Was sailor Simon first victim of a city killer?

A grieving mum has told chief reporter

anguish. of her

Branded a killer unlike Portsmouth has ever before seen, Allan Grimson is in jail for the brutal murder of two young men.

In gruesome confessions the former Royal Navy petty officer told detectives how he viciously attacked 18-year-old naval rating Nicholas Wright and 20-year-old barman Sion Jenkins after luring them to his Portsmouth flat.

Killed a year apart on December 12 in 1997 and 1998, the two men’s deaths landed cruel Grimson with a 22-year jail term.

But questions remain over the disappearance of naval rating Simon Parkes, who vanished during shore leave from HMS Illustrious in Gibraltar on December 12 in 1986.

Grimson, 60, who was serving on the warship, was among the last people to see Mr Parkes alive. He has always denied killing the 18-year-old radio operator.

Links between Grimson, formerly of London Road in Portsmouth, and Mr Parkes are now the subject of TV documentary Murdertown due to be screened on the Crime+Injustice channel on Monday.

The thought of Grimson’s possible Parole Board bid to leave prison, when he becomes eligible to apply in November, fills naval rating

Mr Parkes’ mother, 73-yearold Margaret Parkes, with a sense of dread.

‘That’s the worst thing possible to think he’s walking around free,’ she told The News from her Bristol home, ‘not because of his crimes but because I think he’s a very dangerous man.

‘I don’t think psychologically he can change even after all these years.

‘He’s a very clever man, he can use a situation. When they were profiling him at the time (for a previous BBC documentary) the programme had to be very, very careful — he’s very manipulative.’

Nicknamed Frankenstein by his naval colleagues, Grimson served 22 years in the senior service travelling the globe. But he was secretly a murderer who would later tell police killing was ‘better than sex’.

Grimson had previously taught Nicholas Wright on a firefighting course and the pair were seen talking at the back stairs of Joanna’s nightclub at Southsea seafront on December 12, 1997.

Retired detective Neill Cunningham, whose interviews elicited confessions from the killer, said: ‘For years it had been popular with the Royal Navy at the end of a night out and then that same night, his friends talked about – they may have seen him speaking on the back stairs of Joanna’s nightclub, to the firefighting instructor they’d previously met on a course, and that was the last time anybody saw of him that evening.

‘He never reappeared. His family reported him missing to the navy and he was dealt with as AWOL, which is absent without leave, which in effect is quite a major difference to how you deal with a missing person.

‘But not uncommon to go absent without leave in the navy. It’s not necessarily that they’d always report it to the police even now.’

When Hampshire police were informed of the disappearance a missing person probe was launched.

That led to witness