Britain's Most Notorious Prisoners

by Stephen Wade

  Brady’s prison life has always made the headlines. In October 1999 he had been staging a long hunger strike and after thirty days was force-fed. At that time he was sixty-one and had refused food for a month as he was protesting about being moved to another ward in Ashworth secure hospital in Merseyside. The story was that he had been forcibly moved to the top security Lawrence Ward and that he was supposed to have broken a wrist in that transfer. But what is to be believed is always a tough question in the Brady saga. He wanted, and still wants, to die. But Ashworth authorities felt that they had to intervene as they were bound by a duty of care. The Prison Service is also bound by that duty, and will not generally intervene. Officers will endure a long and tiring suicide ‘bed watch’ in cases of high risk, but in Brady’s instance, to die is his will. Brady’s lawyer in 1999 tried to have a court injunction issued to prevent intervention. The lawyer told The Independent, ‘The critical issue is this: do the authorities have the right to force feed somebody who does not want to be force-fed – even if that means they may die?’

  In his ward, a knife had been found taped under a sink, and so security was tightened. That move to the ward and the security move, prompted Brady’s strike. The incident was a key event in Brady’s long saga of complaints of abuse and rough handling inside; he wrote letters claiming that he had been assaulted and that his arms had been so severely injured by officers that he had not been able to write for ten days.

  The moans go on. In 2008, he said, ‘I am the sole high-profile prisoner Ashworth holds to exploit as a demonizing agent.’ He expressed concern that his wages were low and that he was maltreated. This long letter was to his MP, George Howarth and also to his solicitor. The drift of his main argument was that civil liberties in general are being eroded, but more particularly, he stated there that his prison wages of £25 a week were unfair, as most prisoners he said, earn £100. The fact is that payments in wages inside depend on what the person actually does to earn cash.

  He aimed at fellow prisoners in the letter as well: ‘Perhaps more embarrassing to prudently financial New Labour are the ranks of tramps and malingerers who have escaped into Ashworth to avoid working for a living, demanding and receiving full board and benefits …’ He turns attention to himself, noting that his cataracts had been untreated for ten years because he would not be taken to a hospital as his ‘visiting an outside hospital would attract unwanted attention’.

  In 2008, his solicitor told the press: ‘The change in the therapeutic environment at Ashworth since the late 1990s has led Mr Brady to wish to be transferred back to prison. He wishes to be free from the power of psychiatrists under the Mental Health Act, including the power to artificially prolong his life by force feeding.’

  Brady is now the longest serving prisoner in England and Wales. He has explained his hunger strike, which still goes on, by referring to Myra: ‘Myra gets the potentially fatal brain condition, whilst I have to fight simply to die. I have had enough. I want nothing, my objective is to die and release myself from this once and for all. So you see my death strike is rational and pragmatic.’

  His prison career has been peppered with incident and sensation. As far back as 1970, while he was in the top security E Wing at HMP Durham the papers reported an attack on him. The standard prison attack of throwing hot sugared tea into someone’s face was done by Brady on another prisoner called Morris. Sugar is regarded as a risk on the prison wings. Sugar in tea makes the hot liquid stick and burn more intensely. In 1970, Raymond Morris attacked Brady in retaliation and both were then confined to their cells for twenty-eight days.

  In 1971, the issue of where to keep Brady was up for debate. The Home Secretary then was Reginald Maudling, and he was pressured into making a decision on this. It is amazing to note that at the time, the Durham E Wing was used to house just two men: Brady and John Straffen, the child killer. The Times reported that the wing ‘could more usefully be used to house up to 400 prisoners’. Maudling wanted to transfer Brady to Broadmoor but the Department of Health were opposed to that move. The whole situation caused the E Wing at Durham to be held in limbo, as it was due for closure, and that was suspended until a decision on Brady was reached.

