Episode 87:
The Gay Dating App Serial Killer

While taking her dog for a morning walk near a cemetery in Barking, Barbara stumbled upon the dead body of a young man. Shocked, she collapsed to the ground. The body had a peaceful expression, and beside it was a mysterious pill bottle. Yet an even greater shock was still to come.

Three weeks later, Barbara once again went out for a morning walk with her dog. Near that same cemetery, she discovered yet another male body — this time with a suicide note beside him. Barbara had unknowingly found two bodies connected to a notorious serial killing case. "But the police didn't even investigate," she said.

In the early hours of September 14, 2015, the body of a man in his twenties was found in a cemetery in Barking, East London. He was Jack Taylor, a twenty-five-year-old forklift driver, found leaning against the cemetery wall with a fatal dose of GHB in his system — the colorless, odorless "date rape drug" that can cause dizziness, vomiting, and breathing failure within fifteen minutes at lethal doses.

A Case Closed Before It Opened

Investigators learned Jack frequently used the gay dating app Grindr — and the moment they suspected he might be gay, the investigation stalled almost immediately, closed out as an accidental overdose during a same-sex encounter. Jack's family protested furiously, insisting he'd never touched drugs in his life, and even his former partners backed them in demanding the case be reopened. Police ignored them, so Jack's sisters, Donna and Jenny, began investigating on their own — and quickly discovered three other men had died in that exact same cemetery over the previous year, all testing positive for GHB, each one dismissed by police as an accident or suicide.

The first victim, in June 2014, was twenty-three-year-old fashion student Anthony Walgate, who secretly supported himself through sex work advertised online. He'd met a new client near Barking Station two days before he was found dead beside a bottle of GHB — reported to police by a caller who identified himself only as a passerby who'd "stumbled upon" the body, yet somehow already knew the victim's name and age. Police showed little interest given Anthony's sexuality and sex work, and closed the case quickly. Two months later, local resident Barbara found the second victim, twenty-two-year-old Slovak immigrant Gabriel Kovari, who had arrived in London only five days earlier and was active in the LGBTQ+ community — again dismissed with minimal investigation.

A Suicide Note That Didn't Add Up

Three weeks after finding Gabriel, Barbara found a third body in the same area: twenty-one-year-old Daniel Whitworth, this time with a suicide note claiming he had accidentally killed Gabriel with GHB during sex, felt consumed by guilt, and taken his own life — specifically noting that "the man I was with last night has nothing to do with this." Police accepted the note at face value and closed both cases. Jack's family later pointed out that the handwriting and tone didn't match Daniel's at all, suggesting the note had been fabricated to cover up a murder — but police wouldn't reopen it, even with three deaths tied to the same cemetery in under a year.

It took a fourth murder — Jack Taylor's, a year later — before Jack's outraged family forced the issue by raising the possibility of a serial killer. Only then did police reveal they'd had surveillance footage showing Jack's final movements and a clear image of the man with him the entire time, footage they'd been sitting on. After the family fought to get it released to the media, coverage exploded nationally, and other men began coming forward describing being drugged with GHB and assaulted by the same person: Stephen Port — the very man who had called police claiming to have "found" Anthony's body.

The Roommate, The Ex, The Stranger

Port's connections to the other victims quickly surfaced: he had been Gabriel's roommate, and he was the man Daniel Whitworth had slept with the night before his death — directly contradicting the suicide note's insistence that "the man I was with" had nothing to do with it. One month after Jack's death, Stephen Port was arrested on suspicion of murder. He denied everything, claiming he'd simply crossed paths with all four men — until handwriting analysis matched him definitively to the fake suicide note, and his DNA turned up on the bedsheet from Daniel's death. He then shifted his story, admitting he'd slept with all four victims but insisting they'd taken the GHB themselves and that he'd already left before any of them died — even claiming Daniel had personally asked him to write the "suicide note."

Eighty-Three Videos

Forensic analysis of Port's phone, alongside testimony from two surviving victims, painted a much darker picture. Port, a quiet chef at a bus company cafeteria with a history as a male escort in his twenties, had aged out of the escort scene and turned to apps like Grindr and Fitlads to keep meeting young men — specifically targeting slim men in their late teens to early twenties. His search history included terms like "unconscious boy," "date rape drug," and "rape and torture young naked boy." Investigators found 83 videos of him sexually assaulting unconscious men, some of which he'd sold, and evidence he'd secretly photographed victims and pushed them into sex work online, pocketing the fees himself.

Two surviving victims came forward with harrowing accounts: a nineteen-year-old identified as K, drugged after a single drink at Port's home in 2012 and left with no memory of what followed; and a twenty-year-old identified as Mohammed, drugged on what had seemed like a normal fifth date, assaulted while unable to move or speak, then dumped near a train station afterward. Mohammed, fearing his family would learn he was gay, never reported it — a silence Port appeared to exploit deliberately.

Final Thoughts

Police believe Port's pattern escalated into murder starting with Anthony, whom he'd promised payment for sex he never intended to provide since he was broke — drugging him, assaulting him unconscious, and, by his own account, simply leaving for work rather than checking on him, only to find him dead hours later and dump the body near the cemetery before staging his own "discovery" call. Gabriel was killed after resisting Port's advances as a new roommate; Port later texted Gabriel's contacts pretending to be him, claiming he'd moved back to Spain, to avoid suspicion falling on himself. Daniel became both a victim and, through the forged note, a scapegoat for Gabriel's death. With no investigation following any of the first three deaths, Port grew confident enough to kill again a year later, taking Jack Taylor's life in the exact same way.

In November 2016, Port stood trial for four murders, four rapes, four sexual assaults, and ten counts of administering drugs — charges that likely understated the true scope, since many victims stayed silent out of fear of being outed, and evidence was often impossible to gather by the time victims realized they'd been drugged. The jury found him guilty on all counts and denied any sentence reduction given the escalating pattern of the killings, and he received a whole-life sentence with no possibility of parole. Police later apologized to the victims' families and offered compensation — a gesture the families said could never make up for what four years of dismissive investigation had cost.