Life Means Life Read online

  But Detective Inspector Tim Grattan-Kane, head of the Specialist Crime Directorate unit that investigated the murder, believes McGrady was too despicable and devious to stop, even had he been monitored. He said: ‘McGrady has not been brought to our attention since his release in 1997, but whatever systems may have been in place, he is so evil I do not think anything could have prevented him doing what he did.

  ‘Since his last spell in prison, he has used different permutations of his family names to disguise his identity. He has worked as an odd-job man and as a butcher for a time, but latterly, heavy drinking marked his life and he did not stray far from his flat. He was so evil that no restriction, such as a curfew or tagging, would have stopped him. You would literally need a policeman at his side at all times to stop him.

  ‘Although he pleaded guilty, he has never told us what happened, especially how Rochelle came to go to his flat. It was clear that the motive was sexual, but at no time has he admitted why he did it. His mind went completely blank when he had to admit anything.’

  This refusal to tell what happened is hard for Rochelle’s family to bear. ‘I’m never going to hear the proper story of how that beast killed my baby,’ says Jennifer Bennett. ‘I’ve been left in the dark. I want to know why he took her up there and I’m never going to know.’

  In January 2007 McGrady’s lawyers appealed against his whole life sentence, claiming it was ‘manifestly excessive’. His barrister, Thomas Smith, asked Sir Igor Judge, sitting with Mr Justice Gray and Mr Justice Henriques at the Court of Appeal, to reduce his sentence and give him a chance of release before he dies.

  Declining the appeal, Sir Igor said: ‘The sentencing judge was satisfied that the seriousness of what he did in murdering the victim was extremely high and must have been motivated by sexual desires. Particularly when in drink, the judge said he was, and would continue to be, a dangerous predator on women, especially young women.

  ‘The judge concluded that he must pass a sentence which would mean that he would never prey on women again. He concluded that he must impose a whole life sentence. That decision is criticised before us today by Mr Smith. It is argued that a whole life term, whilst it was an appropriate starting point, was only a starting point, and doesn’t represent an end point. He also submits that intent to kill was not proved, and that too great an emphasis was placed on the danger posed by this applicant and the protection of the public.

  ‘It is also argued that there was evidence of genuine remorse, sustained by the guilty plea, and we are also asked to bear in mind Mr Smith’s client’s age. We are extremely doubtful as to the basis of his remorse.

  ‘We are prepared to accept that he felt and feels sorry for himself, but we are not prepared to accept that he has no recollection of how this unfortunate young woman died. If he was truly sorry, he would have something to say to the parents and family of the victim, who have repeatedly expressed their profound disturbance at their lack of real knowledge and facts about the events which led to the death of this precious member of their family.

  ‘This was the murder of a child, a teenage girl, who was chosen by McGrady because she was a teenage girl, for his own sexual purposes. Whatever he may have intended when he first targeted and abducted her, there is no doubt that he must have known exactly what he was doing when he strangled her.

  ‘This was not the first time he had applied manual pressure to the throat of a young woman. Strangling involves serious force and as we know in this case, a struggle. At some stage he intended that this girl should die. After she was dead, her body was subjected to the gross indignity of dismemberment in a bid to escape detection.

  ‘This case fell, rarely, within the category where the starting point is a whole life order. We can see no reason whatsoever for interfering with the sentencing judge’s conclusion, with which we entirely agree. This application is refused.’

  ‘THE FOX’

  ‘Put the light on, scream and you’re dead.’

  Hutchinson (to victim as she cowered in bed)

  Name: Arthur Hutchinson

  Crime: Triple murder and rape

  Date of Conviction: 14 September 1984

  Age at Conviction: 43

  On the morning of 28 September 1983, Arthur Hutchinson arrived at Selby’s antiquated police station in North Yorkshire where he was due to appear at the Magistrates’ Court in the same building that afternoon. The charges against him were theft, burglary and rape.

