Stephen Port murders: Dog walker on the shock of finding two victims
A dog walker who found the bodies of two of the men murdered by serial killer Stephen Port has described her shock at the macabre discoveries.
Barbara Denham was taking out her dog Max on 20 August 2014 when she spotted a young man propped up against a wall in the churchyard near to her home in Barking, Essex.
Ms Denham at first thought the man was sleeping off a heavy night and tried to shake him awake but got “no reaction”.
"I've touched him, what may have been his leg," she told ITV News. "It was very cold."
When she was unable to rouse the man she called police, who would confirm his death and later name him as 22-year-old Gabriel Kovari.
Ms Denham said she tried to put the experience behind her – but a month to the day later she found another young man sitting in a similar position in the exact same spot.
"I'm thinking to myself, please God no, please not another one," she recalled. "I thought please let it be a boy who's drunk or something.”
She added: “To have found two young men in exactly the same position, it did upset me a bit and I was a bit concerned over my reaction. I was trying to keep control of myself."
The second body was Daniel Whitworth, a 21-year-old trainee chef from Gravesend in Kent.
Both men were found within 400 yards from the home of Port, who had already killed before.
But it took police months to establish the deaths were linked murders and identify the 41-year-old chef as a suspect.
Ms Denham said she never imagined at the time that she had stumbled across the double murder, and has been permanently affected by the men’s fates.
"I really did feel sorry for both of them, for the families," she said.