The Friday the 13th Murders

Samantha's crying cranked in David's aching head like a Dante-esque buzzsaw from one of the inner Circles of Hell. It was Friday night, April 13, 1973.

He. Could. Not. Take. It.

His week was hard enough.

Oh, WHY did I drink so much tonight? he thought as he tried to get much-needed rest in the next room while waiting on the children's parents Clive and Elsie to arrive home from Elsie's shift as a popular local bartender at the Punchbowl Tavern.

They should be only about 20 minutes, David reassured himself, pillow over his head to try to keep out the loud machinations of the demon spawn in the next room.

The incessant wailing made him glad his relationship fell apart - that he was 21 and not saddled with kids. I miss Mary but damn, I dodged a bullet there.

Then that one moment's bliss was obliterated again by the crying in the next room.

The Kids. Kids. Kids.

Unemployment was making David feel (generously) "neutered" in having to lean on good friends like Clive and Elsie - even though he rather liked their children: Paul (5), Dawn Maria (2), and Samantha (almost 1).

Still, like rusted nails on a chalkboard, the high-pitched crying made his skin crawl. The sound was visceral, lighting a fire in his bones - all-consuming, hellish, and causing flashes of sharp pain in his forehead and behind his eyes.

KIDS-The KIDS-KIDS

It felt like some unseen force was impaling his organs from the inside. He yearned to jump out of his skin and escape because…

He-Could-Not-Take-It!

That was when an idea hit what was left of his brain: still taking trips off the diving board into the pool of warm beer and Irish whiskey that his liver and brain were floating in.

The Kids. THE Kids. THE KIDS!

(the cadence and volume of the word echoing in his ears like a siren's song from Hades.)

He stumbled down the basement stairs looking for a blunt instrument. Something had to be done…

(his heart going into overdrive - adrenaline powering it like a spark plug! The pain was intensifying! Sharp like a pickaxe split his skull!)

THE KIDS-KIDS-KIDS! KIIIIIIDDDSS!

What resulted from the actions of one man would tear Great Britain apart in grappling with an unspeakable national tragedy. Yet, David McGreavy did not just kill three children as we shall see.

The case stirred profound existential questions about human nature as a whole; specifically, what can drive a normal man to become the "Monster of Worcester" by engaging in a psychotic level of bloodshed that will forever be known in England as the Friday the 13th Murders?

The answer is a case study on what may be the single most important and unseen motivator for seemingly unexplainable violence from people with no prior history of it.

I. Later that Night

Clive and Elsie returned later that night to police, neighbors, and journalists swarming the picket fence around their flat. The police were able to spare the young family the abject horror of seeing what the now absent David had done to their children. No one else let slip the earlier scene either.

Once at the station, police sat the young couple down and explained that their children had been murdered. Elsie, understandably, "went hysterical" (her words) and a doctor on scene gave her a sedative. The young mother would go on to battle deep melancholia, suicide attempts, and suicidal ideation in the nearly 48 years since that night.

In the short time it took Clive to fetch his wife and enjoy a pint at the Punch Bowl - normally about 20 minutes - all three of the Ralph children had been killed, each in a different way, by their babysitter David McGreavy.

II. The Scene and the Display.

Samantha was the first to die that night of a skull fracture. Paul was second after McGreavy strangled him with a length of wire. Dawn was last to die from loss of blood after McGreavy cut her throat using an implement the police were not able to locate.

KIDS-THE KIDS-KIDS!

He was not done. After all this chaos and the blood of three children on his hands, McGreavy went to the cellar of the tiny flat and rummaged around for a pickaxe.

THE KIDSKIDSKIDS!

Emerging from the basement, he heaved all three bodies into one room. From there, he systematically hacked, disemboweled, and disarticulated the three little corpses in front of him.

KIDS! THE KIDS! KIDS!

All the while, Clive and Elsie thought their children were in safe hands. They trusted and liked this man; so did most everyone else.

III. Post-Crime Behavior.

What is truly incredible about this crime is McGreavy's behavior AFTER he killed the children and mutilated their corpses.

