How red flags in Grindr killer Stephen Port’s first call to police ‘should have been spotted’

Serial killer Stephen Port’s body language in police interviews have been analysed for a new television documentary as never-before-seen pictures of him emerged.

Behavioural specialist Dr Cliff Lansley, linguistics professor Dawn Archer and forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes pinpoint nervous ticks which demonstrate Port’s guilt.

Port, 49, known as the Grindr Killer, drugged, raped and killed four men between June 2014 and September 2015 in Barking, east London, and sexually assaulted more than a dozen others. He was sentenced to a whole-life order for murder.

The deaths of Anthony Walgate, 23, Gabriel Kovari, 22, Daniel Whitworth, 21, and Jack Taylor, 25, were not initially linked or treated as suspicious.

Discovery+ spoke to neighbours who gave first-hand accounts of the Metropolitan Police‘s failures in the case.

Scotland Yard has apologised but rejects the bereaved families’ claims that homophobia played a part.

Analysing an audio recording of Port’s 999 call to police after he killed first victim Mr Walgate, Prof Archer immediately spots the signs it was faked.

In The Grindr Killer Scandal: A Faking It Special, she says: “I would have thought, okay this is odd, let’s, let’s do a little bit more digging.”

Matt Parr, then HM Inspector of Constabulary, tells the programme: “When Anthony Walgate was killed, there were a number of red flags they should have spotted.

“If the person that reports an unexplained death is subsequently found to have lied about it, that’s a huge red flashing light. It wasn’t for the Met.

“If they’d done what they had to do at the start, it seems to me extremely unlikely that the three murders that followed would have happened.”

Inquests into the four deaths revealed that officers failed to carry out basic evidence gathering such as examining Port’s laptop, testing DNA on bedsheets on which two of the bodies were found, and checking the veracity of a fake suicide note found with Mr Whitworth’s body.

Seventeen officers were investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Nine were found to have performance failings.

None of the nine were disciplined or lost their jobs, and five had been promoted.

‘The Grindr Killer Scandal: A Faking It Special’ available to stream from Friday, August 16 on discovery+