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The unbelievable cruelty of a global monkey torture network that live streamed primates meeting a horrible fate... and the British gran behind it
Nothing grabs attention like an interactive poll in the online world. And so it was that Holly LeGresley came up with a list of five options for her followers to choose from.
‘Updated poll,’ began the post from April 2022. ‘What should we do with our Monpai??’
Monpai was an orphaned baby monkey in Indonesia. LeGresley was a deeply disturbed woman from Kidderminster, Worcestershire.
The 37-year-old had devised the poll as a torture list to be shared with a group of like-minded sadists and animal abusers on an encrypted messaging app.
The plan was that the winning two cruel options would be enacted in real life and turned into horrific 15-minute videos, before being distributed among the members.
‘Red ants in sealed jar with rat,’ was the first suggestion as to how Monpai should be tortured. It was followed by: ‘Force feeding and painful substance (ie chillies, lemon, mustard, vinegar etc) in eyes and face.’ Another read: ‘Cheese-grate ass, apply painful substance to wounds, then tie to ceiling fan.’
Whether Monpai was ever tortured in a jar is unclear but, that depraved option having won 13 of 33 votes cast, LeGresley was very keen to make it happen.
‘Dying to get going on this first vid, not gonna lie,’ LeGresley wrote. ‘I need some monkey pain! I’m getting withdrawals here!’
And what we do know is that this was no sick, passing fantasy.
Because LeGresley’s nickname was ‘The Immolator’ – meaning someone who kills for a religious sacrifice – and the group she was part of really did commission videos of monkeys being set on fire, attacked with power tools and placed in food blenders.
At Worcester Crown Court earlier this summer, LeGresley pleaded guilty to consuming, causing and facilitating the torture of baby monkeys over the internet.
LeGresley admitted uploading 22 images and 132 videos to online chat groups. She also admitted paying money via PayPal to encourage unnecessary suffering to an animal.
Holly LeGresley arriving at court before admitting consuming, causing and facilitating the torture of baby monkeys
LeGresley's nickname was 'The Immolator' – meaning someone who kills for a religious sacrifice – and the group she was part of commissioned videos of monkeys being set on fire
Yesterday, a second woman, 56-year-old Adriana Orme, from Upton-upon-Severn, also admitted being part of the same sadistic group.
Orme pleaded guilty at Worcester Crown Court to uploading one image and 26 videos of monkey torture between April 14 and June 16, 2022. She also admitted encouraging or assisting the commission of unnecessary suffering by making a £10 payment to a PayPal account on April 26, 2022.
During a brief hearing Judge James Burbidge KC heard Orme had pleaded guilty on the basis that when she began the offending she was trying to ‘out’ others involved in the torture, which the judge said ‘perplexes me’.
In a statement read in court Orme said her ‘physical and mental health played a part in my offending’.
They were brought to justice following investigations by animal rights activists and the makers of a shocking BBC Eye documentary, The Monkey Haters.
Together they exposed an global network of people deriving twisted pleasure from watching monkeys being tortured and killed.
In the US, a teacher, pharmacist and member of the armed forces are among those identified as being involved.
While most are men, there are also several women, including at least three in the UK, LeGresley and Orme included.
Experts say those taking part gain sadistic and often sexual pleasure from the abuse.
While the recent convictions mark a breakthrough, campaigners warn the problem persists.
Social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook, where footage of monkey abuse continues to be posted, have acted as a magnet for like-minded people.
‘These videos are the most horrifying content I have come across in all my years in animal protection. To think these methods of torture and killing have been thought up by people who then paid individuals in Indonesia to inflict that violence, and to film themselves doing so, is just beyond comprehension,’ says Sarah Kite, co-founder of animal charity Action For Primates, which has investigated monkey torture groups.
‘Unfortunately, social media has provided this safe space where people who would never have met in any other way have managed to connect and communicate and become more and more involved in this escalating depraved activity.’
This is echoed by Chief Inspector Kevin Lacks-Kelly, head of the UK’s National Wildlife Crime Unit.
‘I’ve been investigating wildlife crime for 22 years and it sickens me to say that this is unequivocally the worst case I have ever investigated or overseen,’ he said.
The disturbing trade in monkey torture videos emerged three years ago when footage appeared on social media showing the animals being teased and mistreated.
Action For Primates and US animal welfare group Lady Freethinker noticed that people attracted to this sort of material were communicating with one another in the comments sections beneath the online footage. ‘They basically met as a group on YouTube and decided it was a bit tame and wanted to move,’ explained Ms Kite.
Groups were then set up on encrypted messaging services such as Telegram where they could communicate and share even more extreme images and footage privately.
One network called itself Million Tears. Members set up what they described as a ‘monkey adoption scheme’, paying to buy a monkey in Indonesia then deciding how to torture and kill it. Payments were initially made via PayPal.
The abused monkeys were generally long-tailed macaques. These relatively small primates are less than 2ft tall and live in female-dominated groups.
Baby monkeys were the preferred victims, taken from their mothers who were often killed. The infants were then kept in captivity to be abused.
Incredibly, the ringleader of the Million tears group turned out to be a teacher from Ohio in America called Ronald Bedra.
The 42-year-old arranged for his contact in Indonesia to film monkeys having digits and limbs severed, for one to be set on fire and for another to be brutalised with a heated screwdriver.
Another had its ears cut off with scissors. The unspeakably vile footage was then shared among the group.
Having infiltrated Million tears, two years ago animal rights activists tipped off law enforcement agencies in America. Last month, Bedra admitted a string of animal cruelty offences, for which he could be sentenced to more than a decade in prison.
