Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  When detectives visited his home on 21 December 1995, they found a treasure trove of sexual equipment, including handcuffs and rubber gags, a long black truncheon and his customary black leather uniform – and they also found trophies from three of his victims.

  An unrepentant Moore was to tell them over the next two days the details of how he had committed the murders and confessed that they had not found his second victim, Edward Carthy, whose body he had dumped in the woods.

  ‘I used the same knife on them all,’ he explained.

  When the detectives asked why he bought the knife in the first place, his response was every bit as matter of fact.

  ‘To kill somebody. With the sole intent of killing somebody.’

  Then Moore explained that killing for him was ‘a relief from stress’.

  ‘I don’t feel any remorse for what I’ve done.’

  Not long afterwards he also confessed to a whole string of ‘mostly sexual’ attacks during the 1970s and 1980s. Criminal psychologists suggest that stabbing can sometimes be a substitute for sex in both straight and gay relationships, and there is little doubt that Moore was both hypnotised by his own latent homosexuality and yet simultaneously appalled by it.

  In spite of his confessions, however, Moore pleaded not guilty at his trial, which began on 11 November 1996. He claimed instead that a gay lover called Alan, whom he had nicknamed Jason after a character in the Friday the Thirteenth series of films, had ‘wielded the knife’, while he watched.

  When prosecuting barrister Alex Carlile QC asked why he had confessed to the police about the killings, he said: ‘I led them up the garden path and back because I wanted Jason to get away.’

  ‘Do you see Jason here?’ the prosecutor asked, looking round the courtroom.

  ‘No,’ Moore replied.

  ‘That’s because he doesn’t exist.’

  ‘He does exist,’ Moore insisted. ‘He’s still out there … I don’t think he will ever stop.’

  Maintaining the fiction that ‘Jason’ existed, Moore nevertheless agreed that he was fascinated by knives and had assaulted men with them over the years during his attacks on gay and bisexual men. He also confessed that he kept handcuffs and a truncheon in his car ‘on the off chance’ of meeting a man he could assault.

  ‘You’re a bad man,’ the prosecuting barrister suggested to him, ‘aren’t you? And you like other bad men?’

  ‘Yes,’ Moore agreed.

  The jury did not believe a word of Moore’s fantasy about a gay lover called Jason who had actually committed the crimes, and took just two hours and thirty-five minutes to convict him of the four murders.

  Mr Justice Kerr had no difficulty in sentencing him to four life terms.

  ‘I consider you to be as dangerous a man as it is possible to find,’ the judge told him. ‘You are responsible for four sadistic murders in the space of three months. Not one of the victims had done you the slightest of harm; it was killing for killing’s sake.’

  ‘At no stage,’ the judge went on, ‘have you shown the slightest remorse or regret for the killings, or for the twenty years of assaults that preceded them.’ As to the question of release, he added, ‘I don’t want you or anyone else to be in the slightest doubt as to what I shall say … in a word, never.’

  The judge was as good as his word and recommended to the Home Secretary that he impose a whole life order on Moore, which was confirmed in 1997.

  Outside Leeds Crown Court after the verdict and sentencing Janine Ingrams, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of Keith Randles who had been dragged from his caravan and murdered by Moore, called the killer, who had been wearing a black shirt and tie in the dock, ‘an evil man’.

  ‘Justice has been done,’ she said, ‘and the best place for this person to be is where he is going for the rest of his life and that is in prison. Nobody deserves to die in the way that my father and the other men died.’

  Unashamed, Moore had his solicitor read a statement from him after the conviction.

  ‘I knew from the start,’ Moore insisted, ‘that nobody could win in this matter – not the deceased, the relatives, nor myself – nobody.’

  To call Moore’s view bizarre would be an understatement, but it did serve to underline his arrogance and the fantasy world that he had come to inhabit, a fantasy world that included his right to consider himself some kind of victim in these brutal, callous and premeditated killings.

  Moore’s arrogance and determination to ‘work the system’ was evident within four years when, in 1999, he won nearly £13,000 compensation from a couple he claimed had stolen the contents of his home, including his prized set of garden gnomes. He claimed his neighbours had abused his offer for them to become caretakers of his property by selling his belongings at car boot sales.

  The following year, in July 2000, Moore was not so fortunate when he lost his fight to win £160,000 in damages from North Wales Police, after accusing them of failing to protect his home following his arrest in 1995. A district judge agreed his case should be struck off the list, on the grounds that Moore had no realistic chance of winning at trial. Moore appeared in Court flanked by heavy security but did not bother with legal representation. He was clearly intent on causing the maximum inconvenience to the prison authorities and proving to himself that he could.

  It was a view sharpened still more when he launched an appeal against his whole life sentence in 2008, to be told by the Court of Appeal that he would indeed spend the rest of his life behind bars. That decision only fuelled his desire to prove his omnipotence and join Bamber and Vinter’s appeal to the European Court, which provoked fury among the relatives of his victims and the police.

