I am not sure what I expected to feel standing outside the imposing and long-derelict Victorian villa in Dundee’s West End. During my visit in February, it felt as if little had changed since my years as a student in the city back in the early-2010s. There were the same boarded-up windows and flimsy metal perimeter fence. The crudely scrawled graffiti also seemed familiar, though the rain-damaged security camera perhaps represented a more recent addition.
The house’s history is as grim as its appearance. On 18 May 1980, the badly beaten bodies of its elderly owners – a popular retired GP and his wife – were discovered by a passing student. Their killer was Henry John Gallagher, a 29-year-old Dundonian with a penchant for violent home invasions who immediately fled south to Kent, where he was to murder an 88-year-old Benedictine monk and his housekeeper. Gallagher was soon captured and committed to the high-security confines of Broadmoor hospital, where he remains to this day. The terrifying events were left to drift into Dundee folklore, while the building began its slide into apparently permanent abandonment.
One would be hard pressed to find a corner of Britain without its own “murder house”. These are the buildings with notorious histories that squat alongside us in our cities, towns and villages. Some, like Dennis Nilsen’s former flat at Cranley Gardens in London’s Muswell Hill or Lord Lucan’s Belgravia townhouse, are internationally infamous, though most are destined to remain local curios or simply pass unnoticed into obscurity. To many, their very existence gives shape to a nagging, deep-seated fear: that the safety of home is perhaps never really all that far from being transfigured into something frightening and unreal. “No way,” runs the common refrain, “could I ever live somewhere like that.”
My own fascination with murder houses – one that led me to revisit the Dundee villa and other notorious addresses – began when I was a child. I’d spent countless hours on the unremarkable streets around my grandmother’s flat in suburban southeast London. Sometime in the early 2000s, a house had burned down at the junction where our road met the South Circular. Local gossip was plentiful, though verifiable facts were harder to come by. Neighbours mentioned a gas stove that had been carelessly left burning overnight, while others whispered darkly about a potential arson involving a murderously spiteful ex-husband. It was said by some that a man had died in the flames that night, a rumour invariably offered up with at least a hint of thrilled revulsion. Whatever the truth, the building’s charred skeleton remained in situ for years, until its eventual restoration into bland new-build flats at the end of that decade.
How much do we really know about the buildings we call home? It’s what 38-year-old Matt asked himself after moving into his new house in northeast London in January 2021. After a divorce, securing the Victorian terrace felt like a triumph. Though imperfect – “ratty carpets and a slug infestation” for starters – it was something. His brother had a theory, which he’d proffered not long after the move. “The first thing you should do in a new house is purge all memory of the previous occupants. It’s about a fresh start,” Matt says over an afternoon coffee at the British Library.
The gruesome old carpet in the bedroom was one of the first things to go. On removal, it appeared that the floorboards were badly burned. Unnerved, he began to investigate. His inquiries revealed that the house had once been occupied by a serial arsonist and rapist who had murdered a woman in the area in 2009. The news was difficult to process, though Matt has done everything in his power to follow his brother’s advice in the years since. “All you can do is try to create your own future for the place,” he explains to me.
Andy Thompson is the auction consultant at Edward Mellor, an estate agent in Stockport. In 2016, he oversaw an extraordinary back and forth involving a two-bedroom house in Droylsden, a nondescript Manchester suburb. Before being seized by police, the property had belonged to Dale Cregan, a local gangland enforcer who had triggered a wave of national revulsion after murdering two young female police officers in 2012.
“We’ve sold a good number of properties with a chequered past,” Thompson tells me. “When they come to auction it’s probably an investor who buys, rather than an owner-occupier, who might take a more emotional view.”
