On the following day, the Recorder of London, the most senior judge at the Central Criminal Court, sentenced him. On 2 February 2001, Judge Michael Hyam told Mulcahy that the killings were ‘acts of desolating wickedness in which you descended to the depths of depravity in carrying them out.’ The judge went on to add, ‘These were sadistic killings and out of the two of you I have no doubt it was you who derived gratification from the act of killing.’
The Recorder then sentenced Mulcahy to three life terms for the murders and twenty-four years for seven rapes and five planned rapes. The Recorder also recommended that he should serve a minimum of thirty years before even being considered for release. Mulcahy demonstrated no emotion whatever as the sentences were passed down.
Judge Michael Hyam went on to sentence John Duffy to a further twelve years’ imprisonment for the seventeen additional charges of rape that he had admitted to during his police interrogations about Mulcahy’s role in the rapes and killings. The extra sentence did appear to affect Duffy and since then he has seemed to accept that he will remain in prison for the rest of his natural life.
The same has certainly not been the case for his old schoolfriend. In the years since his conviction Mulcahy has repeatedly and consistently claimed to be innocent. He has offered no other explanation of the crimes – beyond the fact they were committed by Duffy.
Mulcahy has also encouraged his friends to launch a website which, like Jeremy Bamber’s, insists he has been falsely imprisoned. The website is headed by a quotation from the French writer Andre Gide: ‘Believe in the ones who are searching for the truth and doubt about those, who say they have found it.’ It then goes on to add: ‘This nightmare is not a story of a famous writer, it is the true story of a man, our friend, who is still incarcerated in HMP Full Sutton, who is still praying and who still believes that sometime soon a retrial will prove his INNOCENCE.’
Under the heading ‘The Facts’, the site proceeds to explain that Duffy’s true accomplice in the rapes and murders is still at large and ‘enjoying living in freedom’, and then outlines the reasons that Duffy falsely implicated Mulcahy in the crimes.
‘John Duffy was convicted in 1986 for a series of rapes and murders and assault on his ex-wife and her boyfriend,’ it explains. ‘Duffy and Mr David Mulcahy went to school together. Mr David Mulcahy gave a statement to the police that resulted in Duffy being questioned for the rapes and murders that Duffy would later be sentenced for. Duffy´s defence during questioning, and later at trial, would be that he was suffering from hysterical amnesia (proven to be false) for the entire offending period.’
The site then insists, ‘After making a deal with the police, Duffy wrongfully gave evidence against Mr David Mulcahy. The only evidence against Mr David Mulcahy was the statement of a murderer and rapist. There is no scientific evidence either to support or refute the allegation that Mr Mulcahy was involved in these cases.’
After maintaining that Duffy wanted revenge on Mulcahy for his statements to the police about his attack on his wife, the site concludes with an exposition of why Mulcahy is innocent, which focuses on nine key facts which revolve around Duffy’s collaboration with the police and prison authorities, but also covers some of the DNA analysis linking Mulcahy to the rapes.
‘No smoke without fire!’ the site concludes. ‘Good saying and I used to use it a lot before, but I know smoke can also be used as a smoke screen … I don’t expect to be believed on face value. All that I ask is that you look at the evidence and come to your own conclusion. If having done that, you see that I am innocent, check your memory; see if you know anything about Duffy … The guilty belong in jail, not the innocent. Do you know anyone who would be willing to look at this case to aid my appeal? Please get in touch. You could be the person who rights a massive wrong.’
Mulcahy’s protestations of his innocence are likely to have exactly the same impact on his life behind bars as they have had on Jeremy Bamber’s. The possibility of release from a life sentence with a fixed minimum term is predicated on the prisoner in question accepting his own guilt and standing by that recognition. To refuse to do so increases the likelihood of never being released – and so it becomes entirely possible that Mulcahy will, like Duffy, end his natural life behind bars even though, were he to admit his guilt, there would be at least the possibility that he would be eligible for release in his early seventies.
But there is another serial killer of recent years serving a whole life term who is equally convinced he is innocent, though he does not have a website to argue his case for him. He is forklift truck driver and former merchant seaman Steve Wright, now aged fifty-seven, who murdered and dumped five prostitutes during a killing spree in Ipswich, Suffolk between 30 October and 10 December 2006. He was given the maximum sentence the law in Britain allows on his conviction in February 2008. The details of Wright’s killings have been widely reported, so I do not propose to go back over them in great detail, but his reaction to his sentence and his crimes throws further light on what convicted prisoners serving whole life terms feel about their crimes.
Like Mulcahy and Duffy, Wright had a lifelong obsession with sex – although in his case with prostitutes rather than identifying young women as targets for rape. All three saw women as objects that inspired a simmering rage – even though all three were married, and two had children. Indeed, all three presented themselves to the outside world as normal-enough men, even though behind closed doors they could be both violent and abusive towards the women in their lives. Interestingly, all three were also almost the same age, born in the late 1950s, with an attitude to sex that owed more to the pre-war era than to the world of the swinging sixties where attitudes to sex became increasingly relaxed.
