Operation Misty: The Undercover Sting That Caught a Serial Killer

0:00 Gary Allen was eight years old when professional started writing alarming things about him in official files. He was acquitted of murder at 26. He was convicted of two murders at 47. Everything in between is the story you're about to hear. There's a version of this story where Gary Arthur Allen gets stopped early. When someone in a position of authority looks at the file, looks at the boy and makes a decision that changes what happens to two women decades later. That version of the story does not exist. This one does.

0:58 Paul England 1981 Gary is eight years old and the professionals around him are already alarmed enough to put his name into an official file. He has been referred to psychiatric evaluation not because of a single bad incident or a rough patch at home but because of a consistent and documented pattern of extreme unprovoked aggression toward his younger siblings. Again, Gary is eight years old. It's the kind of behavior that worries people whose entire job is to stay calm around difficult children. Social workers who worked with Gary used the phrase split personality and they meant it like a clinical observation. He could appear cooperative and completely well-behaved one moment and then become somebody else entirely unrecognizable the next. Between 1982 and '83 he spent two terms at a residential home called Baynard House. Even in a structured supervised setting with trained staff, the other Gary kept showing up.

2:00 By 14, the trajectory had steepened considerably. He attacked his mother with a close prop while she was bedridden and recovering from surgery unable to defend herself. And before you ask me, a close prop is a piece of wood or metal that props up a clothesline to keep it from sagging. I didn't already know that I had to look it up. That same year he grabbed a schoolgirl by the throats on the street and struck her in the head and he forced her to the ground. At 15 while living within the care system, he attempted to strangle the son of one of his foster parents. The voice survived. The documentation of this period is extensive and the institutional response was nowhere near enough. Gary was sending out big signals about the kind of person he was and was still becoming. He joined the British armed forces and was eventually stationed in Germany. In the military can genuinely be a turning point for some troubled people. For Gary Allen, it was mostly just a new geography for the same behavior. He threatened to housemate with a diver's knife.

3:04 He attacked a man with a baseball bat. He boasted to friends about smashing another man's fingers over a car dispute. And then there's this crazy detail. He threw a television through a window because a song he liked did not win the Eurovision Song Contest. Not that it really matters but the song was called Better the Devil You Know, performed by Sonya at the UK Eurovision in 1993, held in Milstreet, Ireland. She ended up finishing second and Gary Allen was big mad about it. Picked up a whole television through it out of a window. Now I'm a Buffalo Bills fan. I have been for the majority of my life. At no point ever have I picked up and thrown a television set. I've never hit anything with a TV. I've never thrown anything and broken anything over a Buffalo Bills game. I've had good reason to if you know the history of the Buffalo Bills, you know what I'm talking about. So we can all agree this is completely unhinged behavior. On the morning of October 26th, 1997, a group of schoolgirls walking near the river Humber at North Therapy found a woman partially submerged in the estuary mud. Her name was Samantha Klass. She was 29 years old, a mother of three. Samantha had grown up in the care system herself. Had experienced instability throughout her childhood and on into adulthood and became involved in sex work. Her daughter Sophia would later stand in court and describe her mother as a million beautiful things. Caring, gentle and strong. Someone who imprinted

4:39 on everyone she met. The forensic picture of what happened to Samantha was devastating. 33 external injuries or clusters of injuries to her head and body. Severe internal trauma, multiple rib fractures. She'd been strangled with the ligature. Her heart had stopped. Evidence that Alan drove his car over her body before dumping her in the river. Where the tides eventually carried her out to the North Therapy shoreline. Humberside police launched one of the most thorough investigations the force had ever conducted to that point. Nearly 7,000 people questioned. 2,000 men DNA tested. In July 1998, a routine drunk driving stop brought Gary Allen into the system. His DNA matched biological material recovered from Samantha class. During interviews, Gary Allen admitted to having sex with Samantha the night she died and denied everything else.

5:34 He had sold his car to a scrapyard the very next day, claiming he panicked after hearing about her murder on the news. There was one problem with that explanation. No media reports of her murder existed on the day that he sold his car. None. The trial took place February 2000 at Sheffield Crown Court. The jury acquitted him. He walked out of that courtroom a free man. Within 35 days he had moved to Plymouth and was targeting sex workers. Again, by December 2000 he was convicted at Plymouth Crown Court for two violent assaults, including one where his victim fought back, bit his hand, and screamed until he ran away. In 2002, serving that sentence, he sat across from a probation officer named Rosemary Parks and told her exactly who he was. He said he had a deep hatred of sex workers. He called them scum. He told her, quote, "I like to frighten them. I like to cause pain. I like to make them cry.

