Life Means Life Page 16

  Days after the discovery of the body, police were led to Culshaw when a man fitting his description was reported stealing bread from a baker’s shop in Penrith. They found him living rough in nearby woodland. He had been staying in a den made from dead tree branches covered by black plastic. When he was arrested, Culshaw said he knew the police would be looking for him but insisted he had nothing to do with Clare’s death.

  The circumstantial evidence against Culshaw, his damning criminal record and the fact that he fled the scene meant that it took the jury less than an hour to find him guilty of murder. Sentencing him, judge Mr Justice Hughes said: ‘The evidence shows that for much of the time you are able to lead a normal, fairly solitary life. You suffer from a severe personality disorder: you are a person who is an enormous danger to other people, chiefly to women, and whose danger lies hidden most of the time.’ The judge said that, prior to strangling his victim, Culshaw forced her to have sex. He went on: ‘It was a violent and determined decision to kill. I regard it absolutely clear you forced yourself on her sexually, you stripped her largely naked. The overwhelming likelihood is that you killed her to stop her revealing the very serious sexual assault you carried out on her. This is a case for a life sentence without any recommendation for a minimum period - that is for a whole life order. Early release provision will not apply here. Life in your case must mean life.’

  After the trial, Clare’s family said in a statement released through police: ‘The result can in no way compensate for the loss of our precious Clare. No words can describe our feelings at this time regarding the inexcusable and callous actions of this man, which left Clare’s son without a mother shortly before his fourth birthday. Paul Culshaw has shown no remorse whatsoever and at no time has he attempted to ease the sufferings of the family during the case. The trauma has continued throughout the trial, where we have heard the graphic details of how Clare was killed. No sentence is long enough to make up for the actions of this evil man.’

  One woman, who lived opposite Culshaw’s flat, told how he would stand staring through his neighbours’ windows for long periods of time. She said: ‘He would hang around shelters for the homeless and lure vulnerable women to his home with heroin and then he would have his way with them. They called him “the Viagra Man” as they said he took that drug before helping himself. He wasn’t one for talking to neighbours and he would walk straight past you on the street. But there were always people coming and going from his flat. He was a bit of a creep and I had to close our kitchen shutters at night as he could see through when he was staring out of his window.’ The 50-year-old recalled that around a year before Clare’s murder she saw a naked young woman screaming from a window of his flat. She said: ‘The girl seemed to be off her head on drugs but you could tell he had beaten her up because she had black eyes and a bloody nose.’

  Detective Chief Inspector Steve Brunskill, who led the investigation, said: ‘Clare was a much-loved and popular girl. Sadly though, because of her addiction to heroin, she led a chaotic lifestyle that made her vulnerable. We cannot begin to imagine the horror of the attack he subjected her to.’

  ‘A LOVING AND CARING FATHER’

  ‘You beat your wife to death in her bedroom and then coldly and deliberately you brought your sleepy children downstairs to meet their deaths.’

  Trial judge David Clarke

  Name: Rahan Arshad

  Crime: Quadruple murder

  Date of Conviction: 13 March 2007

  Age at Conviction: 37

  Flies swarmed around the windows and doors of the Arshad family’s end-of-terrace on Turves Road, in Cheadle Hulme, Manchester. A putrid smell leaked from inside the three-bedroom home to beyond the driveway. One neighbour complained about the ‘stomach-turning stench’ that worsened daily and on the swelteringly evening of Sunday, 22 August 2006, police smashed their way into the house.

  In the living room were the bodies of the Arshad’s three children – sons Adam, 11, and Abbas, eight, and daughter Henne, six. Furniture, walls and ceiling were spattered with blood. The body of their mother Uzma Rahan, 32, lay in the marital bedroom, which was also a bloodbath. All four victims had had their skulls smashed to pieces with a rounders bat.

