Aftermath of the Highgate Vampire

Final Struggle Against A Post-Demonic Infestation At Highgate

“Believers will cast out demons in My name.”

Aftermath Of The Highgate Vampire

How can I tell my struggle without also telling my adversary’s story? What follows is part, albeit an important part, of the puzzle - though I make no claim to this being more than an arbitrary wander down the long corridor of years wherein memory stirs.

Autobiographical detail is provided to dispel falsehood in a work concentrating predominantly on two protagonists: one an exorcist, namely myself; the other a demoniac. I should emphasise that this man is not my arch-enemy. He is merely a pawn of my arch-enemy who is the Devil.  Recounting observations and experiences unveils material, some of which is hitherto unrecorded. These matters need to be shared. The reality of what happened no longer exists - it is now lost in time - yet the truth cries out for a voice for those who might one day benefit from this testimony.

I have been and remain absolutely open and honest about my beliefs. These have not altered or wavered over the decades. They are more at home in a past age when such views were normal and commonplace amongst clergy and laity alike. I have always subscribed to the existence of God, the Devil, angels, demons and those parasitical and predatory demonic entities known as vampires. I have not hidden my knowledge and opinion, having exposed both on innumerable television and radio programmes.

That notwithstanding, I accept that in today’s materialistic, hedonistic, sceptical and cynical world my traditional doctrinal beliefs and experiences struggle to be heard and invariably suffer rejection and ridicule by all who dismiss the supernatural. It is necessary to establish my position in advance and to introduce my private life early on. Only then can a truer picture emerge of the whole for I am not just recounting a conflict between two opposing camps - I am baring my soul as someone who is by no means perfect, but someone nonetheless with faith, feelings, hopes and aspirations.

One of the subjects of this book is a man called David Farrant. Few will have heard anything about him unless they have a particular interest in the dark side of human existence where vampires and demons dwell, and can remember a time when his scandals hit the headlines in England. Beyond brief moments of infamy in newspapers, and latterly other people’s books, he will probably not be recollected. However, nobody is more willing to publicise his notoriety than himself. An example is the following which he posted on his own internet message board on 6 April 2007:

“Rev Christopher Neil-Smith was called into Wormwood Scrubs Prison in November 1974 after a man sharing a cell with me and one other became convinced that he had become possessed after we had conducted a séance in the cell one night. He would wake up screaming in the cell and swore that some 'evil spirit' had entered him. Naturally, as I was in there for allegedly conducting 'witchcraft ceremonies' in Highgate Cemetery, I was held to blame for his condition. He was moved out of the cell, but the next thing I heard was that the Rev Neil-Smith had been called in to 'exorcise' him in the prison chapel. A 'trustee' was present and I got the full story. The prison governor was present, the prison chaplain and a couple of other people. During this 'exorcism', Neil-Smith violently shook this man's head and repeated several times ‘Drive out the evil powers of David Farrant!’ … This took place at the end of 1974 which was after the publication of Neil-Smith's book. I'm sure it would have been included otherwise as I doubt the Rev Neil-Smith would have forgotten it!”

Immediately one is struck by the use of “allegedly” by him in reference to witchcraft at Highgate Cemetery; something he widely publicised and wrote articles about at the time; indeed, something for which he was sentenced to a not insignificant jail term. In prison he wrote further articles about his witchcraft ceremonies in the graveyard, one such article being published in a magazine. Yet in 2007 these incidents were relegated to having been “alleged” by others to have occurred. This modus operandi of creating scandals, boasting about them for a period and then later denying their intrinsic elements, would permeate his life. First he was a vampire hunter. Then he denied ever hunting vampires. Next he was a necromancer and black magician. Then he denied engaging in necromancy and black magic. And so on. All this in the face of recorded interviews at the time where he can be heard confirming doing what he later denied. There is also television footage which gives the lie to much later revisionism. Why does any of this matter? The answer is contained in this book, which should also serve as a warning to all who dabble in the occult, whether for thrills, publicity or for real.

I feel I should say a little something about the person to whom this work is dedicated. Diana Wynne Brewester (née Pryce) was born in Neath, South Wales, on 19 July 1944. She began working as a bank clerk, but was drawn to the performing arts and became proficient in dancing. Her father was a policeman, which gave her an interest in crime investigation that developed into a passion for law. He was also a Freemason and this might have had some influence on Diana’s drift into various aspects of the occult in her early years. In the wake of her father’s death, however, she discovered papers amongst his regalia that gave her pause for thought. What she found disturbed her enough to cause her to apply the brakes to her own immersion in occultism. She eventually turned to Catholicism. This all happened after her arrival in London where she worked as a model for various fashion companies. It was in London that we met.

