100th London killing
Widow beaten to death before her home goes up in flames
Carole Harrison, 73, who had recently boasted she had inherited £ 1million, was seen befriending a ‘shabbily dressed’ man on a nearby high street shortly before she died.
Police believe her murderer may have set fire to her home to cover their tracks.
Neighbours said the inheritance may have been made up – Mrs Harrison’s health had declined and she had become confused.
Her death marks the 100th murder inquiry in the capital this year as a crime wave sweeps across the UK. If the trend continues there will be more than 135 cases by the end of the year. In 2017, 131 murders were recorded.
Senior officers believe they are turning the tide but a series of high- profile killings and gang attacks have caused concern.
Mrs Harrison was found at her semi-detached home in Teddington, south- west London, on Wednesday morning after firmen were called. The blaze was found to have started in at least three separate locations. A post-mortem examination found injuries consistent with being attacked.
Mrs Harrison, a mother of five and a grandmother, had lived in the house for 30 years. Her husband Terence died in 2005 at the age of 64.
Neighbours of the ‘kind hearted widow’ said she often left her front door open to invite strangers inside and was seen walking with a man on Hampton Hill High Street on the Tuesday afternoon before she died.
A neighbour said: ‘He was a A RETIRED nurse was battered to death before her home was engulfed in flames – in the 100th case for London’s murder police this year. middle-aged man and the most noticeable thing about him was that he had an untidy mop of black curly hair.
‘He didn’t look like the sort of person she might have been friends with but who knows.’
Neighbour Flo Osmond, 75, added: ‘She had this habit of inviting people in who she didn’t know.’ She added that the fire ‘blew the window right open – it just exploded outwards because of the pressure inside’.
Meanwhile, a separate murder inquiry was under way after a woman died following a fire at a flat in Finsbury Park, north London. Kaltoun Saleh, 43, spent six weeks in a burns unit but died on Tuesday. Four children were also injured.
Abdi Quule, 44, who was found at the scene and treated for burns, was charged with attempted murder. The charge may now be changed. He is due to appear at the Old Bailey next week.
TOO many residents on the Elmington Estate in Camberwell, South London, live behind security doors with iron bars and grilles on the windows. They are perhaps the most visible signs of a community under siege. ‘There is nothing to be done any more,’ said one woman despairingly. ‘I just want to leave.’
She describes the neighbourhood as a ‘war zone’. It has become an overused analogy, but it genuinely applies here in SE5.
The surge in shootings and stabbings blighting almost every part of the capital culminated last week in a bloodbath in broad daylight outside the woman’s home in Landor House, a five-storey block of flats on the estate.
A mass knife fight next to a children’s play area — repeat, children’s play area — involv-ing up to 30 teenagers resulted in scenes rarely witnessed outside a terrorist atrocity or motorway pile-up. A virtual field hospital was set up to treat the wounded.
The most badly hurt were hooked up to drips and oxygen masks before being wheeled away on stretchers.
Among the casualties was a 15-year- old with injuries more commonly seen on the battlefield. He had been disembowelled and was screaming for his mother.
There is a new gangland slang word for what happened to him. He had — to use the brutal vernacular of this sociopathic sub-culture — been ‘cheffed’.
This alludes to the fact that the weapon used on him was a long-bladed knife, the kind chefs use in the kitchen to gut fish and slice through meat. The boy, we have learnt, is now off the ‘danger list’ but has sustained life- changing internal damage from being repeatedly sliced with the knife and faces months, if not years, of recovery.
A petty dispute over a belt, it was reported, was the catalyst for the carnage. But it goes much deeper than that. The youngster who was ‘cheffed’ was a member of the notorious Moscow17 crew, our inquiries have estab-lished. Such gangs appear in so-called drill rap videos, their faces covered with hoods, masks and scarves, boasting about ‘cheffing’, ‘splashing’ (stabbing an enemy repeatedly until they pour with blood) and ‘capping’ (shooting someone.)
The list of young men from this nihilistic world who have ended up on the mortuary slab is proof that these ‘lyrics’ are more than just bravado.
