Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Huntley and Carr’s trial opened at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey, London, on 5 November 2003, before Mr Justice Moses, but in spite of Huntley’s private ‘theory’ about the case, he pleaded not guilty to the two counts of murder. It was a plea that Richard Latham QC, for the prosecution, belittled throughout his opening remarks to the jury of five men and seven women. Latham explained that he would present the court with overwhelming evidence that Huntley had indeed brutally murdered the girls and tried to cover it up. He also claimed that there was evidence that Carr misled the police to protect Huntley, although it was likely that she was not directly involved in the murders.

  Over the ensuing weeks, Latham meticulously built up a picture of Huntley taking precise precautions to cover up his crimes, not only by cleaning out his Ford Fiesta, but also getting four new tyres for it to make sure it could not be identified from tracks that might have been found near the ditch on the edge of RAF Lakenheath. He also suggested that Huntley had lured the two children into his house with the promise that Maxine Carr would be pleased to see them.

  After Latham’s prolonged destruction of Huntley’s story, and three weeks into the trial, there came a moment of high drama. Huntley changed his story, and his plea, admitting that he had been with the girls in his house when they died, but claiming that their deaths were entirely accidental. Huntley’s defence counsel, Stephen Coward QC, offered a statement from the school caretaker, who was not in court because he was reportedly ill, claiming that the girls stopped by his house to talk to Ms Carr and during that time Holly had a nosebleed. While getting some toilet paper, Huntley accidentally knocked Holly backwards and into the bathtub, which was half full of water. After that, he had ‘accidentally’ stifled Jessica when he put his hand over her mouth to stop her screaming.

  Maxine Carr also made a confession that week. She told police that it was her idea to claim she was in the house she shared with Mr Huntley on the day Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman disappeared, because she wanted to protect her boyfriend, whom she believed was innocent of murder. Carr also alleged that she lied because she wanted to prevent the 1998 ‘false’ rape allegation against Huntley from being unearthed again.

  Almost immediately after these two dramatic twists in the trial, the defence opened its case to the jury, and sought to substantiate Huntley’s theory of the deaths. Richard Latham QC ridiculed Huntley in the witness box when he came to give evidence in his own defence. During his cross-examination he accused Huntley of lying and changing his story to fit the facts, calling the nosebleed story ‘rubbish’ and telling him that he had been ‘tempted’ by the girls the moment they arrived at his doorstep. Latham also suggested that Huntley deliberately intended to murder the girls, which would account for the fact that he made no attempt to resuscitate them after their deaths. For his part, Huntley angrily stated that he did not do so because he was ‘frozen by panic’.

  After three days in the witness box, Huntley stepped down, and Carr’s defence began. Her counsel, Michael Hubbard QC, told the court that his client had ‘no control’ over the events on that fateful Sunday. Carr testified that she didn’t think Huntley could ever commit murder and said that had she known at the time he was responsible for Holly and Jessica’s deaths she would have ‘been out of that house like a shot straight to the police or straight to the nearest person I could talk to, to tell them.’

  On 12 December the jury retired to consider their verdict – but there was no quick conclusion. Indeed it was not until five days later, on 17 December, that they returned. The jury accepted Carr’s explanation that she had never believed that Huntley had murdered Holly and Jessica and that she had only lied to the police to protect Huntley. She was found not guilty of assisting an offender, but the jury accepted her plea of guilty to the charge of perverting the course of justice. She was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

  As for Huntley, the jury retired again and struggled to come to a conclusion, until in the end they found him guilty, but only by a majority of ten to two. Sentencing him to two terms of life imprisonment, Mr Justice Moses said that he had displayed ‘merciless cynicism’ after killing the two ‘best friends’.

  ‘You murdered them both,’ the judge went on. ‘You are the one person who knows how you murdered them, you are the one person who knows why. There are few worse crimes than your murder of those two young girls.’ Mr Justice Moses also castigated Huntley for his pretence of helping to search for them and his offers of sympathy to their parents.

