Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Geoffrey Wansell

  * * *

  LIFERS

  Inside the Minds of Britain’s Most Notorious Criminals

  Contents

  Preface: Death’s Shadow

  1. No Mercy, No Remorse: Jamie Reynolds

  2. Should Life Mean Life?

  3. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’: Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale

  4. ‘I killed to see how I would feel’: Joanna Dennehy

  5. ‘I am bored and it was something to do’: Gary Vintner, Ian McLoughlin and Lee Newell

  6. ‘Imprisonment is nothing’: Jeremy Bamber and Peter Moore

  7. ‘Selfish, self-pitying and grotesquely violent’: David Oakes and Daniel Restivo

  8. ‘Only for the most heinous of crimes’: Michael Roberts and David Simmons

  9. ‘He kills coppers’: David Bieber

  10. The One-Eyed Gangster: Dale Cregan

  11. What ‘Life Means Life’ Feels Like: Robert Maudsley, Sidney Cooke and Charles Bronson

  12. Not ‘Seeking Release’: Victor Miller, Mark Bridger and Rosemary West

  13. A ‘Cushy’ Life: Arthur Hutchinson and Ian Huntley

  14. Who ‘Deserves’ Life?: Mark Hobson and Roy Whiting

  15. Charming Psychopaths: Peter Tobin and Levi Bellfield

  16. Killing for Profit and Pleasure: John Childs, Paul Glen, Kenneth Regan and William Horncy

  17. Partners in Crime but Not in Sentence: John Duffy, David Mulcahy and Steve Wright

  18. Lifers Who Kill Again: Glyn Dix, Anthony Rice and David Tiley

  19. They Deserve Nothing Less – Or Do They?: Rahan Arshad and Mark Martin

  Afterword

  Illustrations

  Picture Credits

  Follow Penguin

  For my son Dan Wansell and my editor Dan Bunyard

  Preface: Death’s Shadow

  This is a book about murder, and the men and women who commit the foulest crime known to mankind. But it is also a book about the ultimate penalty those killers face under English law – a whole life sentence of imprisonment, which means they must spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars with only the remotest possibility of release.

  It also asks a question – does locking the worst of the worst offenders up forever and throwing away the key represent the right response from society? Indeed, do we as a society truly understand the consequences of a whole life sentence?

  Are we comfortable, for example, in sending a young man in his early twenties to jail for the next sixty, or even seventy years of what remains of his life? Are we so determined on revenge for the victims and punishment for the offender that we can sentence a young woman in her early thirties to spend the rest of her life behind bars?

  One lifer himself once memorably said, ‘What keeps me going is knowing I’ll be dead soon enough anyway of natural causes. The average male only lives until he’s sixty to sixty-five. The way I see it, I’m closer to death than birth.’

  As an author who has written two books about individuals sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in a cell – the Gloucester serial killer Rosemary West and the bus stop killer Levi Bellfield – I wanted to try and find an answer to that question, and others. Did I think, for example, that either of those killers should ever qualify for release?

  That is an important question as we no longer have the death penalty in this country. It disappeared in 1965 – fifty years ago last year – and I have no quarrel with that. The possibility that any man or woman should have their life taken away by the state when there is even the remotest possibility that there could have been a miscarriage of justice has always seemed to me an unanswerable argument against the death penalty. No civilised society should ever allow for the possibility that it can send an innocent man or woman to the gallows.

  The most severe penalty that any murderer in this country can now receive, therefore, is a whole life sentence, and there are more than fifty people currently serving that sentence today, two of whom are women, the rest men. Indeed there are now more prisoners serving whole life sentences than at any time in our history, and the number has more than doubled in the past fifteen years.

  How did that come about? In 1965, in place of the death penalty came a mandatory life sentence for all murder convictions, on the understanding that every convicted killer theoretically forfeited his liberty to the state forever. In practice, however, nearly all lifers in the twenty years after 1965 were released on licence at some point, when they were deemed to no longer present ‘a risk to society’. The average life sentence at that time was around ten years, which aroused increasing public concern as the years passed, in part encouraged by the controversy over the Yorkshire Ripper’s sentence in 1981.

  That concern eventually provoked a political reaction, and in 1983 the then Conservative Home Secretary, the late Leon Brittan, began to set minimum terms that certain convicted killers were compelled to serve behind bars before they could be considered for release on licence. He also gave any future Home Secretary the power to keep a killer imprisoned beyond the recommended term, as was the case for the Moors Murderer Myra Hindley. In 1985 Brittan imposed a thirty year minimum upon her that meant she should remain in prison until at least 1995 – thirty years after her original arrest.

