Life Means Life Read online

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Special thanks to my girlfriend Emily Lyons for all her help reading, writing and researching this book. It could not have been published without her. Cheers also to Deano and Mark Harris for their advice.

  INTRODUCTION

  While anyone convicted of murder in the UK is automatically handed a life sentence, for only a tiny fraction does life really mean life. This grisly elite includes Dennis Nilsen, who butchered a string of young men in London, Rose West who – with her husband Fred – raped, tortured and murdered girls and women in the Gloucester area, and Ian Brady, one half of the Moors Murderers.

  The crimes involved are of unparalleled savagery, perversion or scale. For these killers there is no hope of rehabilitation for society has ruled they must never walk the streets again. They are the men – and one woman – who committed the crimes that shocked and outraged Britain, and the courts have ruled they must end their days behind prison bars. In their wake, they leave a trail of death and devastation that both fascinates and revolts the world. Their trials have uncovered stories that horror writers would discard as outlandish; fascination for them is so enduring that every scrap of gossip about their life behind bars is devoured by the public, even decades after they were caged.

  Crimes of this magnitude inevitably spark debate over the restoration of the death penalty. Within living memory every killer featured in this book would have gone to the gallows. In 1861 the Offences Against the Person Act dictated that anyone who murdered a fellow human must be executed, and so it was that all convicted murderers died, by hanging, for almost a century.

  After many years, campaigners for the abolition of the death penalty secured a partial victory with the 1957 Homicide Act, which restricted capital punishment to cases of the five worst types of murder. They were, in the words of the Act: ‘Murder in the course or furtherance of theft, murder by shooting or causing an explosion, murder while resisting arrest or during an escape, murder of a police officer or prison officer and two or more murders – of any type – committed on different occasions’. Killers who did not meet the new criteria for hanging were given mandatory life prison sentences. This substitute sentence did not mean a lifelong period of imprisonment. Rather, it meant the prisoner would spend a finite period in jail before being released when he or she was no longer deemed a danger to others.

  The 1957 Act received as much criticism as it did support. After all, why should someone who shoots a man dead be eligible for execution, while another who intentionally kills by strangulation or with a knife is not? Also, murder in the course of theft was punishable by hanging, while murder in the course of rape merely carried a jail sentence. In many ways, the new death penalty guidelines were as unfair as before.

  Eight years later, the 1965 Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act replaced capital punishment with a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. The last executions in Britain were Anthony Allen, 21, and Gwynne Owen Evans, 24, who were hanged respectively in Walton Prison, Liverpool, and Strangeways Prison, Manchester, on 13 August 1964. They had murdered a man while robbing him in his home on 7 April of the same year.

  For almost two decades the basic rules of sentencing for murder in Britain went unchanged until 1983 when the ‘tariff system’ was introduced. The new rules allowed Home Secretaries to set the minimum terms that convicted killers would serve before being eligible for parole on life licence. The arrival of the new system brought with it the ‘whole life tariff’, a sentence reserved for those who commit the most heinous of crimes. Successive Home Secretaries used this power to increase the sentences of several high-profile murderers, many of whom feature in this book.

  In November 2002, new human rights legislation and a Law Lords ruling stripped Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett of the power to set tariffs. Lord Bingham said the power exercised by the Home Secretary to decide the length of sentences was ‘incompatible’ with Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right of a convicted person to have a sentence imposed by an independent and impartial tribunal. The minimum length of a life sentence is now set by the trial judge although the Attorney General can still appeal to the High Court if he considers a sentence unduly lenient and the Lord Chief Justice then has the power to increase that sentence.

  In response to being stripped of the power to keep killers behind bars, Blunkett outlined new minimum terms to be used by sentencing judges. All convicted murderers are now sentenced to ‘life’ in prison but judges set their tariffs. ‘Starting points’ of 15 and 30 years are available to trial judges, depending on the severity of the crime. These tariffs can be lowered by ‘mitigating’ factors like provocation and increased by ‘aggravating’ factors, such as the macabre disposal of a body. Whole life orders are the starting point in any case where two or more murders are committed that involve a substantial degree of premeditation, or sexual or sadistic conduct. This also includes the killing of a child involving any of the above factors.

