Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  The ugly details of Childs’ brutal crimes were eventually revealed to the jury by prosecution counsel at the second trial in November 1980. Ironically, even though Pinfold was in prison at the time for his part in an armed robbery, Childs told the court that he was in fear for his own life and for the lives of his wife Tina and their two daughters for giving evidence against both men, but that he was determined to do so regardless of the possibly lethal consequences. In fact Childs’ evidence was to become one of the most bare-faced acts of perjury ever seen at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey – but the jury did not know that at the time.

  Looking absolutely calm, Childs proceeded to go into the most graphic, sordid detail about each of the six killings, while minimising his own role in each and every one of them. On the first murder, of thirty-five-year-old Terence Eve, for example, he described how it was Mackenney who had hit him persistently with a length of hose that had two heavy nuts attached to it, before strangling him. The next morning he and Mackenney had taken the body to Childs’s flat in Bow and used an axe, saw and knives to cut it up, because the industrial mincing machine they had bought for the purpose of destroying the body was not up to the task. Childs then spent almost twenty-four hours burning the remains in the grate of his living room fireplace.

  After the murder, Childs told the jury, he and Mackenney set up as contract killers for hire, using Pinfold as their agent. Their first target was to be haulage contractor George Brett, and they were paid £1,800 to do the job. The two men lured Brett – who had his ten-year-old son Terry with him for company – to a church hall on the pretext that they had some work for him. When Brett got there, Childs explained that Mackenney killed both the father and son with shots to the head from an Army sten gun. Once again the bodies were taken back to Childs’ flat and the same procedure was followed – with the ashes emptied into a nearby canal.

  Their fourth victim was ex-wrestler Robert Brown, who had escaped from Chelmsford Prison and was on the run. He had been witness to a part of their killing of Terence Eve and so was doomed. Once again, Childs claimed that Mackenney shot him in the back of the head – though this time he survived, which resulted in the two men hacking at him with axes. That too failed and Childs told the jury that he had taken a ‘short sword stick and stabbed him in the belly, running the blade up into his heart’.

  The next target for the two was Fred Sherwood, who owed a colleague of Mackenney’s a large sum of money. This time Childs hit him over the head with a hammer and Mackenney shot him.

  Their last victim was not for money, but for an entirely different reason. Mackenney had been having an affair with the wife of a friend of his named Ronald Andrews, and had decided to murder him and move in with his wife, as she had a ‘nice house’ and was comfortably off. Childs was given £400 to help with the murder. Posing as a private detective, Childs lured Andrews to his flat, where Mackenney shot him in the head with a revolver fitted with a silencer.

  After Childs had finished giving his evidence, however, Mackenney’s defence counsel, Michael Mansfield QC, called two witnesses who both suggested that Childs had told them individually that Mackenney was innocent, and that he was naming him because he wanted to ‘do Mr Mackenney down’. In his closing speech for the defence, Mansfield suggested to the jury that the case against his client ‘rests almost entirely upon the word of one man, Childs, a man who is maniacally obsessed in thoughts and actions by violence.’

  In spite of that claim, the jury convicted Mackenney of the murders of George Brett and his son, and of Frederick Sherwood, as well as Ronald Andrews, but he was not convicted of the killings of either Terence Eve or escaped wrestler Robert Brown. Pinfold, meanwhile, was found guilty of the murder of Terence Eve. On 28 November 1980, Mr Justice May sentenced Pinfold to life imprisonment, and then turned to Mackenney, whom he also sentenced to life imprisonment but with the recommendation that he should serve at least twenty-five years.

  From the dock, ‘Big H’ shouted, ‘I think you are a hypocrite. Bring this farce to a close … I killed nobody.’

  The Court of Appeal did not believe him. Pinfold and Mackenney unsuccessfully appealed against their convictions in 1981 and were denied leave to appeal again in 1987. Pinfold served more than twenty-one years in prison before being released on licence in September 2001. But it was not until after an investigation by the Criminal Cases Review Commission that it was finally acknowledged that Childs had lied through his teeth at their trial two decades earlier. Pinfold and Mackenney were hardly saints, but they had been convicted almost entirely on the basis of Childs’ evidence, which was fatally flawed.

  It was not until 30 October 2003 that the Court of Appeal finally heard the truth about Childs. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, sitting with Mr Justice Aikens and Mr Justice Davis, heard from a string of witnesses that Childs suffered from ‘personality disorders’ – although attempts to introduce that information had been blocked at the original trial. Edward Fitzgerald QC, acting for Mackenney, called evidence to show that Childs was a ‘skilled fabricator’ and a ‘highly intelligent psychopath’ who would ‘say anything, at any time, when it suited him’. He even questioned Childs’ claim about disposing of the bodies in the grate of his flat.

  This new evidence convinced the Court of Appeal that there had been a miscarriage of justice and on 15 December 2003 – almost a quarter of a century after Pinfold and Mackenney were convicted – the pair were released. Lord Woolf commented that the court was ‘unable to say where the truth lies as to these terrible murders’, but concluded that Childs’ evidence was ‘not capable of belief’. He explained that the new evidence presented to the court proved that Childs’ evidence against Pinfold and Mackenney was unreliable because he was a ‘pathological liar’.