McGreavy carried all three bodies outside and impaled them - Part. By. Part. - on the neighbor's picket fence. This act - and the symbolism that arguably runs through it - is truly an oddity in this kind of crime on any continent. He would later say "Kids! Kids! Kids!" echoed in his head throughout the actual commission of these ghastly crimes.

("All I can hear is the kids, kids, fucking kids!")

Around 5 hours later, police captured McGreavy wandering nearby - just walking, in what appeared to be a type of fugue state. Under questioning, he said it both "was and wasn't me."

To thoroughly understand the symbolism at play, it is necessary to examine McGreavy's personal history and the events leading up to the murders.

IV. "Your Average Bloke"

David McGreavy was known as "your average bloke" (to use local journalist Tony Bishop's words) by most of the neighborhood. He would drink occasionally, yet rarely to excess.

When he would have a pint, he could get a bit officious and surly. Perhaps this can be blamed on just how down on his luck this average bloke seemed to be for a large chunk of his life so far.

V. The Early Years: Psychopathy?

David McGreavy was born in Southport, England in 1951. He was the second of six children to Bella and Thomas McGreavy, a sergeant in the RAF Royal Signals.

As the elder McGreavy was a military man, the family moved around quite often. Nevertheless, McGreavy's childhood was normal by any reasonable interpretation. David was educated in military schools wherever his dad was stationed.

David's mother thought their time in Germany was the happiest. David concurred. Favorite activities while there included skiing, picnicking, and hiking. No matter what fun they decided to have, the family had it together.

When the McGreavys were back in London during David's teenage years, he stole his mother's shopping money and took the train from the family home in Cardiff to Liverpool for unspecified reasons. The trip was about four hours.

Is this incident evidence of psychopathic impulsivity in the young David? Or just youthful rebellion? It is impossible to tell for reasons we will get into below.

VI. Naval Service, Discipline, and the Psych Battery

McGreavy was only 15 years old when he ran away to join the Royal Navy. He was stationed at Portsmouth Naval Base where he joined his first ship, the HMS Eagle.

David wanted to join the navy for as long as he could remember. But his father constantly doubted his dedication and loudly told him so.

Meanwhile, colleagues in the navy called McGreavy arrogant and cocky. This equaled regular trouble for the young man. His disciplinary record was long - yet his offenses at this juncture were relatively minor.

There was, however, one notable incident during his navy stint. David was working as a steward in the ship's mess hall - a job he apparently enjoyed. One day he noticed his name written in a commanding officer's notebook.

McGreavy thought that his name on that notebook list equaled an unwelcome change of job. The next day he came to work very drunk and agitated.

Separate from the drunken incident, McGreavy broke into an officer's quarters, ransacked his wardrobe when he set fire to papers by it through (according to McGreavy) accidentally dropping his cigarette on it. McGreavy raised the alarm at 2:30 that night and the fire was extinguished.

McGreavy believed his commanding officer would see the fire as an accident and not sanction him at all. He was sorely mistaken when the brass found him not guilty of arson but guilty of negligence. The verdict came with a 90-days-in-the-brig sentence for the young McGreavy.

The military also administered a thorough psychological battery on David McGreavy during his sentence. His commanding officer never revealed the results, even to David's parents.

Might the government be holding on to this because it showed some predictors of violence and they don't want to be called negligent for sitting on the information when McGreavy cracked and brutally killed three children? It's possible.

Fire starting is one element to check off on the famed "MacDonald Triad" otherwise known as the "Triad of Sociopathy." The other elements are animal cruelty and bed wetting past childhood.

There's no evidence that the author is aware of which shows McGreavy checking either of those other two boxes in the Triad. But the fire was still undoubtedly a show of great impulsivity on McGreavy's part. This alone can be an indicator of sociopathy and another interesting differential diagnosis which we will get into below.

VII. 1971: McGreavy Falls in Love.

The Navy kept McGreavy despite whatever results the psychological test battery showed. In 1971 he was given a land-based assignment at Portsmouth after finishing a tour of the Far East in the HMS Eagle.

That was when a friend suggested David write his sister Mary: he thought they might hit it off. So, McGreavy did. The two ended up exchanging letters at least twice a week from January to April of '71.

