HOSPITAL security guard Jack Crawley stands convicted of murdering 56-year-old Annan man Paul Taylor. He was also found guilty of attempting to murder another man near York. PHIL COLEMAN reports on how a killer's dark and violent fantasies became horrifying reality.
FOR almost three weeks, Jack Crawley sat in silence as barristers methodically set out the case against him, telling jurors why he was guilty of murder.
The 20-year-old – a skinny, 6ft 3ins tall former security guard at Carlisle’s Cumberland Infirmary – appeared unmoved, sitting quietly in the dock, staring dispassionately at a TV screen as it showed exhibits in the case.
As day eight of the trial got underway, the key evidence came from Home Pathologist Dr Matt Cieka. Methodically, in forensic detail, he described his findings.
His damning conclusions were based on a series of meticulous examinations of the “skeletal remains” of Paul Taylor, a former soldier who was working as a catering manager at the same hospital where Crawley worked.
The partially burned remains had been hidden at Finglandrigg Nature Reserve, a remote beauty spot seven miles west of Carlisle.
At the click of a computer button, a new and shocking image replaced the document that had been on the court TV screen – an image of Paul Taylor's shattered skull.
Crawley was transfixed.
Utterly realistic, and detailed, the image showed how Paul Taylor’s skull and face had been destroyed, the attacker’s hammer smashing gaping holes through the bone, leaving appalling head and fatal injuries.
Crawley grimaced, the colour draining from his face. Suddenly, turning away from the screen, he vomited.
It was a disturbing scene.
For a moment, perhaps, the brutal reality of the violence he had inflicted on another human being dawned on Jack Crawley as he stared at the terrible consequences of his violence on that October night last year.
As security staff took Crawley into a back room to clean him up, Dr Cieka continued his evidence, giving his conclusion: 56-year-old Mr Taylor died after being brutally attacked by somebody wielding a hammer.
The fractures, he said, bore the hallmarks of an attack with a claw hammer - the same weapon Crawley used on a man in York 80 days after Mr Taylor died.
So what was his defence strategy? Put simply, Crawley admitted killing Mr Taylor on October 18 last year, but he claimed it was manslaughter, not murder; he said this was not a premeditated killing, but robbery that went wrong.
As he tried to steal his victim's car, Mr Taylor fell and suffered a fatal head injury, he claimed. The evidence told a different story.
A secret life
The tragedy that engulfed Paul Taylor and his family had its roots in his secret life.
A former soldier and a respected hospital catering manager, Mr Taylor had for years been leading a double life, outwardly a married father with a happy home life but secretly meeting other men at “hook up” sites for gay sex.
He also secretly visited a Carlisle adult shop to buy ‘poppers,’ a drug which is popular among gay men for boosting sexual desire. It was through that other life, facilitated by the Grindr dating app, that Paul Taylor met Crawley.
Throughout his three-week trial at Carlisle Crown Court, Crawley remade his world, offering a fantastical story of how he was controlled by a London based Mafia gang, whose senior figures gave him criminal “missions”.
In reality, his life was more mundane: he was a 19-year-old security guard, who did 12-hour shifts at The Cumberland Infirmary.
Away from work, Crawley was existing in a shadowy world, meeting strangers, ostensibly for casual sex, in isolated country laybys. He was interested in sensational crime.
He may even have had a fascination, said the prosecution, with murderers – and with the US serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in particular. If true, it became a deadly preoccupation.
On the night of October 17 last year, Crawley’s mood was darkening, as reflected by his choice of music: three times, he listened to the song Romantic Homicide, with its lyric: ‘In the back of my mind I killed you, and I didn’t even regret it.
"I can’t believe I said it but it’s true; I hate you.’
After this, at 8.39pm, he visited a local shop and bought charcoal and two lighters. He then listened again to Romantic Homicide, twice. Was it coincidence that he then left home to meet Paul Taylor at a remote country lane?
“It’s the prosecution case that Jack Crawley had murder on his mind,” prosecutor David McLachlan KC told the jury.
