A British actor has been found dead in his prison cell just two months after being jailed for sexually assaulting two young teenage girls.
John Alford, 54, who appeared in TV dramas London’s Burning and Grange Hill in the 1980s and 1990s before a dramatic fall from grace, died at HMP Bure in Norfolk on Friday.
Medics were called after staff opened Alford’s cell to find the predator unresponsive on his bed, and a source told The Sun: “He didn’t wake up in the morning.”
“He was in his bed and they thought he was just asleep,” they said.
“But when they tried to wake him there was no response and they realised he was dead.”
Alford, who was previously jailed in 1999 for supplying drugs after being entrapped by disgraced Pakistani journalist Mazher Mahmood, was jailed for eight-and-a-half years in January.
He was charged under his real name of John Shannon with four counts of sexual activity with a 14-year-old girl, and one count each of sexual assault and assault by penetration relating to a 15-year-old girl.
His September 2025 trial heard he bought a bottle of vodka for the girls, which they consumed at a friend’s home in Hertfordshire in April 2022, and then sexually assaulted them both.
The mother of one of the girls reported Alford to police two days later, but he claimed he had been “set up” when he was arrested.
Alford denied all wrongdoing and told jurors he “never touched” either girl, and then yelled “wrong, I didn’t do this” at the jury after they convicted him.
“You were a trusted family friend and fully aware that the girls were 14 and 15 years of age,” Recorder Caroline Overington told him in sentencing.
“You have shown a lack of acknowledgement of your offending and showed little remorse.”
After serving his drug supply sentence Alford was caught drinking driving in 2006 and convicted of criminal damage and resisting arrest in 2018, and claimed to have mental health issues he blamed on being “blacklisted” from the entertainment history.
Header image: John Alford (Hertfordshire Police).
