When is a serial killer not a serial killer? When it’s a series of similar but unrelated deaths.
You may recall the episode on the Smiley Face Killers from a ways back, in which it was believed a gang of people were committing murders and then spray painting smiley faces nearby. As it turns out, a smiley face is among the most common forms of graffiti, and you’d be hard pressed to find a murder that wasn’t coincidentally near one.
The human brain is designed to excel at pattern recognition. We’re so good at recognizing patterns that we can identify patterns where they don’t even exist. And that brings us to the subject of today’s video, the Manchester Pusher. There is a lot of debate over whether this person actually exists, or if people have simply identified a pattern and constructed a story around it.
But if the pusher is real, he would be one of England’s most prolific serial killers, only coming in behind Harold Shipman and possibly the Finchley baby farmers. Let’s see if we can figure out the truth as we examine the story of the Manchester Pusher.
Origin Story
The exact origins of the story are unclear, though it seems to have existed locally for years as a bit of an urban legend. To many people it was just a joke and to others it was the true story of a dangerous serial killer, but it didn’t receive any major attention. The common reporting is that the theory was popularly discussed on the hashtag #thepusher on Twitter, but this is entirely untrue.
After scrolling through 10 years worth of tweets on that hashtag, because I couldn’t be bothered to look up how to restrict the search by dates, I discovered that there was almost no activity prior to January 2015. The few tweets about the Manchester Pusher didn’t provide any context so it’s clear that people locally were aware of the idea, but it wasn’t a popular hashtag for discussion on the proposed serial killer; it was mostly just people quoting the lyrics to that Steppenwolf song.
What changed on January 11, 2015 is that for the first time a major publication released a story about the abnormally high number of deaths in the Manchester canals and the fear that there was a serial killer on the loose. That publication was of course the Sunday edition of the Daily Star. While I’m sure the Daily Star has come up on this channel before, for American viewers who are unfamiliar with the tabloid it roughly seems to be less credible than the National Enquirer but more credible than Weekly World News. So basically it’s trash.
Thanks to FOIA requests, because the UK has that as well, the Daily Star was able to reveal that in the previous six years, there had been 61 deaths in the Manchester canals. Of course, further investigation by a Channel 4 documentary proved that this wasn’t accurate. There hadn’t been 61 deaths, there had been 85. That’s more than one death per month, which is an awful lot of murdering.
Or possibly accidents. Regardless, following the Daily Star’s front page story and their rare use of actual, verifiable information, numerous other newspapers began picking up the story as well.
The Manchester Pusher was no longer just an urban legend or a running joke, it was now a full fledged media sensation. One of the key pieces of information in the story that lent some credibility to the idea of a serial killer was the cause of death. In 28 of the cases, the coroner returned an “open verdict”. This means that the cause of death could not be definitively determined.
While it’s a troubling statistic, it’s not necessarily that surprising. Many of the bodies spent a significant amount of time in the water before being found which would remove a lot of types of evidence. There were also no witnesses to their deaths and they hadn’t been caught on CCTV footage. In many cases this meant that there was simply no way to determine if it was an accident, suicide, or if someone had pushed them in.
Even though the open verdicts shouldn’t have been surprising, they were still seen as suspicious.
But what’s more suspicious is that CCTV footage, or lack thereof. Many of the bodies were found on or near Canal Street, which is important for a couple of reasons. First, the area is littered with both nightclubs and CCTV cameras. It was a very popular area that should have been full of potential witnesses and not a great place for committing murders. But the volume of cameras in the area is a much bigger deal.
These cameras are monitored in real time, and many have the ability to move. Not to get up and walk around obviously, but to turn from side to side. Despite the cameras, the generally high traffic, and the disproportionately high police presence in the area to try to keep people safe, none of the victims were seen entering the water. Out of all 85 bodies pulled out of the canal, not a single one had been captured entering the water on CCTV.
That is incredibly noteworthy, but still not a smoking gun. One of the reasons these cameras are monitored is so that if someone is seen falling into the canals they can receive help before it’s too late; the waters are incredibly cold and can quickly result in shock and a drowning fatality even from a person who was otherwise fine before entering the water. If the cameras caught someone falling in, they would ideally notify police who could go rescue the person.