  The mother of Edward Carthy said, as Moore’s European case began, ‘The thought of him having the cheek to think he can get out. He’s just not going to get out because he’s destroyed how many families? He’s destroyed ours, I know that. My husband was never the same again … He went into shock, drew into himself and wouldn’t talk about it. It horrified him.’

  The reaction was every bit as strong when Moore won his appeal in July 2013 in Strasbourg, which found that a whole life term was ‘degrading and inhuman’. Detective Constable Dave Morris, for example, who had arrested Moore in 1995, said bitterly when the Court in Strasbourg found in Moore’s favour, ‘There are other people here whose rights have been infringed. The rights of his victims have been overlooked in this matter and not just the victims, the victims’ families as well.’

  Those words were reflected in the Court of Appeal’s decision not to reconsider the whole life terms that applied to Peter Moore, any more than those of Jeremy Bamber and Douglas Vinter in the light of their European victory.

  7

  ‘Selfish, self-pitying and grotesquely violent’

  David Oakes and Daniel Restivo

  Another case that confirmed just how determined the Court of Appeal in England and Wales was to protect the right of the English judiciary to pass a whole life sentence on the most heinous murderers concerned a vicious, bullying, former nightclub bouncer and unemployed builder named David Oakes, aged fifty, who lived part of the time in a static caravan near Braintree in Essex. His crime also shocked the nation and the Court.

  In July 2005, when he was still only forty-four, the swaggering, bald-headed Oakes, who had a reputation in the local area for being a man who would resort to violence at the slightest opportunity, started a relationship with a round-faced, cheerful, outgoing thirty-two-year-old woman named Christine Chambers. She already
had three children with her previous partner, a close friend of Oakes called Ian Flitt. These three were Levi, Gary and Abigail, but Chambers went on to have another daughter with Oakes, called Shania, who was born in October 2008. Chambers and her children lived in a plain, white-painted, semi-detached house on the outskirts of Braintree.

  Never exactly conventional and, indeed, distinctly stormy, the relationship between Oakes and Chambers began to break down in the first months of 2011. There were fights between them, he dragged her out of her house by the hair on several occasions and attacked her repeatedly – all because Oakes sensed that she might be the one person who would not be bullied by him into doing exactly what he wanted. By the end of March the couple had broken up completely, but that did not stop Oakes harassing Chambers.

  As a result, Chambers made an application to the Court for a non-molestation order, and on 21 April 2011, on the basis of a number of allegations of Oakes’s persistent violence towards Chambers, the order was made. It did not deter Oakes for one moment. If anything, it made the man who had a gunshot for a ringtone on his mobile phone even angrier, so determined was he to show that he controlled his partner and their now two-year-old daughter Shania. In the seven weeks after the non-molestation order was granted, Oakes lost control completely.

  In spite of the order, and repeated police warnings to Oakes about his breaches of it, which included a ruling that he could not come within one hundred yards of his partner and their daughter, his violent threats continued. In one week, Chambers received no fewer than a hundred arrogant, bullying text messages from Oakes, many of them threatening to kill her. Finally, just before midnight on the evening of 5 June 2011, he decided to act.

  Oakes left his caravan and arrived at Chambers’s house carrying a blue holdall containing an axe, a bottle of petrol, a Stanley knife, some scissors and a pair of pliers, as well as a length of wire threaded through rubber tubing that could be used as a garrotte. He was also carrying a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun together with cartridges for it. Oakes had bought it from a ‘friend’ for £300 just a few days earlier.

  Most significant of all, this was the evening before Oakes and Chambers were due to go to court to confirm the custody arrangements for their daughter Shania.

  At about 11.55 on that June evening Oakes let himself into Chambers’s house with a key that he had kept from the time that he had lived there and walked up the stairs to the bedrooms where she and her daughters were asleep in bed. Oakes turned the lights on, waking everyone, including ten-year-old Abigail and her two-year-old stepsister. He then subjected his former partner and her two daughters to one of the most terrifying and brutal ordeals it is possible to imagine.

  When Christine Chambers told Oakes to ‘get out’ of the house, he opened the holdall and took out the axe. He then showed her the shotgun and said he would burn the house down and that he had petrol in the holdall as well as a lighter to do the job. Oakes then punched ten-year-old Abigail in the eye and hit her with the butt of the shotgun, but when she tried to use her mobile phone to get help, he snatched it from her and broke both it and her mother’s phone.

  Oakes then ordered his former partner to cut off chunks of her hair with the pair of scissors he had brought along in the holdall. He made her remove her top and walk about without a bra, before insisting that she hug and kiss him, and say that she loved him. For her part, Christine Chambers pleaded with him not to touch her children, saying that she would do anything he wanted. It did nothing to placate Oakes whatever – quite the reverse.

