On 2 December 2004, the trial judge, Mr Justice Moses, told Bieber he had shown ‘no remorse or understanding of the brutality’ of his crime. He went on to condemn his ‘cool and detached approach’ in attempting to explain away the evidence against him, and emphasised that both PC Broadhurst and PC Roper had treated him with ‘conspicuous fairness and consideration’.
‘You repaid their courtesy by killing PC Broadhurst and attempting to murder PC Roper,’ Mr Justice Moses went on. In particular he drew attention to the fact that there was no need whatever to shoot PC Broadhurst a second time, in the head.
‘You had already disabled him and he was defenceless,’ the judge concluded. ‘You could have escaped then but you chose to wait and fire a second shot at point-blank range … It must be acknowledged that he might have died as a result of your first shot, but you made certain of his death. To shoot and kill an officer in such circumstances, doing no more than trying to serve us all, is an attack on all of us.’
An emotionless Bieber, who stood unblinking in the dock, was given three life sentences, and Mr Justice Moses exercised the power the judiciary now had – under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 – to recommend that he should never be released.
The ever-arrogant Bieber had no intention of taking his conviction, or his sentence, lying down, however. He immediately instructed his legal team to launch an appeal, which was heard almost two years later, on 24 October 2006. At the Court of Appeal Bieber failed to secure the right to appeal against the conviction, but he was granted leave to appeal against his whole life sentence.
Two more years passed until Bieber’s second Court of Appeal hearing – this time on his whole life sentence. The result was something of a victory for Bieber.
On 3 August 2008, the Court of Appeal, led by Lord Phillips, then the Lord Chief Justice, decided to replace Bieber’s whole life term with a fixed term of thirty-seven years. It meant that he would have to remain in prison at the least until 2041 and the age of seventy-five, and even then there was no certainty that he would be released immediately. But there was now at least a glimpse of freedom for this merciless killer of a policeman.
It was a decision that surprised some in the judiciary, and infuriated both PC Broadhurt’s family and the British Police Federation.
The Federation’s chairman, Paul McKeever, bitterly condemned the three Court of Appeal judges’ decision. In a letter to Lord Phillips, he said, ‘Granting an evil, calculating killer any kind of dispensation is criminal and leaves the judiciary with blood on its hands. The decision to surrender to the appeal of this cold-blooded murderer is nothing but unforgivable. I urge you to do whatever is needed to reverse this travesty of justice.’
Explaining that his heart ‘goes out to PC Ian Broadhurst’s family’ he went on, ‘This is shockingly disrespectful to his memory and illustrates the utter travesty of our criminal justice system, where the rights of a cop killer outweigh the rights of a fallen officer’s family, friends and colleagues. David Bieber is a monster with no consideration for life.’
PC Broadhurst’s mother, Cindy Eaton, told one newspaper, ‘I feel cheated and let down on behalf of my family. I brought them up to believe that for every choice you make there is a consequence and you live by it. I don’t see Mr Bieber in any other light. He chose to do what he did and this is the consequence. I don’t think he has any rights. We can never go back to the life we had. He has no idea about our pain.’
The fact that the Court of Appeal’s decision might have been influenced by Bieber’s legal team’s argument about the European Court’s suggestion that a whole life term might be ‘inhuman’ only served to heighten the sense of injustice that the Federation and PC Broadhurst’s family felt.
Meanwhile, Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg said, ‘As a police officer one of the most frustrating things is when killers who have shown not one ounce of compassion for their fellow human beings start trying to have the shield of human rights drawn around them.’
Privately, Bieber was not intending to wait until he was seventy-five before leaving the English prison system. Even before the Court of Appeal’s decision to quash his whole life term, he had been planning escape attempts, some of them involving the use of firearms. In one he had asked a former inmate, who had become a friend, to organise a helicopter to send down a revolver on the end of a rope which he could use against any prison officer that attempted to prevent him being lifted up and out of the prison on the same rope.
In one of four other known attempts, Bieber arranged for a gun to be smuggled in to a prison wedding, which he intended to use to hold at least one prison officer hostage to leverage his release. In another he faked high blood pressure to encourage the prison authorities to allow him out of prison to visit a hospital near by, having arranged for a gang of armed men to snatch him from the prison officers’ hands. The prison authorities did not fall for his scheme.
Bieber discussed getting false passports and driving licences with another former cell-mate who had also been released, as well as plans to travel to Scotland, and later Ireland, where he would undergo plastic surgery to disguise his appearance still further. None of these plans succeeded – after his former cell-mate sold the story to the media.
In 2010 Bieber was suddenly moved from the high-security Full Sutton Prison near York to the equally high-security prison at Belmarsh, south-east London after the Serious Organised Crime Agency received information that there was a ‘serious threat’ that he might attempt to escape. Typically, Bieber reacted by launching an appeal for a judicial review against the move, claiming that it was ‘unlawful’. The claim was rejected in May 2011.
