The firm understanding in the House of Commons when the death penalty was suspended was that murder of any kind should always attract a life sentence, providing the killer was over twenty-one years of age. Yet in the years that followed, a life sentence for murder seldom meant life. Indeed by the late 1970s, the average term of imprisonment served by a murderer was around nine years. Many of those sentenced to life for murder emerged from prison to resume normal lives, but a substantial minority did not, and often went on to commit further crimes, including murder. That infuriated many members of the public, as did the fact that the sentence did not seem to deter murderers who might fairly be called ‘the worst of the worst’.
There emerged a strange confusion about what a life sentence meant, not least because it no longer seemed a sufficient penalty for the most depraved and ruthless killers, many of whom killed more than one victim, or were responsible for the deaths of children. As a result, trial judges started to add a ‘minimum term’ to a life sentence in the worst cases of murder – by specifying, for example, that a convicted killer sentenced to life should serve a minimum period (say twenty-five years) in prison before he or she could be considered for parole.
Then, gradually, the politicians of the day started to override the judges’ decisions about a minimum term and insist that particularly heinous offenders should receive a ‘whole life tariff’, regardless of the judicial view. That reflected an ever-increasing clamour from the general public, often incited by the media, for harsher and harsher sentences for those who had committed the worst crimes.
That fervour came into full flood a few weeks after the death penalty had been legally suspended. Just one month later, Greater Manchester Police arrested two of the most notorious killers in British criminal history, Ian Brady and his female accomplice Myra Hindley, who would become known as the Moors Murderers for their killing of five children between the ages of ten and seventeen, four of whom they also sexually assaulted.
The crime shocked the nation, a shock that deepened still further when Brady and Hindley came to trial in April 1966. The prosecution played the jury a fifteen-minute tape recording of one of their female victims, ten-year-old Lesley Anne Downey, being tortured by the pair and pleading for her life. It left even the most hard-nosed reporters in the press gallery traumatised and in tears.
At the end of the trial, after the jury had convicted them both, the judge, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, described them as ‘two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity’ and Brady as ‘wicked beyond belief’. He recommended that they should both spend ‘a very long time in jail’ but, significantly, he did not recommend a ‘tariff’ – or minimum term – for Brady. He did, however, recommend that Hindley serve a minimum of twenty-five years.
In fact, due to a series of decisions by successive Home Secretaries, Hindley was never released and died, still a prisoner, in 2002 at the age of sixty – from bronchial pneumonia. Brady too was destined never to be released, again through the intervention of the Home Secretary, being declared criminally insane in 1985 and transferred to the Ashworth high security hospital near Liverpool. Now aged seventy-seven, he has been on a form of hunger strike there for the past fifteen years, although one that allows him to make toast and drink packet soup – ‘to help him to survive’.
It was the Moors Murders that first brought into clear focus the difficulties of just having a simple ‘life’ sentence for murder. Surely, some argued, there had to be a distinction between a domestic argument that led to a single death and a determined effort to kill a police officer, for example, or several people, especially children?
That question came into sharp focus again just a few months after Brady and Hindley were convicted when a small-time armed robber named Harry Roberts was caught after the killing of three Metropolitan Police men in East Acton, London, in what became known as the ‘Massacre in Braybrook Street’. On the afternoon of 12 August 1966, just a few days after England had won the World Cup at Wembley, Roberts and two associates were on their way to commit a robbery carrying two handguns, when they were stopped by an unmarked police car carrying two detectives and a young constable.
Convinced that the officers would discover the guns, Roberts, then aged thirty, shot first one and then a second officer dead, while one of his accomplices shot and killed the third. Desperate to escape justice, Roberts went on the run, hiding out in east London’s Epping Forest using the military training he had been given as a soldier during the Malayan Emergency between 1948 and 1960. He was finally captured after ninety-six days on the run, sleeping in a barn on the edge of the forest.
At his trial in 1967 Roberts was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing the officers, and the trial judge recommended that he serve a minimum of thirty years. In fact, once again, after the repeated interventions of a succession of Home Secretaries, each fully aware of how strongly the police service felt about the killing of policemen, Roberts remained in prison until November 2014.
By then aged seventy-nine, Roberts had been refused parole on a number of occasions after repeated attempts to escape and a five-year campaign of brutal intimidation, ending in 2006, against the female owner of an animal sanctuary, where he was on ‘day release’ in preparation for his potential freedom. Eight years later the Parole Board allowed his release on licence.
Both the Moors Murderers and Roberts concentrated the public mind on what a life sentence truly meant – especially when it came to multiple murders – but there was no political appetite to revisit the whole issue so quickly after the formal suspension of the death penalty under Harold Wilson’s Labour Government. For the most part, both politicians and the public were prepared to allow the uncertainty of whether ‘life should mean life’ to continue.
