London - A serial killer who murdered four young men by giving them overdoses of a date rape drug may have claimed more victims, police said on Wednesday night.
Stephen Port, who has a fetish for raping unconscious men, was found guilty on Wednesday of four murders and attacks on seven others.
Scotland Yard was accused of ‘institutional homophobia’ over its multiple failures to stop Port far earlier - despite repeated warnings of a murderer on the loose.
The force is reviewing the circumstances surrounding the drug deaths of 58 gay men in London over four years amid fears they may have also been murdered.
On Wednesday night a senior officer said that Port may well have drugged and raped other victims.
For more than three years Port, 41, carried out attacks against 11 men under the age of 26, including the four who died, after watching violent porn featuring drugged men and women.
The chef and gay escort lured young men to his flat after meeting them on gay dating websites such as Grindr. He spiked their drinks with GHB - a drug known as liquid ecstasy - and raped them while they were out cold.
Over 15 months, Port dumped three of the bodies next to a local church and left one outside his flat. He planted drugs on them to make it look as if they died from accidental overdoses.
Those who survived suspected they were drugged and some have a hazy memory of being raped while incapacitated.
The serial killer, who worked as a cook in a bus garage canteen, was finally caught in October 2015 after the family of his fourth victim Jack Taylor carried out their own research and showed police the striking similarities between Taylor’s death and the previous three murders.
Port faces spending the rest of his life in jail after being convicted of four murders, three rapes, seven counts of administering a poison and three sexual assaults.
An astonishing 17 police officers, including a detective inspector, are currently being investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission over their handling of the case. But no officer has yet been disciplined or even put on restrictive duties over the failings.
Port first came to the attention of the police in June 2014 when a young man he had drugged collapsed next to him at Barking train station in East London. Despite admitting that both he and his companion had taken illegal drugs, he was released without charge.
Two weeks later Port raped and murdered his first victim, Anthony Walgate, before dumping the body outside his flat. He then called 999 anonymously and pretended he had merely come across the lifeless body of the 23-year-old fashion student.
Police realised that Port was lying and charged him with perverting the course of justice after he claimed that Walgate died of an accidental overdose after consensual sex.
The Metropolitan Police spent £25,000 and 980 man-hours on the investigation - but crucially never opened a murder investigation.
While on police bail, Port raped and killed two more victims, his Slovakian flatmate Gabriel Kovari, 22, and chef Daniel Whitworth, 21.
The bodies were found within a month of each other in the summer of 2014 in the same graveyard by the same dog walker only 400 yards from Port’s flat in Barking. Port left a fake suicide note in Whitworth’s left hand which said Whitworth had accidentally killed Kovari by giving him an overdose of GHB during a sex session.
The note went on to say: ‘Please do not blame the guy I was with last night, we only had sex then I left. He knows nothing of what I have done.’
Police accepted the note at face value and did not check if it matched Whitworth’s hand-writing. They also failed to look into Whitworth’s last movements and made no attempt to trace ‘the guy I was with last night’.
Port’s first three victims were all found in a seated position with their clothes pulled up to expose their stomachs which was caused by the bodies being dragged.
In each case, their cellphones were missing and post-mortem examinations found the cause of death to be a GHB overdose. The stark similarities between the deaths were raised by members of the gay community to the Met. But Detective Chief Inspector Tony Kirk told a local newspaper at the time that police were not looking for suspects.
The missed opportunities meant Port was able to carry out further sex attacks on vulnerable men.
And after serving less than half of his prison sentence for lying to police, Port murdered Taylor, 25, in September last year. The body of the forklift truck driver was found in the same churchyard as the previous two victims, but yet again his death was treated as ‘non-suspicious’.
Police finally linked the four deaths after Taylor’s family made their own inquiries and put pressure on the police to carry out a more rigorous investigation.
Veteran gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said the police’s failings ‘could amount to institutional homophobia’.
‘It seems likely that biased assumptions about gay men played a role in the police failings,’ he said.
Taylor’s sisters Donna and Jenny called for the Met to be ‘held accountable for Jack’s death’.
In a statement, they said: ‘We do understand it’s not them who have taken Jack’s life, but if they had done their job, Jack would still be here. Stephen Port would have been stopped.’
Port worked as a chef at a Stagecoach depot in West Ham where he was filmed serving meatballs to bus drivers on Celebrity Masterchef alongside EastEnders actress Emma Barton and JB Gill, a former member of boy band JLS.
Port trawled gay dating websites for boyish looking men, known as Twinks. On a site called Slaveboys he said his passions were ‘kidnap, 24/7 slavery, metal restraints, rape fantasies and rope work’. He also advertised himself as a £150-an-hour escort
After the verdicts, Detective Chief Inspector Tim Duffield described Port as ‘a voracious sexual predator who appears to be obsessed with surreptitiously drugging vulnerable young men with the purpose of drugging them.
‘This is a highly manipulative, devious and self-obsessed individual who has never once shown remorse for his victims or their families.’
Daily Mail