When Miller appeared before Hereford Magistrates Court he sat in silence in the dock as the formal charges were read out to him, but he did ask that a written statement be read out. It said: ‘I fully accept what I have done and I have co-operated fully with the police. I can never make up for taking Stuart from his family. But I would ask that justice will be done, and I will receive the maximum sentence available.’
That remained Miller’s stance when he arrived at Birmingham Crown Court on 4 November 1988. He pleaded guilty to Stuart Gough’s abduction and murder and was sentenced to life with a minimum term of twenty-five years. The judge expressed his doubt about whether it would ever be safe to release him, and a year and a half later the Home Secretary agreed, extending Miller’s sentence to a whole life term.
In the wake of the decision in late 2002 that politicians should no longer have any sentencing powers, which were transferred to the judiciary under the Criminal Justice Act 2003, Miller’s minimum term was reinstated at twenty-five years – which meant that he would be at least eligible to be considered for release after February 2013. That was not what he wanted, however.
Miller has persistently indicated to the Prison Service that he does not want to be considered for parole and actively wishes to die in prison, even though that could mean that he could spend a further twenty-five years or more behind bars. His case will be automatically reviewed every five years, and it is, of course, possible that he may change his mind as time passes, but there is little sign of that now.
There is another male prisoner, in a much more recent case, also convicted of only one murder and sentenced to a whole life term, and who appears to have made exactly the same decision as Victor Miller. He is former slaughterhouse worker Mark Bridger, the murderer of five-year-old schoolgirl April Jones in North Wales in October 2012.
April was last seen alive on Monday 1 October 2012 after she was witnessed climbing willingly into a vehicle, possibly a Land Rover, near her home in Machynlleth, Powys. In this close-knit rural community in North Wales, her completely unexpected disappearance provoked an immediate reaction. Within a day a full-scale hunt had been launched and on Wednesday 3 October her mother made an appeal for information about her daughter.
The following day the Prime Minister David Cameron issued an appeal for information, saying, ‘Clearly having this happen to you, and the fact that she suffers from cerebral palsy, something I know a little about from my own children, only makes this worse. My appeal would be to everyone. If you know anything, if you saw anything, heard anything, have any ideas you can bring forward, talk to the police.’ His own son, nine-year-old Ivan, had succumbed to cerebral palsy in 2009.
In the next few days one of the biggest missing persons’ searches in British history expanded still further, but without success. In spite of the fact that officers from forty-six police forces and hundreds of members of the public scoured 650 acres near her village, the body of the smiling-faced little girl with delicate blonde hair was never found.
One local resident rapidly attracted the attention of the police, however. He was former lifeguard, fireman, welder and slaughterhouse worker Mark Bridger, aged forty-six, who lived in an isolated cottage on the banks of the fast-flowing River Dovey on the outskirts of the village. A regular at the local pub and an enthusiastic pool player, he was well regarded, and had never aroused any suspicions whatsoever.
But on Friday 5 October, the police officially altered April’s disappearance from a missing persons’ inquiry to a murder enquiry, and the following day Mark Bridger was charged with child abduction, murder and attempting to pervert the course of justice. He appeared before magistrates at Aberystwyth on 8 October, where he was additionally charged with the unlawful concealment and disposal of a body. Bridger was then remanded in custody and held at Manchester Prison pending an appearance at Caernarfon Crown Court on 10 October by video link. By then April Jones had been gone for just nine days.
Born in Carshalton, London, on 6 November 1965, and christened Mark Leonard Bridger, he was one of the three children of policeman Graham Bridger and his wife Pamela. He grew up in a semi-detached house in the south London suburb of Wallington and went to school in Croydon, leaving with seven CSEs. But Bridger did not turn out to be a stable young man intent on a career. He rapidly became very troubled.
When Bridger was nineteen he was convicted of firearms offences and theft, and finally moved to Wales in his late twenties. There he was convicted of criminal damage, affray and driving without insurance in 1991, and the following year he was convicted again, for driving whilst disqualified and without insurance. Hardly surprisingly he rarely settled anywhere and often moved from job to job, including working in an abattoir, as a mechanic and as a welder.
Bridger also had six children by four women, including two by his wife, whom he married in 1990, but he nevertheless did not seem to present a particular threat to children. However, in 2004 he was convicted of battery and threatening behaviour and in 2007 received a fifth conviction, for assault. The cheerful man in the pub, who seemed to have not a care in the world, clearly suffered from his own demons.
On 14 January 2013, Bridger officially pleaded not guilty to the charge of abducting and murdering April Jones, but nevertheless accepted that he was ‘probably responsible’ for her death. But when his trial began on Monday 29 April 2013 at Mold Crown Court, before Mr Justice Griffith Williams, Bridger again pleaded not guilty to the murder of April Jones.
At his trial Bridger confessed that he was an alcoholic, and described how he had ‘accidentally’ crushed the five-year-old to death with his Land Rover, and had then made repeated attempts to resuscitate her. ‘There was a little girl under the wheels of the car. She had gone a funny colour. She was only a little thing,’ he told the jury, giving evidence on his own behalf.
