The Serial Killer Shrine: The Shaye Groves and Frankie Fitzgerald Case

Her bedroom looked like a shrine to serial killers. Framed photos of the Yorkshire Ripper, Myra Hindley, Rose West, right there on the wall. And when her boyfriend ended up dead in her bed, prosecutors say she used every trick she'd picked up from years of true crime obsession to try to walk away from it. It almost worked.

The Shaye Groves Murder Trial: Inside the Botley Drive Killing

Growing Up in Leigh Park: The Making of Shaye Groves

Shaye Groves grew up in Leigh Park, on the edge of Havant in Hampshire, England, a housing estate built after World War Two to give bombed out Portsmouth families somewhere to live. By the time Shaye was a kid there in the 1990s, it had become one of the most deprived neighborhoods in England, top five percent countrywide. That's the soil she grew up in.

Shaye was partially deaf from a young age and wore hearing aids in both ears starting around eleven, which made her an easy target for other kids. She leaned into horror instead of running from it, loved the Child's Play movies so much that classmates started calling her Chucky. By thirteen or fourteen, the school had referred her for a mental health evaluation, and she came out with a bipolar diagnosis a judge would later call probably wrong. She started drinking and using drugs on and off, started cutting her legs, and at one point pulled a scalpel on a classmate.

She left home as a teenager into a relationship with its own problems, and things stayed rocky for years before a stretch where life evened out. She had a daughter in 2017 with a man named Ashley Wingham, who by all accounts was not violent toward her, and around that time got a second diagnosis, complex post traumatic stress disorder, pointing to trauma stacked up over years.

A Bedroom Full of Serial Killer Photos and Hidden Weapons

She moved into a council house on Botley Drive in Leigh Park with her friend Lauren White, another single mom, and this is where her identity sharpened into something extreme. Facial tattoos, piercings, and a bedroom that looked like a horror movie prop closet, with framed photos of Peter Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper, Myra Hindley, Rose West, and Jeffrey Dahmer on the walls, gangster biographies on the shelf, a Celtic dagger, a ball bearing gun, two Viking style axes, and a flick knife tucked in the heel of her boot. She told the court the dagger was for pagan rituals. The judge didn't buy it, since there was zero evidence she'd ever practiced anything pagan, and said flat out those weapons were there to be used if she ever decided she needed them.

Meeting Frankie Fitzgerald: A Fast and Volatile Relationship

In February of 2022, Shaye met a twenty five year old from Portsmouth named Frankie Fitzgerald on a night out. Frankie had two young kids with a woman named Charlene Scutt, and his own history, including a domestic violence conviction against her. These two fell fast and hard. The judge who eventually sentenced Shaye called the relationship nothing if not passionate, meaning rough sex, filmed encounters, cocaine, alcohol, and jealousy ratcheting upward on both sides. They even signed a sex contract, witnessed by Shaye's friend Vicky Baitup, and set up a bedroom camera, something they both agreed to at the time.

Jealousy, a Fake Cancer Lie, and Escalating Threats

By March, a month in, it was already falling apart in flashes. Frankie did cocaine, got angry, kicked her stuff around the room, and that same night Shaye cut her legs again, the old habit resurfacing. Around this stretch she told Frankie, Lauren, and others close to her that she had cancer. She did not. Her old doctor confirmed no cancer diagnosis was ever on record. The judge later called this lie a tool she used to pull sympathy and money out of the people around her.

By April the jealousy had teeth. Frankie found out about a text from one of Shaye's old boyfriends and lost it. Shaye became convinced he still wanted his ex, the mother of his kids, all while she was quietly seeing an old boyfriend named Declan Payne, careful to keep the two men apart. Lauren, watching it unfold in a group chat, called the three of them dead girls walking if Frankie and Declan ever met.

By June, Frankie had blocked Shaye's number after suspecting she'd been out with Declan again. His texts got darker, threatening to snap her in half if she slept with someone else and telling her cancer would be the least of her worries. Vicky Baitup saw some of these messages and was truly scared for her friend.

Two weeks before the murder, Shaye's own kitchen cameras caught her talking through a plan to have male friends jump Frankie in an alley, with a staged cut on herself so she'd look like the victim. Police later investigated it as a possible conspiracy. No charges came, but it shows exactly where her head already was.