Likewise, if there were witnesses to such an event, hopefully the witnesses would help pull the person from the water. So while it makes sense that the people who died are the ones that nobody saw enter the water, it’s still an awful lot of people to dodge the high number of CCTV cameras in the area.
The other reason that Canal Street was seen as important is because it’s part of what is referred to as Manchester’s Gay Village. Because of this, there initially was speculation that the pusher was specifically targeting homosexual men. While some of this speculation persists, it has largely been discredited.
Although the alleged serial killer is referred to as the Manchester Pusher, the bodies in the canals were found in the entire Greater Manchester area, not just near Canal Street. While a meaningful amount of the victims were found to have likely entered the water near one of the gay clubs on Canal Street, it’s not even close to the majority of the people they found. This larger area in which the bodies were found also includes sections that aren’t nearly as well covered by CCTV, some of which are even underground and unlit.
So far, it all sounds a bit coincidental. There is absolutely no way that all 85 of those deaths were the result of murder, though few people would argue it was even close to that many. But what about the 28 open verdicts? Were these all accidents that simply couldn’t be identified by the coroner due to lack of evidence, or was there something more going on here? There are a few victims in particular that draw the most attention as being likely candidates for murder.
The Cyclist
The water in the Manchester canals is extremely cold, and you don’t have to look far to find official government warnings about the dangers of going into the water. In fact, it’s so dangerous that someone who isn’t from England might look at it and ask why the fuck there aren’t guardrails.
For anyone unfamiliar with the setup of these canals, you have a narrow-ish sidewalk running alongside a canal. It’s normally only about an eight inch drop to the water so a person should theoretically be able to climb out, but there are small sections where the drop becomes as much as eight feet. I’m told that at night the water is so dark that it just looks like a street, and a drunk person could walk into it not realizing it was the water.
But the most notable part is that there are giant sections with absolutely no guardrail at all. Many of the areas that do have guardrails are weak and offer little protection, while I even saw some areas where the barrier between the sidewalk and the canal is only a couple inches off the ground, making it a tripping hazard rather than a form of protection.
Anyway, even with how cold the water is, a person could climb out of the water in most locations so long as they didn’t succumb to shock. Pushing somebody in wouldn’t be the most reliable means of committing murder, so surely there must be survivors of the pusher, right? To date, there is exactly one person that claimed to have survived a brush with the pusher back in April of 2018.
It was around 10 pm when a man was cycling home from work. That’s when he saw a figure out of the corner of his eye. The man clotheslined him, catching the cyclist directly in the neck with his arm and sending him toppling into the canal, bicycle and all. The cyclist’s legs were tangled up in the bike, and as he tried to pull himself out of the water the man kicked him back in.
The man then fled and the cyclist was able to pull himself from the water. He then went to a nearby gym to call 999 since the water had destroyed his cell phone.
The cyclist described his attacker as a white male, average build, normal hair, aged 20-40. Really helpful, dude; you’ve narrowed the search down a lot. He also asked police about the pusher to make sure they weren’t somehow oblivious to the legend, and described his attacker as a “psychopath”.
Even if the pusher is real, there’s a lot of debate over whether the cyclist was his victim or not. First of all, he survived when none of the other victims have. Also, he is the only one that was riding a bicycle rather than being on foot. It doesn’t really seem to match, and there’s some other context that’s important as well.
The people of Manchester fucking hate cyclists. I thought this was pretty universal and we all just talked about how much we hated dealing with bicycles on the sidewalk, but I guess Manchester takes it to a whole other level. With little effort, you can find countless stories of pedestrians assaulting people on bicycles. One girl had rocks thrown at her head just for the sin of riding her bike on the sidewalk. I am definitely not a fan of cyclists taking up the sidewalk, but that is not an appropriate response.
There were no other witnesses, so we also don’t know whether the person involved was even attacked at all. Maybe he was just a clumsy asshole who fell into the water himself and made up a story for attention. We can’t be sure, but if the pusher is real this certainly doesn’t feel like his work. Fortunately, the other victims are much more compelling.
David Plunkett
In April of 2004, 21 year old David Plunkett thought he had won his Willy Wonka style golden ticket. He traveled 50 miles from his home in Halifax to a concert in Manchester at the Daytona Racetrack. That concert was Budweiser’s King of Clubs, a massive event with no cover charge and an open bar. The only catch was that you couldn’t buy a ticket, you had to win them.
