Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  ‘It wasn’t right for a mother and someone who came from Pakistan to change the way she dressed all of a sudden. It wasn’t right at all,’ he said later. His wife certainly knew about her husband’s feelings – even confessing to a friend, ‘Count the days before he kills me,’ – although she did nothing practical to protect herself or her children; and she certainly did not leave the family home.

  On his return to Manchester from Thailand, Arshad freely confessed to murdering his entire family, telling the police, ‘My beautiful kids. I don’t regret killing that bitch but my kids. Killing my kids.’

  Arshad later retracted that confession, however, claiming that it was his wife who killed the children and that he killed her as a result. His claim meant that there had to be a full trial for the four murders. It began on 27 February 2007 at Manchester Crown Court before Mr Justice David Clarke with Arshad pleading guilty to just one charge of manslaughter – that of his wife – and not guilty to the murder charges.

  When the prosecution opened their case against him, outlining the details of the injuries to Uzma and her three children, one female member of the jury broke down and wept.

  For his part, Arshad gave evidence in his own defence, telling the jury that he adored his wife – ‘she was beautiful,’ – but also depicting her as a bad-tempered, materialistic spendthrift who continually put him down and thought herself to be his superior. He maintained that he struggled to keep afloat financially and was forced to work longer and longer hours to sustain her and the family. He also denied the prosecution’s claims that he abused her – insisting instead that actually she had hit him.

  As for killing her, Arshad told the court that he had ‘blanked out’ after confronting his wife about killing their children and his next recollection had been waking up naked in the bath holding the rounders bat. ‘I don’t feel any responsibility,’ he insisted. ‘What happened is nothing to do with me.’

  The jury declined to believe him, not least because of the extensive forensic evidence linking him to the crimes, including the fact that when he flew back to Heathrow his Nike trainers still bore some of Uzma’s blood, while some of his daughter Henna’s was on a T-shirt in his suitcase. It took the jury just two hours to find him guilty unanimously of all four counts of murder on 13 March 2007.

  Uzma’s brother, Rahat Ali, shouted, ‘Yes!’ as the foreman of the jury announced their decision, and a statement from him and the rest of Uzma’s family was then read out in court. ‘No one can heal the grief we have suffered,’ it began. ‘Uzma was my best friend, our beloved sister and beautiful daughter. My mother can’t understand how he could destroy them … None of us could understand how a father could do such a thing to his own children and his wife.’

  Passing sentence, Mr Justice David Clarke told Arshad bluntly, ‘You beat your wife to death in her bedroom and then coldly and deliberately you brought your sleepy children downstairs to meet their deaths. You left the scene and fled the country. It was over three weeks before the bodies were discovered. There is no suggestion of mental illness on your part … Life imprisonment in your case means life. You killed your entire family in circumstances of great brutality.’

  For his part Arshad displayed no emotion whatever – beyond shutting his eyes as the judge pronounced sentence. Four members of the jury, by contrast, were in tears.

  Outside the court, Uzma’s brother Rahat applauded the judge saying, ‘I am glad this man will never get out of prison. The judge made a brilliant decision. A person like this should never be freed.’

  As for the reasons for the murders, Detective Superintendent Martin Bottomley of Greater Manchester Police explained, ‘We will never really get to the bottom of it. There are a number of theories but I don’t think we will know until he tells us.’

  That was unlikely to happen, DS Bottomley went on, because Arshad had declined to say a single word to the police after his initial confession. ‘When he came off the plane Arshad came across as someone who wanted to tell us everything,’ the superintendent said. ‘He showed remorse. He was upset. He arrived at Cheadle police station eight hours later and he has not spoken to us since. The first time we saw him open his mouth was at the trial.’

  Arshad has not made any comment of any kind on his crime since his conviction, and it seems highly unlikely that he will do so now, for it would appear – according to those close to the case – that he feels ‘totally justified in what he did’, seeing it as an ‘honour killing’ acceptable to his religion and community.

  The possibility that Arshad might find himself in prison for the rest of his life appears to have made no difference whatever to his actions, and – perhaps significantly – he has also declined to launch any kind of appeal against his sentence or conviction. There can be little doubt that he deserves to spend at the very least a large proportion of the rest of his life behind prison bars.

  The same must surely be true of homeless man Mark Martin, who memorably remarked to a fellow prisoner when he was on remand for the killing of three young women in Nottingham between December 2004 and January 2005, ‘If you’ve killed one, you might as well have killed twenty-one. I’m going to be the city’s first serial killer.’

  As a child, round-faced Martin, who was born in Nottingham in 1981, was fascinated by serial killers, including the Moors Murderer Ian Brady and the ‘Black Panther’, Donald Neilson. He even boasted to his best friend at school, Gareth Moyes, how the two of them were going to be the next Kray twins, a pair of brutal gangsters. By then Martin had developed an unhealthy appetite for extreme violence.

