Sinister South
Join Rachel and Hannah on the Sinister South Podcast as they explore the shadowy corners of South London. Each episode digs into the gritty true crime stories that have left their mark on the local streets of South London. They’ll introduce you to the victims and dissect the mysteries while giving you a taste of the places these dramas unfolded. It’s not all doom and gloom; Rach and Han also have plenty of nonsense to chat about! So whether you're a true crime buff or just curious about the darker tales from their neck of the woods, pull up a chair, tune in and join the mischief!
Want to get in touch with us, or request an episode? You can email us here: sinistersouthpodcast@gmail.com
Sinister South
Broken Promises: Tragedies in South London's Mental Health Support
Episode 30 is here! This week, we’re taking a deep dive into some of South London’s most tragic stories tied to mental health care—and let’s just say, it’s a bit of a rollercoaster. We talk about the harrowing murders of Ilona Czuper in Mitcham, Eileen Dean in Catford, Maureen Watkins in Peckham and Florise Corette in Brockley.
From heart breaking failings to moments that make you question how things could go so wrong, we’ll be unpacking cases that hit close to home. As always, there’s plenty of our usual banter (because we can’t help ourselves), but also a lot to think about when it comes to how we can do better. Grab a cuppa (or something stronger) and join us for a chat about the tough stuff, told with our usual mix of curiosity and dark humour.
Sources include:
https://southwarknews.co.uk/area/southwark/exclusive-investigation-reveals-at-least-50-killings-by-slam-patients/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-35988862
https://www.hundredfamilies.org/the-victims/london/
Thanks for tuning in! If you loved diving into the dark corners of South London with us, don't forget to hit that subscribe button to never miss an episode of "Sinister South."
Also, follow us on Instagram @SinisterSouthPodcast for sneak peeks, behind-the-scenes content, and more cheeky banter, or www.sinistersouthpod.co.uk. Remember, every crime tells a story... and South is the best side of the river...
Produced and hosted by Hannah Williams & Rachel Baines
Mixed & edited by Purple Waves Sound (A.K.A Will)
SLaM
Hello. Hi. I'm Rachel.
I'm Hannah and this is Sinister South, a podcast all about the untoward, the nefarious, the sinister in South London. Yay, well done. Well done.
Thanks babes. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm all right. I'm okay.
I'm, yeah, just, I am who I am and I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm really looking forward to this year being over, I think, 2024 camp again in the bin. I'm quite frank.
Although a bit harsh because, you know, we started a podcast and that's really cool. I don't think, I think that we can, we can legitimately say that we want the year to be over. Not everything within it was negative.
No, but I'm with you. I think it just feels like one kick in the dick after another at the moment and just very over it. Yeah.
I mean, I think that's fair, mate. Don't even have a dick. Stop kicking me in it.
The fuck. Oh dear. Um, but yeah, so I think I'm, I'm like, yeah, just a bit ready for, for Christmas and ready for a break and then hit in 2025 and yeah.
And sending positive vibes out from the start. Yeah, no, I think that, I mean, I think that's entirely fair mate. I'm with you.
I cannot wait to, um, eat my body weight in mince pies. Um, brandy cream. Nice.
Although I don't like brandy cream. What is wrong with you? I don't know because it, you really think I would, right? Yeah. Like it's so up my street.
It's 100% a bit of you. No, I don't like it. Oh, mold wine though.
I mean, yeah, absolutely knocks me off my perch. Are you going to tell the people about your mommy's one? It's just got so much brandy. I have one glass.
I'm fucked. Um, but it's delicious and I can't help myself. And it's got oranges in it.
So it's basically a health drink. Oh, a hundred percent is a hundred percent is. I do exactly the same with, um, cause I'm, I'm not, cause I'm not really a wine drinker.
Um, I am a cider drinker. Mold cider is like, I see it as the equivalent of, um, it's like the ug boot of the winter drinks. Um, you know what I mean? Like it's a bit, it's a bit basic bitch, but, um, I'm all about it.
And in my head I'm like, apple juice, healthy. Definitely fine to have seven of them. So yeah, I'm with you.
I'm with you. I'm going to make you using my mother's recipe, make you some mold wine and then make you drink it and then just see what happens to you. Oh, I will, I will fall over and die.
Her head will fall off. I'm really excited. I, I, I say, I love how I just sat here being like, oh yeah, I can have seven of the seven of them.
Yeah. In about six weeks. Um, I cannot drink to save my life anymore.
Um, oh, well yeah, I mean, I hear you. How are you? Yeah. All right.
Same, same. Yeah. Like life be life in as per just lots of children's activities at the minute, which is lovely, but it's enough kind of drag on a bit.
Yeah. Oh, so on Tuesday we've got this and then on Wednesday I've got to go see the other one do that. And then they've got a school disco and then we've got this on the other.
She's like, oh, sit down, sit down. But no, it is lovely to go and see them do all this stuff. And I do, I have to add it in every now and then I do actually quite like my children.
Um, I love your kids. Yeah, they're all right. They're all right.
I'm, I'm excited to see the little one in her, um, school nativity. Yeah. She's been singing me all the songs.
Um, it's like, we've got a story everybody knows and we're gonna put some twinkle in your toes. Uh, and she will do it where I know not visual medium, but she will do it where she has to do the little shoulder, shimmy, shimmy shake as she sings it. Uh, so I'm so sassy.
She's very sassy. So I'm sassy. I love it.
So yeah, I'm quite excited to see that. And then the big one's got Christmas Carol at the church. So that'll be, obviously my husband will, cannot come because he will go off and flames, disintegrate something of that.
Nothing into a thousand bats. Yeah. Uh, nothing to do with the fact that it's actually his work's Christmas do the same day.
Um, but I'm going to get to go and I, I'm not a church goer. I don't believe in it or anything like that. Sorry.
No offense to anyone who does, but I'd love a church at Christmas time. Yeah. It's very, it's just, yeah, part of it, isn't it? Exactly.
So it's not, it's going to be nice to have an excuse to go and listen to some carols in a church. I mean, how good those carols will be being done is anyone's guess. Uh, but yeah, but no, other than that, kind of just life.
