Donna Taylor was on the phone to her mother, both of them worried that her brother had not been home for two days, when police officers arrived at her parents’ front door.

Still listening down the line from her own home, Donna could hear them asking: “Are you Jack Taylor’s mum and dad?”

“And I heard mum say ‘yes’. And then I heard them say: ‘Jack’s dead.’ As plain cut as that. I heard mum scream. And that scream doesn’t ever go away. Because you know what that scream is,” recalled Donna. “And I just slid down the fridge door to the floor and sobbed.”

Donna, 40, and her sister Jenny, 30, now know what happened to Jack, 25, their adored younger brother.

An Old Bailey trial determined the “who”.



Jack was the fourth – and final – victim of serial killer Stephen Port, then 41, a chef who drugged and raped young men he lured to his flat in Barking, east London, through dating apps including Grindr, using multiple aliases.

The trial also answered the “how”.



Port’s victims, Jack Taylor, fashion student Anthony Walgate, 23, Slovakian Gabriel Kovari, 22, and chef Daniel Whitworth, 21, were drugged with lethal doses of the “date rape” drug GHB and their bodies dumped along with planted drug paraphernalia and, in one case, a fake suicide note.

It’s the “why” that today haunts Taylor’s family and the relatives of the other victims: why was Port not caught sooner? Why did police not initially link four deaths with such striking similarities? Why did these young men seem to be dismissed as “druggies”? And why was the LGBT community never warned?

Last week the police watchdog, the IOPC, completed a 380-page report on the Metropolitan police investigation. Knowing so much rested on it, the families were forced to crowdfund their own independent legal representation and launched a CrowdJustice campaign.

They needed to, said Donna, to ensure their questions were asked. They wanted full accountability, and for any mistakes Barking and Dagenham police may be found to have made to never be repeated. It would, they hoped, prevent other families from going through a similar agony. Without the crowdfunding, the sisters feared they would not be able to continue with their legal representation.

As Port’s trial highlighted many missed opportunities and potential vulnerabilities in the police investigation, perhaps it was understandable for Donna to say: “It takes a lot, now, for us as a family to trust anybody in authority with a title.”

Port was sentenced to a whole life term in November 2016 for the four murders, and also for offences against seven other men who survived. He will never be released. The body of Walgate, his first victim, was found outside the communal entrance to Port’s flat in June 2014. Those of Kovari and Whitworth were discovered in a churchyard near Port’s home in August and September 2014, and Taylor’s near the same churchyard in September 2015.

Taylor’s family say that 11 days after that knock on his parents’ front door in Dagenham they still knew nothing other than his body had been found in a park in Barking.

Daniel Whitworth, 21, Jack Taylor, 25, Anthony Walgate, 23, and Gabriel Kovari, 22. Photograph: Metropolitan Police/PA

From the police, there was complete silence, and the family were not required to identify him, so when the coroner released his body to a funeral director’s on the 11th day, “we even thought it might not be Jack”, said Jenny, who – three weeks before his death – had given birth to her second child.

“Still to this day, it shocks us. Eleven days. Nothing. You would never think that is even possible. You cannot describe it in words,” said Donna, a mother of five who works as a supermarket cashier. Jack’s “unexplained” death, it seemed to his sisters, “wasn’t even taken seriously enough” to merit a call from police to his parents. “We cannot get our heads around that,” she said.

When Jack’s sisters did manage to track down officers in the case, they learned only that toxicology results were awaited.

The police assumption, it seemed to them, was that Jack was a drug taker who had overdosed, even though, as they said police admitted, he “didn’t look like your average drug taker”. The Jack Taylor his family knew was anti-drugs, and had regular drugs tests at work, where he was an acting supervisor at a bonded warehouse.

Over the coming days, the sisters said, police told them Jack had been seen on CCTV going into the park area alone. There was a needle mark on his right arm, an unused syringe, and a tourniquet, along with a small plastic vial of clear liquid.

They were shown the wall against which his body was found. “We both looked at each other and said: ‘Why would he sit here?’ There’s a bench right there. Why would he go into a corner in the pitch black – and he’s terrified of the dark – and sit there, and apparently do drugs? It was filthy, dirty, covered in mud and leaves,” said Jenny.

“We said, ‘We don’t know if he was put there alive or dead, but someone has put him there,’” added Donna.

They say they challenged each police assumption. Jack gave blood, could that account – as it later transpired it did – for the “needle mark”, they asked. How could Jack, who was was right-handed, inject into his right arm? There was an unused syringe, but had police found a used one? Apparently not.

The sisters furiously searched the internet each night piecing together clues. Putting in the words “small plastic bottles”, “drug” and “clear liquid”, they immediately found GHB – though neither had previously heard of it. “I said, ‘Oh my God! That’s a date rape drug,’” said Jenny.

Further searches would reveal reports – though very scant – of three other unexplained deaths, all in Barking, all young men, all linked to GHB, all bodies found within yards of Port’s flat. “None of them were from around here. So why have they been found in this area? What did they come down here for?” said Jenny.

With so many questions, the sisters said, they implored the police to re-examine the CCTV. And there was Port, meeting Jack in the early hours at Barking station, and the two walking together in the direction of Port’s flat. One month after Jack’s death, Port was arrested.

Along with innumerable other questions, the inquest will examine why Port was not treated as a murder suspect over Anthony Walgate’s death, though he served two months for lying about the death, and why an unsophisticated fake suicide note, found on Whitworth’s body and blaming himself for Kovari’s death, was seemingly taken at face value by investigating officers. The response would, the sisters believe, have been different had the victims been young women.

For Donna and Jenny, and the other relatives, the inquest is a final chance to get answers they desperately need. “Knowing what that man did to Jack is devastating. To think that police could have got him before, and Jack could still be with us. That is what our family carries with us all time,” said Donna.