Anthony Walgate
An aspiring fashion designer from Hull, Walgate, 23, occasionally worked as a male escort and featured on the website Sleepyboys. He was a popular and talented second year fashion student at Middlesex University. Friends said he was “choosy” about his clients and turned down jobs he felt were risky.
His mother vented her anger and frustration at the police investigation nine months after his death, telling her local paper she had been given no information about why Stephen Port had been arrested at the time. Port was later jailed for eight months for lying about how he found Walgate’s body.
Gabriel Kovari
The 22-year-old had left Slovakia because he felt people were “conservative and intolerant”, and briefly worked in a Slovakian shop in London.
In a statement to his inquest, his mother, a pharmacist, and brother, described him as a gifted artist who wanted to make a difference. “He was full of love and care for others,” and loved the company of his friends, they said, adding that he “had been a very inquisitive and special child, gifted in arts”.
Daniel Whitworth
The 21-year-old from Gravesend, Kent, was “an active and intelligent outdoors boy who loved days on his bike exploring leafy byways”, his father, Adam Whitworth, told the inquest into his son’s death. “Those who knew him were shocked by this terrible news.”
The former Dartford grammar school student loved his job as a chef at One Moorgate Place and Canary Wharf in London, and was passionate about cooking. He had been in a relationship with a live-in boyfriend for three years, and his friends insisted he would never have taken his own life.
Jack Taylor
The 25-year-old lived with his parents in Dagenham, east London, and worked as a forklift truck driver at a warehouse for the company London City Bond. He was not “out” as a gay man.
He was a regular at the Trades Hall club in Dagenham, where he had spent Saturday night before returning home, calling a minicab and travelling to meet Port in Barking in the early hours after online contact. CCTV footage released by police of the two men walking from the station at 3am helped lead to Port’s eventual arrest.
