Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Riley endured fourteen stab wounds to his neck – one of which severed his windpipe – while another almost severed his spine. There were five stab wounds to his back, and five to the chest, which had punctured the toddler’s lungs. There were also six wounds in the abdomen, one of which had penetrated his stomach wall. Yet even that grotesque violence was not enough for Rosser. There was also a deep bite mark on Riley’s upper left thigh, a mark that matched the former soldier’s teeth.

  Finally thirty-two year-old Rosser placed his hands around the little boy’s neck and strangled him. Yet Rosser did not flee into the night after committing such a dreadful crime: quite the opposite. After destroying the tiny, innocent toddler’s body and covering his bed with his blood, Rosser went into Riley’s parents’ bedroom and curled up on the floor on Sharon Smith’s side of the bed.

  At about four thirty that Sunday morning, Sharon Smith woke up suddenly to discover Rosser lying beside her on the floor. She quickly woke up Guy Earwaker, who told Rosser to get out, which he did, but only after apologising and asking for some tobacco. But he did not leave the house. Rosser simply went downstairs and waited. He wanted to hear the devastated reaction of Riley’s parents when they found his body.

  That only took a few moments. Guy Earwaker looked out into the hallway after Rosser had gone downstairs and saw that the light was on in Riley’s bedroom. He went to investigate and discovered Riley’s blood-soaked corpse lying on his bed.

  Unable to speak, Earwaker went back to find Sharon Smith, who followed him into Riley’s bedroom. She screamed, and it was only then that the couple heard the front door slam downstairs as Rosser finally left. Earwaker chased him outside into the street, but lost sight of him in the darkness and returned to the house to comfort his wife and call for an ambulance and the police.

  Later that morning Earwaker joined in the police hunt for Rosser, and within just a few hours he found him hiding in a caravan that he had broken into on a smallholding not far away from Harewood Road. There was blood on the snow outside the caravan, and smears of blood inside the caravan itself.

  ‘I have ruined my life,’ Rosser told Earwaker. Then, after the police arrived and he had been arrested he said, ‘I know I have done summat but I don’t know what. After what I have done I am a piece of shit.’

  Nevertheless, in spite of the blood smears in the caravan and the fact that he had clearly been in the house when Riley Turner died, Rosser continued to deny any knowledge of the boy’s death. It was to be a year before Rosser finally pleaded guilty to killing Riley Turner.

  Throughout those months, Rosser took legal refuge behind his defence team’s call for expert reports. Time and again the deadlines for delivery were missed and those delays saw his trial postponed from July 2013 to October 2013 and finally until February 2014. It was only after the experts concluded that his ‘antisocial personality disorder’ and psychopathic personality did not mean that he had not known exactly what he was doing when he killed the four-year-old, that Rosser accepted that he could not hide behind his mental condition to diminish his responsibility for the killing.

  Sentencing Rosser on Thursday 13 February 2014, Mr Justice Coulson referred to two ‘victim statements’ about the effect the slaughter of this ‘bright, lively, happy, innocent four-year-old’ had had on his family. They were made by Riley’s mother Sharon Smith and her own mother. They make heart-rending reading.

  ‘I wish I had told that monster “no” that night when he asked if he could sleep,’ Sharon Smith wrote to the Court. ‘He said people were outside his house and were going to beat him up and I believed him. I didn’t want him to get beaten up, but all along he had a knife in his pocket, plotting to hurt one of us, or all of us. I feel so much guilt that my poor son had to go through such horrific things because my kind heart didn’t want to let that monster get beaten up. Now my kind heart cost me my son’s life.’

  But Sharon Smith did not end there. ‘The guilt eats away at me every day,’ she went on. ‘What he’s done is unforgiveable, he’s ruined our lives. I don’t look forward to life any more. I wake up now and just want to be with my son Riley so that he’s not alone. I can’t bear to think he’s sad and alone.’

  She ended by explaining the impact of his death on his twin brother. ‘It’s very upsetting,’ she wrote, ‘to hear my boy cry for his brother all the time and wonder where he’s gone and why he isn’t coming back. Some questions I can’t answer to my boy. I try my best but I don’t understand myself and I never will.’

  Mr Justice Coulson was clearly deeply moved by Riley’s mother’s testimony, but it was the horrors of the crime itself that made the strongest impression. In particular, he drew attention to the sexual and sadistic elements of the killing. He pointed out that both the prosecution’s and defence’s psychiatrists had expressly identified the ‘sexual element’ in Rosser’s motivation and conduct.

  ‘On any view, this murder involved a strong sexual component,’ Mr Justice Coulson said. ‘That can be seen from the removal of Riley’s pyjama bottoms, the slicing open of his scrotum, the biting, and, in particular the repeated insertion of items into his rectum.’ He went on to point out that the sadistic element included Rosser’s determination to stay in the house until he had heard Riley’s parents’ reaction to the killing.

  Mr Justice Coulson also suggested that the killing was ‘a gross breach of trust’ because Riley’s parents had specifically invited Rosser to stay that night. He added that the murder was clearly premeditated because he had brought one knife with him, and remarked that Rosser had a history of violence, including a December 1996 assault that resulted in actual bodily harm – although he had only received a police caution for the offence.

