Facebook warnings about dangerous couple are fake

A series of Facebook posts which claim a dangerous couple are on the run in various towns throughout England are fake. 

The posts appear in local buy and sell Facebook groups. One, aimed at residents of Castleford in Yorkshire, reads: “URGENT: Alert. Please lock your doors and stay vigilant. A dangerous couple Husband serial Killer Ryan Edward (51) and the woman Alice Chapman(32), a House Burglar are on the run after killing 3 female police officers on Saturday here in Castleford.

“Warn others. They go around preying on elderly people,  vandalizing parked vehicles, knocking on peoples’ doors claiming to be homeless ,seeking for help & then attacking you after gaining your trust. They’re ruthless and very dangerous. They’re also armed so if you see them please do not approach just call the police. LET’S BUMP THIS POST AND HELP WARN OTHERS [sic]”.

The posts are accompanied by mugshot-style photographs of a man and a woman. Other posts for groups based in Gosport in Hampshire and Leeds in Yorkshire are identical except that the location has been changed. 

However, no such couple exists and the details in the post are fake. The woman named in the posts as Alice Chapman is actually Joanna Dennehy, a British woman who in 2014 was sentenced to a whole life order after being convicted of three murders and two attempted murders, meaning she will never be released.

The image claimed to be of Ryan Edward, meanwhile, is actually of a man who in March 2020 was being sought by the police department of the city of Hobart in the US state of Indiana on suspicion of burglary. He was reportedly apprehended soon after his image was circulated, but we have not been able to find any information about his current whereabouts and circumstances. 

No police officers have been recently murdered in any of the towns where the posts appear, let alone three of them together. If such an event were to occur, it would receive widespread coverage. 

We regularly fact check hoax posts in Facebook groups, such as reports of missing children, elderly relatives or pets. We have seen instances in which these sorts of posts are edited later to offer cheap housing, links to surveys or other freebies, with comments often disabled so other social media users are unable to identify the posts as a hoax. 

Hoaxes can damage people’s trust in local community news, because groups can become overwhelmed with false information. As a result, genuine posts may be ignored or dismissed as false. 

We have written to Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem. We also have a guide with seven ways to spot if a Facebook post you’ve seen is a hoax.