This typically British compromise was sustained because the public were prepared to accept that politicians – and particularly the Home Secretaries of the day – could and should decide whether a murderer should remain in prison, regardless of what the trial judge may have said. This left the issue to be decided on a case-by-case basis, usually depending on the political assessment of how far the public would be appalled if a particular prisoner were to be released.
The contradiction is that by allowing the compromise, British society – so determined to suspend and then abolish the death penalty – covertly accepted a system that allowed some killers to spend their entire lives behind bars, while others were deemed sufficiently rehabilitated to be freed ‘on licence’.
There is no finer example of that covert acceptance of the confusion than the case of Britain’s longest-ever serving prisoner, John Straffen, who spent more than half a century in jail. The Hampshire-born Straffen, son of an army officer, killed two young girls, aged five and nine, with no apparent motive in 1951. At his trial that October he was found ‘unfit to plead’ because of his mental health, and sent to Broadmoor Special Hospital in Berkshire.
Just a few months later, in April 1952, he escaped and, during his four hours of freedom, killed another five-year-old girl. At his subsequent trial he was convicted of murder – as the jury were apparently convinced that he was sane. Straffen was sentenced to death, but was reprieved due to his mental deficiencies. He was to spend the rest of his life in prison, before his eventual death in November 2007. He had served a total of fifty-six years, and had become the oldest prisoner serving a whole life term. Yet at no point had he ever received that sentence from a judge.
Straffen was an exception. For the majority of other prisoners convicted of murder during the 1970s and 1980s, a life sentence meant serving an
average of nine years or so in jail. Yet, as they did so, the public clamour of being ‘tough on crime’ and especially murderers steadily gathered in pace. As the years passed and the twentieth century drew to a close, so the public, and therefore political, demand for longer and longer sentences for murder grew and grew. Slowly but surely, a form of ‘sentence creep’ began to take hold, so that murderers, and especially multiple ones, received ever longer terms of imprisonment.
One reason for that lay in a group of high-profile cases that increased public revulsion at what a murderer could be capable of – thereby increasing the call for ‘life to mean life’.
The first major crime to accelerate the growing call for ‘whole life’ terms involved the balaclava-clad ‘Black Panther’, Donald Neilson, who shot dead three sub-postmasters during robberies in various parts of England between 1971 and 1974. Then, early in 1975, he abducted seventeen-year-old heiress Lesley Whittle from her home in Shropshire.
Neilson attempted to ransom the terrified daughter of the owner of a successful coach hire business for £50,000, while keeping her hostage in a water drainage shaft in Staffordshire. The ransom attempt failed and her body was finally recovered almost seven weeks later. She had fallen, and the tether that Neilson had placed round her neck to restrain her from trying to escape had strangled her to death. In July 1976 Neilson was given four life sentences, and the judge recommended he be given a ‘whole life’ term, which the Home Secretary accepted.
Thirty-two years later, in 2008, Neilson attempted to have his sentence reduced to a minimum of thirty years, but his appeal was refused. That same year he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and he died, still a prisoner, in December 2011, at the age of seventy-five. He had spent more than thirty-five years behind bars. For millions of people throughout Britain Neilson epitomised a man who would have been a candidate for the death sentence, had one still existed.
Perhaps more than any other, Neilson’s was the case that began the escalation in the length of imprisonment meant when a life sentence was imposed. He ushered in an era in which a life sentence increasingly came to mean exactly that – and his case was followed just five years later by another which would confirm public opinion about the treatment of serial killers. It was the conviction of the thirty-five-year-old lorry driver, Peter Sutcliffe, ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’, who was charged with the murder of thirteen women and the attempted murder of a further seven, after a killing spree that had lasted for five years and terrified the female residents of Leeds and Bradford in Yorkshire.
At Sutcliffe’s trial in May 1981, he pleaded guilty to the murders, but claimed diminished responsibility on the grounds of his paranoid schizophrenia. Sutcliffe claimed that he had killed as a result of a ‘divine mission’ and as the result of hearing the ‘voice of God’. The jury heard some horrifying details of his killings – many of his victims were prostitutes who were beaten about the head and their bodies mutilated after their deaths – and declined his argument of diminished responsibility. They unanimously found him guilty of murder and attempted murder and the trial judge at the Central Criminal Court in the Old Bailey, Mr Justice Boreham, imposed a sentence of thirty years, calling Sutcliffe ‘an unusually dangerous man’ and recommending that he serve the full term before even being considered for release.
In fact, Sutcliffe only spent the first three years of his sentence in prison. He was transferred to Broadmoor Hospital, a top-security psychiatric unit, in 1984 as a result of his paranoid schizophrenia and he has remained there ever since. As the end of his thirty-year minimum term approached in July 2010, he appealed against his sentence, but was told by Mr Justice Mitting at the Court of Appeal that, in his case, life would indeed mean life. The families of some of his victims were appalled that there should ever be a chance that he be released, not least because of his mutilation of his victims with a hammer, a sharpened screwdriver and a knife.
