The killer the police missed
After the first death, police arrested him and took his DNA.
So how did he go on to kill three more men?
At the end of summer 2014, three weeks apart, the bodies of two young men were found in the same east London churchyard by the same woman walking her dog.
Both men were of a similar build. Both in their 20s. Both propped up in the same position in the graveyard.
Both men were gay. Both died from drug overdoses. Neither came from Barking, the area in which they had been found.
Police deemed the deaths of the men found in the churchyard, Gabriel Kovari and Daniel Whitworth, to be non-suspicious.
An apparent suicide note found with Whitworth’s body appeared to explain what had happened. Kovari had died after taking drugs during sex, the note said, and a guilt-stricken Whitworth had taken drugs in order to end his life, it suggested.
But a year later – in September 2015 – another body was found, propped up on the other side of the churchyard wall. Again it was a young gay man – Jack Taylor – who had died of a drug overdose.
How could this be coincidence? Three men found dead within a few feet of each other.
But the key to the case was another man, Anthony Walgate, who had died nearby before any of the others.
He had been found only 500m from the church, outside the flat of a man named Stephen Port.
The truth was that Port had killed all four men and then fooled the authorities with a cover-up that, while elaborate, should have been easily uncovered.
Anthony Walgate
Anthony Walgate wanted to be a fashion designer. Born and raised in Hull, he had come to London to pursue his ambitions, and was living in Golders Green and studying at the University of Middlesex.
At 04:18 on Thursday 19 June 2014 the ambulance service received a call to report an incident on Cooke Street, Barking.
"There's a young boy, looks like he's collapsed outside," the caller said. He could have "had a seizure or something, or just drunk".
Paramedics and police officers found a young man, a black holdall bag resting next to him, sitting against a wall. He was dead.
There were no signs of struggle or injury, but police noticed that the man's top was pulled up, exposing his midriff, as if he had been dragged.
His bag held a dark brown bottle containing a small amount of liquid, but his mobile phone was missing.
The nearest CCTV camera, on a roundabout, was found to be faulty.
The 999 call had been made by Stephen Port. After meeting his flatmate outside, police entered 62 Cooke Street to find Port asleep in bed.
In a witness statement, Port told police he had come home at 04:00 after a night shift to find "a male lying in my front door" and "I tried to rouse him by slapping his face".
He said the man made a "gurgling" noise. Propping the man against a wall, he called an ambulance before going indoors and falling asleep.
Port was lying.
Officers soon found Walgate had been hired as an escort by Port, just prior to his body being found.
Walgate had been occasionally escorting since 2012.
Taking his usual precautions, he had told close friends about a job in Barking and shown them a picture of the man he was going to meet.
When officers discovered the man was Port, they arrested him on 26 June 2014 on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. As well as the lies in his statement, he was suspected of taking Walgate's phone.
Interviewed over two days, Port initially stuck to his original account. He then gave a confused account of meeting another “Anthony”, who wasn’t this one, and asked detectives: “Can I just say for the scenario – if it was an accident, and if he did have a fit in my place, is that still my fault?”
Port eventually changed his story and said he had contacted Walgate on an escort site called “Sleepyboys”, agreed a fee and met him at Barking station.
At the flat, according to Port, Walgate had taken drugs from two small bottles, becoming sick at one point.
After twice having sex, Port said, Walgate was preparing to leave but had suddenly become tired. Rather than getting a late train home he had gone to bed wearing his clothes and shoes.
The next day, after leaving Walgate snoring when he went to work, Port said he had returned late at night to find him still in a deep sleep.
Port told officers he had got into bed himself but panicked after waking about 03:00 to find Walgate stiff and rigid.
He carried him outside and sat him down before fetching his bag. He worried that if Walgate was dead, “they're gonna think I murdered him or something”.
Port denied knowing what had happened to Walgate's mobile phone.
Police searched Port’s flat and seized a laptop computer. They also took samples of his DNA.
