Life Means Life Read online

  On the morning of 23 December, Sheila went to pick up her two-year-old daughter, Debbie, from her mother’s house two miles away. When she failed to return to their two-bedroom flat by late afternoon, Michael became agitated. Recently, she had been going out a lot with a girl who lived in a flat near to theirs in the city’s Penkhull area. Her new friend took her for the occasional night out to pubs and clubs, much to Michael’s annoyance. He assumed she was out with her again and spent the night on the sofa, drinking cider. When she came home, he killed her.

  At his trial at Stafford Crown Court in April the following year, Smith gave his version of the events that led to Sheila’s death. He explained that she had gone out in the morning to ‘fetch her child from her mother’s home and collect her social security. But she did not come back all day, and I guessed she had gone out with this girl and some men. I went to bed that night and she had still not returned.’

  He told the jury that he woke up just before midnight to loud knocking on the front door. When he answered it, a man was standing there with Sheila by his side: ‘The bloke told me to hand over the keys and get out of the flat because it was Sheila’s flat. Sheila kept saying that she hated me – it was like a slap in the face coming from her. The man hit me and kicked me, then left.’

  Smith said that once the man had gone, he tried to talk to his girlfriend and ‘calm her down.’ He told the court: ‘She said that other men were better than me – I took that to mean they were better in bed than me.’ Those were to prove her last words.

  ‘I put my hands around her neck,’ Smith said. ‘I did not mean to harm her; I have never felt like that before. I can vaguely remember putting part of her tights round her neck.’

  After killing Sheila, Smith stripped her body. Judge Mr Justice Melford Stevenson asked him why he did so and Smith replied: ‘I have thought about it since, but I still don’t know why I did it. I put a cushion under her head and put a coat over her. I sat there until morning, just staring at her: I knew she was dead.’

  He then went to his parents’ house nearby and told his father that Sheila had dumped him for another man and that he felt suicidal. After about an hour, he said he was going to try and talk things through with her, promising his father that he would not do anything stupid and would return by lunchtime. When he had not shown up by 8pm, his father phoned the police, fearing he might have harmed himself.

  Officers went to the flat and broke down the door. Sheila’s naked body was laid out on the living room floor with Smith beside her. The gas taps in the kitchen were turned on and the flat was full of fumes.

  Smith denied Sheila’s murder, but admitted manslaughter on the grounds of provocation. Prosecution counsel Peter Weitzman, QC, told the jury: ‘Provocation means a sudden and temporary loss of control. The question is, was the defendant subject to such passion that he was not in control of himself?’

  The jury of three men and nine women took two hours to find Smith guilty of murder. In tears, his mother was helped from the public gallery before the judge told him: ‘The jury have convicted you of murder and I cannot see how they could have avoided that conclusion… You will go to prison for life.’ He was then told that he would be eligible for parole after 10 years but, far from being released after that time, Smith spent 30 years inside after escaping from various prisons.

  In July 1982, he was one of six inmates who escaped from Nottingham Jail. He spent 12 days on the run before being caught while drinking in a pub in Hanley, near Stoke. In 1987, he escaped from Ashwell Open Prison, in Leicestershire with another inmate. He absconded from Sudbury Open Prison, near Uttoxeter in 1991, and then went on the run from Leyhill Open Prison, in Gloucestershire, in 1993. Finally, he was given parole on 26 August 2005. Almost a year to the day, he killed again.

  The battered body of his former drug addict friend Peter Summers was found on 24 August 2006. The dead man’s mother, Stella Parson, called police when he failed to return her calls for more than a week. Officers entered his flat in Squires View, Stoke, and found him lying face down under a double bed. He had been beaten about the head with a champagne bottle and his bedroom was covered in blood.

  A pathologist said the 35-year-old was probably attacked on 17 August. In his view, the victim could have lived for up to four days before he died. Trails of blood across the floor and handprints on the bed suggested he had been able to crawl around the room during his slow death.

  A week before he attacked Peter, Smith broke the terms of his parole when he tested positive for controlled drugs. Recall to prison was inevitable and this gave him a devil-may-care attitude during his last few days of freedom.

