Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  But Reynolds’ legal team would have warned him that in the past fifteen years the minimum terms of imprisonment for a life sentence had been growing steadily longer. In 1997, for example, the average length of time a prisoner served under a life sentence before being released on licence was only some nine years, now it was almost double that – at seventeen years or so.

  The atmosphere in the well of Stafford Crown Court on the chilly morning of Friday 19 December 2013 could hardly have been more charged, and the tension grew even more dramatically when fifty-four-year-old Detective Constable Stephen Williams stood in the well of the court to read his ‘impact statement’ to the judge before sentencing. Unable to hold back the tears, his whole body appeared to be trembling as he stood up to read the brief statement that he held in his hand.

  The grey-haired police officer was in such obvious distress that Mr Justice Wilkie offered to read the statement for him, but Stephen Williams bravely replied, ‘Thank you for your consideration but I’d like to do it myself.’ Struggling to control himself, he said in a voice on the verge of breaking: ‘I cry endlessly from morning to night … we have been damned by evil to endure this misery to the end of our lives.’ The loss of the young woman who had been his ‘truly wonderful daughter’ was clearly almost too much to bear.

  Mr Justice Wilkie began his sentencing remarks by addressing Reynolds directly, and telling him, ‘You have, for at least five years, been obsessed with sexual violence against women, particularly in the form of hanging, or strangulation, and by sexual violation of them in death. Repeatedly you have sought to engineer situations where you were not simply the viewer of fictional fantasies but were the real life assailant.’

  Jamie Reynolds must have realised at that precise moment that his fate was likely to be far worse than a simple life sentence with a fixed minimum term.

  A Scots-educated, thoughtful man of almost sixty-six, with a careworn face and the manner of an academic, Wilkie had dealt with serious murderers before. He had presided over the conviction and sentencing of the predatory wheel clamper and drug dealer Levi Bellfield for the murder of Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler just eighteen months earlier. He was no stranger to evil.

  Not long after he began his sentencing remarks, Mr Justice Wilkie made it clear to everyone in court that the life of the prisoner in the dock was about to change forever when he told him firmly, ‘The only sentence I am empowered to pass is one of life imprisonment and I do so.’ But then he paused and added, ‘My next task is to consider whether this is a case which calls for a whole life term and, if not, to fix a minimum term before the expiration of which you, Jamie Reynolds, will not be considered for release on licence.’

  The words would have chilled Reynolds’ bones to the marrow, for Wilkie had suggested that – even at his age – he might join the group of fifty or more men (and two women) condemned to end their lives in prison, with barely any hope of release beyond the onset of a terminal illness.

  Reynolds was facing the ultimate punishment that the English law could pronounce on a prisoner – after the replacement of the death penalty by a life sentence which gave nothing but the slimmest chance of release. Only two men in recent memory had walked out of jail after receiving such a sentence – when their innocence was proven many years after they were sent to jail. There was no chance of that for Reynolds – he had pleaded guilty.

  As the sentencing went on it became clearer and clearer that the judge had been strongly influenced by Reynolds’ meticulous planning of Georgia’s murder and his desire to keep a record of it. The pictures taken while Georgia was suspended with a noose around her neck, while she was still alive, clearly profoundly shocked and moved Mr Justice Wilkie, who said, ‘Seeing those photographs of her, totally trusting and helpless, unknowing of what you were about to do to her, has been almost unbearable … You then, as you had envisaged, enjoyed the spectacle of her final ghastly minutes as she struggled for life, knowing that she had been betrayed and that she was facing death. At no stage have you expressed any genuine remorse for your horrific actions.’ Mr Justice Wilkie added, ‘It follows that, whilst your plea of guilty has in fact saved Georgia’s family from having to endure a trial, in the context of this case, where the evidence against you is so overwhelming, that, as a mitigating factor, is of little significance.’

  In his quiet, studious voice the judge then began to explain to Reynolds that basis under which the Court could sentence him to spend the rest of his life behind bars. It came under Section 269 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and allowed a judge to make this ruling where: ‘… the Court is of the opinion that the offence is so serious that no order should be made providing for the possibility of release’. In those circumstances ‘the Court must make a whole life order.’

  But under the provisions of Section 269, the judge explained, the Court also had to consider factors that had to be taken into account when looking at the ‘seriousness of the offence’, using the guidelines laid out in Schedule 21. In particular, these pointed out that when the seriousness of the offence was ‘exceptionally high’ and the offender was over twenty-one, the starting point for the Court was a whole life order, especially if there was either the murder of two or more people, which included premeditation or planning, as well as sexual or sadistic content – or the ‘murder of a child involving abduction or sexual or sadistic motivation …’

  After looking at the legal precedents in other cases involving a whole life order – and reminding Reynolds that whole life was a ‘draconian penalty’ reserved for cases of ‘exceptionally serious criminality’, he then touched on the debate going on between the European Court of Human Rights and the Courts of the United Kingdom about the legality of a whole life term of imprisonment – which had been brought to a head by a European judgement in the summer of 2013. After that Mr Justice Wilkie reached his conclusion. It did not make comfortable hearing for Jamie Reynolds, standing in the dock.

