Crossbow tragedy, bigger than Kyle Clifford, social media culture
March 04, 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
In July 2024, people throughout London and the UK were shocked by a man killing his girlfriend, her sister and her mother with a crossbow and a knife. ( Wikipedia article).
In September, he entered a not guilty plea. At the end of January he changed his plea, admitting that he is guilty. For better or worse, this means there will only be a trial on one aspect of the event and we may not be able to see the extent to which social control media was a factor in the overall tragedy.
The coroner opened an inquest which was adjourned while the criminal trial and sentencing takes place. When the inquest reopens, I really hope they will look at the role of Google and social control media throughout the trial of his older brother, his career and his relationships.
The government has speculated they may need to regulate crossbows. I looked and I didn't find very many cases like this. It was almost one of a kind and the focus on the crossbow, rather than cultural issues, may be a distraction. It appears far more urgent to investigate the impact of social control media on youth.
Some statistics and research
3 people killed by crossbows in 2024
570 total homicides in the UK during 2024 according to this official report. The UK Government also provides the raw data and on the Notes tab, in note 24, they observe that crossbow murders are tallied together with shooting by firearms. The total number of shootings for 2024, including the 2 crossbow victims, was just 22 out of 570.
Most UK police do not carry any gun or firearm. It is argued that this policy reduces the inclination of criminals to acquire firearms and that is why the UK has so few firearm deaths compared to the United States.
29,000 women killed by tobacco-related illnesses in 2019 (an estimate from the charity ASH). ASH asserts this is the biggest cause of avoidable death in the UK that could be eliminated by government policy. Regulating tobacco appears far more important than regulating crossbows.
A Swedish study from 2014 suggests that
if a sibling commits a violent criminal act, the risk that a younger sibling may follow in their footsteps is more likely than the transmission of that behavior to an older sibling.
This is based on a paper from researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University and Lund University in Sweden. Original paper by K. S. Kendler, N. A. Morris, S. L. Lönn, J. Sundquist, K. Sundquist. Environmental transmission of violent criminal behavior in siblings: a Swedish national study. Psychological Medicine, 2014; 1 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291714000932
A study from 2013 suggests that
The study’s findings showed that both physical bullying and cyber bullying associated with substance use, violent behavior, unsafe sexual behavior, and suicidal behavior.
These are the very things that Kyle Clifford has been accused of: violent behavior (crossbow and knife), unsafe sexual behavior (he is currently on trial for rape) and suicidal behavior (he went to a cemetery and was found with self-inflicted chest wounds).
To avoid confusion, I'm not suggesting that the last tweet from the woman is responsible for the man's unjustifiable behavior. I'm suggesting we need to look at all the tweets and other online interactions he was exposed to since the moment his brother was charged with a serious crime in 2017. It isn't hard to imagine that the amount of negative content far outweighed the positive over those seven years.
Social media companies have been accused of deliberately preventing parents and next-of-kin from checking the content in social media accounts after suicides. This prevents outsiders from seeing the extent of the negative content that men like Clifford may have been exposed to before they flipped. If we were able to look at all those messages together we may start to suspect that other people should share at least some of the blame for this horrific tragedy.
Chronological summary
5 April 1998, Kyle Clifford was born in Enfield, North London.
In August 2017, Bradley Clifford, the oldest brother of Kyle, was involved in a road rage incident that resulted in the death of a scooter rider. Bradley told police it was an accident.
While waiting for the trial, Bradley's family may well have come to believe the accident story and defended Bradley in front of their friends. The whole thing must have had a big impact on Kyle who was only 19 at the time this court procedure commenced.
I have had two similar accidents while cycling and I don't believe either of them was an accident. One of them was caused by a London taxi driver who rammed me in a bus lane. The other was a bike-hating racist Swiss woman who tried to push me off the road as I passed through a section of roadworks in Lausanne. The latter collision actually occurred as we were at a pedestrian crossing too. Both motorists had approached me impatiently from behind, just as Bradley Clifford rammed a scooter from the rear. I've experienced numerous other collisions where a motorist was 100% responsible but there was no way to prove whether the motorist acted maliciously.
In May 2018, a jury found Bradley Clifford guilty of murder and he was sentenced to prison. The murder had been very brutal and the trial was widely reported in the British press. Details about Bradley Clifford are easily found online.
