by Stephen Wade
Roberts had seen the inside of a prison before the murder. In 1959 he had been at the Old Bailey, charged with robbery with violence after breaking and entering a home, pretending to be the tax man. He was given a seven-year stretch and was told that he was ‘a brutal, vicious thug’.
In his existence as a lifer with a real life term, he has done what many do: enter the world of the artist, and learn the essential skills. He paints, and Kate Kray was impressed, although there is one drawback: he tends to draw murders of police officers. He has clearly indulged his artistic skills in a number of ways, one being making pastries. He is apparently skilful at making pastry flowers. This is all very much in line with the typical prison arts product and activities found across the establishment: many prisoners paint watercolours or make impressive matchstick vehicles, create computer art or edit magazines of poetry. Harry Roberts is in that category. But as a prisoner there is clearly still one fundamental problem: he still lives up to his chin in the thoughts and imaginings of his high-profile murder, back in the year when England won the World Cup.
CHAPTER 12
Dennis Stafford: Escape from Dartmoor
It is hard to believe, but there have been several escapes from Dartmoor prison. As Trevor James wrote in his book, About Dartmoor Prison, ‘Throughout Dartmoor’s history every escapee has had to face the hazards on the moor, a vast expanse of barren heath and bogs and rocky tors.’ He adds, ‘Every trick you ever heard of has been used by determined men breaking out from Dartmoor. Convicts have dug down through floors, prised stones out of their cell walls and even managed to hack their way through the barred windows, using makeshift ropes to lower themselves to the ground.’
In the late fifties and early sixties of the last century, there were six men ‘gone away’ within a few months, and one of these was Dennis Stafford. Stafford and William Day escaped on 5 January 1959, after using an improvised ladder, a pole taken from some scaffolding. There may have been outside help. The Times reported: ‘The search was made difficult by heavy rain and a thick mist over the moor. Even those familiar with the area often missed their way. In places a car’s headlamps could only penetrate a few yards. Immediately the escape was discovered, Devon County Police put their escape plan into operation. Rings of foot and motorised police around the prison spread for 20 miles.’
Stafford was something of an expert at escaping from Her Majesty’s hotels. He had escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in November 1956 and then recaptured in Trinidad. His career on the wrong side of the law was eventful to say the least, as he had also had damages awarded against him for causing a road crash in which a young woman had died.
But the real impact of Dennis Stafford was to come later. The inmates of British jails who have been interviewed about Dennis Stafford agree that here was a man with a lively mind – he liked chess and good conversation. Some report that, despite all this, there was something in his eyes when you spoke to him that showed he had an inner toughness. If ever a man needed such strength, it was this son of Joe Stafford. This is because his life has been a creative mix of myth, sheer media hype and undoubtedly a story of a miscarriage of justice.
The myth and the media are easily explained – Stafford is the man whose life inspired the cult crime novel and film, Get Carter. He is now seventy-seven. It is astonishing, when we read the compelling narrative of Stafford’s colourful life, that he is not yet the subject of a minor genre of crime-writing, with its own following.
The basis of the major story in Stafford’s life is the Sibbett murder: the circumstances are dramatic and atmospheric in the extreme. The sheer extent of the consequences, reaching into both tragedy and farce, make this one of Tyneside’s most notorious and intriguing cases. On a snowy night in January 1967, Angus Sibbett’s body was found, full of bullets, on the back seat of his Jaguar in South Hetton. He had been a collector in the one-armed bandit business in that area for some time, and it is now known that he was creaming a huge sum of money for himself from this activity. According to Frankie Fraser, the figure was around £1,600 a week (about £24,000 today). His offence was certain to make enemies and put his life at risk. Sibbett was living a jet-set lifestyle. His boss was Vincent Luvaglio, known as Vince Landa, and his son Michael played a prominent part in the set up, some say. The affair was later to be known as the ‘Gaming Wars’ – a reference to the film, Get Carter.
But what really happened on that night of murder in the snow? Ironically, a whole troop of miners walked past the car and none of them reported seeing a corpse inside – some even recalled a hand coming out of the window to wave them on. The likely time of the killing was between 11.15 pm and 5.30 am. A Jaguar in that place would have been something so unusual that it would certainly have been noticed. This did not tie in with the official police report.