But despite police seeking advice from a homicide assessment team, the case was never treated as murder.
He was bailed and the Crown Prosecution Service was asked to decide whether he should be charged with perverting the course of justice.
Stephen Port
Stephen Port was born in 1975 in Southend, Essex. At a year old, his family moved to Dagenham in east London, where his parents still live.
His father, now retired, worked as a cleaner for the local council and his mother as a supermarket cashier.
Aged 16, Stephen went to art college, but it proved too expensive for his parents and he spent two years training as a chef instead.
He found kitchen work at local businesses, events and weddings, before eventually settling at West Ham bus depot where he cooked for drivers and staff.
He came out as gay in his mid-twenties.
His sister, Sharon, said at his eventual trial she "always kind of knew" but their mother "had a problem with it" as she wanted grandchildren.
Port left home in 2006 for a small flat in Barking, close to where he had grown up.
The flat brought new freedoms - there were parties, and partners were able to stay over.
Friends noticed a strange, childlike quality. He would sit watching cartoons and visit children's shops alone to buy himself toys, some of which were placed overlooking his bed.
But Port was also engaged in increasingly transgressive behaviour - cheating on partners, taking drugs, working as a male escort and eventually acting as a pimp to others.
He became a habitual user of GHB, which can be taken as a powder but is usually dissolved in water, and a colourless liquid called GBL, which is drunk and then converts into GHB in the body.
The drugs can lead to feelings of euphoria in small doses but in only slightly larger amounts can cause unconsciousness and death.
The rise of social media, which coincided with Port's move to Barking, saw him go out less often and instead retreat into the online world.
Port joined, left, and rejoined various social networks, sometimes using different names alongside his own picture or even creating entirely fictitious identities.
He used dating sites to seek out sexual encounters, particularly with youthful looking men, typically in their teens and early twenties, known as "twinks".
He also had a series of longer-term relationships, which became ever more exploitative, his trial later heard.
In 2007, Port started seeing a 16-year-old schoolboy he had approached online.
The relationship lasted over two years but the teenager discovered Port was being unfaithful. There were hints of Port's other activities - a glimpse of his online escort profile, a video of him with another man, and the teenager being told that he himself featured in a sex tape that Port had shown to someone else.
Port's next partner remembers him lying routinely throughout their two years together.
He also recalls Port's vast sexual appetite. By this time, he was bringing escort clients back to the flat and arranging for young men to visit for group sex, which, in order to please Port, his partner joined in with.
Some later boyfriends, who were highly vulnerable young men, became prostitutes themselves while in volatile relationships with Port.
They were advertised on escort sites with Port's phone number provided as the contact. Some of the photographs included in an escort profile showed one of the men naked and either asleep or unconscious on a bed.
Port regularly searched the internet for "drug rape" pornography.
People he corresponded with online learned about his obsession, with one person being told "the last young guy I met just wanted to get high on g [GHB]" and that it was like having sex with "a rag doll as he was so out of it".
But at least one of the online pornography videos he accessed featured a storyline about drugs being slipped into someone's drink.
It was a story that Port brought to life.
In early 2012 a student in his late teens spent a night with Port after they met on the gay dating app Grindr.
At Port's trial, the man said his first impression after being collected at Barking station was that his date was "quite polite, friendly, nothing that would ring any alarm bells to me".
At the flat, Port put on an animated film in the lounge and offered a small glass of red wine that "tasted bitter, which I attributed to it being cheap".
After drinking the wine, the student "noticed a sludge in the bottom of the glass". He quickly felt "very dizzy and tired". Port suggested he go to lie down in the bedroom, which he did alone and immediately fell asleep.
When he awoke, Port was raping him. The young man was "only half aware of what was happening".
After being awake for about a minute he fell unconscious again.
He woke in the morning feeling "disorientated".
Port drove him to the station and spoke "as if nothing had happened". The man was too scared to say anything about the previous night.