‘I need to say sorry to her family. I can’t believe I didn’t just call an ambulance or the police. The intention was to head to the hospital. There was no life in her. No pulse. No breathing. No response in her eyes.’ But he insisted that he had not dumped her body. ‘She is a human being,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have done that.’
The jury did not believe a word. On Thursday 30 May 2013, after retiring for less than a day, they found Bridger guilty of abduction, murder and perverting the course of justice. Later that day, the judge delivered his brief two-page, sentencing remarks. They were coruscating.
‘For the last four weeks,’ Mr Justice Griffith Williams told Bridger, ‘the Court has listened to compelling evidence of your guilt, evidence which has also demonstrated that you are a pathological and glib liar.’ The judge paused. ‘There is no doubt in my mind,’ he went on, ‘that you are a paedophile who has for some time harboured sexual and morbid fantasies about young girls, storing on your laptop not only images of pre-pubescent and pubescent girls, but foul pornography of the gross sexual abuse of young children.’
Mr Justice Griffith Williams did not know what had prompted Bridger to kill April Jones, but he did allow himself to reflect, ‘What prompted you on Monday 1 October to live out one of those fantasies is a matter of speculation but it may have been the combination of the ending of one sexual relationship and your drinking. Whatever, you set out to find a little girl to abuse. I am not sure you targeted April specifically – it was probably fortuitous that she cannot be seen on some of the images, which you stored on your laptop, of her older sister – but you were on the prowl for a young girl.’ Pointing out that April would not have been afraid of him because he knew her elder sister and was a familiar face in the
locality, he added, ‘And so it was that April got into your Land Rover smiling and happy.’
‘What followed is known only to you, but this much is certain,’ the judge continued, ‘you abducted her for a sexual purpose and then murdered her and disposed of her body to hide the evidence of your sexual abuse of her, which probably occurred on the way from the estate to your home because there is some sixty minutes of your time which cannot be accounted for.’
Mr Justice Griffith Williams then made a series of withering remarks about Bridger’s insincerity. ‘The grief of April’s parents cannot be over-stated,’ he said. ‘They lived with the torment of a missing daughter, praying that she would be found alive and then, following your arrest, with the knowledge that you were providing the police with no assistance at all as to her whereabouts. To add to that torment, they have had to endure the spectacle of your hypocritical sympathy for their loss and of your tears, flowing not because of any regret for your crimes, but because of your enduring self-pity.’
Finally Mr Justice Griffith Williams told Bridger, who sat in the dock at Mold Crown Court utterly unmoved by his conclusions, ‘Your offences were aggravated by their premeditation and by the destruction of at least part of her body and the concealment of the rest. It is also a relevant consideration that you not only abducted April with a sexual motive but then sexually abused her in some way. I have no doubt there can be only one sentence,’ he concluded firmly. ‘Life imprisonment with a whole life order.’
Bridger was led down to the cells, still showing no signs of emotion whatever. He was practised at hiding the truth. Indeed Dyfed-Powys Police believe that parts of April Jones’s body were burned in a wood-burning stove in Bridger’s cottage, while other fragments of the five-year-old’s remains were distributed around the wooded local countryside. Certainly his disposal of her body, and refusal to admit exactly what he had done with it, served only to confirm Bridger’s lack of empathy or remorse.
Barely five weeks later, on Sunday 7 July 2013, the forty-seven year old was attacked with a makeshift blade by a fellow prisoner as he walked along a gangway at Wakefield Prison in West Yorkshire. His attacker wanted to know what Bridger had done with the body of April Jones, but Bridger refused to tell him – and as a result was cut from the throat up the side of his face to his temple. He was treated in hospital, where he required thirty stitches, but was returned to prison on the same day.
The attack on his father provoked a fierce reaction from Bridger’s son Steven Verona, aged twenty-seven, and one of his father’s six children by four women. ‘Personally I wish whoever slashed him had gone for his throat. It’s hard to accept I’m related to someone so inherently evil. I dread telling anyone who my dad is, in case they think I have evil in my blood. But sometimes I am terrified at what I might have inherited from him.’ Bridger’s son also revealed that he wanted his father ‘to get the electric chair, I wanted him to experience the pain April and her family have.’
Six months later, on 16 December 2013, Bridger launched an appeal against his whole life sentence, which horrified every member of April’s family. Coral Jones, her mother, told one reporter, ‘It’s disgusting. He’s in prison where he belongs and should stay there. He’s just torturing my family with these legal battles. It’s like he’s taunting us, like he wants to show he has got the upper hand.’
Then, quite suddenly, on 13 January 2014, Bridger dropped his application for permission to appeal against his whole life term – just eleven days before the formal hearing was due to take place at the Court of Appeal in London. The decision delighted April’s grandfather, who told the BBC, ‘I don’t think he should have been allowed to appeal. He’s done an horrific crime and he should spend the rest of his life in prison. That’s it as far as I am concerned. He should never be let out.’
