Susan Rushworth was 43 when she disappeared on 22 June 2009. Shelley Armitage was 31 when she vanished on 26 April 2010. Suzanne Blamires was 36 when she was last seen on 21 May of the same year. All three worked in Bradford's street sex trade, a fact that journalism would later use as shorthand and that the police would acknowledge had shaped how seriously earlier reports of missing women were taken. On 25 May 2010, parts of Blamires's body were found in the River Aire at Shipley, just downstream of Bradford. Tissue from the same river was later identified as belonging to Armitage. No remains of Rushworth were ever recovered. For her family, the absence has never closed.

Stephen Shaun Griffiths, then 40 and a postgraduate criminology student at the University of Bradford, was arrested on 24 May 2010. In the magistrates' court he gave his name as "the Crossbow Cannibal," a piece of theatre that would dominate every front page. Behind that theatre was a quieter, more troubling fact: police had been monitoring Griffiths for two years before the murders, had already seized hunting weapons from his flat, and had contacted his housing association after he was seen reading books on dismemberment. As a teenager he had served three years for an unprovoked knife attack. Psychiatrists who had assessed him in custody had warned, on the record, that he fantasised about becoming a serial killer. The warnings were there. The women were not protected.

On 21 December 2010 at Leeds Crown Court, Griffiths pleaded guilty to all three murders. Mr Justice Openshaw sentenced him to life imprisonment with a whole life order, meaning he is not eligible for parole and will almost certainly die in prison. He has attempted suicide several times since and went on a 120-day hunger strike in 2011. The case widened a national conversation that the murders in Ipswich a few years earlier had already begun: how sex workers, often pushed to the margins by drugs, poverty, or the criminalisation of their work, become easy victims because the wider world looks away. Then–Prime Minister David Cameron called for the country to look again at how the law treats people in the trade. Public vigils were held in Bradford. The debate has never fully settled.

Bradford itself sits in a basin of millstone-grit hills, the River Aire threading through Shipley and on toward Leeds. The flat in which Griffiths lived was an ordinary block in an ordinary inner-city neighbourhood, a few minutes from the doctor's surgery, the pharmacy, the bus stops anyone might use. That ordinariness is part of the story. There were no monsters in shadow; there were warnings filed, missed, or weighed against other priorities. In 2013 criminologist David Wilson examined whether Griffiths might be linked to older unsolved cases including the 2001 killing of 19-year-old Rebecca Hall in Bradford. New DNA work on Hall's clothing led to an arrest in 2019 of an unrelated person, released under investigation. The case files remain open.