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their European counterparts asking if they had any unsolved sex crimes with a similar signature.
    Meanwhile they were also interviewing every man who lived or worked within a three-mile radius of the YWCA. During these interviews, Patrick Byrne’s landlady told them that he hadn’t returned from his mother’s after the Christmas break, which seemed suspicious, but his cousin gave him an alibi for the night of Stephanie’s murder. Luckily, the police went to his mother’s house in Warrington anyway and she explained that he’d now found a labouring job near her home so had moved in with her and wouldn’t be returning to Birmingham.
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    Patrick Byrne
    Asked to attend Warrington police station on Tuesday 9 February 1960, he arrived and nervously denied any knowledge of the crime. But he looked stunned when they asked if they could take his fingerprints. The detective had a feeling that the somewhat immature labourer was holding something back and added, ‘Is there anything else you would like to say?’ Byrne hesitated then blurted out,
    ‘Yes, I want to tell you about the YWCA. I had something to do with that.’
    He went on to give full details of the mutilations carried out on Stephanie Baird, details which hadn’t been made public. He said: ‘I cannot get it off my mind.’ He added that he’d had an equally strong urge to kill Margaret Brown – to kill all beautiful women – but that he’d panicked when she screamed and the stone swung out of his hand.
    Trial
    Byrne pleaded guilty to the murder of Stephanie Baird at Birmingham Assizes in March 1960, so only his degree of culpability had to be decided at the trial. Three psychiatrists testified for the defence, saying that Byrne was a sexual psychopath who was aroused by sexual perversion, their term for sadism. He was also sexually immature and partly insane – but at the time of the offence he’d known that his actions were wrong. The prosecution said that he was fully aware that he was killing his victim and mutilating her body so deserved to be found guilty of murder rather than manslaughter.
    The all-male jury took only 45 minutes to find Patrick Joseph Byrne guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He appealed and the sentence was changed to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, but the court confirmed that the sentence should still be life.
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    Freed
    Patrick Joseph Byrne spent the next 33 years in prison, then was released in 1993 on licence, aged 61. But his subsequent behaviour concerned the Home Office and he was recalled as a precaution in 1999.
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    CHAPTER THREE
    VICTOR GLENFORD
    MILLER
    Victor Miller was responsible for one of the cruellest child murders of the mid 1980s. His desire to hurt young boys sent him out into the Herefordshire countryside again and again.
    Early beatings
    Victor was born in 1956 to a Jamaican father and a white mother in England. The couple had three sons, but when one died, his mother deserted the household. Victor was distraught, but his father’s solution was to beat him with increasing severity and he became a deeply disturbed little boy.
    The authorities removed him from his home and sent him to a residential school in the village of Bodenham. (He would later take one of his victims to a field a mile away from this locale.) His family rarely visited him during the next eight years.
    Failed by the adults in his early life, Victor took to cycling for hours through the countryside, lost in his fantasies. Back in the school, he was desperate to control his environment and would tidy his few possessions and fold his clothes again and again. If anyone invaded his space he became alarmingly aggressive but 39
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    on other