Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  The judge added, ‘Ms Chambers had, for her part, made it clear that she wished to treat the defendant generously. She recognised that he was important to Shania and that contact between father and daughter ought to continue.’

  That was not the way that Oakes had interpreted the three weekends a month access that was the likely outcome of the custody hearing they were both to attend on the morning that he killed his daughter and her mother. As Mr Justice Fulford put it, Oakes reaction ‘was purely selfish, self-pitying and grotesquely violent’.

  ‘Instead of thinking about his daughter whom he has claimed to love,’ the judge went on, ‘he concentrated on himself alone and most particularly his desire for revenge and his determination, that he had expressed quite clearly on more than one occasion in the past, that no other man was going to be Christine’s partner or was going to act as Shania’s father. He resolved that if the family was at an end, then they would pay for leaving him with their lives. And worse still, he decided that their last hours of life would be terrifying, and in the case of Christine Chambers, extremely painful.’

  Pointing out that Oakes had carefully planned the murders and arrived at Chambers’s house complete with a holdall filled with weapons that he intended to use against her, the judge continued, ‘Drink and drugs may well have played their part, but this defendant knew exactly what he was doing, particularly having clearly prepared and planned these deaths for a not insignificant period in advance.’

  But it was the torture inflicted on Christine Chambers before her death that drew Mr Justice Fulford’s gravest condemnation.

  ‘Two final aspects of this terrible history need emphasising,’ the judge told the Court, whose public gallery included members of the Chambers family. ‘First, it is apparent that before she died, Christine Chambers would have been in agony. The injury to her head and the shotgun wound to her knee would have been excruciatingly painful. I am certain that Oakes delayed delivering the fatal gunshot wound as an act of deliberate sadism. She had made him suffer by ending the relationship … and this was his revenge.’

  The second aspect was Oakes’s treatment of his baby daughter, Shania, who had been asleep in her cot when he first burst into the house and began to attack her mother. He had taken the trouble to lift her out of the cot and wake her up so that she could witness the attack on her mother.

  ‘Throughout, she would have been aware of her mother’s cries and tears,’ the judge concluded. ‘In my judgement the defendant allowed his daughter to see at least part of what he was doing and she would have seen the appalling injuries to her mother. The next door neighbour heard Shania crying for at least five minutes after Christine Chambers had been shot. That little girl must have been terrified. He then put the barrel of the twelve-bore shotgun against her head and pulled the trigger. No civilised, decent human being could ever describe that as being the result of love.’

  Mr Justice Fulford concluded by passing a whole life sentence for the two murders, and added, ‘The defendant will never be released from prison.’

  That was certainly not how David Oakes saw it, however. Barely five months later, his legal team brought an appeal against his whole life sentence to the Court of Appeal in London. They argued that the fact that the by now fifty-one year old would be condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison was ‘grossly disproportionate’ to the crime. They also argued that the whole life sentence was incompatible with Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The hearings were held on 10 October 2012, and the Court released its decision on 21 November 2012.

  Led by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, the Court of Appeal took the opportunity to outline its view about the Vinter, Bamber and Moore appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, and Oakes’s attempt to piggyback on it.

  They also dealt – exceptionally firmly – with Oakes, and his appeal against his whole life term. The specially convened Court, which included Lady Justice Hallett, Lord Justice Hughes, Lord Justice Leveson and Lady Justice Rafferty, used the Oakes case to underline again the Court of Appeal’s support for whole life sentences – regardless of what the European Court might say about them.

  Dismissing any suggestion that the gruesome murders of Christine Chambers and her daughter were anything but ‘sadistic’, the Court concluded, ‘It seems to us clear that Oakes did not simply explode into violence as a result of the stresses and strains of the breakdown of his relationship. Rather, he decided to revenge himself on Christine Chambers.’

  ‘He did not merely plan to kill her and their daughter,’ the Court went on, ‘but he planned and then carried out his deliberate intention to make the death of his former partner the most terrifying and agonising ordeal that he could envisage, and this was exactly what he did. He was utterly merciless, and took pleasure at her prolonged suffering. Thereafter, quite deliberately, and in cold blood, he deliberately executed their daughter, as she was screaming with fear at witnessing what he had been doing to her mother.’

  There had been ample opportunity after the murder of his former partner, the Court argued, for Oakes to allow a moment of compassion for their daughter – but he turned it down. ‘We agree with the judge that there was not a shred of mitigation,’ the Court concluded. ‘The analysis made by the highly respected judge is not open to criticism. There is no reason to interfere with this sentence.’

  In a supreme irony, by the time David Oakes learned that his appeal had been refused he had been given another sentence, but this time a medical one. He had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer that had spread from his lungs. ‘We used to write,’ his father said when he broke the news of his son’s illness. ‘He was still my son, despite being a killer.’

  David Oakes died on Tuesday 12 February 2013, less than two years after he had viciously murdered his former partner and their daughter. The day before, he had been taken from Frankland Prison to a local hospital, and he died within a matter of hours.

