Daniel Handley

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (September 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Daniel Handley (born April 27, 1985, died October 7, 1994) was an English murder victim.

[edit] Murder

Handley was fixing a chain on his bicycle in Beckton, London, on October 7 1994, when he was approached by two men in a Peugeot 405. The men had been cruising the area looking for a young, pre-teen, fair haired boy to make real their fantasy of abducting such a boy, sexually abusing him and then killing him. The driver of the car claimed to be lost, and asked Daniel to show him directions on a map. The map was placed across the back seat of the car and, when Daniel leaned inside to look at it, one of the men pushed him into the car and the other drove them off. They drove Daniel to a flat, where each man sexually abused him in turn while the other videoed the activity with a camcorder. Afterwards, they took Daniel to a layby near Hungerford in Berkshire, where he was again sexually abused before being strangled to death with a rope. His killers dumped his body in a shallow grave near Bristol, where it was found in March 1995 - five months after he was last seen alive.

On May 17, 1996, two homosexual partners, Timothy Morss, aged 33 and Brett Tyler, aged 30, were convicted of murdering Daniel Handley. The trial judge and the Old Bailey branded them as "vultures" and sentenced them to life imprisonment with a recommendation that they should never be released. Six years later, the pair were given a 50-year minimum term by the Home Secretary David Blunkett.

After the trial, it was revealed that Daniel's killers had met in Wormwood Scrubs Prison during the early 1990s, while they were serving prison sentences for child sex offences. One of the men already owned a house near Bristol, a minicab firm and a florist's shop, assets which had been obtained with his former homosexual partner.

They fled to the Philippines after Daniel's death, but by the time they returned to Britain, Daniel's body had been found, and they were quickly arrested on suspicion of murder.

One of the killers later recalled "the feeling of sexual excitement when I grabbed his body and pushed him into the car, the fear of being caught and the excitement that we might get away with it. It was like a fantasy."