I met Kate Moss’s murdering stalker at his creepy home – he did something so terrifying it haunted me for years
I’VE called at hundreds of people’s homes during my career as a journalist.
But I’ll never forget the sense of terror in my stomach when I knocked on the door of William Warrington.
That day was brought back to me in sharp focus this week when I saw that the man who had once made me a cuppa then LOCKED me in his home had gone on to murder his mother — in that very house — and then his father.
I’d been dispatched to approach Warrington, 42, in 2019 after he was handed a restraining for stalking model Kate Moss.
The £500,000 house, which he shared with his ageing mother, was in Bourton-on-the-Water, one of the Cotswolds’ prettiest villages.
But covered in dark wooden cladding and set uncomfortably far back from the road, it had been left to fall into a ramshackle state of disrepair.
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“It’s like the Bates Motel,” I whispered to the photographer who accompanied me, referencing the horror hotel from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 chiller Psycho.
I passed a rusting barbecue and empty gas bottle as I made my way to the front.
I paused at bits of fraying rope, cast-iron furniture and what looked like a weird assortment of World War One memorabilia left strewn outside.
The house was deadly quiet, apart from the creaking of the faded wooden gate.
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I asked the photographer, Stan, to wait outside, and made my way to the porch after plucking up the courage to knock.
Stan was worried, even before the door opened. “I’ll give you ten minutes,” he said, fear in his voice. “If I haven’t got a text from you, I’m coming in.”
My panic was going into overdrive
The next moment the door opened and there was Warrington. Surprisingly normal, for a stalker, I thought.
Although he towered over me, he looked like any middle-aged country gent.
Wearing a cream jumper and dark jeans, he quickly invited me in, not knowing I wasn’t alone.
The house was messy and it felt like an old woman’s.
There were pictures in frames, including one of Warrington as a schoolboy in neat uniform.
He politely ushered me into the kitchen, then I heard the front door being locked behind me.
My heart started pounding. I tried to reassure myself.
I’m sure it’s all OK. He’s not violent, he’s just an oddball, he’s just a stalker. He’s obsessed with women but he doesn’t want to kill them.
He offered me a cup of tea in a floral mug and then we went into the living room where he lit the first of a stream of roll-ups.
We began chatting and he started telling me he was sorry for what he had done regarding Kate Moss.
A cocaine and cannabis user, Warrington was trying his absolute hardest to come across as sympathetic and nice.
Just a fortnight before, he had been told by a judge that he had caused “distress” to the catwalk queen after leaving creepy items at her home.
He was not a weirdo, he insisted. He was just stressed about things.
Then my heart nearly leapt out of my chest when he suddenly rose and locked the living room door.
My panic was going into overdrive. Why had he locked two doors?
With a nervous smile, I asked him what he was doing and he calmly told me it was for “safety” reasons.
My hands were sweating and I truly thought he would do something to me.
I looked at my phone, there was no reception in the house.
Then I looked up and he was grinning menacingly while searching for something in a cupboard full of letters.
He didn’t seem right.
I then heard a crash and my name being shouted.
It was Stan, who had broken the lock on the rickety front door and was now banging loudly on the living room door.
“Scarlet, Scarlet, where are you?” he screamed. Warrington leapt out of his seat with fright.
“That’s the photographer,” I said, trying to be as calm as I could.
Stan was dripping with sweat.
He asked if I was OK before turning quietly to Warrington and saying: “Sorry about your door.”
Warrington did not seem to think this the least bit odd.
He just asked if we could resume the interview and added: “Does that mean we will be doing pictures?”
He proceeded to sit on the couch and go into a ramble about how he had come to end up in court for stalking Kate.
“I want to apologise to everyone,” he told me. “It’s all incredibly regrettable.”
I could barely listen to a word. All I could think was I’ve got to get out of here.
I’d never met anyone so sinister. It was the way he did things with no anger or aggression, just matter of fact.
He would switch between speaking fairly eloquently about his actions to talking about how he had telepathic communication with Kate and Vladimir Putin.
The only time I saw a hint of passion was when he was talking about a long-running planning squabble with his local council.
Warrington became manic and started thrusting town hall paperwork in my face.
Then he started telling me he received signs and messages.
The television and radio were talking to him, he insisted. I thought, it’s really time to go now.
Everyone was to blame but him, he went on. He blamed movies. He said he was inspired by 2007 war drama Atonement and 1984 Mozart flick Amadeus.
He’d long since lost his train of thought
Meanwhile, the whole time he was talking, his TV was showing the Phantom Of The Opera — on mute.
A Phantom mask was among the objects he’d left outside Kate Moss’s house.
It’s lonely in the countryside, he told me, as he clenched and unclenched his fists.
“There’s not much to do but watch films,” he added with a weird look.
After 40 minutes I could take no more. He’d long since lost his train of thought and was babbling about how he wanted to eat calamari on a faraway beach.
He even had a place in mind — Tarifa, on the southernmost tip of Spain. As we now know all too well, he never did get to start that new life in the sun.
I made it home with a sense of relief. Then at 3am my phone pinged with an email notification.
It was Warrington. Shaking, I opened the message and it contained a single internet link.
I clicked and it opened a video of the final scene from 2010 thriller Black Swan, with Natalie Portman dancing to Swan Lake. I was petrified.
The next night he sent me a creepy link to the ending of the 2000 movie Billy Elliot — another Swan Lake dance.
He messaged me the morning afterwards and apologised, saying how he had fallen asleep with his iPad on and to ignore the links.
This was followed by a number of exclamation marks.
I blocked him and never ran a word of what he told me.
I’d hoped never to hear the name William Warrington again, then news broke on Tuesday of how he’d been convicted of killing his parents.
Warrington stabbed and beat to death dad Clive, 67, and mum Valerie, 73, in March — a day after absconding from a psychiatric unit, where was being held for attacking his housemate with a knife.
He dragged Valerie’s body from their home, kicking her in the head to “make sure she was dead”, and then ran her over as he drove to kill his dad at his flat in Cheltenham, Gloucs.
He admitted the killings on the grounds of diminished responsibility and was sent to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital “indefinitely”.
Bristol Crown Court heard he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and had “delusional beliefs”.
It seems beyond belief that one of those terrible deaths happened under the same roof where we had chatted so awkwardly.
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But a part of me was not surprised his campaign of terror had not ended with stalking Kate.
It was clear he was a dangerous man and needed to be helped. And it was clear I’d had a lucky escape.