  The judge reminded Reynolds that he had ‘long anticipated’ the murder of Georgia Williams, had planned it and decided what steps he would take to avoid being caught. It was also designed to give him ‘sadistic and sexual’ pleasure, that he had the opportunity to save her but instead allowed her to suffer ‘horribly’.

  ‘After the killing you took sexual pleasure by repeatedly violating her body,’ he added in the hushed courtroom. ‘You then treated her body with contempt, dumping it in a remote spot, far from home, naked, without burial, intending that it should not be found for a long time, during which it would be vulnerable to the ravages of nature.’

  The catalogue of depravity did not even end there.

  ‘This was not a one off, directed at one person,’ Wilkie continued, proved by the fact that Reynolds had invited two other young women to come to his parents’ house the following day. Finally the judge reminded the twenty-three year old that his killing of Georgia was the result of his long-standing preoccupation with violent sadistic pornography, as was made clear by his collection of doctored digital images of young women, and the fact that he had attacked two of them, in January 2008 and February 2013.

  The conclusion was inevitable, but it still must have chilled the heartless Reynolds to the core of his being. Mr Justice Wilkie said simply, ‘The sentence I pass is one of whole life imprisonment. The early release provisions are not to apply to you. I make a whole life order.’

  At that moment Jamie Reynolds became the youngest person in British legal history to be sentenced to spend the rest of his natural life in prison. There was every prospect that he might end up staying
there for more than sixty years, in a small cell, and with the opportunity for exercise a maximum of an hour a day.

  As he was led back to the cells beneath the court, Reynolds’s pasty, white face was emotionless. Perhaps he was stunned, perhaps he did not care what he had done, but one thing is certain: he displayed not one ounce of remorse for his crime.

  Outside the court, however, emotions were high. West Mercia Police’s investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Neil Jamieson, branded Reynolds ‘a sadistic, very dangerous and manipulative individual’.

  But it was DC Steve Williams who somehow captured the sense of despair that had swirled around the courtroom.

  ‘There is no sentence that we can ever say that we’re satisfied with because it’ll never bring Georgia back,’ he told the assembled crowd of reporters and television crews, his voice still wavering. ‘She’s dead, she’s gone physically and lives in our hearts.’ Clearly still deeply hurt by his daughter’s murder, he went on: ‘The one thing that will always get to us and cause us grief is the fact that even though Jamie Reynolds is serving a full life sentence, he still has life to hang on to.’

  Sadly, the suffering inflicted upon Steve Williams and his family was not to end there. Even though, in January 2014, Jamie Reynolds’ solicitors announced that he would not launch an appeal against his sentence, just three months later he changed his mind. On 14 April 2014, he announced that he would indeed be launching an appeal on the grounds that the ‘sentencing judge did not give enough weight to his age and plea of guilty,’ and that he intended to take the European Court of Human Rights’ view that full life sentences were ‘incompatible with the human rights convention’.

  The Williamses were devastated. ‘We thought that was the end,’ Steve Williams announced. ‘But now it’s almost like there’s a new trial coming up. It makes you feel sick. It makes you feel angry and it devalues Georgia’s life.’

  Every bit as distraught, his wife Lynette added: ‘It’s made us really upset and angry. You do worry how people can contemplate how he should serve anything less than full life.’

  Moments later, her husband brutally summed up the feelings of all his family, and, quite probably, the millions more who had taken an interest in the case in the press, on radio and on television. ‘But to me, the pure evil of it all was how he orchestrated Georgia’s death to fulfil his own sexual fantasy – like I’ve said before, if you are going to kill somebody in cold blood for a few moments of perverted sexual pleasure you should accept the consequences. He’s saying his age hasn’t been taken into account, but you look at life expectancy now and he’s probably taken about seventy years of Georgia’s life and that’s what we should have taken – the whole of his life. He has never shown an ounce of remorse. He has never apologised. He could have stood up in court and said I’m really sorry. He knew us. We had contact with him. But he couldn’t face us in court. He didn’t even look at us.’

  The ordeal of Georgia Williams’ parents would not end for another eight months – until Reynolds’ appeal was heard in the Court of Appeal in London. But their case would highlight for the world the importance, and significance, of a whole life term of imprisonment.

  2

  Should Life Mean Life?

  The words of fifty-four year-old Detective Constable Steve Williams should haunt us all.

  It was April 2014, with his wife Lynette beside him, when he told reporters bitterly that Reynolds’ claim that his age had not been taken sufficiently into account when he was sentenced, and neither was the fact that he had pleaded guilty, made a mockery of everything he and his wife felt about their daughter’s brutal murder.