A small detail worth pausing on. This is a woman running cameras through her own kitchen and living room, and it never occurs to her that all that footage could just as easily be used against her later.

The Night of July 16, 2022: How the Killing Unfolded

On the night of July 16th, 2022, Shaye's five year old daughter was with her dad for the weekend. Frankie came over, Lauren was home too, and the three of them drank while Frankie and Shaye took cocaine, Frankie more than Shaye. Frankie spent part of the night gambling online, trying to borrow money, and messaged Declan Payne, telling him to back off.

At 1:20 in the morning, Frankie found Declan's name saved in Shaye's Snapchat contacts. They argued, mostly upstairs in the bedroom, which no longer had a working camera since it had been taken down earlier that month. At some point Shaye picked up Frankie's phone while he wasn't watching and found a Facebook exchange between him and someone claiming to be thirteen. She photographed it at 3:12 in the morning, a timestamp that becomes huge later, since it proves this happened before anything violent. What she left out was that Frankie had blocked that account the second the person said her age, and that the person was actually seventeen.

The Killing, the FaceTime Call, and the Staged Crime Scene

Frankie came upstairs and fell asleep. While he slept, Shaye took the Celtic dagger she kept by the bed and cut his throat. The pathologist said it only took moderate force. His jugular vein was completely severed, his carotid artery partially severed, and that first cut alone would have killed him fast. There were no defensive wounds anywhere on his body, because he never had the chance to wake up and fight back. She then stabbed him nineteen more times in the chest, after he was already gone or nearly gone.

Within hours, Shaye FaceTimed Vicky Baitup, who later testified Shaye was giggling on the call. Shaye turned the camera toward Frankie's body, wrapped in a bloody duvet, and told her, I've done him. She wrapped him in bin bags, brought Lauren in as her accomplice, and floated burying him in the garden or staging a suicide. She texted Vicky claiming Frankie had left the house alive, and even invited another man over, while his body lay upstairs.

She cleaned with bleach, strong enough that police smelled it walking in, and left the dagger in the bathroom sink. She told officers Frankie had attacked her and that she had footage proving he'd raped her, and sent Vicky clips from their bedroom recordings edited to make consensual sex look like assault. Police later recovered the unedited originals, which told a very different story.

How Digital Evidence Unraveled Her Story

It all came apart fast. The officers' body cameras caught her building the false account in real time, before she'd had a chance to smooth it out, and that 3:12 a.m. timestamp anchored the whole timeline against her. Every piece of evidence she thought she controlled worked against her instead.

The Trial, the Verdict, and a 23-Year Sentence

At Winchester Crown Court, the same courthouse where Rose West, whose photo hung on Shaye's wall, had once stood trial, the case ran five weeks. Shaye testified Frankie had raped her repeatedly and that she grabbed the dagger in self defense, striking his throat to stop him and stabbing his chest to stop what she called the bubbling. The jury didn't buy it, deliberating almost eighteen hours before a guilty verdict on February 16th, 2023, rejecting self defense, loss of control, and diminished responsibility, all three.

At sentencing, the judge acknowledged her rough childhood, the abuse, the deafness, the self harm, and said it counted for something, just not much. He accepted emotionally unstable personality disorder, sometimes called borderline personality disorder, as more accurate than the earlier bipolar diagnosis, and said it reduced her responsibility slightly. He also didn't let Frankie off the hook, calling him a violent man who had threatened and sexually assaulted her. Both things were true at once. He gave her life with a minimum of 23 years, and left her with one line a lot of people who followed this case still repeat. The damage you have done cannot be undone.

Frankie left behind two kids who will grow up without him. Shaye's daughter will grow up with her mother in prison until at least the mid 2040s. Lauren White, briefly a suspect herself, was cleared completely, since Shaye told police Lauren had no part in the killing.

What lingers about this case goes well past the serial killer posters on the wall. This is a woman who spent years absorbing true crime documentaries, building what she must have believed was a playbook for getting away with something terrible, and then watched every piece of it come apart under the same kind of evidence those documentaries are built on.