Diana was quite tall with blonde hair and green eyes. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was exceptionally glamorous; an enchantment that remained with her to the end. Diana was my secretary throughout the 1980s and 1990s. She was also my friend and comrade. More than that, Diana, like me, was an only child. Our birthdays were just four days apart. We immediately became as close as any brother and sister. As our blood relations died off, one by one, we became each other’s family. She had grown to know my parents in their last years. Diana’s support was always unflinching. She would always help people where she could. In her twilight years she helped her elderly neighbours with errands, nursing them when they were sick. Ironically, she was alone at home when she passed into the Lord’s safekeeping just before Christmas 2003, having been diagnosed with cancer in the previous September. News of her illness she restricted to just three people. Due to her throat being affected by the cancer we could no longer hold a proper telephone conversation, as she could barely speak at all and allowed none of her friends to visit her during her illness. This was probably because she had always been so glamorous and would not permit anyone to become distressed at seeing her in a bad way. She was undergoing radiotherapy until her sudden demise in the third week of Advent. Whatever she suffered, she suffered alone. Yet her letters to the end were full of good cheer. She looked painfully thin and wan in her latter years, but this did not halt her adventures which included regular visits to Denmark to visit a friend and to Germany for trips along the Rhine.

Diana accompanied me in 1986 on a pilgrimage to Newstead Abbey and Hucknall Torkard Parish Church where Lord Byron’s remains are interred below in the family vault. I often felt that here was someone who would accompany me to the ends of the Earth. She was a devoted friend, a dedicated supporter of our mission and believer in our Faith. There will never be another like her, and I shall miss her more than words can express. Yet she, too, was not free of the machinations of the Devil’s Fool. It saddens me deeply that this close friend and colleague was to suffer in her last months such vile abuse from a public nuisance and malicious pamphleteer who shared the initials of the appellation he has been given. This man disseminated nonsense of the most depraved nature about Diana in his self-published tracts that also revealed her private address. All this occurred in the period immediately prior to Diana’s fatal illness and subsequent death in 2003. This purveyor of the diabolical always posted his malice to his victims; namely those whom he maligned and whose character he attempted to destroy by way of falsehood. Such practices, in one form or another, have a history that traces back to the late 1960s. Diana became one in a long line. This made her a recipient of the pamphlets produced in his bed-sitting room at Muswell Hill. She naturally reported the matter to the police who arrested and charged him with harassment in December 2002, but sadly to no avail. He managed to wriggle off the hook, and it merely spurred him to persist with his vicious hate campaign.

Diana tried to deal with the assault on her character by attempting to laugh it off. Yet it must have caused her immense distress and there is no way she would have wanted this man’s coterie knowing her personal whereabouts. On 28 September 2003, having been diagnosed with cancer, she wrote me the following: “Farrant just gets more and more unbelievable, he’ll never stop.” I was to receive just two further letters from my dear friend. The man responsible for all this unpleasantness was never mentioned again between us in the final weeks of Diana’s life, but it had already been established earlier in the year that she feared she was being followed on some occasions.

Diana Brewester died on 16 December 2003 and was cremated one month later at 11.00am on 16 January 2004 at Islington and St Pancras Cemetery. Father Hubert Condron of St Joseph’s Catholic Church and I blessed the coffin with Holy Water during the funeral service as we each took it in turns to address those present. Panis Angelicus played as the curtains finally closed across the coffin containing Diana’s remains. Her ashes now repose in a private chapel under the auspices of our Church. Those who attended the funeral included old acquaintances I had not seen for years. Among them was someone I first met almost forty years earlier; someone I did not at first recognise due to his changed appearance. Anthony Hill greeted me warmly with a handshake before taking his seat in the chapel. Afterwards, as groups started to disperse and wander back to their vehicles in various parts of the vast cemetery, I walked down a lane of tombs with Anthony before bidding him farewell. He told me he was quitting England to live in a sunnier country with his second wife, Lucy.