  After sentencing, Leslie Chapman, Jessica’s father, told reporters, ‘The next time I’d like to see him is how we last saw our daughters and that was in a coffin.’ Holly’s father added that he hoped the Home Office inquiry, which had just been set up by Home Secretary David Blunkett MP, would make sure that ‘no other families have to endure what we have over the past sixteen months’.

  But Mr Justice Moses had not set a minimum term for Huntley’s life sentences as, ironically, he was now caught up in the argument over the decision, encouraged by a judgement of the European Court of Human Rights, about whether the rights of politicians to confer whole life terms on prisoners should be replaced by that power being restricted to the judiciary alone. Ironically, had Huntley been convicted the very next day, 18 December 2003, the judge would have had the power to set his minimum term as that was the day that the new Criminal Justice Act came into force.

  Astonishingly, it was to be almost two years before Huntley’s minimum term was finally set. On 29 September 2005, Mr Justice Moses announced that Huntley must remain in prison until he had served at least forty years; a minimum term that would mean that he could not even be considered for release until at least 2042, by which time he would be sixty-eight years old. Announcing the decision Mr Justice Moses said, ‘The order I make offers little or no hope of the defendant’s eventual release.’

  At that point the judge concluded that Huntley’s crime were not heinous enough to qualify for a whole life term of imprisonment – a curious decision in that there were two victims, both of whom were children, although there was no explicit evidence of a sexual or sadistic element to the killings. It is difficult, however, to see what other motivation there could have been, given Huntley’s sexual history with underage girls that had emerged in the wake of his conviction.

  The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, had come to the conclusion that Huntley should be treated under ‘transitional arrangements’ as the murders were committed before the guidelines as to what constituted a sufficiently heinous crime for a whole life term were reconsidered in the light of the demands of the new Criminal Justice Act. Had Huntley been convicted five years later, in 2010, there seems little doubt that the trial judge would have given the thirty-one year old a whole life term.

  Dr Julian Boon, a forensic psychologist at the University of Leicester, who made an assessment of Huntley’s character on the basis of his trial, told the BBC in 2003, ‘There is a strong suggestion that we are dealing with a psychopath. It is very difficult to believe that this was not sexually motivated.’ Suggesting that Huntley had acted impulsively as he thought he could get away with the murders, Dr Boon added that the way he disposed of the bodies was exceptionally significant.

  ‘Psychopaths treat other people as if they do not have an identity,’ he explained. ‘Look at what Huntley did with the bodies of the girls, trying to burn them. It was done with callous self-interest. His reaction to their deaths was all about self-preservation. He put his own future before the girls.’ The lack of emotion Huntley demonstrated during his evide
nce in the witness box was another reason that Dr Boon concluded that he had a psychopathic personality.

  The court may not have thought Huntley’s crimes sufficiently serious to warrant a whole life term, but his fellow inmates in prison did not agree. One senior prison official, for example, remarked before his forty-year minimum term was announced that his attitude towards the killings was one of ‘sarcastic nonchalance’, just as he demonstrated no sign of remorse or contrition after his conviction.

  His fellow inmates were clearly infuriated by his attitude, and on 14 September 2005, just days before his minimum term was announced, he was scalded with a bucket of boiling water by quadruple-murderer Mark Hobson, who was then aged thirty-six and serving a whole life term himself. Huntley’s injuries meant that he could not attend the hearing that confirmed his forty-year minimum term.

  A year later, on 5 September 2006, Huntley was found unconscious in his prison cell, where he was thought to have taken an overdose, and spent two days in hospital before being returned to Wakefield Prison. There seems little doubt that Huntley’s narcissism meant that he was perpetually anxious to draw attention to himself. His fellow prisoners clearly resented the child killer’s posturing and his swaggering self-interest.