  ‘I saw him once try to smother a baby because it was crying,’ Moyes was to admit later. ‘I just shouted at him, “What are you doing?”’ Before long, the two teenagers were smoking cannabis and taking amphetamines together, which provoked Martin’s aggressive nature still further. Moyes remembered that his friend would hit and swear at young girls they met together.

  By the end of October 2004 Martin’s already dysfunctional life as a husband, father and ex-homeless man was beginning to disintegrate. He even telephoned the police on 1 November to tell the operator, ‘I want to hurt somebody. I’m going to end up killing someone … I was locked up last night for trying to strangle my ex-wife.’ It turned out that she had told Martin that she no longer trusted him with their son because of his violent temper.

  Martin’s response was to return to living on the streets of Nottingham, where he was known as ‘Reds’ because of a distinctive birthmark on his cheek. But he was also known for bullying and intimidating other homeless people while living rough, often stealing what few possessions they had and boasting that he would be famous. The method he chose to achieve his ambition was murder.

  On 29 December 2004, an eighteen-year-old homeless girl called Katie Baxter became Martin’s first victim. She was last seen alive at her sister Charlene’s house that evening, where she had been attending a family party, although she had concealed that fact that she was living rough from her relatives. Two days later, a second young woman, Zoe Pennick, aged twenty-six, also disappeared. She too had been living rough in Nottingham for some time, even though she had a seven-year-old son (who was looked after by her father). Both women had fallen into Martin’s vicious clutches.

  Yet it was not until Friday 11 February 2005 that the bodies of Baxter and Pennick were found – inside a derelict warehouse in the city which was a favourite shelter for the homeless community, and where Martin had set himself up in a makeshift tent amongst the rubble.

  The local police had heard a seri
es of rumours that there might be ‘bodies’ buried there, and at 11 am on 11 February 2005 a sniffer dog discovered Baxter’s decomposed body under a ‘carefully placed’ mixture of bricks and debris. Five days later, while searching for forensic evidence in an effort to find Baxter’s killer, the police also discovered Pennick’s decomposed body, less than two metres away from Katie’s, and also buried under rubble. Both women had been beaten and strangled.

  Police quickly linked the two young women’s deaths to that of a third, Ellen Frith, a twenty-five-year-old mother of two, whose partly burned body had been found in a burning ‘squat’ in the city centre on 24 January 2005. She too had been beaten and strangled.

  It did not take long for the police to identify Martin as a prime suspect. As one officer put it later, ‘He was a bully with a short fuse and there was barely a homeless person in Nottingham who did not have a bad experience to tell about him. Nearly everyone we spoke to pointed the finger at him.’

  Martin had not been acting alone, however. He had called on the help of two other homeless men during the killings. One was John Ashley, aged thirty-four, known locally as ‘Cockney John’, who played a part in the killing of Baxter and Pennick, while the other was Dean Carr, aged thirty, who was involved in the murder of Frith.

  Martin and Ashley were both charged with the murders of Baxter and Pennick and remanded in custody to await their trial, while Carr was charged with the murder of Frith and also remanded.

  While he was in prison, Martin began to brag about the killings – telling a cell-mate named Scott Sinclair the precise and grisly details of how exactly he had murdered his victims. After he did so, Sinclair told the prison authorities and the police about Martin’s boasts, and his statement to the police left no doubt about Martin’s capacity for extreme violence towards women, nor about his scant regard for human life. He had killed them, he told Sinclair, for no reason other than that one had ‘scratched his face’ and the other had left a hypodermic needle in his bed.

  When they appeared at Nottingham Crown Court on 16 January 2006, however, Martin and his two accomplices denied the murder charges.

  Opening the case for the prosecution, barrister Peter Kelson QC told the jury that Martin ‘seemed to be glorying in his notoriety … You will hear evidence that he was relishing the prospect of being known as Nottingham’s first serial killer.

  ‘He seems to have a fascination with violence towards women,’ the prosecutor went on, ‘with the crimes he committed and with the suffering his victims endured.’

  Pressing home the point, Kelson explained that both Martin and Ashley – who had once been Katie Baxter’s boyfriend – had made comments to friends about the killings even before the bodies were found.

  One prosecution witness, who had also spent time in jail with Martin while he was on remand, explained from the witness box that he once asked Martin how many women he had killed and was told, ‘Oh five,’ and that Martin boasted that he had fed the other two victims to pigs at a farm in Leicester – a claim that has never been substantiated. He added that Martin was upset that he did not have photographs of the two other bodies to prove he had done it.

  Another witness from Martin’s time in prison on remand, who had been terrified by his grim boasts and was persuaded to give evidence against him anonymously, gave the court some of the details of Martin’s account of his killing of Baxter and Pennick.

  The witness explained that Martin had reacted badly when Katie scratched him. ‘He said he picked her up and took her to the factory (the disused warehouse) because she fancied him. They were chatting and went into his tent. Then he just snapped and strangled her. He dragged her out of the tent, into the factory and buried her with debris.’