  In 1989, however, the Conservative Home Secretary David Waddington imposed a whole life tariff on Hindley, after she confessed to having been more involved in the murders than she had previously admitted. Hindley was then persistently denied release by succeeding Home Secretaries and was kept in prison far beyond the thirty-year term she had been allocated. In fact Hindley remained a prisoner until her death on 15 November 2002 at the age of sixty – having spent thirty-seven years of her life behind bars.

  In May 2002 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the decisions about sentencing made by the Home Secretary were an abuse of power, and that the responsibility for deciding the length of sentence should be transferred from politicians to the judiciary. The then Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett accepted the ruling, but insisted on providing a new set of mandatory guidelines to judges about how long offenders who committed the most heinous crimes should serve under his new Criminal Justice Act, passed in 2003.

  In particular, Blunkett’s guidelines suggested, where an offender was twenty-one or over at the time of the offence and the Court took the view that the murder committed was so grave that it demanded the most severe penalty – he or she should spend the rest of their life in prison on a ‘whole life order’ – that was the ‘appropriate starting point’.

  Those grave cases were defined as including: the murder of two or more persons where each murder involved a substantial degree of premeditation, the abduction of the victim, or sexual or sadistic conduct; the murder of a child if it involved the abduction of the child or sexual or sadistic motivation; a murder done for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause; and the murder by an offender previously convicted of murder.

  Over the past twelve years those guidelines have been subtly amended to allow judges increasing leeway to pass a whole life sentence if they feel the murder is particularly heinous, even if it does not exactly satisfy those definitions.

  Gradually,
however, this has led to ambiguity about what exactly constitutes a sufficiently heinous crime to demand a whole life sentence. In the case of the brutal massacre of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, London in May 2013, for example, one of his very public attackers was given a whole life sentence while the other was not, even though both were convicted by the jury of the same murder.

  Yet after a dozen years of leaving sentencing powers in the hands of the judiciary, there are still underlying moral questions that remain unanswered. Do we take the draconian action of denying a killer freedom forever just to satisfy the demand for punishment and revenge on the offender from the families of the victims? Or does the general public demand it? Intriguingly, England and Holland are the only countries in Europe that still have a whole life sentence for the most heinous murders – the judiciary in Scotland decided on a fixed term when a life sentence was imposed in 2001, after which the offender had at least to be considered for release.

  I wanted to look at the killers and the murders they committed, as well as at the reactions of the victims’ families, the police who investigated the crimes and the judges who sentenced the offenders, to see if I could discern a pattern.

  Most of all, I was anxious to put the murders in context – focusing not just on the details of the crimes themselves but also on the human reactions to them. Have our views about the severity of sentencing hardened over the past two decades, so that we as a society increasingly demand the most severe penalty? What do the lifers themselves feel about their sentences?

  I was also determined to look at the less high-profile murderers who nevertheless warranted a whole life sentence. I did not want to revisit the best-known cases where there were fixed public attitudes to the killer, rendering a debate about a whole life sentence all but irrelevant. So this book does not contain a lengthy re-examination of the cases of the Moors Murderer Ian Brady, the serial killer Dennis Nilsen or the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe. There are excellent examinations of those crimes already – Brady himself has written at length about his own case, my friend Brian Masters wrote brilliantly about Nilsen, while Michael Bilton’s extraordinary book on Sutcliffe left no stone unturned.

  We know that Brady, at the age of seventy-seven, is still on hunger strike and demanding to be left to die in Ashworth Hospital, the secure psychiatric unit on Merseyside; that Nilsen, who is now sixty-nine, seems content to remain in custody; and that Sutcliffe, who is sixty-eight, is campaigning for a transfer from Broadmoor (also a secure psychiatric hospital) to a lower-security unit.

  Instead of these three notorious cases, I wanted to look at some of the slightly less publicised ones that nevertheless offer insight into the minds of the murderers themselves and the judges who sentence them. I have included Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby, whose appeals against their sentences I watched in the Court of Appeal in London in the autumn of 2014. I have also included Anwar Rosser and Jamie Reynolds, whose appeals against their sentences I also attended just a month later. But I could not neglect Rosemary West, every day of whose trial and appeal I witnessed, nor Levi Bellfield, at whose trial I was also present throughout.

  This is my third book about killers and it is fair to say that writing about the most foul of murders is a profoundly difficult thing to do, and to survive. The details that you are forced to consider lodge in your brain. They have stained my consciousness forever, but they also mean that I feel strongly that the families of the victims have every right to express the strongest views about what should happen to the man or woman who robbed them of a loved one.

  Many of the cases in this book brought tears to my eyes, as the suffering inflicted on so many of the victims almost defies human understanding. The mutilation of innocent men, women and children to satisfy the urges of an evil killer who seems to have no grasp whatever of human decency or compassion can bring one to doubt one’s own humanity.

