Michael Stone (murderer)

Michael Stone (born Michael John Goodban in 1960) is a British man who was convicted of the 1996 murders of Lin and Megan Russell and the attempted murder of Josie Russell, and who is a suspected serial killer. 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 remains in doubt.

Stone remains the prime suspect in an unsolved murder that occurred in Maidstone in 1976. He is also known to have previously killed his partner through an accidental heroin overdose.

Early life

Stone was born as Michael John Goodban in Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent in 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. Once 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 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 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 an established 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."

Killing of lover

Stone is known to have accidentally killed his same-sex partner by injecting him with too much heroin, causing an overdose.

Links to other historical murders

Stone was also questioned about the death of a friend who inexplicably 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 on 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
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