  As Ian Flitt, Christine Chambers’ former partner, told one reporter the next day, ‘His death is probably the best thing for everybody concerned, including him. He was a monster, but I remember him being my best mate as well.’

  In their judgement on the Oakes murders, the specially convened Court of Appeal also considered three other recent cases that had attracted whole life sentences, but – in stark contrast to the case of Oakes – they did not confirm any of them as appropriate.

  The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, was at pains to describe the reasoning behind whole life terms, not least because the Court of Appeal was well aware that the European Court would be considering the issue in just a few months’ time, at some point in 2013.

  At the outset, Lord Thomas carefully summarised the background to the whole life term. ‘Whatever the judicial views about the whole life minimum term, it was incorporated in express legislative terms in the 2003 Act,’ he said. ‘This statutory provision reflects the settled will of Parliament. Simultaneously, the legislation removed the possibility of imposing it from the executive and placed it full square in the hands of the judiciary, we emphasise, as a discretionary element of sentencing.’

  He then went on to say that it was ‘reserved for the few exceptionally serious offences in which, after reflecting on all the features of aggravation and mitigation, the judge is satisfied that the element of just punishment and retribution requires the imposition of a whole life order. If that conclusion is justified, the whole life order is appropriate: but only then. It is not a mandatory or automatic or minimum sentence.’

  That meant th
e whole life sentence was ‘not incompatible’ with Article Three of the European Convention on Human Rights, he said firmly.

  The other three defendants appearing before the Court of Appeal had also been given whole life sentences by the judge in their original trials, but the Court saw fit to replace each of those sentences with shorter minimum terms, while taking some pains to point out that this did not mean that any of the three would be released once their minimum terms had been served. In doing so, the judges reaffirmed their view that life should only mean life in ‘exceptionally serious offences’.

  One of the three men concerned was the Sicilian-born, Bournemouth-based hair fetishist, Danilo Restivo, who was aged fifty at the time of his appeal, and had escaped justice for a full ten years before being arrested and tried for the exceptionally ugly murder of Heather Barnett, who lived across the road from him in Dorset, where she worked from home as a seamstress.

  Barnett, a single mother aged forty-eight, lived with her three children in Bournemouth when she was killed on 12 November 2002. At 8.30 am she had driven her children to school, then returned and parked her car outside her house about ten minutes later. When the children come back from school shortly after four that afternoon, her son Terry, aged fourteen, along with his sister Caitlin, aged nine, discovered her body.

  Barnett had been hit on the head, most probably with a hammer, though the murder weapon was never found. There were at least ten lacerating blows, causing skull fractures, while it was also clear that she had fought with her attacker, as there were defensive wounds to her left hand.

  It turned out that Restivo had visited Barnett six days earlier using an excuse that he wanted her to make some bedroom curtains for him as a surprise Christmas present. After that visit she told some friends that she thought he might have taken the key to her house, but she was not certain. What is certain is that there was no forced entry into her home when her children got back from school and found her body.

  What made the murder quite exceptional was the mutilation that her body had been subjected to over a period of time after her death. Her throat was cut from ear to ear, she had been cut down her spine and both her breasts had been cut off. The zip of her jeans was unfastened and her underwear and part of her pubic hair was exposed. A hank of cut hair was found in the palm of her right hand which lay over her stomach near her groin. This hair came from someone else, but the victim’s own hair was cut – some was placed in her left hand, and some left on the floor beside her.

  After the discovery of her mutilated body in the bathroom, and desperately upset, Barnett’s children ran into the street to look for help. Restivo, who had been watching from his house across the road, then emerged with his then girlfriend to help them. Quite calmly and deliberately, he comforted them, even though he knew perfectly well that it was he who had killed their mother. It was an act of the most wretched disingenuousness, for behind his caring face lurked the foulest killer.

  Unsurprisingly, the police quickly concluded that Restivo could have been the killer as he was the first person on the scene. Indeed, they took him in for questioning, only to release him without charge after three days. One reason for his release was that he produced a bus ticket timed at 8.44 on the morning of the murder to prove that he had been on his way to a computer course at the time. Another was that the police regarded him as ‘bumbling’ and therefore possibly not competent enough to commit such a vicious crime without leaving any forensic evidence.

  The police investigation revealed that the killer had left very few traces at the crime scene. Their Luminol tests, for example, showed a trail of bloody shoe-prints that ended suddenly, which they concluded might mean that the killer was clever enough to change his shoes before leaving Barnett’s house that morning. The detectives clearly wondered whether the apparently harmless and slow Restivo could have managed that subterfuge.

  Even though the dead woman’s son told them that his mother’s keys had disappeared after Restivo’s visit on 6 November, and he was found to have soaked the trainers he had worn on 12 November in bleach – possibly to remove any traces of blood on them – he was dismissed as a prime suspect partly because of the bus ticket and his unthreatening manner.

