Stephen Port: CCTV identification a 'goosebumps moment'

Jack Taylor wanted to become a police officer

The identification of a serial killer via CCTV footage was "a goosebumps moment", an inquest jury has been told.

Det Insp Tony Kirk added that since then, he had thought about the Stephen Port case "every day" and would "continue to do so".

Port murdered four young men in 2014 and 2015 using fatal overdoses of the "date rape" drug GHB, before dumping the bodies near his flat.

A hearing is examining the Met Police's initial investigation of the deaths.

Det Insp Kirk also denied his colleagues were "lazy" in not connecting the cases despite the similar circumstances, instead saying they had been "battling with relentless workloads".

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Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor were all in their 20s, had the same cause of death, and were all found near Port's home in Barking, east London, despite having no links to the area.

Port, now 46, had been jailed in 2015 for perverting the course of justice in relation to Mr Walgate's death, which police were still treating as non-suspicious.

Mr Taylor's family pressed the police to identify the man seen on CCTV with him. A month later, officers realised it was Stephen Port

Before his guilty plea, he had also killed Mr Kovari and Mr Whitworth. On his release he killed Mr Taylor.

The inquest, at Barking Town Hall, previously heard that Mr Taylor's family insisted CCTV footage - showing Mr Taylor walking with an unknown man - should have been investigated further.

A detective in the office working on Mr Walgate's case looked up and recognised Port as Mr Taylor's companion.

Det Insp Kirk, who was the head of local policing in Barking at the time of Port's murders, said borough officers were having to deal with "hundreds of crimes every day", meaning long-term investigations had to "take a back seat".

"I'm not going to excuse what happened. But these were not officers who were lazy, they were working relentlessly in difficult conditions with very little reward or recognition," he said.

The inquests previously heard that police ignored information from the victims' family members and friends, and that the Met's murder squad turned down requests from the borough officers to take over the investigations.

Det Insp Kirk said: "It's the small things that were missed in this investigation that stick in my mind."

Port was given a whole-life jail sentence in 2016.