Finally tracked down in 1990, Black abducted, raped and murdered four schoolgirls aged from five to eleven between 1981 and 1986. He was also convicted of the kidnapping of a fifth schoolgirl and the attempted kidnapping of a sixth in the years before his eventual capture.
Black was finally caught by the police after he was seen snatching a six-year-old girl off the street in Stow, in his native Scotland, and throwing her into the back of his van. The police chased the van and finally caught up with it, but not before Black had sexually assaulted the girl. The police officer who saved her turned out to be her father. The case made headlines around the country. He was in jail for the abduction when he was finally charged with murder.
Black finally went for trial in April 1994 and denied all the charges against him, but the jury disagreed and in May 1994 he was convicted. The judge recommended that he serve a minimum of thirty-five years before he could even be considered for release, which meant that he would not have been considered for parole until 2029, by which time he would be eighty-two years of age. But in October 2011 Black was found guilty of the murder of another schoolgirl, this time in Northern Ireland in 1981, and given a further life sentence. Robert Black died in January 2016, shortly before he would have been charged with the murder in 1978 of Genette Tate.
The other case in the 1990s that confirmed the public desire for whole life sentences concerned the only woman, apart from Myra Hindley, to be given a whole life term at that time. She was, of course, Rosemary West, wife of the Gloucester-based serial killer Frederick West, who killed himself on 1 January 1995, before he could stand trial. She was charged with the murder of her daughter Heather, aged sixteen, eight other young women who had visited her husband’s house at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, and West’s daughter by his first marriage, eight-year-old Charmaine.
When Rosemary West was convicted at Winchester Crown Court of the murder of ten young woman and children, in November 1995, the trial judge Mr Justice Mantell memorably concluded: ‘If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released.’ In fact, West was officially given a life sentence with a minimum term of twenty-five years before she could be considered for release. It was the Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw who decided two years later that she should serve a ‘whole life tariff’ and die in prison.
West has since decided that she has no wish to appeal against her sentence. Now aged sixty-two, she is reportedly content to spend the rest of her life in prison, although, of course, she would be entitled to change her mind as the years continue to pass. She has, after all, spent two decades already behind bars and there is every possibility, given reasonable health, that she may spend a further three decades in the same predicament. The difficulty, of course, is that her very notoriety will make any decision to release her a matter of great controversy – just as it was for Myra Hindley.
But it was the European Court of Human Rights that ended the twentieth-century discussion between judges and the Home Secretary over who should decide how long the worst murderers should serve in prison. In November 2000, in the wake of an appeal to the ECHR on behalf of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the ten-year-old child killers of two-year-old toddler James Bulger, the European Court ruled that the Home Secretary should lose the right to set a tariff for defendants under the age of eighteen as it did not consider it was appropriate for a politician to interfere in the judicial process. At their trial in 1993 the judge had sentenced Thompson and Venables to eight years each, but the then Home Secretary, the Tory Party’s Michael Howard, set a tariff of fifteen years – partly as a result of the public outcry over the case. The House of Lords overturned that increase, criticising Howard for putting too much weight on public opinion.
Two years later a similar decision in respect of adult offenders followed an appeal on behalf of the convicted double-killer Arthur Anderson, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1988 with a recommended minimum term of fifteen years – only to be told by the Home Secretary of the day, Labour’s David Blunkett, that he would have to serve twenty years. Anderson appealed to the House of Lords who decided that the decision breached his human rights. Their decision was upheld in the European Court of Human Rights.
These two cases effectively cost the Home Secretary any discretion over the length of life and other sentences. In response to the change in the powers of the Home Secretary over sentencing, David Blunkett, as Home Secretary of the Labour Government, introduced the Criminal Justice Act of 2003 which responded to the loss of the Home Secretary’s sentencing power, and gave the judiciary detailed guidance about what factors they had to take into account in their sentencing decisions. Many commentators saw it as David Blunkett’s revenge for the decision to strip the Home Secretary of his powers. Judges are not formally obliged to stick to the guidelines, but must explain the reasons if they depart from them.
Now the only occasion when a politician may intervene in the judicial sentencing process comes when the Government’s Attorney General exercises his right to petition the Court of Appeal if he thinks that the sentence passed by a judge has been ‘unduly lenient’. Only judges can now set a minimum term for life imprisonment, and only the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court can amend their decision.
The sentencing guidelines laid down in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 are still the subject of debate between judges and politicians, and have given rise to further appeals to the European Court of Human Rights, but they nevertheless lay the foundations for sentencing the worst offenders in Britain.
Under the 2003 Act a minimum term (which was formerly called a ‘tariff’) became the minimum number of years a prisoner serves before he can even be considered for parole – it does not mean that the prisoner will be released after the minimum period has passed. That will only take place when the prisoner ‘is judged no longer a risk of harm to the public’, by the Parole Board.
