Colin Campbell

Biography

Colin Frederick Campbell (born 16 September 1947) is a British double murderer who in the early 1980s abducted two separate and unrelated women in West London and killed them in sexually motivated attacks. In 2013, 32 years after the event, Campbell was convicted of the high-profile unsolved murder of 17-year-old Claire Woolterton after a DNA match was found to him. He was already in prison for the 1984 killing of Deirdre Sainsbury, but had had his murder conviction in this case downgraded to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility in 1999 after he claimed that he had only killed her due to having an epileptic fit. In an open prison and about to be released in the early 2010s, Campbell was finally apprehended for Woolterton's murder, which had led to one of the UK's biggest manhunts at the time and a large amount of press coverage due to it being a murder of a minor. The epilepsy experts who had helped Campbell win his appeal in the Sainsbury case accepted that epilepsy could not explain two violent and sexually motivated murders, and in sentencing the judge said that it had been wrong to downgrade his conviction to manslaughter in 1999. Detectives said that had he not been caught, Campbell would have potentially become a serial killer, a term usually used to describe a repeat killer who has killed at least three victims. Campbell is imprisoned at HM Prison Woodhill. The conviction of Campbell for Woolterton's murder was noted in the media for the decades-long gap between the murder and the killer being identified, and was also celebrated for being another successful case of DNA finally solving an infamous cold case in the UK following the recent solving of the murder of Yolande Waddington in 1966 using DNA.

Bio from Wikipedia