  Schedule 21 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 operates as a guide to all sentencing judges in Britain. Section 4 (2) of Schedule 21 states that a whole life order applies in the cases of:

  (a) the murder of two or more persons, where each murder involves any of the following –

  (i) a substantial degree of premeditation or planning,

  (ii) the abduction of the victim, or

  (iii) sexual or sadistic conduct,

  (b) the murder of a child if involving the abduction of the child or sexual or sadistic motivation,

  (c) a murder done for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause, or

  (d) a murder by an offender previously convicted of murder.

  Schedule 21 also states that to qualify for a whole life tariff the offender must have been aged 21 or over at the time of the offence.

  Soham murderer Ian Huntley, who killed 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in his home in August 2002, did not have his minimum prison term set at his 2003 trial because the system on serving life sentences was being altered at the time. Instead sentencing was postponed until 29 September 2005 when the trial judge, Mr Justice Moses, had to consider the new principles set out under the Criminal Justice Act.

  In deciding whether to issue Huntley with a whole life tariff, the judge had to consider the principles set out in Schedule 21. Explaining his decision not to issue such a sentence, Mr Justice Moses said the Huntley case lacked a proven element of abduction because the meeting between the girls and Huntley, while his then girlfriend Maxine Carr was away, had been by chance.

  The judge explained: ‘It is likely that the defendant took advantage of the girls’ acquaintance with Carr to entice them into the house, but that could not be proved.’ He added: ‘Their presence in the house thus remains unexplained. There is a likelihood of sexual motivation, but there was no evidence of sexual activity, and it remains no more than a likelihood. In those circumstances, the starting point should not be a whole life order.’ Instead, the judge chose a starting point of 30 years and added an extra 10 years because the murders were ‘aggravated’ by Huntley’s abuse of the girls’ trust and his deceitfulness afterwards. He said: ‘The two children were vulnerable and obviously trusted the defendant because of his position in the school as caretaker and relationship with Carr.’

  Sentencing Huntley, Mr Justice Moses emphasised: ‘I have not ordered that this defendant will not spend the rest of his life in prison. The order I make offers little or no hope of the defendant’s eventual release.’ Huntley will be eligible for release in 2042, by which time he will be 68 years old. Even then, he will have to convince the parole board that it is safe to release one of the most publicly despised killers in recent history.

  The
latest case to call into question the rules governing whole life tariffs came in August 2008, when cop killer David Bieber won an appeal against his sentence to die behind bars. Bieber, a former US marine, shot dead PC Ian Broadhurst during a routine check on a stolen vehicle he was driving in Leeds on Boxing Day, 2003. The gunman shot the policeman point-blank in the head as he lay injured on the ground pleading for his life. Bieber was also convicted of the attempted murder of two of Broadhurst’s colleagues as they attempted to flee the shooting. Three Court of Appeal judges held that the facts of the case,‘horrifying though they were’, did not justify a whole-life term because the ‘substantial degree of premeditation or planning’ detailed in Schedule 21 was not involved. Instead, Bieber was given a minimum term of 37 years.

  Among the murderers featured in this book are a number of notable omissions, the most obvious being Britain’s most notorious serial killer, Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, who was convicted in 1981 – before the inception of whole-life tariffs – of murdering 13 women. At his trial at the Old Bailey, Mr Justice Boreham ‘recommended’ Sutcliffe should serve at least 30 years before being considered for parole.

