Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  Examining the killings of WPC Hughes and WPC Bone, Mr Justice Holroyde was withering in his condemnation of Cregan’s murderous scheme. ‘You lured two female officers to their deaths by making a false report that you had been the victim of a crime. I have no doubt that you were expecting one or more unarmed officers to attend, and that is what happened. You had armed yourself with at least one grenade, and with a self-loading pistol to which you had fitted an extended magazine containing thirty-two rounds. PC Fiona Bone and PC Nicola Hughes were sent in response to your call for help, performing their public duty for the public good.’

  The judge pointed out that their good intentions had no impact whatever on Cregan’s evil intent, not least because he could clearly see from his position within the house that they were unarmed female officers, and that the element of surprise he had over them as a result enabled him to shoot them without their having any chance whatever to defend themselves or take cover.

  Every bit as significantly, Mr Justice Holroyde then pointed out that Cregan’s use of a hand grenade was something that the ‘Criminal Courts in this country had never encountered before’, and was, therefore, an exceptional ‘aggravating feature’ of the crime.

  ‘The crime of murder ends one life but ruins many more,’ he went on. ‘The harm you have caused, and the pain, anguish and misery you have inflicted, extend far beyond those who were killed and injured by your individual and collective acts.’

  Looking sternly across the courtroom to the dock, Mr Justice Holroyde paused and added, ‘I have seen no sign of any real remorse or of any compassion for your victims. None of you has shown any sign that you care at all for the death and injury you have caused to your immediate victims or of the immense harm you have done to many others. Self-interest has been the motivating force for each of you.’

  But Mr Justice Holroyde took considerable pains to explain that life imprisonment with a whole life term was reserved for the ‘few most exceptional offences’, in which the judge is satisfied that the ‘element of just punishment and retribution requires the imposition of a whole life order.’

  ‘It is important that you the defendants, and the general public, should understand what that means in practice,’ he went on. In one of the most precise and careful descriptions of sentencing the most dangerous and vicious offenders, and what exactly a life sentence for murder meant in the wake of the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, the judge carefully explained what a minimum term meant.

  ‘If the court specifies a minimum term, you cannot be released until that minimum term has expired,’ Mr Justice Holroyde said. ‘But even then you will not automatically be released. You will not be released unless and until the Parole Board are satisfied that it is safe to release you into the community. That time may never come. Even if you are released on licence, that is not the end of your sentence. You will remain subject to the conditions of your licence for the rest of your life. If you reoffend, the Secretary of State has the power to order that you be returned to prison to continue to serve your life sentence until it is thought safe to release you again.’

  The judge then went on to address the principal offender in front of him, Dale Cregan, and he made it abundantly clear from the outset that he felt his crimes were exceptionally serious and therefore warranted the harshest treatment.

  ‘Parliament has provided a non-exhaustive list of categories of murder which will normally be regarded as being exceptionally serious,’ Mr Justice Holroyde told him. ‘One of those categories includes the murder of two or more persons where each murder involves a substantial degree of premeditation or planning. There can be no doubt that at least three of your crimes come within that category, but the full enormity of your offending extends even further.’

  ‘First, because I have no doubt that your guilty pleas were cynically timed to suit your own purposes, and did not reflect any regret for what you had done. Secondly, because in your case the overall sentence which must be imposed is dictated by the exceptional seriousness of your crimes. The aggravating features which I have mentioned lead inescapably to the clear conclusion that your offending is so exceptionally serious that the Court must order that the early release provisions shall not apply to you.’

  Cregan stood impassively in the dock as the sentence was passed, although there were gasps and muffled cheers from the public gallery when they heard that he would never be released from prison. But he smiled and shook hands with some of his fellow defendants when he was eventually led down to the cells.

  Mr Justice Holroyde then went on to sentence his accomplices, the nine other defendants. Luke Livesey, aged twenty-eight, and Damian Gorman, aged thirty-eight, had been found guilty of the killing of Mark Short at the Cotton Tree – though they had pleaded their innocence. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty-three years.

  Anthony Wilkinson, aged thirty-four, who had taken part in the killing of David Short alongside Cregan, had pleaded guilty during the trial to murdering him, although he was cleared of the attempted murder of Mrs Hark on the same day and cleared of causing an explosion with a hand grenade. He was sentenced to life with a minimum of thirty-five years.

  Meanwhile, Leon Atkinson, aged thirty-five, together with Ryan Hadfield, aged twenty-nine, and Matthew James, aged thirty-three, had been cleared of the murder of Mark Short in the Cotton Tree and the attempted murders of three others in the pub. Francis Dixon, aged thirty-eight, was acquitted of the murder of David Short and the attempted murder of Mrs Hark as well as causing an explosion with a hand grenade. They received no sentence.

  Finally Mohammed Ali, aged thirty-two, was found guilty of assisting an offender – Dale Cregan. He was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.