Another man, a Muslim in his early twenties, who had never consumed alcohol or drugs, met Port on the Fitlads website early in the summer of 2014 and went to his flat on five occasions.
The first four visits were unremarkable, but on the fifth, Port plied him with drugs.
Port gave the man poppers, a legal recreational drug, which he used. After a couple of minutes the young man fell asleep.
When he woke Port gave him a glass of clear liquid, saying it was water.
“As soon as I drank it, I went unconscious,” the young man said. “The next thing I remember I was on the floor screaming and shouting. It was like I was going mad.”
The man’s underwear had been removed. Panic set in. He had to get home.
“Then he was putting clothes on me. I felt a bit paralysed.”
Port helped him to Barking station.
“He was kind of dragging me along and holding me up.”
The man recalls "screaming and shouting” during the journey.
Upon arrival, “everyone in the station was looking at me, as if I was probably mad”.
British Transport Police attended and an ambulance was called.
But the young man did not want to involve the police for fear of his parents – who knew nothing of his sexuality - discovering what had happened.
Port was “worried and jittery”, according to police at the scene. He claimed the young man had arrived at his flat in that state and that he was merely taking him home.
As there were no allegations of an offence, both men were allowed to leave.
Later that night, after arriving home, the young man called Port.
“The more angry I got, the less he answered my questions. I got the impression it was a normal thing what happened to me.”
Two weeks later Port met Anthony Walgate.
Bodies in the graveyard
The church of St Margaret of Antioch is an island of calm in the urban bustle of Barking, on the eastern side of London.
Sitting inside a pleasant park, and bordered on the north by a ruined abbey, it’s a sudden scenic contrast from the busy surrounding roads and the high street leading away to the train station.
On the morning of 28 August 2014, while walking her dog, Barbara Denham found the body of a young man in an upright position in the south-west corner of St Margaret’s graveyard.
It was the body of 22-year-old Gabriel Kovari.
Just over three weeks later, on 20 September 2014, Denham was again walking her dog, and found another body on the same spot.
It was Daniel Whitworth, 21.
“When I looked and saw another young boy sitting in exactly the same position in exactly the same place, it was a bit like deja vu. I thought I don’t believe it,” Denham recalls.
While on bail for perverting the course of justice, Stephen Port had killed both men.
Kovari, also known as Gabriel Kline, was a Slovakian who had come to London in spring 2014 from Spain, where he had been living with his boyfriend, Thierry Amodio.
He struggled to find a stable place to live until he met John Pape, who invited him to stay in the spare room of his south London flat.
"He was kind of sweet-natured, intent on living in London," Pape recalls.
Gabriel Kovari
After several weeks with Pape, Kovari announced he had found a room to rent in Barking. Pape insisted he could stay longer, but Kovari wanted to move on.
On 23 August 2014, Kovari moved out.
Pape told him that if things did not work out in Barking he was always welcome to stay again. Three days later he texted Kovari: "Hey, hows it going in Barking?" but got no response.
On the day he moved out, Kovari had messaged another friend with a Google map pinpointing the location of his new home - Cooke Street, Barking.
A day later Kovari wrote: "I sleep in the living room on the sofa." Referring to his new landlord, he said: "I don't want to sleep with him in his bed."
"Dirty old man," his friend replied.
The friend received a message from Kovari early the next day saying "I'm fine" and then a smiley face emoticon.
It was the last message he received from Kovari's phone.
Ryan Edwards was a neighbour and friend of Port, although as Port got ever more into drugs they had seen each other less.
On 24 August 2014, Port sent a message inviting Edwards to meet his "new Slovakian twink flatmate".
That night Edwards briefly met Kovari and messaged Port afterwards to say he was really nice. Port replied by saying he was "taking good care of him hehe".
The next day Kovari messaged Edwards and said that "Stephen is not a nice person". Something had happened to make him unhappy in his new home.
