.

[tense music]

- He'd stabbed somebody in Bournemouth.

Well, that was never traced.

He then named another tramp

that he killed, and exactly the right circumstances.

He'd hit him over the head with a brick

and he'd gone down to a basement down some steps.

The autopsy on him was accidental death

because he got wounds on his head, but he was a drunk

and he'd fallen down the steps.

[recorder clicking]

- Everybody's identities are obscured,

and the police aren't really interested

because you're off the streets and you're in parks

and you're to your own group.

They're getting this kind of like wandering confession

of murder from Kelly that spans 30 years.

[tense music]

- They never got investigated

'cause it's difficult to investigate them.

They wouldn't be able to classify them.

Like there wasn't like scientific stuff like now.

You know, people used to rot in them derelict buildings.

They'd die without violence.

You know, the rats would start eating them.

- People often did go missing

and they'd be never seen again.

They were lost into this kind of street life.

[tense music]

Nearly everybody had some sort of nickname

and a name like Kelly's very common.

And if you are Keiran Kelly,

there's probably a couple of dozen of them around,

so they'll have to have a nickname

so you'd know which one you're talking about.

- When you live on the streets,

you've got to be in constant fight or flight mode.

I'm either going to run or I'm going to fight.

And Kelly was in constant fight mode.

That was what worked for him.

That's what he saw as being successful on the streets.

- Kelly admitted all these murders, all these victims.

We don't know how many he did.

I don't think he knew how many he did.

He just kept throwing out names,

he walked off and didn't know if they were alive or dead,

we just don't know how many victims there were.

We definitely knew there were two.

- The whole object became Let's just get him put away.

We need him convicted and sent to prison.

He can't get out of two murders.

That's two life sentences.

And that'll do.

[tense music]

- Why he got away with it that long.

When you are actually on the drugs and that,

yeah you're more vulnerable,

you are more susceptible to everything.

Even though there's times you're around other people,

you are alone.

You're very isolated.

You feel that, that's the most prominent thing about being

on the streets, is that loneliness.

And you are just trying to survive by any means necessary.

You don't recognise the law in the same way, do you?

You just recognise surviving.

That is a really natural praying ground for people

that want to do things like that.

[dramatic music]

- Ultimately, we charged Kelly with, obviously, the murder

in the cell, of William Boyd and also the murder of Fisher.

McManus was the witness to the murder in the cell,

and McManus was out getting drunk,

and I actually gave McManus two pounds a week

providing he came to the police station on a Friday,

and for the whole time, Kelly was awaiting trial.

He religiously came every Friday for his two pound.

[dramatic orchestral music]

- Kelly would come in and we'd interview him again,

much more lucid, less alcohol in his, his body then,

because he'd been in custody, he admitted more cases

or gave us more facts

about the cases he'd already told us about,

the murders he'd committed.

- If I wanted to interview Kelly,

I would send a young apprentice detective

to Brixton Prison to collect Kelly and bring him back

for his interview, and then he would be returned to Prison.

And the guy that I used for this

was a guy called Geoff Platt,

who actually started all this going

by writing a book

called "The London Underground Serial Killer".

[dramatic orchestral music]

- Suddenly you are struck that Keiran Patrick Kelly

is standing next to them, he was seen by Policeman

at the scene next to the body.

You start to think, Well, maybe he is telling us the truth."

- In the 1980s, you know, when Kieran clearly says

he was killing people by pushing him in front of trains,

you wouldn't have had that CCTV coverage.

However very few London underground stations

are what you would call a remote location

where nobody's around to see what happens.

- Most of the London underground stations

are busy right around the clock, even late at night,

early in the morning, most of the underground starts

about five a.m., finishes about midnight,

lots of witnesses around.

And there's also underground, you know,

station staff around.

And there are, most critical of all really,

are the Tube train drivers who've gotta have, you know,

the best view possible of the events taking place

in front of them.

And if they aren't all saying, yeah,

somebody was pushed in front of my train,

my argument is it didn't happen.

- I mean, the Kelly Case never hit the headlines,

most probably because of who he was,

what he was and his victims,

because they were the hidden society, if you like,

the people that people didn't want to know existed.

it wasn't until the book came out with an absolute load

of rubbish about how the police had conspired

with the home office to stop people knowing

about this man who was running around

pushing people under trains.