Stafford and Michael Luvaglio were not together for the whole evening, only for a period of just forty-five minutes. The prosecution insisted that, in that short period, the two men followed the victim to the lonely place where his body was found, shot him after ramming the car, and then travelled like Stirling Moss back to Newcastle to be seen at the Birdcage Club. The problem with this was that there was no forensic evidence. The arm from the car was seen at a time when the police were saying that Sibbett was dead on the back seat. The blood that was actually found inside the Jaguar was not blood that matched any of the people involved – not even the victim. There was also a notable bias in the trial, some have argued, with the judge referring to the accused as ‘Brutus and Judas’.
The accused had pleaded not guilty and the prosecution, led by Henry Scott, insisted that there had been painstaking forensic work to establish their guilt. Scott’s summary of events was that the car had been found with its radiator damaged and the lights and windscreen wipers switched on. The engine had seized up. There had supposedly been a collision involving this car and the accused’s car and five bullet cases were found which apparently matched the bullets in the Jaguar’s bodywork. The other car involved was also said to be a Jaguar, and it was alleged that green paint from the accused’s car was found on the bonnet of the red one owned by the victim, Sibbett.
In this way, a set of circumstances and ‘facts’ was assembled to make the case look like a clear-cut one, with a gangland killing at the centre. Reading the reports of the case today, after noting that it took the jury three hours to find both men guilty, it has to be said that Stafford’s track record on the wrong side of the law was a determining factor. According to crime historian James Morton, his father, Joe Stafford – he was born Joe Siegenberg – was a man who acted as a ‘straightener’ in the London network. That is, he would be involved in negotiations with the law to sort out bail payments and build an ‘account’ with certain clientele. Not only did Dennis Stafford have this family connection; he had lived a life of high adventure that makes him seem like someone from a James Bond story.
Stafford had been the managing director of a buying agency in Trinidad after escaping from Wormwood Scrubs at the age of only twenty-three. He had been doing a seven year stretch for possessing and receiving stolen goods and there was a break in charge as well. On coming home to see his family, he was re-arrested and made an appearance at Newcastle for further crimes. But even more startling was the Dartmoor escape. When he and Day escaped after serving six months, Day drowned during their escape journey, although Stafford had tried to save him. He was recaptured and was later freed, in 1964, coming north and being mixed up with the Landa empire.
The campaign for a retrial, because of what was seen as Stafford’s wrongful imprisonment, was long and intense. In 1969, just after the trial, it was noted in the press that the evidence had been only circumstantial and that Stafford had challenged the police to prove that there was a motive and indeed a witness. Stafford has always been insistent that there was evidence which was never produced at the trial. Bits and pieces of this were to emerge gradually as the pressure was maintained. In 1972, for instance, The Times reported t
hat Mr Justice Croom-Johnson was hearing the evidence of witnesses in open court. Many of these witnesses never appeared at the original trial, of course, and hence the stink around the whole affair. A highly unusual legal procedure began as transcripts from these new witnesses were collected and sent to the court of appeal. This could only be done because of recent legislation passed in the Criminal Appeal Act of 1968, which modified the original 1907 Act.
In 1972, no less than nine witnesses stated that the Sibbett Jaguar was not damaged at the time covering the first hours of the day, as it lay near the railways bridge and the mine. Some witnesses now gave their times of viewing the car as being between 3 and 3.40 that morning. This was more than two hours before Sibbett’s body was found in the car. There had even been a sighting by a witness who saw the Jaguar outside her house in Beech Grove, Newcastle, at 12.10 that night.
Stafford and Luvaglio were sixteen miles away when the killing took place and there they were, at the time of the appeal, serving twelve year sentences. Something was sadly and outrageously amiss here. There was more sensation at the hearing when the pathologist, Dr Jack Ennis, denied that he had changed his evidence. This followed a statement by another doctor – the one who certified the death – that the body was showing signs of rigor mortis at 6am. Ennis had said that death occurred between midnight and 4am. This muddle could only add more confusion and uncertainty to the situation.
