Michael Stone (criminal)
Michael Stone was convicted of the 1996 murders of Lin and Megan Russell and the attempted murder of Josie Russell. He was sentenced to three life sentences with a tariff of 25 years for the Russell killings.
Stone maintains his innocence and continues to contest his conviction. His legal team argues that the serial killer Levi Bellfield could possibly be the true perpetrator of the attack. In February 2022, Stone's solicitor said that Bellfield had confessed to the murder of both Lin and Megan, although the truthfulness of the confession remained in doubt and Bellfield later claimed that he had confessed for a cash payment. In July 2023 the Criminal Cases Review Commission declined to refer Stone's case to the Court of Appeal, saying that it had "identified no credible new evidence or information". This decision was under review as of October 2023.
Police suspect Stone may be responsible for an unsolved murder that occurred in Maidstone in 1976, and prior to the Russell murders he had spent time in prison for violent assaults and armed robbery.
Early life
Stone was born as Michael John Goodban in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent on 7 June 1960, one of five children. Although the name of his father was registered, and therefore given on his birth certificate, as "Ivor Goodban", there was uncertainty over the true identity of his father and Stone regarded a different partner of his mother, Peter Stone, as having been his father. Both men denied that he was their son. Stone had a turbulent childhood, suffering domestic violence in his family home before he was placed in a care home, where he was abused. As a boy, he had also been beaten with a hammer, and witnessed his mother's former partner attack another man with a meat cleaver in his home. He was known to be prone to uncontrolled outbursts and aggressive mood swings. From the age of nine, he began using drugs and committing crimes.Stone's police record dates back to 1972 at the age of 12 and continued into adulthood. On leaving the care system, Stone began using heroin, and soon developed a £1,500 a week heroin addiction. He served three prison sentences in the 1980s and 1990s for robbery, burglary, grievous bodily harm and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. He was known to carry weapons, including knives and guns, and would also attack victims with ammonia squirted from a Jif lemon bottle. He became a figure in the criminal underworld of the Medway towns of Kent.
Stone was sentenced to two years' imprisonment in 1981 for attacking a man with a hammer during a robbery. He then received a four-and-a-half year sentence for stabbing a friend while he slept in 1983, an attack that penetrated the friend's lung and nearly killed him, and he tried to wound a police officer in the eye after this arrest. When he was sentenced for this crime, the sentencing judge remarked that Stone's violent nature could lead to him killing someone in the future. He was then sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for two armed robberies in Maidstone and Brighton respectively during the same week in 1986. The first robbery was at Maidstone's Hazlitt Theatre, and the second was at the Leeds Permanent Building Society branch in Brighton, where he stole £577. Throughout his criminal career, Stone would steal from garden sheds, taking anything he could sell, and would mug people at cash dispensers, in part to fund his heroin addiction. In prison, he attacked various prison officers.
Stone was known to have been violent towards his partners. His former girlfriend, Rachel Marcroft, recounted that he had once beaten her so badly that she went to the police, who took photos of her injuries as evidence, although the charges were later dropped as she refused to give evidence against him. She had received two black eyes, a swollen mouth and heavy bruising from where he had held her down, injuries which the police later said bore a striking resemblance to those on the bodies of the Russells, whom he was later convicted of murdering. Marcroft said that the way the Russells were tied up was similar to how she was tied up by Stone. She said that whenever he was violent towards her, Stone would not afterwards remember what he had done.
Stone was released from prison in 1993. Prior to the murders, he had received support for his drug addiction and mental health problems and was under the supervision of the National Probation Service. He had a history of severe mental illness. Stone had been sectioned to a mental hospital in Hull in 1994, and was diagnosed with personality disorder and paranoid psychosis. His conditions were controlled by regular injections of medication, but his treatment was affected by his overuse of heroin. The hospital at which he was detained had to pass him into the care of another health authority as they found him "too dangerous". It was then that he was passed into the care of West Kent health authority.