  The Ministry of Justice says Sutcliffe is not on its official list of 36 whole-life sentence prisoners because his tariff has never been ‘formally’ set. As detailed earlier, from their inception in 1983 until November 2002, the tariffs for mandatory life sentence prisoners were set by Home Office ministers. As part of this process, prisoners were entitled to submit written representations to the Secretary of State before their recommended tariff was officially set. The representations gave the prisoner the opportunity to say what he or she thought the tariff should be and were typically prepared by a solicitor.

  The Secretary of State would not set a prisoner’s tariff until the written representations had been made. Solicitors acting on Sutcliffe’s behalf did not submit these representations, presumably because they were well aware that his sentence would inevitably be increased from the judge’s recommended 30 years.

  By virtue of Schedule 22 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the High Court is responsible for setting minimum terms for all those prisoners who, like Sutcliffe, were sentenced before the Act came into force but did not receive a tariff from the Secretary of State under the previous arrangements. There were almost 720 such prisoners when the Act came into force. The majority of these cases have now had a minimum term set by a High Court judge and several of them feature in later chapters of this book. Decisions on some cases have yet to be made. According to the Ministry of Justice, it is impossible to predict when individual tariffs on these prisoners are likely to be set.

  Many of the killers on the official list of whole-life prisoners have appealed, without success, against their sentences. Others have accepted from day one that their crimes warrant the ultimate penalty available to British courts. Some are murderers who have killed again while out of prison on life licence, others are psychopathic serial killers who hunted strangers to satisfy an uncontrollable bloodlust. Several men featured within these pages are sexual perverts who killed to indulge their sick desires; other sexual killers snuffed out the lives of their victims simply to avoid identification. A few murdered purely out of greed.

  Some of the killers you will have heard of, others you will not. What they all have in common is the fact that they will die behind bars.

  ‘THE LITTLE DOCTOR’

  ‘I know where you live. I murdered a young girl in Iffley Road four years ago.’

  Andrezej Kunowski (to a stranger in the street)

  Name: Andrezej Kunowski

  Crime: Multiple rape and murder

  Date of Conviction: 31 March 2004

  Age at Conviction: 47

  Like many thousands of Poles before him, Andrezej Kunowski arrived on a coach at London’s Victoria Station in October 1996. He’d endured a bus journey of more than 30 hours from Warsaw and carried with him a tourist visa. But he intended to work in the UK illegally.

  Kunowski had £500 in his pocket – a fortune in his homeland but a pittance in one of Europe’s most expensive cities. A tiny man at a diminutive 5ft 3in tall, the former cosmetics salesman would have been rather smarter than his fellow down-at-heel passengers. He tried to dress well and smell sweet, with a fondness for cheap cologne. When his neatly combed brown hair began to thin, he took to wearing a hairpiece. In his homeland, this dapper, shiny-shoed man was dubbed the ‘Little Doctor’.

  But there was another difference between Kunowski and the other Poles who arrived at Victoria that unusually-warm morning: he was a psychopathic sexual predator, later described by one senior Metropolitan Police detective as: ‘The most dangerous, and certainly most prolific sex offender I’ve ever met.’

  On Thursday, 22 May 1997, foreign student Trajce Konev was delayed while sitting an English exam at college. For the first time ever, he had left his 12-year-old daughter Katerina home alone. ‘I raced home fast on my bicycle,’ recalled Trajce, who two years earlier had moved to the UK with his family from the war-torn Balkans. He was already worried because his daughter hadn’t answered the phone when he called to check she was OK before setting off. He arrived at his first-floor flat in Iffley Road, Hammersmith, West London, at 4.30pm to find the front door open and the living room door jammed shut.

  Trajce continued: ‘I knocked on the door in case Katerina was changing and said, “It’s Daddy, open up!” There was no answer. I thought she was playing games with me. I shouted through the door, “Katerina, Katerina, open the door!” Nobody answered.’