  The reality was that from the age of eight, Rosser had been a ‘poorly controlled’ boy with a penchant for starting fires. At the age of sixteen he had attacked a boy when he was sleeping, smashing a sporting trophy into his head, a wound that demanded four stitches. Shortly after that attack, for which he received a police caution, Rosser joined the Fifth Regiment, Royal Artillery, but he never saw active service, ending up spending time in an Army jail for his violent behaviour when drunk. He was discharged from the Army as a result.

  ‘Thereafter, your life was punctuated by drink-fuelled outbursts and anger and violence,’ Mr Justice Coulson told Rosser, ‘something of which you were aware but seemed incapable of doing anything about.’

  For his part, Rosser remained motionless in the dock, his thin, pale face expressionless.

  When it came to the details of the sentence, Mr Justice Coulson – taking a lead from Mr Justice Wilkie’s decision in the case of Jamie Reynolds just two months earlier – saw no reason why the European Court of Human Rights’ decision should prevent him passing a whole life order.

  Mr Justice Coulson bluntly told the prisoner before him: ‘The evidence demonstrates beyond doubt that you are an exceptionally dangerous man, and there is nothing to say that such a condition could ever be modified or improved.’

  He pointed to the evidence from the forensic psychiatrist appointed by the prosecution, who considered that he posed ‘a real risk of further acts of sadistic homicide which could involve further child victims’. Rosser did not blink. He simply remained impassive as Mr Justice Coulson told him, ‘You must go to prison for life. I therefore impose a whole life order. That means you will remain in prison for the rest of your natural life.’

  At that moment Riley Turner’s parents, who had been in Court throughout the brief trial and the sentencing, leapt to their feet, c
lapping and shouting, ‘Yes, rot in hell.’

  As he was led down to the cells by the five guards who surrounded him in the dock, Rosser showed no trace of emotion, he simply looked blank, almost as though he could barely understand the significance of what had just happened to him.

  Outside the court, the senior investigating officer in the case, Detective Superintendent Mark Ridley, told a group of reporters that Rosser had never offered any explanation whatever ‘for his savage and gratuitous actions’. The superintendent added: ‘He has shown no remorse or compassion for the pain suffered by Riley’s family … Today brings to an end what has been a very sad and disturbing case.’

  It was not to be the end, however. On Thursday 16 October 2014 Rosser sought leave to appeal against his whole life sentence at the Court of Appeal in London.

  It was here that Rosser’s case and that of Jamie Reynolds came together as they were both considered by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, sitting with Mr Justice Wyn Williams and Mr Justice Sweeney in the book-lined and wood-panelled Court Five in the Royal Courts of Justice. Both Rosser and Reynolds appeared in Court by video link from the prison in which they were serving their sentences – Wakefield in Yorkshire.

  But it was Anwar Rosser’s appeal that was heard first.

  Looking drawn and still a little numb on the video link, he sat there in silence as his legal team raised their concerns about the sentence that he had received from Mr Justice Coulson. Rosser said nothing – beyond confirming his name. His barrister explained to the Court that they felt his whole life sentence was ‘manifestly excessive’, and that Mr Justice Coulson should have sentenced him to a ‘very long but finite’ period instead.

  In particular, they questioned whether there was indeed a ‘sexual element’ to the murder of Riley Turner and whether there had been any ‘premeditation’ to the crime. They also pointed out that he had pleaded guilty ‘at the earliest possible opportunity’, and that he suffered from a ‘severe personality disorder’, which led him to suffer from fits of paranoia. The conclusion, Rosser’s defence suggested, was that his case was only ‘borderline’ for a ‘whole life term’.

  For their part, the prosecution, on behalf of the Crown, firmly told the Court that there clearly had been a ‘strong sexual component’ to the death of Riley Turner, not least because his pyjama bottoms had been removed, and that there had been premeditation because Rosser had carried a knife to the crime.

  ‘The judge took the view that he decided to stay the night because of what he intended to do,’ the prosecution insisted, before adding that there was clearly also a ‘sadistic’ element to Riley’s killing because of Rosser’s decision to stay and listen to the reaction of his parents when they discovered the body – which clearly showed his desire to derive a sadistic pleasure from their suffering.

  Briefly rebutting the Crown’s arguments, Rosser’s barrister told the Court that it was clear that he was in an ‘immensely disordered state’ and that there had been earlier examples in the last days of 2012 and the first days of 2013 of his suffering from bouts of paranoia, and a fear that ‘money lenders’ were going to attack him.

  Lord Thomas, the Lord Chief Justice, then announced that they would not pass judgement that day, but would hand down their written conclusions at some point in the future. When Jamie Reynolds’ appeal was heard immediately after Anwar Rosser’s, the Court also explained it would pass down a written judgement of both cases at some point in the future.

  That came just two weeks later. On 31 October 2014, the Lord Chief Justice and his fellow judges in the Court of Appeal found, in the case of Rosser, that: ‘There is no basis on which it can properly be argued that a whole life order was wrongly imposed.’