- The detail of it sounded quite convincing,

I'm not quite sure why no action was taken at the time?

- [Speaker] They said at the time apparently the detective

was told that it was something to do

with the Home office not wishing to spread panic.

But I do wonder if its an investigation

you might consider reopening then?

- Well, first of all that's an off reason.

I find that not very persuasive if I am honest-

I just don't believe,

I can't say I don't believe it I just find,

I'll take some persuading about the reason.

[tense music]

- I'm quite surprised that this former police officer

who wrote the book

should take at face value the confessions of Kelly,

because if it's done properly,

you should get that person to go back and say, well,

who did you murder?

What exactly did you do?

When did it happen?

Where did it happen?

How did it happen?

I want detail, detail, detail.

I want absolutely forensic detail.

In the case of Kelly, he's vague.

He can't talk about specifics and the devil is always

in the detail.

[tense music]

- We went to the Old Bailey and McManus turned up,

or we got him there.

We had to clean him up, put him in a suit,

make him presentable.

We thought he ought to have a tie.

So, he actually wore that tie

to give evidence at the old Bailey against Kelly.

- Kelly appeared at the old Bailey later that year,

first for the murder of Hector Fisher,

where he is tried for murder and convicted of murder.

Jury found him guilty.

And then a second trial, which was for the murder

of William Boyd in Clapham Police Station.

The jury couldn't come to a decision,

so the judge gave them the alternative of finding him guilty

of manslaughter, and they returned a verdict

of guilty for manslaughter.

He was sent off to Brixton.

[tense music]

- I'd heard about the murder

in the police station cell as soon as it happened.

It was news in the paper.

The prison was locked down, we had to go

to the gate because they brought him to reception.

I went to the gate and we brought in Kieran Kelly,

who had just been released by the police from Clapham.

He was not an aggressive person.

He just came in and he wasn't in handcuffs or anything,

he just walked in.

Just an ordinary little fella.

He would just mingling.

You wouldn't even notice him.

He was just easy going.

The governor knew him, having been in Brixton

many, many times.

Mainly drunk and disorderly and things,

fights and things, whatever.

And the governor said to him,

"What the hell have you been up to?"

He'd committed a murder.

So he would ultimately go into the hospital wing.

They're all doctors there, and they just assess him,

talk to them, and if they had no problems,

they're located in the wing.

He'd be assessed on the wing

and he'd probably be kept in one of the rooms of pads

that was just for safety for the prison itself.

- I think that in some ways that the time of Kelly spent

in prison was most probably the happiest of his life,

because he had somewhere to live.

He wasn't drinking, he was eating.

He had company.

[dramatic music]

Kelly was no fool.

He was devious.

He was cunning, but he wasn't stupid.

- They loved to be in Brixton

because they got three meals a day,

and it was full board and they didn't need to do anything.

[dramatic music]

- Kieran Kelly might've been ready to go to prison

where he was guaranteed a bed with a blanket every night

and three-square meals.

And that might've been just all he all he wanted,

because there was no real remorse in terms

of what Kelly was admitting to.

[gentle music]

- Killers are usually motivated by one of four things.

It could be anger, it could be power, it could be lust,

or it could be financial.

And he's definitely motivated by the anger,

and it's not just any type of anger.

It's an extreme rage that he has in him.

So it doesn't take much for that rage to erupt.

[ominous music]

In terms of the intermittent explosive disorder,

I think that also explains why he doesn't stay around

to see if his victims are dead.

His priority is to get rid of his rage.

If someone happens to die because of that, then so be it.

[ominous music]

- We do know that certainly in two instances

in the early 1980s, Kieran Kelly was proven

to have pushed two people onto train lines

of the London Underground Network.

So, this is something that Kieran Kelly did

and was proven to do.

- He was out of sight, out of mind, so to speak,

because of the subculture in which he lived in.

He's working underneath the radar

and getting away with it for a very long time.

Both Kelly and his victims were underground,

and that is why it did go on for so long.

There was no real identity to these people.

They will have probably not be in contact

with their families, not have any kind of paper trail,

be lost to drugs, alcohol.

The whole case is underground.

[dramatic music]

- There was a thing called the Vagrancy Act.

Police could arrest you for merely being homeless.

It was a different policing environment then.

