Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  On 17 July 2004 Hobson called Diane Sanderson and told her that her sister was suffering from glandular fever and would welcome a visit. But when Diane arrived that evening she too was beaten with a hammer – although not until after she had been tortured with a disposable razor and scissors. Her left nipple was missing, and the police later believed that Hobson may have eaten it. Like her sister, the beatings with a hammer were not the cause of her death, Diane, too, was strangled, while her head was also covered with a plastic bag. There were ligature marks on her wrists, ankles and neck, indicating that she had been ‘hog-tied’. Her pubic hair had been shaved and she had been sexually assaulted; she too was left naked with a plastic bag over her head.

  Claire and Diane’s mutilated bodies were found the following day by Diane’s boyfriend and her father, who had come to Claire’s flat in search of her. But by that time Hobson had disappeared, intent on continuing with his plans to attack other people. He did not search out the twin sisters’ parents, however. Instead he focused his anger – for no apparent reason – on a pair of entirely innocent old-age pensioners.

  On 18 July 2004 Hobson murdered James Britton, an eighty-year-old former Spitfire pilot, and his eighty-two-year-old wife Joan, at their home in the village of Strensall, twenty-five miles north of York. Hobson beat both of them with Mr Britton’s walking stick before stabbing them to death in the back, and leaving their bodies to be discovered by their neighbours.

  Over the next seven days Hobson became the focus of one of the biggest police manhunts in recent times as Britain’s ‘most wanted man’. Twelve separate police forces and more than five hundred officers formed the search team. But he was not actually arrested until 25 July 2004 when he was found by police in a field near a petrol station not far from York after a tip-off from a member of the public. He showed no remorse, or concern, for his victims or their families.

  Immediately after his arrest Hobson merely told the police, ‘I’m a fucking murderer, aren’t I?’

  In a subsequent interview he explained that he had taken a cocktail of drugs, including cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and alcohol and could not remember anything about his girlfriend’s death or indeed her sister’s. He claimed that he had ‘lost a day and a half’ and had ‘come round with a blood-stained hammer’ in his hand. Later, while on remand in custody at Wakefield Prison, Hobson told a prison officer that he had ‘never felt better in my life’ – explaining that he felt as though he was taking part in the reality television programme Big Brother.

  One friend, who had known him for some time, explained Hobson was prone to sudden and violent swings in mood. ‘He would be laughing and joking one moment and then totally different the next,’ he said. ‘He threatened to kill my son, to stab him, but I can’t even remember what it was about. He liked to portray himself as a local hard-man, but he was the kind of guy who would pick on easy targets. The kind of guy who would thump you for spilling his pint.’

  When Hobson’s trial opened at Leeds Crown Court on 18 April 2005 before Mr Justice Grigson, the defendant admitted all four killings at once. Flanked by two prison officers, he bowed his head and appeared to be close to tears as he muttered ‘Guilty’ four times as each of the counts of murder was put to him. As the details of his crimes emerged over the following four weeks, so the Sanderson family sat horrified in court, as did the family of James and Joan Britton.

  Finally, on 27 May, Mr Justice Grigson told Hobson, ‘The enormity of what you have done is beyond words … The damage you’ve done is incalculable. You not only destroyed the lives of your victims, but you devastated the lives of those who loved them.’ He went on to say that Hobson clearly had an abusive relationship with Claire Sanderson. ‘And when you tired of her, you transferred your attention to her sister, Diane. As Claire stood in your way, you murdered her. In my opinion, that was a premeditated act.’

  ‘You also determined to lure Diane to your home,’ Mr Justice Grigson added, ‘and kill her there and then to use her for your own sexual gratification … You battered Claire with a hammer in as brutal and callous a way as is possible to imagine before placing a plastic bag over her head and, having killed her, you wrapped her body in a bin bag.’ On 17 July you succeeded in luring Diane to your home. It is plain at your hands she suffered not only terror and pain but sexual harm before she died.’

  Concluding his remarks, the judge sentenced Hobson to life imprisonment with a whole life term.

  As the sentence was read out, Claire and Diane’s mother, Jacqueline Sanderson, stood up in the public gallery and shouted, ‘Rot in hell!’ After Hobson was led to the cells, she and her husband George issued a statement which asked, ‘How could anyone be such an animal? Claire and Diane did not deserve to die such horrid deaths, both ending up naked, with a plastic bag over Diane’s head and Claire inside a black bag.’

  Outside the court, Detective Superintendent Javad Ali, who led the police hunt for Hobson, added, ‘No one who has heard the detail of these horrific crimes can be surprised at the severity of today’s sentence. I believe it is totally right and fitting that Mark Hobson is never released from prison. For me, today brings about a conclusion to the most horrendous case I have had to deal with in my twenty-two years’ police service.’

