Twisted teen gunman Nicholas Prosper trawled the internet for sickening images of mass murder and asked if gunshot wounds to the neck were ‘lethal’ and if ‘sex with a corpse feels good’ in the hours before he slaughtered his family.
The warped 19-year-old serial killer was on a bloodthirsty mission to commit the ‘biggest massacre in the 21st century’ after exploiting a terrifying loophole in gun laws to buy a shotgun and 100 cartridges.
School dropout Prosper launched his rampage on September 13 last year, blasting his mother, Juliana Falcon, 48, and siblings Kyle Prosper, 16, and Giselle Prosper, 13, in the head at their Luton home before setting off for the school intending to ‘kill all’.
Consumed by a lust for extreme violence and harming children, he fantasised about shooting a classroom of 30 children aged four and five and their teachers, by bursting into the assembly at St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School at 9am.
His disturbed ramblings were so depraved that he was kicked off a gore website – where millions of users share and comment on videos of people being killed – because of his warped stance on child abuse.
His content was uploaded under a pseudonym and featured his distinctive accent, althought the videos were deleted from YouTube in the wake of his appalling crimes.
Building up to the carnage, the wannabe school shooter searched the internet, asking ‘do you die if shot in the neck?’, ‘how lethal are neck gunshots?’ and ‘man shoots woman in the head at close range’ at 1pm the day before he gunned down his family.
He then stayed up all night poring over sickening images of mass murder and school shootings, arterial anatomy and head gunshots. The sordid loner even searched: ‘Does sex with a corpse feel good’, ‘woman raped and killed’, and hunted for details related to the rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a court heard.
He also looked up ‘suicide by neckshot’ and viewed images and videos of school shooters and massacres between 3.42am and 4.08am. He went on to shoot his mother and two siblings in the head little more than an hour later, at 5.50am.
His videos include a clip recorded hours before the massacre, believed to be filmed in his family’s flat, in which he calmly and dispassionately said he would take violent revenge against his 13-year-old sister Giselle over her actions in a computer game.
Prosper said: ‘On June 30, my sister decided to make the incorrect choices on episode one of season one of The Walking Dead games, and for that her face will be mutilated further than necessary.’
He said he was ‘chosen’ to protect a fictional character called Clementine in the zombie video game, in a sign he struggled to differentiate between the real world and make-believe.
The teenager spent so much time on the internet in his bedroom that neighbours had no idea he even existed – despite them being on friendly terms with his mother and siblings.
Yesterday, emotionless Prosper was jailed for life with a minimum term of 49 years at Luton Crown Court – but Justice Cheema-Grubb said he ‘may be too dangerous to ever be realised.’
Teenage serial killer Nicholas Prosper menacingly poses with the plank of wood as though it is a firearm shortly before he went to use a shotgun to murder his family and try to kill 30 children
Left to right: Giselle Prosper, 13, Juliana Prosper, 48 and 16-year-old Kyle Prosper were all killed in their own home. Each suffered shotgun wounds to the face, while Kyle was also stabbed more than 100 times across his body before being shot
Att the time of the attack, school dropout Prosper was unemployed and his life seemed to revolve around going to the gym and spending time alone on his computers.
His online history showed that in August 2023, he started to contemplate a school shooting, Mr Cray told the court.
Between the end of June 2024 and the end of August, Prosper downloaded a total of 208 indecent images of children, of which 12 images and nine videos were of the most serious category.
On July 11, the wannabe school shooter searched the internet for reports on the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena, zombie knives and ‘when were psychosexual stages discovered’.
He also looked up details about when to apply for a child to start school and St Joseph’s Primary School.
On August 3 he searched the internet for various mass killers and for the manifestos of far-right killer Norwegian Anders Breivik and for Christopher Dorner who killed five people in San Bernardino, California in 2013.
The court was told he had reached out directly to one of the victims who had lost a child in a mass shooting and sought to receive images of her murdered child by email.
