Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  It was not until 2008, twenty-five years after the Laitner killings, that Hutchinson launched a campaign for his freedom, questioning his whole life term and saying it breached his ‘human rights’. The Court of Appeal rejected the argument. Reviewing the case in May, Mr Justice Tugendhat ruled that the sixty-six year old should remain in prison for the rest of his life for the crimes. He also refused to allow the appeal to go any further. ‘There is no reason at all for departing from the decision of the Home Secretary,’ he concluded.

  Undeterred, Hutchinson and his legal team pursued an appeal, and in October 2008 returned to the Court of Appeal in London, once again on the grounds that his whole life term was a breach of his human rights, and that – in any event – his conviction was flawed. Once again Hutchinson received short shrift. Three Court of Appeal judges told him that his crimes were so deranged that life must indeed mean life.

  Lord Justice Dyson, sitting with Mr Justice Henriques and Mr Justice Openshaw, said there was ‘no substance’ in Hutchinson’s application. ‘This was a truly shocking case,’ he added. ‘In the experience of all three members of this court we can say that none of us is aware of a case of greater gravity or more heinous than this case. In our judgement Mr Justice Tugendhat was plainly correct in saying that this applicant should spend the rest of his life in custody without prospect of release.’

  Even then, Hutchinson was not prepared to give up his appeal. He pursued his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In August 2013 he became the very first British prisoner serving a whole life term to appeal against it in the Strasbourg Court in the wake of their decision in June 2013 questioning the right of the English Courts to pass a whole life term sentence, which it considered inhuman and degrading.

  His appeal provoked a furious reaction from the remaining members of the Laitner family. ‘Whenever even the name Arthur Hutchinson rears its ugly head,’ the Laitner family said in a statement, ‘it does nothing but create fear and distress to the victims of this heinous crime. Let the [European Court of] Human Rights judiciary members be thrust into our position for just a day and maybe they would understand this. We are confident that justice will be done and more importantly be seen to be done, so that this matter can finally be put to rest.’

  It was a view echoed by the then Secretary of State for Justice, Chris Grayling MP, who commented, ‘To be told this breaches human rights is absurd … What about the rights of the victims and their families?’

  Nevertheless, Hutchinson and his legal team still hoped that the European Court’s decision might eventually lead to his release. But that hope was effectively ended by the English Court of Appeal’s decision in February 2014, upholding their right to pass a whole life sentence, as there remained some prospects for release in exceptional circumstances. Yet, even then, Hutchinson persisted with his case in Strasbourg. It was not until February 2015, two weeks before his seventy-fourth birthday, that any faint hope he may have had for his release was finally extinguished.

  On 3 February 2015, the European Court ruled that his whole life order could not be overturned on the basis that it contradicted his rights under Article Three of the European Convention on Human Rights, which relates to inhuman and degrading treatment. In a stark contradiction of their decision in June 2013, the Strasbourg-based Court also said that it now considered that the United Kingdom was in line with European human rights laws. They were taking into account the Court of Appeal’s verdict in February 2014 that prisoners do have the opportunity of release – even when serving a whole life term – as the Secretary of State for Justice has the right to release them under very specific circumstances.

  The European Court acknowledged the Court of Appeal’s decision, when its judges said in their written ruling on 3 February 2015, ‘In the circumstances of this case where, following the Grand Chamber’s judgement in which it expressed doubts about the clarity of domestic law, the national Court has specifically addressed those doubts and set out an unequivocal statement of the legal position, the Court must accept the national Court’s interpretation of domestic law.’

  In other words, the fate of a whole life prisoner now lay unequivocally in the hands of the British legal system and the Secretary of State for Justice. That decision also meant that the appeal by Douglas Vinter, Jeremy Bamber and Peter Moore that their whole life terms could be overturned by the European Court fell away. Just as significantly, Arthur Hutchinson, the ‘Fox’ from Teesside, who has spent almost thirty-two years in jail since the Laitner massacre, is thereby condemned to remain there for the rest of his life.

  For his part, Hutchinson has remained unrepentant, indeed boastful of his crimes, hinting to his half-brother in a series of threatening telephone calls that he would find the surviving members of the Laitner family, if he were ever to be released, even though that possibility must now be so remote as to be all but meaningless. That thought will no doubt torment a man who is possessed by a desire to control and manipulate everything and everyone around him. Hutchinson is reported to be still regarded as a danger to his fellow prisoners – so deep is the rage he feels at not being able to dictate his destiny.

  As Dan Hodges put it in the Daily Telegraph, ‘This is not a man who deserves to wake up every morning hopeful that he is a day nearer to his release. He is a man who should know with brutal, unequivocal certainty that the bare walls of his cell will encase him till the days he dies.’ Many would agree in Hutchinson’s case, so grotesque and heinous were his crimes, but there are others who would question it. Janet Crowe, of the Penal Reform Trust, for example, believes that prisoners need at least the hope of freedom: ‘If a prisoner has no hope and they feel they have nothing to lose,’ she has said, ‘it may make them far more dangerous to work with inside the prison.’