Yeah. Looking forward to Christmas, looking forward to the mince pies, looking forward to a sit down. Yes.
So yeah, fair, fair, fair. But before I get to sit down, I have got a story. If you would like to listen, I think I bloody love that actually.
Ah, well, are you, are you nice and cozy? Yeah. I hope it's a jolly one. Wow.
Can you imagine? It's like, actually today, I'm going to tell you all about how lovely South London is. We're going to be talking about the leafy, the leafy green spaces. Uh, no, we are talking death and destruction again, mate.
Fair. Makes sense. So yeah, sorry about that.
Aligns. It aligns. It does align.
It's very on brand for us. Um, right. I have started this episode, the way I think I've started like the last six episodes.
By saying so. By saying so. So, let's get into it.
But also by saying that this one's a little bit different. Actually, I don't think it is. I think we did, um, we did Halloween and we were like, oh, I like this fall.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I agree. I think that's what's happened. So yeah, I'm not going to be talking just about one case today.
I'm talking about multiple. And while all of them are criminal, they are also incredibly tragic. And so I just wanted to put a bit of a trigger warning out for lots of different things, predominantly mental health concerns and issues.
And I wanted to make something absolutely clear. I know I probably don't need to do this and hopefully it's just taken as a given, but seeing as we love a caveat, we do love a caveat. Queens of the caveat.
I, it would not be on brand if I hadn't mentioned a small thing. So while I am discussing some of these cases, I am not trying to villainize people with mental health issues as that would be incredibly hypocritical. Nor am I suggesting that all people with conditions like schizophrenia, which is one that features quite prominently throughout these cases are dangerous or violent.
It's just unfortunate that they are the conditions that the people I'm talking about today were suffering from. And this episode is touching on sort of like broader issues around the provision of mental health care in South London, more generally. So I don't know, this is something that might get Hannah up on her soapbox because of her history.
But I'm going to be talking about two organizations that are really well known within South London and probably quite a lot of places around the UK, actually. So the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, which is also known as SLAM, which I will probably refer to it as throughout because the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Hospital Trust is a bit of a mouthful. Yes.
And then also the South West London and St George's Mental Health NHS Trust, which goes by the snappy acronym of SWL STG. No, that's rubbish. Sounds better.
It's not, really quick little bit of context around what these organizations are because I think it's important to know what they do. So I've got to stop saying so. SWL STG, which is the South West London organization, they provide services to over 1.2 million people across five boroughs and they trace their roots back to 1840 with the opening of Springfield University Hospital in Tooting.
SLAM is the largest mental health, well, the largest NHS mental health provider in the UK and it serves a local population of 1.3 million people across all the South London boroughs. Do you want to say what the boroughs are? Six boroughs. Can you remember them? These are boroughs geographically.
This is the NHS provision. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. So it's Greenwich, Lourche, Bexley, Bromley, Southwark, Lambeth.
Well done. Jesus. Very good.
You should recite that in my sleep. It's been a little while. It's been a while.
Yeah, so they do offer national services as well, though, and they have actually been tied to, kind of their origin story, if you like, is tied to some of the most historic institutions in mental health care, including the Maudsley Hospital and Bethlehem Royal Hospital, which is also known colloquially as Bedlam. And these institutions have been involved in mental health care since the 13th century. So the Bethlehem Royal Hospital was up in sort of like 1296, I think it is, or something of that is something ridiculous that feels like a made up date.
And it's obviously gone all the way up to modern day NHS provision. And the other thing I wanted to say was that, yes, I am going to be talking about some of the failings of these organizations today. I also wanted to just put out there that and I know everyone will have different experiences with mental health provision.
But as someone who has had very luckily, I've been very privileged to have a positive experience with the South London Maudsley Trust. When I worked there many eons ago, same, same, but also just from sort of accessing local mental health services, same, same, there we go. So they do do a good thing.
And it's also like, they have a reputation. So they've been slam, mainly, was rated good in its provision by the CQC on so many different areas, including research, community care and specialized services. But their long term inpatient Maud, which is essentially what I'm going to be talking about today, has been marked as requires improvement specifically around its safety provision.
So I just wanted to put that out there. I think, look, I can only really speak about SLAM because I was South London based, but like, it depends when you talk to somebody in their mental health care journey or their relationship with SLAM journey, like, and like where they're at professionally with it, where they're at, if they're accessing it, like, they're so it can swing so widely between absolute being in love and absolute hate should be reformed, should be torn down, whatever. You know, doing the job I did, doing complaints for South London for so long, like, you obviously get exposed to the worst scenarios and it can be harrowing and horrific.
But you also working for the NHS and like, there is a culture of sharing positive news and like, you know, I suppose basically what I'm trying to say is a shit job. Thank God people want to do it. It's a thankless task, right? Oh, a thousand percent until it's not.
Yeah. Anyway, you know, I do. I do.
I do. I do. But yeah, that was just my caveat for today.
So now we are going to launch into the cases and I'm not going to lie. The first one is particularly brutal and I have done it on purpose so that I can like hit it and then run. Right.
So so, yeah. So the first episode, first episode, not doing multiple episodes on this, I promise. The first case today is the horrific death of a lady called Ilona Zuppa in Mitcham, South London.
So shortly before midnight on Thursday, the 6th of July, 2017, the body of 62 year old Ilona Zuppa was found by her daughter and granddaughter in the rear garden of the family home in Edchill Road, Mitcham. Ilona had been victim to a frenzied attack and the injuries she sustained were awful. And I'm going to list them, but like, I want a big flashing red trigger warning over this, by the way.
Her throat had been cut open and she had over 60 stab and slash wounds to her head. Wow. There were numerous other stab wounds to her torso and hands and multiple fractures of her ribs.
On top of all this, Ilona's killer had also removed her eyes and placed them beside her body before striking her skull repeatedly with a paving slab. No. By the time it was over, none of Ilona's facial features remained.
The bodies of the family pets, a cat and a dog also lay nearby. Like Ilona, their skulls had been reduced to shattered fragments by repeated blows with the same slab. Fucking hell.
Yeah, it's not nice. A neighbour had heard cries coming from the garden earlier that evening, but these had stopped and so they thought no more of it and made no attempts to help Ilona or her pets. Police were called to the scene upon the discovery of Ilona's body and quickly obtained CCTV footage, which revealed a man leaving the house in bloodstained clothing.
