Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  In February 2009, a few months after his letter, and the strong reaction to it from the families, Wright withdrew his second appeal, and – although he indicated in 2012 that there was a possibility that he would launch a third with the support of his brother David and partner Pam Wright – as yet no further official action has been taken.

  Indeed, as time has passed, more evidence has emerged of Wright’s violent tendencies. In a television documentary in 2014, for example, Wright’s second ex-wife, Diane Cole, explained just how quickly his mood could change. ‘When I first met Steve in 1985,’ she said, ‘he would inundate me with flowers and presents, and he was quite a charmer really. But he had a very possessive streak though, very possessive, which I didn’t like.’

  In particular, she remembered a time when she and Wright had been working on a cruise ship together. ‘I walked back to the ship with the shop manager and when I got to the cabin it had been written on the door “Slag. Whore”. I opened the door and he said, “You liked him that much, there’s your grass skirts.” And he had cut all my work skirts … Then he went at us with a knife, whether it was meant to hit me I don’t know as it hit the door. He was so strong, he used to call himself “The Mean Machine”.’

  No matter the face he presented to the outside world, Wright’s true personality has begun to emerge. There must be a possibility that he could attack prostitutes again were he to be released on licence.

  18

  Lifers Who Kill Again

  Glyn Dix, Anthony Rice and David Tiley

  At the start of this book about the men and women subjected to whole life terms of imprisonment I asked two simple questions – does life mean life? And its corollary – should life mean life?

  The answer is, as we have seen, both ambiguous and confused. The truth is that life means life sometimes, often depending upon the publicity associated with the crime committed, and it does not at other times, sometimes when there is less celebrity associated with the murder.

  A whole life term is the ultimate penalty available under English law – although it is no longer used in Scotland. Once a prisoner has been sentenced to spend the rest of his or her life behind bars, and any appeals process has been exhausted, then the law suggests that is where they should stay.

  Yet there are times when an appeal can downgrade a whole life sentence to life with a minimum term, which allows for at least the possibility of release, while there are other occasions in which a life sentence without a whole life term attached to it can mean that a prisoner can be released to kill again. That is what I would like to deal with here.

  The trouble with allowing a prisoner serving a life sentence without a whole life term the possibility of regaining his or her freedom, albeit under licence, is that the Parole Board, who are charged with making the decision to release on licence, marches to a significantly different drum than the judiciary.

  In the Court of Appeal, for example, the details of the original crime are always included in the written judgement handed down when the appeal is considered – which means that everyone involved is fully aware of the true nature of the murder that led to the sentence.

  Yet, when considering a prisoner with a life sentence for release, the Parole Board does not take significant interest in the original crime. It concerns itself far more with how the offender has responded during his or her period in prison – whether, for example, there has been an acceptance of guilt, whether there has been evidence of rehabilitation, and whether he or she has displayed an attitude that suggests that they would no longer pose a threat to the population at large were they to be released on licence.

  It is a well-intentioned position, but sadly one which can go spectacularly wrong – and one case illustrates that beyond all reasonable doubt. It concerns the schizophrenic Glyn Dix, who is now aged sixty and living in Ashworth Special Hospital on Merseyside alongside the much more celebrated killer Ian Brady.

  Dix’s case illustrates just how frail the concept of a life sentence can be – for he killed brutally and without a hint of remorse not once but twice – the second time twenty-four years after the first – and he did so after his release from a life sentence for the first murder.

  His case reveals just how poorly equipped the parole system can be to deal with the most disturbed and violent offenders – who may take great pains to appear to have been transformed by their sentence but who, in dreadful reality, have not. No matter how rehabilitated they may seem to the Parole Board when they come before it for consideration for release, beneath the surface they have been skilful and manipulative enough to conceal the dreadful danger to society they can still present once they have been released.

  But let us look at the case of Glyn Dix carefully. In the early evening of 2 October 1979, thirty-two-year-old Pia Overbury, a mother of two, left the cake shop in the county town of Gloucester where she worked and set off for a friend’s party. She was never seen alive again. Three weeks later her body was found in an isolated copse of trees near the village of Hartbury, a few miles north-east of the town. She had been tied to a tree, raped and shot in the head – for no apparent reason. She had no enemies, no dark secrets in her past, no furious lover, no unhappy spouse. Pia had fallen victim to that rarest of all murderers – a ‘random’ killer.

  The police investigation into the murder led officers to a twenty-six-year-old hospital porter named Glyn Dix, who came from the area, and who was finally charged with Overbury’s murder. At his trial at Bristol Crown Court in July 1980, the jury heard his extraordinary version of events – that Pia had offered him £2,000 that evening to kill her husband and that they had gone to the isolated wood to discuss it. Dix then claimed that she had begged him to kill her as she could not go on living with her husband, and he had carried out her wishes.