  And yet, I still find it difficult to sympathise entirely with the argument that the only acceptable response to their actions is to lock them up forever and throw away the key – denying them all hope of redemption.

  It is a genuine moral dilemma, and one which is little discussed. It nevertheless provided me with the inspiration to write about it. On the one hand there is society, the law and the victims, demanding punishment; on the other the lives of the prisoners themselves. I would never say the ‘rights’ of the killers, for they surely abandoned those rights once they committed the dreadful crime of murder.

  Perhaps there can never be a resolution to this powerful dichotomy, but – after working on this project for more than two years – I am increasingly convinced that there can. I believe it is time to put an end to the whole life sentence, not because the European Court of Human Rights decided in 2013 that we should, but because the failure to do so is, in my view, morally indefensible.

  In its place we should establish a maximum fixed term for life imprisonment at fifty years, half a century behind bars, after which point the offender must at least be offered the possibility of freedom.

  I hope this book illuminates how I reached that conclusion, and why I believe it is correct. But I am not turning my head away for one moment from the contradiction that I can argue for a fixed term for a life sentence, after which there should be the possibility of release, while at the same time I have included in this book case after case of men released on licence after serving a life sentence who then go on to kill again.

  How can I also argue that society would ever be truly prepared to accept a notorious serial killer back into its midst – even if they were given a fresh identity? Would not the outcry overwhelm the good intention of trying to accept a whole life prisoner’s redemption?

  Perhaps it would, but this book argues that a higher moral standard should apply – the possibility that the passage of time may allow even the worst of the worst offenders to change for the better – and that to deny them any hope whatever is too high a moral price to pay.

  I am still an old-fashioned liberal at heart who believes society should set itself the highest moral standards, and I have not changed in that view throughout the seventy years of my life.

  In my first book, Caught in the Act – about the treatment of young offenders – written in 1973 with my friend and former colleague Marcel Berlins, we argued for the need for a system of carefully supervised institutions to allow young offenders the appropriate therapeutic help that they needed, but under strictly secure conditions.

  That was more than forty years ago, but I believe it holds true today, and it is even more true for men and women in this book. It is the reason I suggest a ‘supermax’ prison offering both an extremely secure and a specifically therapeutic environment for whole life prisoners.

  Most of all, however, I hope this book sparks a debate about how we treat the worst of the worst offenders, no matter how unpopular or little discussed that subject may be. In doing so, we are confronting one of the central questions in any civilised society – how it copes with the greatest evil and wickedness.

  For that can lie in the most unlikely places, as this book shows.

  1

  No Mercy, No Remorse

  Jamie Reynolds

  The scene is a neat semi-detached house in a polite, well-kept road in the small town of Wellington in Shropshire, not far from the border between England and Wales. It is approaching dusk on the evening of a quiet Sunday, 26 May 2013.

  Everything looks as normal as it possibly could in this provincial street of well-kept hedges and tidy gardens. But behind
the lace curtains of this unostentatious little house, something utterly unimaginable is happening – the most depraved, despicable murder is being committed.

  A sparkling-eyed, redheaded girl of just seventeen years and nine months in age – Georgia Williams, with her whole life ahead of her, and who hoped to become a model – has fallen into the clutches of a baby-faced young man just five years her senior, who looks as harmless and innocent as the day is long, and has been her ‘friend’ for five years. His name is Jamie Reynolds.

  But Reynolds is certainly not behaving like an innocent ‘friend’ on this particular Sunday evening. Telling her it will further her modelling career, he has persuaded Georgia to take part in a bizarre private ‘photo shoot’. It involves her changing into a set of clothes he has specially selected for her. He has brought her a black leather jacket and shorts, and shortly before eight she poses for him in the kitchen and hall of that neat little house in Avondale Road.

  A few minutes later, Reynolds takes another set of photographs of Georgia, only this time she is standing on a box in the upstairs hallway with a red rope around her neck attached to an oar placed across the trapdoor entrance to the attic above, in a makeshift gallows. She is still wearing the leather jacket and shorts, while her hands are free, hanging by her side.

  When she agreed to take part in this extraordinary ‘photo shoot’ Georgia was probably smiling, giggling even, as she cheerfully acquiesced to Reynolds’ weird demands. She almost certainly believed that she had nothing whatever to worry about. After all, she had told her father, Steve, a detective constable with West Mercia Police, and her mother, Lynette, that she was going to see Reynolds, so what harm could she possibly come to?

  That thought must have been in Georgia’s mind as Reynolds quietly suggested in his wheedling voice that she should climb on to the box and allow him to slip the red rope around her neck. Once she had climbed on to it, Reynolds stepped back once again and started taking photographs with his stepfather’s camera. The shutter clicked time after time, as he took frame after frame, and cajoled Georgia to smile for the camera.