Welsh Vampire Matthew Hardman

When it comes to serial killers Wales is very much a second division country which is a good thing in my view. I guess we're just too nice. The only one who really springs to mind is 'the man in black' Peter Moore from north Wales. Wales has, however, produced a genuine class A vampire in Matthew Hardman. I know this because his name crops up in those true crime books with the lurid red and black covers – a reliable indicator that in the world of the macabre he has arrived. Infamously Hardman committed the stomach churning crime of stabbing a harmless 90-year-old lady to death before cutting out her heart. He then drained some blood from her leg and drank it. He was 17 at the time and an art student at Coleg Menai in Bangor. Hardman is profiled in Sondra London’s True Vampires: Blood-Sucking Killers Past and Present (2003). He is part of a particularly gruesome pantheon that includes such psychos as Ed Gein, Henry Lee Lucas, Issei Sagawa, Andrei Chikatilo and Transylvania’s own Vlad the Impaler, amongst others. Author London is a bit of a crazy lady herself having dated at least 2 serial killers. Not for nothing has she been dubbed ‘the serial killer groupie’. Her book is illustrated by Nicolas Claux who is, of course, a convicted serial killer, necrophile and cannibal.