Killer who impaled children’s bodies on railings ‘released’

A lodger who killed three young children at their home before hanging their bodies on garden railings has been released from prison, the victims’ mother has said.
By The Newsroom
Published 11th Jun 2019, 23:19 BST

David McGreavy killed four-year-old Paul Ralph, and his sisters Dawn, two, and Samantha, nine months, in Worcester in 1973.

Their mother, Elsie Urry, who has since moved to Hampshire, told BBC Hereford & Worcester yesterday that a support worker had rung to tell her the news.

She said: “Yeah, I’m afraid so.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“All she has told me is that he’s been released, he’s got a tag and he’s got to obey by certain rules that they’ve given him.

“Other than that, I don’t really know.”

A Parole Board report from the end of last year said McGreavy had changed “considerably” since the 1973 triple murder.

He first became eligible for release in 1993.

Conservative MP for Worcester Robin Walker, who has repeatedly written to successive justice ministers and home secretaries objecting to McGreavy’s release, said: “Frankly, I don’t think someone who carried out such crimes should ever be let out.”

In crimes which shocked the nation, it emerged that Paul had been strangled, Dawn was found with her throat cut, and Samantha died from a compound fracture to the skull.

McGreavy, a family friend and lodger, then impaled their bodies on the spiked garden railings of their terraced family home in Gillam Street, in the Rainbow Hill area of Worcester.