  And so he knocked again, harder this time, but still no answer. Trajce knew his daughter was in there and he panicked more. ‘I could hear noises from inside the sitting room,’ he recalled. He tried shoulder-barging the door but it was barricaded from the inside. Then he looked through the keyhole and saw his daughter’s schoolbag on the floor. He knelt down and peered under the door, only to find Katerina was not alone. ‘I saw two men’s black shoes,’ he said. ‘I just froze. I knew something was wrong; I was so scared. I thought that maybe if someone is inside and she cannot get to the door, he must get to the window and jump.’

  The frantic father ran out of the flat, where he saw a strange man climbing out of his living room window, clutching a bag. ‘We came face to face,’ he said. ‘I noticed one small drop of blood on the left of his face. He was staring at me. I asked him, “What are you doing in my house?” He was just so calm; he didn’t say anything: he just looked at me. He had a knife and I thought he was going to kill me. I turned a little and he managed to escape. He ran off down the street and I followed him.’

  Trajce sprinted after the intruder through a few streets and across a building site but just as he caught up with him, the stranger yelled for help, claiming he was about to be assaulted. Two workmen intervened and told Trajce to leave the man alone and so he escaped his grasp.

  The assailant ran into the road and tried to hijack the car of a 42-year-old woman whose son, aged four, was sat in the passenger seat. ‘I saw two men, one on either side of my car,’ she said. ‘One had blood on the side of his face as if he had been punched. He tried to get into the car through the open window. I wound it up and sped away; I was terrified for my son. One of the men was shouting, “Call the police!”’

  The stranger then tried to commandeer a lorry in Hammersmith Grove but was forced out by the driver. Next, he jumped in front of a Fiat Uno. The driver, Christina Kearney, later said that he shouted, ‘Help me, help me – call the police!’ But his act was short-lived and, once the car was stationary, he brandished a knife and ordered her out. He sped off in the car to Hammersmith Bus Station, where he disappeared aboard the number 220 bus to Hammersmith Broadway.

  Meanwhile, Trajce decided against explaining himself in broken English to the duped workmen and sprinted back home. He was back inside the house at 4.50pm and managed to kick open the living room door that had been propped shut from the inside with a chair. Lying on the floor was his daughter, barefo
ot and unconscious, wearing a cardigan, white T-shirt and elasticated tracksuit bottoms. She had been garrotted with a piece of cord cut from a Virgin Atlantic flight bag that she used to carry her schoolbooks. The garrotte, which had been tightened round her neck with a pen, was so taut he couldn’t release it with his hands and so he used a knife to cut it off. He said: ‘I started to cry and shout her name – Katerina! Katerina!’

  Moments later, the police burst in. ‘I was bending over her, crying, when they arrived. I remember one of the officers telling me to help him to resuscitate her,’ he said. ‘He showed me where to push her chest, but I just couldn’t do it – I was just so shocked. I felt weak and hopeless. I didn’t want to touch her in case I hurt her.’ Katerina was dead.

  In the absence of an assailant, Katerina’s father became the initial suspect in her murder. Police doubted his story of finding a stranger at the flat and he was taken to a nearby police station. Trajce recalled: ‘My wife and son were brought to the station to see me. I was wearing a white forensic suit. My wife Zakalina just started shouting, “What have you done?” She was kicking me and screaming at me. All I wanted to do was hug my wife and cry with my family. I had lost my little girl, but my wife was attacking me and my six-year-old son was looking up at me with hate in his eyes. I remember just banging my head from wall to wall in my cell; they must have thought I was a madman. They thought I had killed my Katerina.’ However, within hours Trajce was released when eyewitness accounts and CCTV footage backed up his story. Police also found fingerprints throughout the flat that did not match those of any member of the family.

  At a press conference held days later, Trajce said: ‘I put Katerina on a bus to school on the morning of her murder. It was just a usual morning; she just smiled. When you saw her face, you didn’t need to listen to words from an angel. She was the best. At everything, she was the best – maths, music, sport, she was perfect. She worked so hard. All her friends loved her. For her, the world was there to love.’