On September 1, he made a large number of searches related to mass killings and school shootings, along with several searches related to bad things happening on Friday 13.
Prosper wanted to become a notorious school shooter, gunning down children at a nearby primary after slaughtering his family
Prosper, seen in the white shirt, was filmed on CCTV purchasing the shotgun he used to murder his family less than a day later
Over the next week there were more searches related to St Joseph’s primary school and he even checked the advance weather forecast for Friday 13.
Today, as the loner faces being jailed for decades, it can be revealed Prosper was able to purchase a shotgun with ease simply by copying real certificates he found online.
He discovered that lethal weapons can be traded privately without any official checks if the buyer is able to produce a genuine-looking paper firearms certificate to the seller.
Under the current law, sellers have to notify police within seven days about the sale of a weapon.
But they don’t have to check with police whether the buyer’s firearms certificate is genuine before the purchase, creating a loophole whereby the new owner has a window to carry out an attack before anyone discovers the fake.
Prosper, now 19, downloaded a blank firearms certificate and used a website which allows you to amend pictures so he could create his own fake.
He was so proud of the forgery that when he was arrested, he couldn’t resist bragging to officers: ‘My name is Nicholas Prosper; you saw my fake shotgun certificate in my room in the 82 flat? Did you see the fake shotgun certificate I made?’
Prosper pictured in Luton Crown Court on Tuesday in an artist’s impression
On August 30 last year Prosper contacted a gun owner on a trading website called Gun Star, offering him £600 – £150 over the £450 asking price – for the shotgun, claiming it was for clay pigeon shooting. Luton Crown Court was shown CCTV of the handover in a car park outside Prosper’s home on September 12 where he produced the cash after inspecting the gun in a car boot.
Less than 24 hours later he would begin his shooting spree after staying up all night poring over sickening images of mass murder and school shootings.
Yesterday he smirked in the dock as the court heard how he later confessed in prison that he ‘wanted to cause the biggest massacre in the 21st century’, whispering to a horrified nurse: ‘I wish I had killed more.’
Prosecutor Timothy Cray, KC, said on Tuesday: ‘What drove him on most was the desire to be famous or infamous as a mass killer. This was killing for the sake of killing.
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‘The killing of his family was to be the first step in an even more shocking mass killing.
‘Specifically, he wanted to imitate and even surpass other mass killers around the world.’
Prosper was bent on killing more children than the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, US, in 2012, when 20 died.
He spent a year researching local schools, carrying out surveillance on St Joseph’s, capturing images of staff and pupils, checking assembly and lesson times and sketching class layouts.
He carefully assembled a ‘killing costume’ and spent months poring over ‘images and audios that showed deep alienation from normal life and interest in the darkest sides of humanity, including people being killed or seriously injured and violent video games’.
Police found a diagram of the early years’ classroom at St Joseph’s in which Prosper had written ‘Kill all’.
The smirking wannabe school shooter was caught on camera after purchasing his shotgun
In a chilling foreshadowing of the horrors that were to come, Prosper, wearing his distinctive yellow bucket hat, filmed himself pretending a piece of wood was a shotgun
He had recorded videos of him practising the shooting with a piece of wood in his family kitchen and he uploaded a clip promising to shoot his sister an hour after the murders.
He claimed he planned to kill his family in their sleep before raping his sister, stating: ‘Why so early? So I’d have time to cannibalise my family, and rape a woman at knife point before the shooting. ‘Why? Because I could.’
But his mother woke up, forcing him to carry out his plan earlier than intended.
In a sign of his warped mentality, a few days after gunning down his family, Prosper told prison nurse Tatenda Muketiwa: ‘I wish I had killed more.’
Yesterday Prosper’s father Raymond said in a victim impact statement that ‘part of my soul died’ on the day of the killings.
‘The pain of our loss will never be healed. This includes my whole family; our lives will never be the same,’ Mr Prosper told the court on Tuesday.
‘For me personally, when I heard the horrific news on that day, part of my soul died too.
