In May 2008, Bamber’s lawyers tried and failed to have his whole life tariff reduced. High Court judge, Mr Justice Tugendhat, said: ‘These murders were exceptionally serious. In my judgment you ought to spend the whole of the rest of your life in prison.’
A month earlier, Bamber attempted to have his prison status downgraded from category A to B, claiming he posed a lower risk and required a less severe regime inside.
In April 2007, he passed a lie detector test in Full Sutton Prison, near York. He was asked 12 questions, including: ‘Did you shoot your family on 7 August 1985?’
He is now campaigning for a third appeal against his conviction and has employed controversial lawyer Giovanni Di Stefano – who has represented the likes of Saddam Hussein and Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic – to head his legal team. Nicknamed ‘The Devil’s Advocate’, Di Stefano says the new case for Bamber focuses on evidence gleaned from graphic police pictures of Sheila, which he claims were undisclosed at the original trial and the two subsequent appeals.
The pictures, taken by a police photographer who arrived at the farmhouse after 9am, allegedly show the blood still red and flowing from Sheila’s wounds. Bamber’s team say the new evidence puts the case into a fresh light. They argue that if blood was still leaking from Sheila’s wounds, then she had died relatively recently, and certainly long after the time that Bamber met with police at around 3.50am. His lawyers also claim to have a police radio log proving that in the hours after meeting Bamber outside the farmhouse, officers believed they saw, through a bedroom window, someone alive inside the house. At the original trial, the officers put the sighting down to ‘a shadow’ or ‘a trick of the light’. Di Stefano believes the new evidence proves they were right the first time.
He said: ‘These photographs prove, at the very least, that Mr Bamber could not have killed his sister. Put it all together and it is a very bad picture of yet another possible miscarriage of justice, for which a man has paid with more than 20 years of his life.’
Whether the new evidence turns out to be as overwhelming as Bamber hopes remains to be seen, but his cousin, David Boutflour, insists: ‘The fact is the man is guilty as hell. I really wish Jeremy wasn’t a murderer and a liar, that he wasn’t the one who killed five members of my family. Jeremy has probably convinced himself he didn’t do it to the point he passed a lie detector test, but he did it, and he deserves to rot in jail for it.
‘The Criminal Cases Review Commission really needs to stop being persuaded by publicity seekers. If Jeremy came out of prison, we’re pretty sure he would come after us.’
‘HANNIBAL THE CANNIBAL’
‘It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad. They do not know the answer and they do not care, just so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind.’
Robert Maudsley
Name: Robert Maudsley
Crime: Quadruple murder
Date of Conviction: 16 March 1979
Age at Conviction: 25
At 11am on 26 February 1977, Broadmoor patient Robert Maudsley and fellow psychopath David Cheeseman snatched a third inmate, David Francis, from his room. They claimed Francis, a paedophile, had sexually assaulted a friend of theirs.
As they dragged him, kicking and screaming, across the corridor, four nurses intervened but they were threatened with knives fashioned from pieces of a dismantled radio. Maudsley and Cheeseman bundled Francis into an office and trussed him up with flex from a record player.
For more than nine sickening hours, the corridors rang with the sound of his screams. Staff recalled hearing him shout,‘God, no; God, no!’ while the sadistic pair took their time in torturing him. Between punches, kicks and knife cuts, he pleaded for his life. After nine hours, just after 8pm, Maudsley garrotted Francis and finally put him out of his misery. He and Cheeseman held the body triumphantly above their heads, moving to the door so that guards and medical staff could see them through the window.
What happened next is the stuff of prison legend. According to one guard, when he and his colleagues entered the room, the dead man’s head was ‘cracked open like a boiled egg.’ A spoon was hanging out of it and part of his brain was missing. It is believed Maudsley ate it.
Bizarrely, considering the crime had occurred inside a secure mental hospital, Maudsley was declared fit to stand trial for the murder and was sent to Wakefield High-Security Prison in West Yorkshire, where his reputation preceded him. The grisly killing earned him two prison nicknames: ‘Blue’, after the colour his victims turned and ‘Spoons’ in homage to the utensil he is said to have used to sample Francis’s brain. When the serial killer film The Silence Of The Lambs was released 13 years later, the tabloid newspapers described him as the real-life Hannibal the Cannibal.
On 28 July 1978 – just five months after his arrival at Wakefield – a wild-eyed Maudsley strolled into a prison officer’s room, placed a homemade knife on the desk and calmly announced: ‘There will be two men short on the roll call.’
Shortly before morning exercise, the tall, wiry maniac had stood behind the door of his cell holding a knife crafted from a canteen soup spoon. He was waiting for his fellow inmate Salney Darwood, a 46-year-old sex offender who had been giving him French lessons. As Darwood entered the room, Maudsley pounced, frenziedly stabbing him in the back, neck and head. When his victim fell bleeding to the floor, he knelt over him and hacked away at his throat until he was sure he was dead. He then pushed the body under the bed and washed his blood-soaked hands.
