Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Just a minute or so later, Reynolds photographed her with her hands tied behind her back. Georgia was still smiling, but tragically she did not know what was in store for her.

  Far from being Georgia’s friend, Reynolds was about to become her executioner, for as soon as he briefly stopped shooting, he reached up and pulled the noose tight, tying it to the banister. That forced Georgia on to her tip toes and started cutting off the blood supply to her brain.

  Now plainly terrified, Georgia, who had been head girl at her secondary school and was a corporal in the Royal Air Force cadets, started to struggle, but Reynolds showed the helpless girl not a shred of mercy. Instead, he applied further pressure to tighten the rope by putting his knee in her back and pulling downwards, shortly before kicking the box Georgia had been standing on away from beneath her so that she was left swinging helpless in the void, the noose tightening around her neck, her legs kicking in wild panic.

  Then, as Georgia’s life ebbed away, he calmly stepped back and started taking pictures again – delighting in his power over her, relishing the horrific fantasy that he had created of killing a young woman by hanging, and doing nothing whatever to prevent her death. As the breath finally began to leave her body, he simply grinned in triumph and took yet another photograph. He gloried in his betrayal of the teenager and her horrifying, grotesque death.

  Within a few minutes of Reynolds kicking the box away from beneath her feet, the pretty young woman, who was still legally a child no matter how mature she may have looked, was dead at the end of Reynolds’ rope. Yet, tragically, her ordeal did not even end there.

  The twenty-two-year-old Reynolds carefully took Georgia’s body down from his makeshift gallows and laid it on one of the three beds upstairs in his family home. His parents were away in Italy for a week, and so there was no chance whatever that the lonely – but undeniably persuasive – Reynolds would be disturbed.

  That was precisely how Reynolds had planned it, for Georgia’s murder was the culmination of a fantasy that had been playing out in his mind for months. He had even foretold it in one of the forty violent, sexual ‘stories’ he had written depicting what he intended to do to various young women he knew of in the local area.

  Reynolds took pleasure in one story in particular, started on 27 January 2013 on his iPhone, five months before the murder. It was entitled ‘Georgia Williams in Surprise’, and it described in graphic detail exactly how he intended to abuse and kill the teenager after he had persuaded her to come to his parents’ house while he was alone there. He had revised the story repeatedly over the months, the last time in early May, three weeks before the murder.

  In his story Reynolds went into pornographic detail about what he intended to do to the innocent seventeen-year-old, including a description of her hanging. ‘Her feet start kicking wildly as she hangs,’ he wrote. ‘She dances wildly at the end of her rope.’

  Soon after he had written his story for the first time, he started texting Georgia, telling her how much he liked her and how interested he was in her. She displayed no interest in him whatsoever, but that did nothing to deter Reynolds as he went on to describe how he was interested in ‘artistic’ photography, and told her that he wanted to use a ‘simulated hanging’ as a scenario.

  Just before that fateful Sunday evening, he sent Georgia a text saying, ‘Fake hanging. Just want to double check to make sure you are cool with it because it is “totally safe”.’

  Along with his depraved written fantasies, which were also directed at other young women, this pasty-faced young man with a stubbly excuse for a beard also assembled a vast electronic library of violent pornography, including no fewer than 16,800 images and seventy-two videos of extreme pornography, including ‘snuff’ movies that depicted the death and sexual mutilation of young women.

  Acting out these fantasies on the helpless body of Georgia Williams, Reynolds ruthlessly set out to destroy the dignity and grace of the young woman who had brought ‘light and joy’ into the lives of her family and friends, and had been a school counsellor to victims of bullying in her school, as well as a fine sportswoman.

  In the last hours of that Sunday evening, Reynolds systematically sexually abused the lifeless body of Georgia Williams. He posed her body on all three beds in the house, including his parents’, and gradually stripped her until she was naked. He took photographs of her, and then of himself – by now also naked – as he violently assaulted her in every conceivable perverted way.

  Then he transported her naked corpse downstairs to the kitchen, only to resume the attacks and continued to do so for hours – after taking care to close the living room curtains. Reynolds was only too aware that suburban streets have many watching eyes. He was later to be described as both ‘narcissistic’ and ‘necrophiliac’, and there can be no denying that it is all but impossible for an ordinary human being to conceive of the depravity that Georgia Williams was subjected to during that evening.

  Reynolds’ actions defied all human conscience. They were the work of a young man who can only be described as truly evil, and who glorified in being in charge of the body of a lifeless teenage girl and relished the humiliation he was subjecting her to. But just as Reynolds had taken care to ensure that no prying eyes would catch a glimpse of his depravity, so he had sculpted a plan that, he thought, would ensure that he got away with Georgia’s murder and monstrous violation.