Police identified Ilona's grandson, 21-year-old Cordian Philmanowitz as the perpetrator. Oh my God. Yeah, it's sad.
Ilona's daughter Marta had moved to England from Poland in 2010 and she was followed by her children in 2011, so she had a son and a daughter. We don't know the daughter's name, so she will just be referred to as the daughter or the sister. But yeah, so she had the daughter and Cordian and in 2013 Cordian returned to Poland to live with his grandmother, Ilona, and it was to sort of help him finish off his schooling and things like that.
And then they moved back to the UK in 2016 together and they all lived in a house together in Lambeth, although at this point in time is when Cordian's mental health started to deteriorate. In October of 2016 police in Westminster detained Cordian after he was reported for following a member of the public and claiming that he was Jesus, which is very reminiscent to the case we did of Samantha Drummond's, her partner. Yeah, witnesses also saw Cordian standing in the middle of oncoming traffic on a very, very busy road, so they detained him for his own protection and when detained he became violent and headbutted one of the detaining officers.
He was then held under section 136 of the Mental Health Act and admitted to a psychosis ward at South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. By January 2017 Cordian was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Doctors prescribed clozapine after other treatments failed which required regular blood tests and monitoring and this is where I went on a little bit of a rabbit hole into this drug clozapine and it's really interesting so I wanted to bring it up.
Yeah, no, I want to know. But when I say I fell into a rabbit hole, like at one point I was looking at molecular structures. It was a whole thing, it was a whole thing.
So what is clozapine? Clozapine is an anti-psychotic medication used primarily to treat schizophrenia in patients who have not responded adequately to other drugs. Right. It is also sometimes used to reduce the risk of recurrent suicidal behavior in people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and belongs to a class of drugs called atypical antipsychotics or second generation antipsychotics which are known for causing fewer movement related side effects compared to older antipsychotics.
Okay, because I suppose there is like, I don't know if it's a misconception or just a perception or if it's based in truth, whatever, like the people on antipsychotic drugs are kind of like, I hate to use flippant terminology when we're talking about this, but like zombified or like very kind of, you just, they're sat there and staring into the middle distance kind of thing. So if these have been developed to kind of not give, you know, to do the treatment correctly but not have those kind of side effects. Yeah, I think so.
I mean, I'll be honest, when we get, I'll talk a bit more about it, but it doesn't sound like it's a fun drug. No, no, it still is. Well, yeah, it's a bit.
Yeah, anyway, so it works by balancing the neurotransmitters in the brain, particularly dopamine and serotonin, which are believed to be involved in the development of psychotic symptoms. But unlike many other antipsychotics, it has a unique receptor profile which makes it really effective for resistant strains of psychosis. So essentially it is, it's almost like a last resort drug.
And it, while it's really effective, it's also got a absolute laundry list of things that can go wrong with it. Right. So it carries, like you need to have like really careful monitoring when you're on it because it can include something called agranulocytosis, which is where it can suppress the white blood cell production.
Oh, wow. Yeah, which increases the risk of severe infections. So you have to have really regular blood tests.
So they have to have mandatory blood tests if you're on this drug to make sure that you're not having white blood cells being basically taken over. And it can also cause seizures, cardiac issues such as myocarditis and cardiomyopathy and metabolic effects, sedation and hypertension. So actually, I think that this is more the sort of drug that would make people feel a bit more.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's not, not fun.
Wows. Not fousers. It is, as I said, it's considered a last resort medication and its use is really heavily regulated.
Patients have to be enrolled in a monitoring program and this will kind of like track blood tests and ensure that the medication is being used safely. So this is the stuff that they put Cordian on at the age of 21. So Cordian initially stabilized on the colosapine and under the care of the Maudsley hospital.
But when the family, so the family moved home in 2017 and they moved from Lambeth to Mitcham and his care completely fell apart. Yeah. Because essentially what was happening is we're now moving from Slam, which looks after South London, over to the Southwest London and St George's, which is a different trust.
I mean, you run a risk of your med, of your records going haywire when you move doctor surgeries and it could be from one end of your road to the other end of your road. Exactly. It can be a fucking nightmare.
Yeah. So not only moving boroughs, but moving trusts. Yeah.
Like you're under the jurisdiction of a completely different business model, basically. Exactly. Even though it is all centralized going to the government.
Because I could do things very differently to how they do them over there. Well, exactly. So yeah, this is kind of where it starts to all get a bit not happy.
So Cordian and his family moved just two miles outside of like from Lambeth to Mitcham, which put him outside of the Lambeth home treatment team's catchment area. And so he was discharged from the service without a clear transition plan. His clozapine supply was insufficient and the family struggled to access refills due to the local pharmacies inability to dispense the medication.
Fuck. Attempts to transfer him to the Merton early intervention center service, which was part of the Southwest London and St George's hospital trust was delayed by confusion over which team should be managing his care. Oh, for fuck's sake.
And now am I bringing back some really, really bad drama here. In the weeks before the murder, Cordian missed blood tests, which as we've just heard is not a good idea, failed to take his medication and began smoking cannabis, which was a known trigger for his psychosis. He had been smoking it since he was 14 and he started smoking it again.
His family repeatedly raised concerns describing his verbal abuse and his fixation on his grandmother, whom he had called evil. Oh no. And despite these warnings, Merton early intervention service did not prioritize his case and delays persisted.
Two days before a loner's murder, Cordian's sister called the Merton emergency contact center, reporting that he was not taking his medication and had become aggressive. The call handler dismissed it and basically said that the sister needed to call the police. I mean, in the back of my mind, when you were saying that, I was like, if it had been me, that's such a shitty thing to say, like she's a victim in all this too.
But like, I mean, I make no secret of the fact I'm very call the police happy. It doesn't take a lot for me to pull the trigger on ringing 999. You do love a bit of a 999 call, yeah.
It's what the service is there for. I agree. Agreed.
You will be in no problem. I haven't done it willy-nilly. I'm not wasting police time.
Yeah, exactly. I know, I know, I know. Her stopped child abuse once.
