The twisted guile of a serial killer led to him being released from custody - only to kill again. Having been arrested on suspicion of murdering a 17-year old girl, Trevor Hardy committed an act of self mutilation that allowed him to slip through the police's net.
Dubbed 'The Beast of Manchester', Hardy's three victims all lost their lives within a small area to the north east of Manchester during a 15-month period. Starting at the end of 1974, Hardy's crimes overlapped with the start of Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe's five year killing spree.
There were similarities between the two in terms of the widespread terror they inspired. In neighbourhoods such as Moston and Blackley, women were reluctant to go out alone after dark, and men would be asked to escort them home from nights out.
Here, M.E.N True Crime writer Lee Grimsditch looks back at one of the most disturbing episodes in Greater Manchester's criminal history.
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Born in 1947, Hardy had been in trouble for much of his life. Before the killings began, he had been released on parole after serving time for battering a man over who was paying for a round of drinks.
Hardy was jailed for five years for wounding his victim with a pick-axe. The judge told him he was a menace to society but could not have predicted how terrible a menace he would become.
Lesley Stewart - Hardy's first victim
Within weeks of walking out of the Isle of Wight's Albany Jail on November 18, 1974, Hardy committed his first murder. It was on New Year's Eve 1974 that he mistook 15-year-old Janet Lesley Stewart – a Rose Queen at the Harpurhey church she attended – for a schoolgirl he had become infatuated with.
He stabbed the teenager and buried her in a shallow grave in Newton Heath, taking a ring from her finger to give to another girl as a love token. For weeks afterwards he kept returning to the makeshift grave at night to disturb the body and hide parts in various places.
Police listed Lesley Stewart as a missing person. It was 21-months before they learned her fate from Hardy's confessions.
Wanda Skala - Hardy's second victim
Seven months later, Wanda Skala, aged 17, was walking home from the Lightbowne Hotel where she worked as a barmaid when the killer Struck. The teenager was hit with a brick, bit and strangled before Hardy buried her body on a building site.
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Shortly after Wanda Skala's murder, Hardy's younger brother, Colin, alleged he had confessed the killing to him during a night in the pub drinking. In May 1977, the Manchester Evening News reported Colin hadn't believed his older brother when he said the killing was the result of a robbery that had gone wrong.
"I knew he was not telling the truth," he said. "Then things got tense. We went back to my flat, and then the next thing I knew he was beating seven bells out of me.
"He ripped the clothes off me, battered me with a telephone, and finally left me senseless and covered in blood on some stairs. There was blood everywhere – even on the ceiling. He wouldn't let my wife go for an ambulance, or help me in any way.
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"Then he walked out... and returned 10 minutes later as calm as anything and ordered her to cook him beans on toast. She was petrified. Then he calmly ate, chit-chatting away as if nothing had happened while I was still unconscious on the stairs."
The following day, Colin and his wife went to the police and Hardy was arrested for Wanda's murder. But he had arranged an alibi with his mistress, and, in order to prevent him being incriminated by bite marks on the body, filed his teeth into points with a file that had been passed to him in custody.
Sharon Mosoph - Hardy's third and final victim
Having mutilated himself to throw police off the scent, the killer was freed to kill again. The third woman to be tragically killed, Sharon was just 17, had left Failsworth School and was working at a kitchen firm, Status, based at a mill close to the family home. Speaking to the M.E.N. in 2012, Sharon's dad, Ralph Mosoph, recalled the night she went missing.
"She went on a promotion do with Status to Farnworth," said Ralph, then aged 75, a former delivery driver. "She was on her way back home. We’d just gone to bed, it was getting on for midnight and she phoned asking what number bus she should get from Piccadilly."
Had it been earlier in the evening, Ralph and wife Jacqueline would have driven down to Manchester to collect Sharon. Instead, they told her which number bus to get, left the door on the latch and put two bottles behind the door so that the clinking, when the door opened, would reassure them that Sharon was home.
That reassuring clink never came. A police officer in a van had seen Sharon get off the bus and she was only five minutes from home when she crossed paths with the man who would end her life.
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"He was hiding in the door of where she worked, trying to break in," said Ralph. "We’ve only got one side of it, but his story was that she said to him: 'What are you doing? I work there and I know your face'."
Sharon's body was found the next morning in the Rochdale Canal by someone working at a nearby dairy. It was a cold night in March 1976 and, by the time she was found, the water had frozen around her.
Ralph and Jacqueline, both married for a second time, at first thought Sharon may have gone to the home of her natural mother. But it soon became obvious that there was police activity around the canal, and the awful truth dawned.
"It happened in March. He was apprehended in April," said Ralph. "He'd gone on the run and he was living rough in Broadhurst Park."
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Hardy was also responsible for another violent sexual assault on a woman in a pub toilet during that period on the run. At his trial, Hardy sacked his QC and conducted his own defence, attempting to confess to manslaughter.
The plea was rejected and he was found guilty of murder and given three life sentences. The M.E.N. reported on October 27, 1977, that Hardy's mistress – who had admitted in court she had withheld information and had harboured the killer – had struck a deal with police.
It was reported that Mr Paul Rose, barrister and MP for Blackley had told the parents of murdered teenager Wanda Skala that "something of an arrangement" was made to ensure his conviction. For many years, the suspicion lingered that Hardy may have killed more than three times.
Dorothy Leyden was 17 when she was raped and beaten to death in April 1971, her body dumped behind a pub on Rochdale Road, Collyhurst. Many believed this could have been a precursor to Hardy's reign of terror, but police reviewing the case said in 2008 that forensic evidence discounted Hardy as the killer.
Also in 2008, Hardy asked that his minimum jail term be set at 30-years. The plea was rejected by Mr Justice Teare at the High Court, who said that Hardy did not accept his guilt and showed no remorse. For him, life should mean life.
For Ralph Mosoph, the effect of the tragedy was to make them ultra-protective of the four other children in the family. Asked how many of his thoughts had been occupied by Trevor Hardy down the years, Ralph replied: "A hell of a lot. I’ve had many sleepless nights."
Shortly after he was sent down, Hardy sent a letter for the attention of the Mosoph family, posting it to a nearby club. "He was saying it was all his parents' fault and that he wasn’t to blame," said Ralph. "He was blaming his upbringing."
In May 1977, shortly after Hardy's conviction, the M.E.N. reported on a final macabre twist. From his Strangeways prison cell, the serial killer smuggled out to a relative a scrawled four-page "dossier of death" just before his trial.
The pages coldly recorded the sickening detail of his savage crimes. Hardy is said to have claimed to have wanted to "set the record straight".
On September 2012, 67-year old Hardy suffered a heart attack in his cell at Wakefield Prison and died. He had spent the last 35-years of his life in jail and was one of the longest-serving prisoners in England and Wales.