Of course, David didn’t actually know where he was going; the event was being held at a “mystery venue”, likely to keep people from camping out and trying to sneak in.
David and his friend Mike were fortunate enough to attend the event, which included guaranteed travel back to Halifax. Unfortunately, David never received that free ride home. In a turn of events that could only be described as unforeseeable, a 21 year old at a free concert with free booze got “too drunk”. Instead of being given safe passage back home, David was thrown out of the venue. Because when all of those Budweiser commercials tell you to “drink responsibly”, it turns out they are not fucking around.
It was around 1:30 am when Mike called David’s parents to tell them that the pair had been separated and David was nowhere to be found. They got off the phone and David’s parents tried calling him, with David finally answering on the third call. But he never said a word. All that his mother could hear was breathing that sounded like he was walking. Beyond that, there was total and complete silence. She stayed on the phone with him for about eight minutes, and that’s when the screaming began.
She described it as “ghastly screaming”, and David’s father said it sounded like David had seen something that terrified him. When the howls and screams began, his mother handed the phone to his father and dialed 999. The Greater Manchester Police officer who answered the phone was able to hear the screams, but the call wasn’t recorded. She said that the recording device had failed to work, but wound up resigning in shame following the incident.
According to the police officer, David’s screams were “distressing”, and in a later interview she said the incident still haunted her over a decade later. With every new report of a body found in the canal, she became more and more convinced it was the act of a serial killer.
However, the official report said something entirely different. It took two weeks after David’s disappearance for his body to be found, but this was not one of those open verdicts; the death was ruled an accident. For many people including David’s parents, this answer wasn’t satisfactory.
Why had David not spoken on the phone? What caused him to scream? And if he fell into the water, why wasn’t there the sound of a splash? After the screaming had ended, his parents stayed on the phone with him until 4:30 am when his phone died. But in all that time, there was total silence.
In 2016, a year after the Daily Star put the Manchester Pusher in the national and worldwide spotlight, Channel 4 ran a documentary called Manchester’s Serial Killer? in which they investigated the suspicious deaths, including David’s. The documentary following former homicide detective Tony Blockley as he investigated these deaths, and he absolutely did not believe that David’s death was an accident.
Aside from everything that happened on the phone, there was also the matter of some cuts on David’s head and arms. The coroner ruled that these happened when he fell into the canal, but Blockley believed they were more likely to be defensive wounds from some sort of a struggle. Unfortunately, nearly 20 years later, there isn’t going to be any new evidence in this case so we may never know the full details.
Nathan Tomlinson
Nathan Tomlinson was a 21 year old student, studying to be a gym teacher. On December 17th, 2010, he went to the Mitre Bar in the center of Manchester for a work Christmas party. At one point during the evening, he received a text from his family. It was a snowy, treacherous night and they wanted to make sure Nathan didn’t drink too much and would be safe.
He assured his family that he was pacing himself and drinking shandy. For those unfamiliar, which included me until about five minutes ago, shandy is beer watered down with something nonalcoholic, normally lemonade. Of course people say a lot of things, especially to their families. Was Nathan actually pacing himself? There’s not really any way to be certain, but I’m inclined to think not.
He left the bar at about 10:15 pm after being slapped across the face by an unidentified woman. I don’t know what precipitated that event, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume he deserved it. I think it’s also fair to assume that most guys who were trying to pace their intake of alcohol aren’t going to do something that would result in them getting slapped, especially at a work function. That’s just my personal speculation so you’re welcome to disagree.
Maybe totally sober guys in the UK do inappropriate things at work parties that get them slapped all the time.
Upon leaving the bar, Nathan was picked up by CCTV footage. He was seen exiting the bar and crossing the street, but then it’s kind of anyone’s guess. Like I said, it was a crappy, snowy day so visibility from the cameras wasn’t great. They were definitely following somebody, but were they following Nathan? That part isn’t so clear. He was taking quite a bit of a detour rather than heading directly home, as if he was lost and trying to figure out the way.
But this actually checks out. A man matching Nathan’s description asked a bus driver how to get home to Stockport, and from the timestamps on the CCTV footage as well as the admittedly low quality images, it sure seems like they were following the same person the entire time.
