Killer used web to plan attack

To his friends and family double murderer Garry Harding appeared “ordinary” but beneath the surface the 22-year-old was anything but normal.

Harding was a man drowning in gambling debts of more than £16,500. He was also a man using the internet to visit warped websites to construct a plan to murder and rob his way out of his financial problems.

Harding thought he would get at least “a couple of grand” by raiding Rachael’s Health Studio at 13 Frankwell on July 1 last year.

All he left with was £330 and a lifetime of guilt after brutally bludgeoning Annie Eels and Samantha Tapper to death with a hammer.

When he finished the frenzied double murder, Harding coldly returned to his Welshpool home, got changed and sat down to watch the second half of the England v Portugal World Cup Match.

His family said they “detected nothing about his appearance that showed any change in him at all”.

Harding then set about destroying the evidence. He made sure he did not leave a forensic trail, leaving police without any scientific clue he was behind one of Shropshire’s most awful murders.

A massage parlour regular, Harding had been unemployed for four months before he bludgeoned Annie Eels and Samantha Tapper to death. His family said he was “so ashamed” that he had lost so much money.

During those four months he turned to the internet to try to solve his mounting cash crisis. It was not long before his thoughts turned to suicide and then, more sinisterly, murder.

At Birmingham Crown Court prosecutor Stephen Linehan QC described the warped websites Harding visited while planning his sick attack.

Mr Linehan told the court: “In June he began to search the web for information upon how to commit murder. Appalling as it is to contemplate, the plain fact is that Garry Harding had begun to construct a plan to get money by murder and robbery.”

Despite his preparation, the killer did not take into account Shrewsbury’s web of CCTV cameras, which captured him walking through the town

When these images were published in the media on August 21, Harding, of Gilmour Court, Severn Street, Welshpool, was watching TV. He realised the stills were clear enough for people to identify him. That night he confessed all in a detailed letter to his mother Sylvia and brother Brendan.

But after handing himself into police, he then changed his story, claiming he had been at Rachael’s but did not kill the women. In court his guilty conscience caught up with him and he changed his plea.

By Steve Todd