  There was only one officer on duty at the station that day, PC Fred Jackson, who was just two weeks away from retirement. He already had his hands full in dealing with two juvenile absconders, when psychopathic Hutchinson, 42, turned up at the ground-floor reception, flanked by two warders from Armley Jail in Leeds. He was taken to the station’s only interview room and searched. While PC Jackson logged the contents of the prisoner’s pockets, Hutchinson made his move to escape.

  He told the prison officers that he needed to use the toilet and they took off his handcuffs to allow him to do so. But while PC Jackson signed various forms accepting responsibility for his visitor, all three officers heard heavy footsteps as Hutchinson sprinted up the staircase leading to the court rooms above.

  He thundered into Court No. 1, where a stunned decorator watched as he vaulted the rail surrounding the dock, jumped onto the Press bench and dived through a window, shattering the glass and slicing his knee open. Outside, he landed on a barbed wire fence but worked himself free, hobbling anonymously through the town’s bustling streets.

  Three-and-a-half weeks later, at around midnight on 22 October, Hutchinson entered the home of solicitor Basil Laitner, 59, and his doctor wife, Avril, 55, in Dore, Sheffield, 42 miles from Selby Magistrates’ Court.

  That day, the Laitners had hosted a wedding reception for their eldest daughter, Suzanne. The reception was held in a marquee in the garden from 4pm until around eight that evening. Once the guests had gone, the Laitners went with their son Richard, 28, for supper at a nearby relative’s house, leaving an 18-year-old bridesmaid at home because she felt tired. They returned home at about 11.15pm and were joined shortly afterwards by Hutchinson, unshaven and filthy after many days on the run. He had broken in through a patio window.

  Sometime shortly before midnight, the bridesmaid was awakened by Avril Laitner’s screams. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness in the bedroom, she realised someone else was in there with her. The intruder left and the girl, who Hutchinson would later rape, was so petrified she was unable to move from her bed.

  As she sat frozen and gripping her bed sheets, the girl heard Basil Laitner arguing with a man whose voice she did not recognise. Next, as prosecution counsel would later say in court, she heard a ‘gasping, choking sound and then all returned to deathly quiet’. She then heard Avril saying, ‘Just take the money and go, leave us alone!’ before the sound of ‘terrible screaming’.

  Basil was murdered on the landing. He was stabbed twice in the throat and then, as he slumped on the banister, Hutchinson rammed the knife into his back. His wife was stabbed to death in her downstairs bedroom and Richard was similarly killed in his room.

  At Hutchinson’s trial at Durham Crown Court in September of the following year, the jury was shown a video recording made by police when they arrived at the house. The film began with the outside of the Laitner home and then the camera moved inside. Avril Laitner was lying face down on the floor of her downstairs bedroom, surrounded by her scattered jewellery and credit cards. A pathologist would later reveal that she had 26 marks of violence on her body, including four stab wounds to her left arm and 13 wounds in the palm of her left hand, which were received as she tried to fend off her attacker. The fatal wound had been inflicted down the left-hand side of the neck, severing her jugular vein.

  The camera then moved to the stairs and the dead body of Basil Laitner came into view. He was laid out on the top two steps, his head down and his hands resting on the top step in front of him. Blood was spattered on the carpet a
nd walls.

  His son Richard, a promising young barrister, was in his bedroom, half on and half off his bed. He was covered in blood and his hands were folded, gripping his chest where he had been stabbed twice.

  Prosecution counsel Robin Stewart, QC, said the defendant probably went to Richard’s bedroom first because a bridesmaid’s dress hung on the outside of the door, leading him to believe that he would find a girl there to rape. But on discovering Richard, he ‘speedily despatched’ him. Mr Stewart said Basil Laitner was most likely killed next, followed by his wife.

  The court heard that after the killings, Hutchinson went back into the bridesmaid’s room, where she remained terror-stricken in the dark. He flashed a torch in her face and said: ‘Put the light on, scream and you’re dead.’ At knifepoint he ordered her out of the room, warning her to hide her eyes otherwise she would see ‘something horrible’ on the stairs. He walked her through the pool of blood next to Basil’s body and into the wedding marquee, where she was forced to sit on a chair while Hutchinson handcuffed her hands behind her back. The girl, the prosecution’s chief witness, told the court: ‘I said, “Please don’t kill me.” He said that he would not if I did as he said. He walked me up to the other end of the tent and said he wanted to screw me.’