  When he eventually went to Broadmoor, the hunger strikes began and the subject went as far as parliament. Roy Jenkins told the House that the doctor responsible for Brady had made the decision, but another MP said that ‘Most of us thought … that the practice of artificial feeding in response to hunger strikes was ended.’ There was a feeling in the air that most would want Brady dead. The MP for Berwick said, ‘Most of us … feel that it is implicit that neither he nor the prison authorities have any obligation to seek to prolong the life of a person like Brady against his determined wishes …’

  The years passed and every move Brady seemed to make caused a stir up to the more recent plateau in which an impasse has been reached. In 1978, a letter he wrote managed to find its way into a national paper. He was at the time a category A prisoner in Wormwood Scrubs. The explanation given to parliament was that ‘Inquiries at the prison suggest that the letter was one sent to an acquaintance in the normal way. A letter which was recognized as intended for publication would be stopped, but such an intention may not always be apparent.’

  By 1980, with the support of Lord Longford who had been in touch with Brady, the debate as to where to move Brady for a more permanent residence was hot again, and Longford announced that doctors who had treated Brady at Broadmoor and at Gartree agreed that he should be taken to Park Lane, Liverpool. That happened in November 1985 when The Times announced that he was in Park Lane, but added: ‘If Brady’s mental health improves sufficiently he can expect to be sent back to prison to continue serving his sentence.’ But the Home Office had said at the time that there was not to be any consideration about his parole and could not happen until another ten years had passed.

  Writing this in 2010, I am aware that Brady still lingers in that no-man’s land which is a kind of antechamber to death. He wants to go through that door to oblivion. He has been a notorious prisoner for so long that his infamy rests now on a repulsive image of an old man waiting for death, and he has been in that state for a very long time.

  He had been a guest of Her Majesty long before his sentence for murder. He was sent to a Borstal in 1955, coming back out into society in November 1957. He had always found mountains and moors to be in some way imaginatively arousing. One psychiatrist told Duncan Staff, who wrote The Lost Boy, a book about the Moors murders, that on a trip out of Glasgow when a boy, and living with his adoptive parents, he had ‘fallen into a trance’ at the sight of mountains. He added that for him they had a ‘pantheistic, almost religious significance’.

  Ian Brady lies there now, in his bed at Ashworth, surely dreaming of mountains and keeping his secrets. As a notorious prisoner, he has both bored us and intrigued us, and truths will be buried with him, whether we like it or not.

  CHAPTER 15

  Jeremy Bamber: Endless Campaign

  The first time I ever worked as a writer in a prison, it was in Full Sutton, and there I gave, with another writer, a talk on poetry. My first book had just been published and I recall that I read a few poems in that classroom in the education department, having no idea who was in the room. There were around thirty men there, and they listened intently and then asked questions at the end. One of them showed me their writing magazine: it was one of the best I had ever seen, and in my life as a writer in residence I have produced many magazines. In the group at the time was Jeremy Bamber, and I feel sure he got something out of the session. He comes across to the media as articulate, expressive and creative. Many people behind bars are like that, but he has made a point of telling the world that he is so, and he appears to believe that opinions of him will change, and that perhaps one day people will listen to his ‘truths’ of what happened on the day of the White House Farm murders in 1985.

  In August 1985, the bodies of Nevill Bamber, June Bamber, Sheila Caffell a
nd her two children Daniel and Nicholas, were found gunned to death in the Nevill farmhouse at White House Farm, near Tolleshunt D’Arcy in Essex. The police had been rung by Jeremy Bamber, adopted son of the family, expressing the fear that his sister Sheila was mentally insane and was about to go crazy with a gun. On the way to the farm the police passed a Citreon which was moving slowly; Bamber was in the car, aiming to arrive after the police on the death scene.

  From those two facts – the phone call and the slow car – matters were to change and the focus was placed on Bamber as a suspect, after the initial police belief that the scene was indeed indicative of Sheila slaughtering the family and then taking her own life. She had a history of mental illness and the local community were aware of her strange outbursts from time to time. The turning point in the enquiry was when Bamber’s girlfriend, Julie Mugford, talked to the police about Bamber and his plan to kill the family to obtain the inheritance.