“So you’re not coming back?” I enquired. “Only to visit,” he answered, adding: “It’s just not the same any more.” Indeed, nothing was quite the same any more in the new century. Anthony’s parents were both deceased and his only sibling had been left the greater portion of an inheritance by his recently departed mother. We walked a little further down that lonely avenue of graves on one of the coldest and dankest days in recent memory. I was struck by the fact that Anthony wore nothing on his head. He must have been absolutely freezing and our skin was almost starting to take on the hue of my purple biretta headwear. Despite the cold and solemnity of the occasion, there still remained a warmth from long ago that had returned to embrace this last meeting. Someone else would later remark that, even in death, Diana brought friends together. Things had not always been so warm. Suspicion once lurked due to Anthony cuckolding and even colluding with the Devil’s Fool. But that was now all in the past.

His vehicle was outside the graveyard. We reached the point of departure, and, slowly coming to a halt, turned, faced each other and shook hands. As we did so, Anthony placed an envelope within my grasp. Then, leaning forward, and in a hushed tone that was quite unnecessary in view of the fact that only those resting quietly in their tombs were in hearing distance, whispered: “Here’s a little something for old times’ sake.”

I slipped the slightly bulky envelope into my pocket, and thought little more about it. Different matters dominated that day. Anthony’s grey, watery eyes reflected just how low the temperature had reached on that bleak January day, and I recalled how they once used to contain a glint of mischief and mirth. That was in another era when optimism loomed and the world was young. Now his eyes were sad and serious, as were the times in which we found ourselves. The moment passed. Mouths exhaled more mist as we each struggled to form some semblance of a frozen smile. I waved as Anthony receded into the dismal veil beyond where foreign climes beckoned. 

X Seán Manchester

In court Mary Farrant, subpoenaed by her husband, recoiled in horror and almost fainted when shown images of open coffins - later to become Black Museum exhibits - and, along with her husband, implied that Anthony had something to do with it, according to a court report in the Hampstead & Highgate Express, 21 June 1974. It is true that Anthony had taken some of the photographs showing Farrant wielding a stake and holding a cross in Highgate Cemetery, plus the picture of him peering at a damaged coffin (wearing Anthony’s jacket, as he did not possess a decent one of his own), but there is no evidence to support the claim that photographs, like the Black Museum exhibits, originated with Anthony.

The public relations damage inflicted on the British Occult Society by Farrant’s phoney association was due to his obsessive manufacturing of news stories and claims of “occult powers” and “witchcraft ceremonies.” In countless published interviews given by him to the press he boasted of sacrificing cats, invariably adding that they were “stray cats” and that they were “anaesthetised” before having their throats slit. “We rarely sacrifice animals in rituals but this sacrifice was essential to our belief as we derive power from blood. The power we gain is used for good as against evil,” he told Roger Simpson in an article for the Hornsey Journal, 31 August 1973, adding: “Hundreds’ of years ago a naked virgin would have been sacrificed but obviously we couldn’t do this now so we had to have an animal for the important ritual.”

A front page headline story in the Hornsey Journal, 28 September 1973, revealed: “Farrant, as the Journal reported, admitted slitting a ‘stray’ cat’s throat at the height of a bizarre witchcraft ritual … in Highgate Woods recently.” There are innumerable quotes where Farrant threatens and describes his animal sacrifices, eg headline of the Hornsey Journal, 7 September 1973: “I will sacrifice cat at Hallowe’en: Farrant,” and the same newspaper, 16 November 1979: “Ritual sex act and cat sacrifice,” followed by a report opening with the words: “Self-styled ‘high priest’ David Farrant told a High Court jury this week of the night he performed a ritual sex act in an attempt to summon up a vampire in Highgate Cemetery. He also admitted that he had taken part in the ‘sacrifice’ of a stray cat in Highgate Wood.” In a squalid and revealing report, where Sue Kentish interviewed him for the News of the World, 23 September 1973, he is quoted as saying: “I did not enjoy having to kill the cat, but for one particular part of the ritual it was necessary. The sacrifice of a living creature represents the ultimate act in invoking a deity. I do not see animal sacrifice as drastic as people have made it out to be. … And, at least, I anaesthetised the cat before I had to kill it.”

While serving a four years eight months prison sentence, Farrant wrote an article for New Witchcraft magazine (issue 4), in which he states: “In magic, blood is symbolic of the ‘life force’ or ‘spiritual energy’ which permeates the body and in this context is used in many advanced magical ceremonies. It would not be sacrilegious to compare this to the use of wine as symbolic of blood in the Catholic Communion. Accordingly, at approximately 11.45pm, I drew blood.” His lengthy description of summoning a “satanic force” is nothing short of an open admission to his engagement in unabashed diabolism: “We then lay in the Pentagram and began love-making, all the time visualizing the Satanic Force so that it could - temporarily - take possession of our bodies.” The insertion “temporarily” unconvincingly manifested years after the event.

