Britain's Most Notorious Prisoners

by Stephen Wade

  Why does Sutcliffe write so many letters? Dr George Erdos, a psychologist, explains that ‘People who kill women, particularly prostitutes, do it for reasons of inadequacy … they don’t like women or they’re frightened of them. Being in prison … means there’s little chance to vent that aggression. This way, he can manipulate women by telling them how special they are … It’s a sadistic thing to do.’

  Why write to crazed psychopaths? The main reason is to try to understand the mind with such a complex level of deviance and violence, but of course, these people are established subjects of professional psychiatrists, so everything there is to be known about the subject will be in print in the journals and books. Sutcliffe has said that some people have written and cultivated a relationship with him simply in order to gather material for a book about him.

  The literature on Sutcliffe extends from the pot boilers that set out to exploit the notoriety and merely explain the gore and the maniacal attacks, to the serious, imaginative and thoughtful book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984) by the late Gordon Burn. Naturally, such a serial killer will continue to attract writers and publishers who want to monopolize on the commercial side of his crimes and identity, but as far as his prison life goes, the fact is that we are monitoring the pathetic decline of a maligned, physically wrecked person who is sometimes explained as ‘demonic’ and sometimes as a ‘schizo’. Whatever line is taken on him, the result is that he has a sickness, a deviance, which is thankfully rare.

  CHAPTER 18

  Beverley Allitt: Bring Me The Innocents

  Planning this chapter, it was hard to avoid the feeling that the case of Allitt is totally separate from every other one in this collection. In her story there is no gang; there is no overt criminal life in the community; there was never a criminal trajectory with which she can be seen in retrospect. More exceptional than this, her crimes demand a certain degree of understanding, as she undoubtedly had severe mental problems during her murderous period while in charge of children at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in 1991.

  This story begins with the subject of Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy (MSBP). In some notable philosophical works in our time, several writers have argued that advanced capitalist culture, with massive urbanisation and consequent disintegration of a sense of an integral community, deviance has taken forms which are not overtly ‘criminal’ in the sense that behaviour may be invisible, submerged or unknown. One expression of this deviance from the norm is in professional guise. If a person with a flimsy sense of self works within a profession, the results may be disastrous and the crimes heinous. That was the case with Beverley Allitt. Add to the nature of some mental illness as being submerged and hard to locate, the notion that fantasy plays a major role in deviance, and there may be some understanding of why Allitt was able to murder four children and injure five more while she was working as a nurse, in a State Enrolled capacity – the SEN nurse we are all familiar with. The hard fact of how she took these young lives is that she injected them with potassium chloride or with insulin. She was working in a position of power over life and death, and all the time her own personality was severely disordered.

  Fantasy, in its more potent and individualised sense, is far from harmless. The heart of the problem is a fragile ego. The term ‘Munchausen’ stems from a German soldier of that name who tended to exaggerate his stories of the wars, but beneath the simple feature of pretended illness there lies something more complicated. The person has low self-esteem and tends to look for strategies in life that will give them power, control and status. The person with MSBP is essentially projecting a self into a community be means of exaggerated roles and actions, so that there will be responses of respect and admiration. A vein of ‘martyrdom’ can run through their behaviour, as sacrifice and devotion can of course easily gather admiration.

  The crimes committed under the aegis of this illness are difficult to detect, and that is where Allitt’s story begins. As a child she wore wound dressings on her body so that heads would turn and sympathy would be elicited; she was overweight when young, and her lack of physical grace and appeal would only have served to exaggerate her need to be respected and noticed. Typical of the MSBP type, she frequented hospitals with imagined illnesses, and this led eventually to her perfectly healthy appendix being removed. Even that was not enough: she messed with the scar, in a way very similar to the self-harmer. Self-harm does not occur as a means of seeking attention: it is an observable symptom of inner angst and pain, with also the added dimension of self-loathing and remorse. In MSBP, this is inverted so as to be an action indicative of an appeal for notice and admiration.

  With this background, the question arises: how did such a person come to be a nurse, responsible for caring for infants? People, speaking with hindsight after the offences were done, noted that in her nurse training she did some strange things, such as smearing walls with faeces. In one relationship she claimed to be pregnant when she was not actually in that condition. The track record was not exactly indicative of her having a successful nursing career, but surprisingly, she was given a temporary contract at the Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in 1991. It has to be said that there was a staff shortage: on her day shift there were just two trained nurses, and on the night shift there was only one. In effect, that meant that Allitt had plenty of opportunity to be alone with her young victims.

  Liam Taylor was just seven weeks old when he was admitted to the hospital with a chest infection; he was murdered on 21 February. The other killings were to take place between then and 22 April, when little Claire Peck died after being admitted with an asthma attack. She was put on a ventilator and left in Allitt’s care. There she had heart failure, was resuscitated but again had a cardiac arrest and died. Allitt was fond of injecting potassium chloride (KC1) and this causes at its least harmful gastrointestinal irritation; at its worse, on infants and patients weakened for other reasons, it causes heart failure.