  But the case of Arthur Hutchinson throws into sharp relief the case of another multiple murderer– school caretaker Ian Huntley – who was not sentenced to a whole life term of imprisonment, in spite of committing crimes that may have seemed to many every bit as heinous as Hutchinson’s. On the surface it is difficult to see why there should be a difference between the two sentences, but Huntley’s crimes underline the ambiguity that lies behind the current judicial attitude to whole life terms of imprisonment. To see why that is, we need to look at his case in some detail.

  Just after 6.15 on the sunny Sunday early evening of 4 August 2002, two ten-year-old schoolgirls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman – both wearing Manchester United football shirts – were walking home from the local shop in the pretty Cambridgeshire village of Soham after buying some sweets. They had both attended a barbecue that day at Holly’s house and were in high spirits. On their way home they passed the rented home of twenty-nine-year-old Ian Kevin Huntley, who opened his front door and went out to talk to them. The girls knew him, just as they knew his live-in girlfriend, Maxine Carr, who worked as a teaching assistant at St Andrews primary school, which they both attended.

  Telling Holly and Jessica that Maxine Carr was inside the house, and would love to speak to them, Huntley ushered the two ten year olds inside – only for them to discover that Maxine Carr was not actually there. She was in her home town of Grimsby in Lincolnshire visiting her mother. But Huntley did not let them leave, and within a matter of minutes both young girls were dead.

  No one can truly say why Huntley killed them on that sunny August day, for he certainly did not appear to have planned the killings. Huntley’s mother later suggested he had killed them in a ‘fit of jealous rage’ in the wake of slamming the phone down on Carr after a bitter arg
ument over the fact that she may have been cheating on him with another man, and that he was stuck at home alone, while she was out ‘enjoying herself’. The police also believe that this was Huntley’s motive for the killings, as they found no evidence whatever of premeditation.

  One thing is certain. Huntley has never explained why he killed Holly and Jessica inside his tidy little house on that day. But the transcript of a telephone call Huntley made from prison to a member of his family, which was published in The Sun newspaper in March 2007, revealed some of the details of the killings, though not the motive for them. In the tape Huntley said that Holly had died in the bathroom of the house, possibly from drowning, and that Jessica had died in the living room, probably after being asphyxiated.

  In the ninety-minute tape, alleged to have been made in September 2006, Huntley explained that he had been brushing his dog, Sadie, when he had seen Holly and Jessica that Sunday. Holly had a nosebleed, he explained, and Jessica needed the toilet, so he had taken them into the house and upstairs to the bathroom. Huntley then maintained that Holly had ‘fallen’ into the bath, which was full of water, and Jessica had ‘started to cause a bit of commotion’. He also revealed that he had taken Jessica’s mobile phone – ‘I grabbed it from her and turned it off as she was constantly saying I had pushed Holly.’

  ‘As soon as I got Holly out of the bath,’ Huntley was quoted as saying, ‘and realised she was dead, Jessica went schiz.’ The caretaker took her downstairs to try calm her edown, but she tried to leave. ‘I don’t know what was going through my head, I don’t recall thinking, “I’ve got to kill her to stop her leaving”. I think it was my intention just to stop her … I guess you could say that she acted, I reacted without even thinking. I grabbed hold of her, realising that I couldn’t let her go. At that point, with one hand over her mouth and the other round her neck, she died.

  ‘I feel it’s important to reiterate that there was no sexual motive,’ Huntley added. ‘There was no sexual interference with either girl.’ He also insisted that he was not ‘evil’.

  What is not in doubt, however, is that Huntley had a track record of taking a sexual interest in young girls. In August 1995, for example, when he was twenty-one years old, a joint investigation was launched by police and social services in his home town of Grimsby after a fifteen-year-old girl admitted that she had been having sex with him. But no prosecution took place.

  In March 1996 he was investigated again over allegations that he had been having sex with an underage girl, but again he was not charged. Then, in April 1996, Huntley was investigated yet again over allegations of underage sex, but this allegation, too, did not result in a charge. The following month he was investigated over further allegations of having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl, and yet again no prosecution followed.

  Two years later, in April 1998, Huntley was arrested on suspicion of raping a woman. He admitted having sex with her but claimed it was consensual. The police decided not to charge him. The following month, May 1998, he was formally charged with rape and remanded in custody after an eighteen-year-old Grimsby woman claimed to have been raped by him on her way home from a nightclub in the town. The charge was dropped after the Crown Prosecution Service determined that there was no realistic chance of a conviction.

  Then, in July 1998, Huntley was investigated once more over allegations that he had indecently assaulted an eleven-year-old girl the previous September, but again he was never charged. He was investigated over allegations of rape on a seventeen-year-old girl in February 1999 but yet again no charges were brought against him.