The starting point for a ‘whole life’ order is that the offender must be aged over twenty-one – Jamie Reynolds, for example, only just came within its terms at the age of twenty-three, and Schedule 21 of the Act lays down the types of murder that might attract a ‘whole life’ term. They include multiple murders, where each murder involves premeditation, abduction, or sexual or sadistic conduct; the murder of a child involving abduction or sexual or sadistic conduct; any assassination committed to further a religious, political, racial or ideological cause; and any murder by a person previously convicted of murder.
The trial judge can also pass a whole life order if he considers the offence so serious – or the combination of offences that make it so serious – to be exceptionally high.
In 2011 three prisoners sentenced to whole life orders, all of them murderers, Jeremy Bamber, Peter Moore and Douglas Vinter, disputed the rights of the British Courts to pass a ‘whole life’ term, and appealed to the European Court of Human Rights that whole life orders breached their human rights. They argued that to sentence them to spend the rest of their life in jail was ‘inhuman’. The three killers lost their case in 2012 when the ECHR found that the whole life prisoners could apply to the Home Secretary for compassionate release, and therefore their human rights were not breached.
But on 9 July 2013, after a further appeal by the same three men, the ECHR found that there had to be the ‘prospect of review’ for prisoners subjected to whole life orders, and that any impossibility of parole would violate their human rights under Article Three of the European Convention.
Just seven months later, on 18 February 2014, the Court of Appeal in England and Wales fundamentally disagr
eed with the European Court in their ruling on appeals by three different whole life prisoners, Mark Bridger (killer of five-year-old April Jones in 2013), Lee Newell (guilty of murdering a fellow prisoner, while in jail for murder) and Matthew Thomas, whom it was later discovered had not been sentenced to a whole life term and whose case was, therefore, not considered.
Led by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, the five-strong Court, which included Lady Justice Hallett, found that the ECHR in Strasbourg was not correct when it concluded that English and Welsh law never allowed whole life orders to be reduced. Lord Thomas specifically pointed out that the Home Secretary could review them in ‘exceptional circumstances’.
On behalf of the Court, the Lord Chief Justice explained that they believed there are some crimes which were so heinous that Parliament was entitled to allow ‘a sentence which includes a whole life order’. He concluded: ‘In our judgement the law of England and Wales therefore does provide to an offender “hope” or the “possibility” of release in exceptional circumstances … Judges should therefore continue as they have done to impose whole life orders in those rare and exceptional cases.’
In effect, the Court of Appeal denied the European Court’s assertion that there was no possibility of parole or release under a whole life order, no matter how exceptional the circumstances might be. This did not, therefore, breach an offender’s human rights under the European Convention.
Interestingly, only four prisoners serving ‘whole life’ terms have ever been released on compassionate grounds by a Home Secretary. Three of them were Irish Republican Army sympathisers released as part of the ‘Good Friday’ agreement for peace in Northern Ireland, including the infamous Paul ‘Dingus’ Magee, who originally escaped during his trial for the murder of an SAS soldier in 1981, and was sentenced to a term of thirty years in his absence. Magee was finally imprisoned for killing a policeman in England in 1992, but was repatriated to Northern Ireland in 1999 as part of the ‘peace process’ and eventually released in December 2000, when he was given a pardon under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy.
The only other theoretical ‘whole life’ prisoner, whose existence in that category was never officially confirmed, was the London gangster Reggie Kray, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer when he was released by the Home Secretary on 1 October 2000. He died within a matter of weeks. The reality is that the possibility of release on compassionate grounds is, to put it politely, remote – unless the prisoner is facing a terminal illness.
It was against this background that Jamie Reynolds’s legal team came to the Court of Appeal in London on Thursday morning 16 October 2014 to argue that his whole life order should be amended because the trial judge had not taken into account his young age and the fact that he had pleaded guilty to the charges. His legal team knew the Court’s ruling that whole life orders were legal, in spite of the European Court’s decision, but they also knew that the weight of the argument would once again revolve around whether life should indeed mean life for the twenty-three-year-old convicted murderer.
In the low-key atmosphere of the wood-panelled Court Five on the first floor of the Royal Courts of Justice, Reynolds’ case was placed before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, sitting with two other Appeal Court judges, by Reynolds’ defence team. The Court’s attention was drawn to his eventual plea of guilty – though it had not taken place until a psychiatrist had warned that he could not claim any ‘diminished responsibility’ for his crime as a result of the meticulous planning he had demonstrated.
The Court also heard that the closeness of age between Reynolds and his victim should play its part in weighing the length of his term of imprisonment as it was not the murder of a young child, but rather one of a mature teenager. The Court was then told by the Crown, on behalf of the prosecution, that the closeness of age between Reynolds and Georgia Williams had effectively helped him commit murder and in no way mitigated against the sentence.
