Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Probably the most horrifying case of all concerning a prisoner who killed while on licence after his release – although not from a life sentence – concerns another rapist. In 1995, thirty-five-year-old David Tiley was convicted of two counts of rape and one of buggery and sentenced to serve six years in prison. He had broken into a woman’s home and attacked her while her children were asleep in the next door bedroom, brutally beating her around the face with his fists.

  Yet when Tiley was released in 2001 the official judgement on him was that there was a ‘low to medium’ risk of his harming members of the public again. It was to prove a tragic misjudgement. In the six years after Tiley’s release he was returned to prison no fewer than three times for failing to inform the police of his whereabouts – thereby breaching his licence. In the same period he also violently and sexually assaulted a string of former girlfriends, but not all of those attacks were reported to the authorities, and no official action was taken.

  The truth is that the six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered and heavily tattooed Tiley, whose criminal record stretched back two decades, knew exactly how to work the parole and release supervision system to his advantage. He groomed the police and the Probation Service into assuming that he no longer posed any kind of sexual or violent threat to anyone. He did so by striking up a relationship with a forty-nine-year-old mother of five sons called Susan Hale, who suffered from cerebellar ataxia – a rare degenerative brain disorder which brought her difficulties in walking.

  The couple met in an amusement arcade in Southampton in the summer of 2006 – which Mrs Hale was visiting on her mobility scooter. An active, outgoing woman, in spite of her disability, she worked part-time in a charity shop in the city and prided herself on not giving in to her poor balance and need for support. Tiley clearly saw an opportunity and seized it. Early in August 2006 he moved in with her, but did not tell the police. When his failure to do so was discovered, it led to another breach of his licence which saw him sent back to prison for five months. But when he was released again early in 2007, Tiley duly moved back in with Mrs Hale.

  To be fair to Hampshire Police, who were in charge of supervising Tiley, no sooner had he settled into Mrs Hale’s flat in Southampton than an officer went to visit the couple together. He went to ensure that Mrs Hale knew about her new companion’s criminal background, and later reported that she ‘implied’ she was aware of his past and was ‘happy’ to continue the relationship. No one will ever know whether Susan Hale made that commitment willingly, or under coercion from Tiley; suffice to say that it was taken at face value by the officer visiting her, however naïve that may have been, and the matter was left. Within a matter of weeks Susan Hale was dead.

  In the evening of Wednesday 7 March 2007, the diminutive, kindly Mrs Hale, who was known for her sense of humour, made the mistake of teasing her new lover – to whom she was by now she engaged to marry – about his criminal past. In an instant, Tiley exploded with rage and hit her viciously on the head with a hammer that he grabbed from a tool box in the kitchen. Now clearly bent on sexual violence, he tied his terrified fiancée up with dressing gown cords, binding her ankles and wrists before dragging her into an upstairs bedroom. There he committed a serious sexual assault with a table lamp before stabbing her twice in the head and twice in the chest with a six-inch kitchen knife. Tiley did nothing to save her; instead he stayed with her, plainly intent on watching the life drain out of her body. Pathologists were to say later that she died ‘rapidly, but not immediately’.

  Demonstrating no remorse, Tiley wrapped his dead fiancée in a duvet from the bed and turned on a fan in the bedroom to lower the temperature and conceal any subsequent smell from her decomposing body. After doing so, he sprayed deodorant around the room. Mrs Hale’s decaying corpse was to remain in that bedroom for the next eight days, while Tiley went about his normal business of visiting betting shops and amusement arcades on Southampton seafront, cooking himself meals in the kitchen and sleeping on the sofa in the front room, regardless of the ever-increasing smell. When family or friends called or sent text messages to her mobile phone, he would reply and tell them that she was not well, but that he was looking after her.

  Eight days later, on the morning of Thursday 15 March 2007, Mrs Hale’s regular carer, Sarah Merritt, aged thirty-nine and a mother of two children, who was responsible for looking after the forty-nine year old’s general health and well-being, arrived to give her a scheduled bath. Tiley opened the door and let her in, but when she asked where Mrs Hale was he told her she was dead and produced a knife. Tiley proceeded to tie Sarah Merritt’s wrists and ankles, take her bank card from her purse and demand to know the PIN so that he could remove money with it. Desperate, Merritt told him, and Tiley left her gagged and bound while he went out to withdraw £150 from her account.

  When Tiley returned he removed the gag from her mouth and ‘had a conversation’ with her while he smoked two cigarettes. Sarah Merritt may have thought that he was going to spare her life, but she was wrong. When she began to sob with fear Tiley became angry again, tore off her clothes and raped her before stabbing her twice in the neck with the same kitchen knife that he had used to kill Susan Hale. Tiley left her body in the hall of the flat, but, realising that she would be traced, left himself – going on the run to nearby Dorset – but not before he had scrawled the word ‘GOTCHA’ in Mrs Merritt’s blood inside the front door.