McGreavy's letters were long, loving, and filled with hyperbolic "purple prose" (as Romance writers call it). All this even though he had never physically met Mary.

That would change in April when he met her physically for the first time. Only one week later, he would propose to her in Birmingham. This kept with his impulsive pattern in this sphere where his actions showed a fear of being alone.

McGreavy saw Mary for two long weekends in June and July that year. For the rest of it, he wrote her at least three letters a week, each consisting of five to six pages.

McGreavy's mother did not like Mary one bet. Mrs. McGreavy thought she was a hypochondriac because Mary was in constant - legitimate - pain from a spinal issue. Without further treatment of it she would be paralyzed.

By August, McGreavy's naval career went out with a whimper when he was dismissed and returned to his parents' house devastated. We don't know the exact reason he was dismissed as the Navy has not released his service record.

VIII. Borderline Personality Disorder?

There are some interesting psychological signs that McGreavy arguably shows which could point in the direction of Borderline Personality Disorder as a possible untreated diagnosis of what was happening with him. This doesn't equal "insanity" in the legal sense. That question is examined below.

Per the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V, BPD is defined as "a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, marked impulsivity, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts…" These contexts include the romantic, but overall, they tend to revolve around one central issue: abandonment and the sufferer's trying to prevent it in any way possible.

In terms of McGreavy, it could be argued that his abandonment stemmed primarily from moving around so much as a youth and how loud his father was about his opinion of his son being unfit for naval service. This morphed into another abandonment - this time by the institution he swore to fight for and uphold - when the navy dropped him without giving a reason.

It is hard to imagine McGreavy didn't take all steps he could rationally take to avoid these abandonments while his anxiety cranked 100mph about them. In BPD, this often equals outbursts of unreasonable anger - which there is proof of when McGreavy would tie too many on. While this was a rare occurrence, it did happen occasionally.

Abandonment runs like a leitmotif through the life of David McGreavy. It is always at least in the background, and very often in the foreground, as it soon would be with Mary.

IX. Mary & the Melancholia.

As McGreavy was unexpectedly broke by August of 1971, he couldn't give Mary an expensive church wedding.

Yet, it seemed David - not Mary - was the one obsessed with the big church wedding. This arguably can be viewed as another symptom of BPD, if indeed David had it. While "grandiose narcissism" is more allied with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, it can be a more tertiary delusional feature of BPD.

By New Year's Eve 1971, Mary wanted out. David was getting nowhere on the job front and she had just had enough. So, she broke the engagement, telling McGreavy she had never loved him in the process. David, for his part, wanted to wed her at Christmas.

As the reader can likely foresee by now, this development crushed the still young and fragile David.

X. 1972

David fell into a deep depression while going through all of this and still living with his parents in Worcester. He parked himself on a couch for hours, refusing to do chores, contribute to rent, or look for a job.

This is where, in the author's opinion, you see another diagnosis which can often be comorbid with BPD: profound depression, often bordering on the psychotic. McGreavy couldn't get out of bed most days and often thought of suicide.

XI. The Ralphs

It was at the end of the year that McGreavy moved in with Clive and Elsie Ralph in their little home on Gillam Street. The house was only about a mile from his parents' house.

At the time, Clive and Elsie only had 3-year-old Paul and 20-month-old Dawn with Samantha on the way. By all accounts, the Ralphs were a happy family. They carried a lot of optimism as young families tend to do. They could take on the world as long as they had each other.

David was a welcome addition to the family - Clive had known him from when they were boys. The rest of the family seemed to like him well too. He helped quite a lot around their little flat: cleaning, cooking, and even playing with the children.

The Ralphs had zero reason to suspect there was a monster laying just under the surface of the innocuous façade of their new friend.

Clive even picked David up from the pub that very night. He'd had five to seven pints of beer and gotten into a fight with a friend after a cigarette was put out in his drink.

XII. Arrest and Trial

There are certain things your humble, American author will never understand about jurisprudence on any continent. Why a triple child murderer would ever be released ranks quite near the top of those things.

McGreavy was sentenced to multiple life terms with 20-year minimums. He was often abused by other prisoners and had to be kept in protective custody for his own safety for much of the time he was behind bars.