Sitting in Wakefield Prison, watching proceedings by video link from the Court of Appeal, Reynolds looked pale and uncertain. No longer sporting the partial beard he had worn during his trial, he looked for all the world like a terrified schoolboy, rather than the depraved killer that he had appeared at trial. Only speaking when asked to confirm his name, his voice was high-pitched, almost strangled, and he sat there watching the proceedings, staring blankly at the screen in front of him showing the London hearing, while nervously biting his nails.
No judgement was reached on that Thursday morning, however. The Lord Chief Justice and his two colleagues promised to hand down a written judgement on Reynolds as soon as they could – although they did ask if they could see the photographs of Georgia Williams’ ordeal that the trial judge had seen when he sentenced Reynolds to spend the rest of his life in jail.
It was an ominous harbinger of what their decision would be. If the Court of Appeal was as appalled by Reynolds’ detailed record of his crime as the trial judge clearly had been, then the chance of his receiving a shorter sentence seemed less and less likely. Two weeks were to pass before the Court of Appeal handed down their judgement on James Reynolds’ appeal against his whole life term. Their decision would confirm whether or not there was any judicial sympathy for sentencing a young man barely in his twenties to spend six decades in prison.
ROT IN HELL
Barely two months after Mr Justice Wilkie sentenced Jamie Reynolds to a whole life term of imprisonment at Stafford Crown Court in December 2013, another judge passed exactly the same sentence on a thirty-three-year-old former soldier and alcoholic drifter named Anwar Rosser.
At Bradford Crown Court on the morning of Thursday 13 February 2014 – ironically, the day before the Court of Appeal was to make its historic judgement that whole life orders in England and Wales did not contravene the European Convention on Human Rights – Mr Justice Coulson ruled that Rosser too should spend the rest of his life behind bars.
In some ways Rosser’s crime was even more heinous than Jamie Reynolds’ sexual and sadistic killing of teenager Georgia Williams – because it involved the death of an innocent, cheerful, loving four-year-old boy called Riley Turner. The facts alone chill the bones.
Shortly after 4.00 on the snowy morning of Sunday 20 January 2013, Rosser, for no clear reason other than sexual perversion, savagely murdered this little boy in his own bedroom in the house he lived in with his mother, Sharon Smith, and stepfather, Guy Earwaker, in Keighley, Yorkshire. His twin brother and eighteen-month-old baby brother were also asleep in the house when he was killed.
At the time, Rosser was living in a flat just across the road from Riley’s parents in Harewood Road, Keighley. The couple had befriended the ex-soldier – even to the extent of helping him to furnish his flat – but on that bleak Saturday night which turned into an even bleaker Sunday morning their friendship fractured forever.
On Saturday evening, 19 January 2013, Rosser had gone to his local pub, the Bracken Arms, and got drunk, though not incoherent or incapable. Filled with alcoholic bonhomie – and lust – he met two local women there and invited them to ‘make a party of it’, but instead of going back to Rosser’s flat he suggested they all went to visit Riley’s parents instead.
Things did not go to plan for Rosser, however. As the evening turned into the first hour of Sunday morning the two women left, and Rosser asked Riley’s parents if he could sleep on their sofa in the living room instead of walking back to his flat across the road. His excuse was that he was afraid that some people to whom he owed money might be waiting outside his flat intent on beating him up.
Out of compassion, Riley’s parents agreed that their neighbour could stay on the sofa and went upstairs to bed themselves at about 1.00 on that Sunday morning. What Riley’s parents did not know was that Rosser had another, far darker, reason for wanting to stay in their house that night – he almost certainly wanted to seriously injure one or more members of the family. To do so, he had even brought with him a four-inch knife with a brown handle, which he had stolen from the pub where he worked as a part-time chef.
Rosser may have been carrying the knife partly out of a sense of paranoia about the men who he claimed could be waiting for him outside his flat, but that was certainly not the principal reason, as he was soon to reveal. Shortly after 4 am, Rosser got up from the sofa and crept upstairs armed with no fewer than four knives, including the one that he had brought with him. The other three he had taken from the family’s downstairs kitchen.
Rosser looked into Sharon Smith and Guy Earwaker’s bedroom, but he did not wake them – nor did he attack them. For reasons known only to himself, he had decided to attack their son Riley. So he crossed the landing and entered the bedroom of the four-year-old, who was sound asleep.
Quite without warning, Rosser attacked the little boy in the most depraved and brutal way, repeatedly stabbing him in a frenzy as the boy lay in his bed. In total Riley suffered no fewer than thirty stab wounds, all inflicted by the brown-handled knife Rosser had brought with him that evening.
But Riley’s ordeal did not end there. Rosser also attacked the boy sexually, stabbing him in the scrotum and then inserting objects into his rectum when – according to the report of the coroner – he was still alive. He finally removed Riley’s pyjama bottoms when they were soaked with urine, and one of the objects found nearby contained traces of the child’s faeces and blood.
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