  One final allegation came in July 1999, when a woman was raped and Huntley was interviewed by police about his possible involvement. But an alibi was provided for him by his latest girlfriend, Maxine Carr, and again there was no charge. The woman subsequently said that Huntley was not the rapist. The BBC also revealed in 2012 that North East Lincolnshire Social Services had received four separate complaints of underage sexual relations against Huntley in the late 1990s.

  Huntley’s marital record was every bit as chequered. In December 1994, then aged nineteen, he met eighteen-year-old Claire Evans, embarked on a whirlwind romance and married her within weeks. The marriage was short lived, however, and she left Huntley within a matter of days, moving in with Huntley’s younger brother Wayne. An enraged Huntley refused to grant his wife a divorce until 1999, thereby preventing his brother’s marriage to Evans.

  In February 1999, at the age of twenty-five, Huntley met twenty-nine-year-old Maxine Carr at a Grimsby nightclub, and they moved in together after just four weeks. The relationship endured despite some turbulent rows, and they moved to Soham in 2001, where Huntley took a job at the Village Centre as the manager of a team of caretakers. In September 2001 he applied for the post of caretaker at Soham Village College, a secondary school; and in November 2001, despite his history of sexual contact with underage girls, he was awarded the position. Carr, meanwhile, became a teaching assistant at the local primary school.

  Cambridgeshire police knew none of those facts when they embarked on their investigation into the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in August 2002. They also did not know that Huntley had hidden the girls’ bodies in the boot of his red Ford Fiesta on that Sunday evening – bending their young limbs to do so – while pretending to the world that he had ‘no idea’ where they had gone, even though, as one television reporter put to him, he could well have been the last person to see them alive.

  ‘Yeah, that’s what it seems like,’ he said calmly, while insisting that their disappearance was ‘absolutely’ a mystery. Chillingly, he also told the reporter, ‘While there’s no news there’s still a glimmer of hope, and that’s basically what we’re all hanging on to.’

  For her part, Maxine Carr showed another television reporter the ‘thank you’ card that Holly Wells had given her on the last day of the summer term at school that year. ‘She was just lovely, really lovely,’ Carr said, urging Holly and Jessica to ‘just come home’.

  The grim reality was that at about 8.30 in the morning of Monday 5 August, the day after the murders, Huntley drove the bodies of the two dead girls, still in his boot, to a field at the perimeter of the Royal Air Force base at Lakenheath in Suffolk, about six miles from Soham. There he stripped their clothes from them, leaving them naked, dropped them into a six-foot ditch, poured petrol from a can that he had brought with him over them and then set fire to them both, hoping to destroy any forensic evidence that might incriminate him. Huntley then calmly drove home, taking the girls’ clothes with him.

  By that time a police search for the two girls was in full swing. Pictures of them were circulated throughout the community in the hopes that someone had seen them. Their parents held an emotional news conference pleading for any information about their whereabouts. Even the Manchester United football star, David Beckham, whose name adorned the back of the two girls’ shirts, made a televised appeal for their safe return. Huntley played his part in the search, as did Maxine Carr, who had, by then, returned from Grimsby.

  Holly and Jessica’s Manchester United shirts were eventually found in a rubbish bin in a storage building at Soham Village College, along with their shoes. It was one of the first breaks in the investigation, but it did not come until Saturday August 16, twelve days after the girls’ disappearance. The police arrested Huntley and Carr in the early hours of Sunday 17 August on suspicion of murder. Later that same day a game warden walking through the woods at the edge of RAF Lakenheath came across the girls’ partially-burned bodies, which we
re by then ‘severely decomposed’ and ‘partially skeletonised’. An autopsy revealed that they had both been asphyxiated.

  At the outset of the inquiry into Holly and Jessica’s disappearance, Carr had provided Huntley with an alibi for the time of the girls’ deaths, telling the police that she had got back from Grimsby when the girls arrived. It did not take them long to discover that she was actually in Grimsby at the time of the murders. Nevertheless, both she and Huntley maintained their innocence.

  Three days later, on Thursday 20 August, Huntley was charged with two counts of murder and detained under Section 48 of the Mental Health Act at Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire, where his mental state was assessed to determine whether he suffered from mental illness and whether he was fit to stand trial. Consultant psychiatrist Dr Christopher Clark carried out the assessment and concluded firmly, ‘Although Mr Huntley made clear attempts to appear insane, I have no doubt that the man currently, and at the time of the murders, was both physically and mentally sound and therefore, if he is found guilty, carried out the murders totally aware of his actions.’

  On 8 October 2002, a judge agreed with Dr Clark’s conclusions and found that Huntley was indeed fit to stand trial. As a result, the school caretaker was moved to Woodhill Prison in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, where he attempted suicide on 9 June 2003 by taking twenty-nine antidepressant pills which he had saved up in his cell. Within forty-eight hours, however, he was back in prison and transferred again, this time to Belmarsh Prison in south-east London.

  Meanwhile, Maxine Carr was charged with perverting the course of justice shortly after her initial arrest on 17 August 2002, and in January 2003 she was formally charged with two counts of assisting an offender. She, like Huntley, was remanded in custody to await trial.