‘I was involved in a stabbing (not fatal) on the wing,’ Vinter explained. ‘You see how I can admit in a letter to an offence as serious as that. It’s because the judge when he sentenced me to natural life gave me an invisible licence that said I can breach any laws I want, no matter how serious, and the law can’t touch me. I’m above the law. I said to the governor, don’t waste any money on investigations, just give me another life sentence for my collection. They don’t mean anything any more.’
Not long after he wrote that letter Vinter offended again – stabbing convicted paedophile Roy Whiting in both eyes, using a sharpened plastic toilet brush handle. Whiting was himself serving a whole life sentence at the time for the murder of eight-year-old Sussex schoolgirl Sarah Payne.
After being tried for the attack, Vinter was given an indefinite sentence with a five-year minimum term to serve in addition to his whole life sentence. There could hardly have been a better example of what Vinter called his ‘invisible licence’ to break any laws he chose. The further sentence was irrelevant to a man already destined to spend the rest of his life in jail.
No one would describe Douglas Gary Vinter, usually known as Gary, as being an innocent or good man. Born in 1970 in Middlesbrough, he is six feet seven inches tall, powerfully built, and given to misusing anabolic steroids. He also has a record of exceptionally violent behaviour. He committed his first murder in August 1995, when he brutally stabbed and killed fellow railway worker Carl Edon, aged twenty-two, in a trackside railway workers’ cabin near Middlesbrough. Covered in blood, Vinter then drove to a local police station and gave himself up. He had stabbed Edon, who had one child and was expecting another with his girlfriend Michelle at the time of his death, no fewer than thirty-seven times. The police found Edon’s body with the knife still embedded in it.
When he was interviewed by the police Vinter formally denied committing the murder, but he accepted responsibility even though he said he ‘could not remember what happened’. But the jury at Teesside Crown Court convicted him of murder, and he was sentenced to life in 1996. The Home Office then ordered that he should serve a minimum of ten years and he was released in August 2005 having been on remand since Edon’s murder was committed.
In the last two years of that life sentence, Vinter struck up a relationship with a young woman named Anne White, then in her thirties, whom he had met during a series of ‘home visits’ from prison prior to his intended release. They moved in together in Eston, near Middlesbrough, some distance from his former hunting grounds, and married in July 2006.
Even the move to another part of Teesside did not quell Vinter’s appetite for violence, however. On New Year’s Eve 2006, just a few months after his marriage, he was arrested after a brawl outside a local pub. By that time he had started beating his new wife, and shortly after the New Year they separated, but were later reconciled.
In July 2007, however, Vinter was recalled to jail for six months after being convicted of affray at the pub brawl on New Year’s Eve, thereby breaching his right to freedom.
Anne, who had four children by previous relationships, still suffered severely when he was at home with her, and friends became deeply concerned that his abuse of her was escalating dramatically, while also realising that she was ‘afraid’ to leave him.
Nevertheless, Vinter behaved impeccably in prison, becoming a ‘model prisoner’. Suitably impressed, the Parole Board recommended his second release in December 2007.
At the very beginning of February 2008, just a few weeks after his re-release from prison, he moved out of the family home after yet another violent argument with his wife Anne. Vinter smashed the television set and confiscated her passport – presumably so that she could never escape him.
The couple remained apart for the ensuing few days, but on the evening of 10 February, Vinter spotted her on a night out in central Middlesbrough with friends and once again turned to extreme violence. He grabbed her and bundled her into his car. He drove his terrified wife, then aged forty, to his mother’s house in Middlesbrough, and repeatedly attacked her over a period of half an hour– an attack which finally ended with her brutal murder.
Vinter tried to strangle Anne with his bare hands, before losing his temper and stabbing her four times with two knives, one wound piercing her heart. He then strangled her again, this time driving the life out of his innocent wife’s dying body. He left her lifeless corpse on his mother’s kitchen floor.
Armed police arrested him in the early hours of the following morning, using two baton rounds to subdue the six-foot-seven-inch bodybuilder. Vinter offered no excuse for the killing, beyond telling the police, ‘Right, my name is Gary Vinter. I am solely responsible for the death of my wife. There’s nobody else involved, just me. That’s all I’m prepared to say.’
Shortly after he was charged, Vinter pleaded guilty to murder and, passing sentence, the Recorder of Middlesbrough, Judge Peter Fox QC, told him, ‘The extreme violence which you used is described as continuing … You therefore fall into that small category of people who should be deprived permanently of their liberty. I therefore pass a whole life sentence.’
For his part, Vinter sneered at the White family in the courtroom around him, and smirked as he pleaded guilty.
As the local newspaper put it: ‘With tears and disgust, Ms White’s loved ones were asked to try and control their emotions.’ That did not prove easy, and Anne White’s father Jim, aged seventy-one, asked reporters outside the court after Vinter had been taken to the cells, ‘Why was this convicted murderer allowed to walk free last Christmas?’