The location of the murder, the Clifford's home town of Enfield, is also the place where Kyle resides. Ever since 2017, anybody using the search box in Google or social media to try and locate Kyle Clifford in Enfield is likely to have encountered stories about his brother.
People are not guilty by association and these things don't always run in the family. Just look at the reports about the highly conservative former prime minister Tony Abbott, who opposes gay marriage and divorce. His sister, an outspoken lesbian, has had a gay marriage, a divorce and then a second gay marriage.
Presumably details of Bradley Clifford's conviction would have been conflated with Kyle Clifford's name in search results, especially given they both lived all their lives in Enfield and that is also the location of the previous murder. All kind of speculation about the family has been shared on social control media in Kyle's circle of friends, with his neighbors, his workplaces and it would have come up sooner or later each time he started a relationship with a woman.
The news reports tell us that Kyle eventually found he was unable to avoid people gossiping behind his back and so he would simply declare his brother is a murderer at the beginning of each relationship. It is very sad that people have to live like this.
I had a similar experience after the conviction of Cardinal George Pell. Rogue Debianists began spreading rumors that I had some connection with harassment or abuse. Ever since those rumors started appearing behind my back, I've had to openly tell people that my cousin was in the choir and I had supported various victims throughout my career, from the time people elected me as a student representative to the time developers elected me as the Fellowship representative.
In 2019, the final movie in the Rambo series, Last Blood, was released in cinemas. Rambo is known for the use of a compound bow, not a crossbow, in all but the first film in the series.
In 2019 Kyle was accepted into the military and passed out successfully from basic training in 1st The Queen's Dragoon Guards. Reports tell us he passed his training but didn't stay in the military for very long. Some reports suggest he served for approximately three years and left the military in 2022.
The military always does background checks on the families of recruits. They would have known about his brother and personally, I feel it is to their merit that they give people a chance even when some other employers would instinctively have reservations about such an issue.
Early 2023, Louise Hunt and Kyle Clifford met through a dating website and began a relationship that appeared to last continuously for 18 months.
From 22 February 2023 to 20 July 2023 he was employed as a security guard by Amthal, a company based in St Albans, Herts. The company did not give any reason for his departure. It is speculated he then worked in other security jobs but the employers are not identified.
In February 2024, by coincidence, the UK Government Home Office put out a call for evidence to see if the existing legislation, the Crossbow Act 1987, needed to be improved in some way. Inconveniently, their call for public input was published on Valentine's Day. Cupid is traditionally pictured with a bow and arrow.
1.4. ... In answer to a Parliamentary Question in 1991 (Crossbows (Hansard, 26 November 1991) (parliament.uk)), the estimate provided then was that there was between 250,000 and 300,000 in circulation. ...
1.5. Incidents involving crossbows are, fortunately, rare and the vast majority of those using crossbows do so safely and responsibly. There were fewer than 10 homicides by crossbow from 2011 to 2021 and no killings by crossbow (or catapult) in 2021/2022, which was the first year data were collected on the Home Office Homicide Index. There has since been a tragic killing by crossbow in December 2022 involving a crossbow in Westcliff, Essex. It is shocking and traumatic when incidents do occur involving crossbows, and the Government is clear that such misuse is a very serious matter and where an offence is committed, this should attract the severest penalties possible.
In May 2024, reports appeared about a song published on TikTok, "I'm Looking for Man in Finance" that was going viral. Commentators differed over whether any significant number of women really think like this or whether it was pure parody.
London is the European capital of finance and one in three jobs in London relates to finance. Therefore, some women in London are dating a guy who works in finance and a lot of the prices in restaurants and other discretionary expenses are higher than the rest of the UK.
The drama about a "Man in Finance" may have caused some feelings of insecurity of men who can't compete with that.
Then again, the reports tell us he had at least two other girlfriends at the same time.
The woman and her family lived in Bushey, an area that is slightly more affluent than Enfield.
An LBC report tells us that Clifford had concerns about his girlfriend wearing makeup and about whether she spends time with other men. On the question of makeup, it is not clear if this was really about the cost of the beauty products. But if he had two other girlfriends, maybe he didn't have enough money to support them all at the same time.