By 2002 it seemed that there was some kind of resolution and closure of this unique case. Strasbourg decided that, by refusing Stafford parole, Home Secretary Michael Howard had breached his human rights. After all those years inside and caught in a net of frustrating legal combat, Stafford was paid around £28,000 in damages. In 2004, new guidelines on full-life tariffs were introduced and the law has generated a vast and unwieldy machine to monitor full-life sentences and parole procedures. The Criminal Cases Review Commission has shown that justice is eventually possible even in the most convoluted and long lasting cases – Timothy Evans, the man wrongfully hanged for one of the Rillington Place murders, was declared innocent.
David Lewis and Peter Hughman wrote Most Unnatural, an enquiry into the case published in 1971, to raise awareness, and that played an important part in the resolution. Yet the name of Dennis Stafford will evoke debate, disagreement and legal dispute as time goes on. It will go on reverberating through the North East in particular whenever the phrase ‘One-armed bandit murder’ is spoken. The question remains – who did kill Angus Sibbett?
In March 2009, Stafford and Luvaglio met in order to play their part in a judicial review of the case. Stafford told The Sunderland Echo: ‘The problem was that Michael Luvaglio wasn’t the sort of person you would take on in a pillow fight, never mind to kill his best friend.’ The same paper has labelled Stafford ‘The Playboy Crook’ – and that seems like a backhanded compliment.
The tall tales and misleading statements go on. Only as recently as June 2009, Gordon Witton told Durham Crown Court that Dennis Stafford had told him that he was guilty of the Sibbett killing. Stafford commented: ‘I am hardly going to tell an ice cream dealer that I am guilty.’ Taking a long view of this case in crime history, it has to be said, with some frustration, that it is time the myths and exaggerations stopped and a real closure was reached. But whatever the reasons for the mystery and the ongoing questions, one thing is sure: Dennis Stafford has been high in the ranks of notorious prisoners.
CHAPTER 13
Dennis Nilsen: Nice To Be Loved
There is an old African proverb that says, ‘When an old person dies, a library burns down.’ That applies to wisdom, but it also applies to the mystery of a human mind. At death, there is little doubt that Dennis Nilsen’s demise will be like a library burning down, but it will be a macabre location of murder and the stink of corpses.
Nilsen’s name is firmly entrenched in the dark library of works on serial killing; his name is in all the lurid collections at the more popular end of the true crime spectrum. He was arrested for the murder of fifteen people in 1983 and has been languishing behind bars ever since. Prison is for retribution in most eyes, but it is also for public protection, and if ever there was a man from whom the public needed protection, it is Nilsen.
Yet there are paradoxes, as there always are with psychopaths. The man himself and the crimes he committed are like two compartments in a train, separate yet part of the same construction. He is lodged in Full Sutton high security prison as I write this, doing what lifers do: read, take part in various useful and creative projects, and live with thoughts and memories which will forever hook into their surface selves, like parasites. Since being inside, he has been occasionally busy in print in various places, but he has also, controversially, written a long autobiography, and that will not, as far as the case is now, see the light of day.
Before looking at his time inside, we need to recap on what exactly his crimes were. This has often been told, but the essential facts are necessary. He was born in November 1945 at Strichen, Fraserburgh, Scotland; his mother is Scottish and his father Norwegian. His parents were divorced in 1949, and Nilsen’s grandfather, of whom he was very fond, died when Dennis was only six.
He was in the army between 1961 and 1972, being a cook in the Catering Corps; serving in Yemen, Cyprus and Germany. When he left he joined the police and then the civil service. In London, he committed his first murder – of Stephen Holmes, strangled with a tie. Between 1978 and 1983 he killed fifteen young men, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1983. One of the unusual aspects of his life since then is that he was involved in a televised interview from prison, in 1993.
