Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  West’s belligerent attitude to her sentence, coupled with her desire to make life as comfortable as possible in prison, must bring into question the European Court’s conclusion that whole life terms are, by definition, ‘inhuman’, even though there can be no doubt that to deny any individual their liberty without any possibility of release takes a particular toll. Yet it is a toll that Victor Miller, Mark Bridger and Rosemary West are prepared to accept and live with, as all three see no chance whatever that it will be revoked. In the case of Bridger and West, there is also an acknowledgment that their celebrity merely confirms the impossibility of their freedom.

  13

  A ‘Cushy’ Life

  Arthur Hutchinson and Ian Huntley

  One whole life prisoner who certainly did not accept his punishment, and did everything in his power to appeal against it, including taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights in 2014, was the triple murderer and rapist Arthur Hutchinson, now aged seventy-four. Hutchinson had spent the previous thirty years of his life in prison and was determined not to die behind bars – if he could find a legal process that would help him to avoid it.

  Given the inhuman bestiality of Hutchinson’s rape and murders, it is hard to see how he had the nerve to launch his string of appeals. In fact, he did not do so until twenty-five years after the killings in October 1984, when he clearly realised that he was never going to be released. But his punishment cannot have been a complete surprise as Hutchinson had been a lifelong criminal with a history of violence when he was finally convicted of a murderous spree that resulted in the death of three members of the same family in September 1984.

  By that time Hutchinson, who was then aged forty-three, had already spent more than five years in prison for the attempted murder of his brother-in-law, even escaping from a Magistrates’ Court in the process. But let us begin at the beginning.

  A resourceful, wily man, who later nicknamed himself ‘The Fox’ – ‘because of my cunning ways’ – Hutchinson was preoccupied by sex and violence from childhood. Born in Hartlepool, County Durham, on 19 February 1941, he was the illegitimate son of Louise Reardon, wife of a local coal miner. Together she and her husband Cuthbert had four children, but she also had two illegitimate children with the couple’s lodger, Arthur Hutchinson, whose name her son took. As his mother put it later, ‘I had five girls and they made life hell for Arthur. They called him a bastard, which was true.’

  Nevertheless, Hutchinson remained utterly devoted to his mother who, in turn, remained loyal to her son, calling him her ‘little angel’ until her death in 1985. After his murder convictions she insisted that his crimes were the result of an accident he suffered as a small boy, when he rode his bicycle into a lamppost, leaving him in a coma for three days. The incident certainly left him with a fractured skull, and – some said – a bipolar personality, with a distinct appetite for violence. At the age of seven he stabbed one of his sisters with a pair of scissors.

  Hutchinson rapidly became sexually precocious. At the age of eleven, he made his first appearance in Juvenile Court, where he was charged with indecent assault. Nineteen further appearances followed during his teenage years, including four charges of sexual intercourse with girls under the age of sixteen. Then, at the age of eighteen, Hutchinson married a neighbour, Margaret Dover, who was already pregnant with his child. The couple separated after only three years, and at the age of twenty-two he was sent to prison for the first time, after being convicted of unlawful sexual intercourse.

  After his release, Hutchinson married for a second time, to a girl called Hannelore, who rapidly came to experience his sexual preoccupations as well as the violent side of his personality. ‘Anything could provoke him, sometimes nothing,’ she said later. ‘He used to boast about his conquests. The day he left me, he beat me up in the street. He knocked me to the ground and put the boot in. I once saw him knock his mother out of a rocking chair, halfway across the room.’

  In his thirties, Hutchinson tried to shoot his half-brother, and was imprisoned for five and a half years. That did nothing to change him, however, and by September 1983 – when he was aged forty-two – he was charged with theft, burglary and rape, and remanded in custody. But he had no intention of remaining in jail.

  On the morning of 28 September 1983, Hutchinson was brought to Selby Magistrates’ Court in North Yorkshire for a hearing on the three charges, but shortly after he arrived he told the two prison officers who had brought him from Armley Prison in Leeds that he needed to use the bathroom and they removed his handcuffs to allow him to do so. It was to prove a catastrophic mistake.

  No sooner had they done so than Hutchinson sprinted up the stairs from the ground floor reception area to the courtrooms above. He ran into Court One, jumped over the dock and dived through the window, shattering the glass and cutting himself in the process, only to land on a barbed wire fence, which inflicted severe damage to his knee. Undaunted, Hutchinson worked himself free of the tangled wire and set off to run to freedom.

  In a taunting audiotape that Hutchinson later sent to the police, he described his escape from Selby Magistrates’ Court. ‘I hurled myself through an upper window, crashing into a barbed wire net, ripping my leg to pieces,’ he said, explaining that he then ran for four miles, barely stopping before collapsing.

  ‘I stopped in the bushes for hours then I see the helicopter hunt,’ he went on. ‘So I dragged myself into the gutter, crawled along the gutter and forced myself into bramble bushes and stayed there till it got dark.’ Hutchinson then claimed that he spent the next four nights on the run, surviving on dandelions and roots, before going to hospital in Doncaster in search of medical help.