Almost certainly, by 9.48pm when Crawley listened to the song for the third time, Paul Taylor’s fate was sealed. Within hours, he lay dead at the roadside, his skull smashed by what could only have been a frenzied hammer attack.
Police appeal
Only Crawley knows what his emotional response was to the killing.
But he did everything in his power to conceal his crime: carefully cleaning Paul Taylor’s car, moving his body to an isolated burial site at Finglandrigg Nature Reserve, and attempting to burn the corpse with the charcoal he had bought.
To the world at large, Paul Taylor has simply vanished.
Cumbria Police issued appeals, asking the public for help to trace him, and publishing images of his Vauxhall Corsa in the hope that somebody would recognise it and solve the mystery of his disappearance.
Crawley fell under suspicion and was arrested. When questioned by the police, he denied even knowing Paul Taylor (pictured).
It was the first of many lies.
Perhaps most damning for Crawley were the decisions he went on to make after the police, lacking the hard the evidence they needed to charge him, released him on bail in mid-November.
Fake European accent
He was supposed to live and sleep at the Carlisle home of his grandparents.
But on New Year’s Eve, he skipped bail. Donning a “Hagrid” style wig, and speaking in a fake European accent, he took a train to Penrith. He travelled to Aberdeen, Glasgow, and eventually York, arriving there on January 4.
Almost immediately, he began planning a second deadly “mission.”
Buying a claw hammer from the city’s Toolstation, he used Grindr to contact an older gay man, arranging a “hook up.”
As far as the man was concerned, it was to be sex with a stranger, destined to happen at a remote location ten miles from York.
Crawley seemed nervous, the man later recalled.
The man tried to perform a sex act on Crawley, but noticed he was not aroused. Then, without warning, came the violence: a flurry of hammer blows as Crawley attacked the man on his knees before him, the victim desperately pulling away.
Unlike Paul Taylor, the victim was able to pull free and disarm Crawley.
The would-be killer fled into the night, losing a shoe as he sprinted away, seeking help from a farmer who lived nearby. According to Mr McLachlan, what happened was an “almost carbon copy” of the attack on Paul Taylor.
Only Crawley knows what motivated him. The jury rejected his claim that the York victim threatened him with a knife.
Giddy and excited
Perhaps a clue came during snatches of conversation from Crawley, including during the car journey to Carlisle after he crashed Mr Taylor’s stolen Vauxhall Corsa.
This happened on October 19, the day after he murdered Paul Taylor.
Seeming "giddy and excited", he spoke of somebody dying, almost "flaunting" this fact, said the young man who provided the lift.
The witness told jurors: "He said the world was better without him; it was getting rid of one more rat.”
Crawley described the person as a “drug dealer,” saying he was "worse than Jeffrey Dahmer."
In the car with Crawley that day was his co-defendant and fellow hospital security guard, Marcus Goodfellow, who was cleared of knowing anything about the grisly circumstances in which his colleague acquired the Corsa.
He perhaps wondered whether that explained Crawley's references to "somebody dying", drug dealers and the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
In court, Mr Goodfellow accepted the suggestion from prosecutor William Beardmore that Crawley was something of "an oddball," and a "fantasist." He said he knew nothing of Crawley's claim to use terms from the video game Grand Theft Auto as a code for discussing upcoming criminal missions.
Small-time dealer
As he gave his evidence, Crawley tried to portray himself as a young man who had been accidentally caught up in an underworld of serious drugs crime, controlled by a ""Mafia gang, who sent him on criminal "missions."
“It’s something you can’t escape from,” he said.
“They started getting me to take things, packages, to other people." The missions included “taxing” or stealing from other criminals, he said. A small-time cannabis dealer, he took selfies of himself with wads of cash.
On the day he killed Paul Taylor, he said, he bought the charcoal and the hammer he had because his job would be to raid a cannabis farm that was set up in a barn conversion. He wanted only to steal the Vauxhall Corsa, not kill Mr Taylor, he said.
Perhaps the real explanation for the murder came during Mr McLachlan’s cross examination of the defendant. Crawley (below) was giddy on October 19 because he had killed Mr Taylor, an older man he met for sex, suggested the prosecutor.