Perhaps Bridger’s legal team pointed out to him that the Court of Appeal in England and Wales was not likely to uphold the judgement of the European Court on the ‘inhumanity’ of a whole life term, or, equally possibly, Bridger had come to understand that he was one killer who could never be rehabilitated because of the strength of public opinion against him. His name had become as notorious as that of Ian Brady – who had also always refused to identify the exact whereabouts of one of his and Myra Hindley’s victims, fourteen-year-old Keith Bennett.
Bridger may also have sensed that April’s mother Coral – like Keith Bennett’s mother before her – was certain to campaign relentlessly against his release. She had already called for the return of the death penalty in the wake of his conviction for the murder of her daughter.
‘They should bring death row back to the UK,’ she said after he withdrew his appeal ‘… but instead of having it for years and years, have it for five years and before the five are up he should … have a lethal injection. I’d be there to push the button and make sure he saw me.’
Coral Jones gave one of the most poignant descriptions of the plight of a close relative confronted with the killing of a loved one, even though she accepted that the return of the death penalty was highly unlikely.
‘Life should mean life,’ she said. ‘I don’t think they should have an easy life in prison where they have three meals a day. Perhaps years ago they had to earn stuff – today they have human rights. Our rights went when he killed our daughter and we still suffer now … He’s ruined my life, my husband’s, my kids’ and everybody else’s in my family. The next time he comes out he should be in a box.’
Mrs Jones has also pointed out, ‘If they’re allowed out you don’t know where they’ve gone and what else they could do … My little April was only five, she was small and she had health issues and he did it to her.’
Bridger is already is his late forties and therefore unlikely to spend more than half a century behind bars, unlike Jamie Reynolds, who could spend far longer, or Michael Adebolajo, who could also spend longer. But one thing unites the three men – they each committed just one single murder, no matter how loathsome and depraved.
That is not the case with the one other prisoner who has accepted being condemned to spend the rest of their life behind bars. Rosemary West is one of only two women serving a whole life term of imprisonment – the other is Joanna Dennehy. Now aged sixty-two, West has already served more than twenty years in prison, and shows every sign that she too has accepted that her notoriety makes it all but impossible for her ever to be released.
During the first years of her imprisonment in the late 1990s, West talked to her fellow prisoner Myra Hindley about the prospect. At that point they were being held in the same prison and there is no doubt that they became friends. Hindley was still campaigning for release, a campaign that ultimately failed, but there is little doubt that West sensed the parallels between them. She too believed that she had fallen under the spell of a man she loved, her husband Frederick West, and had been forever tarred by the sadistic brutality of his relentless killing of girls and young women, including their daughter Heather. But unlike Hindley, she was not prepared to admit her guilt.
As the official biographer of Frederick West – I was appointed by the Official Solicitor to the Supreme Court to give financial support to three of the Wests’ other children – I watched every single day of Rosemary West’s trial at Winchester Crown Court in the autumn of 1995. It was an unforgettable, unnerving experience, with its appalling litany of the killing, dismemberment and burial of nine bodies beneath their home at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, over a period of almost thirty years. Another body, of an eight-year-old girl named Charmaine, was buried beneath the
kitchen of the Wests’ previous flat at 25 Midland Road, also in Gloucester.
Rosemary West, then a portly woman aged forty-one with dark hair, a fearsome stare and large ivory glasses, sat impassively in the dock throughout some of the most chilling evidence it is possible to imagine, including the details of the torture many of the victims had suffered at the hands of the Wests, which included the removal of fingers and kneecaps – bones that were notably missing when the victims’ remains were eventually recovered from beneath the cellar and garden.
At her trial in October and November 1995, West repeatedly sought to paint herself as the victim of her husband, a mere bystander who had no knowledge of, or collaboration with, the killings that took place in their small, cramped semi-detached house just three minutes’ walk from the centre of the cathedral city of Gloucester on the River Severn. Indeed, when she came to give evidence in her own defence – answering questions from her defence counsel the late Richard Ferguson QC – she spoke in a low monotone, rather as if she were no more than a parking warden addressing magistrates about a car owner who disputed a fine. There was an arrogant calmness about her demeanour, a sense that she was determined to disguise the true depths of her own emotions and sexual compulsions. For there can be no doubt whatever that Rosemary West was consumed by sex – in all its manifestations.
As her husband Fred’s Court-appointed biographer, I was the only author or journalist given access to a string of home-made videotapes that vividly portrayed Rosemary West’s sexual appetite and predilections – all of them shot in their home in Cromwell Street by her husband. The image of her apparently open, innocent face in a string of the most sordid acts of sexual exhibitionism is an image that has never left me, and forever colours how I feel about her attempts in Court to pretend to be nothing more than a caring mother, concerned only to bring up her children. Those videotapes were never shown to the jury as they would have been ‘prejudicial’ to her fair trial, but they convinced me that she was capable of the most chilling, ruthless and wicked deception.
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