  Peter’s former partner Sarah Welch had taken their nine-year-old son Liam on holiday to Turkey and left Peter in charge of the Squires View flat. On 16 August, his friend Smith went round to the flat to take drugs. In a heroin-induced moment of madness, Peter showed Smith a toolbox containing £8,000 in cash that Sarah had hidden in the loft. He even counted the money in front of him.

  That afternoon, Smith sent a text to his friend Mark Johnson, boasting that he had pulled off a drugs deal and asking him if he ‘wanted a grand’. At some point during the next 24 hours, Smith walked into Peter’s bedroom armed with an empty champagne bottle and repeatedly bludgeoned his defenceless victim around the head. He then picked up the cash and fled, leaving him bleeding on the floor.

  On 18 August, Smith travelled 16 miles to Stafford and took his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Hulme, out on a shopping spree. Caroline later told police that her boyfriend had a red bag that was full of cash and he was ‘jittery’. He told her that he was in ‘big trouble’ but would not say why. She said he spent lavishly on them both.

  At his trial at Stafford Crown Court in May of the following year, prosecutor Nigel Baker, QC, said around £800 of jewellery had been recovered, but the rest of the money was still missing. He added: ‘The defendant was partying and enjoying himself in the days after coming into this money from the deceased.’

  The barrister read out the statement that Smith gave to police: ‘I didn’t intend Peter any serious harm. My intention was to leave him dazed and make my escape with the money. I didn’t think he needed emergency treatment; I was later shocked to hear that he had died.’

  Anthony Barker, QC, defending, said Smith admitted the murder shortly after being recalled to prison on 25 August. He added: ‘He is resigned to the fact that he will spend the rest of his life in prison. This is the picture of a man who has effectively thrown his life away. He is not asking the court for mercy.’

  Mr Barker told the court that his client had a dreadful early life, suffering physical and sexual abuse. It made him a deeply disturbed boy and by the age of 11 he was at an approved school, where experts tried to control his violent urges. But his temper worsened and when he was 13, he was locked up in a borstal. During the next five years he enjoyed fewer than 12 months of freedom.

  On 31 July 1974, he was jailed for two years for beating up a man who disturbed him while he was burgling his house. He was back on the streets in November 1975, and within weeks he had committed his first murder.

  Sentencing the double killer, Mr Justice Nelson told Smith: ‘You have pleaded guilty to the brutal killing of a former friend. You struck his head with a bottle to enable you to steal a substantial amount of money you had seen him counting. He may have lived between one and four days before he succumbed to injuries you inflicted. This was a terrible crime. You have taken a life and caused terrible grief and loss to his relatives and his friends.’

  The judge added: ‘Murder is a dreadful crime, but what is truly shocking is that this is the second time you have committed it. You were released and committed this murder about one year after. The law requires me to pass a life sentence, but I am also required to pass a minimum term. I have considered whether there is any mitigation which might affect that starting point. The case remains exceptional and that minimum term should be one of a whole life order. This was a brutal atta
ck on a man for the purpose of theft, the victim was left to die and afterwards money was spent by you on a shopping spree.’

  After the sentence, Peter’s former partner Sarah Welch paid tribute to him: ‘We were together since I was 13 and I spent my teenage and adult years with him until the age of 29. We had two children. Our first son, Kieran, died suddenly when he was just seven weeks old. Liam, our second, is now nine.

  ‘Peter’s death means that Liam has missed out on the chance of having his dad there as a teenager and as an adult. I’m still too angry to have an opinion about Michael Smith. He knew Peter had a son, and must have understood that his actions would have consequences for Liam. Our son will now have to grow up, knowing that a person could be so evil as to murder another human being, purely and simply out of greed.’

  Peter’s mother, Stella Parsons, said: ‘I will never understand how or why anyone could do such a thing, how they could take someone’s life in such a horrible and vicious way. I’m still as angry with Smith as I was then. His sentence will never be enough.’