  The anonymous witness also explained that Martin had persuaded Pennick to go with him to pick up 2,000 cigarettes that he wanted her to sell for him. Once there, he grabbed her by the throat and strangled her. He then laid her body next to Katie’s and buried her in a similar way. ‘He said he’d sorted her out and “smashed her legs like biscuits” … He said it was hard and she didn’t want to die. He was punching her, kicking her. In the end he stood on her throat.’ The witness also revealed that Martin had vomited on one of the two girls because she had soiled herself while being strangled, but that he had the presence of mind to remove her top in case he had left DNA traces from the vomit.

  It was compelling evidence, made all the more so by the testimony of Martin’s former cell-mate Scott Sinclair. But Martin himself declined to give evidence on his own behalf. Nevertheless, it took the jury a week to reach a conclusion. It was not until Thursday 23 February that they returned unanimous verdicts of guilty on all three defendants.

  The following day, Mr Justice Butterfield passed sentence. Starting with Martin – who was standing impassively in the dock before him – he said grimly, ‘These murders were committed by you because you positively enjoy killing. You took the totally innocent lives of these women for your own perverted gratification. You have devastated the lived of those who loved them and have not shown a moment of remorse. You have revelled in the macabre details of each senseless, brutal, callous killing. The facts of the offences are so horrific and the seriousness of your offending so exceptionally high, you are to be kept in prison for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Cockney John’ Ashley was then sentenced to life with a minimum of twenty-five years for his part in the murders of Baxter and Pennick, while Dean Carr was also sentenced to life with a minimum of fourteen years for his role in the killing of Frith.

  Outside the court, Baxter’s father Stephen told reporters, ‘Katie was a lovely, happy girl with her whole life ahead of her … She associated with people from the homeless community and although she often stayed in those circles, it was no reason for her to be murdered. She did not deserve to die.’

  Pennick’s father Kevin added, ‘The pain of losing my little girl in such a brutal way will always remain with me. Zoe was not homeless. She had a home to go to but chose to associate with other people who led the homeless lifestyle.’

  Perhaps predictably, Martin declined to appeal against either his sentence or his conviction, preferring to glory in the notoriety that his killings brought him, and relishing in his new nickname of ‘The Sneighton Strangler’. After all, this was the man who had written to his schoolfriend Gareth Moyes from Wakefield Prison before his trial, saying cheerfully, ‘I can’t believe I’m in jail for murder and three of them as well. Ha ha ha, oh dear, ha. Yeah, it’s a mess boy, hey pal, but I’ll get over it. I was all over the news.’

  It is hard to see what other sentence could possibly have been passed on Arshad or Martin. The full weight of the law as it stands today surely demands that they spend the majority of the rest of their lives behind bars – and yet there remains a lingering doubt in my mind about whether the whole life sentences they both received do not, in some way at least, contradict the basic tenets of a civilised society.

  Professor Dirk van Zyl Smit of Nottingham University, an expert on penal law and life imprisonment, pointed out in 2014, ‘A commitment that we will never consider the release of some offenders serving life sentences, except perhaps when they are at death’s door, means that we write them off permanently. It means that we deny that with the passage of time they may change for the better; or that we may change our assessment of their crimes.’

  ‘Worse still,’ Professor Van Zyl Smit concluded, ‘we are denying some fellow humans all hope. In that sense we are putting them in the same position as those awaiting execution on death row.’
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  It is a powerful argument for, as the case of Jamie Reynolds illustrates for all to see, society, in the shape of its judiciary, can effectively condemn a young man in his early twenties to what could amount to sixty, or even seventy, years in prison. Naturally enough, Reynolds’ young female victim’s family, including her police detective father, are determined that he should pay the maximum possible price for the horrifyingly ugly murder of their daughter Georgia – an entirely reasonable emotion that is shared by almost every other family that loses a loved one to a brutal killing.

  Yet there is a sense in which that desire for revenge against a murderer has surely to be tempered by a sense that every prisoner, no matter how heinous the crime, at least deserves the prospect of redemption – however remote. Over a very long period behind prison bars he or she may be capable of rehabilitation and change; and to deny them even the possibility of release is to deny their humanity.

  As Professor Van Zyl Smit argued powerfully in The Guardian in 2014, ‘The United Kingdom is one of the staunchest opponents of capital punishment. Yet it appears to have no moral objection to an irreducible life sentence, which in many ways is simply a delayed death penalty. This must change, not because the European Court of Human Rights says that it should, but because failing to act now is morally untenable.’

  There can be little argument that a whole life sentence in its present form is indeed a ‘delayed death penalty’, and as such deserves to be questioned far more rigorously than has been the case in this country in the fifty-one years since the effective abolition of the death penalty. Indeed, whole life sentences have become an increasingly familiar part of the sentencing process as those five decades have passed – with ‘sentence creep’ meaning that they are awarded far more regularly than they once were. The political slogan ‘Tough on Crime’ has effectively translated into more and more whole life sentences.