In the afternoon of the following day Port sent a text message to Edwards who replied by asking: "How is Gabriel?"
Port said he had "gone to stay with another local guy… some soldier guy he had been chatting to online".
When Kovari's body was found on 28 August, he was wearing sunglasses. Two bags placed next to him contained his possessions. His clothing was pulled up to reveal his midriff, just as Anthony Walgate's had been.
John Pape was one of the first to be informed.
"Four police turned up at my door and they asked me, 'do you know Gabriel Kovari?' and they said he'd died in a cemetery.
"I felt a need to find out more. I ended up Googling the report of Gabriel's death."
Another unexplained death in June came up.
"It sounded so similar. Another young man - 22, 23 - who'd died in unexplained circumstances. Then I can remember looking how close St Margaret's Church was to Cooke Street where this first death had occurred. That set off alarm bells."
Within a few days Pape had contacted Gabriel's former boyfriend on Facebook with concerns. "I was advising that he bring that to the attention of the police and the coroner."
Kovari's ex-partner, Thierry Amodio, had begun his own research.
On 10 September he noticed someone called Jon Luck was following Kovari on Facebook, so wrote to ask if they knew each other.
In his reply, Jon Luck expressed surprise on hearing Kovari had died and said they had spent two nights together around 22 August.
Jon Luck described himself as a 21-year-old former gay porn star from California who now lived in Dagenham and was studying humanities at university.
He said Kovari had been collected from his home by an older Irish man called Tony who drove a green Toyota.
Jon Luck asked Amodio:
Will police want to speak to me as my DNA would be on him?
Over the following days, Amodio kept asking for information about Tony in the green Toyota.
Then on 19 September 2014, Jon Luck said he had found Tony:
I text him and asked what happene to Gab and he said h left with a young guy about his age named Dan and they was heading to a party/orgy in Barking… Dan is tall, light brown hair he said, loks similar to Gab just a bit taller, very slim, when I told him Gab is dead, he said he don't want anything to do with it, leave him alone.
Jon Luck described the parties as places where older men "get young guys so high that they then just rape them".
Amodio messaged Jon Luck to say that the police had called to tell him of Dan's death:
that guy Dan is dead too. and they know he knew Gabriel.
Jon Luck replied:
please don't let them arrest me, i will try find a much info as i can to help you… please let me know if you have any more info from the police, names etc.
Amodio asked him to call police and provided the number of a Barking and Dagenham detective, but Jon Luck said he was "scared" and made excuses.
The following morning Jon Luck made a telling suggestion:
maybe Dan knew what happened to Gab and could not life with the guilt or something like that.
That afternoon, the detective whose number had been given to Jon Luck responded to emails sent by Amodio the previous evening.
Amodio had provided a link to Jon Luck's Facebook profile. He had also sent over a story from the Barking and Dagenham Post about the death of Anthony Walgate and asked: "Can this be related to Gabriel and Daniel?"
Gabriel with his ex-partner, Thierry Amodio
The detective replied: "The news on the Barking and Dagenham Post is nothing about Gabriel or Daniel.
"Have you contacted Jon Luck? Get Jon Luck to contact me."
He emailed the detective again four days later: "Any update regarding Gabriel? did Jon Luck call you?"
It took three days for a response: "I have not received any phone call or text messages or email from Jon Luck. I would appreciate it if you could get him to contact me."
Jon Luck never contacted detectives, nor they him. Had they traced the person behind the Jon Luck Facebook account they would have found Stephen Port.
The "Dan" whose death was linked to Gabriel Kovari was 21-year-old Daniel Whitworth from Gravesend, Kent.
Barbara Denham, the same dogwalker who discovered Kovari, found Whitworth's body on the same spot on the morning of 20 September 2014, only hours after Jon Luck had first mentioned "Dan".
He was sitting against the graveyard wall on top of a blue bed sheet.
The clothing on the top half of his body exposed his stomach, again like he had been dragged.