Well done. So fuck you all. But when you know that the care has been so disruptive and things have been so haywire and hectic, yes, technically the right thing to do would be to call the hospital or call the emergency line to see what can be done under the provision of care he's meant to be cared for by.
But at that point, I would have rung the police. So fuck that call handler for not dealing with it. Yeah.
But we're going to get more angry. I'm already really fucking angry. We're going to get a bit more angry, mate.
So the sister calls the police, as she was advised to, and the police officer dismissed it as a non-police matter and advised her to contact a doctor. The handler also failed to log the name of the sister. Any key details about Cordian's condition, aggression or risk factors, and absolutely no kind of attempts were made to even do a safeguarding check.
Oh my God. So when it logged the name. Yeah, no, none of it.
None of it. Fucking hell. When a doctor... Let me back in.
I'm going to fix it. When a doctor later requested police support for a welfare check, so they finally got someone to pay attention, there weren't any police units available to attend. Paramedics arrived an hour later, but could not engage with Cordian, who declined clinical observations and denied that he had any mental health issues whatsoever.
But it was said that he reportedly, during that interaction with paramedics, gave staff intense and threatening gazes one by one, and it was noted. The following day, a care coordinator noted Cordian's severe deterioration, and threats towards his family, including his grandmother, Ilona. Although a psychiatrist determined that he required readmission, errors and miscommunication delayed the referral.
The referral was not handed over to the out of hours approved mental health professional team over the weekend due to an IT system misunderstanding. You're joking. And when the approved mental health professional team finally acted, a message was left for Marta, Cordian's mum, to contact them, but no urgent attention was given to the case.
Wow. You left a fucking voicemail. Yeah.
Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
Wow. That evening, Ilona was killed in the family garden. Cordian was found in a nearby park and he was detained.
And during a mental health assessment, he claimed to feel angels and demons and believed he was Jesus. And at trial, prosecutors revealed his fixation on eyes because he said that he could see evil behind them. In 2018, Cordian pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and was detained indefinitely under the Mental Health Act.
His mother Marta stated the family was destroyed by his illness, but insisted that she did not give birth to a murderer or a monster. Judge Anthony Leonard QC told the defendant, your mother says that nothing can get her mother back, but she asks for helping getting you back by getting you the right treatment. The domestic homicide review highlighted systematic failings from both SLAM and SWL-SGH, with poor care transitions to delayed interventions and there's been a call for greater vigilance in mental health management.
And Judge Anthony Leonard QC reflected on the tragedy and urged improvements to prevent such failures in the future. Wow. So that's case one.
Fuckin' hell, mate. Yeah. Next, we're going to be talking about a lady called Eileen Dean.
And she was a 93-year-old widow, mother of three, grandmother of five, and great mother of four, described by her family as a kind and caring person who had lived through the Great Depression and the Blitz. Eileen was living at Fieldside Care Home in Catford, where she had been since June 2020. She was moved in by local social services during lockdown of the same year, due to very limited access to day centres and family support.
She was known by staff to be very calm, lovely and quiet. Fieldside Care Home was primarily a facility that catered to vulnerable elderly residents. And despite her age and suffering from dementia, Eileen was described as independent and it stated that she only required basic support primarily for her own personal care.
On the night of the 3rd of January 2021, 93-year-old Eileen Dean was brutally attacked in her bedroom by fellow resident, Alexander Rawson, who used a metal walking stick to inflict severe injuries on the defenceless Eileen. She suffered multiple fractures to her facial bones and a traumatic brain injury, which led to her death later that day at Lewisham Hospital. At the time of the attack, Eileen was self-isolating in her room as she recovered from COVID.
63-year-old Alexander Rawson was born in 1958 and had a documented history of mental health issues, which had been exacerbated by chronic alcoholism. In 2020, his condition had deteriorated significantly, which had led to multiple hospital admissions, including being an inpatient at psychiatric units at Lewisham Hospital and the Maudsley, both of which are managed by SLAM. And he was also detained under the Mental Health Act.
While here, he exhibited violent and threatening behaviour with records showing at least 34 incidents involving aggression towards patients and staff, including threats to kill and the use of potential weapons such as a bread knife, scissors and dinner trays. Jesus. Despite this history, Alexander was discharged from the psychiatric unit in December 2020 and placed in the fieldside care home in Catford in the room next to Eileen.
It's not entirely clear why he was placed here. Yeah, it was just about to ask. Yeah, but due to his history of mental illness, age and the need for supervised care, it's thought that he was a particularly challenging patient to find an appropriate facility for.
The care home themselves admitted that they lacked the specialist mental health services required to manage individuals with Alexander's complex needs and a subsequent review by the Lewisham Safeguarding Adults Board revealed that there had been no comprehensive risk assessment conducted prior to his placement at fieldside. Administrators at fieldside had sought information about the risks that were also imposed, but were reassured by social workers and medical staff leading to his acceptance without adequate safeguards. Less than two weeks after his admission, Alexander attacked Eileen.
Police were called to fieldside at around 12 40 p.m. on the 4th of January after Alexander phoned 999 in a state of distress. He phoned them. Stating, I think somebody's been killed and I don't know what's happening.
I think I might have done something wrong. So it's thought that he was the one who called because she was self isolating. So she wasn't having as many checkups from staff as she would have done.
And they actually believe that she was attacked in the sort of early hour, or like sort of the late evening of the previous day, but she wasn't found until much later on the following day. Yeah, he told the operator, I think I might have done something wrong. When officers examined CCTV, they saw Alexander holding a metal walking stick near the scene at around 10 20 p.m. He was next seen coming from the same direction approximately two hours later.
No one else was captured on CCTV between that time period. A blood stained metal walking stick was found in Eileen's room with Alexander's fingerprint on it. The death of Eileen left her family devastated.
Her daughter, Georgie Hempshaw, described the harrowing moment when police arrived at her door in the early hours of the morning to inform her of the attack. Visiting Eileen in the hospital, Georgie said she did not recognise her mother due to the extent of her injuries and had to identify her by her feet. Fuck me.
