Disgraced former British television star John Alford was found dead in a prison on Friday — just two months after he was locked up for sex crimes involving two teenage girls.
Alford, the one-time heartthrob from the hit UK dramas “Grange Hill” and “London’s Burning,” died at 54 years old while serving an eight-and-a-half-year sentence, according to reports
Alford, whose real name was John Shannon, was discovered unresponsive in his cell at His Majesty’s Prison Bure near Norwich, a Category C prison — a medium-security facility for inmates deemed unlikely to escape.
“John Shannon died in prison on 13 March 2026,” a prison spokesperson said in a statement, according to The Mirror. “As with all deaths in custody, the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman will investigate.”
Prison staffers tried to wake Alford up from his sleep before realizing that the actor was dead.
“He didn’t wake up in the morning. He was in his bed and they thought he was just asleep,” a source told The Sun. “When they tried to wake him there was no response and they realized he was dead.”
In January, Alford was sentenced to eight years and six months following his conviction for shocking sexual offenses involving two teenage girls, aged just 14 and 15, at St Albans Crown Court.
Prosecutors said the encounters happened after the girls had been drinking during a night out in April 2022 before ending up at a house in Hertfordshire where Alford was staying with a friend.
Jurors later heard disturbing details during the trial. Alford had sex with the 14-year-old girl and sexually assaulted the 15-year-old while she was half asleep.
Chris White, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said Alford knew exactly how old the girls were but still chose to prey on them — a sick move that ultimately landed him behind bars.
Despite the guilty verdict, Alford had insisted the jury got it “wrong”.
But Alford would end up serving only a fraction of that sentence before his life inside came to a sudden end.
The troubled star first shot to fame in the 1980s as rebel Robbie Wright on the BBC teen drama “Grange Hill” when he was just 13. He later found new fame in the 1990s playing firefighter Billy Ray on “London’s Burning”.
But the promising career quickly spiraled.
In 1999, he was sensationally axed from London’s Burning after being convicted of supplying cocaine and cannabis in a scandal that saw him jailed for nine months, though he served only six weeks.
Though he attempted a comeback in the early 2000s, the controversies kept piling up.
In 2018, he was charged with resisting a police officer, and his final conviction over the teenage girls sealed his downfall — ending a once-bright TV career in disgrace.