Social control media has also given us the phenomena of "trad wives", that is, social media algorithms show both men and women the images of wives and girlfriends who choose to have traditional roles and let their man make decisions for them. There is some debate about whether some subset of women are freely choosing this way of life or whether it is just another way that social control media brainwashes people. There are some couples who seem to be satisfied with relationships like this but not every woman wants that.
At the end of June 2024 the relationship between Louise Hunt and Kyle Clifford had ended somehow. Multiple news reports repeated a quote about a "messy" ending to the relationship but no detail is given. The reports suggest the woman ended the relationship by sending a text message.
More details of text messages have been released during the trial. Looking at the messages, it is possible to see how they have both hurt each other, even if that wasn't intended. If saying the same things in person, the words can be forgotten over time. When the same words are put in writing, even if it is just a text message, the words will bring back the same bad feelings every time the recipient looks at the message.
The media was able to obtain testimony about the relationship from neighbors and friends. However, some of these people emphasized they only knew the woman and never met the boyfriend. These are already second-hand comments, Chinese whispers, by the time they are given to the journalists.
Given the extraordinarily horrific nature of the crime, it seems that nobody wanted to identify themselves as a friend of the boyfriend.
Therefore, we don't really know a lot about the relationship or the man's history up to this moment, except that some people found him a bit immature and he had multiple girlfriends.
In the first days of July, it is reported that Louise had a car accident, she collided with a telegraph pole and the door of her car had caved in. The news reports speculate that stress about the break-up was a factor.
On 3 July 2024 Louise made a social control media post that is critical of relationships but somewhat ambiguous about the reasons. It is not clear if this was just down to a difference in personalities, due to financial issues, due to apprehension about the brother or due to some specific mistake by Clifford personally. During the trial, it was revealed that the brother and the rest of the Clifford family were factors for the woman ending the romance.
I couldn't help thinking about some of the resignations people have written in free software organizations. There is a long list of FSFE resignations. Whenever somebody resigns from one of these groups, the ringleaders try to make it look like the volunteer has done something wrong. What you end up with is the fact that cult-like groups boasting about "enforcing" a Code of Conduct may actually be violating the coercive control laws that were created to protect women.
Looking at it the other way, when you leave a voluntary group you are free to put your concerns in writing by email. In a professional environment that is quite appropriate. If you have concerns about wrongdoing then it is even more vital that you make a written record of your position so that you can distance yourself from the behavior. But in a personal relationship it is very different. Breaking up by text message or email leaves the recipient feeling that the relationship was just another business transaction. It is far better to find a neutral place to meet and end the relationship with mutual respect.
If there was some genuine hazard, making a social media post is not going to lessen the hazard, it can only make it worse.
The social media post doesn't mention Clifford's name but it is not hard to understand why some men would feel humiliated and ambushed by this type of social media activity.
This is the point where we have to try to imagine what was going through Kyle Clifford's mind in the 6 days between the moment he felt attacked on social media and the deaths.
It has been widely reported that the woman's father is a BBC sport presenter with over 10,000 followers on his social control media profile. Clifford may have feared that the humiliating words in the tweet would be shared more widely than her immediate circle of friends.
In reality, the BBC has given employees strict rules about use of social control media. On top of that, for many journalists, bringing their children's romantic relationships into the public domain is probably the opposite of what they want. Nonetheless, even if John Hunt had no intention of sharing the woman's tweet, Clifford may have been unable to sleep at night from fear that the father was going to share it.
Sharing a tweet takes so little effort, it is just a click and that is why the perception of sharing the tweet would have created such strong feelings of dread.
Clifford bought the crossbow on the very same day that his ex made the tweet.
It would be interesting to know about the role of algorithms that may have guided him to purchase a crossbow. For example, did he make online searches for crossbows, or was it suggested to him spontaneously?
In addition to the fear that Mr Hunt would personally share the tweet, Clifford may have feared colleagues of Hunt in the BBC may have used his circumstances for public debate.
Related to this is the fear that people would connect the tweet with the prosecution of his brother and his status as a former soldier and blow it out of all proportion. For example, if they had simply broken up because his salary as a security guard forced him to be strict about budgeting, it would be really wrong to extrapolate that into a national debate. Nonetheless, social control media has a tendency to try and make those generalizations in the great race to the bottom as the users seek attention or seek a place to unload their feelings.