And, you know, they were considered to be vagrants,

were considered to be, you know, a very low form of life.

[dramatic music]

- The social divide and keeping yourself hidden,

was a lot more important then, with the legal threat

of vagrancy and the stigma attached,

people made themselves more invisible in some ways, I think.

- My view of homeless people before I was homeless

was naive, no.

Oh, most of them want to be there.

They put themselves there, and they deserve it.

I didn't want to be there.

But I was just, I couldn't think of, I knew as long

as I was an addict, that's all that was important to me.

And the streets offers that.

It offers that you can just focus all your resources

on just being an addict,

but then you just get trapped in this vicious circle.

- That time the psychology was different.

We knew we were winos, it was against the law.

Begging was against the law.

Everything was against the law, sleeping rough.

So you, you just, there was no other, you accepted it,

you didn't like it, but that was the law.

- Yeah I think there's a lot more compassion

or understanding or acceptance nowadays.

There's a lot more people, well,

the society is more fractional, fractionalized.

So it's become more accepted, I think, anyway.

I mean obviously you still get sort

of an angry response occasionally

or people will be abrupt or abusive,

but I didn't find that very often.

There's a lot more support,

consideration for people's mental health.

- You learn a lot of humility being on the streets,

and you learn that you don't need so much that alone,

that in itself is an addiction.

Just going out and buying or you're trying to,

there's better ways to fulfilling that emptiness

in your life and you use them, you know.

[tense music]

- This London underground network

was essentially a killing field for Kelly,

the man who just murdered somebody in the cells

and had now confessed to a spree of murders

across 30 years,

this was something that the police were forced

to take very seriously.

[tense music]

- When I heard about this supposed serial killer,

the first thing that I thought was, if he's a serial killer,

how come I've never heard of him.

1983, I was at the height of my career.

I thought to myself, there's gotta be some mistake here.

You know if this really

was a serial killer investigation,

it would've been headlines everywhere.

And clearly it wasn't.

So there has to be a reason for that.

[tense music]

- When you're killing people who no one cares about,

no one cares about them.

So, there's no real need to follow up or investigate

or respond and whether it's a serial killer

or whether it's a one-off, the coroner

or whoever investigated a death

would've probably passed it off as something as simple

as possible so it wouldn't take up finances

or time or energy resources.

Yeah, it's disappointing, isn't it really?

[dramatic orchestral music]

- An unnamed anonymous rough sleeper

is found dead somewhere in London.

You're not gonna get television crews descending

on the scene to find out what happened.

They're just not, it's just a fact of life.

There's no great interest in that.

And I would say that it's entirely possible that for a man

like Kieran Kelly could, could have killed

more than once in his life.

[dramatic orchestral music]

- How many murders did Kelly commit?

Nobody really knows.

Nobody will ever know.

He died in 2001 in Durham Prison.

[dramatic orchestral music]

In the first interview,

we talked to Kelly about the robbery from the old bloke up

in Clapham high street, and Kelly had put his hand

under his tongue and pulled out the ring and said,

"You better have that."

and laid it on the table and gave it to me.

Two days later when we interview Kelly,

the third time he demands the ring back.

I mean you were arrested over the ring, weren't ya?

- [Kelly] No.

- [Ian] What were arrested for originally?

- [Kelly] Yeah.

- [Ian] Right, so the ring is an exhibit to show

why you got arrested.

All right.

It's for a court to decide whether you stole it

or whether you didn't-

- [Kelly] I'm pleading not guilty to the whole lot.

- [Ian] All right.

- [Kelly] That's it, I'm not guilty to this one.

So you can go now and chase,

chase all your- - All right Kelly.

- [Kelly] All right, that's it.

Sorry.

That's the way it stays.

You can chase, I am not guilty to the murder in this cell.

- Because of the ring? - What?

- [Ian] Because we won't give you the ring?

- [Kelly] I am not guilty to the murder

of the man down in this cell.

- [Ian] And you're saying that

because we won't give you the ring?

[tense music]

The interview concluded at 5:20 p.m.

Kelly returned to the cells, tape switched off.

- [Speaker] Identify Yourselves.

- [Adams] Detective Chief Superintendent Adams

in the presence of Detective Inspector Brown.

[tape clicking]

[tense music]

[tense music]