In December 2021, Alexander was deemed unfit to stand trial due to his mental health condition and a judge at the Old Bailey gave him an indefinite hospital order. Detective Chief Inspector Chris Wood, who led the investigation, said Eileen was a completely defenceless woman whose life was suddenly taken away in a horrific manner. She had already been through a great deal losing her husband almost 30 years ago but was described as a calm, quiet and lovely woman by all those who knew her.
We hope her children and grandchildren have the space to grieve together now the trial is complete and to remember Eileen for the wonderful woman she was. Georgie, her daughter, had spoken publicly about the immense guilt she felt for placing her mother in the care home. Despite assurances that Eileen would be safe, the tragedy has left her questioning the system that allowed such a dangerous individual to reside there basically.
Georgie has demanded answers from both SLAM and fieldside care home emphasising the need for greater transparency and accountability. She was quoted as saying, you hand over that responsibility and they let you down. I just don't want this to happen to anyone else.
Jesus. Two hours without being seen again on CCTV. So potentially the attack could have been that long.
It could have been, yeah. Fuck. Yeah.
That's really horrible. And like, yeah, it's wild that he was there. Wild.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, trying to... I get into sort of like what SLAM say about these cases at the end, but like trying to find a rationale behind it is just... It's literally impossible.
Like we talk about rationale quite a lot, right? When we talk about these cases and I'm always saying to you, you're trying to rationalise murder again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Find reasonings.
But this is kind of like a special... area where they're legally and legitimately has to be rationale behind decision-making. Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't seem that there was much.
I think it was... And again, it's one of those... Don't get me wrong. Mm-hmm. I don't know if you know this, but we were living in unprecedented times.
Were we? It was unprecedented. Was it? Oh, okay, okay. So I understand that decisions would have been made under a very different lens to how they might have been made.
Two years before that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But at the same time, like that's the one thing, like the one thing that you kind of like... You come away from working in the NHS with.
And I mean, hark at me, like I was the fucking director of it all or anything like that. But you walk away... Or like one of the things that's kind of been the biggest hurdle for me to overcome in working back into the private sector is how decision-making is done and how little influence and input people need in the private sector to make fundamental decisions about businesses. And rightly so, in the NHS, you just do not have that freedom.
Like you don't make those decisions in isolation. You don't make those decisions independently. It is very much a document, like show your working system.
As it should be. So for these things, like that's what... Yeah, I'm tying myself in knots here, but I'm just really curious as to... Like I would love to see all the meeting minutes from around that time from the teams moving and placing and homing. Because you're right.
Difficult cases and patients. Because you're right. It's not going to have been one person.
Like multiple people will have had to have gone, yeah, that makes sense. And it would have been multi-agency as well. It would have been mental.
It would have been any physical. Yeah. Care that he might have required.
That would have been in, like you'd hope, it was an all hands decision about the care of this one person and where best place, where would be best place to support him. Yeah. And they went for a... And they went for that.
A care home. Which I mean, I don't know. I'm trying to do it without seeing any... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know. Well, we'll never really know. I mean, I suppose like all of that as well is confidential and it's about that man's care and all the rest of it.
But I can't help but feel for... I feel for the care home. I mean, I wonder why it took them so long. And why he had to call the police.
I also, yeah, I think I call bullshit that just because she was isolated, she didn't need regular checks. You would think. But I do feel a bit... I kind of empathise with the... They said, we don't have the staff here.
We don't have the expertise. Like we don't have the expertise. We don't have the skills required.
And they were kind of... And I get again, as you were saying unprecedented times, like what were we meant to be doing at that point in time? Hospital beds were needed like all the rest of it. But I didn't just... And it's probably like... Yeah. I wonder how many of these decisions were based on.
It might not be the safest option, but is it safer than a potentially infectious ward? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. And when we don't know... Yeah.
Right, with death rates we're through the roof. And like, you kind of go, you know, what looks... What's the lesser of two evils here? Exactly. Having another person die from COVID because they're in a ward.
Or putting them somewhere that technically isn't right. But it keeps them safe. What's threat to life? Which level of threat to life is kind of more important here.
And you're also not sitting there thinking, oh, well, this person is going to do this. Is going to murder somebody else. Like it's not a... But they obviously hadn't got his medication right.
They obviously hadn't got his treatment plan right. And I could... Interestingly, I couldn't find out what Alexander Rawson was diagnosed with. It just said complex mental health needs.
So, you know, whereas a lot of the others and the other ones that we'll talk about... Get a diagnosis. They've got a diagnosis. He is schizophrenic.
He is, he is. Yeah, so it's interesting. But yeah, so that's... That's poor Eileen Dins.
That is really fucking sad. I know. That is really, really sad.
I've got some more. The Maureen Watkins was a 75-year-old grandmother who lived a quiet life in her home on Ethnard Road, Peckham. Described by her family as kind, intelligent, and empathetic.
Maureen has spent much of her later years supporting her 55-year-old son Edward, who was known as Eddie, who struggled with severe mental health issues. Fraile and partially disabled from emphysema, Maureen's physical health made her dependent on oxygen therapy, but she was devoted to caring for her family and Eddie helped his mother in kind, mainly providing loving care, doing household chores and shopping. Eddie's niece, Katie, said, they looked after each other.
They were each other's companions. If someone had broken into the house, my uncle would have died to protect her. But also, they would be taking the piss out of each other, laughing so much, digging each other out.
It was a happy relationship. There was never any aggression there. She never begrudged that he was unwell.
On the evening of 16 November 2018, Maureen was violently attacked and stabbed to death by Eddie in their shared home. She was found face down in the hallway of their flat and a kitchen knife with a 17-centimetre blade was discovered beside her body. Eddie was found naked in the street outside and told police that God made me do it.
Eddie had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which was diagnosed in 2018, but had first been diagnosed with paranoid psychosis in 1993. Wow. Yeah, so he's been going on for a long time.
Yeah, he's dealt with it for a long time. His condition was well controlled until he switched from his usual medications in the spring of 2018 because they were making him drowsy. Oh God.
Yeah. So in August 2018, Eddie had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act and detained at the Maudsley Hospital after he became concerned that his neighbours were abusing a child, broke into their home and assaulted them, including a pregnant woman who resided in the house. He was initially arrested and released under licence before being admitted to hospital on August 18th.