  No matter how heinous the crimes, however, Hobson felt he had been singularly mistreated. Not least because he had unwittingly set a precedent – by becoming the first prisoner to be subjected to a whole term after pleading guilty to all the murder charges. Incensed, he announced shortly after his conviction that he would be seeking leave to appeal against his whole life sentence on the grounds that he deserved greater leniency as he had admitted all four murders at the earliest opportunity.

  Before the appeal could be heard, however, Hobson had tipped the bucket of boiling water over Ian Huntley on 14 September 2005 and was sentenced to three months in solitary confinement as a result. He was still subject to that punishment when his appeal against the whole life term of imprisonment was concluded on 30 November 2005. In a written judgement, the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, said the facts of the murders were so horrific that a whole life order was inevitable, regardless of the guilty plea. He added that Hobson did not deserve any compassion for pleading guilty, as he had not demonstrated any towards his victims.

  Mr and Mrs Britton’s daughter, Catherine Wilkins, said after the appeal verdict, ‘Mark Hobson horrifically and sadistically murdered four people without compunction. He has never shown any remorse or given any explanation for his actions. Admitting his guilt does not change the fact that he is a callous, vicious murderer and his victims suffered horrendously.’

  But are Mark Hobson’s murders distinctly more heinous than those of Ian Huntley? It is my contention that they are not. It is simply a matter of the ‘impression’ the murders leave in the mind of the judiciary and the public that distinguishes between the two cases. If society is intent on ‘throwing away the key’ for the most heinous criminals, I fail to see how it failed to do so for the killer of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

  Another case that illustrates the ambiguity and uncertainty at the heart of the argument about whole life terms concerns West Sussex-born Roy Whiting, who killed eight-year-old schoolgirl Sarah Payne in July 2000 when he was forty-one. Although Whiting killed only one child – which remains utterly abhorrent in itself – he did not kill two, as Huntley was to do. Yet Whiting received a whole life term in the wake of his conviction for Sarah’s murder in December 2001, only for the Home Secretary of the day, Labour’s David Blunkett to argue for a m
inimum term of fifty years, and then for the Court of Appeal to amend that sentencing decision yet again.

  It is worth looking back at Whiting’s case, and his criminal career in detail, to understand the prolonged argument over his sentencing. For, once again, it is the question of the ‘impression’ created by the case that seems to have had the most marked effect on the decision the judiciary arrived at in this high-profile case.

  A scruffy, six-foot tall, gangly loner with a front tooth missing, Whiting was born in Horsham, West Sussex, in January 1959, where he was brought up. His parents divorced during the 1970s, and he had a strangely isolated childhood. Originally he had five siblings but three of them died in infancy – only his older brother and younger sister survived. Whiting left school at sixteen with no academic qualifications and struggled to keep a job over the next ten years, at one stage working for the local Co-operative store as a delivery man, at another working as a car mechanic and paint sprayer at a local garage.

  With the garage as his base, Whiting developed an interest in ‘banger racing’, which attracted a considerable following in the 1980s. He even came third in the Smallfield Raceway championship in the late eighties, but in spite of being watched by large crowds, he always maintained a low profile, preferring to blend into the background. Then, in 1986, Whiting married petrol pump attendant Linda Booker, who became pregnant that same year; but their marriage did not last and they separated just before the birth of their son in 1987 and were divorced in 1990.

  A man with few friends, who ‘liked to keep himself to himself’, Whiting was steadily developing an obsession with young girls. That could have been a result of his own disturbed childhood, or his dislike of marriage and the responsibility of his own child, but there is no doubt that on 4 March 1995 – at the age of thirty-six – he abducted and sexually assaulted an eight-year-old girl on the Langley Green estate at Crawley in West Sussex.

  Whiting was arrested a few weeks later after a man who knew him came forward to tell the police that Whiting had recently sold him a red Ford Sierra car, the same make as the vehicle that the eight-year-old had been seen climbing into during her abduction. Three months later, Whiting admitted to the charges of abduction and indecent assault and was sentenced to four years in prison. The maximum sentence he could have received was life imprisonment, but the judge took into account his guilty pleas and offered leniency. That proved to be a mistake. While in jail, Whiting was assessed by a psychiatrist who concluded that he was likely to reoffend once he had been released.

  Nevertheless, Whiting was duly released from prison in November 1997, having served two years and five months of his original sentence. He then became one of the first people in Britain to be placed on the newly introduced Sex Offenders’ Register. Probably sensing that he would not be welcomed in Crawley, given the abduction, he moved some twenty-five miles away to Littlehampton on the West Sussex coast, where he rented a flat in St Augustine’s Road.

  Two years later, he moved into another flat in the same road, and it was while he was at this second flat that he became involved in the police search for eight-year-old Sarah Payne, who had disappeared from another part of Littlehampton on the afternoon of Sunday 1 July 2000. Sarah had been playing with her brothers and sisters in a field near her grandparents’ home when she decided to make her way home alone. She never arrived; instead she disappeared into thin air.

