Twisted world of 30st loner in Willoughby murder plot

Essex neighbours rarely saw isolated’ Gavin Plumb, who was planning a horrifying attack on former ITV This Morning star

- AMY-CLARE MARTIN

Inside a cramped, grubby two-bedroom flat filled with Ghostbusters memorabilia, Gavin Plumb hatched a plan.

He would kidnap, repeatedly rape and murder the object of his obsession – television personality Holly Willoughby – as he plotted to live out his ultimate celebrity fantasy. But weighing in at almost 30 stone and having tried and failed to kidnap women twice before, he knew he could not do it alone.

So in the dark world of encrypted chat groups and online forums, where people shared details of their most sordid sexual obsessions under the cover of anonymity, he looked for likeminded individuals to join his “crew”.

In hundreds of depraved messages shown to the jury, many too graphic to be published, he set out in shocking detail to his potential accomplices how he would ambush the former This Morning presenter at her home and tie up her husband, before taking her to an abandoned building to abuse. Afterwards, he planned to slit her throat and dispose of her body.

It was here – chatting to a man he had met in a forum called “Abduct Lovers” – that he unwittingly revealed his plan to an undercover US police officer. The officer was so concerned about the “immediate danger” facing the mother-of-three that he alerted the FBI, who contacted the UK authorities.

But neighbours in Plumb’s suburban road in Harlow, Essex, where mothers and young children play on the green opposite his block of flats, had no idea the man living on the ground floor had been carefully assembling his “kidnap kit” – complete with knife, shackles, metal cable ties and chloroform to stupefy his victim. Nor did they know he already had serious convictions for attacking women.