The case of Finsbury Park attacker Darren Osborne has shocked police due to the speed at which he went from being a unemployed painter-decorator with no strong political views to a far-right fanatic plotting to kill as many people as possible.
His extremist views were ignited after he watched a BBC drama about the Rochdale grooming scandal. It was aired at a time when his life was falling apart as he split with his partner and spiralled into heavy drinking and rough sleeping.
Just one month to the day after last of the three-part TV series was broadcast, he was driving around London in a hired box van, looking for a group of Muslims to run over.
Osborne, pictured in a court sketch, quickly became obsessed with far-right material online
The father-of-four was born in Singapore but raised by his parents John and Christine in the seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset.
He tried to steal from his own grandfather aged 10 and later became known as an unpredictable troublemaker.
Speaking after the attack, his sister Nicola said: ‘Weston is a small town. Everyone knows Darren. I’ve lost jobs, boyfriends after people found out I am Darren Osborne’s sister.’
He drank heavily, took drugs and got into fights, previously serving a two year sentence for assault.
A pub barmaid said he once he grabbed her by the throat and pinned her to the wall and locals claimed he once beat someone up using a belt buckle.
Osborne on CCTV at a pub in Cardiff where he wrote his hate-filled letter before the attack
Locals knew him as ‘Mr Moody’. One said he was ‘often drunk and cuckoo’. Another called him ‘loud and aggressive’, adding: ‘He was always shouting the odds if anyone disagrees with him.’
But Osborne was never political until the breakdown of his relationship with pub chef Sarah Andrews in his mid-40s. They had moved to Cardiff several years ago.
He began going off the rails at the start of summer last year. His sister said he threw himself into a river in Cardiff in an apparent suicide bid and asked to be sectioned.
His partner didn’t want him in the house and he began sleeping in a tent and was seen buying bags laden with alcohol from a local Aldi.
His conversion was so quick that those who had not seen him in the three weeks before his attack couldn’t believe his actions.
‘He wouldn’t even know who the Prime Minister is,’ his sister Nicola said soon after the incident. ‘I’ve never heard him say anything about Muslims or anything racist.’
Unbeknown to many who knew him, Osborne had become an internet obsessive, scouring the web for far-Right and anti-Muslim material after watching Three Girls in May last year.
The court heard he became consumed by anti-Muslim hatred after watching the BBC documentary Three Girls, about Asian grooming gangs in Rochdale
Osborne was sleeping in a tent in this woodland in Cardiff as his life spiralled out of control
His estranged partner Ms Andrews told police: ‘Three to four weeks before the incident we watched a program called Three Girls about young girls being sexually exploited by Muslim men.
‘That caused Darren to go onto the internet to research further. We may have watched a couple of those episodes back to back on catch-up.
She said he was soon ‘non stop’ on the internet, obsessively going over the perverse catalogue of extremist material it had to offer.
Ms Andrews added: ‘He started watching Tommy Robinson stuff on the internet. He had been reading Tommy Robinson posts on Twitter.
‘I think he was a ticking time bomb. I should have realised what was going on’.
Muslim neighbours also noticed a difference in him.
Whereas he had previously been polite and helped them with DIY, a few days before the attack he called a neighbour’s 12-year-old son an ‘in-bred’.
Osborne, who police said was far from ‘tech savvy’ before watching Three Girls, set up a Twitter account and started following Britain First deputy Jayda Fransen, who this year gained notoriety when Donald Trump retweeted her anti-Muslim posts.
But it was the speed at which Osborne went from reading far-right posts to plotting a terrorist attack, which shocked detectives at Scotland Yard.
The Met’s Counter Terrorism Commander Dean Haydon: ‘It is clear that in the space of only a few weeks, Osborne developed a warped and twisted view to such a degree that he was prepared to plan and carry out this attack.’