Every Town - The Most Unbelievable & Terrifying Murder Spree of Anthony Arkwright

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

His name was Anthony Arkwright and chances are if you’re not from England then you probably havn’t even heard of him. But in the span of just a couple days he did a couple things so terrifying and messed up that I almost didn’t make this episode. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/scarymysteries 🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT 💀 Exclusive Videos, Podcasts & Perks: https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries  👁 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg 👁 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald 👁 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial 🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you love true crime, grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a dose of creepy true crime every single morning with a morning cup of murder. This short daily show is the perfect podcast to incorporate into your morning routine because in less than 15 minutes, you'll hear about a true crime that took place on a day's date in history. Each day's dark history lesson will kickstart your morning with intriguing tales of murder, abduction, serial killers, cults, and everything in between.

With over 20 million downloads, Morning Cup of Murder has something for every true crime lover. One listener describes the show as a small package with a powerful punch of crime. Another writes that the show is an absolute delight in the morning. Support yourself a piping hot cup of murder every single morning with Morning Cup of Murder. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. Everybody knows the name Jack the Ripper, a man who operated out of London using surgical precision to dismember ladies of the night back in the 1880s. This case is so well known that over time he's easily become one of the most popular serial killers the world has ever known,

which is why a tormented and twisted young man who was also from England envy Jack so much. He looked up to him with morbid fascination, conjuring up dark fan. fantasies and desires to reach that kind of infamy for himself. But try as he might, he never quite got there. But it doesn't mean he didn't do something completely insane back in the summer of 1988 that is hard to top in terms of how horrifying it was. His name was Anthony Arkwright. And chances are, if you're not from England, then you probably haven't heard of him.

But in the span of just a couple days, he did a few things so terrifying and made. messed up, I almost didn't make this episode. Hey everyone, it's Andrew and thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Everytown. This is one of those stories that seem so crazy that it just can't be real, but it certainly is, and that's why I wanted to cover it today. Anthony was a ticking time bomb for a variety of reasons, and when he exploded, it resulted in a killing spree where his intention was to get attention by horrifying people with his deeds. It was the only way he figured he could get any sort of notoriety in this life. So, strap in, as we head on over to England, and dig into the unreal case of Anthony Arkwright, spree killer.

Anthony was born back in 1967 into the gloomy backdrop of Wath in South Yorkshire, England. This town was mainly a middle lower class mining community with not a whole lot of bright spots in it, both figuratively and literally. and then he was raised in a home that felt fitting for this dark little area of the country. While he had four other siblings, there was rarely a day that passed where they didn't witness their parents yelling and fighting. When it wasn't at one another, it would often turn towards one of the children. Eventually his mom had had enough trying to go on living that way. When he was young, she just packed up and abandoned them all.

His father worked those minds day in and day out and didn't have a whole lot of time for the five kids, and since he wasn't going to win any father of the year awards, eventually the children just found their way into various homes through the foster care system. So separated from his mother, father, and siblings. Anthony didn't have much of a chance. Not that that's an excuse, but the cards were stacked against him. Drifting around to various foster homes while growing up, he was a poor student who didn't care about learning. With no chance of moving on to higher education, It looked like Anthony was destined to become just another minor in that town, living out his days covered in dirt, spending the evening drinking at the bars.

He committed some petty crimes around town, stealing from shops and robbing people for a few bucks. The police around town knew him as such, but he never really got into too much trouble for this, and in fact the townsfolk actually felt a little sorry for Anthony. Here, in a place surrounded by people struggling to make ends meet, Anthony stuck out among them, is having it worse. Obviously, there was his tough upbringing, but also there was a rumor around the area about the Arkwright family that was something Anthony could never shake off. It followed him like a disease wherever he went.

Other foster kids would tease him about it constantly, but this one was deep, dark, and twisted. and a mess with Anthony in a way few rumors and insults can. Mark Wright spent his life growing up hearing about rumors that his dad wasn't actually his dad. Mattie was born from an ancestral relationship between his mother and grandfather. Now, he's never found out the truth behind this, even to this day, but the fact that it followed him around so much and bothered him should give you a sense that, at the very least, it was actually a possibility. And really, rumors come and go, but rarely does something so morbid as incest get created out of thin air. In his late teens, Arkwright went on to do a stint in youth custody for burglary and disorderly conduct. And it was around this time that his grim aspirations came out,