MOSCOw17 has been engaged in a vicious feud with Zone 2 from Peckham, immediately to the east of Camberwell. The rivalry between them was the real reason for the explosion of savagery on the Elmington Estate last week. It has been likened to the world depicted in the classic dystopian novel and film, A Clockwork Orange.
when Stanley Kubrick brought Anthony Burgess’s novel to the screen in the Seventies, audiences were shocked by its portrayal of ‘ultra-violence’ in a futuristic Britain.
The prevalence of gangs such as Moscow17 suggest that this chill-ing future has now arrived in London, where the recent crime-wave has led to fears the police have lost control of the streets.
The statistics are frightening. The borough of Southwark, in which Camberwell falls, has the second highest level of knife crime in London; 805 incidents were recorded last year.
In June alone, according to the latest (and most localised) Home Office data, 349 crimes, including 92 ‘violent/sexual offences’ were committed within just half a mile of the Elmington Estate. This works out at around three a day.
Brian Delgado has seen dysto-pian London unfold, in microcosm, from the kitchen window of his maisonette at Elmington over the past few months.
He saw a group of boys, some of them still in their school uniforms, kick open the door of a nearby flat. Even when the man who lived there came out, they stood their ground, taunting and intimidating him. He
saw a young girl being humiliated by another group of youths near the chil-dren’s play area. There were about eight of them. They pro -ceeded to coat the girl in flour, then pelt her with eggs. He also witnessed the aftermath of last week’s bloodbath.
Mr Delgado, 57, was returning from the shops when he saw a ‘zom-bie’ knife being chucked away before someone jumped into a van.
Several knives are understood to have been found in the vicinity. Banned in the UK, they can be bought for as little as £10 online. The weapons are frequently seen in zombie apocalypse movies, hence the nickname.
Elmington resembled the set of such a movie at the height of the recent skirmish, with youths running around the blocks and jumping from first-floor balconies.
‘ It was mayhem,’ says Mr Delgado. He has given a statement to the police but is reluctant to testify in court should criminal charges ensue. ‘I don’t want my home burned down,’ he adds.
Elmington is just down the road from Camberwell police station. But, these days, the station is only open for a few hours a month. Instead, it is used as a base for the safer neighbourhood team.
The once seven-strong commu-nity policing team has also been reduced to a single officer and a single PCSO (Police Community Support Officer.) It’s a familiar story. The Metropolitan Police service has seen its annual budget cut by about 20 per cent over the past decade and has lost ten per cent of officers in that time.
Still, the force’s top brass insist they have not lost control of the streets. From a flat on a desolate walkway in Landor House, it’s hard to see things that way. ‘ what’s happening is not normal,’ said one mother of two teenage boys.
‘My husband saw a group of them with knives chasing each other through the block only a few weeks ago. The police did come but they had run off. Every day, 15 to 20 youngsters aged about 14 and 15, hang around the building shouting and arguing. It’s intimidating. You don’t want to walk past them.’
Yet Landor House is just a five-minute walk from tree-lined Camberwell Grove, one of London’s loveliest avenues which is lined with multi-million pound Georgian mansions.
The informal dividing line between rich and poor, between townhouses and council houses, is Camberwell Church Street, a bustling main shopping thorough- fare. The entire area is — on the surface at least — gradually becoming more gentrified.
The opening of a refurbished, better connected London Over-ground station at Denmark Hill in 2012 has attracted young profes-sionals working in the City to the postcode. Apartments in new high- end developments can cost up to £825,000.
Perversely, however, in boroughs where deprivation levels are going down and property prices are rising, violent crime increased in the first five months of the year.
One factor behind this phenom-enon, professional and academic observers believe, is that for many locals, especially those from disad-vantaged backgrounds, the aspira-tional lifestyles on their doorstep are unattainable and this, in turn, has created a growing sense of alienation and resentment.
Such disaffection, they say, plays into the hands of gangs.
Almost all the murder victims and suspects in the recent spate of fatal stabbings and shootings in Southwark are young black men, even though only just over a quarter of Southwark’s population is described as black or black Brit-