His journey itself is mostly unremarkable. He does a bit of walking, and at the very end does a little running. Not from anybody, just into a covered walkway where he would no longer be being snowed on anymore. That was also the last time he was picked up by the cameras, and his body was found in the canals nearby some two months later.
However, there is one interesting part of the CCTV footage that I haven’t seen anyone discuss. In one of the final segments when he is walking down Adelphi Street in Salford, he started doing something strange. Instead of walking normally as he had been the entire time up to this point, Nathan started sliding.
It’s possible he was slipping as he was walking through snow that could have been layered on top of ice, but it looks intentional. At this point it was closing in on 11:30 at night, but the person in the footage looked to be intentionally propelling himself then sliding across the ground rather than just focusing on getting home where it would be warm and dry. It’s the sort of thing a child might do when playing in the snow, which means it’s the sort of thing a drunk person might do in the snow as well.
So we have two possible options here. Either he was screwing around because he was much more drunk than he led his family to believe, or it was just really slippery out. Either could easily result in a person accidentally falling into the canal without needing to be victim of a serial killer, but there is one other important piece of evidence that points in the direction of foul play.
When Nathan’s body was recovered, his phone, passport, wallet, and coat were all missing. It doesn’t necessarily point to a serial killer, but it does point to a mugging gone wrong. If he kept his phone, passport, and wallet in his coat, someone could have stolen it from him followed by an unrelated accidental slip. Or perhaps there was a struggle and he was pushed into the canal while a mugger ripped the coat off of him.
Or maybe he fell into the water with the coat on. Nathan’s body entered the canal near a weir. Some reporting indicates that these weirs can tear clothing off a person, so there doesn’t need to have been anybody else involved. The coat almost certainly would have been recovered from the canal at some point if this happened, but it also probably would’ve been found first. That means whoever found it would have thought, “Hey, free wallet!” without realizing it was connected to a missing person case.
Considering I still don’t fully understand what a weir is or how it could remove clothing, I can’t say how likely a possibility that is. It’s allegedly a reasonable explanation, though in this case a mugging gone wrong sure seems pretty reasonable as well.
It doesn’t help that police were criticized for their handling of this case. It wasn’t until four days after he disappeared that Nathan’s status was upgraded from “low risk”, despite having disappeared while on foot by the canals in treacherous weather conditions. When the initial missing person report came in, the police were operating under the assumption that he had left the bar with a girl and was enjoying some cuddle time. This was easily refuted by the CCTV footage of him leaving the bar alone, not to mention that it’s kind of hard to pull after the entire bar sees another girl slap you.
While the police response is more than a little disappointing, it wasn’t going to change the outcome. Nathan would have been dead within minutes of entering the water, so all they could have hoped to do was find the body more quickly.
Souvik Pal
The final victim we’ll be looking at today is Souvik Pal, an 18 year old design student from India who was attending college in the UK. It was New Year’s Eve, 2012, and Souvik was excited to go to the club with his friends. But one of his friends was less excited about him coming. Souvik had never been clubbing before coming to the UK, and she was worried that the venue would be too large and intimidating. But he was definitely not intimidated.
It began as a normal night, with everyone dancing to celebrate the Earth returning to an arbitrary position in its orbit around the sun. Wow, Kevin, you must be so much fun at parties. During the night, Souvik got separated from his friends. He eventually got ejected from the club after attempting to cut in front of the line for the bathroom.
That’s the most common way it’s reported, anyway. More detailed reports note that his attempt to jump the queue involved charging security to try to push past them. So there’s that. After being ejected from the club, Souvik never met back up with his friends or returned home. It took three weeks of extensive searches before his body was found in the canal, just 50 feet from the Warehouse Project nightclub where he had been partying.
When they were interviewed, his three friends that spoke to the police said that Souvik hadn’t had much to drink that night. But he had taken ecstasy. Lots of ecstasy. He took some a couple hours before they left for the club and took more while they were at the nightclub. One of his friends even mentioned how he had been Googling how to sneak drugs past the sniffer dogs that the nightclub apparently used.
Police reviewed the CCTV footage, and they found something odd. The final confirmed sighting of Souvik was outside the club at about 11 pm. However, there was other footage that is believed but not confirmed to be of Souvik. The first piece shows him walking down an embankment towards the canal with another person. This mystery person returns, but Souvik does not. That second person has never been identified, and it has been heavily speculated that he is the killer, particularly by Souvik’s father.