Steven Gerald James Wright was born on 24 April 1958 in the Norfolk village of Erpingham, the second of four children of a military policeman and a veterinary nurse. He had an elder brother, David, and two younger sisters. While Wright’s father was on military service, the family lived in both Malta and Singapore, but Wright’s mother left the family home in 1964 when Wright was six – his father divorced her and both later remarried. Wright and his siblings went to live with their father, who had a son and daughter with his second wife, Valerie.
At the age of sixteen, Wright left school and quickly joined the Merchant Navy, becoming a chef on ferries sailing from Felixstowe, Suffolk. At the age of twenty he married Angela O’Donovan, with whom he had a son, Michael, but they later divorced. Wright went on to become a steward on the Cunard liner QE2, then a lorry driver, a barman and – prior to his arrest – a forklift truck driver.
Wright’s second marriage came in August 1987 when he married thirty-two-year-old Diane Cassell, but the couple split up within a year while he was a pub landlord in Norwich. He then formed a relationship with Sarah Whiteley between 1989 and 1993 and they had a daughter together, born in 1992. It was during this time that Wright managed a public house in south London, a job he was to lose as a result of his gambling and heavy drinking. He was convicted of stealing £80 in 2001 to pay off his gambling debts. By then his drinking and gambling had escalated out of control and he twice tried to commit suicide, once by carbon monoxide poisoning in his car, and then by an overdose of pills. He was a man living on the edge.
One constant in Wright’s life, however, besides his heavy drinking and gambling, was his use of prostitutes. In 2001 Wright met Pamela Wright – their shared surname is mere coincidence – in Felixstowe and they moved to a house in Ipswich together in 2004. She was apparently aware of his habitual interest in sex with se
x workers, and while the couple were in Ipswich Wright admitted to her that he went to massage and sauna parlours that were actually brothels. During this period he is reported to have had sex with three prostitutes who were to become his victims in the final weeks of 2006.
What tipped Wright over the edge into killing the women he chose as sexual partners has never been clearly established – he himself has offered no explanation. He has remained studiously silent on the whole question of his motivation for killing from the time of his arrest until his conviction. After his arrest on suspicion of murder, he refused to answer any of the questions put to him by the police – replying throughout with just two words, ‘No comment’.
Intriguingly, Wright’s victims – although all sex workers in the Ipswich area, three of them known to him – were not sexually assaulted as part of their murder, although all of their bodies were stripped naked before they were dumped in the surrounding area. Each had, however, been strangled – the most intimate method of murder, implying as it does an extraordinarily close connection between murderer and victim. No evidence has ever been produced to suggest that the act of strangulation during the killings might have brought Wright some form of sexual arousal, but it must, at least, be a possibility. But there is no evidence that he was impotent or incapable of an erection during his relationships with prostitutes over many years.
Whatever the motivation, there is no doubt that Wright was responsible for the deaths of five sex workers in December 2006, whose bodies were discovered in a ten-day period between 2 and 12 December. The killings had taken place over a six-and-a-half week period, beginning on 30 October 2006.
The first body to be found was that of twenty-five-year-old Gemma Adams, whose body was discovered in the water of Belstead Brook at Thorpe’s Hill, near Hintlesham, Suffolk. Six days later, on 8 December, the body of nineteen-year-old Tania Nicol, a friend of Adams, who had been missing since 30 October, was discovered in water at Copdock Mill just outside Ipswich. There was no evidence of sexual assault on either body, although both were found naked.
On 10 December, a third victim was found in an area of woodland by the A14 near Nacton, Suffolk. She was identified as twenty-four-year-old Anneli Alderton, a mother of one child. According to a police statement, she had been asphyxiated and was around three months pregnant when she died. She too was found naked, but had not been sexually assaulted. Her body had been posed, however, in what was later described as a ‘cruciform’ position.
Two days later, on 12 December, the police announced that the bodies of two more women had been found. On 14 December, they confirmed that one was twenty-four-year-old Paula Clennell, a mother of three, who had disappeared on 10 December. According to the police, she died from ‘compression of the throat’. The next day the police confirmed that the other body found was that of twenty-nine-year-old Annette Nicholls, a mother of one child, who disappeared on 5 December. Her body, too, was posed in a ‘cruciform’ position. The bodies of Clennell and Nicholls were also found in Nacton, close to where Alderton had been found.
Suffolk Police launched a major investigation after the discovery of the second body, and quickly established a link between the killings. Officers from thirty other forces participated in the investigation and the police rapidly seized upon Wright as a prime suspect. At 5 am in the morning of 19 December, just a week after the discovery of the final two bodies, Wright was arrested. Just two days later, on 22 December 2006, he was charged with all five murders.
On 16 January 2008, Wright appeared at Ipswich Crown Court charged with all five murders and the prosecution opened their case against him. In particular they revealed that Anneli Alderton and Annette Nicholls had been deliberately posed in the ‘cruciform’ position, that DNA evidence linked Wright to three of the victims and fibre evidence connected him to all five victims.