‘This is a lose-lose situation for us all and we have lost four family members.’
Nicholas Prosper admitted murdering his family members (pictured left to right) Kyle, Juliana and Giselle. He remained emotionless during the hearing in February
Prosper is seen in a court sketch, flanked by a prison guard during his sentencing hearing
Court artist drawing by Elizabeth Cook of Mrs Justice Cheema Grubb while Prosper is in the dock at Luton Crown Court, Bedfordshire, on Tuesday
During their investigation, police uncovered Prosper’s sickening obsession with death, with the evil teen having spent his time trawling the internet for chilling slaughter videos.
His disturbed ramblings online were so depraved that he was kicked off a gore website – where millions of users share and comment on videos of people being killed – because of his warped stance on child abuse.
The wannabe school shooter’s content was uploaded under a pseudonym and featured his distinctive accent.
His videos have been deleted from YouTube in the wake of his appalling crimes, although the Mail has been able to view them.
They include a clip recorded hours before the massacre, believed to be filmed in his family’s flat in Luton, in which Prosper vowed to mutilate the face of his sister ‘further than necessary’ for making an incorrect choice’ in the Walking Dead game.
In the video, the 19-year-old also ranted that he was ‘chosen’ to protect a fictional character called Clementine in the zombie survival game, in a sign he struggled to differentiate between the real world and make-believe.
Prosper said he was ‘chosen’ to protect a fictional character called Clementine in zombie video game The Walking Dead, in a sign he struggled to differentiate between the real world and make-believe
Prosper peppered online forums with his repulsive ideas, many relating to children and including the sexual abuse of dead bodies.
His rants were so revolting he was banned from a gore website for repeatedly ‘sexualising minors’.
One moderator told the Mail: ‘There were multiple comments by him either in support of or arguing for child-adult sexual interactions that made it clear this was not in jest or a careless attempt to play devil’s advocate.
‘We do not know what sort of person Mr Prosper was, other than someone unwilling or incapable of following our site’s rules and therefore someone we would not allow on our platform.’
In another video, Prosper sarcastically suggested that child sexual abuse was blamed for ‘virtually every mental disorder and issue’.
Police were called to the high-rise block in Luton, following reports that shots had been fired
Apologising for his ‘slurred’ speech, the teenager said: ‘Who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll see Aids, rectal cancer, increased chance of stubbing your toe, every single problem you face in life is because you touched a winky [penis] when you were six.’
While caged in prison, awaiting his first court hearing, Prosper wrote out his murder plan and stashed it in his shoe. The chilling document was later found by a prison officer on November 13 – two months after the teen’s rampage.
Part of the notes read: ‘I was right in predicting no-one would’ve called the police had I killed them in their sleep. 3 shots under 30 seconds.
‘The only known phone call to police that day was made by the b**** at the door as a result of my B**** mother waking them up and it being turned into a long struggle.
‘My plan wasn’t ‘stupid’. I was f****** right. MY MOTHER IS A STUPID F****** COW.’
The notes continued: ‘But why so early? So I’d have time to cannibalise my family, and rape a woman at knife point before the shooting.’
Pictured is the scene of Prosper’s home where he gunned down and killed his family
Tributes were left outside the Leabank building after the triple killing in September last year
There was also a step-by-step guide to the planned school shooting, including Prosper leaving the flat at 8.40am on his mother’s bike and arriving at the school for 9am.
The guide said he would ‘shout that this is a robbery and for everyone to get down’ before shooting the two teachers and killing the children.
Defending, David Bentley, KC, said Prosper was not a psychopath, but a ‘socially impaired’ teenager with ‘autistic traits’.
He said: ‘He is a young man who has gone down effectively an internet wormhole.’
Grinning, the killer rocked back and forth as his lawyer called his actions ‘incomprehensible’.
Prosper admitted the murders at an earlier hearing, as well as possession of a shotgun with intent to endanger life. He will be sentenced today.