as he talked about that admiration he had for Jack the Ripper. And he told anyone who would listen, as he liked to educate people on the details of what Jack was able to do. the dissecting of his victim's body parts, the fear had instilled in the city of London, and of course, and most importantly, my Jack was able to get away with it all and never be caught. Arkwright wanted to make his mark in the world, and just like Jack had, with the little amount of opportunities available and a rage inside burning from the years of neglect and rumors, killing people was perhaps the only way he could get any attention at all. His claims to friends about achieving notoriety akin to Jack the Ripper

wasn't just idle talk. It was a very real and deranged ambition. When he did it, he was going to make sure to do it bigger and more vicious than anyone ever had before. Settling back into life and Wath after his release at 21 years old, Arkwright's existence was fairly directionless and mundane as he divided his time between sporadic jobs at a local scrapyard to make ends meet, and drinking as much as he could get his hands on. He moved into a low-income apartment complex, was trying to numb the pain of everything as much as he could. And every day that went by his sinister inclinations and dreams of serial killer

stardom, inch closer to the surface. And viewing his grandfather is really the root of all his problems. And whether they were real or unfounded, Arkwright only saw one real eye. It's on the afternoon of August 26th of 1988, Anthony decided he should start there. He made his way to pay a visit to Stanislav Padakas, his 68-year-old grandfather. Inside the house, Anthony was let in, and of course, Stan didn't have his guard up for any reason. That's when the savage attack started. Anthony stabbed him several times in the back while he was sitting down, facing away from him. One of those strikes sent the blade into the elderly man.

spine which severed a nerve paralyzing him from the chest down. Then slumped over, fell to the ground, unable to defend himself in any way. But Anthony was far from done. Remember, he needed to make his mark on this world. While he was incapacitated but still alive, Anthony grabbed his grandfather by the feet and dragged Stanislav from the kitchen, out to the backyard, leaving a trail of blood smeared along the linoleum floor. He pulled Stan into his own shed out back, but before him hung a plethora of tools to choose from. A pickaxe, pro bar, pruning shears, everything really you'd find in an old man's shed.

Anthony grabbed the trusty sledgehammer, though, looking to inflict maximum damage. He raised it above his head and smashed it into Stan's head. After that, he gave him a few wax with an axe just to see what kind of damage you could do with it. He then went back inside the house. to steal some of his granddad's cash. It was what he was owed after the years of torture. Anthony endured from those stories of incest. While he was grabbing the money in the upstairs bedroom,

Elsa, Cronidai, his grandfather's 73-year-old housekeeper, came into the room unaware of what was happening. And Anthony then pushed her down the stairs, killing her as well. With a fat stack of cash in hand and a weight lifted off his shoulders, Anthony then did what any good 21-year-old would do. He headed out to the pub to celebrate. After spreading the money around by ordering a couple of pints and shots of whiskey for his pals, on him, Anthony was feeling on top of the world.

Nice and loose, he then couldn't help but let his excitement out to the group who were asking where he got all the money by saying, It's been murder on the allotment today, boys. Not only was he murdering to get famous, but He was dropping lines like that as if they had been written in the script of a movie he was the star in. Anthony was off and running now, and there was no reason to pull back the reins. He got a taste for murder and didn't want to stop. And if he was going to keep going, he needed to make sure he stayed up to par with his old idol.

Only Anthony didn't have any surgical know-how, so his plan was to make the crime scenes look as bizarre and disturbing as he possibly could. One of Anthony's neighbors who lived in his apartment complex was 45-year-old Raymond Ford. By all accounts, Ford was a meek individual, and at this time in particular, he was really struggling in his life. He didn't have much. He'd recently been laid off from his teaching position for drinking too much, which, of course, made him drink even more. And so he basically slept around the apartment building, and Anthony despised him for this. and he taunted the poor man any chance he saw him. Anthony viewed his way of life as pitiful for a grown man. In his view, Ford was someone who didn't have great aspirations to do big things like he himself had.

Anthony made sure he felt that, and Ford never really fought back because deep down he knew he was a middle-aged loner. Two days after Anthony had brought his grandfather out to that shed, he decided to pay a visit to his good neighbor. Before he made his way down the short hallway, Anthony stripped naked and then put on a devil mask and proceeded to knock on Raymond's door. Now, what exactly happened inside Ford's apartment is hard to tell exactly, at least in terms of the sequence of events, but I can assure you it was an intensely grotesque scene once it was eventually discovered. The brutality of the attack certainly demanded attention, just like Arkwright wanted. as Ford had been stabbed so many times it was impossible to tell exactly how many wounds there actually were. Somewhere between 350 and 500, though, is what the estimates are, but with that many cuts, they'd blend into one another, making it hard to tell where one started and another ended.