  Jeremy Bamber had been adopted by this wealthy farming family. June was a very religious person and tended to force her beliefs on her adopted children (Sheila was also adopted and worked to a limited extent as a model). Jeremy was sent away to have an expensive education, even going to the famous Gresham’s School in Norfolk, and then later he gained some GCEs nearer home. The plan was for him to learn to be a businessman and estate manager. He had his own house and an income. Nevill clearly wanted his son to work and learn, rather than wait and inherit without a foundation knowledge required for the squire’s life.

  Nevill did lead the life of a squire: hunting with his dog, shooting rabbits, living in a place with a massive acreage and a fine house at the centre. But Jeremy did not want to work and wait. Julie Mugford told the Essex police that Jeremy had spent a long time planning the murders; she explained that he hated his mother, and usually called her ‘an old cow’. He detested the life with his adopted parents but would not leave them. Julie told the police that he stayed because he had said, ‘I have too much to lose. It’s important to have money when you’re young.’

  The day before the deaths, he had rung Julie and said that it had to happen that night or it never would. She never warned the Bambers, almost certainly believing that Jeremy was drunk and had no real intention of actually killing the family. But he loved guns and he had not only been brought up amongst shooting pieces; at school he was in a place which was famous for its army cadet force. He was a good shot. Julie had struggled to hold in what she knew after learning that there really had been a mass murder. The police, after listening to her, thought again about what had been defined as a clear-cut case of slaughter by a mad woman who had shot herself through the head after killing her own children and adopted parents.

  Time has passed and the blame for the wrong-headed thinking about the crime scene has been placed on DI Ronald Cook and his team, who allegedly made mistakes in the hours after arriving at the scene. The evidence had suggested to these officers that the crime was an extreme example of a ‘domestic’. In terms of Sheila’s wounds, Dr Craig, the police surgeon, saw that there were two wounds on her: one shot had gone through her jugular vein and the other had gone through the chin and up into the brain. If this was suicide, then the first shot had to be into the vein, giving her some seconds to fire again and die very quickly as the brain was smashed.

  But after Julie’s words to the police, there was fresh thinking and that has gone on to this day, with a number of new findings emerging over 2009 and early 2010 in particular. The first line of thought was about the necessary struggle involved: Nevill was a tall man, and still strong at sixty-one. The killer would have had to fight him. Yet there were no bruises or marks of a struggle on Sheila. Soon after, it was realized that the practical aspect of Sheila lying down and raising a rifle with a silencer on above her, so she could fire through her chin, was of great value. In effect, the gun would have been too long for her to handle in that way.

  While this was going on, Jeremy Bamber was away on holiday in St Tropez with his New Zealander friend, Brett Collins. When Bamber arrived back at Dover, he was arrested and charged with murder. At the trial Bamber stood firm against questioning. Anthony Arlidge fired questions at him which went to the heart of the matter:

  Arlidge: You did shoot the first four people with that silencer didn’t you?

  Bamber: That is not true.

  Arlidge: Then you shot Sheila with the silencer on?

  Bamber: That is untrue.

  Arlidge: When you came to fake her suicide, you realized it was not possible for her to shoot herself with the silencer on?

  Bamber: That is untrue.

  What had happened in further enquiries was that a silencer was found in a cupboard, smeared with blood. The first police officers on the scene had failed to find this. But after the discovery, a more meaningful narrative of the murderous events was put together.

