Danger patient freed to murder women

Serious questions are being raised today about the mental health protection system which let Camden Ripper Anthony Hardy commit three murders.

The 54-year-old was let out of hospital without surveillance before committing the killings.

He had earlier been detained under the Mental Health Act because police believed he was seriously mentally ill when they arrested him on a charge of threatening behaviour.

But he was released into the community by the authorities at St Luke's Hospital in Muswell Hill when a panel of health managers said he did not meet the criteria for detention.

He was supposed to be supervised by the Multi-Agency Protection Panel, a joint group of police, probation officers and social workers.

Sources said the panel had been told by psychiatrists that he was of "low to medium" risk and therefore did not need to be under surveillance.

Hardy himself had appealed against being kept in hospital and on 7 November 2002 was given unescorted leave. His mood was described as "stable" at the time. He agreed to have weekly appointments and receive help for his alcohol abuse. Hardy attended his last meeting with health carers on 30 December.

The Old Bailey heard how Hardy was a pornography-obsessed necrophiliac who killed the three prostitutes so he could take explicit photos of their naked corpses.

He gained his photographic skills after health professionals encouraged him to take up the hobby.

After each of his victims died, he stripped them naked and positioned them on beds in preparation for the photography, covering their heads to stop them being identified.

From as early as 1982 Hardy displayed symptoms of mental illness. He was first admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Queensland, Australia, for attempting to murder his wife. Her account of the incident was given in in the subsequent divorce proceedings.

He was imprisoned after breaking the terms of a restriction order preventing him from contacting his wife.

After returning to Britain in 1987, a psychiatrist diagnosed him as suffering from a mental illness.

In 1995 he was admitted to hospital as a voluntary patient after walking into the back of a police van. There followed periods in hospital and attacks on patients.

Doctors agreed he suffered from a mental illness and concluded his potential for violence was greater than first thought.

In December 1995 he was admitted to hospital but later discharged to a hostel, where he began to use prostitutes and associate with drug users around King's Cross.

For two years he was on the list of a homeless outreach team but in 1998 he was arrested on charges of indecent assault after a prostitute claimed he had raped her. She refused to press charges and the case was dropped.

That year he was admitted to hospital on an emergency basis and the assessment described him as hostile.

While living in Camden he was arrested after pouring battery acid through a neighbour's letterbox.

It was at this time that police found the body of 38-year old Sally White in his flat. She was killed in January 2002. Hardy was never charged with killing her because a post-mortem found she had died of a heart attack.

For most of 2002 Hardy was an inpatient at a mental hospital, receiving treatment for mental illness. He struck again in late December, the month after coming out of hospital.