Michael Stone (criminal)
[7][12][13] He was known to carry weapons, including knives and guns, and would also attack victims with ammonia squirted from a Jif lemon bottle.[11] Throughout his criminal career, Stone would steal from garden sheds, taking anything he could sell, and would mug people at cash dispensers, in part to fund his heroin addiction.[8][9] She had received two black eyes, a swollen mouth and heavy bruising from where he had held her down, injuries which the police later said bore a striking resemblance to those on the bodies of the Russells, whom he was later convicted of murdering.[14] Prior to the murders, he had received support for his drug addiction and mental health problems and was under the supervision of the National Probation Service.[19][23] On 9 July 1996, in a country lane in Chillenden, Kent, England, Lin Russell, aged 45, her two daughters, six-year-old Megan and nine-year-old Josie and their dog Lucy, were tied up and savagely beaten with a hammer while walking home from a swimming gala.[10][9] The trio had walked past a parked car on the lane before a man got out wielding a claw hammer and then demanded money.[10] Lin urged Josie to run home and get help but the attacker caught her, blindfolded her with strips of her swimming towel and tied her to a tree before hitting her until she passed out.[25] In July 1997, police arrested 37-year-old Michael Stone for the crimes after tip-offs resulting from a reconstruction on the Crimewatch television programme.[28][11] Stone had told a psychiatric nurse that he dreamt about torturing people and that he fantasised about killing children and running about in woods.[9] In his outbursts to medical staff, Stone had asserted his own dangerousness, saying he was too violent to be held in prison and would need to be admitted to Broadmoor Hospital, with notions of achieving "fame and glory" for his crimes.[11] A friend also rang police after the reconstruction to say he believed Stone looked like the E-fit shown on the programme and reported that he had recently been acting strangely.[24] Police discovered that a lawnmower had been stolen from a cottage in Chillenden on the same day of the murders, only 200–400 yards (180–370 m) away from the scene of the attacks, and believed that Stone was responsible for this theft.[33] A key witness in the case was a woman driving on the adjacent road, who said she had seen a man hurriedly emerging out of the junction by the murder site in a beige car.[28] A third witness also testified seeing a beige car parked by bushes nearby, a Ford Escort, and said that when he took his dog for a walk to the same spot half an hour later he found a string bag with the strips of towel in it that had been used to restrain the Russells, and which were smeared with their blood.[28][9] After the arrest of Stone, surviving victim Josie Russell had said that she recognised him from newspaper pictures in articles covering the story, but evidence admissibility laws prevented this from being heard in court.[47] Stone had threatened to kill his probation officer, his family, and criminal justice staff in an "aggressive outburst" with a psychiatric nurse five days before the murders of Lin and Megan Russell.The proposed measures were described as "draconian" by Nacro and a number of changes were made before the bill was finally passed as the Mental Health Act 2007.[49][50] Stone continues to argue that his conviction is a miscarriage of justice on the grounds that the evidence against him came from another prisoner, who was described as a "career criminal"[51] who the Crown acknowledged "would lie when it suited him".[54] As part of its investigations, the CCRC had carried out a number of forensic tests on the materials found at the crime scene at the request of Stone's legal team.[54] Subsequently, Stone's legal team applied in 2011 for a judicial review, seeking court orders which would force the CCRC to reconsider their decision.[55] Stone's legal team had asked the CCRC to re-examine a 1 metre (3 ft 3 in) long boot lace which had been used in the attacks and had been dropped at the scene of the crime by the murderer.He [Bellfield] never left my side, all day and all night, so there's absolutely no way he could have got from Twickenham, where I lived, or Windsor, where I kept my horses, to Kent, done what they say he did, and got back without me not knowing he was there.[59]In 2013, criminologist David Wilson investigated the possibility that Levi Bellfield could be responsible for the murders in an episode of his Killers Behind Bars: The Untold Story series.[34] In May and June 2017, the case was scrutinised in a two-part BBC Two programme, The Chillenden Murders, in which a team of independent experts re-examined the evidence,[13] and suggested that the wrong man might have been convicted.[61] On 29 November 2017, BBC Wales reported that Levi Bellfield had allegedly confessed to the murders to a fellow prisoner, giving details that "would only be known by the killer".[62][63] However, a member of Stone's legal team stated that there was nothing in Bellfield's statement which was not already in the public domain, suggesting he could have fabricated it using known evidence.[64] The Metropolitan Police previously investigated allegations that Bellfield was involved in the Russell murders and found no evidence to support the suggestion.[5] As part of the review, the CCRC announced in November that it was performing new forensic testing on some of the evidence in the Russell murders using a technique that had not been discovered at the time of Stone's conviction.[72] In May 2021, it came to light that Kent Police had relocated the lace found at the scene of the attacks, which had been mislaid, and that Stone's defence team had asked for it to be analysed for DNA traces, hoping it could lead to the overturning of his conviction.