  On 21 March 2010, Huntley was once again taken to hospital, his throat having been slashed by another inmate, fellow life sentence prisoner and convicted armed robber Damien Fowkes. Huntley received twenty-one stitches but his injuries were not said to be life-threatening and he was returned to Frankland Prison near Durham after three days in hospital – having moved from Wakefield two years earlier. In October 2011, Fowkes pleaded guilty at Hull Crown Court to the attempted murder of Huntley, and received a second life sentence.

  Huntley’s self-obsession was again underlined in 2012, when his younger brother Wayne, who had married Huntley’s first wife Claire, although by this point they were no longer together, published a book called The Blood We Share. It outlined how his elder brother ‘swaggers around prison’ boasting about what a ‘cushy’ life he had. Huntley reportedly watched Manchester United football games on his own television set, while enjoying pizzas and steaks with some fellow prisoners.

  ‘His notoriety and reputation is all he has to live for,’ his brother Wayne insisted in his book, ‘so he gets what he can from it. He has a swagger to him.’

  ‘I don’t think he will ever tell the truth now,’ his brother went on. ‘I believe he knows the truth is too awful for him to admit – it would mean even more people in prison would want to kill him … Yet he has never uttered a word of contrition to me.’

  Maxine Carr was released from prison on 14 May 2004, having served half her three-and-a-half-year sentence – the first sixteen months having been spent on remand – and immediately received police protection. She won an injunction on 24 February 2005, granting her lifelong anonymity on the grounds that her life would otherwise be in danger.

  In doing so, Carr became one of four former prisoners to be given entirely new identities, along with the Newcastle-born double child killer Mary Bell, herself a child at the time, and the two children convicted of the murder of toddler James Bulger. Carr was reported to have given birth to a child with her new husband in November 2011. That child, too, is protected by her lifelong anonymity order.

  For his part, Huntley brushes aside criticism and concentrates instead on his own comfort and wellbeing. ‘I’m currently serving life in Belmarsh Prison,’ he tweeted recently, ‘it’s not so bad though – I have internet access and Sky +. My favourite show is Robot Wars. Life is sweet in Belmarsh.’

  They are hardly the words of a man despairing of his future, crushed by the reality that he will not even be able to be considered for parole until 2042 – but they are the words of a man who has never once launched an appeal against his conviction or his sentence.

  14

  Who ‘Deserves’ Life?

  Mark Hobson and Roy Whiting

  The crimes of Mark Hobson, the quadruple murderer who scalded Ian Huntley in Wakefield Prison in September 2005 – using that ‘invisible licence’ to commit crimes in jail that so many killers serving a whole life term seem to feel that they have to harm others – are in many ways every bit as heinous as Huntley’s. Yet Hobson has little or no prospect for release while Huntley has at least the prospect that he will return to being a free man under licence at some point after 2042, when he will be aged only sixty-eight.

  The disparity between their two sentences again underlines the uncertainty in the use of a whole life term for the ‘most heinous of crimes’. No one could deny that by suffocating the two ten-year-old schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and setting fire to their bodies to disguise the forensic evidence Huntley was committing a crime of the most heinous kind, yet Hobson is serving the ultimate sentence under the law of England and Wales – for committing crimes every bit as gratuitous and unprovoked.

  Unlike Huntley, however, Hobson had no track record of brushes with the law before the crimes for which he was given a whole life term of imprisonment. It is worth comparing the lives of the two men to see why one should deserve a whole life term and the other not. Born on 2 September 1969 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, Hobson was the son of a coal miner and a factory machinist, with two sisters. His childhood has been described as ‘happy and stable’. One of his teachers remembered him as ‘very well behaved … so average and ordinary that he was almost anonymous’.