  About a month earlier, late on 28 July, the man of the house, Rahan Arshad, brutally murdered his family in a bid to protect his honour after learning of his wife’s three-year affair with another married Asian man. He killed Uzma, beating her about the head 27 times. Then the taxi driver – described by all as a doting dad, who worked 12-hour shifts to provide for his family – carried his sleeping children, one-by-one, downstairs and savagely killed each of them in turn. He covered the bodies with their duvets and bed sheets and left them to rot while he jetted off to holiday in Thailand.

  DCI Tony Mole, one of the first officers at the house, described the scene that greeted the police as the worst any of them had ever come across. He said of the children: ‘The bodies were so badly decomposed that the floor was soup because the bodies had basically melted. The forensic team that worked on this deserve a medal – they could hardly step anywhere.’

  After the murders, Arshad, 36, drove to Heathrow Airport in his new BMW, caught a plane to Bangkok and travelled on to the resort of Phuket. He was stopped at the Thai-Malaysian border by an alert border official who was carrying out a routine visa check. ‘Amazingly, he put Rahan’s name in Google and found out that he was wanted in Manchester for the murders of his wife and three children,’ said Detective Supt Martin Bottomley, who led the investigation. ‘Up until that point all we knew for sure was that he had flown into Bangkok. Obviously he’d made his way down to the border.’

  The Manchester police team did not have sufficient evidence to extradite Arshad but he agreed to fly back to England of his own accord. When he got off the plane at Heathrow, he told the policeman who met him: ‘I don’t regret killing that f**king bitch but my beautiful kids, killing my kids.’ Moments later, when the detective formally arrested him, Arshad said, ‘I confess to murder’ and broke down in tears.

  He was driven 200 miles up to Manchester for interrogation, but on advice from his solicitor, he clammed up, offering ‘No comment’ to every question. Police had only circumstantial evidence against him and were hoping forensic examination of his luggage would change that. They were in luck. A pair of shorts Arshad brought back with him from Thailand had microscopic traces of each of his children’s blood on them. Police were able to tell from the distribution of the blood that whoever was wearing them was less than 90cm away from Adam, Abbas and Henne when they were murdered. Also, the trainers Arshad was wearing as he stepped off the plane had traces of Uzma’s blood in the seams and on the laces.

  Armed with this new forensic evidence, police charged him with four counts of murder and on 27 February 2007, six months after the bodies were found, his trial began at Manchester Crown Court.

  One female member of the jury openly wept as Paul Reid, QC, outlined the case for the prosecution, giving details of the repeated blows suffered by the family. On the advice of the judge he moved on to a more general account of the appalling injuries suffered. Throughout, Arshad sat impassively in the dock as the court was told how he had been plotting to slaughter his family for several weeks.

  The jury heard that he booked his flight from Manchester to Bangkok on 11 July, originally for travel on 31 July. He later transferred the booking to a 29 July flight from Heathrow, presumably because he’d decided to bring forward the day of the killings. In the days before the murders, Arshad showered his wife with presents, including jewellery, a TV and a sports car, and told his family that he had booked a holiday for them in Dubai.

  Prosecutor Mr Reid told the jury that not long before she died, Uzma had revealed to her brother, Rahat Ali: ‘He’s planning something. Count the days until he kills me.’ Arshad told the same brother that he’d bought a £30,000 BMW as an early birthday present for his wife. When Rahat expressed shock at such an expensive gift, his br
other-in-law had replied: ‘Well, just wait. There will be a much bigger surprise.’

  Arshad and his wife were wed in an arranged marriage in 1992. For more than a decade, they seemed happily married but in late 2003 Uzma began an affair with a man called Nikki Iqbal. Chief Supt Bottomley explained: ‘Mr Arshad found out about this affair and that resulted in their separation and we know that Uzma and the children only moved back in with Rahan around June, shortly before they were killed. Uzma didn’t try to hide the affair – in fact she flaunted it, driving around Cheadle with Nikki, calling at his house. She had started dressing in a very Westernised way, wearing skimpy tops, showing her midriff, very tight jeans, boots, and people were talking. Perhaps this had been playing on Rahan Arshad’s mind, perhaps he’s thinking she’s dressing and behaving like a prostitute. Perhaps he’s thinking he’s lost his honour, he’s lost his respect and he’s got to take the ultimate sanction and in this case the ultimate sanction is to kill her.’