While at the Maudsley, Eddie continued to display aggressive behaviour, including two separate attempts to strangle another patient. Staff noted that his mental health was unstable, yet they sought to minimise the severity of his actions, describing some incidents as insignificant during internal reviews. He was put on a high-dose regimen of anti-psychotic medication before being discharged on the 12th of November.
Two days later, he shouted abuse at neighbours again, but there was no intervention. Senior coroner Andrew Harris stated during the inquest at Southwark's Coroner's Crown Court that the admission of the care coordinator to escalate to a psychiatrist details of the repetition of the perpetrator's altercation with the neighbours after release from hospital contributed to the death of Maureen. Yeah, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you say something? I know, it's madness.
He went on to state that on the 16th of November, Eddie hallucinated that he was being commanded to rape his mother and in his distorted reasoning believed that it would be better to just kill her. That's so sad. It is so sad, especially when all the commentary around Eddie beforehand, like Eddie and his mum, like they had such a good relationship.
And he was apparently never ever aggressive, ever. Prior to Eddie's release from the Maudsley, Eddie himself had admitted that his mother was probably now afraid of him. However, his family stated that doctors at the hospital put too much emphasis on Eddie and Maureen depending on each other at home and not enough on their safety.
They also said that Maureen and the rest of the family were not given enough information about how violently Eddie was acting on the ward to make an informed decision to bring him home. There were concerns that Eddie was having money stolen from him on the ward, which was said to be a reason why Maureen wanted him to leave. And while there were attempts made to find alternative housing for Eddie, Maureen ultimately agreed to take him back believing that she could manage his care.
And this is a quote. Maureen was not a trained psychiatrist or mental health professional. She was unaware of all the facts and she was a mother who loved her son first and foremost.
The family also criticised doctors' assessment that Eddie was unlikely to be violent towards women. A psychiatrist treating him said that the history of the family showed no evidence that he would ever likely direct violence to his mother. But it also showed that he'd never been violent to anyone.
Exactly. So how do you make that conclusion? I don't know. Eddie's condition may have been exacerbated by drinking alcohol and taking drugs, the coroner said, and he stole cannabis from a fellow patient's bedroom.
But doctors failed to investigate whether drink or drugs would make him more violent. There's also no documentation proving that doctors carried out a detailed assessment of Eddie's mental state before he was discharged. What? Yeah.
What? Apparently. Fucking hell. I know.
Yeah, it beggars belief. That is mind-blowing. Yeah, it beggars belief.
The coroner added that it was a misjudgment to discharge without further risk assessment. You reckon? And that doctors should have carried out a home visit where it would have been likely that he would have been taken back to hospital, but no visit was made. Fuck me.
Because of this, the failure of the care coordinator to escalate the incident to a psychiatrist has contributed to the death of Maureen. Katie, Maureen's granddaughter and Eddie's niece, stated that they wanted SLAM to change how they operate to make sure a tragedy like this does not happen again. She said, My uncle is still in their care.
If he is ever let out again, there's also a risk that he could hurt someone else. These things are playing with people's lives. Even though it's awful that it's our nan that died, at least I don't have to look another family in the eye because it's their relative.
Because it's their relative that's been killed, but it could have been. Eddie was charged with the manslaughter of his mother on the grounds of diminished responsibility and was sentenced to indefinite detention under the Mental Health Act and is currently residing at the Bethlehem Hospital in Beckenham. And while we're at it, there's one final case.
This is all just so sad. I know, I'm so frustrated. I'm bumming everyone out.
I do apologise. So last one. Shortly afternoon on a summer day in July 2015.
Shortly afternoon? Yeah, afternoon. Oh, after. Shortly after noon.
Yeah, shortly afternoon. Shortly afternoon. Later morning.
So shortly after midday. There we go. On a summer day in July 2015, tragedy struck at a family home on Lockhiber Road in Broccoli.
81-year-old Fleurice Caret, a devoted mother and grandmother, was brutally attacked and killed. Fleurice was bludgeoned with a wine bottle and sustained catastrophic head injuries. Her daughter Patricia was also attacked with the same bottle in the home.
Fleurice was described by her family as a loving matriarch who had spent her life providing strength and stability to those around her, including her children, Patricia and Gilbert. Gilbert Caret was 45 and had had a good relationship with his mother Fleurice. However, in the months leading up to her death, their relationship had grown increasingly strained.
In 2010, Gilbert had been diagnosed with depression and I know that we don't use this term anymore, and Asperger's syndrome. So it's now just, I think autism spectrum disorder. Which made it difficult for him to maintain stable employment, although he worked intermittently as a supermarket shelf stacker.
In March 2015, Gilbert's behaviour worsened significantly leading to him being sectioned under the Mental Health Act. He was admitted to the Ladywell Unit, a psychiatric facility located within Lewisham Hospital and managed by South London and Maudsley. Over the following months, Gilbert's mental health appeared to stabilise and he was gradually granted more freedoms.
Despite Gilbert's history of paranoia and aggression, the care he received failed to address the risks he posed adequately. As his condition appeared to stabilise during his time at the Ladywell Unit, staff granted him unescorted day release to visit his mother at her home in July 2015. This decision was made without a thorough risk assessment and with limited consultation with the family.
Fleurice's growing fear of Gilbert's behaviour, evidenced by her precaution of padlocking rooms in her house, was overlooked. Similarly, Gilbert's own paranoid delusions, including claims that his life was in danger, were not given sufficient weight when evaluating his readiness for unescorted release. On the day of the tragedy, there were no safeguards in place to ensure Gilbert's safe return to the hospital.
The family, who had been left uninformed of the potential dangers, had no support or guidance on how to manage the visit. When Gilbert's behaviour escalated into violence, there was no mechanism for immediate intervention. His attack on his sister, where he is said to have told her I have to do it, and subsequent fatal assault on his mother showed the massive gaps in care and lack of protective measures for his family.
The aftermath revealed glaring communication failures between healthcare providers and the family. Fleurice's fears about Gilbert were dismissed and the family's concerns were not factored into the care planning process. The decision to allow Gilbert unescorted release reflected a profound misjudgment of the risks he posed to those around him.
