The Secret Serial Killer

Book excerpt: This true crime investigation into the notorious case of Kieran Kelly reveals “new twists that add further intrigue to the mystery” (Irish Post). On the evening of August 21,1983, Metropolitan Police detectives raced to London’s Clapham Police Station to find a prisoner dead. His cellmate sat quietly in the corner. Kieran Kelly, a laborer from Ireland, calmly confessed to strangling the prisoner—and then stunned officers by confessing to dozens of unreported and unsolved murders over the previous 30 years. Kelly may have been Britain’s most prolific serial killer, yet he was convicted on just two of his admissions. In 2015, a former police officer who worked on the case made a bombshell accusation: that Kelly' crimes were covered up by the British Government. Strangulations, murders on the London Underground, an internal Metropolitan Police review—as the story’s elements whipped the international news media into a frenzy, journalist Robert Mulhern set off from London to rural Ireland on a methodical search for the truth. Could Kieran Kelly really have murdered 31 times?