But that was not the end of it. Other groups had by then sprung up, including one run by another American, Mike Macartney, a former motorcycle gang member who had previously served time in prison and went by the screen name ‘Torture King’.
His group’s activities would feature in the BBC probe, as would Mini, a baby monkey, subjected to regular abuse in Indonesia.
‘Pull its teeth out,’ urged one group member as they clubbed together to raise $200 to torture it. Another added: ‘I think we should hammer its hands and feet flat.’
Orme and LeGresley were both members of the group. While neither physically tortured monkeys themselves, police say LeGresley was far more than a spectator, that she raised funds, archived videos to share between groups and welcomed new members as a network administrator.
Adriana Orme, 55, from Upton-upon-Severn, also admitted being part of the same sick group
The pair were brought to justice following investigations by animal rights campaigners and the makers of a shocking BBC documentary called The Monkey Haters
Messages sent by LeGresley refer to monkeys as ‘rats’ and call for ever more extreme forms of torture to be inflicted on them.
‘I’d like to see a . . . rat, glued mouth to c**k,’ she wrote in one. ‘Once glued, offer it a bottle of milk and see how long it takes before the rat draws its own blood to get the bottle.’
The message was followed by a laughing emoji.
Meanwhile, Indonesia police arrested two men involved in the torture of monkeys. Asep Yadi Nurul Hikmah, who was charged with animal torture and the sale of a protected species, received a three-year prison sentence. M Ajis Rasjana was sentenced to eight months, the maximum available for animal torture.
As Ms Kite observes: ‘I run out of adjectives to describe what was going on and the pleasure these people took from the suffering and distress they were watching.
‘One thing that struck me was that one minute they would be laughing and making fun of a helpless baby monkey, maybe only days old, screaming in pain and fighting for its life, being subjected to the most awful brutality and, the next minute, these same people would be talking about mundane day-to-day things like what they were going to do later, or what they had for breakfast.’
Bizarrely, both LeGresley and Orme claimed to be animal lovers.
On her now-removed Facebook page, LeGresley posed with her pet parrots, Chancey and Princess Pea. She also criticised an action film for portraying ‘gratuitous animal cruelty’.
The scene in Birds Of Prey, a spin-off of supervillain film Suicide Squad, showed parrots in an aviary being burnt alive. ‘That’s sick,’ she wrote. ‘You don’t do that s***, even [with] computer graphics because it’s too far. Sick, twisted people who made this film. What a disappointment.’
But elsewhere she revealed an interest in horror films, describing Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer who eats his victims, and Pennywise, the clown from Stephen King’s It, who preys on children, as her ‘icons’.
She also claimed to be ‘utterly obsessed’ with horror writer Clive Barker and the main character in his Hellraiser franchise, Pinhead – a demonic creature that tears its victims apart with hooks.
Away from the keyboard, LeGresley’s life was somewhat more mundane. Home is a tired-looking house in Kidderminster.
‘We don’t really see Holly,’ one neighbour told the Mail. ‘She comes out once in a blue moon and goes out with her mum for the day.
‘They don’t go out for long and from what we’ve seen they just go to the Costa drive-thru typically on a Saturday, sit in the car and drink a coffee.’
LeGresley, who walks with the aid of a stick, is not believed to be in work.
Dutch-born Orme, meanwhile, is married to an HGV driver and lives in a similarly unremarkable house in the village of Ryall near Upton-upon-Severn.
As asides during her chats on the monkey-abuse group, the grandmother would regularly mention her dog, telling other members how she needed to take it to the vet.
Former neighbours were stunned when told about her involvement.
‘I don’t believe it,’ one said: ‘She was very quiet, she didn’t drive and I know she was suffering from ME or something that made her have to rest a lot.
‘As far as I know, she was a lovely lady.’
The reality, as we now know, is very different.
As well as the women’s revolting obsession with torturing monkeys, the court heard that ‘they have expressed a hatred of pregnant women and babies’ – and that the monkeys have ‘very childlike appearances’.
Despite the growing numbers of gang members now convicted, the sad reality is that deeply disturbing material of monkeys being mistreated is still just a click away on social media sites.
One Facebook page seen by the Mail in June, open for anyone to view, showed what appeared to be a dead or dying baby monkey with the caption: ‘So cute’.
Another showed a shivering, cold and clearly distressed baby monkey cradling itself in a washing-up bowl.
Messages in the comments section included links to other groups on the Telegram messaging site.
Comments included: ‘I wanna see them slowly get smashed in a trash compactor’ and: ‘Anyone got any milk food deprivation stuff? Where they go nuts.’
As Ms Kite says: ‘It is highly disturbing that there are groups and individuals continuing to distribute these horrific and graphic videos on the world’s top social media platforms, such as Facebook, making them easily available for others, including children, to access and view.
‘By allowing these people to post monkey torture content, social media companies have enabled and continue to enable animal cruelty fetishists to connect and escalate their depraved activities to extreme and grotesque levels.’
Asked how such videos were allowed to be published on Facebook, a Meta spokesman told the Mail: ‘We do not allow animal cruelty on our platforms, and have removed the content brought to our attention for violating our community standards.
‘We also encourage users to report this content to us using the tools on our platforms, so that our teams can investigate and take action.’
A YouTube spokesman said: ‘Content depicting violence or abuse toward animals has no place on YouTube.
‘Our teams work hard to quickly remove violative content and this year alone, we’ve removed hundreds of thousands of videos and terminated thousands of channels for violating our violent and graphic policies.’
As for Telegram, its spokesman said that animal abuse videos and content that encourages violence was ‘explicitly forbidden’.
She added: ‘Moderators use a combination of proactive monitoring of public parts of the platform and user reports in order to remove millions of pieces of harmful content each day.’