The other piece of footage that is believed to be Souvik shows him trying to climb a fence to sneak back into the nightclub. In the Channel 4 documentary, former detective Blockley doesn’t buy this explanation at all. He said it would be “exceptionally odd” as this path back to the club would require him having to wade through the water. However, there is something that Blockley doesn’t seem to address or consider with that analysis: Souvik was high as a kite.
I don’t know when he took his first dose of ecstasy, when he took it again once inside the club, or how long he was at the club before they were thrown out. But what I do know is that it doesn’t really matter because ecstasy lasts for a good six hours. Would it be weird to climb a fence and walk through freezing cold water to try to get back into a nightclub? Little bit, yeah. But would it seem that weird to a person who was tripping balls? Probably not.
The thing that’s really weird is that there’s no footage of Souvik falling or being pushed into the water. He’s purportedly seen on CCTV walking down the embankment with someone else and seen attempting to climb the fence. The other person is seen walking up but Souvik is not, and yet he also isn’t seen falling off the fence into the water of being pushed. To this day police aren’t even sure where he entered the water, and his case was one of the ones that returned an open verdict.
A Sensible Explanation
So what exactly is going on here? Is the pusher a serial killer who has taken the lives of dozens of individuals, or is it just a joke/urban legend that got taken too far by a tabloid newspaper? Well let’s take a look at the victims as a whole.
Of the 85 people who had been found dead in the canal during the period that was initially reported on, 72 of them were men. Most of those men were also college age. This is not surprising for reasons that point away from murder.
Many of these cases were ruled as accidents, and many of them almost certainly were. Alcohol played a role in a lot of these deaths, which should probably go without saying given how many were people who left nightclubs or bars, possibly after being thrown out. And as any man can tell you, one of the best parts of having a penis is that you can urinate absolutely anywhere with incredible ease.
It’s entirely likely that many of these people were drunk men who decided to piss in the canal on their way home and then accidentally fell in. Even if they weren’t taking a leak prior to their deaths, it still makes sense that men would be more likely to accidentally fall in the canal than women would be.
When I go walking for exercise, I normally do so around 2 or 3 in the morning. I have no problem doing this because even though I’m alone late at night and sometimes in unlit areas, as far as I’m concerned I’m the scariest person walking around out there. I’m not actually scary, but I’m big and have resting bitch face, so I suspect any would-be attacker would opt for a different target.
But women don’t think that way, and rightfully so especially since they’re far more likely to be chosen as targets. Women generally have the good sense not to travel alone at night, which would make them far less likely to be the ones winding up in the canal. If the pusher was real, he would prefer to target someone alone. If these are accidental deaths, having someone with you means there’s someone to help you out of the water.
Given this, is it possible that all of these deaths were just accidents, a bunch of mostly men who got too drunk and fell into the canals while walking alone? Well, probably not. Many of the bodies found in the canal did not have their wallets, which means there’s a good chance that at least some of these people died as a result of a mugging gone wrong. Even taking into account the weir thing that I still don’t fully understand, most of the bodies weren’t found near a weir.
Also, at least some of these people must have kept their wallet in their pants instead of their jacket.
Of course, that still doesn’t point to a serial killer. It points to a bunch of potentially unrelated incidents, but not to a serial killer. There are sections of the canal with underground walkways that are completely unlit. These would be the perfect location to rob somebody, and I’m sure lots of people have had that idea. It could be unrelated criminals or some sort of roving gang, but it’s a reasonable explanation for some of the victims.
However, police actually disagree with this and claim that these muggings are extremely rare. Of the bodies found in the canal, there is one that was identified as being a mugging victim and the five people who assaulted him were promptly arrested. Another one of the bodies was the attacker in a mugging who wound up falling in himself. Those are the only cases that the police are willing to attribute to robberies getting bungled, but they also have 28 open verdicts so what do they know.
The other explanations just seem too plausible to justify the invention of a serial killer, and there’s also some other important data we haven’t even mentioned yet. Manchester isn’t the only city in the world with canals like this, so maybe we can compare the numbers. Manchester had just over 12 deaths per year in the canals, so what about another city like Amsterdam? As it turns out, Amsterdam averages 18 deaths per year in their canals.