  Outside the High Court in London, ‘Big H’ Mackenney said, ‘I’m shattered at the moment; I’m very relieved. It’s been a long time coming – it’s twenty-three years too late. The case should never have gone to court in the first place. It was a fiasco.’ For his part, Pinfold contented himself with saying, ‘Childs gave his story, and looking at the evidence, he was proved a liar.’

  Throughout his time in prison Childs has changed his story, but since 1986 he has consistently maintained that he lied about Pinfold and Mackenney. In July 1986, for example, he even swore an affidavit admitting that Pinfold was ‘only convicted because of my perjured evidence’ – though he declined to clear Mackenney.

  In 1998, Childs also told the Daily Mirror that he had also committed five other murders – though that has never been corroborated. He told the Mirror reporter, Jeff Edwards, ‘I know I’m going to die in jail. There’s a few things I’d like to get off my mind before I go … a few skeletons still in my cupboard.’ Those were the other five murders, and whether they are part of his fantasy life or reality is impossible to tell. What is indisputable, however, is that Childs will indeed end his life behind prison bars. The life sentence he received in 1979 was converted into a whole life term by the Home Secretary after 1983, although that has never been officially confirmed; there seems little prospect of his being released.

  Childs boasted about his murders in a series of letters to a ‘penfriend’, thirty-one-year-old Sandra Watson, whom he was introduced to through the Prison Reform Trust. Watson explained in 1998, ‘The things he told me have shocked and sickened me. They are so terrible. He shows no remorse for what he did. He’s proud of it and would do it again tomorrow if he was released from prison.’ Childs described to Watson in grim detail how he had killed his victims, and dis
cussed the best ways to sever a head and limbs.

  Childs also told Watson, a divorced mother of three children, about his part in a bank robbery in 1979, a crime for which he has never been charged, and once again took a positive delight in his violent role. ‘Because a couple of guards wanted to be heroes,’ Childs wrote, ‘and a customer wanted to have a go, I was forced to pistol-whip the customer senseless and shot the two guards at point blank range with my Webley revolver. Any idiot who fails to obey me when I say “Get on the floor or die!” in my opinion deserves to die. It’s as simple as that.’

  Childs then told Watson that hours later he made passionate love to his wife Tina on a bed awash with banknotes.

  ‘I will kill anyone for money,’ Childs gleefully told Watson. ‘All I wanted to do was to get rich and I don’t give a damn. I will kill for money, revenge, honour!’

  Not every contract killer is quite as intelligent or manipulative as Childs, however. One man who most certainly was not is the baby-faced builder Paul Glen, now aged forty-two, who was convicted of two murders and made the subject of a whole life term. Hired as a hit man, the naïve Glen managed to kill the wrong man – murdering builder Robert Bogle, who was a black man in his mid-twenties, instead of Bogle’s housemate Vincent Smart, who was white and in his early thirties. It might almost be laughable had not an entirely innocent young man lost his life for no other reason than his killer was an incompetent bungler.

  Born in Blackpool, Lancashire, in 1972, Glen committed his first murder when he was just seventeen, killing a gay Blackpool guest house owner called Ivor Usher on 21 February 1989. Originally he and an accomplice had intended to steal the £5,000 that they believed their bachelor victim had stored in his safe, but when it came to the robbery itself Glen seemed to lose all sense of control and bludgeoned Usher to death while he was tied to a chair.

  Later that year he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released in 2002 after serving just thirteen years. Like many other men before him and after him, his release on licence after a life sentence did nothing whatever to persuade him not to kill again. Indeed I have discovered that at least eighteen men who have been released from life sentences for murder have gone on to kill again while on licence.

  Nevertheless, it was Glen’s reputation from the earlier murder as a man who was prepared to kill without hesitation that saw him get a contract to kill again for money just two years after his release. A wealthy local businessman in Lancashire wanted to frighten fellow businessman Vincent Smart because he believed Smart and his three sons had been bullying him. He was recommended to speak to Glen, who was at this point offering his services as a local thug, and who certainly had the credentials to do the frightening. As a result, in return for a fee of just £300, Glen was hired to put the ‘frighteners’ on Smart – the only trouble was that Glen could not manage to restrain himself. He only really knew how to kill.

  Shortly before eight in the evening of 8 June 2004, builder Robert Bogle was cooking supper for his girlfriend in the house they shared with Vincent Smart in the village of Farcet in Cambridgeshire when a man wearing a hooded top, an overcoat and black gloves walked into the kitchen. Without hesitation the hooded man raised a foot-long kitchen knife he was carrying and started to stab Bogle repeatedly, even though the builder tried to fight back. By the time he was finished the intruder had stabbed Bogle ten times, striking his hands, arms, right cheek and, ultimately, his heart. Bogle’s girlfriend, meanwhile, was hiding behind the sofa in the living room, traumatised by what was happening in front of her.

