This is my third book about murder and the men and woman who commit this most foul of all crimes, and I am as certain as I can be that it will be my last. There is only so much brutality and ugliness that any imagination can take, and I have had more than my fair share. To relive the tragedies contained in these pages in detail was sometimes almost too much to bear. Murder affects not only the victim but also a far wider circle, including, of course, their families and friends. It stains the world forever, and no amount of scrubbing will ever rub out its memory.
The only reason that I embarked on the stories of the group of individuals who earned the greatest penalty the law in England and Wales can provide – a whole life period of imprisonment – was that the subject seemed to me to have been all but ignored in the discussion of the crimes themselves. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that the steady increase in the number of these sentences has happened almost without anyone noticing, or considering its implications for a civilized society.
My old friend legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg was kind enough to agree with my argument and to point me in the right direction, and I must also pay tribute to a number of members of the British judiciary who offered me their opinions freely, on the simple grounds that I never identify them. I thank them all, just as I must thank Richard Whittam QC, the First Senior Treasury Counsel, who was consistently helpful in ensuring that I was working from the right documents in cases that came before the Court of Appeal.
My editor, Dan Bunyard, was as enthusiastic about raising the issue as I was, and has given me extraordinary support throughout the process, for which I am profoundly grateful. His assistant Fiona Crosby has been equally generous, not least in assembling the plates of pictures, as have their colleagues Martin Higgins in the sales department and Ellie Hughes in publicity. The manuscript was meticulously copy-edited by Fiona Brown.
I also owe special thanks to my excellent young researcher Sahyma Shaid, who trawled through mountains of material to unearth the precise details of some of the darkest crimes ever committed in this country, and did so with consummate skill, no matter how testing the task may have been. I am every bit as grateful to my own assistant and great supporter, Diana Fletcher, who bore, with great strength and dignity, the burden of ensuring that I did not submerge completely beneath the tidal wave of tragedy that sometimes threatened to engulf me.
None of these admirable people are responsible for my conclusions, however. Those are mine alone.