Flat 33: Gruesome rucksack find led police to 'slaughterhouse'

More reports and background on Stephen Griffiths

The passer-by reached into the water to retrieve the bag, which weighed about 25 kilogrammes and was so heavy it had to be held with both hands.

And then out of the rucksack rolled a mutilated woman's severed head, with a broken knife and crossbow bolt embedded in it.

Within minutes, this quiet market town a mile north of Bradford was a crime scene and a crucial site in one of West Yorkshire's largest police investigations of recent times.

As teams of police officers were drafted in to comb the area, detectives searching for the three missing Bradford sex workers feared they were now dealing with a fourth murder.

But forensic tests would later prove that the head belonged to Suzanne Blamires, a woman who, as CCTV footage showed, Griffiths knocked to the ground and shot with a crossbow in the corridor outside his third-floor flat in Bradford three days before the grisly discovery was made.

Police divers were called to search the Aire while the head and the other contents of the rucksack were taken to a laboratory for analysis.

In the days that followed, they found more bags which provided invaluable evidence in the case building against Griffiths.

In total, 81 different pieces of Ms Blamires were recovered from the water or the riverside by West Yorkshire's specialist victim identification team.

Ms Blamires's head could not be identified easily because Griffiths had removed her hair, skin, nose and ears. One of her feet was found next to it in the rucksack.

Numerous other pieces of Ms Blamires were found in a holdall recovered from the river, including her hands.

Robert Smith QC, prosecuting, told yesterday's court hearing that pathologists were able to establish how she died after her body was reconstructed.

They decided she had been beaten with a blunt instrument and had died from severe head injuries caused by the knife and crossbow bolt before she was dismembered.

Small pieces of Ms Blamires's body tissue were also found on a hacksaw and knives discovered in a black suitcase in the river.

Police divers found two body parts in the river which DNA tests showed did not belong to Ms Blamires – a piece of thoracic spine and a section of flesh marked with fine cuts made by a knife.

After further analysis, these were revealed to be the remains of Shelley Armitage, a friend of Ms Blamires and fellow sex worker who had been reported missing on April 26.

The discoveries led police to the horror which had unfolded in Flat 33 in Holmfield Court, off Thornton Road in Bradford, the squalid dive Griffiths had called home for the previous 13 years.

Scenes of crime officers gutted the flat and found that, although the body of the third missing sex worker Susan Rushworth had not been found, the property was spattered with blood belonging to all three women.

Police found evidence that all three women had bled heavily in the flat, which Griffiths called a "slaughterhouse", having been killed and dismembered either with knives, hacksaws or power tools.

Griffiths had tried to cover his tracks, removing blood-spattered tiles from the bathroom and setting fire to other areas of the flat, but disturbing images recovered from a digital camera and laptop camera proved his guilt.

One image showed Ms Armitage lying dead in the bath. Another showed an unidentified victim lying bound on the living room floor with green twine as Griffiths touched her bottom.

And CCTV footage recovered from cameras in Holmfield Court, Bradford city centre and Forster Square showed that, after killing Ms Armitage and Ms Rushworth, Griffiths had taken their dismembered remains out of the flat in bags and taken them to Shipley by train.

Unsuspecting fellow passengers cannot surely have imagined the horrific contents of the luggage.