  ‘THE HIGHLY-INTELLIGENT PSYCHOPATH’

  ‘I unsheathed a short sword stick and stabbed him in the belly, running the blade up into his heart.’

  Childs on killing one of his victims

  Name: John Childs

  Crime: Mass murder

  Date of Conviction: 4 December 1979

  Age at Conviction: 40

  On 28 November 1980, East End hard man Henry MacKenney, known in the London underworld as ‘Big H’, was found guilty of four gruesome murders at the Old Bailey. Standing at 6ft 5in tall, the 48-year-old snarled down from the dock as the verdicts were read out. Many of the jurors looked away to avoid his intimidating stare.

  The ruthless villain, whom notorious gangsters the Kray Twins had failed to recruit, stood with his fists tightly clasped by his sides. Five prison guards surrounding him in the dock could see that he had his fingers tattooed: those on his right hand had the letters ‘LTFC’ and those on the left said ‘ESUK’. When he intertwined them, it spelt: ‘LETS FUCK’.

  As the judge began sentencing him, MacKenney moved forward in the dock and shouted: ‘I think you are a hypocrite. Bring this farce to a close. Do your worst!’ In response, Mr Justice May said to him: ‘The court has listened to a story the like of which I have seldom heard, even in these violent times.’ With his face red with fury, MacKenney interrupted: ‘I killed nobody! I have saved lives. You forbade me to bring those people here. You hid a psycho report from the jury!’ He then turned to the jury of ten men and two women, who had unanimously convicted him, and yelled: ‘You are mongols and right mugs!’

  MacKenney had every reason to be angry: he was completely innocent of all four murders. His conviction was based exclusively on the testimony of John ‘Bruce’ Childs, a psychopathic self-confessed killer with a serious mental disorder that compelled him to lie repeatedly in a way that would have been undetectable to a jury. The ‘psycho report’ that was kept from the jury would have destroyed Childs’ credibility as a witness. Because of Childs’ lies, MacKenney spent 23 years in prison for crimes he did not commit.

  On 15 December 2003, MacKenney and his friend Terry Pinfold – wrongly jailed for his involvement in one of the killings – walked free from the Court of Appeal when their convictions were quashed. Both men were frail and gaunt after suffering ill health in prison. Pinfold, 70, had suffered six strokes and had serious heart and bowel problems. MacKenney, 73, was pale and weak after contracting emphysema and a near-fatal dose of pneumonia. The best years of their lives were a long way behind them.

  More than 25 years earlier, in September 1978, the man behind their ruin was arrested in connection with a £500,000 robbery in Hertfordshire. During police questioning, Childs – well known among London’s East End criminal fraternity as an oddball fantasist – told detectives that he had something much bigger to admit than anything they already had on him. In a statement lasting many hours, the wiry, bearded crook told how he and two associates, MacKenney and Pinfold, had been in the business of murder. He said they had killed six people for profit between October 1974 and October 1978. Their victims were haulage contractor George Brett and his son Terry, nursing home proprietor Fred Sherwood, roofing contractor Ronald Andrews, teddy bear manufacturer Terry Eve and prison absconder Robert Brown.

  Childs boasted to police that they would not find any bodies because they had been chopped up and disposed of. Checks quickly proved that all six people were missing and Childs was charged. The police could not have dreamt of an easier result.

  On 4 December 1979, Childs, of Poplar, East London, pleaded guilty to six counts of murder at the Old Bailey. John Mathew, QC, for the prosecution, briefly outlined the details of the crimes before the judge, Mr Justice Lawson, sentenced him to life imprisonment on each count, to run concurrently. The full macabre and horrific details of the murders – among the worst any Old Bailey jury has heard – were saved for November the following year, when Childs took to the witness box to turn Queen’s Evidence against his ‘accomplices’ MacKenney and Pinfold.

  Childs, who had spent 15 months in solitary confinement for his protection in the run-up to the trial, told the court how he needed to come clean about every detail of the murders because he found it increasingly difficult to stomach what he had done. Indeed, until his confession to the six killings, his criminal record did not include offences of serious violence.