His mobile phone was missing and later tests showed that a small brown bottle found with his body contained GHB.
His left hand contained an apparent suicide note. It claimed responsibility for the death of Gabriel:
The 'suicide note' found by Daniel Whitworth's body
I am sorry to everyone, mainly my family, but I can't go on anymore, I took the life of my friend Gabriel Kline, we was just having some fun at a mate's place and I got carried away and gave him another shot of G. I didn't notice while we was having sex that he had stopped breathing. I tried everything to get him to breathe again but it was too late, it was an accident, but I blame myself for what happened and I didn't tell my family I went out. I know I would go to prison if I go to the police and I can't do that to my family and at least this way I can at least be with Gabriel again, I hope he will forgive me.
BTW Please do not blame the guy I was with last night, we only had sex then I left, he knows nothing of what I have done. I have taken what g I have left with sleeping pills so if it does kill me it's what I deserve. Feeling dizey now as took 10 min ago so hoping you understand my writing.
I dropped my phone on way here so it should be in the grass somewhere. Sorry to everyone.
Love always
Daniel P W."
Whitworth was an ambitious young chef who was building a promising career. He loved his job and worked extremely hard.
He lived in Kent with his long-term boyfriend Ricky Waumsley. When apart they stayed in constant touch, and it was Waumsley who raised the alarm after his boyfriend did not return home.
Those who knew Whitworth were appalled at the suggestion he had killed someone. And they did not believe he had been suicidal.
But Barking and Dagenham Police, despite again seeking advice from a homicide assessment team, deemed the death non-suspicious and accepted the note at face value.
The prosecution told Port's eventual trial that detectives neither fully investigated Whitworth's movements in the hours before his death nor tried to find the person referred to in the note as "the guy I was with last night".
Had they done so it would have led them to Stephen Port.
Port's DNA was on the blue bed sheet, on Whitworth's body and on his clothes. It was also on a sleeve that the note was found in. The police already had his DNA on their database.
Port had met Whitworth on the Fitlads website in August that year.
They exchanged messages. On 3 September, Port asked if they could go for a drink before dinner at his Barking flat: "Just so you can get to know me a bit so you know I'm not some psycho."
Whitworth was last seen by a colleague leaving work in Canary Wharf on 18 September. He mentioned he was going to meet friends in Barking.
In January 2015, Port was charged with perverting the course of justice for lying about the circumstances of Anthony Walgate's death.
He pleaded guilty at Snaresbrook Crown Court in February and appeared for sentencing at the same court a month later.
The prosecutor said: "There is no suggestion that Mr Port bore any criminal responsibility for the death of the young man."
Walgate's friends, China Dunning and Kiera Brennan, were in court to see Port convicted.
"We spoke to the police after," says Dunning. "We were like, 'look this isn't enough, this isn't right' and they basically said to us that there's only two people who know what happened that night: one of them's dead, one of them isn't going to say.
"The cop got a bit of an attitude with me and he said 'look China we've done all we can do' - a bit like shut up and put it down now."
Dunning was convinced that Port had hurt other people and would again.
Port was sentenced to eight months' imprisonment.
He was released in June 2015, after serving little more than two months, just weeks before inquests into the deaths of Gabriel Kovari and Daniel Whitworth.
The inquests returned open verdicts, with coroner Nadia Persaud saying she had "some concerns surrounding Daniel's death which have not been answered by the police investigation".
The coroner said that “most concerning are the findings by the pathologist of manual handling prior to his death” and noted that "the bed sheet that he was found wrapped in was not forensically analysed, and the bottle of GBL which was found near him was also not tested for fingerprints or DNA".
She asked a detective why the bed sheet had not been tested.
He replied: "It is a consideration, but the circumstances at the time indicated towards no other external parties being involved at the time. The potential outcome of having the blanket analysed, the bed sheet analysed, could have been to identify maybe where he had been the night before, who had contact with him. But it wasn't submitted."
