10 Serial Killers Who Got Away With It
4. David McGreavy
Murders: 3
Dates active: 1973
Quite often, people do go ‘off the rails’ in their younger years, rebelling from their strict parents, school teachers, and frequently getting involved in illegal acts. So, when David McGreavy was dismissed from his Navy post in 1971 for starting a fire in a mess wardroom, his whole life seemed to crash around him.
Moving back in with his parents at age 20, they soon grew tired of his heavy drinking and lack of drive to find work, and kicked him out onto the streets of Worcestershire, England. He was then taken in by a couple named Clive and Elsie Ralph and lived with them and their three children.
Due to their busy lifestyle, the Ralphs would be out working most of the time, leaving McGreavy to look after the three children kind of like a baby-sitter. Reports say that he was loved by the Ralph family and would even act like a father figure to the children who adored him immensely... so why did he brutally murder them all?
On the night of 13 April 1973, Clive left to go and pick up Elsie from her work at the family pub. The kids were sound asleep, and McGreavy had been out drinking heavily... but he had still been left alone with the children. When the Ralphs returned, McGreavy was gone, and the police were already at their family home. They were then taken to the police station and told how their three children were brutally slaughtered.
McGreavy had been thrown into a drunken rage by nine-month-old Samantha crying for her bottle. Instead of feeding the innocent child, he strangled her to death before turning his attention to the other two children, slitting two-year-old Dawn’s throat, and strangling four-year-old Paul to death with a curtain wire. If that wasn’t gruesome enough, he then mutilated their tiny bodies and impaled them on their neighbour’s fence.
He was in prison for 46 years under protection as he was subject to violence from other prisoners, but in December 2018, he was released on parole as he had apparently ‘changed significantly’ through serving his time. What a monster!