Even if nobody shared the tweet and if nobody tried to link him to the misconduct of his brother, the process of having a woman write and broadcast her side of the story may have had a triggering impact for him, bringing back bad feelings from the period between the arrest and conviction of his brother.
There is a certain amount of one-upmanship in social media. When one person puts their side of the story out there, the other person feels compelled to correct mistakes or defend their honour. It is a lose-lose scenario.
Even if it had been a mundane break-up, all of these surrounding circumstances, including the woman's celebrity father, the murderer brother and the public humiliation may have compounded the stress. He may have been unable to sleep at all in the six days between the tweet and the fatal encounter with his ex on 9 July.
If previous romances or jobs had been undermined by the association with his brother he may have been suffering from an even deeper feeling of dread about his prospects for finding a new partner.
What would have been a relatively normal break-up for any other two families may have created a perfect storm in the man's mind.
Twitter/X, the platform used for millions of acts of public humiliation every day, is owned by Elon Musk. Recent news reports have looked at exactly the same phenomena in the US Federal workplace, where Musk is accused of deliberately creating a confrontational environment. The most recent example was the humiliation of the Ukrainian president, although in that case, reports blame JD Vance rather than Elon Musk.
On 6 July 2024, Clifford went for a night out in central London with a former army colleague. The colleague has stated it was unusual that Clifford left their hotel early the next morning without saying goodbye.
This is one of many hints that Clifford was already going over the same thing in his mind. We went through a similar analysis for the death of Frans Pop in Debian. Pop had sent his resignation note the night before Debian Day. When we read it now, we can see he had clearly started planning his death. Yet he only went through with it five days later. As in the case of Clifford, there was a period of approximately five days or more where people continued to interact with Pop not knowing what was really in his head.
On the day of the murders, 9 July 2024, the news reports differ. Some suggest that Kyle Clifford went to the woman's house on the pretence of collecting some possessions while other reports suggest he had been invited or ordered to come and remove his possessions.
The reports tell us he arrived at about midday, that he encountered the mother first, the girlfriend came home later and the sister was the last person to come home. He departed at about 7pm so it appears that he was there for up to seven hours.
All we know for sure is that a security camera or dashcam recorded him leaving the house with the crossbow covered in a cloth.
As a former soldier, he had trained with a variety of weapons. If he deliberately chose the crossbow instead of any other weapon, what motivated his decision? For example, did he anticipate the huge media interest that would be created by this type of weapon?
It looks like he had planned to kill himself and this crime was intended to create a message, similar to a suicide note. Once again, the high public profile of his brother's trial and the instantaneous manner in which gossip is shared on social media may have contributed to his feeling that he had to do something enormous himself. He was faced with the choice of doing something incredibly sinister to get attention or not having any attention at all. Social media thrives on the thirst for attention and young people who grew up with this technology are more likely to be suffering from the impact of dopamine.
Did he photograph or video the murder scene and if so, did he make any effort to try and share or publish such things online? If he had planned to publish the crime, his choice of weapon may have been based on the type of impression he wanted to make on social control media. Other criminals have been motivated by the intention of livestreaming.
The police spent some time searching for him. About 17:00 on the following day, 10 July, Clifford was found at the Lavendar Hill cemetery in Enfield. We are told that he had shot himself and was seriously injured at the time when police found him.
Given that he was found in a cemetery, people have asked if he was in proximity to the grave of a family member or the grave of his brother's victim, Sobhan Khan. It is an uncomfortable topic but nonetheless, if society is going to address this phenomena, facts like this may give insights into how he made such dreadful decisions. It is reported that his home was beside the cemetery and this raises the prospect that he was passing the grave of his brother's victim on a daily basis. These things can mess with people's minds and it wouldn't be obvious to outsiders.
News reports stated that the police recovered a crossbow. Yet the pictures in the news reports vary and it appears they are not showing us pictures of the same crossbow. It may even be another type of bow, such as the compound bow used by Rambo. In the British justice system, it is normal for these details to be hidden by the police up to the moment when they go into a trial or an inquest. In the American system, it is more common for the police to show this type of evidence to the media very quickly in the hope of being transparent and avoiding accusations of evidence-tampering.