  Outside Preston Crown Court, the families of both young women police officers explained to reporters how devastated their lives had been by their murder. Bryn Hughes, Nicola’s father, said simply, ‘Our lives will never be the same again,’ and that his family would ‘live with what Cregan has done every single hour of every single day for the rest of our lives.’

  Speaking about Cregan himself, Hughes added, ‘He has lost nothing, He had already committed two murders and was destined for a lifetime behind bars.’ The family on the other hand were left with ‘a life barely worth living without her’. But he did not call for the reinstatement of the death penalty.

  Alongside him outside Preston Crown Court, Paul Bone, Fiona’s father, explained that he had been told that it gets easier with time, ‘but at this moment every Tuesday lunchtime is difficult as that is when our lives changed forever’. He expressed his pride in his daughter’s achievements, and her service as a police officer, but he too declined to call for the reinstatement of the death penalty.

  In the wake of Cregan’s sentencing one friend of his family admitted, ‘He knows he’ll never be freed from prison, and the enormity of what he did is starting to dawn on him. He is praying he dies early. He told his family, “I’m not going to kill myself but I wish I had cancer.” He’s sorry for what he did. Whether anybody believes it or not is another matter.’

  Cregan’s mother Anita reflected that sentiment when she told the Manchester Evening News later, ‘Can I just take this opportunity to say sorry to the police and policewomen’s families? That shouldn’t have happened. I mean it from the bottom of my heart, my heart goes out to them. I’ve cried for them, but I didn’t bring him up that way.’

  So ended one of the most dramatic criminal trials in modern history, and certainly one of the most expensive, but it was certainly not
the end of the story of Dale Cregan. No sooner had he been taken to the cells than he made sure that the world would hear more and more about him.

  By then in Full Sutton Prison, near York, Cregan was demonstrating no remorse. Like David Bieber before him, he was demanding that he should be released from the solitary confinement that the prison authorities had decided was the best place for him. They had done so for his own protection, as there were persistent, and apparently well-founded, rumours in the jail and among the underworld community in Manchester that a £20,000 payment was on offer to any offender who blinded Cregan’s right eye permanently, thereby rendering him blind for life.

  Cregan ignored the threat and went on hunger strike, this time to support his demand that he be relocated to Strangeways Prison in Manchester so that he could be nearer to his family. By August 2013 he had achieved his transfer, but still Cregan refused to collaborate. He maintained his hunger strike in Strangeways, where he was again kept in isolation for fear of an attack by a fellow prisoner, and was eventually placed in the prison’s hospital wing.

  In early September 2013, Cregan was transferred again, this time to Ashworth Secure Hospital on Merseyside, which houses prisoners deemed to be criminally insane. Moors Murderer Ian Brady was continuing to serve his sentence there. Brady had been on permanent hunger strike for several years, insisting that he wanted to bring his own life to an end.

  By the time Cregan arrived at Ashworth he was reported not to have eaten for five weeks and was just lying on his bed all day every day without talking to anyone, be they inmates or staff. ‘His head has gone,’ reported a police source. ‘He can’t take it any more, he’s not cocky any more, what a difference in attitude.’

  But Ashworth did not suit Cregan either. Within a matter of weeks of his arrival he was in a fury with the authorities because the hospital banned everyone from smoking. ‘He thought it was going to be a holiday camp in there but it has not panned out like that,’ one source commented as Cregan was about to be transferred again. ‘He is pleased he is going back to prison because he thinks he will be around prisoners who are more like him. But he does not want to be kept in solitary.’

  Cregan was reported to have told one friend, ‘I’ll do my time standing on my head. I just want to be on a regular wing.’ Such was his apparent ability to influence the authorities that he was transferred back to Strangeways in Manchester in February 2014 after barely six months in Ashworth.

  He has always had his friends within the police service, however. In December 2014 WPC Katie Murray, a serving officer with Greater Manchester Police, was sentenced to two years and nine months’ imprisonment for supplying information about the hunt for Cregan, while it was going on, to her lover Jason Lloyd, a drug dealer and associate of Cregan’s.

  There can be little doubt that Dale Cregan positively relishes his reputation as the whole life prisoner who killed not one but two unarmed policewomen. It burnishes his preening vanity and brings him the notoriety he craves. More frighteningly, however, it also brings him an ‘invisible licence’ to kill again in prison as there is nothing left for him to lose. That very fact underlines the dangers behind a whole life sentence – no matter how ‘heinous’ the crimes he has committed – and places a great burden on the prison officers and staff, not to mention the other inmates who are in prison alongside him.

  It is perhaps significant that Cregan has, so far, declined to appeal against his whole life term of imprisonment.

