A photo shows a serial killer who is on the run in the UK after shooting dead a police officer called Michael Horan.
This is a hoax post. No such police officer has been killed in the UK, and the images of the man being shared with the posts are of American serial killer John Getreu, who died in prison in September 2023.
Fake posts claiming that a serial killer is on the run in the UK after killing a police officer are circulating on Facebook.
The posts have been shared in local information and buy and sell groups, with identical wording. One, shared in a local group for Leeds, says: “Warning Everybody around #beeston is being warned to be alert & vigilant as there is a serial killer on the run. Last night, he attacked and killed a police officer, Michael Horan.
“When officers arrived at his house, they observed the victim, Michael Horan, inside the residence suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. He was pronounced deceased at the scene. ... If you see him please call the police and always be careful. Warn others.”
The posts include two mugshot-style pictures of a bald man with a short grey beard.
But, the incident described in the posts isn’t real—and no police officer called ‘Michael Horan’ has been murdered in the UK. Such an event would elicit widespread coverage.
However, a US police officer named Michael Horan was killed on 23 December 2024 after being shot in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The image being shared of the apparent serial killer is also not from the UK. Using reverse image search tools we found that the picture was published by US media outlets in 2018, as part of coverage of the arrest of a 74-year-old man called John Getreu for the murder of 21-year-old Leslie Marie Perlov in 1973.
The serial killer and rapist was later convicted of murdering Ms Perlov and another woman, Janet Taylor. He had previously been convicted of the rape and murder of teenager Margaret Williams in Germany in 1963.
Getreu died in prison in September 2023.
We regularly fact check hoax posts in Facebook groups, such as reports of missing children, elderly relatives, pets—and warnings of dangerous criminals ‘on the run’.
Often these sorts of posts are later edited to offer cheap housing, links to surveys or freebies, with comments often disabled so other social media users are unable to identify the posts as hoaxes.
We have published a guide with seven ways to spot if a Facebook post you’ve seen is a hoax, and have written to Meta asking them to take stronger action in response to this problem.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because a police officer called Michael Horan was not killed in the UK, and the man pictured died in prison in September 2023.
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