Fungus & The Cul-De-Sac Killer

Vol. 147: Please wash your hands

Fungus, Spores and Moldy Old Things

I’m yelling at the same thing Bowie is!

Let’s look at books that feature horror of the creeping quiet kind. The killers that silently spread through the air or at the slightest touch. Take a deep breath and it’s able to propagate in your moist lungs (cue Brick Heck whispering “moist lungs” to himself). Take a step and it’s on your shoes, in your clothes, coating your hair. Let it go unchecked and it fills your home. These books are all about fungus, spores and mold. Ewww.

1. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

The first of the Southern Reach Trilogy sees a new crew sent through a portal to find out what happened to the last crew. And the crew before that.

The mysterious place they arrive in is home to growths that need to be examined and explained, but for one crew member whose husband is of the few to return from this bizarre place, she’s looking for answers that she may never find.

2. What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

A soldier is called to the mansion of friends, where the sister of the two siblings is falling deeper into an illness that puzzles her doctor. The soldier notices that the land is heavily populated by rabbits, and the animals move in strange, unnatural ways. In this re-telling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, even the land is disturbing.

3. Wilder Girls by Rory Power

An all-girl school is put on lockdown when a virus begins sweeping across the country, but it’s too late. The ‘tox’ is already in and the people who have it, students and teachers alike, begin to mutate.

4. Bleed by Ed Kurtz

Walter is a new arrival in town, and looking forward to starting his teaching job. He understands that his new home is old, but there’s some worrying stuff growing on the walls. Do you want to be too freaked out to sleep? Here ya go.

5. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

When a sheltered young woman is sent to check on her newlywed cousin, she finds a suave but intimidating groom, a secretive family, and a crumbling mansion that holds even deeper secrets.

Stephen Akinmurele Hated Old People

In late 1998, the Yankees were sweeping their way through the World Series, and that always makes headlines. It was also the year that British singer George Michael was outed, but that didn’t even come close to what every media source was talking about non-stop in 1998: Bill Clinton’s affair with a twenty-two year-old intern. It was one of the first major political stories to break on the internet.

I’m just saying, that with all the oxygen being sucked out of the room by these major stories, it’s likely that serial killer Stephen Akinmurele flew under your radar.

He was born on March 16, 1978 in Nigeria, to a Nigerian father and a White British mother, but by 1988 the relationship was over and his mother took young Stephen to her home of the Isle of Man, about 80 miles off the English coast in the Irish Sea. Stephen was ten when he arrived on this rather insulated island, so very different from where he had lived his whole life. Stephen’s grandmother was strict with him, some say harsh, and it’s believed that this is when the boy began to develop a hatred of elderly British women. By the age of eleven he was developing a criminal record for things such as burglary, and the elderly island residents were his targets. By the time he was in his teens he had moved on to the more unusual crime of stalking elderly women.

In May, 1995, the body of Marjorie Ashton, 75, was found strangled in her home. Stephen had been stalking her, that was known, but there was no evidence against him so the case went cold.

In February, 1996, the charred body of a legally blind and deaf 68 year-old named Dorothy Harris was found in the burned remains of her house. Again, with no evidence, the case went cold. It’s likely that the small island police force didn’t know how to investigate such events.

Stephen Akinmurele moved to the English seaside town of Blackpool in 1996. He took a day job in a government office and another bartending in a topless club at night, where he enjoyed dating both men and women and developed a reputation for being particularly promiscuous. He was young, good-looking, and whether he believed it or not, he was lucky, having gotten away with two murders and multiple other crimes on the island. If his goal was to build a life for himself, he might have done it here and never been punished for his crimes on the Isle of Man, but in a short amount of time in Blackpool, Akinmurele became a drug addict and would wander at the seaside, angry and yelling.

He lived in a room at a guest house owned by 75 year-old Jemima Cargill. Guest houses are a common business for the elderly across the U.K., providing short-term visitors with a B&B experience. It had been nearly three years since the murder of Dorothy Harris, but in October of 1998, Cargill’s charred body was found in the rubble of her burned home.

Just days later, on the 30^th of October, the daughter of Eric Boardman, 77, and his 74 year-old wife Joan, would discover their bodies in their home. She entered the front foyer and was confused to see a wardrobe lying across the hallway. Underneath was her father, dead, with a homemade cosh made of batteries in a sock lying near him. In the living room was the strangled body of her mother.

Joan Boardman didn’t know it, but Akinmurele had been stalking her. He broke into the Boardman home and killed her, which brought Eric from upstairs. Akinmurele knocked out the retired electrician with the cosh, but he regained consciousness and fought Akinmurele, who overpowered the elderly man and then stood on Boardman’s throat while pushing his hands against the ceiling to increase the weight. Boardman’s throat was crushed. Then he dragged the wardrobe from another room and toppled it onto the body. He left a horrible scene for their daughter to find, but it would also be the break the police needed, as fingerprints were lifted off the batteries of the forgotten cosh and the ceiling. They matched the prints on file to Akinmurele from his previous arrests on the Isle of Man. He was arrested in Blackpool on November 1^st.

Akinmurele was charged with the murder of landlady Jemima Cargill, but police also began looking at him for the murders and house fires on the Isle of Man when he was a teenager. Once in custody, he began confessing. Along with truths, he mixed in lies, as psychopaths tend to do. He told them that he had murdered a male hiker and buried the body along a cliff on the island, but exhaustive searches by the police proved this to be false. The fact was, Akinmurele didn’t kill young people, he killed the elderly, specifically, women. Eric Boardman was murdered because he was in the house when Akinmurele broke in. As one investigator said, he had “a pathological hatred of old people.” Detective Superintendent Bob Denmark stated, “I’ve interviewed him personally and regard him as one of the most dangerous men I have ever met.”

In custody, Akinmurele attacked a surgeon, and on a different occasion, was found to have a shiv, a toothbrush that he’d shaved to a dangerous point. As the story came out in the papers, the press nicknamed him the ‘Cul-De-Sac Killer’ because his victims tended to reside on quiet streets where crime is unusual. A more accurate sobriquet would have been ‘The Pensioner Killer’.

Akinmurele was so compelled to kill that he likely began at just seventeen years old, and he was a serial killer by the age of twenty. Despite his brutality, he had a girlfriend who was worried about him and warned the prison officials that he was suicidal. She would later give this stunning statement to the press: “He told me he wished the police had never found him and he didn’t want to go to trial.”

Akinmurele was placed on suicide watch in Strangeways Prison, where he did make two attempts. His charges were initially for all five murders, but the charges for the Harris and Ashton murders were dropped because of technicalities, which likely means there was a lack of evidence. There was strong evidence against him for the Boardman murders and Jemima Cargill. The trial was just weeks away when Stephen Akinmurele’s body was found hanging from his cell window bars on August 28, 1999. In his pocket was a note that included the statement, “I can’t help the way I feel, what I did was wrong-I know that and I feel for them- but it doesn’t mean I won’t do it again.”

It’s odd, this being fairly recent, that the only photo you’ll find of Akinmurele on the internet is the one above, taken while in custody.

Next on Autumn Lives Here: I’m polishing up another short story. Tell your friends, neighbors and whoever’s in the next stall, because this one will be covered in sequins and tap-dancing its little heart out.