The barrister pressed on, asking Crawley about his reported comment during the drive to Carlisle about Jeffrey Dahmer. "What sort of people did Jeffrey Dahmer kill?” the barrister asked Crawley.
“Gay people,” came the reply.
“Do you have a fascination with serial killers? A fascination for murderers?” asked Mr McLachlan. “No,” said Crawley. “A fascination for Jeffrey Dahmer?” pressed Mr McLachlan.
Again, Crawley answer was: “No.”
He said he did not know an alias he had used – Joshua Bailey – was the name of an American man who was kidnapped and murdered in 2008. Mr McLachlan asked Crawley about his dislike of paedophiles.
Crawley said: “No, I don’t like paedophiles; I don’t think anyone likes paedophiles.”
He denied wanting to “hurt” paedophiles. “Do you have a problem with older gay men?” asked Mr McLachlan. “No,” replied Crawley. “Older gay men who go with younger men?” continued Mr McLachlan.
Crawley again denied having an issue with older gay men.
Compulsive liar
As the jury considered the evidence – phone records, video footage, statements – what probably struck them most were Crawley's lies.
His use of video game Grand Theft Auto as a code to discuss crime missions; his "links" with a London drugs gang; and the reason for defensive injuries on Mr Taylor’s arm, with Crawley saying the limb was damaged as he closed the Corsa’s boot lid.
All lies.
Nor was his self-defence claim for the York attack credible: he accused his victim of threatening him with a knife.
Perhaps the most glaring lie was Crawley’s explanation for why Paul Taylor’s skull was so badly shattered, disfigured by ten impact fractures – the result of hammer blows so powerful they “punched” the bone into the victim’s brain.
The pathologist said those injuries were typical of the damage that would be inflicted by a claw hammer, like the one Crawley bought in York.
How did Crawley explain those fractures?
“I just wanted it over,” he told the jury. He described using charcoal to burn Mr Taylor’s body at Finglandrigg Wood. When that failed, he said, he used a “mallet hammer” to destroy the body.
He told the jury: “I thought his body would crumb up, but his body wasn’t doing anything. It didn’t work. I couldn’t stand the smell anymore; I kept being sick. I kept passing out.”
It was another lie.
A compulsive liar, Crawley spent much the trial attempting to twist reality, repeatedly failing to fit his evidence to inconvenient facts.
The truth was truly disturbing. For whatever reason, Crawley appeared fascinated by crime and death, perhaps wanting to emulate Jeffrey Dahmer, a murderer who targeted gay men. In Crawley’s bedroom at his Sheehan Crescent home, there was damning evidence.
Police found a latex pig mask, a skull mask, cable ties, rope, gaffer tape, and – most incriminating of all – hidden beneath the back garden decking was a bottle of the 'poppers' sex chemical used by gay men. (pictured).
On its lid were traces of Paul Taylor’s DNA. Did Crawley take that bottle home as some kind of "trophy?"
Perhaps there were two moments when Crawley got near to the truth.
The first was when he looked at the pathologist's image of Paul Taylor’s shattered skull – and vomited. Vivid, horrifying, and detailed, that image depicted graphically the fatal consequences of Crawley’s violence.
The second truthful moment came during Crawley’s evidence.
Mr McLachlan was quizzing him about his claim to not know Paul Taylor was an older man because, he claimed, he wore a mask during their sexual encounters.
What happened to that mask?” asked the prosecutor.
Pausing, Crawley seemed confused, and then replied: “It would be burned.” Mr McLachlan told the defendant he was lying to “save his own skin.” For a moment, Crawley seemed angry, his voice growing louder as he replied: “To save my own skin? My life is already over; I perhaps deserve that.
“But to save my own skin in what way?”
Only Crawley knows what motivated him.
Was he on a deadly mission to rid the world of older gay men who sought "hook ups" with younger men in laybys? Was he simply a wanna-be gangster who discovered a sick pleasure in the act of killing?
Only he knows. But he did recognise at least one inescapable truth: that his life of freedom is now over - because he will be behind bars for decades - decades in which to will have ample time to work out why he became a violent killer.
The defendant will be sentenced on Wednesday.
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