Of course, Amsterdam also has more canals than Manchester does. The city has a little more than 50% more kilometers of canal, which works out nicely since they have about 50% more deaths in their canals than Manchester does each year. I could bore you with a bunch of additional numbers, but just assume that the rate of death in the Manchester canals is within one standard deviation of what would be expected for how many kilometers of canal they have.
And in all of the places that have these canal deaths there is one common thread: it’s predominantly young, drunk men who are dying. Honestly it feels like this is pretty open and shut, and it’s no wonder that the police constantly deny the existence of the pusher or that any of these deaths are related.
When it comes to stories like these, it’s important to remember what the source is. There are a lot of articles available about the Manchester Pusher, but virtually everything comes back to one of two sources: the Daily Star, or the equally garbage Daily Mail. In fact, a lot of the articles you’ll find are simply reports from the Daily Star or Daily Mail copied verbatim. Of course tabloids are going to push a sensational story like this over the much more boring “Unfortunate Drunk Men Fall into Canal”.
The problem with this is that obviously they’re going to emphasize unimportant details or omit things that damage their narrative. For example, there have been hundreds of articles posted about David Plunkett since the pusher story made news in 2015. They all say that he get separated from his friend at a concert, but it was only a tiny article from the BBC in 2005 that mentioned he was thrown out of the venue for being too drunk. The article had quotes from his parents confirming that piece of information, and they even explained why they weren’t going to sue Budweiser for his death.
The short answer to that is “because this didn’t happen in America.” That wasn’t their answer, it’s just the real answer.
Anyway, exactly how drunk David was just isn’t something that anyone reports. Likewise, it’s difficult to find references to Nathan being slapped and I haven’t seen any mention of him screwing around in the snow other than what I saw with my own eyes. Lots of articles mention that Souvik’s friends told police he hadn’t had much to drink that night, but you’d be hard pressed to find one that follows that up with saying that the same friends confirmed he was high off his tits on ecstasy.
I’m not trying to character assassinate the victims or anything like that, but it is important information for determining what the most likely thing that happened actually was. If the pusher was real and there was a serial killer on the loose, then yes I would absolutely want police to catch him. But if the allegedly mysterious deaths can be more easily explained as accidents once we have a more honest picture of exactly how intoxicated the victims were and what their behaviour was like prior to their deaths, then there isn’t any benefit to trying to instill fear in people by manufacturing a serial killer.
I mean for tabloids there is because they want money, but the rest of us should try to do better. I think. Maybe I’m wrong and once this video is live Simon will come back to me with the watch time analytics to give me a proper scolding for not pushing the conspiracy narrative harder.
But of all these cases, the one that still bothers me is David’s. The phone call is just so bizarre and it doesn’t really make sense. Drunk people can still talk, even if what they say isn’t necessarily coherent. My initial assumption was that maybe his attacker was right next to him and he kept the phone in his pocket when he answered to make it stop ringing, but his mother could hear him breathing on the phone so it couldn’t have been in his pocket. And then, there was the screaming.
I don’t have any rational explanation for this, and it’s odd to me that his case was ruled an accidental death rather than returning an open verdict. It’s completely bizarre, and even the pusher isn’t a good explanation for it as an encounter with the pusher sounds like it would be extremely brief. If it was just testimony from his mother then maybe I could try to justify it as her mishearing or something, but the mother, father, and the police officer who answered 999 all heard David’s screams. I don’t even have a guess as to what happened to him, but I’m willing to rule out an accident.
Wrap Up
The Manchester Pusher has gone from a joke to an urban legend to a media sensation, and all the evidence and logical reasoning tells us that no such serial killer exists. It’s unlikely that all of these deaths were purely accidental, but it’s even less likely that the ones that remain were the work of a single serial killer. Which means it would be the perfect crime.
Think about it: it’s known that people accidentally fall into the canals with some regularity, so would it really be that hard to push someone in and get away with it? As long as you know how to avoid the CCTV cameras, it should be pretty trivial. Just picture yourself walking along the narrow sidewalk by the canal. You reach a secluded area where some drunken sod has stopped to take a leak on their way home.
As you pass them, you just reach your arm out and give a little shove. You’d never even break your stride, because you know that the person is too drunk to escape from the icy waters so there’s no need to stay and make sure the job is done. It’d be so easy to do, and just as easy to get away with.