  Amazingly, when he arrived at Accident and Emergency no one seemed to question his bloodied and torn trousers. ‘I got my treatment,’ he said, ‘left and walked another three to four miles back into the wilderness. You just have to keep continuing sometimes. I just had to live day by day but I won’t give in. I’ll never give in.’ Hutchinson managed to evade recapture by the police for the following three and a half weeks, and it was while he was on the run that he was to commit the heinous crimes that would mark him out as a man who should spend the rest of his life in prison on a whole life sentence.

  On the night of 22 October 1983, Hutchinson was lying in wait outside a prosperous detached house with large grounds in Dore, near Sheffield, more than forty miles from Selby. There had been a wedding that day – local solicitor Basil Laitner, aged fifty-nine, and his doctor wife Avril, fifty-five, had hosted the wedding reception of their eldest daughter Suzanne in their house, with a marquee in their large garden, after the formal ceremony at the United Hebrew Congregation in Sheffield. The wedding reception had started at four in the afternoon, but had come to an end just after eight that evening. The Laitners and their son Richard, aged twenty-eight, then went out to dinner with relatives not far away, leaving their eighteen-year-old daughter Nicola, who had been a bridesmaid, at home because she said she felt tired and wanted to go straight to bed.

  Empty champagne bottles were left everywhere in the marquee, as was food left over from the reception. Perhaps it was the food and drink that attracted Hutchinson but, more likely, the ordeal of his weeks on the run had sharpened his appetite for sex and violence. He almost certainly watched the reception from the bushes and became aroused by the fact that the Laitners’ daughter Nicola looked exceptionally beautiful as a bridesmaid. There was the added attraction that Hutchinson was also intent on collecting whatever cash and valuables he could find in the house to sustain him on the run. N
o one will ever know for certain what motivated him that night, for he has never explained it.

  Whatever the reason, when the Laitners and their son returned home at about 11.15 on the evening of Saturday 22 October 1983 they were not alone. A filthy and dishevelled Hutchinson had broken into the house through a patio door and was waiting for them – but they did not realise it for some time. Not suspecting that anything was amiss, Avril Laitner retired to her downstairs bedroom, her son Richard, who was starting out on his career as a barrister, went to his bedroom upstairs and his father Basil also went to his own upstairs bedroom.

  Given Hutchinson’s track record, and sexual appetite, it seems almost certain that his primary target was a sexual conquest – Nicola Laitner, the bridesmaid. Seeing her dress on the outside of a bedroom door, he went in – only to find that it was actually her brother Richard’s room. Keen to neutralise the threat to his sexual ambitions of a fit young man, and furious that he had got the wrong room, Hutchinson proceeded to ‘speedily despatch’ the twenty-eight year old, though not before he had let out two plaintive screams. Hutchinson stabbed Richard Laitner twice in the chest, killing him instantly, and then calmly moved on to Nicola’s room. Richard was found later covered in blood, half in and half out of his bed, with his hands clasped to his chest above the fatal wounds.

  Richard’s screams woke Nicola Laitner, who then realised that there was someone in the room with her when she looked around. It was Hutchinson. But she was so terrified that she was unable to move. Having established she was there and petrified, Hutchinson went back out on to the first-floor landing, where he encountered Basil Laitner who had also been alerted by the screams. From her bedroom Nicola Laitner heard her father arguing with a man whose voice she did not recognise before she heard a ‘gasping, choking sound – and then all returned to deathly quiet’. Basil Laitner had been stabbed twice in the throat and then, as he slumped to the ground, once more in the back.

  Confident that the two men in the house no longer presented any threat to him, Hutchinson went downstairs to approach Avril Laitner. Nicola heard her mother shout, ‘Just take the money and go, leave us alone,’ before another series of ‘terrible screaming’. Avril Laitner was later found face down on the floor of her bedroom, surrounded by her jewellery and credit cards. She had twenty-six knife wounds, including four stab wounds in her left arm and thirteen in the palm of her left hand as she tried to fend off her killer. She died from a stab wound to the left side of her neck, which severed her jugular.

  Now the only person left alive in the house was Nicola Laitner, and she was at Hutchinson’s mercy. He retraced his steps back upstairs and went into her darkened room, before flashing a torch in her eyes and saying, ‘Put the light on, scream and you’re dead.’ He was nevertheless clearly aware that the screams may have alerted the Laitners’ neighbours, but as time passed and no one came to investigate he relaxed. Hutchinson marched the terrified teenager out of the room at knifepoint, although also urging her to hide her eyes on the stairs in case she saw ‘something horrible’ – her father’s dead body.

  In the hours that followed, Hutchinson subjected the girl to a prolonged sexual assault, raping her in the marquee and twice back in her bedroom. He affected a Scottish accent, presumably to try to conceal his true identity, and told her that he had killed everybody left in the house. Finally, as first light started to reveal the extent of the carnage, he left her tied up in her bedroom. As he left he told her, ‘I’m going now. Don’t suffocate yourself.’