  The jury took some considerable time to reach a decision. In the end a majority verdict was accepted by the judge, Mr Justice Drake and with a vote of 10–2 the verdict was guilty. Bamber was sentenced to life imprisonment with a ruling that at least twenty-five years had to be served before parole could be considered. The sentence was one of five concurrent life sentences. It was noted that Bamber opened the door of the dock himself. But his exit from the court was just the beginning of a lengthy saga of arguments, appeals and legal preoccupations from Bamber, one of the most litigious and vociferous prisoners in the establishment. For decades he has campaigned, insisting on his innocence. The general public probably have an image of him fixed in their minds, weeping at the family funeral; he was also a very handsome and attractive young man. Women were drawn to him and he had charm.

  The ongoing campaign for a case review has included several gambits from the cell at Full Sutton. He recently took a lie detector test and although the results of a polygraph are not admissible in Britain, the lawyer for Bamber wrote to the Home Secretary to ask for his client’s release. After two refused applications for appeals in 1987 and 2002, we might have felt that everything had come to and end and that acceptance was in order. Not one bit was this the case.

  Jeremy Bamber is the quintessential example of the prisoner who constantly takes on the system. This type studies the law books, discusses legislation and argues every step taken by the Prison Service. A prison regime involves an almost infinite number of security measures; daily routine is built around following prison regulations and correct procedure. A modern prison has to do things by the book, meticulously and thoroughly. Gone are the days when, as with the story of Harry Roberts, large tools may be smuggled inside or holes made in cell walls. There are regular and often unannounced spins, cell searches, undertaken to look for such illegal items as mobile phones or even makeshift weapons.

  In April 2009, Bamber wrote to Inside Time newspaper that he had ‘lost a landmark case’. He wrote: ‘My complaint was that officers are now searching the cell rather than simply doing bars and bolts. During an official search, our legal documents are put into a bag in front of us and sealed.’ He then alleged that copies of legal material had been given to police liaison officers by prison security staff. If true, then he has a valid and important point to make. Otherwise, with him it has become a classic example of ‘the boy who cried wolf’ because he has had so many complaints and objections to prison discipline.

  From the first stint he did inside at Wormwood Scrubs, he has attracted notice, and that is exactly and primarily what he wants. The writer and poet, Ken Smith, worked as writer in residence at the Scrubs at the time and he noted that Bamber was ‘Under close supervision all the time. He was not popular on the wing.’ I have listened to accounts from former wing mates of his alleging that Bamber was so much in fear of attack that he was in the habit of wrapping thick copies of Country Life magazine around him to protect him from knife attacks. That may or may not be true, but the story goes around the prison population, which has an oral history of its own, separate from anything in print.

  Bamber also att
racted attention in the first phase of his life inside from young women. He was visited by Anji Greaves for a while – a very attractive woman who worked as a beautician – and he told her how much she exuded sex appeal. That was while he was in his long remand period: after the sentence, the relationship ended. Other women visited as well. One woman told the press, ‘I can’t believe he’s the evil monster he’s made out to be. He said he’s innocent and I believe him.’

  Even after just one month following his conviction, an appeal was launched; the argument was that the judge had been biased in his summing-up, stressing that Sheila Caffell had not been capable of the attack on her adopted father. Then, in 1988, Bamber must have realised how far he had fallen into oblivion because he was taken out of jail to a tribunal to try to have some ownership of the land and estate at the Bamber’s home. This failed and of course, as he had a murder conviction, the inheritance is never going to happen.

  This long series of events relating to the crime and to prison life would still continue to be no more than irksome and irritating to the authorities. A full-length book by Scott Lomax has detailed alleged shortcomings in police communications in relation to the murders, but this is nothing compared to the development which has occurred in February 2010. In a letter to the press it has been revealed that Peter Smethurst, a forensic specialist, has reported that there is an anomaly in the photographic evidence at the scene of the crime. The Express summarized: ‘It was claimed that Bamber was in a violent struggle with 61-year-old Nevill in the kitchen of their home … in the early hours of August 7, 1985. During the struggle the end of the silencer caused scratch marks on the underside of a shelf above the Aga cooker. Now expert Peter Smethurst says photos taken hours after the murder do not show scratch marks. He concludes that the marks were made a month after the crime …’