Plus, on top of all that, Ford's stomach had been sliced open, his insides draped around the apartment like a morbid renovation. over lamps, tables, and chairs. Arkwright spent hours in there making sure it looked as insane as it possibly could. High off the adrenaline from a night that I'm sure he'll never forget. Anthony walked back to his place to shower up. It was early in the morning, around 7 a.m., and what must have been going through his mind is anyone's guess.

But he knew he was going to get caught soon. The problem with leaving such a violent scene for shock value is There's going to be evidence, trails of blood, DNA, and he had done this right next to his own apartment. He thought about who lived near him, someone who he could easily overpower or someone he held a grudge against, and that's when he figured it out. He wasn't done yet because he had the perfect target. It was 25-year-old Marcus Law. Marcus was another neighbor at the complex.

It was another easy target and another person, Anthony, didn't like all that much. After getting into a motorcycle accident a few years back, Marcus was bound to a wheelchair. Because of that, he had a nice modified bungalow in the complex that gave him easy access in and out. This, of course, annoyed Anthony, and he saw it as special treatment. Marcus took advantage of his new disability. Anthony hated that people felt sorry for him and treated him with kid gloves. Whenever Marcus ran into Anthony, he bummed cigarettes from him, he reluctantly gave up.

He was so angry at this power Marcus had over him and other people that, later, Arkwright would even go on to claim that murdering him was because of how many times he'd taken a smoke from him. Though, the crime suggested there was a bit more to it than just that. After washing up and gaining entry into Marcus's place, Anthony would go on to stab the young man, a total of 70 times. And then grab one of the man's crutches and jammed it inside one of the wounds, of his stomach. Marcus's mother would often go over to his place to help out her son with his

day-to-day life since the accident. She ended up going over later that morning, where she opened up the door and was confronted by the macabre scene. Beyond everything else mentioned, Anthony had also removed Marcus's eyeballs and inserted cigarettes into the sockets, his mouth, and ears, just for good measure. And this was an insane killing spree that all took place in the span of just 56 hours. It wasn't hard for police to find, Ark, right? They just followed the trails of blood back to his place, where he patiently was waiting for them. In his deranged mind, a part of him, expected to be escorted outside to screaming fans lined up and

down the sidewalk, like he was John Paul, George, Ringo. But of course, that it wasn't reality. Well, in holding down to the station, Anthony then couldn't believe that he was still being mistreated. In reality, the police were doing the same. to him as they would any other detainee, but his inflated ego expected more. As a way to protest against this, he would smear his excrement along the walls of his cell. Psychiatrists were brought in to evaluate him, at which time he was deemed insane and then moved from the jail over to Rampton Hospital, where he would remain until his trial.

But once in the care of many different doctors there who got to observe him over a longer period of time. They deemed him to be very much sane. He was only acting out because it added to the allure of the legacy he was building. And plus, it wouldn't hurt a trial either if it worked out. But it didn't. At his trial, the prosecution presented the case that essentially Arkwright was an individual with zero moral compass, an evil fantasist, but not insane. As a result, who sentenced to a life behind bars with no chance of ever getting out. And so even though what Anthony did was beyond anything you typically see in a murder case, he never got close to being as famous as his old idol, Jack the Ripper.

There's actually a lot of good reasons for that. For starters, Jack was never caught, and that brings true crime stories up a whole other level. People like the Zodiac Killer also have remained unidentified, and it's this mystery and intrigue that fascinates the world. Jack also committed his crimes, five murders for sure, shore, though maybe more, over the course of three years. This created a sense of unease that permeated throughout London for all that time. His grip over people and taking up the headspace of anyone walking at night

can become ingrained in the culture and last a very long time. Anthony, on the other hand, started and finished his crimes before anyone even knew it was happening. So, comparably, it just became a blip in the media. And lastly, while what Jack did was grotesque. It was nothing compared to what Anthony did. The Ripper seemed to enjoy the surgical aspect of his dissections, while Anthony was just doing all this for attention. It really is only so much that people can take. Like I said at the start, I almost skipped this story because of that factor. I figured a lot of listeners would bow out because it was too much, which actually means if you made it this far with me, well, I'm not saying something.

So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, were you aware that I made a feature film specifically made for you in mind as a dark thriller about a kid getting revenge on a sadistic cult? It is true. It's called an angry boy. And it's available to stream June 7th. It's won a bunch of awards at some festivals,

co-stars Academy Award nominee Eric Roberts. And there's some wild and crazy stuff in it. so please do check it out to help support all the work we're doing. Please do come back next week for another episode for what scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.