  After Restivo’s release the investigation to identify Heather Barnett’s killer stalled. It was not until March 2004 that it was to start again in earnest – when it emerged that he was a suspect in the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl named Elisa Clap in southern Italy in 1993. Restivo was placed under close surveillance using electronic tracking and listening devices, and as a result the police heard Restivo being spoken to as a child by his parents on the telephone. He was also observed making regular visits to a local beauty spot where he took a close interest in women there on their own.

  On 12 May 2004 the police surveillance team became alarmed, because although it was a warm day Restivo was seen wearing waterproof over-trousers. A uniformed patrol car was ordered to stop and search Restivo. In his car they found an identical change of clothing, filleting knife, scissors, a balaclava helmet and more than one pair of gloves. The following month a local schoolgirl identified him as the man who had cut her hair on a bus in the town without her permission and without her initially noticing that he had done so.

  But Restivo was not arrested. Indeed it was not until November 2006, more than two years after the beauty spot incident, and four years after Barnett’s murder, that he was finally rearrested and his home searched. It was then that the police found a lock of hair and discovered that the trainers he had worn on the day of Barnett’s murder had minute traces of blood on them. The problem was it could not be identified as hers.

  Once again, Restivo was released without charge, and it was not until 2008, when new techniques revealed a blood-stained towel left at the murder scene had a DNA match for Restivo, that he was to be taken in for questioning again. Even then, he claimed to have left the towel on his visit to order some curtains from Barnett on 6 November 2002. Once again, it was decided that there was still insufficient evidence to justify his prosecution for murder.

  It was not until the body of sixteen-year-old Elisa Clap was finally discovered in the loft of the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in Potenza, Italy in March 2010 that the case against Danilo Restivo strengthened decisively. She had disappeared in September 1993, and was well known to Restivo, whom she had ‘taken pity on’ before going missing. The Italian investigators found that Clap’s bra had been broken in exactly the same manner that Heather Barnett’s had, while her trousers had also been damaged and disarranged in the same way.

  Every bit as tellingly, Clap’s hair had been cut shortly after she had been killed and her body placed in the loft, where remnants of her hair were left with it. The last person to see her alive had been Restivo.

  It was the similarity between the two cases that finally convinced the police and the Crown Prosecution Service in 2011 they should proceed against Restivo. Two months after the discovery of Clap’s body he was arrested and charged with the murder of Heather Barnett – almost a decade after the crime had been committed. The Italian case played a central part in Restivo’s trial, once the judge, Mr Justice Burnett, had ruled that the foreign case could be mentioned as part of the prosecution’s case against him, even though – at that point – Restivo had not been convicted of the Clap murder. (That was not to happen until several months later.)

  At the opening of Restivo’s trial at Winchester Crown Court in June 2011, prosecuting counsel Michael Bowes QC told the jury, ‘… the circumstances in which Elisa Clap was killed so closely resem
ble the circumstances in which Heather Barnett was killed that you can have no doubt that both of the killings must have been the work of one person – Danilo Restivo.’ He described her killer as ‘depraved’ and ‘callous’.

  The jury then heard one psychiatrist’s assessment of the reasons for Restivo’s actions and, particularly, those parts of his life that may have led him towards a hair fetish and anger at women. The psychiatrist referred to an occasion when Restivo had responded aggressively to bullying when he was thirteen; that he had admitted to voyeurism as a teenager; and that from the age of fifteen he liked to touch and smell the hair of women he came across in public, for example on a bus, and had started to cut it secretly.

  The prosecution’s psychiatric expert then offered the jury a motive for Restivo’s killing. He suggested that the Sicilian, whose family had moved to Potenza when he was a child, may have decided to kill a mother in circumstances that would leave her children to ‘fend for themselves’ as he felt he had been forced to do himself. This meant he had directed the anger he felt at his own mother’s treatment of him on to Heather Barnett and her children. The psychiatrist also maintained that his habit of cutting hair was sexually driven and sadistic, and the murder itself was a sexually sadistic act. Nevertheless, he also concluded that Restivo was mentally fit to stand trial.

  Indeed, Restivo did not claim ‘diminished responsibility’ at his trial, instead he simply pleaded that he was innocent of Barnett’s murder and mutilation.

  During his trial in June 2011, the jury heard evidence from two local schoolgirls in Bournemouth who had come across Restivo’s fetish for cutting the hair of young women. One, Holly Stroud, who had been seventeen in 2003, told the Court that he had cut her ponytail while travelling on a bus around 8 am on 13 March 2003: ‘I first thought my hair had got caught on the bus seat, so turned around and was expecting a child from my school teasing me, what I saw shocked me because it was a grown man.’ It was not until later that she realised her hair had actually been cut. A year later she identified Restivo from a set of photographs the police showed her of possible suspects. Another local girl, Katie McGoldrick, who was fifteen at the time, also told the Court that she had felt her hair being tugged while travelling on a bus in Bournemouth. It too had been secretly cut.