In my first complete account of the Highgate case, I tendered the following opinion: “I have found not a single shred of evidence to suggest that the least of these things are true.”[1] I became less confident in that view, and accordingly expurgated it from the 1991 edition of The Highgate Vampire. The simple fact of the matter is that I do not know how far he is capable of going, or has gone. He had broken the law before I ever met him, using two British passports - the phoney one being in the name of “Allan Aden Ellson.” To own this passport meant that he had acquired Crown property through deception by falsifying information on the application form. Had it been known at the time by the authorities, he would have been arrested and charged with a serious offence. He was causing a lot of personal inconvenience and was clearly a sick and depraved individual. But how really sinister or satanic was Farrant?

Two people who have known him longer than anyone else, Anthony and Farrant’s first wife, Mary, are convinced that his witchcraft and occult stunts were utterly bogus, and that he is a complete fraud. I would concur with that sentiment, but I can no longer opine exactly how far or not he is willing to go in the pursuit of publicity.

The Sun, 21 June 1974, recorded: “The wife of self-styled occult priest David Farrant told yesterday of giggles in the graveyard when the pubs had closed. ‘We would go in, frighten ourselves to death and come out again,’ she told an Old Bailey jury. Attractive Mary Farrant - she is separated from her husband and lives in Southampton - said they had often gone to London’s Highgate Cemetery with friends ‘for a bit of a laugh.’ But they never caused any damage. ‘It was just a silly sort of thing that you do after the pubs shut,’ she said. Mrs Farrant added that her husband’s friends who joined in the late night jaunts were not involved in witchcraft or the occult. She had been called as a defence witness by her 28-year-old husband.”

Shortly before and following his imprisonment in 1974, I attempted to gain Farrant’s confidence in order to discover the truth about his alleged “occult” activities. The conclusions I arrived at are published in The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook, a work that covers this area comprehensively: “My personal view is that he has become possessed by demonic influences. His behaviour, by any standard, is extremely obsessive.” His self-styled organisation, rarely consisting of more than one or two members, I deduce “did not have the same appeal [as other witchcraft groups], owing to the ‘high priest’s’ total lack of occult knowledge and contradictory statements.”[2]

From the very beginning - when most of his acquaintances knew him as “Allan” - to the final moment I spoke to him,[3] Farrant, in the absence of any corroborating witness, would ridicule witches, occultists and also members of any mainstream religious faith. For him witchcraft and the occult was only a means to an end. The impression I gained was that he actually believes none of it. He saw those who took the occult and certainly the paranormal seriously as being worthy of his contempt. His raison d’être was and remains an agenda where his manufactured publicity masks insecurities that probably stem from childhood. Yet, in dabbling in these dangerous areas, he opened himself to the very thing he scorns. Thus he is the Devil’s Fool.

“I don’t believe in the existence of the Devil,”[4] he would protest in later years when interviewed. But the Devil, of course, was more than aware of Farrant’s existence.

Farrant seated in a television studio audience.

Barring those journalists who will always take advantage of a free meal ticket when a compulsive publicity-seeker offers one on a plate, some who were to provide Farrant with succour turned out to be apologists for the infamous Satanist Aleister Crowley.

Graham Bond - a promising and talented rock musician - was born in Romford, Essex, on 28 October 1937. John Pope (who would later change his surname by deed poll to “Pope de Locksley”) was born in north London on 11 July 1953. David Farrant was also born in north London on 23 January 1946. These three individuals came to be linked by one single factor - rivalry within the transparently satanic religion of Thelema concocted by Aleister Crowley before Bond, Pope and Farrant were born.

Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley in Warwickshire in 1875, was the self-proclaimed “Wickedest Man in the World” and the “Great Beast 666.” He also considered himself to be the “avatar of the Age of Horus” which was supposedly a 2000-year-old aeon, beginning in 1904, that would supplant Christianity with “Crowlianity” - the false religion of Thelema. Crowley had rebelled against a strict religious upbringing and was thus initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898, after leaving Cambridge University. He left the Order after a row with its founders and then travelled to Mexico, India and Ceylon, where he was introduced to yoga and Buddhism which replaced his interest in the occult until an experience in Cairo in April 1904. Crowley was asked by his wife, Rose, to perform an esoteric ritual as an experiment. During the ceremony, she entered a trance-like state and became the medium for the words of a communicator. “They are waiting for you,” she said to Crowley. “They,” she said, being Horus, the god of war and the son of Osiris, according to the beliefs of ancient Egypt. The communicator told Crowley to be at his desk in his hotel room between noon and one o’clock on three specific days. He agreed and in these periods he wrote, via automatic writing, a document called The Book of the Law. This tome spoke of a race of supermen and condemned traditional Christianity, pacifism, democracy, compassion and humanitarianism. The foundations for Crowley’s bizarre tenets of Thelema and much of modern Satanism were laid.

Aleister Crowley

Ordo Templi Orientis, once headed by Crowley, today boasts a membership of three thousand in forty countries, half residing in America, and there are many more rival organisations describing themselves as the OTO. All but forgotten at the time of his death as a poverty-stricken heroin addict in a run-down Hastings boarding house in 1947, Crowley was rediscovered two decades later by drug-crazed hippies of the 1960s counter-culture, and was also popularised by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin who bought Crowley’s home in Scotland. From 1973, Crowley was imitated by John Pope, whose belief in Crowlianity is absolute, and David Farrant who believed only in his desire to court publicity and the achievement of same at any price. Farrant and Pope supposedly attempted some of Crowley’s more notorious demon raising ceremonies, including the “raising of Pan,” which led to both being charged with and acquitted of arson. Pope has described himself as the “spiritual son” and “successor” to Aleister Crowley. Farrant’s self-description merely being that of “high priest of witchcraft.”

Farrant (centre) and Pope (right).

"What do witches really do?" was the question posed by Robert Kilroy-Silk on 21 June 2001 on BBC television’s Kilroy programme. Farrant sat in the studio audience. He had been invited as a self-styled “high priest of British witchcraft” along with Kevin Carlyon who coincidentally claimed an identical description. Neither are recognised by other witches or pagans outside their own virtually non-existent covens. Briefly interviewed, Farrant placed importance on being properly initiated into wicca. Carlyon felt that initiation by others was unnecessary. Questions nonetheless arise over Farrant’s own “initiation” and whether or not he is a witch even by his definition because headlines in national newspapers some three decades earlier described him as a “phoney witch.” Michael Fielder, for example, writing in in The Sun, 4 July 1974, titled his article about David Farrant: “Phoney Witch Sent Out Dolls of Death.”

Today Farrant claims the year 1964 for his initiation into witchcraft, but when asked about this matter in interviews given over the previous three decades he told newspaper reporters that he had been initiated by his spiritualist mother when a minor. The age of thirteen was sometimes given. This age wavered in the telling to different journalists, but any “initiation into witchcraft” was obliged to remain prior to 1959 (when he would have been thirteen) because this is the year his mother died. Farrant nowadays claims he was initiated by a someone called “Helen,” but fails to confirm the identity of “Helen.” Such conjecture becomes academic for those who are familiar with his story, as they would be more than aware that his “wicca” is a publicity ploy.

Farrant married his pregnant wife, Mary, in a Roman Catholic Church in August 1967 where a nuptial Mass took place. She gave birth to a son three months later. Albeit a strange choice for a wiccan, when Mary appeared as a defence witness during his Old Bailey trials in June 1974, she affirmed that she had no knowledge of his interest in witchcraft and the occult. His Highgate Cemetery antics were described by his wife under oath as being nothing more than a bit of a laugh and a joke. In the early months of 1970, when he began his attention-seeking shenanigans, he was often photographed in attitudes of prayer before Christian crosses. He posed for photographs wearing crucifixes, rosaries and holding Holy Water. He was still doing so in August 1970, six years after he was supposed to have been initiated according to the latest date of 1964. A photograph taken in 1970 shows Farrant holding a wooden stake in one hand, a bottle of Holy Water in the other and wearing a cross around his neck. It can be found on page 54 of The Vampire Hunter’s Handbook. These are strange accoutrements indeed for a pagan witch. Yet there is no question from autumn of that year he turned to something diabolical to hold the media’s interest. Dr J Gordon Melton records: “In the summer of 1970, David Farrant, another amateur vampire hunter, entered the field. He claimed to have seen the vampire and went hunting for it with a stake and crucifix - but was arrested. He later became a convert to a form of Satanism.”[1]