6:34 I like blood. I like to hurt them. I enjoy it. It makes me feel good." He said that for him the pleasure started in the planning stage. By 2010, Gary Allen was back in the Humberside area. The police, they were so genuinely convinced that he would kill again that they built an entire fictional criminal underworld. Operation Misty deployed seven undercover officers playing members of a fake gang, led by a man that Allen knew as Ian, a hardened criminal with a lot to hide. Ian spent two years earning Gary Allen's trust through staged crimes. In one scenario, Allen sat in a getaway car while Ian appeared to beat up an undercover officer.

7:19 In another, he was asked to burn some clothing Ian claimed was blood stained after an incident overseas. Gary Allen burned it and then photographed the burning pile on his iPhone to prove that he could be counted on. On December 6, 2010, Gary told Ian that he had something to say and warned that Ian probably would not want to know him afterward. Then he confessed. He said Samantha Klass had threatened to report him for rape after a condom split. So he killed her and dumped her in the Humber. 400 hours of recordings. The operation discontinued in 2011 after Allen attacked a couple of different women and went back to prison again. Now Gary Allen cycled in and out of the prison system. A woman named Arlene Gralikova was trying to rebuild her life in Rotherham. She was 38 years old, a mother of four, and had immigrated from Savakia to England in 2008. She gone through a divorce, a period of serious hardship, and found herself in sex work during the worst of it. At the time she disappeared on Boxing Day 2018, she'd been making real plans to return home to Savakia to finally be close to her family again. Her body was found the next year in April in a stream in the Parkgate area of Rotherham. She'd been strangled and left in the water. The similarities to Samantha Klass were precise. A vulnerable mother strangled, discarded near water. Her final moments defined by a man who had been rehearsing this for decades. Gary Allen left Sheffield Crown Court in

8:52 February 2000, believing that he was bullet proof for Samantha's murder. He'd already been tried and acquitted. Under centuries of English law, an acquittal was a wall nothing could breach. That was true. Until the Criminal Justice Act of 2003 partially abolished the double jeopardy rule for serious crimes in England and Wales, making retrials possible when new and compelling evidence emerged. And the big one here is that the law was written to be retrospective. It could be applied to acquittals before the law even came into existence. So, in 2021, at Sheffield Crown Court, Gary Allen faced trial for both of the murders, Samantha Klass and Arlene Agrolecova. The jury deliberated for two days and returned guilty verdicts on both counts.

9:39 For the class family, it was justice they had waited 24 years to see. Her daughter Sophia said, at least for us, there are no more questions. Mr. Justice Goose sentenced Allen to life in prison with a minimum of 37 years, calling him wicked and extremely dangerous. A man whose warped view of women made it unlikely he would ever be able to be safely released. Gary Allen would likely die in prison. The eight-year-old boy who alarmed every professional around him became exactly what they feared. Two women, Samantha Klass and Arlene Agrolecova, mothers and daughters and sisters, paid the price for every year the system moved along without stopping him. Thanks for listening to 10-minute murder, bingeable true crime stories. I'm Joe, I'm the host, and here's an email subject quick question. Hi, Joe. Quick question. What kind of microphone do you use for recording? My husband's guess is the SM7B. Is he right? Also, I love the new True Crime Blueprint podcast. Thanks for everything you do. It brightens our day. As weird as that sounds considering the topics. Monica in Washington, DC. Monica, thank you for the email and thank you all for listening. And the answer is no. I do not use a sure SM7B.

11:02 I have used it. Let me back up and say I have used it once or twice on the podcast years ago. When I first started the podcast, I thought if I'm going to be serious about this thing, I should get the microphone that all of the big name pod like Joe Rogan uses a sure SM7B. In case you don't know what microphone that everyone's talking about, a lot of the big name people that you see videos of podcasters, they're using a sure SM7B. So I bought that thinking if I'm going to be serious about podcasting, I should get that microphone. I didn't like it. I didn't think it worked for my voice, so I sold it. And I started using the microphone that I've had for a very long time because before the podcast, I did voiceovers. The chances that you've heard my voice before on TV commercials, on radio commercials before this podcast ever existed is very high because that's what I did with this current microphone that I use.

11:52 And this is all super boring to the people that don't care about microphones, but I use a Sennheiser MKH416. Now I have been considering getting a different microphone to use for this podcast, considering being the keyword because microphones aren't cheap. And I've been using this one for a very long time. It's never let me down. So why would I change to a different microphone? Who knows? In this room that I'm sitting in my studio at home, there are probably, I don't know, eight microphones. And I only ever use this one mic. Alright, hey, if you're a brand new listener to this podcast, welcome. Make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening right now. Check the episode notes of this episode that you're listening to right now. You're going to find some links and also a place where you can go and check out my new podcast that Monica mentioned True Crime Blueprint. Pretty stoked about it. It's going really well and I'm enjoying doing it and I hope you enjoy listening to it. True Crime Blueprint, wherever you listen to this podcast, chances are it's available there too. True Crime Blueprint.

12:53 And that's going to do it. That's your episode for today. Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder. See you next time. [Music]