  11

  What ‘Life Means Life’ Feels Like

  Robert Maudsley, Sidney Cooke and Charles Bronson

  One man who knows exactly what it means to be sentenced to spend the rest of your life behind bars – and the ‘invisible licence’ it gives to kill in prison – is sixty-two-year-old Robert John Maudsley, a wild-eyed, long-haired Liverpudlian, who killed one man before he was imprisoned and three more once in custody.

  Now living in a specially constructed cell, Maudsley has spent a large part of the past thirty-two years in solitary confinement in what is effectively a two-roomed cage, with bulletproof windows and a team of six prison officers dedicated to looking after him. He is allowed just one hour of exercise outside a day, and never in the company of other prisoners – both for his protection and theirs.

  Maudsley’s two-cell unit bears an uncanny resemblance to the one featured in the film version of Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs, but it was created more than seven years before the film itself was released. A visitor has to pass through no fewer than seventeen locked steel doors to reach the unit, which is approximately five and a half metres by four and a half metres. The only furniture is a table and chair, both made from compressed cardboard, and the lavatory and sink are bolted to the floor. The bed is a concrete slab with a mattress.

  A solid steel door opens into a small cage within the cell, encased in thick Perspex, with a slot at the bottom through which prison officers pass food and other items. During his daily hour of exercise, he is escorted to the yard by at least three officers. As the Observer writer Tony Thompson noted in 2003, ‘It is a level of intense isolation to which no other prisoner, not even Myra Hindley, has been subjected.’

  The effect on Maudsley has been to drive him into a severe depression. ‘My life in solitary is one long period of unbroken depression,’ he has said. It also illuminates the dilemma that lies behind the ‘lock them up and throw away the key’ approach to the incarceration of those who have committed the most heinous crimes – for it reveals the effect it can have on those who receive a whole life sentence.

  Maudsley has made no secret of his views, even to the extent of writing to The Times newspaper several times about his treatment. ‘It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad,’ he has said. ‘They do not know the answer and they do not care just so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind.’ Now with a pale prison pallor and wispy, thinning hair, Maudsley also said, ‘I am left to stagnate; vegetate; and to regress; left to confront my solitary head-on with people who have eyes but don’t see and who have ears but don’t hear, who have mouths but don’t speak.’

  ‘Why can’t I have amazing pictures on my walls in solitary rather than the dirty damp patches I currently have?’ Maudsley wrote. ‘Why can’t I possess or purchase postage stamps so I can maintain contact with my family, friends, people who contact me etc; why can’t I have hand-held electronic games in my cell; why can’t I have toiletries? With the open toilet that blocks up here it certainly does smell like a sewer.’

  In another letter he asked, ‘Why can’t I have a budgie instead of the flies and cockroaches and spiders I currently have? I promise to love it and not eat it.’

  With an exceptional IQ, he has repeatedly asked for access to classical music tapes, a television set, pictures and toiletries, as well as the budgerigar. Some of his requests have been granted. He gained access to postage stamps, for example, but his conditions in the first decade or more of his time in his Perspex cell have left him with a residue of anger as well as depression.

  ‘If the Prison Service says no,’ he wrote in another letter, ‘then I ask for a simple cyanide capsule which I shall willingly take and the problem of Robert John Maudsley can easily and swiftly be resolved.’

  There are those within the Prison Service who see Maudsley as a problem that cannot be solved in any other way than his exceptional confinement, in view of the outstanding danger he presents to other prisoners whom he may come into contact with.

  But not everyone shares that view. Professor Andrew Coyle, now Emeritus Professor o
f Prison Studies at the University of London, and a former prison governor himself, asked me when I discussed the issue with him, ‘Do people really know or understand what “throw away the key” really means?’

  In a speech in the United States in 2014, Professor Coyle quoted from a United Nations report to the General Assembly, which said bluntly, ‘Prison regimes of solitary confinement often cause mental and physical suffering or humiliation that amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment … Solitary confinement should be imposed, if at all, in very exceptional circumstances, as a last resort, for as short a time as possible.’

  Professor Coyle also cited an example from his own experience as a prison governor in Scotland’s maximum security prison with a prisoner named Thomas McCullough. In 1970 McCullough had been convicted of murdering two people and was ordered to be detained indefinitely in the Scottish Secure Psychiatric Hospital. But in 1976 McCulloch and another patient broke out armed with an axe and a knife. In the course of their escape they killed another patient, a member of the nursing staff and a policeman.

  When they were caught, both men were sentenced to life imprisonment, and McCulloch was kept in a specially constructed suite of three rooms – a cell where he slept at night, a living area and a workroom. Three prison officers were present within the suite and directly supervised his movements at all times, and a further team of three rotated their duties with them.

  ‘At the outset,’ Professor Coyle told me, ‘it seemed likely that he would never be released. But as the years passed the prison staff worked with McCulloch so successfully that he was eventually transferred to lower security prisons and in 2013 was released from prison entirely – although he will remain under supervision in the community for the rest of his life. McCulloch is now living anonymously in the Highlands of Scotland.’