As with all lifers, his case is subject to judicial reviews, and in 2003 the issue of his autobiography was raised. It is called The History of a Drowning Boy, and after a failure in court in Britain, permission to publish is still a matter held in the limbo of human rights’ decisions. In 2006, he was denied any further parole applications. He has said, ‘I am always surprised … that anyone can be attracted to the macabre. Their fascination with types like myself plagues them with the mystery of why and how a living person can actually do things which may be only those dark images and acts secretly within them.’ Certainly in the extremes of deviant psychology there is the fascination with what homo sapiens is capable of doing. The definitive work on Nilsen, Killing for Company, by Brian Masters, has a title which suggests an answer. But what Nilsen did was first allure gay victims by charm and conversation, then spend time with them, being sociable and amiable; and finally he throttled them and cut their bodies into pieces. He sometimes boiled their heads. His handiwork now features in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard.
How can this behaviour be explained? In court, the defence argued from the testimony of two psychiatrists, Dr James MacKeith and Dr Patrick Galwey. They stated that he had a troubled childhood, and had difficulty expressing his emotions; the result was a shaky sense of self and an inability to have responsibility for anything. Galwey put a label on the killer: he had ‘False Self Syndrome’ which includes an element of schizophrenia.
In October 1983, Nilsen admitted to killing fifteen men. The Times reported:
Mr Nilsen, aged 37, showed the police where he had hidden bodies under the floorboards of his North London flat before dismembering them and burning the remains or flushing them down the toilet… Mr Green said that Nilsen admitted not knowing how many bodies there were under the floor because he had not done a ‘stock take’. He told the police he had killed the victims with his own ties, adding, ‘I started with about 15 ties. I have only got one left.
The psychiatrists were certainly kept busy. One report announced that he had sexual fantasies, tended to have black outs brought on by alcohol abuse, and had a grandiose craving for attention. The opinion was that the victims had died because they ignored his lonely outpourings when they were in his flat. His fantasies involved his being naked and unconscious. He had said to Dr MacKeith who was analysing him, when talking of his victims: ‘If they e
ntered into it, it would be okay. If they slept they would be dead! You have got to listen to me. I am a valuable member of society. Once they were dead, I would stop thinking at fever pitch. It was the ultimate to pay for apathy.’ On one occasion, Nilsen had taken his dog for a walk and he was carrying the internal organs of victims in a bag. One conclusion about his mental state was expressed in terms of an element of schizophrenia, but one doctor said that Nilsen clung to the routine of office work and union activities ‘as though drowning in his own nightmares and to try to reassure himself and others that he was not the grisly monster that in ordinary language he is’.
As with numerous high-profile trials for homicide through the ages, the question was whether or not Nilsen knew what he was doing and whether he had the intent to murder. Dr Paul Bowden had interviewed Nilsen and at trial he said that Nilsen was manipulative and was indeed aware of what he was doing when he took lives. The judge backed up Bowden’s thinking and on 3 November 1983, he said that this was a case in which there was some mental illness, but that there was a solid argument in favour of mens rea – the intention to commit the crime.
The jury were not as sure. Finally, the judge agreed to take a majority verdict and Nilsen was found guilty on six counts of murder.
As a prisoner, Nilsen is undoubtedly notorious, but this has been, in recent years, more related to issues of creativity, expression and human rights. He, like most lifers, has become very much an expert with language, having had time to read, think and absorb all kinds of information. I have known lifers who have studied foreign languages, set themselves the task of reading all the world’s literary classics, or started philosophy courses and become experts on Plato or Marx. Nilsen writes to the prison newspaper, Inside Time, and one of his recent letters has been about the case of a scrapped issue of that newspaper after a contentious article was published, having a drawing of a pig, which was perceived as anti-Moslem. Nilsen wrote: ‘Those of us of a certain age are well acquainted with the word ‘‘appeasement’’ and, I guess, one would have had to look very hard indeed in 1934, after the ‘‘Night of the Long Knives’’ in Germany … to see a cartoon in the papers of a pig with a Hitler moustache and wearing a swastika armband … criticising the encroaching fascism of that time … When intimidation works, then we either stand against it or meekly await its next and more exorbitant demand!’ This could be a letter from a university academic. The vocabulary and the grammar are impressive and the whole expression very powerfully and skilfully done. The Nilsen who killed for company is hard to locate.