In March 2011, Sutcliffe returned to the Court of Appeal once more, on the grounds that his incarceration without a fixed period raised major issues of law, but the Court, this time led by the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, rejected his bid for the case to go to the new Supreme Court because of the serious issues of law that it raised. Sutcliffe also claimed that he was now ‘much better’ and no longer ‘uniquely dangerous’.
Lord Judge accepted Sutcliffe was ‘disturbed’ when he went out to commit the murders, but then added, ‘There is no reason to conclude that the appellant’s claims that he genuinely believed he was acting under the divine instruction to fulfil God’s will carries any greater conviction now than it did when it was rejected by the jury,’ before suggesting that Sutcliffe’s crimes were ‘criminal conduct at the extreme end of horror’.
As a result Lord Judge confirmed that the Court’s view was that ‘the interests of justice require nothing less than a whole life order. That is the only available punishment proportionate to these crimes.’
During Sutcliffe’s years of incarceration, the atmosphere and culture that surrounded the worst offenders changed significantly. Sutcliffe may have gone to prison originally in a less ferocious climate of public opinion, but over time that had been transformed beyond recognition by a string of high profile cases, of which his was one of the earliest and most significant.
Sutcliffe too had changed during his years in Broadmoor, where he has spent the last thirty years. Still diagnosed as suffering from mental health problems, he adopted his mother’s maiden name of Coonan, became a Jehovah’s Witness and struck up a long-lasting friendship with the late – and now disgraced – radio disc jockey Jimmy Savile.
Only a matter of months after Sutcliffe’s conviction, however, the British public were presented with another infamous serial killer, the Scottish-born ex-policeman Dennis Nilsen. In his own way, Nilsen became every bit as notorious as Sutcliffe had in 1982, when it was discovered that he had murdered and dismembered no fewer than twelve young men – most of whom were homeless, homosexual or prostitutes – in two north London flats over a period of five years between 1978 and 1983. He then stored their body parts in the flats – by doing so, he was, in his own words, ‘killing for company’.
Nilsen later told the police, ‘I wished I could have stopped, but I couldn’t. I had no other thrill or happiness.’ But he did not deny that he washed, clothed and retained his victims’ bodies within his two flats for weeks or even months at a time, before burning some of them on bonfires and hiding others under the floorboards, or flushing their bones down the lavatory. He did deny that he was a necrophiliac, though accepted that he had engaged in sexual acts with the bodies of six of his victims. The revelations shocked the British public to the core.
After his conviction on 3 November 1983 at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, the judge, Mr Justice Croom-Johnson, recommended that he should serve a minimum of twenty-five years as part of his life sentence. But successive Home Secretaries – again reacting to public and media opinion – decided that the extreme seriousness of his crimes and the public revulsion that accompanied his trial meant that he should never be freed. He remains in prison today more than thirty years after his conviction, and complains that he has been denied the right to publish his autobiography, History of a Drowning Man, as well as some music and poetry that he has written.
Just three years later came another equally controversial case that again underlined the public desire for killers to be locked up forever. It involved a twenty-five-year-old former waiter in a Little Chef restaurant called Jeremy Bamber, who was charged with shooting dead his adop
tive parents, his sister and her twin six-year-old sons at the family home, ‘White House Farm’ in Essex, so that he could claim a large inheritance. He shot the boys twenty-six times.
The killings became one of the most dramatic multiple murder cases in Britain, but Bamber insisted that his sister, Sheila, who was a diagnosed schizophrenic, had actually committed all four of the other murders before turning the gun on herself. At his trial in October 1986 the jury decided that Bamber’s story about his sister was concocted to save himself, and found him guilty of the five murders.
In sentencing Bamber to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of twenty-five years, the judge suggested that he found it ‘difficult to foresee’ that he would ever be released, and in 1994 the Home Secretary let it be known that he would indeed never be released.
Now, almost thirty years later, Bamber remains in prison. But he is exceptional in that he is the only ‘whole life’ prisoner who has never accepted his guilt. Indeed he has vigorously protested his innocence from the day of his conviction, and is continuing to appeal against his sentence – and his continued imprisonment – to this day.
In 2003 Bamber won a case in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, stating that his whole life term was a breach of his human rights, and he is still pursuing that argument with the British Courts from his prison cell. Indeed, it was Bamber’s appeal which led indirectly to the ECHR deciding that whole life terms were ‘inhuman’ in 2013.
Two cases in the 1990s further underlined the ever-increasing demand from the public – and the families of the victims – that ‘life should mean life’, especially for the most heinous crimes. The first major case to escalate the steadily increasing appetite for whole life terms of imprisonment, handed out by successive Home Secretaries, was that of the paedophile Robert Black.
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