  Just two days later, on Saturday 17 March 2006, police received information that Tiley had been seen in Swanage, about fifty-five miles along the coast from Southampton, and he was arrested at 2 pm on the seafront. He had removed another £100 using Sarah Merritt’s bank card before taking a train to Weymouth. On 14 June he appeared at Winchester Crown Court, where, faced with overwhelming evidence against him, Tiley pleaded guilty.

  Sitting in the dock, displaying no emotion, Tiley listened to a heart-rending victim’s impact statement read to the court by Sarah Merritt’s husband Peter.

  ‘What is this world coming to,’ he asked, ‘when a kind, loving and caring person such as Sarah loses her life doing the job that she did, and being killed in such a wicked way while caring for others? I cannot get the thoughts out of my mind of how scared and so very afraid she must have been that day and that I could do nothing to help her in her hour of need. I am going to have to live with that for the rest of my life. Sarah didn’t do anything to deserve such an end to her life.’

  On behalf of Susan Hale, one of her five sons, David Chopra, told the court that the horrific details of what had happened to his mother and her carer had shocked the family ‘to the core’.

  But those were not the only statements read to Winchester Crown Court on that June day in 2007.

  Tiley himself instructed his defence counsel, Lisa Matthews, to read a note that he had written and which he wanted the relatives of both victims to hear. ‘I want to express to you all my regret,’ his statement read. ‘No words that I can say will replace Susan and Sarah. I am so sorry for what I have done. I deeply regret what has happened. But no amount of justice would compensate for what I have done. I hope that when I am sentenced you will be able to find some closure and get on with your lives. I am totally to blame for what has happened.’

  Lisa Matthews then added, underlining that Tiley’s statement was not a plea for mitigation of his sentence, ‘There is nothing I can say that is going to change the outcome of the sentence. He knows that and everyone in court knows that. He knows that life is going to mean life.’

  And so it did. Mr Justice Irwin was coldly dismissive as he
addressed the prisoner in the dock. ‘David Tiley,’ he began, ‘I will speak to you about what you have done, but your case is such I’m quite unsure if you will ever grasp the enormity of your own acts.’

  The judge went on to explain that the police knew he was living with Susan Hale in Southampton. ‘As we have heard, she was disabled with cerebellar ataxia, making her vulnerable and needing care. You applied to the Department of Work and Pensions to become her registered carer. Instead of caring for her, you killed her. Mrs Sarah Merritt was a dedicated community carer, who did look after Susan Hale. You raped her and you killed her.

  ‘The brutality and evil defies adequate description,’ Mr Justice Irwin went on. ‘The pain and grief of the victims’ families left in the wake of the deaths is profound … One’s heart goes out to them; nothing can repair the damage done to them.’

  The judge concluded by sentencing Tiley to two life terms. ‘These offences are quite exceptionally serious,’ he said firmly, ‘and the only appropriate sentence should be a whole life order. The only proper punishment for you is that you must never be released.’

  In particular, Mr Justice Irwin used the word ‘punishment’ in his sentencing remarks. There was no question of Tiley ‘paying his debt to society’ or being ‘given an opportunity to consider his actions’, implying there was at least the possibility of eventual redemption and rehabilitation. The whole life sentence was a matter of punishment, pure and simple – and in that respect was only an inch away from the death penalty, had that still been a possibility under the law. Mr Justice Irwin concluded bluntly that he saw no alternative to locking Tiley up for the rest of his life – with every possibility that he would spend the final thirty to forty years of his life behind prison bars.

  Yet the failure of the authorities, including the police, to supervise Tiley during his release cannot be ignored for its contribution to the deaths of both Susan Hale and Sarah Merritt. Defending the action of the force after the end of Tiley’s trial, the Assistant Chief Constable of Hampshire, Simon Cole, said that Tiley had been the ‘subject of visits in accordance with national standards’. He went on, ‘Short of twenty-four-hour surveillance or locking up an offender for life, there can be no guarantees, and it is just not possible for agencies involved to do that. The professionals involved in monitoring this man did their best working within the system.’

  If ‘their best’ was visiting Susan Hale and Tiley when they were together (not separately) and asking her if she was aware of his criminal past – and accepting an ‘implied’ response that she was – is ‘working within the system’, then it would be fair to say that the system leaves a great deal to be desired. Yet it later turned out that Tiley was one of 300 violent or sex offenders being monitored in the Southampton area early in 2007 – by a team that had originally consisted of just two officers but had been expanded.

  It also transpired that there had been a lack of ‘communication’ between the many agencies involved in Tiley’s case, which meant that details of Tiley’s breaches of his licence – and his three returns to prison in the wake of his 2001 release – had not been shared ‘effectively’ between them. It is a sign, if any were needed, that the profound demands on the professional agencies charged with the monitoring and supervision of the most violent criminals to protect the public often go unsupported and virtually ignored – until a very public case reminds society of what is expected of them.