Having initially sold to a local Manchester buyer for £71,000, the house was immediately returned when they discovered its history. Despite a popular assumption to the contrary, sellers have no obligation to divulge a property’s past to a prospective buyer. Two months later, it was sold again for £3,000 more, this time to a London-based buy-to-let investor who immediately installed a tenant in the house. Thompson explains the logic with a note of cheerful pragmatism. “These houses aren’t going to get knocked down, so somebody is going to live in it at some point. What you’ll find then is that tenants have less knowledge about the history of the place, or don’t care so much as it’s a shorter-term thing.”
Of course, many murder houses are simply demolished, though it tends to rest on the precise degree of notoriety, or just everyday feasibility. A midterrace house or high rise flat is unlikely to be torn down, whereas a semi-detached corner house like that which used to belong to Fred and Rose West at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, is easier to raze, though this hasn’t stopped murder tourists continuing to turn up over the years. The passing decades have transfigured the address into something new and unimpeachably modern: a site for true crime pilgrims from Britain and beyond.
I speak with Jan Bondeson, the Swedish-British author of several books on London and Edinburgh’s murder houses. “There were so many of these houses and I wanted to bring the history up-to-date,” he says. It’s work that requires skill and expertise to do properly, he stresses. “You need to know the murders and the cities very well.” Both capitals have their idiosyncrasies. “In central London particularly, these places acquire the reputation for being haunted. It wasn’t like that in Edinburgh. The Scots were more rational, for one thing.”
The new owner of the Dundee villa wasn’t interested in talking about the history of the building so, instead, during my days in the city, I spoke with several people about their memories and impressions of the house. Though everyone knew it by sight, it was intriguing how its history came out mangled in some fresh way in every recital. Reality had curdled into something far more potent: a piece of hyperlocal urban myth.
But it was everyday housing that most people really wanted to talk about. The villa’s dereliction had nothing to do with its squalid past. Instead, the new owners had embarked on an ambitious redevelopment that had run aground due to local vandals whose attentions had devoured their budget. Like so much of the UK, the city is in the teeth of a deep crisis. In January, it was reported that rents had risen by 33% in a single year. Seen through the current reality, the continued dilapidation of the house might easily be seen as an irritant, rather than simply a macabre local curiosity. It is perhaps hard to care too much about old murders and vaguely defined bad vibes when your rent is due to be doubled at the end of your tenancy, as more than one local told me.
This sentiment was echoed when I knocked on the door of a flat in Camden in north London. A befuddled-looking man in his late-20s answered, completely unaware that he was living in what had once been home to the so-called “Camden Ripper”. In early 2003, the national press descended on this quiet low-rise council estate after police charged a middle-aged man with the murder of three women. Anthony Hardy, the occupant of the flat, was given a full life tariff later that same year.
Its current occupant had nothing to say about the flat, but when local shock and media glare were at their zenith, some residents had called for it to be demolished. The idea of someone else living in the cramped, tainted little space was too much for them to handle. “I would rather they tear it down,” one local neighbour told the Camden New Journal in 2004.
Others suggested converting it into a caretaker’s apartment, or even a permanent shrine to the victims. But Camden council’s social housing waiting list was already several thousand long. When the flat was gutted and put back into rotation in 2004, there was no shortage of applicants. The flat has changed hands many times in the almost two decades since the moment it became indivisible from the crimes of the disturbed sadist who had once called it home. For some who now live on the estate, the enduring fascination is a source of hurt and frustration.
How could it be otherwise, after almost 20 years of cyclical true crime documentaries and “anniversary” pieces in the press? When I approached a flat in the same block, an elderly woman shooed me away before I’d had the chance to mouth the word “journalist” in her direction.
This vehemence didn’t come as a surprise. There was little reason why she, or anyone else on the estate, might have faith in the idea that my visit would be any different from those who had gone before. I hoped this reticence would melt away after I’d explained my motivations. That they were different; more thoughtful. In truth, there were times when the dividing line between curiosity and voyeurism felt thin enough. But the continued existence of these buildings, wherever they were in the country, was enough to merit investigation. For better or worse, their mere presence bore witness to a violent and unloved chapter in a place’s history, no matter how many people might wish to forget it. I also found it compelling to trace how the most infamous residences had become dark monuments of a sort and how this continued fascination so often curdled into the strangest kinds of myth.