Perhaps the greatest trick the pusher ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Or maybe he really doesn’t exist and it’s mostly accidents with a few unrelated acts of violence. It’s probably that last one, though the confidence with which I’m willing to declare that only furthers my belief that it would be very easy for someone to actually become the pusher if they wanted to. But even if one or two murders have been committed this way, based on the relative numbers from other cities with canals it doesn’t seem like there’s a genuine serial killer at large.
I’d like to end this episode with an open letter to the cities of Manchester, Birmingham, Amsterdam, and anywhere else that this is a problem.
“Dear City Council,
Build some fucking barriers or guardrails along your canals. And I mean real ones, not a little rope that’s like six inches off the ground. Seriously, you have tons of people dying in your canals every year. I’m sure the taxpayers would be willing to pay the additional onetime fee of like 50 cents each to build some proper protection.
Drunk people are idiots too, so you should probably build them at least six feet high so people can’t easily hop over them. This is a simple problem with a simple solution, so get your shit together.
Love always,
Some Loudmouth American.”
Key Takeaways
- The Manchester Pusher theory originated from a 2015 Daily Star tabloid article and lacks credible evidence of a serial killer.
- Eighty-five canal deaths over six years mostly involved young, intoxicated men, with rates comparable to Amsterdam’s canal deaths per kilometer.
- No CCTV footage captured any of the 85 victims entering the water, though cameras exist primarily to enable rescues of those spotted falling.
- Tabloids omitted key context about victims’ intoxication, including David Plunkett being ejected for drunkenness and Souvik Pal’s ecstasy use.
- The author concludes deaths are likely accidents and unrelated crimes, though David Plunkett’s bizarre final phone call remains unexplained.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
What publication first brought the Manchester Pusher story to major attention, and when?
The Sunday edition of the Daily Star first brought the Manchester Pusher story to major attention on January 11, 2015.
How many deaths occurred in Manchester canals in the six years prior to the Daily Star’s report, according to FOIA requests and later investigation?
According to FOIA requests, the Daily Star reported 61 deaths, but a Channel 4 documentary later proved there had actually been 85 deaths in the previous six years.
How many of the canal deaths returned an ‘open verdict’ from the coroner, and what does that mean?
In 28 of the cases, the coroner returned an ‘open verdict,’ meaning the cause of death could not be definitively determined as accident, suicide, or murder.
Why is the lack of CCTV footage of victims entering the water considered noteworthy but not definitive proof of foul play?
None of the 85 victims were captured entering the water on CCTV, which is noteworthy because Canal Street has many monitored cameras. However, this isn’t definitive proof because the cameras exist partly to rescue people who fall in, so those who died are likely the ones nobody saw enter the water.
What happened to David Plunkett during his final phone call with his parents?
During his final phone call, David Plunkett never spoke, only breathed as if walking, then began ‘ghastly screaming’ that terrified his parents. The call continued in silence until his phone died at 4:30 am. The police officer who answered 999 also heard the screams.
What evidence suggests Nathan Tomlinson may have been more intoxicated than he told his family?
Nathan Tomlinson told his family he was pacing himself and drinking shandy, but he was slapped by an unidentified woman at the bar, and CCTV footage showed him intentionally sliding on snow in a manner suggesting drunken playfulness rather than just slipping.
What substances did Souvik Pal consume on the night he died, according to his friends?
Souvik Pal’s friends told police he hadn’t had much to drink, but they confirmed he had taken ecstasy—lots of it—both before arriving at the club and while inside.
How does Manchester’s canal death rate compare to Amsterdam’s?
Manchester had just over 12 deaths per year in its canals, while Amsterdam averages 18 deaths per year. Amsterdam has about 50% more kilometers of canal, which corresponds to about 50% more deaths, putting Manchester’s rate within expected norms.
What is the author’s conclusion about whether the Manchester Pusher exists?
The author concludes that no such serial killer likely exists, that most deaths were probably accidents involving drunk young men, some may have been muggings gone wrong, but the evidence doesn’t support a single serial killer. However, the author notes it would be very easy for someone to actually become ‘the pusher’ due to the circumstances.
What safety recommendation does the author make to cities with canals?
The author recommends building proper barriers or guardrails along canals, at least six feet high, noting that current protections are often inadequate or nonexistent and that this is a simple problem with a simple solution.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: The Pusher - The Canal Killer of Manchester
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
