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Sex killer who murdered mother and her two daughters 28 years ago is told he will die behind bars
By Daily Mail Reporter
Updated: 09:32 EST, 17 December 2010
A sex killer who got away with murder for 28 years was today told he would die in jail for the brutal slaying of a mother and her two daughters.
Tony Dyce, 54, thought he had escaped until journalist Peter Law began researching a book on footballer Laurie Cunningham, brother to the murdered woman's partner.
His inquiries triggered a cold case police review and Dyce was arrested last year.
Murdered: Norma Richards was raped and killed by Tony Dyce, who also stabbed and drowned her two daughters
He was found guilty today of stabbing to death Norma Richards, 27, and her daughter Samantha, nine, and drowning second daughter Syretta, seven, in July 1982, at their home in Dalston, north-east London.
Old Bailey Judge Anthony Morris gave him three life sentences and told him it would be a whole life term.
He told Dyce: 'These murders were exceptional.
Victims: Samantha was nine when Dyce struck and Syrett, right, was seven
'There are no mitigating features.
'You will serve a whole life order which means you will never be released.'
He said Dyce had been a 'sexual predator' through the 1980s and was a 'habitual' carrier of knives.
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'You've got away with these offences for over 28 years and since your arrest you have shown no remorse whatsoever.'
Ms Richards was the partner of Cunningham's brother Keith who was staying with the star in Spain at the time of the murder.
When Mr Law began researching his book, he rang police to ask if any progress had been made in the case which had shocked London.
The scales of justice on top of the Old Bailey, where the case was heard
Police sent the original exhibits back to the lab for new DNA analysis and the evidence pointed immediately to Dyce.
Wilbert Anthony Dyce, known as Tony, was arrested at his home in Romford.
He denied entering the flat and the three murders but claimed he had had sex with Ms Richards in the toilets of a club that night.
However the jury heard how Dyce had sexually attacked two other women in their homes when he knew their partners were away.
He also stabbed his ex-wife Pauline Griffiths repeatedly, attacked her with a hammer, bicycle chain and dumbells and - in a horrifying echo of Syretta's death - even tried to drown her in a bath.
Syretta was discovered with her thumb still in her mouth under her sister's naked corpse in the bath.
Dyce has a catalogue of criminal convictions dating back to the mid 1970s ranging from assault to carrying knives, possessing a shot gun and burglary.
After a three week trial Dyce was found guilty of murder and sentenced to three life terms by Judge Anthony Morris QC.
During the trial Aftab Jafferjee QC, prosecuting, said Ms Richards had been stabbed four times so violently that the weapon - possibly a 19th century bayonet kept as an ornament in the flat - went sheer through her body and out the other side.
Dyce's fingerprints were found on the wall close to where the bayonet usually hanged.
Samantha was stabbed eight times and her body stripped and dumped over her drowned sister's body in the bath filled with water.
Dyce tried to lay a false trail by daubing NF, the far right National Front logo around the area, but this was nothing more than a 'red herring.'
'This is a particularly distressing case not only because it involves three murders but the victims of these almost unspeakable acts of cold blooded murder are a mother and two young daughters,' said Mr Jafferjee.
'These murders took place in 1982. It was an age of some promiscuity, being prior to the onset of the restraining influence of AIDS, and a time prior to the advances of DNA profiling.'
He added: 'Ms Richards was found completely naked in the living room with furniture upturned.
'Her rapist then went on to become her murderer. At least one - if not both - of her children awoke to see their mother being raped and/or murdered.
'Their crime was to have seen their mother's attacked.'
When he was finally arrested Dyce claimed he had never had sex with the victim because 'she was like a sister to me.'
Confronted with the DNA evidence he then claimed they had had sex in the club's toilets that night but not at her flat.
Norma Richards' surviving daughter Rhodene Cunningham, now aged 32, told how at the age of four she discovered the dead bodies of her mother and two sisters.
'I was really scared; my mum was just lying there covered in blood,' she said in a victim impact statement read to the court.
'I ran upstairs and my sisters were in the bath. They were dead too.
'I couldn't understand who would want to hurt them. It was hard for me to show emotion, no-one in the family would talk about it or talk to me.
'I would have a cry now and again; I would turn the music up loud in my room so my gran couldn't hear me.
'As I got older it got harder. I knew they weren't coming back.
'Every year on my birthday I would cry, it would be tears of happiness as I remembered them all but also of great sadness.
'I fell pregnant at 18. I wanted my mum so bad, to hear her say she was there for me, and to hold her granddaughter for the first time.
'I told myself I can be a good mother, be the mother my mum would have been.'