Who: Darren Presley, 60
When: Thursday, 10/1/2008
Where: Devonshire Road, Blackpool
How: Blackpool Gazette
Perp: Kirsty Burdon, 19 (charged); Stephen Kidd, 36 (charged); Lea Mason, 32 (charged)
Status: Charges
BBC News
Blackpool Gazette
Lancashire Constabulary
Blackpool Citizen
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20 comments:
no one deserves to be murdered but ask yourself this..why did John Bentley change his name to Darren Presley? because he was trying to hide his true identity and escape the young victims families who he abused.
no one deserves to be murdered BUT a sex offender should never walk the street again so what they done did us all a favour at least he cant harm another innocent child again i hope he rots in hell. its just a shame that the law allows these animals to be set free they should let the parents get hold of the sick perve and let them deal with the sick animal. i feel sorry for the baby thats been brought in to the world which now has no dad as hes behind bars which if the law was tougher on these perves then none of this would of happened.
To Anonymous who wrote a comment on the 25 january i agree that a man like darren should have never been let out of jail, however you are making excuses up for what these 3 men did to him. what they did is unforgivable. Yes darren was convicted for sexual assualts on children and that is not acseptable but he served his time and ended up with no life when he came out of jail, isnt that bad enough?
i understand if you dont agree with me but you are making it sound quite justified what these three people did to him and i dont want anybody giving my uncle LEA MASON a reason why he took those actions my uncle is an evil sick twisted man that deserves to rot in a cell
I do agree with what has been said that he shouldnt of ever been let out but i do think unless you know the murderers as does the comment above me and myself knowing STEPHEN KIDD i cant speak about the other 2 but i knew Stephen unfortunatly and he has done some horrid things already in the past i dont think he should of been able to go from any of the 14 prisons he was in before this i dont think that Darrens past should be a reason to murder it would of been more justified if any of them had been the parents of the alleged abused children but as usual for Stephen thought he was above the law . I must agree with the rotting in the cell i hope that Stephen also rots in there and also he will never go to heaven he will rot in hell FACT
What these people did cannot and will not be justified! They turtured that man in a horrific way!! To the last comment made.. What else did Stephen Kidd do before this? Why did he go to 14 prisons before this? I no Stephen Kidd but chose to have no contact with him since I was about 8 as I hate the bastard, but I'm just wondering what else the evil man has done! Would be greatful if you could tell me? I also think these sick people should rot in hell!! And feel very sorry for the baby!!
He wasn't involved. He was blackmailed into pleading in order to protect his baby Boy from being taken out SS
When the TRUTH is FINALLY revealed 💠person will hopefully feel differently
He didn't deserve this
The TRUTH will be revealed soon..
They’re different courts, Stephen. Your child being taken out of SS had nothing to do with your guilty plea and fighting for innocence would have been better protection for your child. If you were truly innocent, you would have been found innocent, Stephen. But the truth is your girlfriend and mother of your child LIED to back up your LIES and ended up in prison herself as an accomplice. You’re sick.
Hurry up and reveal it then Stephen, because all you're doing is banging on about how corrupt the system is. You've given various versions of events and reasons for your 'innocence' but not once explained how you're actually innocent. You said you were coerced in to pleading guilty, then you said you had substantial mental health issues at the time of the plea. Which is it?? Because those are two quite different reasons. Your defence used legal precedent in which the accused did actually kill a man.
How could you have heard nothing in a small Blackpool flat while a man was being brutally murdered in a prolonged attack?
Good luck getting the public onside
Not going to happen.
It’s the 30th of June, 2008, and 36-year-old Stephen Kidd is sitting in his holding cell in Preston Crown Court, waiting for his trial to begin. The jury is also waiting, and the judge is at the bench. The charge? Murder. Specifically, the murder of 60-year-old Darren Presley in a Blackpool flat on Devonshire Road in January of 2008. Mr Presley had been doused in paint, attacked with a frying pan and a bottle, stabbed and stamped on. A post-mortem recorded the cause of death as severe head injuries. One of Kidd’s two co-defendants, Lea Mason, also faced a murder charge and was sentenced to 17 years.