Even after this exchange, no tests were done.
There had been multiple opportunities to stop Port in his tracks.
Instead, he went on to kill a fourth man.
Jack Taylor
Jack Taylor was a 25-year-old from Dagenham who worked as forklift truck driver.
He had two older sisters, Donna and Jenny, and was living with his parents at the time he died.
Donna Taylor says he was a "true inspiration". Jenny Taylor says he was "always smiling, always laughing" but was also "very loving and caring".
Their brother had had several girlfriends and was not openly gay, but used the dating app Grindr as a way of meeting men.
In the early hours of Saturday 13 September 2015 he left a local social club after a night out and went home.
He spent some time browsing the internet and just before 02:00 was contacted on Grindr by Stephen Port.
After exchanging messages for a few minutes, Port asked if he had ever taken "T", meaning crystal meth, to which Taylor replied "never have mate".
They decided to meet at Barking station. Taylor ordered a cab to the station and met Port at 03:00.
Within 36 hours he was found dead.
His body was propped against the other side of the graveyard wall from the spot where Gabriel Kovari and Daniel Whitworth were found.
His shirt was pulled up over his belly. No mobile phone was present. A syringe was in one pocket and a small brown bottle in another.
Police did not regard the death as suspicious and seemingly treated it as a self-inflicted overdose.
The Taylor family did not accept the conclusion.
They say they were then not contacted by police for nearly two weeks. "I think it was more there's another young boy - a druggie - I really don't think they cared at all," Donna Taylor recalls.
In the meantime, the family began their own investigation.
Donna Taylor says: "Once we knew where he was found we then wanted to know what he had on him, what he was found with, and we did a lot of research on that.
"We went through where Jack had been all weekend, who was the last people he was with, the area in which he was found. We were told it was known for drugs.
"So at the time we went on the internet and searched the area and that's how we came up with the other boys.
"We already knew that Jack wouldn't have gone and sat there and done that himself. We already knew that."
Taylor was not a drug user, so his family were outraged by the suggestion that he had taken an overdose.
"We literally went through where the boys were from, went back to their local papers of their area, what the press had wrote about them," says Donna Taylor. "We wrote down similarities, key points, and then compared them to Jack. Spoke to the police about that and at first obviously it got discarded. They were just having none of it."
Jenny Taylor recalls the police attitude: "Everything we were asking and everything we put to them they was telling us no. There was no chance that it was anything to do with the same situation. So the boys weren't linked to what had happened to Jack."
While at the police station they were told CCTV existed of Jack walking down the street with a man in the hours before his death.
Jenny Taylor recalls: "We asked for that to be put in the newspaper. To see if anyone knew him."
"It was said that it could be seen as a possibility, but it was unlikely because they didn't feel that Jack's death was suspicious," according to Donna Taylor.
"I think they kind of felt they had to do something rather than be seen to do absolutely nothing."
On 13 October 2015 the Met issued a CCTV image of Jack Taylor walking near Barking station with a tall, blond man.
Police received several calls, but it was actually a Barking and Dagenham officer who realised the man in the video was someone they already knew - Stephen Port.
On the morning of 15 October 2015 Port was arrested at his flat on suspicion of causing the deaths of the four young men by administering poison.
A handwriting expert compared the "suicide note" with a sample of Daniel Whitworth's writing and confirmed he was not the author.
But letters written by Port were examined and were a match for the fake note. The paper on which it was written - and the plastic sleeve in which it had been placed - were found to be from Port's flat.
The investigation tested items found with the bodies of the three men who Port denied meeting prior to their deaths.
Several items were covered in Port's DNA, including the blue sheet found with Daniel Whitworth. It was from Port's own bed.
When the inquiry looked for Jon Luck they quickly found Port, who had even used the fake Facebook account to message two ex-boyfriends.
The IP address associated with the Jon Luck account matched one used by Port - and two of Port's laptops had been used to log into the account.