With his weapon tucked into the waistband of his trousers, prisoner 467637 walked out to the yard, where he mixed with other inmates on exercise. An hour later, he spotted his next victim, William Roberts, who was lying face down on his bed. Maudsley – who had never met the man before – lunged at Roberts and stabbed him in the back of his head. When Roberts turned to face his deranged attacker, he was stabbed in his chest and face. Maudsley then lifted his victim and repeatedly banged his head against the wall with such force that chunks of plaster fell into the pool of blood on the floor.
Convicted of double murder the following year, the judge told Maudsley that he would spend the rest of his life in prison and he was inexplicably sent back to Wakefield. Unable to mix with other prisoners for his and their safety, Maudsley – now officially classed as ‘Britain’s Most Dangerous Prisoner’ – was placed in solitary confinement, where he has remained for more than 30 years.
During his time in solitary, he has been moved to a number of high-security prisons, including Woodhill in Buckinghamshire and Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, but he has spent the vast majority of his sentence at Wakefield. In 1983 a ‘cage’ was specially constructed for him in the basement of the jail, under F-Wing. A solid-steel door led to a bulletproof Perspex window, similar to the one through which Dr Lecter was observed in The Silence of the Lambs. The only furnishings were a table and chair made of compressed cardboard and a concrete slab, which served as a bed. Like Lecter, Maudsley was passed his meals and other items through a slot at the bottom of the window.
In an article in the Sunday Express in 2002, Maudsley described his life inside the cage:
At 8am breakfast is brought to my cage by my keepers and put under the inner gate, which has a gap at the bottom. It consists of cornflakes, a carton of prison milk, a one-inch container of jam and one of butter, two bread rolls and a bottle of hot water.
The milk is often sour, so I throw it and the cornflakes down the toilet and just eat the rolls with a cup of tea. This is the time I make applications to write letters or visiting orders. It is also the time I must request exercise. If I forget to ask, I am deemed not to need it.
If I have asked for exercise, six or seven officers take me out of the cage at 8.30am. First, I stand on a wooden box and spread my arms; then I am required to open my mouth, then stick out and lift my tongue. A keeper then gives me a rub-down, while another keeper uses a metal detector all over my body. I have to lift my feet for inspection.
; If I disagree with any aspect of this procedure I am returned to my cage and deemed to have refused exercise. Exercise is for one hour. I am not allowed to smoke or bring anything to drink out into the exercise yard. If another inmate attempts to speak to me from his cell window, he could be given CC [cellular confinement].
The yard has CCTV cameras and is made of concrete or Tarmac. There are no trees, grass or flowers. It is bare, sterile and bleak. I find the enforced silence depressing. When the hour is up, I have to go through the search process and return to the cage. I leave my shoes outside the cage. From 9.30–11am I see no one.
At 11am lunch is placed through the gap. I usually only eat half as it is tasteless, bland and unwholesome. At this time I am usually given any mail and a prison newspaper.
At 5.30pm I am given the last meal of the day. I am given hot water to last until 8am. I am given two loaves of white sliced bread a week. This usually goes mouldy after a few days. No extra butter or jam is provided.
On Wednesday afternoons my keepers bring me my ‘canteen’ to my cage. These are goods from the prison shop. Usually I can only afford hand-rolled tobacco, plus cigarette papers and a large box of matches.
On Sundays I am meant to be given a kit change. If it happens, I get one pillowcase, two sheets, two towels, two pairs of socks, two pairs of underpants, two T-shirts and a set of one-piece overalls. If it doesn’t happen, I have to stay in dirty clothes and sheets for another week.
For many years, Maudsley remained in the cage for 23 hours a day. In 2003 he was moved to solitary at Wakefield Prison’s Close Supervision Centre – where he still resides – which was set up especially to house the most disruptive inmates in Britain. Once a day, he leaves his cell for an hour to walk around the 20 x 12ft exercise yard, where the walls are so high that the sun never shines. His every move is watched by at least five guards. It has been three decades since the 6ft 2in prisoner killed anyone, but no one is taking any chances.
The mental and physical effects of solitude have made Maudsley appear far older than his years. He is gaunt and sickly-looking, his skin a ghostly white from a lack of natural light. In letters to The Times in March 2000, Maudsley said: ‘The prison authorities see me as a problem and their solution has been to put me into solitary confinement and throw away the key; to bury me alive in a concrete coffin. It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad. They do not know the answer and they do not care, so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind.’
He added: ‘I am left to stagnate, vegetate and to regress; left to confront my solitary head-on with people who have eyes, but don’t see and who have ears, but don’t hear; who have mouths, but don’t speak. My life in solitary is one long period of unbroken depression. All I have to look forward to is further mental breakdown and possible suicide. In many ways, I think this is what the authorities hope for. That way, the problem of Robert John Maudsley can be easily and swiftly resolved.’
Maudsley has a genius-level IQ and loves classical music, poetry and art. He studies the paintings of Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh and is keen to do an Open University degree in Art History.