  Allitt’s reign of ‘caring’ murder was later to have the media dub her ‘The Angel of Death’. How could that kind and caring, dedicated young nurse be linked with the high level of deaths among the infants in her ward? That was the initial thinking. But suspicions were aroused, and police were called in. Allitt had been the only duty nurse at the times of all the deaths.

  At her trial, she was charged with attempted murder and grievous bodily harm; found guilty on both charges, she was sentenced to thirteen concurrent sentences of life imprisonment. The ruling there was that she should be in custody until 2032, and even then there would have to be a certainty that she was not a danger to the public. She launched an appeal against this. Then, in 1993, there was a clamour for a public inquiry into how these deaths happened, and how and why Allitt had such power and autonomy to act in that way. At the court of appeal, this call was rejected: two staff unions were refused the right to appeal, in opposition to the ruling by the then Secretary of State for Health, Virginia Bottomley. There was already an inquiry in place, led by Sir Thomas Bingham, and the court accepted that this was sufficient. A spokesman said at the time: ‘The effectiveness of this kind of inquiry depends not on the procedure adopted but on the integrity, energy, skill and fairness of the tribunal and in particular the chairman. Mrs Bottomley explained her position by saying that she wanted the same questions answered that the parents of the dead children did, and she promised a full investigation.

  At the High Court in 2007, Allitt’s appeal was heard. The decision was that she would serve the thirty years which was at first recommended. The life she has at Rampton High Security Hospital will continue. Mr Justice Burnton summed up: ‘The impact of these offences does not require to be described and could not be exaggerated. Young lives were cut short at their inception. One of the parents commented: ‘I don’t think the press will ever forget, and the police who were involved in it – because it was such an horrendous story at the time, something that you never thought would happen in this country.’

  The Angel o
f Death had emerged from a narcissistic personality – her mind shifted from the visible status her uniform gave her to the unchecked exercise of the power and opportunity Allitt craved in order to fulfil the fantasy. The word ‘fantasy’ in its most negative application falls short of what the nature of her killings did, to kill infants and to permanently affect other lives, profoundly and very painfully. It is never possible to explain her motives in plain terms: all that can be surmised is that the extinguishing of lives under her control was an extension of the status her position gave her. In other words, the sick mind says, ‘I have this position and I am part of this profession; therefore I can take the lives I have under my jurisdiction, as well as save those lives.’ At one end of the spectrum it could be argued that the action to kill was an act of mercy; but that only comes from a diseased mind who turns around the situation of normality in which healthcare does and should operate.

  For Beverley Allitt, a life in Rampton will be, ironically, an existence in the milieu her mind longed for. But that life is contained by the walls and the keys.

  CHAPTER 19

  Charles Bronson: Prison Superstar

  Charles Bronson, aka Michael Peterson, is the most publicised prisoner in the establishment of Her Majesty’s prison service. In an astounding case of a prisoner’s writings going into print, he leads the field. Not only have we had his autobiography, simply called Bronson; we have also had his guide to the prisons across the land: his Good Prison Guide. His public image and his cultural impact have had ambivalent responses. Some would say that he had increased the knowledge of prison life and that his books discourage younger men to follow his pattern of life, while others might reason that his writings, drawings and general image assert the glamour that so many young cons want to revel in and attain.

  Freddie Foreman tells a story of Bronson in Full Sutton. Bronson had come out of his cell one morning, looking for revenge: ‘Charlie jumped out into the passageway like Rambo. He was stark bullock naked, covered from head to toe in black shoe-polish and only wearing a bandanna round his head. Wielding a table leg in one hand and a broom handle sharpened into a spear in the other, he raged down the passageway. ‘Foreman found him in a recess, ready to fight, and he and some friends managed to coax Bronson into having a bath to wash off the black, and talked him down. The usual army of officers was ready to charge him, and so the situation was defused. That encapsulates the nature of Bronson inside prison walls. The life inside has become his destiny and he has made it his vocation and his specialist subject, should he ever sit in the Mastermind chair. His book written as a guide to all the prisons he has known shows once and for all just how far he is ahead of all other prisoners in knowledge of the prison estate.

  It is human nature to be interested in transgression; we therefore also have to maintain that curiosity when it comes to the consequences of that action. From being little children, we know that the world contains checks and restraints on our urges and deeds: prison is merely an enlargement of that, with a mix of retribution and correction. It is there primarily to rehabilitate, but only ‘works’ in some cases and all the factors affecting the change of the prisoner are variables. With Bronson, these never worked, from the very beginning.

  A summary of his prison record shows that from his first term of two months for criminal damage in Risley Remand Centre in 1969 to his present residence in Wakefield’s ‘special cages’ he has had 160 jail stretches, and that time has included spells in several top security jails and even time in Broadmoor.

  But he is a man of paradoxes and extremes. I once interviewed a head of education in one prison, and we talked of Bronson’s time there. The manager produced a long letter, written to him by Bronson, describing just what satisfaction he derived from working with a party of handicapped people who came into the prison to use the gym every week. I worked in that gym when I wrote my documentary book, A Good Stretch, and I saw for myself exactly what some cons are capable of. I have an abiding image of a young man who was in and out of prison all the time, and yet who was bouncing on a trampoline, holding an older man who was in the visiting party. They were both beaming with pleasure. That would have been the kind of delight Bronson experienced and the satisfaction he took in helping these visitors to enjoy themselves.