Rejection was a common enough theme in my journey around the country in search of murder houses. My inquiries were often dismissed out of hand, or with the caveat that any contribution be kept anonymous, in case others got the wrong idea about the whole thing. This was not the case with Louise Bloomfield. For the past 23 years, she and her family have lived in an imposing house on the fringes of Darlington. In 1990, 44-year-old Ann Heron was brutally killed at their property, a crime which led to a nationwide media frenzy and remains unsolved to this day. “People will always be fascinated in it,” Bloomfield says. “It was such a big story here. It’s almost like it’s part of the heritage of the northeast.”
The macabre history never concerned Bloomfield or her husband, Andy. After a period of dereliction, they’d bought the house and began to run a dog kennel and training business on its expansive grounds, which continues to thrive to this day. Their children were born and raised on the property and the family was, and is, a happy one.
“I always felt safe here,” says Bloomfield. “I’m big into spiritualism, though my husband isn’t. I always felt her ghost here. We occasionally smell cigarette smoke in the house and neither of us have ever smoked.” Her clairvoyant told her that Ann was happy with their presence in the house and the tranquillity they’d brought to what had been a sad, secluded place. “I feel like Ann is almost a friend now.”
I had less luck in Margate. There is an unremarkable midterrace council house on a quiet suburban street on the fringes of Cliftonville, now occasionally referred to as one of the UK’s “trendiest neighbourhoods”. In the early 1990s, the property had been home to Peter Tobin, the peripatetic Scottish serial killer, who murdered three young women between 1991 and 2007. In May 2007, the police had discovered the remains of his first two victims in the back garden of the house. Amid the shock and disgust came calls to raze the building to the ground. Surely, ran the argument, no one would be found who would willingly live in the freshly dubbed “house of horrors”.
None of this seemed to bother Abigail Denton, who moved into the house in 2009 after the previous tenants had left immediately after the Tobin revelations. Before the move, Denton and her young family had spent time living in overcrowded housing in Margate. In late 2020, she told the local press how happy a home it had been in the 11 years since. “It doesn’t bother us; it’s a house, that’s it. My youngest doesn’t know what happened here, but my other children do – and they’re fine with it. They like living here.”
I’d been driven to the house by David Whitehouse, a friend and Margate resident, at the end of an unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon in October last year. I had with me an introductory letter I’d printed at the library in the town centre. I thought Denton and her family’s story neatly summed up the gulf between the horrors of the past and the more mundane, if immediate, concerns of the present. My timing couldn’t have been more intense. As I’d left the library, David had turned his phone to me with a look of astonishment. The BBC were reporting that Peter Tobin had died earlier that same day, handcuffed to a bed in an Edinburgh hospital. Our visit to the house was likely the first of many media impositions. Unsurprisingly, my letter remained unanswered.
For months, I’d wrapped my macabre odyssey around the country in a loose sociological dressing. Justification, I supposed, was to be found in attempting to demystify the places which had the rank misfortune to become synonymous with terrible, pointless violence and its lingering reverberations. To chart the ways that normality might, or might not, return to them and wash some of the accumulated darkness away. There were no rules or roadmaps to this process. No regional specificities or shortcuts. What mattered was temperament and time, as well as a refusal to be dominated and browbeaten by the past.
When I spoke with Andy Thompson, the auctioneer had proffered a theory. Occupancy was the only halfway effective remedy for “cleansing” a building of its past. “It just becomes another house after a couple of years and that cleans up its history. It’s when things get left empty that the stigma remains.” It was a word that came up repeatedly in conversation with Louise Bloomfield. Of course, the house would always carry its reputation with it, though there had perhaps been some dilution over the years. They had called it home for a long time now, she told me. It was their place of sanctuary.