It would be helpful if the inquest clarifies the impact of social control media during the trial of his older brother, during his relationships and also in the six day period after the woman sent the public tweet.
Personally, I'm not keen on censorship and I don't want to sound like I'm reprimanding the woman for talking about her feelings. On the other hand, there is a tendency for social control media platforms to be rigged against men, rigged against elderly people and rigged against people of colour. If an elderly woman made a post about abuse in care homes I suspect the algorithms would not show it to anybody. But when an attractive young woman makes even a relativley minor complaint, even if it is just a difference in personalities, the algorithms blow it out of all proportion. The algorithms are actually using young women like Louise Hunt as bait to attract discussion from other users.
Obviously, most men don't lie on the sofa with a phone in their hand all day waiting to respond to every tweet. Some hours may pass and hundreds of comments may appear before a man even realizes people are gossiping about him. By that time, even if he posts a reply, it is too late and nobody sees his defence because they have already moved on to vilifying somebody else.
To put it another way, there is a strong bias against people who simply do the right thing and concentrate on their job. The algorithms and the toxic culture of social control media rewards people who are only half working, half looking at their phones throughout the entire day.
Another interesting comparison is the disappearance of indigenous women and children in Australia. The remains of one woman were left in a duffle bag in a public park for many weeks before anybody even realized she was missing. Yet when a white woman of the same age goes missing, social control media and the traditional media make a huge effort to raise awareness.
How a Brisbane mother-of-10 died "may never be known", with the Deputy State Coroner unable to make definitive findings into her death.
Some women seem to realize the algorithms will help them attack somebody while other women are just sharing their feelings impulsively. Nonetheless, while I don't like the idea of censorship, I do feel that the system needs to be rebalanced so that men are not subject to disproportionate negativity and acts of vigilantism. In the case of Dr Jacob Appelbaum, for example, women deliberately spread rumors on social media and this motivated other people to vandalize his home.
It is not hard to imagine onlookers saw Clifford being humiliated and decided to kick him while he was down, making unjustified links between his brother and his break-up. Just as we need to pull away the grey cloth that covers the crossbow, we need to lift away the veil that covers tweets, text messages and similar communications that anybody else sent to the man during the break-up. The role of vigilantism and the role of social control media in bringing out the worst in people could be considered as accomplices in some of the crimes, maybe even in this one.
When the man's ex made a public post, there was a huge loss of privacy and control for the man. His mind could see many ways that the situation would get worse and not one way to make it better. This loss of control is often a factor in the thinking of suicide victims. The option to commit an act of violence may appear to be the only way they feel they can recover control and dignity.
Sun Tzu explains it in The Art of War:
When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.
Yet social control media does not give victims any outlet. As each new case shows us, the rumors just keep going around in circles until people hurt themselves or they hurt somebody else or both.
In any business transaction, we try to measure outcomes. The outcomes here are very clear: the lives of these two social media users have both been destroyed in different ways, along with the lives of two other women, while the provider of the social control media, Elon Musk, has become the world's richest man and a regular guest in the White House. █
- 2024-07-11: The Guardian: Crossbow murder suspect was found in cemetery with self-inflicted injuries
- 2024-07-11: Sky: Kyle Clifford: What we know about Bushey triple murder suspect
- 2024-07-11: Sky: Kyle Clifford's brother, Bradley, is convicted murderer serving life sentence
- 2024-07-11: Manchester Evening News: Sisters and mum made 999 call and text as horror details emerge of Bushey crossbow killings
- 2024-07-12: Yahoo: Who is Kyle Clifford? The former soldier captured by police after John Hunt’s family killed in crossbow attack
- 2024-07-12: AI generated article Brothers in Trouble: Devastated Parents Of Kyle Clifford And His Brother Bradley Clifford with various user comments
- 2024-07-30: Watford Observer: Carol Hunt 'died from stab wounds' in Bushey crossbow attack
- 2025-01-22: BBC: Crossbow killer admits murdering mum and daughters">
- 2025-01-23: LBC: Crossbow killer Kyle Clifford ‘controlled and ridiculed’ girlfriend 'banning' her from staying out late and wearing make-up
- 2025-02-22: The Mirror: Crossbow killer Kyle Clifford's grim life in jail 'paralysed with damaged voice'