  With a thin, oval face and piercing eyes, his teenage years were equally unremarkable – and certainly showed no sign whatever of the violence that was to emerge so dramatically after his thirtieth birthday. At the age of twenty-two, in 1991, Hobson moved in with his childhood sweetheart Kay and her two children from a previous relationship, and they married in 1993 – after the birth of their own daughter, Alice. At that point Hobson worked at Drax power station and as a landscape gardener. Indeed, his wife described him as the ‘perfect husband’. Sadly, that was not to last.

  In 1998 Hobson registered as a nightclub doorman and began working at a nightclub in Selby, North Yorkshire. It was the first clear evidence that his life was slowly beginning to spin out of control. On New Year’s Day 1999 he walked out on his family without giving a reason. His wife Kay said later, ‘There was no one else involved, he just didn’t want married life any more … I couldn’t believe it. He turned to pot and drinking heavily … He became like a zombie … His life just went completely off the rails.’

  The ‘ordinary’ schoolboy suddenly became a violent criminal. In the four years after leaving his family, Hobson committed a string of ever more serious crimes. In 2002, for example, he stabbed what he called ‘a love rival’ five times in the chest with a handyman’s knife in broad daylight outside an off licence in Selby, watched by a stunned crowd of local shoppers. His victim was left with a punctured lung. Hobson admitted causing grievous bodily harm, but avoided a prison sentence, receiving a community punishment order instead. The leniency of this sentence was to come under close scrutiny in the light of his later behaviour.

  By now working as a refuse collector, and in an increasingly wild, untamed state, Hobson had taken to abusing the women in his life, particularly his new girlfriend Claire Sanderson, who was aged twenty-seven. They made an odd couple. She was as heavy a drinker as he was and the pair would often ‘take chunks out of each other’, according to one friend, as their relationship lurched from row to row. She followed him around ‘like a lapdog’ and was sometimes nicknamed ‘eight ball’ because of the bruising to her face from Hobson’s regular beatings
.

  In the first weeks of 2004, Hobson’s life began to disintegrate still further. His relationship with Claire grew ever more violent, while his by now ex-wife Kay denied him access to their daughter Alice, as well as to her own son and daughter, because of his irrational and often brutal behaviour. She later described his relationship with Claire as like ‘a powder keg ready to ignite’.

  ‘She carried the scars and bruising around the eyes that Mark had inflicted during their drunken rows,’ Hobson’s ex-wife Kay explained. ‘But she obviously dished it out, too. Mark would sometimes visit my home covered in cuts and bruises. One time she left his chest and head littered with bloody bite marks. Mark didn’t seem bothered though. He just said, “You know what we’re like when we’ve had a drink.”’

  In the spring of 2004, Hobson lost his job as a refuse collector, which ignited his final descent into rage against Claire Sanderson and, arguably, against women in general, fuelled by an alcohol addiction that saw him consume twenty or more pints of lager in a day. He confessed to a friend that he had ‘chosen the wrong sister’ when he started going out with Claire and much preferred her twin sister Diane.

  Increasingly irrational, in the first days of July 2004 Hobson began planning to kill Claire and replace her with her twin sister, even to the extent of writing a ‘to-do’ list outlining how he planned to lure his girlfriend’s sister to his flat and a shopping list of items he needed to kill Claire, which included ‘big bin liners’, tie-wraps, fly spray and air freshener. Against Diane’s name he wrote ‘use and abuse at will’, and went on to list a number of other potential victims including the twin girls’ parents and the parents of his ex-wife.

  Finally, on the evening of 10 July 2004, he carried out his plan to kill Claire Sanderson. The couple were last seen together when they went to a pub near the flat they shared. When they returned home that evening Hobson hit Claire on the head no fewer than seventeen times with a hammer and then strangled her. He then proceeded to wrap her body in one of the bin bags he had bought for the purpose and put a plastic bag over her head. There was no evidence of a sexual assault, though Hobson had stripped her naked when he put her into the bin bag. He then stored her body in the flat they shared for a week before executing the second part of his plan – to ‘use and abuse’ her twin sister Diane.