  That side of him is not acknowledged quite enough; however, this is also the man who took a lawyer hostage in Bullingdon prison in 1996, and then did the same with a doctor in Winson Green jail in 1996; his love of taking hostages led to his holding a teacher as a hostage in HMP Hull for forty-four hours in 1998. He also played a part in the Hull prison siege in January 1999.

  Explaining Bronson’s criminal behaviour has been problematic. He said on one occasion that he had been suffering from head pains and blackouts since 1975. He has described having pains on one side of his head for a long period and then blacking out after that. He has spent an immense amount of time alone, and he has known the insides of several prison ‘blocks’ – or segregation units – in his time. His earliest experience of that was horrendous, and he describes it in his autobiography: ‘Pain is not the word. My bollocks were in agony, my body ached, my eye was cut, even my toes were throbbing. They stripped me off, then strapped me up in a body-belt. This is a leather belt that locks at the back and has a metal cuff on each hip, which locks your wrists.’

  Stories of alleged brutality in the jails of the 1960s and 1970s are numerous in the books of memoirs, and whatever Bronson’s nature, it must be mentioned that his early years in prison, with violent suppression being part of the regime, he has to have been made much worse by the treatment. Despite all this record of violence, hostage-taking and constant aggression against the world, Bronson is notorious for another reason: he and others who have helped him have produced some of the most authentic and vibrant prison writing in print. His reasons for writing are many, but he says in the first pages of his first book: ‘I say to all youngsters who are thinking about becoming criminals, “Stop and think now. Don’t be foolish. It’s not worth it. You’ll break your family’s heart and destroy your own.” ’

  In that context, the Hull prison riot of 1976 was an extreme example of what can happened when the lid blows off prison life and everything explodes. The official report into that riot attempted to explain the reasons for the horrendous rampage of violence: top of the list was this: ‘Hull contained an abnormally high proportion of potentially violent prisoners and prisoners with known records of violence, indeed some who had participated in previous disturbances or in acts of disaffection in dispersal prisons.’ As to the scale and cost of that riot, the report summarises: ‘I do not think we should mince words. This was a riot of unprecedented ferocity, and a considerable amount of devastation was caused. The total cost of repair will be in the order of three quarters of a million pounds. I will therefore refer throughout this report to the events of 31 August to 3 September 1976 as a riot.’

  Hull was again the focus of a siege in 1999, and he was tried at Luton Crown Court in February 2000, charged with criminal damage and assault. In that trial he took the opportunity to let the public know about how he perceived his prison life. He said that his life was hell and explained: ‘I first came to prison in 1974 when I was twenty-one … We are talking about twenty-six years being served. Twenty-two years of that I have been in solitary confinement. Isolated. On my own. No contacts. I suffer what you would call post-traumatic stress disorder.’ He had opted not to have a lawyer because he said that he ‘did not trust them’. Prison, he added, was like living in a sewer. His words were: ‘I live in that room 23 hours of a 24-hour day. I am not living, I am just existing.’ Building on this inhumane picture, he said that when the cell door opened, six officers came in to feed him, using plastic cutlery. His cell, he claimed, had a bullet-proof window which gave him a headache because of the unnatural light. He ended his description with, ‘Everything is concrete, razor wire. I am living in hell. I hope you understand that.’

  Only a few months after t
hat, then resident in Woodhill prison, he was being taken to his cell in the prison’s close supervision centre in the early afternoon when he lost control and went on the rampage. He took on twenty-four prison officers in a stand-off which lasted for five hours. The usual procedure then followed: ranks of officers in riot gear closed in and he was caught and restrained. Inexplicably, his violent antics in jail were released in a film clip called Sincerely Yours, in which Bronson is seen fighting a gang of officers, and also taking part in an illegal boxing match. The film derives from security camera footage and a leak occurred somewhere, such is Bronson’s media presence. The Woodhill D Wing was known as ‘Alcatraz’ and was closed after a review conducted by the man who was then Chief Inspector of Prisons and who has since written a large-scale critique of the prison establishment, Sir David Ramsbottom.

  Bronson has produced a body of writing that is like nothing else in the prison literature: what his life presents is a story of consciousness caught up completely inside the prison life. There is a ‘jail head’ in the prison system. This is a man whose entire waking moment is devoted to small victories in the ongoing battle with the establishment. Everything thrown at him, every small regulation and order, will be an appeal to conceive a battle plan. He knows every inch of the material microcosm of the prison: the kitchen, each wing, the education block, segregation, laundry, health care, gym, exercise yard and workshops. The plan and layout of the place are imprinted in his mind. His identity ceases to be the person known by relations and friends outside. When they visit they see only that one-dimensional figure who talks about the weather or what is on television. The man who returns to his pad is already scheming.