In 2016, Gilbert was charged with the manslaughter of his mother and the grievous bodily harm of his sister. He pleaded guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility and was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order under the Mental Health Act. In a statement following the trial, Fleurice's family expressed profound grief and frustration, saying, we sincerely hope that it makes a real difference so that tragedies like this can never happen to any other family in London ever again.
And so while that's all the cases I've got for you today, I wanted to finish this episode off by reiterating that the perpetrators in these cases are individuals with severe mental health conditions. Well, the perpetrators in these cases are bureaucrats not doing their jobs properly. Exactly.
I was going to say it's very much down to systematic failings within their care. SLAM and SWL SGH are two of the largest providers of mental health services in the UK. And these there are recurring issues across these cases which have to be addressed.
So we've got inadequate risk assessments. So patients like Gilbert and Eddie Watkins were released back to their families without thorough evaluations of their potential risks. And the concerns that the family has had were just kind of dismissed.
There were major failures in communication. So key details about patients' behaviours delusions and care needs were either not recorded or not shared effectively with caregivers. For the kept secret because that's useful.
Exactly. So it's like they had absolutely no the family were not able to care for these people that they did care about in the correct ways. And then procedural errors and administrative oversight.
So these led to delays in critical interventions which is primarily why Alona Zupa was killed. Oh mate. I know very last bit I wanted to kind of try and see if I could find some response from the organisations to see what they had to say.
And also the reason why I decided to do this case was because I was looking through newspaper reports and stuff like that as we do to try and find cases. And I came across a charity called 100 Voices, 100 Families. I'll put the name in the show notes.
But they are essentially an organisation that is looking into that looks into sort of the lack of care provision for people with severe mental health disorders after they've been discharged from mental health services. Okay. And they had done a freedom of information request to SLAM.
And in this freedom of information request, they pulled together a report that basically said that 50 SLAM patients had been responsible for homicides between 2003 and 2018. Wow. Yeah.
So that's kind of where this is all stemmed from. And then I went looking to see who some of those people were, which is how we've ended up with the cases. And they didn't do all 50.
I didn't do all 50. I know. But we also, the other thing that it showed was the amount of kind of failings of others.
They weren't murders, but there's like patients who had died. So there was one who had had substance abuse issues, was in long-term rehabilitation under the substance abuse team. And it was, and he died of an overdose in the hospital.
And it turns out that there was some iffy things about certain people not quite telling the truth about stuff. So there's so much that we could have spoken about. And who knows, maybe there's something on those other cases in another episode.
But so yeah, I wanted to get into the whole thing about deaths in restraint. Exactly. And prone restraint and all of that stuff.
Exactly. So it could be that there is another episode. I said at the start, I wasn't going to do multiple, but maybe I lied.
But I kind of thought it was also fair to try and get the organisation's response to this. Look, before I can kind of feel it coming, before anyone comes, don't ask. Like, with everything we talk about.
No, it's not all men. It's not all institutions. It's not every social worker.
It's not all mental health professionals. Obviously, thank, like we said at the top, like thank fuck there are people doing this work. Oh, God.
Thank fuck organisations and teams like this exist and, you know, would be fucked without them. It doesn't mean you can't highlight when things go wrong and mistakes are made. And like, yeah, I just I'm like, yeah.
There's a part of me that wants to be really defensive of a system that is trying its best in awful conditions, but at the same time when you just don't fucking escalate something or you don't do the proper work that you're meant to do, the whole system falls down, right? And people get forgotten or left down or left behind or whatever you want to call it. Also, it's fine. I'm just yeah, like we know that we know we need these organisations and we know we need to support these organisations, but sometimes they do fuck up.
I mean, it's exactly the same way as when we talk pretty much every week about failures from the police. And we've had one of those in today's episode as well. And last week, so fuck me.
But the, do you know what's really grinding my gears at the moment? Go for it. And this is like a real highlight of it is how often in this podcast when we'd research and write in cases, we try and end on a quote or we try and end or feed in at some point in the story, like the quote from the mother or a quote from the father or a quote from the pet. Like other parents exist.
I don't know what I'm trying to say then. Sparence. Sparence.
Sparence. Like and how many of those quotes end in. We just hope this doesn't happen to another family.
Yeah, exactly. Every single time. What are we learning then? Yeah, I know.
Because this is what? Four cases out of 50. Yeah. And I bet you the fucking rest of them are all end in.
We just want institutional learning. So this doesn't happen again. Yeah, 100 percent.
And the fact that, as I said at the start, like, you know, with the CUC or the Quality Care Commission. Care Quality Commission. Care Quality Commission.
Sorry, that's it. There we go. I shouldn't have tried.
I knew she'd tell me. But yeah, the CUC saying that there were some places where Slam specifically was reporting on is doing really brilliantly. But there are areas where it needs to fucking fix up, look sharp.
Like honestly, it's not and I agree. It's not a case of saying every mental health professional, every policeman, every man, whatever. It's it's just the fact that but you can still have people who fuck up and their fuck up is the reason why someone, four people in this case.
And then the fact that fuck up is either covered over or ignored or just gone. Or that was that one bad person. Means that you're not taking any of that knowledge and enacting it.
So it could happen again. Of course. You are not safeguarding the future in any way.
When you just go that was one bad apple. Yeah, exactly. Agreed.
Maybe you should look at the fucking tree is why a bad apple was allowed to be produced then. I agree. You wouldn't just keep looking at the apple and being like, oh, it's another one.
You'd look at the branch, wouldn't you? Then you'd look at the trunk. Then you'd look at the roots. Then you'd look at the fucking soil.
You'd look at everything. For a bad apple. Hate it.
I know. I know. In response.
Sorry. That's all right. In response to these cases, representatives from SLAM and SWL-SGH, I'm going to be glad but I don't have to say that again, have outlined measures aimed at preventing similar incidents.
Dr. Michael Holland, Medical Director at SLAM stated, we are committed to strengthening our processes to ensure better communication with families and more rigorous risk assessments before discharging patients. He has highlighted plans to implement enhanced care coordination protocols and to increase staff training on managing high-risk patients. At SWL-SGH, CEO Vanessa Ford emphasised their focus on community safety.