  Reynolds’ escape plan was every bit as careful and calculated as the fantasy that led to Georgia’s death. For, as the evening wore on, he used the dead teenager’s mobile phone to pretend to be her and sent a text message to her mother saying, ‘Ended up going out. Don’t know when I’ll be back.’ He then added a second message: ‘Phone about to die too,’ clearly intent on covering his tracks.

  When Mrs Lynette Williams picked up that message the following morning she immediately texted her daughter to find out exactly where she was and what she was doing. Reynolds used Georgia’s phone to reply, texting, ‘Stayed with friends. I’ll see you tonight.’

  The subterfuge did not end there. On the Monday morning Reynolds texted Georgia’s older sister Scarlett – using his own mobile phone this time – to suggest that he was worried about where Georgia might be and offering to help Scarlett to look for her. Reynolds then texted Georgia’s own phone from his own mobile, repeating his concern. It was a callous attempt to both conceal his own tracks and manipulate every member of the Williams family, while all the time privately gloating over his crime.

  It had the additional benefit of ensuring that Georgia’s family did not contact the police at once, even though her father Steve was a detective.

  But all the time Reynolds was sustaining the pretence that Georgia had left him the evening before, he was also executing his plan to escape the consequences of his actions. He used his stepfather’s white Toyota van, which was parked in the driveway outside the Avondale Road house – with its rear doors facing the front door – and secretly loaded Georgia’s naked body, wrapped in a cloth, into the back. He also loaded her underwear, some jewellery, as well as the clothes he had dressed her in, and the rope and the handcuffs he had used to subdue her.

  Meanwhile, Reynolds deleted the incriminating pictures from his stepfather’s camera and loaded them instead on to an external hard drive for his computer, which already contained other examples of his obsession with extreme and violent pornography. He was clearly intending to relive the previous evening’s dreadful events at his leisure in the future.

  Then, shortly before lunch on Monday 27 May 2013, after waiting
for a visit from his sister – during which he pretended to Georgia’s sister Scarlett that everything was completely normal and explained that he was going off on a ‘camping trip’ for a few days – Reynolds set off in his stepfather’s van to dispose of Georgia’s body.

  He even knew exactly where he was taking her. Reynolds crossed the border and drove into North Wales, and then through the picturesque Nant-y-Garth pass to the upright little market town of Wrexham. He parked the van – with Georgia’s body in the back – had something to eat, and went to the Odeon cinema while waiting for dusk to fall, so that he could play out the final act in the tragedy of Georgia’s young life.

  That evening, as the light began to fade, Reynolds drove back to the remote woodland valley of Nant-y-Garth and up a track into an isolated wooded area. But he did not get very far as the van got stuck in the mud. So he hauled Georgia’s body out of the back of the van and dragged it deeper and deeper into the trees before depositing it in a remote stream – clearly hoping that it would never be discovered, and not caring what animals or insects might do to her naked body in the wilderness.

  But then came the first hitch in Reynolds’ careful plan. His stepfather’s van was stuck in the mud and he needed help to get it out. A passing motorist finally stopped, but then happened to take a photograph of the van. Realising that the picture placed the van in North Wales, Reynolds slipped into a panic – so much so that he immediately drove north to Glasgow in Scotland, where he bought a new watch, once again went to the cinema, and then checked into the Premier Inn in the city centre for the night.

  As a result of Reynolds’ delaying tactics, Georgia’s parents did not inform the police of her disappearance until Tuesday 28 May – by which time Reynolds had disappeared with her body – but an alert was put out for him that day and he was quickly located on the morning of Wednesday 29 May, three days after the murder, at the Premier Inn he had chosen in Scotland’s second city.

  The following evening, West Mercia Police launched an appeal on BBC Television’s Crimewatch programme in an effort to track down the white van’s whereabouts. Their appeal was an immediate success, and by Friday 31 May, Georgia’s body had been located – though sadly not before it had suffered dreadfully during the three days and nights it had lain naked in dense woodland. At a nearby layby police found the rope used to kill her; the leather jacket and shorts and the handcuffs were also discovered, although her jewellery and mobile phone were never found.

  When Georgia’s parents went to identify the body formally they were traumatised by the damage she had suffered, so traumatised, indeed, that they would never be able to eradicate the vivid images of her dreadful fate from their minds in the months to come.

  In the days that followed his arrest, Reynolds repeatedly insisted during his police interviews that it was all a mistake, and that Georgia had gone to see a friend and he did not know where she was. But when the officers revealed that they had found the external hard drive with the pictures of Georgia both alive and dead, Reynolds claimed total memory loss – until, as a result of the Crimewatch appeal – they also told him that they had photographs of his van stuck in the mud in Wales and of Georgia’s body.

  Asked if he accepted responsibility for her death, Reynolds only replied, ‘Even though I don’t remember it, it does certainly look that way. I hate myself for it … I never wanted to hurt her.’ It was the only remorse he was ever to admit to in the months that followed.