  In particular, the Court insisted, ‘It was not and could not be disputed that the murder involved sadistic motivation,’ and then added, ‘We cannot accept the argument that the judge was wrong in finding it also had a sexual component.’ The three judges pointed to the attacks on Riley’s rectum ‘before he died’ and the deep cut into his scrotum.

  They also declined to accept that there had not been premeditation in Rosser’s actions: ‘Rosser went upstairs with four knives and the plain intention to kill,’ just as they turned down the significance of his plea of guilty, especially because ‘the evidence against him was irrefutable’, and finally the Court of Appeal dismissed the suggestion that Mr Justice Coulson had failed to take fully into account Rosser’s mental condition, saying firmly, ‘None of the experts suggested that the disorders significantly reduced culpability.’

  Anwar Rosser was thereby condemned to spend the rest of his natural life in prison – or until the Secretary of State found enough ‘compassionate grounds’ on which to release him on licence towards the very end of his life.

  The Court’s written judgement, dismissing Rosser’s right of appeal, then proceeded to detail their opinion on the fate of Jamie Reynolds.

  The Court were no more sympathetic to Reynolds’ claim than they had been to Rosser’s. They found that Mr Justice Wilkie had indeed taken into account the reasons for the lateness of Reynolds’ plea of guilty, and that he had also given enough significance to his young age in his original sentence of a whole life term.

  ‘Reynolds did not admit he committed the killing until a few days before the trial,’ the Lord Chief Justice and his two colleagues concluded, even though ‘the evidence was overwhelming and we can find nothing in the psychiatric evidence that in any way justifies the failure to admit the killing.’ The Court then added the telling remark: ‘He showed no remorse’.

  But that was not the only reason the Court dismissed the arguments put forward by Reynolds’ legal team in their appeal against his sentence. Turning to his young age, the three judges concluded firmly that his intention to commit ‘the kind of grotesque murder that he carried out was of long standing’.

  ‘The planning of the murder was very careful,’ they went on, ‘the suffering inflicted was indescribable and motivation both sadistic and sexual,’ while there was no psychiatric evidence that excused him from his sentence. ‘Reynolds was a clever, resourceful and manipulative man who was determined to carry out a murder for sadistic and sexual pleasure,’ and furthermore, Georgia was still a child in the eyes of law.

  The Court did not feel it was necessary for them to elaborate on all the ‘aggravating factors’ that made Reynolds’ crime so particularly heinous – but they did point to ‘the long-standing desire to commit such a crime, the detailed planning, the females he had in reserve, the way in which he watched Georgia slowly die, his degradation of her body by his sexual violation of it, the taking of trophies and the dumping of the body.’

  Given all that they had said in their summing up, the Court’s conclusion was inevitable.

  ‘Quite apart from the future danger Reynolds poses,’ they argued, ‘the judge was plainly entitled to conclude … that the only just punishment for the murder of Georgia was a whole life order. There is no basis on which it can properly be argued that a whole life order was not required.’

  The fates of the twenty-three-year-old shop worker and occasional petrol pump attendant were confirmed. Jamie Reynolds was to spend the rest of his natural life behind the bars of an English prison, a period that could very well exceed sixty years, given the life expectancy of the average man in Britain. Arguably, it was the most draconian sentence ever handed down by an English Court.

  Yet the Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas and his fellow judges were nonetheless careful to explain the background to their decisio
ns in the cases of both Reynolds and Rosser. In particular, they sought to lay out the responsibilities of the Courts in whole life cases and the case law that lay behind their decision.

  The three judges started by referring back to the decision taken on 18 February 2014 stating that the Court of Appeal in England and Wales had concluded that the Courts had every right to continue to impose whole life terms of imprisonment, no matter what the European Court of Human Rights may have concluded in July 2013. The ECHR had ruled then that whole life terms were incompatible with Article Three of the European Convention of Human Rights, as they offered an offender no ‘hope’ of release and should therefore be abandoned.

  In their judgement on 18 February 2014, Lord Thomas, Sir Brian Leveson, Lady Justice Hallett, Lord Justice Treacy and Mr Justice Burnett had disagreed. Lord Thomas concluded firmly: ‘In our judgement the law of England and Wales … does provide to an offender “hope” or the “possibility” of release in exceptional circumstances which render the just punishment originally imposed no longer justifiable.’

  The five judges pointed out that ‘circumstances do change in exceptional cases’, and that each case had to be treated quite separately ‘given that the heinous nature of the original crime justly required punishment by imprisonment for life’.

  Now, just a few months later, in the 31 October judgement in the cases of Rosser and Reynolds, Lord Thomas pointed out that the Court of Appeal’s February decision had concluded: ‘A Court must only impose a whole life order if the seriousness is exceptionally high and the requirements of just punishment and retribution make such an order the just penalty.’ That was exactly why the Court of Appeal could now confirm the whole life sentences on Rosser and Reynolds.

  But the Court was also aware that a detailed consideration of the brutal, ugly details in both cases was required in order to make their judgement, and explained: ‘It is therefore regrettably necessary to set out the horrific circumstances of each of the murders, because only by an objective analysis of the circumstances can a judgement be made as to whether the requirements of just punishment necessitated a whole life order in each case.’