  The court heard how Arshad bought a £1.99 ‘Funsport’ rounders bat on 27 July and on the following day – the day of the murders – took some, or all of the family to Blackpool for a day out. ‘Wristbands were issued to at least two of the children at Blackpool Pleasure Beach,’ said prosecution barrister Reid. ‘The wristbands were still being worn by Henna and Abbas when their bodies were discovered.’ When police found Arshad’s car at Heathrow, the boot still contained the children’s sandy buckets and spades.

  In court, Arshad denied four charges of murder but admitted the manslaughter of his wife, claiming he killed her after finding that she had murdered their three children. He said that when he found the bodies lying in the living room, he went upstairs to confront his wife. She said to him in Urdu: ‘Are you satisfied?’ He then told the court that he had ‘blanked out’, claiming, ‘I found myself in the shower – I mean in the bath. I found myself in the bath with the bat. That is the last thing I remember.’

  Arshad described his wife as ‘a beautiful, bad-tempered, materialistic spendaholic’, who constantly put him down. ‘But I adored her,’ he said. ‘I am the worm that turned.’ Defending him, Ian Glen, QC, asked Arshad to explain why he had bought the single plane ticket to Thailand two weeks prior to the deaths of his family. ‘It would have been a holiday,’ he said. ‘Uzma had been to Pakistan in February on her own and I needed a break as well.’ He explained that he did not tell his wife for fear that she might refuse to let him go. Mr Glen then asked his client what he had meant when he told the arresting police officer: ‘I confess to the murder… but my kids, killing my kids.’ Arshad explained that he meant that he had killed Uzma, but that she had killed their three children.

  Before the accused gave evidence, the defence barrister turned to the jury and said: ‘The question is: which one of them killed the children?’ he said. ‘If the defendant returned home to find his wife had killed his three children, you can’t imagine a better case for provocation for killing her: it is an unusual case, it is a shocking case.

  ‘You may debate the possibilities. What mother, no mother could possibly kill her children? Leaving the slightly greater possibility of the father. It is no more likely that a father would do it than a mother would do it.

  ‘We would say this – we have a father, or a mother, who was mentally ill. Only one of these two was mentally ill unfortunately, and that was Uzma, and that tends towards concluding she did it.’

  The barrister suggested Uzma was paranoid and suicidal. As evidence, he read out an extract from her diary: ‘Allah, take me to yourself. If I could start again, I would not have any more lies in my life.’ Mr Glen told the court: ‘We suggest she was on that very slippery slope that is depressive illness.’

  Arshad closed his eyes as the jury of eight women and four men delivered their unanimous guilty verdicts after deliberating for just over two hours. Uzma’s brother Rahat shouted ‘Yes!’ as the first verdict was returned. Four members of the jury cried as judge David Clarke told Arshad that in his case life meant life and he would never be freed on licence. The judge said: ‘The jury have convicted you on overwhelming evidence: you killed your entire family in circumstances of great brutality. You beat your wife to death in her bedroom and then coldly and deliberately, you brought your sleepy children downstairs to meet their deaths. You left the scene and fled the country. It was over three weeks before the bodies were discovered. There is no suggestion of mental illness on your part. Life imprisonment in your case means life.’

  After the verdict, Detective Supt Bottomley said: ‘Rahan Arshad’s defence has been nothing of ridiculous. The only time he has ever shown any remorse was when he got off the plane from Thailand.’

  In an impact statement read out to the court, Uzma’s brother Rahat, who heard the verdict with his mother, Safia Hassnain, and brother, Mustajab Ali Haider, said that he had not slept between the discovery of the bodies and Arshad’s return to Britain and told of his grief at seeing the four bodies on mortuary slabs. His sister had been his ‘best mate’ and the pain of losing her and her children was unbearable. He said: ‘None of us could understand how a father could do such a thing to his children and his wife also. What must they have been thinking when it was happening to them, especially the children?’