  Immediately suspecting a paedophile abduction, and knowing that Whiting was one of five men on the Sex Offenders’ Register in the area, West Sussex police officers visited him on Monday 2 July 2002 to ask if he knew anything about the whereabouts of the small, smiling-faced blonde schoolgirl whose picture by now was flooding the media.

  Hardly surprisingly, the former car mechanic denied knowing anything whatever about Sarah Payne’s disappearance, and insisted that he had been at a funfair in Hove, several miles away, that evening. Nevertheless the officers were suspicious about his demeanour – not least because of his apparent disregard for the little girl – and arrested him on suspicion of her abduction. Whiting continued to protest his innocence, even though the police found a receipt for petrol he had purchased at Buck Barn Garage near Pulborough the previous evening – which contradicted his alibi of being in Hove at 5.30 pm and then returning to his flat by 9.30 pm on the evening that Sarah disappeared.

  Whiting spent two days in police custody, but officers had no concrete evidence with which to charge him, and – after he was released on police bail to go to live with his father in Crawley – an exhaustive search of his flat in St Augustine’s Road produced no forensic evidence linking him to Sarah or her disappearance. At this point the police were still conducting a missing persons’ investigation rather than a murder enquiry.

  It was not until Tuesday 17 July 2000 that Sarah Payne’s body was finally discovered in a shallow grave. It was identified within twenty-four hours, and two weeks later, on 31 July 2000 Whiting was rearrested on suspicion of her murder – but still the police lacked the concrete evidence they needed to charge him. In spite of the fact that Sarah’s body had been discovered just three miles from the service station where Whiting had bought fuel on the night she disappeared, Whiting was once again released on bail.

  A few days after this second release, Whiting moved out of his father’s house after a vigilante mob smashed some of the windows with bricks. He went to live in a tent in woodland behind a housing estate in Crawley. Clearly unnerved by the events of the past month, he stole a Vauxhall Nova car and was pursued by police at high speed before crashing into a parked vehicle. Whiting was immediately arrested and, on 27 September 2000, he admitted both taking the car and driving dangerously and was sentenced to twenty-two months’ imprisonment.

  It was only after the former paint sprayer had begun his sentence that the police decided to examine his white Fiat Ducato van, which provided them with vital forensic evidence, but it was not until 6 February 2001 that Whiting was formally charged with the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne while he was in prison serving his sentence for car theft and dangerous driving.

  Whiting’s trial began on 14 November 2001 at Lewes Crown Court and the jury heard from a succession of vital witnesses, including Sarah’s brother Lee, who had seen a scruffy-looking man with yellowish teeth drive past the field where he and Sarah had been playing on the afternoon that she vanished. A female motorist then told the jury that she had found one of Sarah’s shoes in a country lane several miles from where her body was found, and forensic scientists had found fibres from Whiting’s van on the shoe. But the most damning piece of forensic evidence of all was a strand of blonde hair on a T-shirt found in Whiting’s van. The jury were told that DNA test results meant that the chance of the strand of blonde hair belonging to anyone other than Sarah were one in a billion.

  The pathologist who analysed Sarah’s body told the court that the eight year old had met a ‘violent death’ and it was his view that she had been the victim of a ‘sexually motivated homicide’. Sarah’s naked and decomposed body had been found in a shallow grave six inches deep. The jury were told that it would have taken just six minutes to dig.

  On Wednesday 12 December 2001, forty-two-year-old Whiting was found guilty of the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne. The jury of nine men and three women had deliberated for nine hours before reaching a unanimous verdict.

  Mr Justice Curtis told Whiting – who stood impassively in the dock before him wearing a grey sweatshirt and jeans, ‘It is important in ordinary life that children are allowed to have some freedom by the
ir parents and others to learn self-reliance and enjoy their childhood … You exploited this for your own abnormal sexual desires.’

  In a withering attack, the judge went on, ‘You took this little child away in a few moments. I am satisfied you were looking for such a little child on that evening on the South Coast. It is ludicrous to suggest that you needed that van for your job. It was a moving prison for Sarah and anyone else that you might have caught.’ That moving prison was found to include a rope, nylon-tie handcuffs and a knife.

  ‘You are indeed an evil man,’ Mr Justice Curtis added. ‘You are in no way mentally unwell. I have seen you for a month and in my view you are a glib and cunning liar … You are and you will remain an absolute menace to any girl … You are every parent’s and grandparent’s nightmare come true.’

  Finally, the judge concluded, ‘This is one of the rare cases when I shall recommend to the appropriate authorities that you will be kept in prison for the rest of your life.’

  Significantly, however, the judge did not specify a whole life term as that power had not yet been conferred on the judiciary. That would not come for another two years. The judge, as had been the case with Rosemary West, could only suggest to the Lord Chief Justice his view about the seriousness of the convicted prisoner’s crimes. Mr Justice Curtis was using exactly the same formula that Mr Justice Mantell had used in Rosemary West’s case: ‘If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released.’ It is a phrase which I can vividly remember hearing at Winchester Crown Court – a day that still reverberates in my memory.