Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  For his part, Restivo maintained that he had started cutting hair in Potenza at about the age of fifteen for a bet. ‘I started liking it,’ he told the jury, ‘and I kept doing it. The problem was that I liked touching the hair and also smelling it. It was not a sexual attraction.’ But the jury did not believe him. They clearly saw the fetish for what it was – a means of sexual arousal.

  The schoolgirls’ evidence about his hair fetish, together with the similarity between Restivo’s behaviour in Bournemouth and in Italy, clearly weighed heavily with the members of the jury. On Wednesday 29 June 2011 they found him guilty, and the following day he was sentenced to life imprisonment – with a whole life term – not least because the judge concluded firmly that he must indeed have killed Elisa Clap.

  Sentencing Restivo on Thursday 30 June Mr Justice Burnett told him, ‘… you have not been convicted of that murder and I do not sentence you in respect of it. But it is important background, because I approach this sentence on the basis that you had killed before. It would be quite unrealistic to pretend that you had not.’

  The judge then told him, ‘You are a cold, depraved and calculating killer,’ and went on to describe the killing of Heather Barnett as ‘inhuman depravity’.

  ‘I can find no mitigation in this case, none has been advanced on your behalf,’ he added. As he spoke some members of the jury, who had returned to hear the sentencing, wept – just as they had done when they had heard the impact statement read to the Court on behalf of the victim’s son and daughter.

  At the end of his remarks, Mr Justice Burnett said simply, ‘You will never be released,’ before telling the prison officers in the dock beside him, ‘Take him down.’

  Restivo received his sentence without a trace of emotion showing on his face.

  Outside the Court, Heather Barnett’s sister, Denise Le Voir, told waiting reporters that her sister ‘would have been horrified by the cruel and callous way Danilo Restivo designed her murder and mutilation so that her children would find her body on return from school.’

  Ben Barnett, Heather’s brother, added, ‘Restivo has already had eight years of freedom that my sister never had. I’ve thought about the death penalty, but I think it’s too good for him. It seems like the easy way out. I think he’s going to have a miserable rest of his life in prison.’

  But it was Heather Barnett’s daughter Caitlin Marsh, by then eighteen, who had found her mother’s body together with her elder brother Terry, who was by then aged twenty-three, who made the most dramatic and revealing statement about her mother’s murder. She said that her life had ‘changed forever’ as a result of the killing, and the ‘horror’ of their discovery of their mother’s body.

  ‘It was at that moment,’ Caitlin said, ‘that I felt as if my heart had been ripped out. I was in a state of complete and utter shock and it took months before I accepted the truth.’ Explaining that her brother had now become her ‘protector’, and the only person she could fully trust, she added, ‘I used to have nightmares and flashbacks reminding me of the events of 12 November 2002. I also don’t like going into bathrooms. I used to think that someone might be waiting for me. Now I just hold a fear of what’s behind the bathroom door.’

  Having decided to sit in Court throughout the trial, in order to look Restivo in the eye – which provoked no reaction whatever from the defendant, who remained impassive – Caitlin Marsh explained how she felt when she saw the killer sitting just yards away. ‘I feel a great anger at him,’ she said. ‘Without him she’d still be here. How could he intrude into our safe and happy family home and then take everything from us in such a horrific and callous way? I still have no explanation for why this happened to Mum. What did she do wrong? Why was Mum the victim?’

  Detective Superintendent Mark Cooper, who led the investigation, agreed with Caitlin Marsh. ‘This was a horrendous and brutal murder,’ he said, ‘and I cannot even begin to describe him.’

  But the judge’s decision to allow the Italian case of Elisa Clap’s murder into Restivo’s trial in Winchester led Edward Fitzgerald QC, who had defended him, to raise the case at the Court of Appeal in the autumn of 2012, and it formed the principal reason for the Court’s decision to remove his whole life term.

  ‘We note in particular,’ the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, noted in their decision, ‘the extensive preparation for the killing (which included careful measures to avoid detection) and the display of sexual perversions and sadism, not least the appalling mutilation of the body, when the appellant knew perfectly well that it would be found by the victim’s children.’

  The Court also pointed out that Restivo was capable of what it called ‘brutal hypocrisy’ in the expressions of ‘concern and assistance’ that he had offered to the children after their mother’s body was found.

  Given those circumstances, which some, including the judge at his trial, felt fully justified the harshest possible sentence, the Court of Appeal nevertheless decided that instead of being condemned to spend the rest of his life in jail, they would reduce his whole life term to one of a minimum of forty years, although they were at pains to point out: ‘We think it highly improbable that it will ever be safe for Restivo to be released from custody.’ Even if he were to be released, which would not be possible under the Court’s ruling until 2051, Restivo would be seventy-nine years of age.