  Weeks later, in a BBC television interview, Rahat recalled seeing Arshad and the children just days before the killings. He said: ‘The last time we saw all the family together was in McDonald’s. I found his behaviour very strange – he just kept hugging me all the time, about eight to ten times in 45 minutes, and I was wondering why he was doing that. I was getting suspicious about his behaviour. I found out after three weeks why he was doing that: it’s because he planned to kill them when they broke up from school for the holidays. He planned to leave them in the house in horrendous positions and leave this country forever, and that is what he did.’

  Describing the grim task of identifying the bodies at the morgue, Rahat added: ‘It was the worst moment of my life. I don’t know where the love was that time when he was killing them – he had no mercy for them. The kids were sleeping; he picked them up, one by one, to bring them downstairs and kill them, like animals. I am never going to forgive what he did to his own kids, especially Henna. He used to love her more than anything in the world and the way he killed her was terrible.’

  DCI Dave Law said: ‘The fact that he volunteered to come back to this country is quite remarkable because clearly he knew what he would face. Obviously there will never ever be an excuse for what he did to Uzma, but in his mind there is a lot of hatred and venom there from the comments he made when he was arrested and there is perhaps an understanding that he was driven to that. But why kill the children? How can a man described by many people as a loving and caring father bring himself to end their lives? That is the biggest question of all.’

  Of the trip to Blackpool in the hours before Arshad killed his children, Detective Supt Bottomley pondered: ‘Was that evidence of pre-planning? Was that Rahan mentally saying goodbye to them, or was it more cynical? Was he tiring them out for the day with a view to getting them home, tired out, putting them to bed and then sleeping through what he had in mind for them, for killing them?’

  Nikki Iqbal later told of the passionate three-year romance he had with the murdered wife. He said they hid the affair by meeting for sex at Nikki’s brother’s house. He revealed: ‘I was at my brother’s and she used to come there. I saw her and thought she was nice – I got her number and we took it from there. We would meet occasionally, anywhere, wherever.’

  After Arshad was jailed, Iqbal told the Manchester Evening News: ‘There’s a million and one women out there having affairs. The murder is nothing to do with me.’ He added: ‘They should give him a lethal injection for what he’s done. What he did to them kids was bang out of order.’

  The delivery driver, 42, and his forgiving wife Musarat told the Mirror how they heard Uzma and the children were dead. He said: ‘We watched the news together and we were all cryin
g. We were so upset. It’s still a shock she and the kids have been murdered – they didn’t deserve that. He has wiped out a whole generation. It will be on my mind till the day I die.’

  ‘I WANT TO HURT SOMEBODY’

  ‘If you’ve killed one, you might as well have killed 21. I’m going to be the city’s first serial killer.’

  Mark Martin (to a fellow prisoner while on remand)

  Name: Mark Martin

  Crime: Triple murder

  Date of Conviction: 25 February 2006

  Age at Conviction: 26

  At 6.39pm on 1 November 2004, Mark Martin dialled 999 from a public phone box and told the operator: ‘I’m getting thoughts in my head that I want to hurt somebody. I’m going to end up killing someone.’ He added: ‘I was locked up last night for trying to strangle my ex-wife.’

  It later turned out that Martin had ‘lost it’ when his ex-wife told him that she no longer trusted him alone with their son because of his foul temper. Filled with anger and resentment, he moved from Ilkeston, Derbyshire, to Nottingham, eight miles away, where he slept rough on the city’s streets.

  Known as ‘Reds’ among Nottingham’s homeless community because of a distinctive red birthmark on his face, he robbed others who were sleeping rough of their money or whatever possessions they had. When he was not bullying other homeless people, he was boasting about how he would one day be infamous. His behaviour did not win him any friends – and Nottingham’s intensely loyal homeless community realised very quickly they had a dangerous man in their midst.