Graham Bond was an orphan, adopted from the Dr Barnardo’s home, who came to prominence in 1962 at the Marquee Club in London as a featured musician with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. In 1963 Bond formed a trio, then a quartet, before founding in 1964 the Graham Bond Organisation. It was during the following period that he took an unusual interest in the occult and the works of Crowley. He was not alone in that respect. David Bowie and Mick Jagger each became fascinated with the diabolist’s writings, and the singer Sting apparently used to read Crowley’s books when touring. Yet Bond went much further and became a practicing Thelemite. From that moment his fate appears to have been sealed. He renamed his band the Graham Bond Initiation; its final appellation being Holy Magick (adopting Crowley’s perverse spelling of the word “magic”). In the early days, Bond was noted as being a silent, humble figure with a plastic alto saxophone; always on the outskirts of what was going on, never part of it. The thing about him was that he was not noticed. This would change. The versatile keyboard player and saxophonist, who also did some vocals, steadily developed an obsession with the occult, especially the brand of Satanism, devised by Crowley and known as Thelema, imitated by Pope and Farrant. Like his mentor, he also became seriously addicted to drugs and alcohol. According to the posthumous biography The Mighty Shadow, written by Harry Shapiro, Graham Bond sexually abused his stepdaughter. Pope would claim to be Crowley’s “spiritual successor” - employing the title “Son of the Beast” - but Graham Bond went one better. He claimed to be an illegitimate son of Aleister Crowley. In the Left-hand Path world of the dark occult nothing is too sacred or taboo for exponents of Thelema.

On 8 May 1974, Graham Bond fell, or perhaps jumped, in front of the wheels of a London Underground train at Finsbury Park station, and died. In the previous year, he had been called upon by another rock star, “Long” John Baldry of Muswell Hill, London, to help in an “exorcism,” as the media insisted on describing it. Baldry had been receiving threats and curses from Farrant, who confirmed this to be the case in repeated boasts published in his local newspapers at the time, eg the front page headline story of the Hornsey Journal, 28 September 1973. Baldry believed that his missing cat Stupzi had been sacrificed by Farrant in a witchcraft ritual. Whilst not denying the ritual sacrifice of cats during this period, Farrant maintained that the one he killed in Highgate Wood was not Stupzi, but a stray. On one occasion, Baldry and Bond arrived at Farrant's bed-sitting room to confront the sender of voodoo threats, but only found Pope whom Farrant had been using to deliver the clay effigies with accompanying menacing poems (as confirmed by Pope in later interviews). Farrant himself was out at the time, or possibly in hiding. When the rock star met with his unfortunate death, Pope immediately claimed that he had killed Graham Bond with a black magic curse; something he reiterated in a recorded interview with this author.

Mystery has always surrounded the untimely demise of Graham Bond and many commentators in the media have looked for simple answers, sometimes erroneously describing Bond as a “white magician.” There is nothing “white” about the magic that springs from Aleister Crowley. I spoke to Baldry in person, following a live television programme we both appeared on concerning the dangers of the occult, to assure him that Farrant was bogus and Pope was a joke. He nevertheless grew ever more terrified of the curses he had received and quit England for Canada, never to return. Farrant issued witchcraft threats to all manner of people throughout 1973 culminating in his investigation by Scotland Yard detectives. They discovered an altar with black candles beneath an image of the Devil in his bed-sitting room. He was arrested in early 1974 and held on remand until his trials in June, resulting in a four years and eight months prison sentence. Pope remained free to pursue his undisguised brand of evil. Bond died a month before Farrant faced his own fate in front of a judge and jury.

John Pope intended to “form a new coven that will rule the world” and “abolish the system whereby children are forced to learn Christian worship,” according to an interview he gave Reveille magazine, 21 November 1975. When this failed to happen, he became increasingly unstable, declaring direct blood descent from Jesus Christ, Dracula, Robin Hood and Jack the Ripper. Farrant would frequently refer to Pope behind his back as a “silly little imbecile.” Today Pope provides “horror tours” to paying voyeurs who want to see the haunts Jack the Ripper in London’s East End where Pope now resides, and the house of the sexual pervert and serial murderer Dennis Nielson, which is located just around the corner from the Muswell Hill attic bed-sitting room occupied by Farrant since his release from prison on parole in 1976.