  Then, and only then, did Reynolds, the former shop worker and petrol pump attendant, finally admit that he had ‘little flashes’ of memory in which he thought he might have dragged her naked body into the woods.

  For almost seven months Reynolds firmly denied his responsibility for the murder and mutilation of Georgia Williams. It was not until five days before his trial at Stafford Crown Court was due to begin in December 2013 that he accepted his own guilt and admitted that he had indeed killed her. But he did not claim that he had done so in an act of ‘madness’ that might diminish his culpability for the crime.

  Reynolds simply stood in the dock of Stafford Crown Court, before Mr Justice Wilkie, and replied, ‘Guilty,’ when he was asked how he responded to the charges put to him. There was no emotion on his face, no weeping or cries of remorse, not even a plea for mercy from the Court. It was as if Georgia was merely a memory that he had wiped from the hard drive of his brain.

  After Reynolds’ plea of guilty it was revealed that he had attempted to commit similar crimes in the past, luring girls he knew from the local area to his house and subjecting them to brutal sexual attacks.

  In January 2008, when Reynolds was still only seventeen, he had persuaded a red-haired young woman to come to his home to pose for photographs which had an eerie similarity to those he finally took of Georgia. When she refused to go upstairs with him, he attacked her and attempted to strangle her. She only escaped by fighting Reynolds off, which left her with red marks and swelling on her neck. When the police were called, they discovered that he also had photographs of other unknown, naked young woman being strangled, as well as two pictures to which he had digitally added a noose around their neck. One of those photographs depicted the young woman he had just attacked.

  Astonishingly, in the light of what was to happen five years later, and regardless of the apparent seriousness of the attack, West Mercia Police did not insist that he stand trial for the attack. Instead they issued the seventeen-year-old teenager with what they called ‘a final warning’. He was also referred to the Youth Offender Service and monitored by the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service. It did nothing whatever to stop him.

  In 2010 he began contacting a second red-haired young woman. She turned him down flat, but he continued to pester her. Finally in August 2011, she confronted him in a car park and told him to his face to stop. Reynolds responded by reversing his car straight into hers at considerable speed. She went on to feature in one of his forty ‘stories’, as well as appearing in a digitally created image with a noose around her neck.

  In February 2013 Reynolds invited a third red-haired young woman into his parents’ house, having modified a Facebook photograph of her to show a rope around her neck, her arms and legs tied, and yet more sexual violation. After she arrived he locked all the doors and pretended not to know where the keys were.

  As a result, the young woman was trapped in the house for almost an hour, screaming, shouting and threatening to climb out of the window, while Reynolds attempted to persuade her to stay the night. In the end he pretended to ‘find’ the keys and she left. She was extremely fortunate, because Reynolds had left himself a note to remind him to remove the oar from the loft’s hatch. She was clearly intended for the same fate as Georgia Williams.

  Four more digitally altered images created by Reynolds of local young women with nooses were found in his bedroom, and in the week leading up to Georgia’s death he sent messages to some sixteen young women, trying to persuade them to come to his house on Sunday 26 May. Astonishingly, two or three of them showed an interest, but could not make that evening. On the morning after Georgia’s murder he contacted them to say that he had a mechanical problem with his camera, and that they should postpone their visit for twenty-four hours.

  In the weeks before Reynolds pleaded guilty in December 2013, he was examined by the distinguished forensic psychiatrist, Professor Bob Peckitt, in a series of interviews. In his report the professor explained that although Reynolds had experienced some physical and emotional abuse as a child – his mother had escaped from the relationship with her first husband
and married again. But the professor also noted that his stepfather and mother had given him a ‘comfortable and supportive’ home.

  Professor Peckitt concluded that Reynolds did not have ‘a sufficiently disturbed upbringing’ to account for his adult behaviour, and he also discounted the possibility that he had a ‘recognised mental disorder’ or an ‘abnormality of mental functioning’. In other words, he was clinically sane.

  But the professor also stated firmly that Reynolds suffered from a ‘long-standing necrophiliac fantasy’ which involved hanging a young woman and having sex with her corpse. He concluded that he was an ‘intelligent and plausible’ young man who had the potential ‘to progress to being a serial killer’ who posed a ‘grave risk to women’ and would continue to do so for the rest of his life.

  It was one of the bleakest statements ever made about a convicted killer of a single human being in a British criminal court, and it was about a young man who was not even twenty-four years of age. It sealed Reynolds’ fate.

  When Jamie Reynolds was summoned back to the dock of Stafford Crown Court on 19 December 2013 to hear Mr Justice Wilkie pass sentence, he knew that he faced a life sentence for the murder of Georgia Williams seven months earlier. The only question in his mind was how long the minimum term that the judge would recommend would be.

  He thought that the fact that he had pleaded guilty (although only after waiting six months before deciding to do so) and thereby not putting Georgia’s family through the ordeal of a trial, and that he was still only twenty-three years of age, would weigh in his favour.