That did nothing to lessen Bieber’s sense of his own importance. After the quashing of his whole life term he launched a series of four legal appeals – all of them brought using public funds under the legal aid scheme and costing the taxpayer at least £12,000. He argued that he should not be categorised as a ‘high security risk’.
On 22 July 2014 at Newcastle Crown Court, Mr Justice Mostyn pointed out, ‘Since his incarceration, Bieber has occupied himself by making numerous applications to the High Court about the conditions in which he is being held.’ Each one of Bieber’s previous legal challenges, the judge added, had been designed to make sure that ‘his life is a little more comfortable’ in prison.
On Bieber’s behalf, however, his barrister argued that the director of high security, who took the decision as to his security clearance, had failed to disclose all the information he took into account when making his decision. He insisted that Bieber’s human right to a fair hearing had been violated.
In a handwritten document submitted to the Court, Bieber himself demanded that he be given more access to certain prison facilities – including the gym – and that he be removed from a secure underground unit. The unit, one of only three in the country, houses twelve of the most dangerous prisoners and is sealed off from the main jail and guarded round the clock.
Bieber argued that there is ‘no reason why I should be subjected to this environment’, claiming that he now exhibited ‘model behaviour’.
In the most extraordinary passage of his document, Bieber even complained about the ‘horrible effect’ the ‘foolish and disproportionate violence’ of his shooting had had on him as well as the victim. It was the first time an ‘exceptional-risk’ inmate had challenged their status.
Dismissing the claims as ‘completely untenable’, Mr Justice Mostyn declared, ‘The offence here was at the upper end of bestial. For someone to have committed su
ch a grievous crime he must have no control when he has normal human contact.’ He added, ‘It is therefore perfectly reasonable to suppose that somebody who has committed a crime as grave as this, and who has accepted in no respect at all the reason for his incarceration, would make every effort to escape from prison at the first opportunity.’
Bieber is now categorised as one of only two ‘exceptional risk’ prisoners in prison in England and Wales, because of his determination to escape. It is all the more surprising then that his whole life term should have been quashed, given his propensity for violence and his utter contempt for the judicial system.
The Court of Appeal’s decision to quash Bieber’s whole life term underlines the confusion that haunts the system for the worst of the worst offenders in England and Wales.
To some members of the Court it would seem that the execution of a serving police officer on duty could not be described as sufficiently ‘heinous’ as to justify a whole life term. Indeed the Court has notably not insisted on a whole life term for other killers of on-duty police officers.
There could be no better example than Britain’s most famous police killer, Harry Roberts, a carpenter and armed robber from Essex who was convicted of killing three police officers in ‘cold blood’ at Braybrook Street in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, on 12 August 1966 at the age of thirty. Roberts was never sentenced to a whole life term of imprisonment for his crimes. Instead he was given life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty years. His killings came just eight months after the official abolition of the death penalty in England and Wales in 1965.
At his trial in December 1966 Roberts pleaded guilty to killing two of the police officers, while his two fellow robbers denied all the charges against them. All three were convicted of the murders of the three officers and sentenced to thirty years each.
The trial judge, Mr Justice Glyn-Jones, commented that the killings were ‘the most heinous crime to have been committed in this country for a generation of more’. John Duddy, who was convicted alongside Roberts, died in prison in 1981, while the other robber, Jack Whitney, was released in 1991 (after just twenty-five years), only to be beaten to death at his home in Bristol eight years later.
In spite of his thirty-year term, Roberts went on to become one of the country’s longest-serving prisoners, spending almost half a century behind bars before his eventual release in November 2014, at the age of seventy-eight. Interviewed in 2008 in prison, the grey-haired Roberts explained that he had changed in the more than forty years since he had committed the crime.
‘I am not that person any more,’ he said.
Speaking of his victims’ families, he went on: ‘Of course I regret it. If anyone had killed my mother I would never have forgiven them, and I totally understand why the families of the policemen could never forgive me and wouldn’t want me released. But I feel I have served my time.’
Commenting on the length of his sentence, and his continued incarceration long after his thirty-year minimum term had been completed, Roberts was careful to be non-committal. ‘I don’t think it’s political,’ he said. ‘I think it’s more to do with civil servants fearing what the papers would say if I did do something again. I think that’s what it is, but it’s ridiculous. I’m just not interested in anything like that any more. I want to get out of prison and just try to make something of the last few years of my life.’
Roberts did not always felt like that. In his first two decades in prison, he made no fewer than twenty-two escape attempts. ‘It was a hobby for me,’ he said. ‘I knew I wasn’t coming out for a long time, so I had nothing to lose.’ In one attempt his mother smuggled a pair of bolt cutters into the prison in her bra. ‘We cut through part of the fence, but there wasn’t time to finish the job, so we planned to go back the next night. What we didn’t know was that there was an informer on the team who grassed us up before I could escape,’ Roberts remembered.