Kidd had already pleaded not guilty between January and June 2008, hence the arrival at a trial. He was all set to go upstairs and face the jury when he was thrown into the hands of an untimely interjection, an unexpected glitch in the matrix. His other co-defendant and girlfriend, 19-year-old Ms Burdon, had received a reduction in her charge. She was no longer to be charged with murder, but with assisting an offender. Not only that, she had admitted to the police that her first account, which supported Kidd’s innocence, was false. She had lied to the police to cover for him. After being notified of her confession, Kidd agreed to plead guilty. He was sentenced to a minimum 17-year prison term.
According to the Birmingham Mail, “The court heard that Kidd smashed a bottle over Presley’s head and covered him in paint before the pair stabbed, beat and stamped on him until he died.”
Fast forward to 2025, and Kidd was discharged into the free world again, although not quite free because he’s on a licence and heavily managed by MAPPA: Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements, something he is not best pleased about. Nevertheless, in this world, he discovered social media. Since his release, he has realised just how practical it can be for shaping the narrative and gaining loyal support while laying down the law according to his own version of reality. He has threatened legal action and multi-agency litigation against anyone and everyone who hasn’t bowed down to his demands: Housing associations, probation, hotels, hospitals, medical staff and individual members of the judiciary who he views as corrupt. He told his supporters that the CCRC (The Criminal Cases Review Commission) have blocked his calls, lawyers are refusing to raise a judicial review, prison staff are spying on his social media pages, ex partners are lying about him, MPs are ignoring him, and the Innocence Project London is deliberately delaying working on his case as part of a conspiracy to conceal the truth. In fact, he threatened to sue them. The Innocence Project is a charity run by law and criminology students designed to investigate cases where appeals have been “exhausted,” and Kidd says he will sue them for a substantial sum should they refuse to take on his case. Addressing them in a video this year, he warned that if they send his files back, he will take them to a civil court to seek one million pounds in damages. These people know the truth, and they’re doing everything in their power to stop it from coming out, he claims.
What truth, you ask?
Well, Kidd insists that he was blackmailed into pleading guilty. Before he got a chance to stand in front of the judge that day at Preston Crown Court and refute these new accusations being made by Burdon, his lawyer told him to think of her and their newborn baby. During her time in custody, Ms Burdon had given birth to their son. In a Facebook video on the subject, Kidd alleges that legal counsel told him if he didn’t plead guilty, Ms Burdon would be sentenced to life, and their baby would be taken into care. If he did plead guilty, she would get to walk.
“I was told, if you plead guilty, she goes home with him. So I said, I’ll plead for them.”
The problem in accepting this claim is that an assisting an offender charge never carries a life tariff. She was never going to get life. But she had already entered a guilty plea, so there was no way the court were just going to throw open the doors and wave Ms Burdon off on her merry way with the baby in her arms. She inevitably received a further custodial sentence, much shorter than her two co-defendants. Legal counsel do not decide what happens to a child in a case where two parents are accused of a crime. Each criminal case in UK law is considered on its own merit.
Despite a clear and coherent description of being given one hour to consider his plea after being notified of Ms Burdon’s charge reduction and the words of his lawyers (think of them), Kidd also alleges that he was not of sound mind at the time of the plea due to suffering from PTSD (from witnessing the murder). At other times, he has claimed not to have been in the room while the murder was occurring, although he has never once explained where he actually was or what he was actually doing while Mr Presley was being attacked. He hasn’t explained why he didn’t call for help. He did say that Ms Burdon didn’t “phone or scream.” When asked these questions, Kidd flees into a digital blackout, systematically deleting the evidence and blocking the account to preserve his insulated echo chamber while screaming “TROLLS.”
It seems more likely that if his lawyers did ask him to think of his girlfriend and child, they meant so as not to put her through the ordeal of a trial. If his lawyers had information from Burdon’s account that told them he would likely be found guilty by that jury, they only had his best interests in mind by suggesting a guilty plea. Being found guilty by a jury can result in a longer sentence, which may have resulted in him being away from his child for longer.