  By now in an unimaginable rage, Oakes proceeded to threaten Chambers with a knife before telling her that he would blow her ten-year-old daughter’s leg off with his shotgun and rip off her nipples with pliers. At one point he put his gun into Abigail’s mouth, but removed it, and her mother shouted, ‘Run, run, save yourself while you can!’ In a panic the girl managed to climb out of her bedroom window, drop down on to a flat roof beneath, and then jump down a further ten feet to the ground below. No sooner had she got there than she ran to her father, who lived near by, for help.

  Ian Flitt later remembered that his daughter banged on the window to wake him up and then started screaming, ‘He is there at the house with a gun!’ Flitt called the police, and armed officers arrived outside not long afterwards. Inside Christine Chambers’s house, however, things were rapidly disintegrating as Oakes’s anger showed no limits. The arrival of armed police made no difference whatever. He continued to subject his former partner to an ‘attack of horrifying violence’, as the Court of Appeal was to put it later.

  Using the axe he had brought with him, Oakes cut deeply into Chambers’s scalp, and then – using the Stanley knife – proceeded to disfigure her dreadfully. He was clearly consumed with the thought that if he could not have her then no other man would. He cut a deep incised wound into her left eyebrow, to which he applied superglue, and a Y shaped laceration to the bridge of her nose. He also all but cut off the lower part of her left ear.

  Even that was not enough for Oakes. He slashed both sides of her face, and used the Stanley knife to cut her from her lower abdomen to the vulva. She was then shot in the left thigh, and while lying on the ground in the upstairs of her house, he shot her again, this time in the right knee. It was only after that inconceivable torture that Oakes killed her, shooting her in the left side of her chest.

  A few minutes later, Oakes raised his shotgun again and shot his two-year-old daughter Shania from point blank range in the left side of her forehead, just above her left eyebrow, killing her, though not instantly – and not until after she had been forced to watch the vicious, prolonged and remorseless attack on her mother.

  In the wake of the defenceless child’s pointless killing, there was a stand-off between the armed police outside Chambers’s house and Oakes, which lasted until 5.45 am on 6 June 2011 when Oakes turned the shotgun on himself in an attempt at suicide. He failed. The gun’s powerful recoil skewed the barrel as he pulled the trigger, and resulted in a severe wound to the left side of his face, but he survived. The police took him to hospital, where he was later arrested and charged with the murders of Christine Chambers and their daughter Shania.

  When it came to Oakes’s trial at Chelmsford Crown Court in April 2012, however, Oakes version of events was quite different. He pleaded not guilty to both charges of murder and maintained that it was Christine Chambers’ fault that she had died.

  Nevertheless, the jury heard prosecuting counsel, Orlando Pownall QC, say that Oakes, ‘fuelled by jealousy, frustrated by the fact that his relationship with Christine Chambers was over and that he would only, in the future, have limited access to Shania, deemed that he would kill them and kill himself.’ Describing Oakes as ‘violent and domineering’, Pownall also pointed out that Chambers had been a ‘doting mother’.

  When Oakes took the witness stand in his own defence, however, he told a completely different version of events. He insisted that Chambers had shot their daughter and that he did not have the shotgun at the time it was fired.

  ‘It’s like time was in slow motion,’ he told his defence barrister. ‘I went through the bedroom door and Chris is on her knees and she’s swinging the gun towards me and I grabbed the gun. I’m hitting and kicking her – I don’t care at that point.’

  ‘I’m not sure if I’ve shot Christine,’ Oakes went on. ‘I’m trying to stop her and get to my baby and then I feel a passing out sensation.’ It was a tissue of lies, but it did not end there.

  Oakes also maintained that he had arrived at the house much earlier in
the evening, and that Chambers had attacked him with a pair of scissors after an argument about money.

  ‘I slapped her around the face and she hit her head on the bedpost or the fireplace which made her bleed,’ he told the jury, then adding that she had been acting ‘like a lunatic’ and hitting her own head against the bathroom wall.

  Oakes even claimed that in the last hour and a half of her life he and his partner had been getting on well. ‘I thought we were going to have sex,’ he said, before explaining that he had given the shotgun to Chambers three days earlier at her request.

  ‘I wouldn’t kill my family, I didn’t intend to either,’ he told the jury.

  They were not convinced, not least, perhaps, because Oakes barely sat in the dock during his two-week trial, saying he did not attend the Court as a result of the ‘physical discomfort’ he was suffering after the shotgun wound to his face, and that he could not bear to hear the details of his daughter’s death.

  ‘It’s the stress of going through it,’ he told the judge, Mr Justice Fulford. ‘I’ve seen first-hand [what happened] and I can’t go through the pictures of my baby again and again.’

  In spite of his protestations of innocence, the jury convicted Oakes on both counts of murder.

  Passing sentence on 12 May 2012, Mr Justice Fulford told the defendant – who by now was in the dock of the court – that he was a ‘bullying and controlling man who had frequently inflicted serious violence on Christine Chambers during the course of their five- or six-year relationship, killed his partner and young daughter simply because he was unable to accept that Ms Chambers could no longer bear to be with him and wanted to start a new life.’