  The decision to lower his sentence provoked a melancholy reaction from Heather Barnett’s brother Ben, who had said that he hoped Restivo would have a ‘miserable rest of his life in prison’.

  ‘I am not criticising those who have made this decision,’ Mr Barnett explained, ‘they must do as the law provides, however distasteful this is for all concerned.’ But Mr Barnett felt that life should have meant life in his sister’s case, as it would have given Restivo an opportunity to reflect on what he had done, although he concluded sadly, ‘Somehow I doubt that this would ever have been the case.’

  The English judicial system was not finished with Restivo, however. In February 2014, the Home Secretary decreed that he should complete the remainder of his life sentence in Italy, where he had now been convicted of the Clap killing in his absence, and transfer the estimated cost of his imprisonment – some £5m – to the Italian Government.

  But Restivo, by then aged forty-one, whose wife still lives not far from the scene of Heather Barnett’s murder, claimed he had the right to a family life in England. He launched an appeal in a special Immigration Court, and so far remains in the high-security Full Sutton Prison, near York.

  As we know, however, Oakes and Restivo were not the only whole life prisoners dealt with by the specially convened Court of Appeal in the autumn of 2012.

  8

  ‘Only for the most heinous of crimes’

  Michael Roberts and David Simmons

  One of the other cases dealt with by the specially convened Court of Appeal in the autumn of 2012 involved an intensely wicked young man named Michael John Roberts – who became known as the ‘Bermondsey Rapist’ between 1988 and 1995 while in his twenties. He earned the title with a string of brutal sexual attacks in his native Bermondsey in south London, where he had spent his entire life when not in prison. It was an old-fashioned close-knit community on the south side of the Thames, and Roberts was very much a part of it.

  Tall, thin-faced, with scruffy stubble and piercing blue eyes beneath a shock of ruddy brown hair, Roberts was born in April 1966 and quickly developed into a violent, aggressive teenager and then a young man who had launched a spree of burglaries and brutal sexual
attacks on the elderly before he reached the age of twenty-five.

  Indeed, Roberts committed his worst crimes even before the police became fully aware of his existence as a vicious predator. It was not until 1995, at the age of twenty-nine, that he was first convicted of a sickening attack on an elderly male pensioner near his south London home, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.

  One of his neighbours at the time remembered that Roberts was frequently violent towards his girlfriends, and had been equally violent towards two longer-term female partners. ‘You heard him because they was always fighting,’ the neighbour explained. ‘He had the kids screaming – he used to smash the place up. It sounded like wardrobes were coming down the stairs.’

  Little did the neighbours or police know that Roberts had also been committing a string of frightening, degrading attacks on elderly women in the area – all of which took place before his 1995 conviction. In the years between 1988 and 1995, Roberts’s attacks created an atmosphere of fear among elderly people in his south London community, although at the time the police had no idea whatever of his identity.

  His period of imprisonment in the late 1990s did nothing to lessen Roberts’s appetite for violence or crime, and in 2005 he was again convicted of robbery and committing grievous bodily harm on another elderly male pensioner in south London, once again not far from his home. This time he was given a life sentence – though not a whole life sentence – for the crime, allowing the parole board to decide when he might be released.

  It was while Roberts was in prison for the 2005 attack that the police opened a ‘cold case review’ of the attacks committed by the ‘Bermondsey Rapist’ between ten and seventeen years previously. Improvements in DNA testing meant that the police then identified him as a potential suspect, as they had a record of his DNA in the wake of his 1995 conviction.

  They rapidly matched it to the samples taken from the operation to try to track down the man also known as the ‘Praying Rapist’ – who had been known to cross himself and utter parts of a Catholic prayer during his sexual attacks. Yet few local people in Roberts’s part of south London could have imagined that this belligerent local burglar could also be guilty of crimes of quite such sexual depravity.

  Roberts’s first victim was attacked in December 1988, when he was just twenty-two. She was a fifty-seven-year-old spinster and virgin, who suffered from a degree of disability, and had returned home on Boxing Day after spending Christmas with her family. She found a male intruder in her house.

  He demanded to know where she kept her money and jewellery and proceeded to hit her repeatedly, inflicting a series of horrific injuries, including a broken jaw and a fractured eye socket. He also left her with a deep cut above her right eyebrow, while her left breast and shoulders were bruised. There were defensive injuries on both her hands, because she had fought him in an effort to defend herself, but it was to no avail. Her thighs were bruised, with dried blood smeared over the entire surface of her thighs and lower legs.

  The ugly truth is that Roberts also raped her, forcing her thighs apart during a prolonged sexual assault. The majority of the blows to her head were caused by his clenched fist, while the injuries to her jaw and eye sockets were caused by separate impacts, possibly by punches or blows from a soft heeled shoe. The injuries above her right ear were more consistent with kicks to her head. It was a merciless attack on a mature, single and vulnerable woman who had done nothing whatever to provoke it. She did not even know Roberts.