  She said Hutchinson, at all times brandishing a knife, had sexual intercourse with her three times, once in the marquee and twice in her bedroom. During the assault he told her that he was on the run from an open prison and boasted of how he had killed everyone in the house. Throughout, he affected a Scottish accent. As dawn was breaking, he left her bound with ties securing her hands and feet. Before walking out of her bedroom, he whispered to her: ‘I am going now, don’t suffocate yourself.’ He left the shattered girl to be discovered hours later by horrified workmen who came to the house to dismantle the marquee.

  When police arrived, the bridesmaid’s foot was caked with Basil Laitner’s blood and her nightdress stained with Avril’s blood from her killer’s hands. Despite the ordeal she had been through, the teenager was able to give a detailed description of her attacker and a police artist drew a sketch of the suspect, which bore a remarkable resemblance to the man who had escaped from Selby Magistrates the month before.

  Hutchinson evaded arrest for 16 days, making his way north to Darlington and his home town of Hartlepool, about 120 miles north of the Laitner home. Finally, he was caught in a field at High Stotfold Farm in Dalton Piercy, near Hartlepool, on 5 November. As he was taken in, he said to the arresting policeman: ‘I’m not a murderer. I should have stayed down my fox hole, shouldn’t I?’ After his arrest, police found a tape recording in a Darlington guest house, where he had stayed under the name ‘A. Fox’.

  On the tape, Hutchinson said: ‘Because I was able to get this tape recorder, transistor, I’ve been able to listen to everything that’s been going on – where they have been waiting for me, where they have been looking for me, so I knew exactly which way to head out of the way from ’em. Like playing cat and mouse, or should I say fox on the trot.

  ‘I’m making no comments on the triple killings. Let the police do what they want, I’m saying nowt. I’m not telling anybody nothing about that business. Mebbes I’m a bit daft in the head like people think I am. Let them think what they want – I am still free, that’s the main f**king thing.’

  When questioned by police, Hutchinson agreed that he had escaped from custody in Selby in September, but denied that he had been anywhere near the Laitner home. Asked about the murders, he said: ‘I did not kill them people.’

  As his trial approached, however, he changed his story after learning of the vast amount of evidence found at the Laitner home which proved he had been there. ‘A forensic expert’s dream’ is how police privately described the murder scene. Hutchinson has a rare blood group, shared with only one in 50,000 people in Britain, and his blood was discovered all over the bridesmaid’s bed sheets. The blood had come from the wound to his knee, sustained when he escaped from Selby.

  Hutchinson also left a palm print on a champagne bottle in the wedding marquee and twice bit into a piece of cheese that he found in the Laitners’ fridge. A dental expert made casts of the bites and they matched a cast of Hutchinson’s teeth taken after his arrest. He duly revised his story in court, claiming the bridesmaid had invited him to the house, where they had consensual sex. He denied any involvement in the triple murders.

  By pleading not guilty, Hutchinson forced the rape victim to go through the ordeal of cross-examination by his defence counsel, James Stewart, QC. Mr Stewart suggested she had met Hutchinson in a Sheffield pub on Friday, 21 October, the day before the wedding and arranged a rendezvous at the house after the reception. She denied this, and further claims that she left the patio door unlatched and told Hutchinson that a bottle of champagne would be waiting for him in the kitchen.

  Visibly shaking, the girl answered ‘No’ to a series of questions in which the defence said that she had taken the man to the bedroom, danced with him, kissed, petted, undressed, had intercourse and then taken a white powder drug. She acknowledged that there was a stage where she tried to appear that she was enjoying sex with Hutchinson. Explaining why, she said: ‘Because I didn’t want to die – I was acting as though I was enjoying it.’