Instead of an accused murderer who had to plead guilty to reduce his time behind bars, Kidd became the victim of a blackmailing scheme by a judicial cabal. He gets to play the caring, selfless altruist who threw his life away to “protect them,” even though pleading not guilty, if he was innocent, should have fixed the problem. He told his viewers that he had to tell the judge he’d done something:
“I knew the evidence. I knew what did kill him and I knew what didn’t. So I said, okay, I’ll say one kick. That’s it.”
No mention of the bottle assault or indignation at the Birmingham Mail article for making such a claim.
He has publicly voiced disdain that his vacation of plea was denied and, separately, that a lawyer refused to raise a basis of plea. A vacation of plea requires requesting the withdrawal of a guilty plea. A Basis of plea means pleading guilty while disputing specific allegations. You cannot have both. A few social media followers stay angry on his behalf, blissfully ignorant to the contradictions.
With a small pool of followers consisting of empathetic well-wishers and anti-establishment crusaders who already harbour a hatred for the system, Kidd can pour on the victim-martyr-complex, safe in the knowledge that his partisans will eat it up without a second thought. The holes in his selective narrative go over the heads of those who prefer to see a poor, innocent, struggling disabled man who suffered a stroke while in prison, rather than take time to look at the administrative facts. Kidd uses Joint Enterprise law and the Jogee ruling (R V Jogee) as part of his brand, but Ameen Jogee never pleaded guilty to the crime for which he was accused. The case comparison is incongruous. When no legal professional will agree to take on his case using the Jogee ruling, it’s not that his case fails to meet the legal requirements; it’s that the system is out to get him.
While Kidd heavily leans into the performative persona of a justice campaigner, his narrative relies entirely on curated excuses, carefully omitting the structural gaps and unanswerable forensic realities of his own case file.
He told his well-wishers that he’d witnessed his co-defendant forcing Mr Presley to drink turpentine earlier on the day of the murder, but that it was just a silly joke. He said he bathed Mr Presley after the same person covered him in paint and that Ms Burdon had filmed this on a phone, but it was all done in jest. Kidd’s supporters seem comfortable with his cognitive minimisation and continue to pour on the soothing ointment of “There, there, you poor man, how can one person endure so much maltreatment?”
For a prisoner who’s spent years behind bars deprived of access to the digital age, social media provides a new and alluring world of contacts, access to various personalities, groups, and a platform to rewrite history and rebrand oneself as a victim of a corrupt and broken system, rather than a violent offender. Kidd has absolutely utilised this world, creating regular videos where he angrily taps and scrapes a pen on the table while addressing those whom he views as a threat to his control. He can block anyone who asks questions that might fracture his facade: “Where were you at the time? Why didn’t you call for help?” He can tap into the supply of those willing to ignore his behavioural leakage and engage in a parasocial relationship where he gets to remain both the hero and the victim, feeding the narcissistic cycle that resulted in him being placed behind bars in the first place.
For a high-conflict narcissistic personality, decisions always come down to self-preservation.
The Echo Chamber, Where Emotional Validation Supersedes Empirical Evidence. Kidd’s audience of doctrinaire sycophants and anti-establishment sympathisers would rather apply a band-aid to his damaged ego than acknowledge the disconnect in his proclamations, or pause to wonder how his guilty plea could have protected Burdon in the first place. They don’t see the legal dissonance, never mind wonder why he would choose to plead guilty to protect someone whom he claims was lying about his involvement in the brutal stamping out of an elderly man’s life.
https://theforensicobserver.substack.com/p/the-stephen-kidd-case-a-short-study?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Quite clearly Kidd is someone who just doesn't take responsibility for his actions, it is never his fault.
He declares his love for his eldest son, yet he tried to set fire to his estranged partners home while he knew his 3 year old son was inside.
I am a researcher for Woodcut Media we were originally just doing an episode of Britain’s Most Evil Killers on Lea Mason however our research and in depth interviews have shown that Stephen Kidd is as culpable and therefore they will share joint billing. Nick Mavroidakis our producer would Like to hear from anyone who would like to contribute to this episode.
https://woodcutmedia.com/contact/
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