  On the third day of the trial, however, Dix changed his plea to guilty. He confessed to the court that he had forced the terrified young woman into the woods, tied her to the tree and then raped her before shooting her in the head and leaving her body in what resembled a shallow grave. Dix insisted he had been inspired to do so by what he called ‘the change of the seasons’, which suggested that there might have been some sort of link to the dark arts of black magic, at least in his mind.

  Dix was duly sentenced to life imprisonment, although with no fixed minimum term. He served no fewer than nineteen years behind bars, a large portion of those years at Ashworth high-security psychiatric hospital. Over the years Dix demonstrated signs of redemption and rehabilitation, and he was eventually transferred to the relatively relaxed Gloucester Prison as part of his preparations for his eventual release.

  While Dix was in Gloucester Prison, one of his cell-mates was a twenty-one-year-old man named Adam Langford, and the two men became friends. In fact, after Langford’s release the young man kept in touch with Dix as his release became more and more likely. Langford’s fifty-year-old mother Hazel often drove her son to meetings with Dix in prison, and the two got along well. So well that Hazel Langford and Dix started a relationship by post while he was still in Gloucester Prison. His letters were reported to be ‘warm, witty and charming’ – and so, not long after he was released on licence in September 1999, the couple married at Redditch Register Office.

  Significantly, Dix’s announcement of his intention to marry Hazel Langford may have played its part in securing his release from prison on licence. His attachment to her, and their apparent happiness together, must at least have had some impact on the Parole Board’s decision to release him. Yet the terrible truth – in the light of what was to
come – must have been that he was using her for his own far darker and malign purposes.

  On the surface, however, everything seemed normal enough between the couple over the next five years. Dix moved into Hazel Langford’s home in Redditch, and the family reported that they appeared happy. But slowly and steadily something much more threatening began to emerge. Dix’s self-control steadily ebbed away, so much so that the slightest disagreement between the couple could see his temper erupt within seconds. They could be enormously close at one moment, and yet at each other’s throats the next.

  One sunny afternoon, on Saturday 19 June 2004, Dix finally lost control completely. He had an argument with his wife about what to watch on television and he attacked her viciously, so viciously that when her son Adam came home at about 3.30 pm, Dix was to be found standing over her naked body with a kitchen knife in his hand. He had stabbed Hazel Langford to death and chopped her body into no fewer than sixteen separate pieces, cutting off her head, arms and legs with a hacksaw, and had then used a total of fifteen different instruments, including scissors and other knives, to mutilate her body. He had also cut out her heart, liver and kidneys.

  Dix had also painted a mural on the wall of the living room depicting an almost naked woman on her knees and a hooded attacker with a knife in his hand standing over her. As his stepson entered the room, Dix grinned at him and said, ‘We had a little argument.’

  By that time Dix had put all his clothes in the washing machine to clean them of blood, and had washed the knife in his hand. Utterly terrified, Adam Langford ran across the road to the home of his sister Rachel, who then went back to her mother’s house with him, where they encountered Dix together. When the police arrived not long afterwards Dix told them calmly, ‘That’s my wife Hazel, and I love her. We had a little argument and it went too far.’

  Adam Langford blamed himself for his mother’s death, saying, ‘My mum gave him everything. He took her life and ruined mine … If I’d never gone to jail I’d never have met this animal and Mum would be alive today. I knew he was in for murder, but couldn’t find out anything about his past.’

  Dix made no excuse for the killing or the terrible mutilation of his wife, but neither did he deny killing her. He was subsequently diagnosed as suffering from severe schizopsychotic affective disorder, a condition made worse if he refused to take the medication required to control it, and on the day of the killing he had clearly not taken any. Dix was remanded to Ashworth Hospital and, on 16 December 2005, pleaded guilty at Birmingham Crown Court to Hazel Langford’s murder.

  It transpired that Dix and his wife had been naked after making love when the argument over what to watch had broken out. The prosecution quoted from a statement that Dix made to the police after his arrest which said, ‘Hazel had said, “Right, that’s it!” and she got hold of a knife and I got hold of a knife and as we started facing each other, I stabbed her. She was going on and on, and I felt under pressure. I felt my anger rise, I said I had had enough of her.’

  He also told the police that he had heard her voice in his head after the killing telling him to chop her body into pieces because ‘she liked the place to be clean.’

  In his defence, Dix’s counsel told the court, ‘Mr Dix wants to … acknowledge the gravest regret and deepest remorse for what occurred … He is bitterly, bitterly regretful and remorseful for what he did that day.’

  The remorse fell on deaf ears. Passing sentence, Mr Justice Butterfield told Dix, ‘You stabbed her to death and dismembered her body. It was brutal, horrific and abhorrent. You took the life of a woman who did much to help you and showed you much kindness. You have also deeply hurt the family, who welcomed you with open arms.’ The judge then went on, ‘Your counsel has sensibly decided that I should not apply a set period and you will be detained on a whole life order. You will be detained either in a specialist hospital or a prison until you die. You are an extremely dangerous man.’