He had a wretched upbringing. On 26 June 1953 he was born in Liverpool to bad parents, who already had three young boys. His father, also called Robert, was a quick-tempered lorry driver, who had little time for family life. He and his wife Jean struggled to cope with their children and just before the young Robert’s second birthday, he, his older brothers, Paul and Kevin, and big sister, Brenda, were deemed ‘suffering from parental neglect’ and taken into care by social services.
All four were moved to Nazareth House, a Roman-Catholic orphanage run by nuns in Liverpool. Several years later, it was decided that their parents – who had since had more offspring – were fit to take them back and they were moved home. Their new life was to be a relentless nightmare of sadistic physical and mental abuse.
Maudsley’s brother Paul recalled: ‘At the orphanage we had all got on really well. Our parents would come to visit, but they were just strangers. The nuns were our family and we all used to stick together. Then our parents took us home and we were subjected to physical abuse. It was something we’d never experienced before. They just picked on us, one by one, gave us a beating and sent us off to our room.’
The most brutal treatment, however, was reserved for little Robert. He said: ‘All I remember of my childhood is the beatings. Once I was locked in a room for six months and my father only opened the door to come in to beat me, four to six times a day. He used to hit me with sticks or rods, and once he bust a .22 air rifle over my back.’
Eventually, social services took Robert away and his father told his siblings that he had died. He spent the next few years in various foster homes and when he was 16, he made his way down to London and found work as a labourer. Within six months he developed a drug addiction and began supplementing his income as a rent boy. In 1974, four years after his arrival in London, he was picked up for sex by another labourer, John Farrell. Once the deed was done, Farrell produced photographs of children he had abused and Maudsley flew into a rage and garrotted him. Later that year he was found guilty of manslaughter by diminished responsibility and sent to Broadmoor Hospital, where he told doctors he sometimes heard voices in his head, telling him to kill his parents.
At his last murder trial in 1979, Maudsley admitted that during his violent rages he imagined his victims were his mother and father. His lawyers argued the murders were the result of pent-up aggression resulting from his terrible childhood. ‘When I kill, I think I have my parents in mind,’ he said. ‘If I had killed my parents in 1970, none of these people need have died. If I had killed them, then I would be walking around as a free man without a care in the world.’
Paul Maudsley is angry at the lack of treatment offered to his brother by the prison authorities. He said: ‘As far as I can tell, the prison authorities are trying to break him. Every time they see him making a little progress they throw a spanner in the works. His troubles started because he got locked up on his own as a kid – all they do when they put him back there is bring all that trauma back to him. All I want for Robert is that he be treated like other prisoners, but it seems that’s too much to ask.’
Norman Brennan of the Victims of Crime Trust says Maudsley forfeited his right to be treated like other prisoners when he murdered three of his fellow inmates: ‘Maudsley is a psychopath. He’s a danger to everyone he comes into contact with and we should not be bending over backwards and spending unnecessary time and resources pandering to his every wish.’
Dr Hugo Milne, a leading criminal psychologist who has spent many hours with other killers, including Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and Black Panther Donald Neilson, once said: ‘Maudsley was the only one I’ve ever been frightened of.’
‘THE TOWPATH STALKER’
‘We have got to piece our lives together again. Life will never be the same for any of us.’
Mother of victim
Name: Anthony Entwistle
Crime: Multiple rape and murder
Date of Conviction: 9 March 1988
Age at Conviction: 38
Walking along a secluded path alone at night, schoolgirl Michelle Calvey was a dream target for Anthony Entwistle. The predator was in his car, scouring the quiet roads around Blackburn, Lancashire, for a vulnerable young female to satisfy his lust for violent sex. It was Sunday, 10 April 1987 and Entwistle was enjoying his 18th day of freedom after serving seven years of a ten-year prison sentence for a string of vicious sex attacks.
Michelle, 16, had been to visit her aunt. She left at 9pm to catch the bus home for supper with her mum, step-dad, two brothers and sister. But a sex beast was following her every step.
Entwistle, 37, pounced on Michelle – who was just 5ft tall – on a canal towpath close to her aunt’s house. He bundled her into his car and then drove her to a more secluded place, where he could abuse her at will.
The following day, a rural policeman on his r
ounds found Michelle at Slipper Lowe, a woodland beauty spot on the fells above Darwen, about four miles from where she was abducted. No attempt had been made to hide her naked body, which had been openly dumped in a lovers’ lane. She had been raped and strangled with a ligature. Police doctors were able to prove that she had been a virgin before the assault.
‘It was a vicious attack,’ said Detective Superintendent Bill Hacking at a press conference the next morning. He went on: ‘It is possible she knew her attacker. He could have picked her up as she walked home. She was taken to the wooded area near Darwen by car and she would have had to be carried, or would have had to walk to the spot where her body was discovered. There had been no effort to conceal her. It is an area used by courting couples and someone may have seen something on Sunday night, which was a fine night.’
Routine police inquiries soon revealed that Entwistle was back on their patch after his prison stint. Within four days of the murder, he was arrested. The suspect initially claimed he was away for the weekend in Blackpool and did not return until the Monday evening. But he had no alibis and could not account for the several witnesses who had seen him in the Blackburn area during that period.
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