  When a group of workmen arrived to dismantle the marquee that morning, they discovered the bodies of the Laitner family as well as Nicola, whose nightdress was stained with blood from Hutchinson’s hands, and whose foot was caked in her father’s blood. But she was not in total shock and, crucially, she was able to give the police a detailed description of her attacker. A police sketch artist rapidly produced a portrait that bore a stunning resemblance to the man who had limped away from Selby Magistrates’ Court three and a half weeks earlier.

  Not that Nicola’s attacker was to be found easily. In the days that followed, the police launched a wholehearted search for Hutchinson, identifying him as their suspect after matching a handprint found on a champagne bottle with a print on his criminal file. No fewer than ten police forces throughout the North of England were briefed to search for him. Yet, once again, he managed to escape by criss-crossing the country, at one point staying in a Darlington guest house under the name of ‘A. Fox’.

  Barely two weeks after the Laitner massacre, Hutchinson was finally arrested on 5 November 1983 in a field on a farm near Hartlepool, County Durham, after being spotted trying to call his mother from a telephone box. He tried and failed to stab himself when he was apprehended, but then told one of the arresting officers, ‘I’m not a murderer. I should have stayed down my fox hole, shouldn’t I?’

  At the Darlington guest house, where Hutchinson had been staying before his arrest, the police found an audiotape that he had made while he was on the run. On it he boasted of having a transistor radio with a tape-recorder which meant he could listen in to police broadcasts. ‘I’ve been able to listen to everything that’s been going on – where they’ve been waiting for me, where they’ve been looking for me, so I knew exactly which way to head out of the way from them. Like playing cat and mouse, or should I say fox on the trot.’

  ‘I’m making no comment on the triple killings,’ Hutchinson went on in his recording. ‘Let the police do what they want. I’m saying nowt. They knew I was finished but makes no difference whether they shoot me for this or anything else. If they think I’m dangerous, let them think that. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. I’m still free and that’s the main thing.’

  Hutchinson concluded by insisting with a laugh, ‘However crackers I might be, I’ve walked past them several times and they haven’t even noticed me. Like I say, I’m a master of disguise.’ Significantly, Hutchinson firmly denied having anything to do with the Laitner murders, although he admitted to escaping from the Magistrates’ Court. He maintained firmly, ‘I did not kill them people.’

  Even though the forensic evidence against him was compelling, Hutchinson continued to protest his innocence for months. Scene of crime officers pointed out that he had a rare blood group which matched the blood found on Nicola Laitner’s bed sheets, which had leaked from the wound in his knee from Selby. He had also left teeth marks on a piece of cheese from the family’s fridge which matched his dental records.

  Eventually Hutchinson changed his story, but only slightly, claiming that Nicola had invited him into the house for consensual sex, and that he had nothing whatever to do with the murders. Even knowing his own guilt, his decision to maintain that Nicola had been a willing sexual partner was an act of gratuitous barbarity for, by doing so, and pleading not guilty to the rape, he forced the teenager to relive her ordeal at his hands in open Court.

  Hutchinson’s trial for three murders and rape finally began before Mr Justice McNeill on 4 September 1984, at Durham Crown Court. But there was controversy from the outset, after the judge decided that reporting restrictions could be lifted, allowing the media to identify Nicola Laitner as the rape victim. The prosecution argued that there was no way she could remain anonymous when it was common knowledge locally – from the initial reports of the massacre – that Hutchinson had committed an act of rape on a further family member who had survived.

  The judge also ruled that preserving Nicola’s anonymity would mean keeping the names of the three murder victims out of the trial; something he deemed legally difficult as the case ha
d attracted considerable public interest and the Laitners had already been publicly identified as the victims.

  In the wake of that decision, no neutral observer could have failed to be moved by Nicola Laitner’s ordeal in the witness box. On behalf of Hutchinson, James Stewart QC suggested to her that she had met his client in a local pub on the day before the wedding and organized for him to come to the house after the reception. She denied each and every suggestion. Visibly shaking, she also denied that there had been consensual sex between them, and then broke down in tears, sobbing, ‘I want to go home.’ After regaining her composure, she continued answering the defence barrister’s questions, but steadfastly refused to tie her own hands using the grey spotted tie that Hutchinson had allegedly used to tie her up.

  In his closing speech to the jury at the end of the ten-day trial, the prosecution barrister suggested that Hutchinson had ‘told a tissue of lies’ about the rape, and that he was a ‘deliberate and repetitive liar’ who had ‘no concept of the truth’. It took the jury of six men and six women just four hours to find Hutchinson guilty of all the charges on 14 September 1984.

  Mr Justice McNeill, passing sentence, called Hutchinson ‘arrogant, manipulative,’ with ‘a self-centred attitude towards life, and a severe personality disorder, which is not amenable to any form of treatment’. He then sentenced Hutchinson to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of eighteen years. Ten months later his appeal against his conviction failed at the Court of Appeal, where Lord Justice Watkins explained that he had been convicted on the basis of ‘devastating evidence’ that proved he had committed ‘outrageous and almost unbelievably horrid’ murders. Not long afterwards the then Home Secretary, Conservative Leon Brittan, decreed that he should be subject to a whole life term of imprisonment, with no prospect of release.