He allegedly accepted rehabilitation and would often paint. In 2019, he was released.

XIII. "The Demon Drink"

Which leads us into the central question of these crimes. Was McGreavy insane or so out of his mind on "the demon drink" that he could not control himself?

One major detail that speaks against insanity is HOW he killed the Ralph children. Three separate instruments of death speak to three separate lines of thought. This in turn equals some degree of premeditation.

A different, divergent line of thought existed between each murder because he went to grab another implement to do the deed. Think about what that means for a second. To quote from McGreavy's confession "I did the same to Dawn and used the piece of curtain wire on Paul… On Paul I used the wire. Everything just seem [sic] to cave in."

A purely "drunken rage" does not look like this. It is not so… organized. Like a lit match in a dynamite cache, the explosion happens and flame billows out in a massive cloud destroying everything in its path until it burns out. THAT is drunken rage.

Yes, McGreavy was hammered that night. But that fact does not exist in a vacuum. Nor does it function well by itself - in light of the evidence - as a way to explain this crime.

XIV. Dissociation

Alcohol fits much better and more cogently in the picture in a surprising way - as a contributor to something that was perhaps underlying in McGreavy. If indeed this line of inquiry is true - and not just speculation - McGreavy would fit into a larger pattern of psychological disturbance that is surprisingly common amongst people who suddenly become violent.

A working definition of "psychological dissociation" is needed before diving deeper. For our purposes here, dissociation is a "mental process of disconnecting from one's thoughts, feelings, actions, memories or sense of identity."

While it can happen to anyone, there are four distinct psychiatric disorders that revolve around dissociation. Dissociative amnesia involves the "inability to recall important personal information that would not typically be lost with ordinary forgetting. It is usually caused by trauma or stress."

Dissociative fugue (also called psychogenic fugue) is a form of dissociative amnesia but involves movement. From the Merck Manual:

"A dissociative fugue may last from hours to months, occasionally longer. If the fugue is brief, people may appear simply to have missed some work or come home late. If the fugue lasts several days or longer, people may travel far from home, form a new identity, and begin a new job, unaware of any change in their life.

Many fugues appear to represent disguised wish fulfillment or the only permissible way to escape from severe distress or embarrassment. For example, a financially distressed executive leaves a hectic life and lives as a farm hand in the country.

Thus, dissociative fugue is often mistaken for malingering (faking physical or psychologic symptoms to obtain a benefit) because both conditions can give people an excuse to avoid their responsibilities (as in an intolerable marriage), to avoid accountability for their actions, or to reduce their exposure to a known hazard, such as a battle. However, dissociative fugue, unlike malingering, occurs spontaneously and is not faked. Doctors can usually distinguish the two because malingerers typically exaggerate and dramatize their symptoms and because they have obvious financial, legal, or personal reasons (such as avoiding work) for faking memory loss."

Depersonalization (also called "derealization") disorder "consists of persistent or recurrent feelings of being detached (dissociated) from one's body or mental processes, usually with a feeling of being an outside observer of one's life (depersonalization), or of being detached from one's surroundings (derealization). The disorder is often triggered by severe stress."

The last major dissociative disorder is dissociative identity disorder. This is the newest name for multiple personality disorder.

Research says psychological and sensory dissociation is surprisingly common amongst this class of offender. It is "a risk factor for violence and is seen most often in crimes of extreme violence." Another notes, "dissociation predicts violence in a wide range of populations and may be crucial to an understanding of violent behavior."

This isn't to necessarily say McGreavy was legally insane at the time of the murders.

It seems likely that, at the very least, McGreavy was in a type of dissociative fugue state exacerbated by alcohol. Recall him being found walking aimlessly away and saying, "it both was and wasn't me."

XV. Conclusion

We will never know why David McGreavy brutally cut short three lives that Friday the 13th in 1973. Only David McGreavy knows that - if there's any justice in the universe, he will be forced to contemplate that very question - and torture his soul - every day until he dies.

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Journalist and dogged student of all things forensic, Wess Haubrich, examines the nitty, gritty details you didn't know about famous (and not so famous but equally weird) crimes and their unseen motivations. Thanks for reading!

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