For their part, the defence argued that Wright was a frequenter of prostitutes, and had had ‘full sex’ with all of the victims, except Tania Nichol. He had picked up with the intention of sexual relations, before apparently changing his mind and dropping her off back in the red light district of Ipswich.
On 21 February 2008, after eight hours of deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous verdict. They found Wright, who was then aged forty-nine, guilty on all five counts of murder. Mr Justice Gross passed sentence the following morning. Wright sat motionless in the dock, staring straight ahead, as the judge told him he had targeted vulnerable women. ‘Drugs and prostitution meant they were at risk,’ he told him. ‘But neither drugs nor prostitution killed them. You did. You killed them, stripped them and left them,’ Mr Justice Gross went on. ‘Why you did it may never be known.’ The judge then pointed out that Wright had carried out a ‘targeted campaign of murder’ and drew his attention to the ‘macabre’ way in which he had arranged two of the women’s bodies in a ‘cruciform’ position. There had been a ‘substantial degree of premeditation and planning’ in the murders, the judge went on, which meant, ‘It is right you should spend your whole life in prison.’
When Wright was led down to the cells he made no eye contact with anyone in the courtroom; neither did he make any comment whatever.
In the wake of the verdict, some of the victims’ families expressed their satisfaction with Wright’s whole life term, but others most certainly did not.
The families of Tania Nicol and Paula Clennell, in particular, expressed disapproval. ‘Today, as this case has come to an end, we would like to say justice has been done,’ they said in a statement outside the court, ‘but we’re afraid that where five young lives have been cruelly ended, the person responsible will be kept warm, nourished and protected. In no way has justice been done.’
They went on to demand a return to hanging. ‘I wish we still had the death penalty,’ their statement went on, ‘as this is what he truly deserves … These crimes deserve the ultimate punishment and that can only mean one thing. Where a daughter and the other victims were given no human rights by this monster, he will be guarded by the establishment at great cost to the taxpayers of this country and emotionally to the bereaved families.’
Yet within a matter of weeks, Wright had launched an appeal against his conviction. In a letter to the Court of Appeal he claimed that the trial should not have been held in Ipswich, that his defence team did not represent him effectively enough, and that much of the evidence against him did not add up. Wright also accused the police of not adequately investigating other potential suspects.
‘The prosecution alleged I had drugged all five women and then strangled them and yet there wasn’t a shred of evidence found on myself, home or car relating to drugs,’ Wright said. ‘All five women were stripped naked of clothing/jewellery/phones/bags and no evidence was found in my house or car.’
Wright’s appeal was heard four months later, in July 2008, when Lord Justice Hughes, sitting alone, concluded that Wright had no ‘arguable’ grounds for the appeal. By this time Wright had dispensed with his previous legal team, and was representing himself. The judge did not criticise the former forklift truck driver for doing so – indeed he said that his arguments had been ‘moderately and carefully expressed and coherently formulated’. Nevertheless, Lord Justice Hughes dismissed his claim that the jury was unduly influenced by the press and concluded that it was ‘quite clear’ that ‘the defendant was fairly treated’.
Wright refused to accept the judgement and two weeks later on 15 July he asked for a further appeal before three judges.
By that time he – like David Mulcahy and Jeremy Bamber before hi
m – had claimed publicly that he was innocent of the crimes. In a letter, sent from Long Lartin Prison in Worcestershire, to his local newspaper, the East Anglian Daily Times, Wright claimed that he did not have a ‘violent bone in his body’ and felt ‘deep sorrow and heartfelt pain’ for the families of the five murdered women.
‘People should believe I am innocent,’ he wrote, ‘because I have gone through my whole life trying to be fair and considerate to other people as I possibly could … to take a life I would have thought would be the ultimate form of aggression. I just know in my heart that one day my innocence will be proved and I will be able to go home to try and rebuild my life, whatever that home will be.’
The former merchant seaman added, ‘What I would say to the people of Suffolk is, “Be on your guard because the real killer is still out there.”’ He also explained that he had been distressed and embarrassed that his sexual habits had been revealed in court, but insisted they did not mean he was the killer. ‘All their evidence proved was that I had contact with said girls, but not one shred of evidence showed that I killed them.’
The letter infuriated the families of the victims. Rosemary Nicholls, the mother of Annette, was particularly angry. ‘I think it is a load of rubbish and it is him trying to get the sympathy of the people of Suffolk and beyond,’ she explained. ‘We sat in court and listened to all the evidence against him and I cannot possibly see how he is innocent. He did not look in court as though he felt any sorrow at all. There was no remorse. He is a disgusting object. He should do the decent thing and tell us what he did to our daughters and where everything happened.’
Meanwhile, Paula Clennell’s father Brian added, ‘It has turned my stomach. He can do what he wants. He has hobbies and a TV and the gym and meals every day. They live the life of Riley. I say let him rot in hell.’
Lifers Page 36