  Next, Mr Stewart asked her if she had consented to all the sexual acts and she broke down and sobbed into both hands. The trial judge, Mr Justice McNeill, offered to adjourn the court when the witness sobbed: ‘I want to go home!’ She regained her composure, but when the defence barrister asked her to bind her hands with the grey spotted tie Hutchinson had allegedly used to tie her up in her bed, she refused.

  When Hutchinson gave evidence, prosecution counsel said: ‘I’m going to suggest to you a number of things. I suggest that you have lied through and through, and in particular that you lied repeatedly to the police throughout the preparation of this case and that you have lied in court today.’

  When the QC asked him if he had repeatedly lied to police, Hutchinson agreed. Mr Stewart continued: ‘I suggest that you are lying now. You have changed your defence to admit being in the house and whatever nasty things you have said against [the rape victim] are because you are a desperate man who realises the evidence nails you to that house that night. Bluntly, I suggest you have told a tissue of lies about [the rape victim].’ In his closing speech, he said Hutchinson was a ‘deliberate and repetitive liar’ who had ‘no concept of the truth.’

  The jury of six men and six women took just over four hours to reach their unanimous verdicts of guilty on all three murder counts and the rape. During the announcement, Hutchinson showed no emotion.

  Passing sentence, Mr Justice McNeill made no direct reference to the ordeal endured by the bridesmaid. He told Hutchinson: ‘You are interested in weapons, are arrogant, manipulative, have a self-centred attitude towards life, and a severe personality disorder, which is not amenable to any form of treatment.

  ‘It seems to me only right in the public interest that I should recommend a minimum period of imprisonment, and I do recommend that that should be 18 years. You will be over 60 years of age, if that period is served.’

  After the trial, Hutchinson’s mother, Louise Reardon, said she believed his crimes were the result of an accident he had as a child. He was just four years old when he rode his bicycle into a lamppost. For three days young Arthur – described by his mother as her ‘little angel’ – lay in a coma. The accident left him with meningitis, a fractured skull and a split personality.

  Speaking days after her son was jailed, Louise, then 79, said Hutchinson’s violent side began to show at the age of seven when he stabbed one of his sisters with a pair of scissors. ‘I had five girls and they made life hell for Arthur,’ she recalled. ‘They called him a bastard, which was true.’ Hutchinson was one of two illegitimate children by Arthur Hutchinson, Louise’s lodger. She also had four children by local pitman Cuthbert Reardon.

  By the age of 11, Hutchinson made his fir
st appearance at Juvenile Court, charged with indecent assault. There followed 19 further appearances, including four charges of sexual intercourse with girls under 16. At 18, he married neighbour Margaret Dover, who was pregnant with his child. Three years later, they separated. A year after that, he was jailed for unlawful sexual intercourse.

  He was 27 when he met his second wife, Hannelore, at a staff Christmas party at Hartlepool’s Buxted chicken factory. She remembered: ‘He just stood and watched me for two hours without saying a word. I suppose it flattered me.’ Five months later they were wed and Hutchinson was both unfaithful and violent. Hannelore said: ‘Anything could provoke him, sometimes nothing. He used to boast about his conquests. The day he left me, he beat me up in the street. He knocked me to the ground and put the boot in. I once saw him knock his mother out of a rocking chair, halfway across the room. Anyone who can do that must have a split personality.’

  Despite his brutality, Hutchinson’s mother refused to forget her fond memories of her son. She remembered how her country-loving lad took home an injured rabbit and bandaged its leg, and of the day he saved a drowning budgie and fed it whisky; of the little Arthur who collected all her lettuces to give to local pensioners, and of the sensitive boy who would nearly faint at the sight of blood.

  The doting mother – who died in 1985 – added that no matter how cruel, violent and dishonest he became as he grew up, she still loved him. She said: ‘I saw him the night they caught him. You could see in his eyes he was sorry. He’s been a bad lad and it has split the family because I stand by him. They accuse him of being my favourite, but I love them all. Arthur just needed the same.’