  Roberts struck again nine months later. This victim lived just a few yards away from his first. She was a seventy-seven-year-old, frail woman with advanced arthritis. On this occasion, however, Roberts was known to his victim. About ten days before the attack, he had suddenly appeared in her sitting room, claiming that he had been chased out of a local pub, but before he could attack her she called out to a neighbour and Roberts ran off.

  The false start did not deter him. On 11 September 1989 he again entered her sitting room, demanding to know where her money and jewellery were kept. Roberts also instructed her not to look at him and then ordered her to take off her clothes, threatening her with his fists if she refused. He made her lie on the bed, and then attempted to rape her. But his victim protested volubly, saying she was a single woman who had never had sexual intercourse and did not want to have it now.

  Roberts completely ignored her. He then tried to make her kneel on the floor but she told him she could not do so because of her arthritis, so he ordered her back on to the bed, before making her remove her dentures and suck his penis. Roberts then left, taking £5 from her handbag in the kitchen.

  Less than a month later Roberts found a third elderly female victim. On 7 October 1989 he attacked her in her flat just over 300 yards from his latest address. Moments after her nephew had left her at the flat door, he rushed in, grabbed her from behind and put his hand over her nose and mouth. He then pushed her into the sitting room and ordered her not to speak, explaining that he could be violent. Desperate to protect herself, his elderly victim told him her nephew would be coming back at any moment, but Roberts ignored her, telling her that she was lying. Indeed the lie served only to make him angrier.

  As Roberts had done in the two previous attacks, he demanded to know where she kept her money and jewellery, and then ordered her to take off her clothes. When she refused he started to pull her dressing gown off and, because she was not strong enough to stop him she took off the rest of her clothes herself, as she was clearly terrified. Roberts then proceeded to assault her sexually, eventually forcing her into the bedroom, where he committed a series of repulsive sexual acts against her. By now his victim was shaking and crying, her body bruised and her shoulders heaving with fear. She begged him to leave, but he refused. Desperate to bring an end to the ordeal, which had already lasted almost three hours, she persuaded him to allow her to make him some tea, hoping that might bring him to his senses. It did not.

  After taking a drink from a tap in the kitchen Roberts returned and once again attempted to rape her before forcing her to masturbate him. This was followed by a third rape attempt and ejaculation. When he was finished Roberts attempted to remove every trace of his presence in the flat, before finally cutting the telephone cord before he left.

  Unable to identify her attacker, and with no leads from the other two attacks, Roberts’s attempts to eradicate any trace of his presence from his third victim’s flat worked. The police were no nearer finding him than they had been in December the previous year and so, emboldened by his ‘success’, he struck again.

  Towards the end of February in 1990, five months after his last attack, Roberts chose another victim, once again someone living within walking distance of his own flat, and close to the home of his previous victim. He had clearly been watching her for some time, planning his assault. This time she was an eighty-four-year-old woman, living alone in a ground-floor flat. Even more distressingly, she was barely able to walk, due to a recent hip operation, a fact that Roberts must have been aware of.

  When she was found, on 2 March 1990, by her ‘home help’, her injuries were so serious that she was unable to speak or describe anything of what had happened to her. A medical examination revealed that her upper jaw had been fractured in one place, and her lower jaw in two. The left side of her face was severely swollen, blackened and bruised. But this time there was no evidence of sexual assault, although her telephone cord had been cut.

  The police were still completely in the dark about who might have committed these four merciless attacks and, as a result,
the local community in Bermondsey was left in a state of shock and fear, which took more than a year to dissipate as the attacks stopped.

  When Roberts was eventually arrested for the attack on an elderly male pensioner in 1995, no connection was made with any of his attacks of elderly women, and he certainly did not confess to having committed them. Instead he accepted his six-year prison sentence and served his time without complaint.

  It was not until 2005, when he robbed a second elderly man and was sentenced to life imprisonment – though not a whole life term – that the police began to suspect that he may indeed have been the ‘Bermondsey Rapist’, who had committed the four attacks starting fifteen years earlier.

  It was at this point that Roberts was examined by a number of psychiatrists, all of whom concluded that his mental condition was extremely dangerous. They recorded a long history of drink and drug abuse, not to mention obsessive compulsive disorder and depression, and said he should be regarded as having a personality disorder which could, in legal terms, be called a ‘psychopathic disorder’.

  The psychiatrists concluded firmly that Roberts could not be seen as anything other than ‘a danger to the public’ and that any treatment for his condition, even after ‘the most arduous efforts’ was not assured, simply because treatment ‘is notoriously unsuccessful’.