  The impact of Dix’s killing on the members of the Langford family was dramatic. Hazel’s brother John Denver said outside the court, ‘We have all lost a sister, mother, grandmother and a very dear friend. No words can describe the devastation this family feels about a man who gave a persona of a quiet, loving, caring person. We were all taken in by the deceit.’

  Deeply upset, Hazel’s daughter Rachel, added, ‘I wish they could bring back hanging. But that would be too quick for him – he should be buried alive.’

  Another daughter, Jodie, called for life to mean life, and bitterly criticised the authorities for releasing Dix from his first life sentence. ‘It’s ridiculous that people get let out early after committing such terrible crimes … if there were different laws in place I’m sure my mum would still be here with us now. I think it’s absolutely disgusting that criminals are let out early. When someone is given life it should mean life.’

  The family firmly condemned the decision to let Dix out of prison in 1999. ‘Someone decided to let this man out to kill again,’ one niece explained; while the daughter of Pia Overbury, Dix’s first victim in 1979, told a television documentary in 2014, ‘He’s a natural born killer, that’s what he is, and a risk to society. I get very angry about it sometimes now.’

  Yet Glyn Dix was not, and is not, an isolated case. My research for this book suggests that there are at least eighteen men who have been released from prison on licence after being given an initial life sentence – and have gone on to kill again.

  As the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve QC has put it, ‘People will be rightly shocked at this level of reoffending by people who have received life sentences. The whole point of the life licence for released murderers is to keep them under supervision and prevent reoffending.’ But he then went on to argue, ‘If prisons and the Parole Board were not so overstretched there would be better rehabilitation and greater supervision before people are released.’

  But would a whole life sentence really have been justified for the killing of Pia Overbury in 1980? I doubt it. If the offender is clever enough, and patient enough, he can groom the prison authorities into thinking that he is a reformed character and therefore no longer a danger to the public. After all, in March 2009 the Labour Justice Minister David Hanson announced, ‘Only a very small minority, just over six per cent, of mandatory life sentenced prisoners who were released between January 1, 2003 and February 17, 2009, were recalled and found guilty of a further offence.’

  Those figures nevertheless include serial sex attacker Anthony Rice, then aged forty-eight, who murdered mother-of-one Naomi Bryant, aged forty, in August 2005. This was just nine months after he walked out of jail in November 2004 after serving a life sentence with a minimum term of ten years for rape and indecent assault in 1989. He was freed in spite of having no fewer than twenty-two previous sexual convictions spanning a period of thirty-four years, including rape and violent assaults on women and children.

  Discussing Rice’s case while he was in custody, one psychologist estimated there was a seventy-two per cent chance that he would commit more crimes. Yet his parole hearing was ‘so distracted’ by protecting Rice’s human rights that it failed to appreciate the threat he posed to society – according to an official inquiry into the events.

  Rice strangled and stabbed Naomi Bryant to death just days after they had met in Winchester, where he was living at a hostel. She was found under her bed by her fourteen-year-old daughter Hannah.

  The official enquiry later confirmed that Rice was too dangerous to have been released into the community. In May 2006, the Chief Inspector of Probation at the
time, Andrew Bridges, found that there had been ‘substantial mistakes and misjudgements’ by the probation, parole and prison services in his supervision after his release, and that he should never have been released in the first place.

  In its assessment before Rice’s release, for example, the Parole Board had concluded that he presented only a ‘minimal risk’. They pointed out that a decision in 2001 to move him to an open prison created a ‘momentum towards release’. But the enquiry found that the Board’s final decision to free him ‘gave insufficient weight to the underlying nature of his risk of harm to others’.

  Underlining how poor the supervision of Rice was during his period of release on licence is the fact that, four months before Naomi Bryant’s murder, he slipped out of the hostel he was living in one night and assaulted a woman with a brick in Southampton. The enquiry noted, ‘Rice later reported that he expected the police to call … but when they did not, he started to feel that he could do anything and get away with it.’

  Every bit as tellingly, the enquiry also concluded that the Board had received ‘over optimistic’ reports of Rice’s progress under treatment and did not have a full picture of his previous crimes. That is the point in the Dix and Rice cases – the Parole Board’s lack of knowledge of, or interest in, the crimes for which the prisoners they were considering for release were found guilty in the first place.

  As Professor Andrew Coyle, a former prison governor and leading academic in this area, put it to me, ‘The Parole Board tend only to look at an individual’s change while he is a prisoner, and the acceptability of his or her release – they do not consider the original crimes.’

  The deaths of Hazel Langford and Naomi Bryant certainly suggest that the Board should look into the nature of the original crimes committed by the prisoners before them – and do so with very considerable care indeed. Both women might still be alive had that been the case.