We are introducing a system-wide review of discharge procedures and prioritising collaboration with family members and caregivers to ensure patients receive the support they need post-discharge. These steps aim to close the gaps in transitioning care and preventing vulnerable individuals from falling through the cracks. So final thoughts.
Once again, most individuals with severe mental health conditions such as schizophrenia are not violent. Research indicates that less than 1% of all violent crimes are committed by people diagnosed with psychotic illnesses and the vast majority of those who are discharged from mental health hospitals go on to live fulfilling peaceful lives. Moreover, individuals with mental health conditions are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.
Organisations like SLAM and SWL-SGH work with thousands of patients annually, many of whom successfully reintegrate into society, proving that with the right support, mental health recovery is achievable and life-changing. And those stories of success are essential to combating stigma and ensuring compassion. But as Hannah has already said, just because you've got a good organisation at heart doesn't mean that you can't... Just because you've got good intention doesn't mean it's going to just systematically all work out fine.
Exactly. And we're all human and mistakes are made, but as you say, fucking learn from them. Exactly.
But yes, so that was my little foray into South London's mental health care. That was intense, mate. Very well researched.
Thank you very much. You are very welcome. But yeah, I'm sorry if I've angered you.
I forgot about the NHS connection. It's PTSD, it's fine. Bless you.
But yeah, it's your episode next. And then it is our Christmas one. I was going to say, is it Christmas yet? No, I think it's... I've got another.
I think you've got another. I can't remember. I have to look at the schedule.
Better right one. That's going to be a continual mantra, isn't it? Better right one. You know, I just want to take a moment actually to celebrate the landslide momentous, gigantically brilliant response to my last episode, which some are saying, not me, but some are saying is the best instance of podcasting anyone's ever heard.
We haven't recorded it yet. I've literally only just finished it. It's going to be amazing.
You'll have heard it by now. Oh, yeah, that one. Yeah, they will.
Yeah, we haven't. I haven't heard it yet. We are doing things in a bit of a backward order, but it's fine.
It's fine. It's me. Hi, I'm the problem.
It's me. We definitely can't afford her royalties. Definitely not.
Because the Patreon hasn't gone live yet. There is a Patreon coming people. We've started recording.
It's batshit. It is fucking mad. It's batshit crazy.
So if you would like any of that, please do let us know. We've essentially decided that any of the mini episodes that we are going to do for Patreon, because I'll give you a bit of a promo bumper now while we're doing it. Shall I? Okay.
Yeah, so there's lots of differences. But one of the things that you get is extra content from us. Like every other podcast.
Yeah, of course. But we have decided that we're going to use Patreon as a space where we can talk about some of the crimes that happen in South London that don't have a huge amount of info on them, but are still really bloody important. And we think should be spoken about, but wouldn't be able to make up an hour-long episode.
So we are putting them over there on the Patreon. But we've also made the possibly stupid decision that we just need Will to top and tail them with a different jingle. Yeah.
So you will get a jingle, which we seemingly just decide to try and sing every week. Every week. Yeah.
And I haven't heard any of the ones that he's topped and tailed yet because he's working on them. But I am a bit scared. I'm terrified.
But that's what I say. I've said this before. We record these.
I walk out of this tiny shed. And then it's like an hour of my life that just didn't happen. And then I listen back and I'm like, God, I'm clever.
Sound amazing. Or Jesus, I'm manic. It's like, oh, oh, I'm due on.
Because that's with Will as a filter there being like Hannah wouldn't want the public knowing that about her. Yeah, so God knows what that's going to look like. But if you fancy fucking about and finding out, you can head over to Patreon when we launch it, which will be in the new year, I think.
Yeah, just nice. Yeah, we'll do it. We'll do it at the start of January and you'll probably get sick and tired of us banging on about it over on Instagram.
I mean, probably already sick and tired of us talking about it. So yeah, stop talking about that. But yeah, so I suppose then all that's left to do is all the usual stuff.
Like, subscribe. Follow, email us. Look with your eyes at the website.
Hey, as I say, look, don't look at TikTok. No, no, because we've still not done anything with it. Look at Instagram.
We've got a few more people on Instagram now, but she's got a little happy face. And yeah, I was going to say, don't look at the website because I don't think I updated it for about four weeks. Don't look at TikTok.
Don't look at the website. No, the website's been updated now. I think there was just there was a period of time where I was like, oh, has it, Rachel? It has, it has genuinely.
Well, it's up to date as of Harriet. I mean, to be fair to you, you never know who I'm doing in advance because I don't fucking know. I'm like, I've done this one.
Oh, good, brilliant. Were they on the list, Hannah? I don't care. Suck it.
The other thing I was going to say was that if anyone does have any, we've mentioned it a few times on the podcast before, but not really belabored the point. But if anyone does have any cases that they know of that took place in South London that they would like us to cover, then let us know because we're planning for season two. Which is essentially exactly the same as season one, but it's just going to happen a couple of weeks.
The cases will be different. The cases will be different, but nothing else is changing. It's going to be exactly the same.
We're just, and look, I obviously can't write anymore. Well, it's also just going to reread. But it's also just like, why would we, when we obviously reach perfection with the Martianess? I was just about to say, we just release the Martianess every week for 12 weeks.
Yeah, that'll work. But no, we're basically, it's just so that we can have a couple of weeks off for Christmas and we'll be back in January. All the bermancy horror.
You want to re-release them? Fucking love that episode. And no one's listened to it. Like four of you.
What's going on? It is a good one. It is a good one. Let me shine.
I would just really want to get Jane Clawson up to a thousand dollars. That would be great. It's been winding me up.
Just keep looking at it being like, nine, nine, four, nine, nine, five. But they're all like three weeks apart. It's just like, for God's sake.
Anyway, this is boring. And Trevor's, we love you. We do.
We never want to bore you. We appreciate you. And peace out.
Peace out, Atam. Oh, I like that. What's that from? Ushers.
Yeah. Peace out, Atam. Oh, I didn't know that.
I'm not. I'm not cool. I don't know if we're allowed to like Usher anymore.
It's a fucking minefield. I don't know. We might be able to.
I don't know. Okay. I think we just finish it there.
All right. Thank you, Trevor's. Love you.
Bye. Love you.
.png)