  In fact, some argue that the whole life sentence is a safeguard against having to rely on the supervision of prisoners (and particularly murderers) in society, as it places the worst of the worst offenders within the prison system so that they can be monitored, although that does not – as we have seen – always prevent them from killing again within the prison walls.

  Like the fifty or more other prisoners serving whole life terms, Tiley may have hoped that the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in July 2013 – that the sentence was ‘inhuman and degrading’ – would lead to every whole life term being reconsidered by the Court of Appeal in England and Wales. But, as we have seen, those hopes were firmly squashed by the Court’s decision in February 2014 that they were entitled to sentence prisoners to whole life terms, as there were ‘exceptional’ circumstances that would allow the Secretary of State for Justice to release a prisoner serving a whole life term. That ruling was accepted by the European Court in 2015, and thereby dashed any hope that Tiley and others may have nurtured that their terms would eventually be reviewed and replaced by a fixed minimum sentence.

  It is hard to feel sympathy for Tiley, whose two murders could hardly have been more depraved, just as it is all but impossible to feel sympathy for the other men serving whole life terms for murders of the utmost callousness.

  These three cases prove that a life sentence for murder or rape offers no guarantee that the offender will not kill again upon his release. Each one demonstrates the weakness of the Parole Board and the Probation Service which tragically failed to protect the public from these three violent men. They were each freed to commit the most terrible crimes and yet the system that released them remains in place today.

  It is difficult to ignore the conclusion drawn privately by some in the judiciary that the only effective way to protect the public when it comes to the most heinous crimes is to rely more and more upon the whole life sentence, as that apparently protects the public – if not the perpetrator’s fellow prisoners.

  19

  They Deserve Nothing Less – Or Do They?

  Rahan Arshad and Mark Martin

  Families of murder victims often feel very strongly that the killer of their loved one should spend the rest of his or her life behind bars, so heinous were their crimes, and it is difficult to disagree with them. Two men in particular epitomise the revulsion society feels for murderers whose crimes set them so far apart from the morals of a civilised society that it is difficult to see any other punishment as appropriate – they deserve to go to prison for the rest of their natural lives.

  These two men are a private hire/minicab driver called Rahan Arshad and a ‘homeless drifter’ from Nottingham named Mark Martin, both of whom killed more than one person and did so without hesitation, conscience or remorse, in the most dreadful ways imaginable.

  Let us begin with Arshad. At some point during the late evening of Friday 28 July 2006, this thirty-six-year-old Pakistani, who worked as a driver for a firm in Didsbury, Manchester, killed his wife Uzma, aged thirty-two, and their three children, Henna, aged six, Abbas, aged eight, and eleven-year-old Adam.

  He killed his wife first, beating her to death in the bedroom he shared with her using a £1.99 ‘Funsport’ rounders bat that he had bought for the purpose just the day before. He hit her no fewer than twenty-three times. Then, quite calmly, he ushered their three children downstairs into the family playroom and beat them to death using the same rounders bat. He then covered all four bodies with duvets, left the house, and then the country.

  The four victims, who all had very severe head injuries, were not discovered at the family’s home in Cheadle Hulme, Manchester, for almost a month – not, in fact, until Sunday, 20 August 2006. The stench of decaying human flesh had finally alerted the neighbours that something was wrong.

  As one of the first police officers on the scene said later, ‘The bodies were so badly decomposed that the floor was soup because the bodies had basically melted. The forensic team who worked on this deserve a medal – they could hardly step anywhere.’ Uzma and her three children could only be formally identified by their dental records, so
bad was their condition.

  Arshad had planned the attack with some care, telling friends that he was taking the family to Dubai for a holiday – thereby making sure no one would be suspicious when their house appeared deserted. In the meantime, however, he bought himself a single ticket to Thailand.

  He actually left the country on Saturday 29 July, the day after the killings, abandoning his wife’s BMW car at London’s Heathrow airport before boarding a flight to Bangkok and travelling on to the holiday destination of Phuket. The last-known sighting of his children was the day before, on the final day of term at their school, Cavendish Road Primary.

  Shortly after the discovery of the bodies the police tracked Arshad down in Thailand – with the help of the Thai police – and he agreed to help the British police with their investigation, possibly fearing that conditions in a Thai prison might be distinctly harsher than those in England. On 30 August 2006, he was arrested by officers from Greater Manchester Police in Thailand and flown back to England the following day.

  There was no other suspect for the killings, and it rapidly emerged that Arshad had been consumed by jealousy as a result of his wife Uzma’s affair with a neighbour’s husband. It transpired that his and his wife’s marriage had been ‘arranged’. They were first cousins who had never met, and only knew of each other through their families.

  It also became clear that after their marriage Arshad had rapidly become infuriated by his wife’s acceptance of western style and dress, including wearing tight jeans and tops. He insisted privately that by doing so she was ‘disrespecting him’, an attitude only made more acute by his subsequent discovery of her affair.