By way of explanation, the Parole Board extended its ‘deepest sympathies’ to Ms White’s family and announced that it would be reviewing the case ‘in order to identify learning points for the future’.
The murder of Anne White had a catastrophic effect on her family. Her father died of cancer a year after her death. His wife, Anne’s mother Peggy White, said later, ‘We have often said that he died of a broken heart.’ Sixty-eight-year-old Mrs White also maintained that Vinter should have been hanged. ‘What about Anne’s children, my grandchildren?’ she asked after his second life sentence. ‘What about Mrs Edon, what about their human rights? He can never be released. He would kill again. They should throw away the key. I think people in his category should really be hanged.’
Michelle Edon, who had changed her surname to Carl’s by deed poll following the death of her late fiancée, felt every bit as strongly, saying, ‘I hope Gary Vinter suffers and rots in hell.’ She added, ‘I want to hear that he is dead. I hope one day to hear those words. I want him to suffer like he has made us suffer.’ Her mother agreed: ‘We will never understand why he was released from prison. He stabbed someone thirty-seven times – how could anyone think it is OK to let him back into society? And then he took someone else’s life. Ruined more lives.’
It is a tragic fact that no fewer than thirty-eight of the sixty or so individuals serving whole life sentences in England and Wales killed after being released from fixed term sentences – though that has never been officially confirmed. The delicate question of releasing a man already convicted of a murder so that he can kill again lies close to the heart of the debate about whether or not life should mean life.
Douglas Vinter clearly does not believe that it should. In June 2009 he appealed against his whole life term to the Court of Appeal, but was turned down. Undeterred, in 2011, Vinter joined forces with convicted-murderer-of-five Jeremy Bamber and convicted-murderer-of-four Peter Moore – both of whom were also serving w
hole life sentences – to petition the European Court of Human Rights that their sentences breached Article Three of the European Convention on Human Rights which gives protection against ‘inhuman or degrading treatment’.
In January 2012 the three lost their petition by four judges to three, the European Court deciding that the sentences did not breach their human rights. The then Secretary of State for Justice, Kenneth Clarke QC, made an impassioned plea to the Court, saying, ‘There will always be a small number of prisoners whose crimes are so appalling that the judges rule that they should never become eligible for parole.’ The European Court, presided over at that time by the British judge, Sir Nicolas Bratza, agreed.
As the Guardian newspaper commented, the European Court’s decision was a little out of character for Sir Nicolas, because three years earlier he had argued in the Court against whole life terms. ‘I consider,’ he said then, ‘that the time has come when the Court should clearly affirm that the imposition of an irreducible life sentence, even on an adult offender, is in principle inconsistent with Article Three of the Convention.’
Perhaps with that contradiction in mind, in December 2012 Vinter, Bamber and Moore launched an appeal against the European Court’s decision. Their petition had been heard by the First Chamber of the Court, but the appeal would be heard by the more important Grand Chamber, who had granted a rare appeal.
This time the three killers won their appeal. On 9 July 2013, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the whole life tariffs given to Vinter, Bamber and Moore did indeed breach their human rights. The problem, the Grand Chamber concluded, was that under the current system a prisoner does not get a chance to prove that they are reformed.
The Grand Chamber’s seventeen judges ruled by sixteen to one that there had to be a review of the sentence and, at least, the possibility of a release. But they added that this did not mean there was ‘any prospect of imminent release’.
Jeremy Bamber dismissed the decision as ‘hollow’ as he was still serving a sentence for a crime he insisted that he did not commit. The European Court’s judges were sympathetic, suggesting that if a prisoner like Bamber was incarcerated ‘without any prospect of release and without the possibility of having his life sentence reviewed, there is the risk that he can never atone for his offence: whatever the prisoner does in prison, however exceptional his progress towards rehabilitation, his punishment remains fixed and unreviewable.’
‘If anything,’ their judgement concluded, ‘the punishment becomes greater with time: the longer the prisoner lives, the longer his sentence.’
Prime Minister David Cameron immediately announced that he profoundly disagreed with the Court’s ruling, and added that he was a ‘strong supporter of whole life tariffs’.
Neither Vinter nor Moore made any public comment on their victory, although both must have believed that there was now at least a chance that they might be released before the end of their lives. If so, they underestimated the decisiveness and clarity of the Court of Appeal in England and Wales.
As we have seen, the European Court’s decision in July 2013 meant that four significant murder trials over the next seven months placed the judiciary in a quandary. Could a judge in England and Wales sentence a prisoner convicted of murder to life imprisonment with a whole life term? The cases involved Jamie Reynolds, Anwar Rosser, Joanna Dennehy and Michael Adebolajo.
In the first three cases, each of the judges concerned concluded that they were still perfectly entitled to sentence the offender to a whole life term, and duly did so, while in the high-profile case of Adebolajo and Adebowale, the jihadist killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby, Mr Justice Sweeney thought it prudent to wait until the Court of Appeal had reached its conclusion on the European Court’s decision. The judge did not have to wait long.
