A woman who dated the barbaric 'crossbow cannibal' for a decade before he was convicted of murdering three women has relived her ordeal in their abusive relationship.
Kathy Hancock, 37, from the Isle of Wight, who was once a prison officer at Full Sutton Prison, near York, recounted her ten years of torture and abuse at the hands of Stephen Griffiths in true crime series Serial Killer Wives on Channel 5.
Criminology student Griffiths, from Bradford, murdered three women between 2009 and 2010. He earnt his grisly nickname because he killed his victims by shooting them with a crossbow, before chopping them up, cooking their flesh and eating it.
His victims were 43-year-old Susan Rushworth, who disappeared in June, 2009, followed by 31-year-old Shelley Armitage in April, 2010, and 36-year-old Suzanne Blamires in May of the same year.
Parts of Suzanne's body were found in the River Aire in Shipley, and other remains found at the same site were later found to be Shelley. To this day, Susan's body has never been recovered.
Speaking in the series, Griffiths' former girlfriend Kathy recounted the horror of living with the monstrous killer, recalling how he once drugged her and laughed as she lost consciousness.
She said: 'I got two thirds the way through a cup of tea and felt strange, he looked at me and said ''do you feel ok?'' and I said ''not really, I feel really weird''. My eyesight was fuzzy and he was looking down at me laughing.
'He was enjoying it, there is this look he gets with a grin, no compassion, enjoying the nastiness of it. I asked why and he said to punish me because my dog growled at him. '
Kathy was increasingly controlled and coerced by Griffiths, to the point where he even abducted her dogs in the middle of the night. All these years on, she still doesn't know their fate.
She said: 'I burst into tears, it tore my heart out, the turmoil of the loneliness, they meant the world to me. Then he told me it was a punishment for the dog growling at him.
'I have never known to this day what he did, whether he did or didn't kill them. But after that it broke me.'
Kathy recalled how Griffiths coerced her into moving in with him - and how his abusive behaviour only escalated once she was trapped in the same home as him.
Recounting the horrendous abuse Kathy said: 'He broke my nose, he knocked me out, he stabbed me in the leg, people knew about him but not how far he could go.'
Just two months after meeting Griffiths, Kathy fell pregnant. However, she was relieved when she found out she had miscarried the baby.
She said: 'I had no contact with people at all, it had to be under his terms. One night he locked me in and didn't come back for hours. It was the same night Rebecca Hall's body was found.'
Rebecca Hall, 19, was battered to death in Bradford in April 2001. Her body was dumped in an alley yards from Griffiths's flat, although he has never been formally linked to her death.
In 2001, Kathy decided she wanted to leave Griffiths and she moved into her own flat but after a week he eventually found out where she was living through the electoral roll.
She said: 'That's when I thought, I am not getting away from this man, I thought I am better off not annoying him and trying to be his friend and I did that against everyone's advice. But to me, better the devil you know.'
In 2006, he started experimenting with hard drugs which made his behaviour even worse. Kathy tried again to distance herself from him but he began bombarding her with threatening voicemails.
She reported him to the police and he was given a harassment order. However, Kathy revealed Griffiths wasn't put off by this and, if anything, his behaviour only became more sinister.
The last message Griffiths left on Kathy's mobile phone had no words, just chilling manic laughter.
Griffiths cruelly held his victim Suzanne in his Bradford flat for two days before she made a desperate bid for freedom. He shot her with a crossbow and dismembered her before dumping her in the river.
Police finally captured the monstrous killer thanks to CCTV footage of him shooting Blamires in the head inside his block of flats. On the video, Blamires can be seen running out of Griffiths’s flat chased by the killer and knocked down. Griffiths brings a crossbow from his flat and fires a bolt into her head.
He dragged his lifeless victim inside his flat and returned to hold his weapon triumphantly at the CCTV camera and raise a finger to it. Later he toasts his success by raising a bottle to the camera.
Over the next 24 hours, Griffiths was recorded going in and out of the building carrying bags. He was taking body parts to dump them in the River Aire in nearby Shipley.
By the time the remains were found, Griffiths was in custody. Caretaker Peter Gee had raised the alarm and armed police raided Griffiths's flat.
At the time of his arrest in 2010, Griffiths told detectives he cooked flesh from the first two women and ate the third one 'raw', landing him the nickname 'crossbow cannibal'.
He told police, 'I've killed loads', and claimed eating his victims flesh was 'part of the magic'.
At the police station Griffiths said: ‘I or part of me was responsible for the murder of Susan Rushworth, Shelley Armitage and Suzanne Blamires.’
He added: ‘I am misanthropic. I don’t have much time for the human race.’
Griffiths had a long history of psychiatric treatment dating back to the age of 17 when he was locked up for slashing a shop security guard’s throat.
Between 1987 and 2009 he was treated by psychiatrists at three different hospitals. He was a patient at Waddiloves Hospital in Bradford in 1987 and Rampton Special Hospital for two months in 1991.
In 2007 and 2008 he was an outpatient at Newton Lodge Hospital in Wakefield and was given anti-depressants.
Crucially, psychiatrists concluded he was ‘not suffering from mental illness’. Although he was identified as ‘a highly dangerous man’ he was freed to live in the community.
Griffiths went on to plead guilty to all three murders at Leeds Crown Court. Judge Mr Justice Openshaw told him he would never be released from prison for his 'wicked and monstrous crimes'.
Through tears Kathy spoke to Griffiths victims: 'I want to say I'm sorry because I know there was so much more that could of been done.'
She revealed that she paid her respects to the three victims in her own special way, having gone paragliding and scattering three white roses into the ocean in their memory.
For many years Griffiths studied the disturbed minds of the most infamous serial killers, terrorists and war criminals.
His idol was Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, who killed 13 women, most of them prostitutes.
His flat contained hundreds of books on Sutcliffe, the Moors murderers and Jack the Ripper, and he was doing research on Victorian murders.
And at some point Griffiths crossed the line from student to practitioner. Perhaps the PhD student regarded killing as a form of work experience in his warped mind.
Watch Serial Killer Wives, a six-part true crime series, Tuesdays at 9pm on 5Star and My5.