Suspect in 1976 murder
Police suspect Stone of having killed Francis Jegou, who was found stabbed to death in a park in Maidstone in 1976. Jegou was a 65-year-old Guernsey man who was a former special constable. The motive for the murder appeared to be robbery, since Jegou always carried around large amounts of cash yet only had £3 on him when his body was discovered. He died from multiple stab wounds to the stomach and of head injuries inflicted by being kicked repeatedly. His body was discovered near Maidstone East railway station, very close to the Stone family home at the time, and very close to the probation hostel Stone was then staying in. Stone allegedly later told a psychiatrist that he was responsible for the robbery and murder of Jegou.Stone was a suspect and was questioned about the crime in the aftermath, and he was again questioned about the murder immediately before being charged with the Russell killings in 1997. At the time of Jegou's murder, police announced that they wanted to speak to four youths who they thought could have seen Jegou or his murderer. Stone was 16 at the time, and a prolific offender. Stone has been known to attack policemen. In 1983 he stabbed a man then attacked and almost blinded an officer, for which he received a four-and-a-half-year sentence.
Stone's sister Barbara, who has always protested her brother's innocence of the Russell murders, said in 1998 that she believed he had indeed killed Jegou, stating: "I don't think he killed Lin and Megan Russell. But I do think he did that murder when he was younger." Explaining, she commented: "When I was about 14 Mick came up to me with a knife in a sheath. He said I was to hide it for him and I buried it. At the time I was just a kid and did what my big brother told me. Years later he said he knew something about the murder. I knew he was up to no good. The killing was his style – it was done by two or more people and Mick never acted alone. It would have been done to get money and, again, that's something he'd have done."
Links to other deaths
Stone is known to have accidentally killed his partner by injecting him with too much heroin, causing an overdose. Police also questioned him about the death of a friend who fell under a London Tube train as he stood next to Stone. Stone later boasted of pushing the man underneath the train. He was also initially questioned regarding the murder of 64-year-old Mary Town, who was found dead in a disused warehouse in Maidstone in 1977, although another man was later convicted of the murder.Russell murders
On 9 July 1996, in a country lane in Chillenden, Kent, England, Lin Russell, aged 45, her two daughters, six-year-old Megan and nine-year-old Josie and their dog Lucy, were tied up and savagely beaten with a hammer while walking home from a swimming gala. Lin, Megan and their dog Lucy were killed during the frenzied 15-minute attack, but Josie survived and made a recovery. The trio had walked past a parked car on the lane before a man got out wielding a claw hammer and then demanded money. Lin said that they didn't have any and offered to go home and get some, but the man refused before tying them up and bludgeoning them. Lin urged Josie to run home and get help but the attacker caught her, blindfolded her with strips of her swimming towel and tied her to a tree before hitting her until she passed out. Lin had also been blindfolded. After attacking the Russells, the attacker then drove off in his car.In the week after the murders, Stone and an accomplice were known to have carried out a robbery in Gillingham.
Josie's recovery and the way she and her father, Shaun Russell, coped with the aftermath of the tragedy were the subject of a BBC documentary.
Conviction for Russell murders
Arrest
In July 1997, police arrested 37-year-old Michael Stone for the crimes after tip-offs resulting from a reconstruction on the Crimewatch television programme. A psychiatrist called to report his suspicions of Stone, and another two nursing staff called in also naming Stone. These medical workers, who had worked with Stone before the attacks, reported that by 4 July, five days before the murders, Stone was becoming increasingly enraged and had aggressively threatened to kill people and their families. The psychiatrist further recalled that Stone had threatened his probation officer with a hammer. The psychiatrist also told police that the threats were so aggressive that they had made him fear for his own safety and for the safety of other employees, and that the fantasies related by Stone seemed to tally with the nature of the attacks on the Russells.Stone had told a psychiatric nurse that he dreamt about torturing people and that he fantasised about killing children and running about in woods. He further added that he felt like killing children while walking in woods and that when he passed by children he felt like killing them, and also claimed to have attacked people with hammers. He had also said that he was angry at the world and was going to do "something bad". Stone had also apparently begged to be admitted as an in-patient to a psychiatric unit at the time, but he was refused as he was seen as "too dangerous". In his outbursts to medical staff, Stone had asserted his own dangerousness, saying he was too violent to be held in prison and would need to be admitted to Broadmoor Hospital, with notions of achieving "fame and glory" for his crimes. It was known that Stone had also tried to admit himself to a psychiatric ward the day after the killings. The psychiatrist told police that Stone fitted the E-fit and the police description of the murderer.
A friend also rang police after the reconstruction to say he believed Stone looked like the E-fit shown on the programme and reported that he had recently been acting strangely. Another friend said he had seen him wearing blood-soaked clothes on the day of the murders, although Stone said that this was because he had been in a fight.
Shortly before his arrest for the murders in 1997, Stone had threatened to kill his sister and one of her children, and smashed up her car. Stone attempted suicide at least twice while on remand.