  ‘He’s probably taken about seventy years of Georgia’s life,’ Williams said, ‘and that’s what we should have taken – the whole of his life.’

  In that one sentence Williams precisely encapsulated how millions of people in Britain feel about how the worst of the worst murderers should be dealt with. ‘Lock them up and throw away the key,’ is the cry time and time again from the families of victims of murder.

  The political cries ring out meanwhile: ‘Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime,’ – and so the demand for longer and longer sentences for murder grows ever louder. ‘There are no votes for being soft on crime,’ politician after politician tells the world, and so the prison population expands and expands exponentially.

  But is that the correct response? Should a just and humane society be sentencing a twenty-three year-old young man to spend what could be the next seventy years behind bars?

  That is what this book is about. Are we right to answer the demands of the families of victims and allow men and women to spend half a century or more locked away?

  Is anyone who commits multiple murder necessarily sane – or should their mental health be taken into account in their prison sentence? Will the prison system be able to deal with an ever-ageing population of killers? Are prison officers correctly trained to deal with the worst of the worst? Should we create a ‘supermax’ prison to house the worst offenders? What do other countries do about prisoners who commit the worst of offences? Does every other country lock them up and throw away the key?

  Those are some of the questions this book will seek to examine and answer. Because the reality is that ever since the suspension of the death penalty for capital murder in 1965, British society has never been quite sure how it feels about ‘whole lifers’, a phrase coined by the distinguished legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg to mean those men and women who are given ‘whole life terms of imprisonment’.

  The Ministry of Justice declines to give a precise figure for the number of prisoners serving that tariff, but this book can reveal that there are more than fifty, if not sixty ‘whole lifers’ – including two women. Each and every one of those prisoners is effectively destined to end their lives in jail, even though some of them were never formally sentenced to serve a ‘whole life’ term in the first place.

  They range from the eighty-seven-year-old paedophile Sidney Cooke (also known as ‘Hissing Sid’), who is now largely bed-ridden in Wakefield Prison, to Robert Maudsley (whose nickname remains ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, even though it is highly unlikely that he actually did eat the brains of the prisoner he killed in jail), who also lives in Wakefield Prison in a specially constructed ‘glass cage’ in the basement with his own staff of six prison officers and no contact with any other prisoners.

  They include the tattooed Peterborough killer Joanna Dennehy, who stabbed and murdered three men in 2013 and claimed afterwards, ‘I killed to see how I would feel, to see if I was as cold as I thought I was. Then it got moreish’; Steven Wright (the Suffolk Strangler), who killed five prostitutes in 2006; and former abattoir worker Mark Bridger, convicted of killing five-year-old April Jones in 2013, even though her body was never discovered.

  They also include Rosemary West, convicted of the killing of ten young women, including her daughter Heather; and Ian Brady (the Moors Murderer) who has been on hunger strike and demanding the right to die for more than a decade, while firmly refusing to tell the authorities the whereabouts of the last of his five victims, fourteen-year-old Keith Bennett.

  Each and every one of them has their own depraved story to tell, but they each confront society with the same perplexing dilemma – should they spend the rest of their lives imprisoned with little or no hope of release?

  Some argue that it would be better to reintroduce the death penalty – as their crimes are so odious that imprisonment, at the state’s considerable expense (about £90,000 a year), is ‘
too good’ for them. It is not an argument I agree with – the concept of one innocent man or woman being sent to the gallows, or given a lethal injection, is simply too repugnant to consider. You can set an innocent prisoner free, but you can never bring them back to life.

  Yet, for half a century, Britain has puzzled over what the supreme penalty for taking a human life in a heinous crime should be. The truth is that there is no truth. There is no correct answer. There will only ever be a debate – but it is a debate that must be had, for it is not enough to ignore it and allow the present muddle to continue for another fifty years.

  For my part, I believe that rehabilitation can, sometimes, be possible – but, equally, that many of the very worst offenders will never be redeemed. The very worst have no conscience or regret about their crimes and would commit them again tomorrow – given the chance. That may not be what they tell the Parole Board when they are being considered for release on licence, but, as this book will show repeatedly, more often than not they cannot resist the urge to kill again.

  To my mind, the concept of an eye for an eye – that a murderer should pay for his or her crime with their own life – was rightly suspended in Britain in 1965. For the previous eight years there had been two degrees of murder, ‘capital murder’ which carried the death penalty and ‘murder’ which did not, although it carried a mandatory sentence of ‘life imprisonment’.

  That was abandoned in the wake of Labour MP Sydney Silverman’s Private Members’ Bill in 1965 that saw the death penalty suspended for five years. It remained theoretically in place for offences including espionage, treason and piracy, but was never used. The suspension became permanent on 16 December 1969, when the then Home Secretary, James Callaghan, proposed it to the House of Commons. It was not finally abolished in Northern Ireland until 25 July 1973.