  Prosecution counsel, David Tudor Price, told the jury that Childs’ confession led the police to MacKenney, who had been brought up in the Elephant and Castle area of South London, and had convictions for taking cars, lorries and causing actual bodily harm. Pinfold, a former amateur boxer, was in prison for his part in an armed robbery when Childs confessed. The police also arrested Leonard Thompson, 41, and Paul Morton-Thurtle, 34. The prosecution said they had taken out contracts to kill with the central conspirators. Both were later found not guilty.

  Mr Tudor Price warned the jury of ten men and two women: ‘The details of this case are extremely unpleasant. It will be necessary for you to steel yourself to listen to descriptions, which are really revolting.’

  In his first of four days in the witness box, the star – and only – witness for the prosecution, said he lived in fear of his life because he had broken the professional criminals’ code by testifying against his fellow killers. Childs, 41, admitted: ‘I’m scared of the damage Mr MacKenney can do to me and my family because I have had the audacity to stand here and give Queen’s Evidence. I am open to being killed myself.’

  He went on to relate the story of what he and his murder gang had done. The tale began, he said, when he was released from prison in 1972 and went to work for Pinfold, who was manufacturing lifejackets, designed by MacKenney, at a factory in a former church hall in Dagenham, Essex. The three had had serious discussions about killing people for money, but nothing came of it until they came across Terence ‘Teddy Bear’ Eve, who made soft toys on the balcony of the hall. Childs said Pinfold wanted to take over Eve’s business and the three would-be killers had various schemes for getting rid of him. They discussed the idea and it was decided that Eve, 35, would be killed by MacKenney and Childs at the church hall with Pinfold absent – as he would be the one taking over Eve’s business and so needed an alibi.

  Childs told the court that at around midnight on Friday, 1 November 1974, MacKenney led Eve into a covered alleyway where Childs was hidden behind a curtain. He bolted the door behind him and started to beat him with a length of hydraulic hose which had two heavy nuts attached to it. Childs emerged from his hiding place and hit Eve twice in the face with a hammer. As Eve lay unconscious on the floor, MacKenney strangled him with a rope. The alleyway was covered in blood so Childs threw buckets of water over the floor and walls. Both men stripped off their bloodied clothes and MacKenney used his jeans to block the gap at the bottom of the door to prevent the bloodied water from seeping out into the car park.

  They continued clean
ing up until the following morning, when they called Pinfold and asked him to come to the factory. Arriving between 8 and 8.30am, Pinfold said he did not wish to know the details, but asked where the body was located and whether the factory was clear as he had employees attending for work that morning.

  Childs said that on the Saturday evening he and MacKenney had put Eve’s body, wrapped in a tarpaulin, into the boot of MacKenney’s car and had taken it to Childs’ council flat in Poplar. They bought an industrial mincing machine and lined the floor with plastic sheeting to catch the blood, but the household electric current was not strong enough to get the machine to work properly so they used an axe, a saw and knives to cut up the body. Relishing the attention he was getting in the witness stand, Childs went into graphic detail, telling the court how MacKenney had sawn off one of Eve’s legs before deciding to complete the dismemberment in the bath.

  At all times avoiding the eyes of the accused men who glared at him from the dock, Childs told how MacKenney called him to watch as he put a butcher’s knife to the dead man’s throat and, ‘with about three motions’, cut his head clean off. Once Eve was chopped up, they tried flushing parts of him down the toilet, but it took too long. Instead, Childs said that he spent 24 hours incinerating the body on a grate in his living room fireplace. He told the court how he sat ‘relaxed and having a drink’ as the flesh burned and that the bones were crushed with a mallet and disposed of with the ashes around the East End. The same method of disposal was adopted for each of the killings.

  Childs said that after the success of their first murder, the three men held a ‘policy meeting and the result of that was that we were going into the murder business.’ He told the court: ‘Mr Pinfold would be our agent, Mr MacKenney would kill, and in any trouble I would assist him to kill. Disposals would be at my place, and in the case of anyone cracking up, the other two would get rid of that member.’