Eventually Roberts gave up the struggle to escape. ‘I decided the best way to get out was to stay clean and do my time,’ he said.
His plan succeeded because in 2001 he was moved to an open prison and allowed to work daily at a nearby animal sanctuary in Derbyshire. But on 1 October 2001 he was recalled to a closed prison in the wake of allegations that he was involved in drug dealing for the prisoners, was actively engaged in other criminal activity and had made veiled but violent threats while working outside the prison.
In 2009 the Mail on Sunday newspaper revealed that a string of secret complaints against Roberts had been made by other workers at the animal sanctuary, who alleged that attacks on their animals after he returned to a closed prison had been co-ordinated by Roberts, and that he had subjected them to threatening telephone calls and promised the ‘tearing limb from limb’ of anyone who tried to block his release. The newspaper also disclosed that in December 2006 the Parole Board had written to Roberts, in the wake of these allegations, saying that it would not be recommending his release. For his part Roberts firmly denied the allegations.
The relatives of Roberts’s police victims felt strongly that he should die behind bars. The sister of one of the plain-clothed detectives he killed said: ‘Harry Roberts should never be released. There will never be enough time to make up for the terrible thing that he did. He is a dangerous man and, despite the time, he should remain in jail.’
The Metropolitan Police Federation agreed. Peter Smyth, the then chairman, commented, ‘There are some evil acts for which there is no forgiveness, Every police officer still considers these awful murders to be one of the most awful events in our history.’ He added, ‘There is no death penalty and we fully accept that, but there are some crimes where life should mean life and that includes the murder of a police or prison officer in the course of their duty.’
Nevertheless, late in 2014, eight years after their decision not to recommend Roberts for release, the Parole Board changed its mind and recommended that the seventy-eight-year old should indeed be freed. In November 2014 he left the prison system, although still on licence should he reoffend. Since then Roberts, temporarily at least, has disappeared into obscurity.
Significantly, four other murderers who have killed serving police officers while on duty have also not been sentenced to a whole life term of imprisonment – suggesting that, whatever the Police Federation might urge – the judiciary does not regard the killing of a single police officer as a sufficiently heinous crime to warrant the Court’s most severe penalty.
In 1993, for example, the Jamaican-born gangster Gary Nelson, now forty-three, shot and killed Ghanaian-born father of four and nightclub bouncer William Danso at his flat in Clapham. Hearing gunfire, PC Patrick Dunne, aged forty-four, who was attending a minor domestic dispute near by, went into the street to intervene but was shot and killed. Not convicted of the killings until 2006, Nelson has been told that he must serve life imprisonment with a minimum of thirty-five years – not a whole life term.
In another case, the illegal Algerian immigrant Kamel Bourgass killed Detective Constable Stephen Oake in January 2003 when Oake and other officers tried to arrest him in the wake of a plot to flood the London Underground system with the deadly poison ricin. Bourgass has been told that he must spend a minimum of thirty-seven years in prison as part of his life sentence, but again there was no whole life term.
In November 2005, two Somalian brothers, Mustaf and Yusuf Jama killed Woman Police Constable Sharon Beshenivsky during the course of a Post Office robbery in Bradford. Yusuf was arrested shortly afterwards, while his brother Mustaf fled back to Somalia, o
nly to be extradited to England in 2007 after an undercover operation to locate him. Both men were sentenced to life imprisonment and to serve a minimum term of thirty-five years, not a whole life term.
Ikechukwu ‘Tennyson’ Obih, a Nigerian, stabbed and killed PC John Henry in Luton, Bedfordshire, when Henry attempted to arrest him after Obih had stabbed a window cleaner in the town shortly after 7 am on 11 June 2007. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Obih was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty-five years, once again not a whole life term.
Just one man has been sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life term by a judge for killing a police officer since 2003, and his name is Dale Cregan. The Manchester gangster killed not one but two female officers in September 2012. As we shall see, his case may help to define the nature of exactly what makes a ‘heinous’ crime.
10
The One-Eyed Gangster
Dale Cregan
Brought up among the neat rows of red-brick terraced houses in Droylsden, just east of Manchester’s city centre, Dale Cregan was a villain from an early age. Born in June 1983, he had become a cannabis dealer while still at school, and by his early twenties had graduated to cocaine. But he was not just a drug dealer, he was also a hard man, a man with an appetite for extreme violence and a member of a criminal underworld that had spread like a malign infection throughout Manchester during his life time. Cregan was a man who gloried in his role in armed robbery, drug dealing and money laundering in the city and its suburbs.
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