In October 2013, Mr Justice Sweeney had also declined to impose a whole life term on fifty-five-year-old Ian McLoughlin, who had admitted killing sixty-six-year-old pensioner Graham Buck on the very first day of his day-release from prison after serving twenty-one years for a murder in 1992.
Mr Justice Sweeney told McLoughlin, passing a life sentence with a minimum of forty years, ‘The implementation of a whole life order within the current legislative framework in this country is in breach at the time of passing of sentence of Article Three of the European Convention,’ and he therefore declined to do so.
The then Secretary of State for Justice, and Lord Chancellor, Chris Grayling MP, immediately criticised Mr Justice Sweeney’s decision, saying, ‘Our courts should be able to send the most brutal murderers to jail for the rest of their lives.’ Not long afterwards, the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve MP, launched an appeal against the sentence, arguing that it was ‘unduly lenient’ – even though McLoughlin would have been ninety-nine years of age when his minimum term of forty years had passed.
Once again the confusion over the reality of whole life sentences was at the forefront of the discussion over the issue of whether life should indeed mean life. It was left to the Court of Appeal to try to clarify the position in England and Wales.
On 18 February 2014, the Court’s Criminal Division responded to the argument over McLoughlin and the European Court’s decision with a specially constituted Court to hear appeals on three whole life terms and the appeal from the Attorney General that McLoughlin should have been given a whole life term. The five members of the special Court were led by the Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas, with Sir Brian Leveson, Lady Justice Hallett, Lord Justice Treacy and Mr Justice Burnett. Their decision was robust, and made it abundantly clear that judges in England and Wales could indeed continue to impose whole life orders under the terms of the Criminal Justice Act of 2003.
The Court ended up hearing appeals on only two of the four cases. The principal one was, of course, McLoughlin’s, whom the Attorney General had suggested should receive a harsher sentence for the murder of Graham Buck, while the other involved Lee Newell, who was already serving a whole life term for the murder of his fellow prison inmate Subhan Anwar, and was appealing against the decision to jail him for the rest of his life.
What is not in doubt was that the facts of the McLoughlin case were shocking in the extreme. An incredibly bright child, he had nevertheless been a criminal since the age of twelve, and had been sentenced to imprisonment fourteen times before his twenty-fifth birthday, even though it was estimated by one psychologist that he possessed an IQ of 140. Then, in September 1984, at the age of twenty-six, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years in prison.
A man with a profound hatred of homosexuals, possibly driven by his loathing for his own bisexuality, he lost his temper with a gay man named Len Dalgatty, picked up a hammer and hit him over the head several times. McLoughlin then tied a towel round his head to dull the sound of yet more hammer blows. When he was certain that Dalgatty was dead, McLoughlin hid his body in a cupboard.
Shortly after he was released from prison after that first murder, he killed again – and once again, his motive concerned his victim’s sexuality. He became convinced that his victim this time, Peter Hall, had a sexual interest in young boys, which infuriated him. McLoughlin marched the man into the bedroom of his house and stabbed Hall repeatedly until he was dead. In July 1992 he was convicted of that second murder and sentenced to life imprisonment – this time with a minimum term of fourteen years.
While serving his sentence in Littlehay Prison in Cambridgeshire, McLoughlin befriended a fellow prisoner, old Etonian Francis Corey-Wright. A wealthy man, but a convicted paedophile serving a t
hirty-month sentence for indecently assaulting a ten-year-old boy, Corey-Wright was released in February 2013, at the age of eighty-seven.
Five months later, on Saturday 13 July 2013, on the very first day of his unsupervised release from prison as a prelude to his eventual release, McLoughlin hitched a lift from Spring Hill Prison, near Aylesbury, straight to Corey-Wright’s home in the picturesque village of Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire. As it turned out, McLoughlin was most certainly not suitable for unsupervised release.
When McLoughlin arrived at his home in the village, Corey-Wright invited him into the house and gave him a drink, but things quickly turned ugly. McLoughlin demanded to know where he kept his ‘gold and silver’, but when the elderly man told him, ‘In the bank,’ McLoughlin picked up a kitchen knife and forced him upstairs before tying him up and stealing those valuables he could find, while also taking his bank cards and demanding their pin numbers. Corey-Wright broke free and shouted for help from the upstairs window.
Graham Buck, a neighbour of Corey-Wright, heard the cries and came across the road to help, which only served to infuriate McLoughlin still further. He marched out of Corey-Wright’s front door and grabbed Graham Buck as he walked towards Corey-Wright’s house. No sooner had he done so than he slashed Buck’s throat with a knife. His victim managed to stagger back into his front garden but died before the paramedics arrived. Meanwhile, McLoughlin took off with a pillowcase filled with Corey-Wright’s valuables.
Buck paid with his life for acting the Good Samaritan. As his wife Karen, a nurse aged fifty-five, said afterwards, ‘To kill him was the most senseless, vicious act of violence and cowardice possible. His family and friends will never be able to make sense of what happened.’
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