Police traced Tony, who Jon Luck had linked to Gabriel Kovari and Daniel Whitworth, but found that he had never met Port nor any of the dead men.
Port, masquerading as Jon Luck, had contacted him online and picked up a few details which he had then tried to use to implicate him.
A mobile phone Port had once owned was found to contain 83 homemade sex videos.
Some of the clips showed him having sex with an unconscious man who lay passive and floppy on Port's bed.
In one video, another male can be heard in the background and Port is heard encouraging him to have sex with the comatose man.
In another, two other men are present, one of whom is seen to have sex with an unconscious figure.
'Devious, manipulative and self-obsessed'
At trial Port looked completely different from the toned blond escort of his online selfies.
The toupee he had worn for over a decade was gone. He was nearly bald. Accompanied by three security guards, he would shuffle quickly into the dock, pale-faced, soberly dressed and appearing older than his 41 years.
Some mornings he would wave keenly at his legal team, breaking into a grin as he did so.
He never looked across at the families of the dead men.
In the witness box, he mumbled and was constantly asked to speak up, answered questions with evasive and unenlightening single word answers, and appeared blank and unaffected in the face of waves of distressing evidence.
When asked about videos of him having sex with an unconscious man, Port said they simply showed "the end of quite a few hours of normal sex".
Admitting lying to the police about the four deaths, he explained it by stating "the truth sounded like a lie, so I lied to make it sound like the truth".
In court, Port told even more implausible lies in order to explain his links to the dead men.
He painted a picture of the victims utterly divorced from reality - on the night of Kovari's death he was said to have attended a sex party with Whitworth. Port admitted writing the "suicide note" but claimed Whitworth dictated it to him. He alleged that Taylor, a sexually discreet non-drug user, took numerous drugs and suggested a two-hour sex session in the place where he was later found dead.
All this was nonsense. Port was, the prosecution said, a "habitual and compulsive liar."
DCI Tim Duffield, who led the successful investigation into Port, describes him as "one of the most dangerous individuals I've encountered".
"He's a voracious sexual predator who appears to have been fixated, nay obsessed, with surreptitiously drugging young, often vulnerable men for the exclusive purpose of rape. This is a highly devious, manipulative and self-obsessed individual."
Port had never shown any remorse.
There will be an inquiry into the original investigations. Seventeen Met Police officers are under formal investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Fifteen are understood to be from Barking and Dagenham.
Commander Stuart Cundy, from the Met's Homicide and Major Crime Command, acknowledges that Port could possibly have been stopped earlier: "The evidence we have heard at the trial of Stephen Port does identify that there were potentially missed opportunities."
John Pape thinks the failings in the investigation can only be explained by poor understanding of the lives of gay men, and even prejudice: "That maybe they thought: 'Oh that's what gay guys do'.
"I think if Barking and Dagenham Police had not taken the circumstances of those first three deaths at face value, if they'd questioned as a detective should do, if they'd empathised with the victims, then they would have connected them, and Stephen Port would not have been allowed to kill Jack Taylor."
Donna Taylor agrees: "It's awful because if they had done what they were supposed to and looked into things slightly different before, then Jack would still be here and maybe even possibly some of the other boys.
"It's obviously heart-wrenching for us as sisters, and obviously mum and dad, and obviously the other families. I don't think that at any point it was taken seriously. I really don't. And it's a life at the end of the day. Somebody's life."
Daniel Whitworth’s stepmother, Amanda Pearson, said in a victim impact statement: "We had a rich and fulfilling life ahead of us with Daniel, of that much I am sure, and it has been stolen from us. I cannot possibly describe the hole this has left us."
Anthony Walgate's friends are left only with memories.
"Anthony was a friend like no other, I doubt in this life I will ever meet anyone even a fraction like him," remembers Kiera Brennan.
None of the families of the four men will forget.
And now there will be an investigation into the actions of the police.
They will have to explain why they missed so much.