  Displaying considerable courage and determination, the desperately injured Bogle managed to drag himself through the house and out into the street in search of help. He attracted the attention of three teenage girls and he asked them to call an ambulance, but he did not stop there. He tried to attract the attention of people at a nearby shop before collapsing in the street. His attacker walked calmly away down an alleyway beside the houses, still wearing the overcoat and black gloves. Glen had not bothered to ask the name of his victim – had he done so he would have realised at once that he was not his intended target, Vincent Smart, Bogle’s housemate.

  Forensic evidence, including DNA, put Glen at the scene of the crime, and mobile phone records confirmed he had been in the area, just as they confirmed that he had returned to Blackpool immediately after the murder. In an attempt to conceal the truth, the Lancastrian claimed to the police that the murder of Bogle had actually been committed by a man named ‘Steve’ whose name and address he did not know.

  That suggestion was ridiculed by the prosecution counsel when Glen came before Norwich Crown Court in June 2005. Rex Tedd QC told the jury in no uncertain terms that there was no ‘Steve’ and the killing had been committed by a ‘professional killer, who had travelled to the area where his identity and appearance were completely unknown. That man on the mission was Mr Paul Glen.’ The jury agreed and, after a five-week trial, convicted Glen of Bogle’s murder.

  Sentencing Glen, the judge, Sir John Blofeld said, ‘As a result of your actions a young man, who had a future before him and a devoted family, lost his life in circumstances which were terrible.’ The judge added that it was ‘immaterial’ to discuss a release date as Glen would be subject to a whole life sentence and would never again be free.

  ‘Do I not get a chance to say anything?’ Glen shouted from the dock in response, but the judge did not reply and Glen was ushered out of the dock and down into the cells by the prison staff accompanying him. But he did not let his case rest or die. In September 2006, Glen’s legal team asked for leave to appeal against his whole life term, but their application was rejected, not only because he had committed a second murder, but also because he had done so for profit – albeit only £300.

  Just a few weeks later, at the end of January 2007, Glen took the extraordinary step of getting married in the chapel at Whitemoor high security prison in March, Cambridgeshire. His bride was forty-one-year-old Paula Kelly from Liverpool, who had been corresponding with him in prison, and the ceremony was conducted by a Catholic priest. A matter of weeks later Glen launched an escape attempt with two fellow prisoners. Prison officers thwarted the plan, and the three prisoners were placed in solitary confinement.

  Glen’s marriage raises an interesting issue about the whole life term. Does it effectively rule out any possibility that the convicted prisoner can ever experience anything resembling an ‘ordinary’ life at any time? To those who believe the principal purpose of the sentence is to ‘lock them up and throw away the key’, then it surely does. But what about the possibility of redemption? Might not marriage – however remote it may be because of the couple’s physical separation – help that process?

  I am not arguing for one moment that Glen is anything other than a psychopathic personality with a clear penchant for the most brutal and sustained violence – nor am I suggesting that he does not deserve the most stringent punishment. I am simply pointing out that if the sole purpose of a whole life sentence is punishment, then society and the judiciary should admit that once and for all. As a former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham, once explained, the law is required to be accessible, intelligible, clear and predictable. If it is not, then it should be revised. I do not believe that clarity exists when it comes to whole life sentences – with some arguing it is simply the ultimate punishment, others that it may allow the possibility of redemption and change.

  In the annals of murder for money, however, there can be few more despicable killers than ‘gang boss’ Kenneth Regan
– often known as ‘Captain Cash’ – and his equally depraved accomplice William Horncy. Between them, they were responsible for a set of the most dreadful killings, and both received whole life terms in 2005 for their part in the atrocities. Both men are in their early sixties now, and have little or no prospect of release – and the reason is clear enough: the public would be at risk, just as they would be from John Childs, if they were to end their time behind bars at any point in the near future. In the longer term, however, that may not be the case.

  An ordinary-enough looking man, though with broad shoulders and an intimidating manner, Kenneth Regan gradually became one of the most successful drug dealers, money launderers and passport smugglers in Britain during the 1990s. At one point he was smuggling forty million pounds’ worth of cannabis into the country in a single shipment, and quickly used the front of an insurance firm to launder the huge fortune that he was making. Regan relished the gangster lifestyle, taking enormous pleasure in carrying vast amounts of cash in the boots of his Mercedes cars, which led to his nickname of Captain Cash. But in June 1998 his criminal enterprises came to a sudden halt as armed police officers pounced during a heroin deal in north London. Regan tried to escape, without success, and the officers found twenty-five kilogrammes of the drug in the boot of his car.

  Facing a jail sentence of at least twenty years, the wily Regan offered the police his ‘co-operation’ and turned into a ‘supergrass’. He proceeded to help with their enquiries into four major investigations involving drugs, smuggling and murder, and his information brought fifteen convictions and five trials. At Regan’s eventual trial the judge explained, ‘… you will never again be trusted by your former colleagues, so you can’t go back and the enmity of those will make your future life precarious.’ The judge then added, ‘Those who turn against former associates should receive a very great reduction in their sentence.’