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No Mercy, No Remorse

Jamie Reynolds

The scene is a neat semi-detached house in a polite, well-kept road in the small town of Wellington in Shropshire, not far from the border between England and Wales. It is approaching dusk on the evening of a quiet Sunday, 26 May 2013.

Everything looks as normal as it possibly could in this provincial street of well-kept hedges and tidy gardens. But behind the lace curtains of this unostentatious little house, something utterly unimaginable is happening – the most depraved, despicable murder is being committed.

A sparkling-eyed, redheaded girl of just seventeen years and nine months in age – Georgia Williams, with her whole life ahead of her, and who hoped to become a model – has fallen into the clutches of a baby-faced young man just five years her senior, who looks as harmless and innocent as the day is long, and has been her ‘friend’ for five years. His name is Jamie Reynolds.

But Reynolds is certainly not behaving like an innocent ‘friend’ on this particular Sunday evening. Telling her it will further her modelling career, he has persuaded Georgia to take part in a bizarre private ‘photo shoot’. It involves her changing into a set of clothes he has specially selected for her. He has brought her a black leather jacket and shorts, and shortly before eight she poses for him in the kitchen and hall of that neat little house in Avondale Road.

A few minutes later, Reynolds takes another set of photographs of Georgia, only this time she is standing on a box in the upstairs hallway with a red rope around her neck attached to an oar placed across the trapdoor entrance to the attic above, in a makeshift gallows. She is still wearing the leather jacket and shorts, while her hands are free, hanging by her side.

When she agreed to take part in this extraordinary ‘photo shoot’ Georgia was probably smiling, giggling even, as she cheerfully acquiesced to Reynolds’ weird demands. She almost certainly believed that she had nothing whatever to worry about. After all, she had told her father, Steve, a detective constable with West Mercia Police, and her mother, Lynette, that she was going to see Reynolds, so what harm could she possibly come to?

That thought must have been in Georgia’s mind as Reynolds quietly suggested in his wheedling voice that she should climb on to the box and allow him to slip the red rope around her neck. Once she had climbed on to it, Reynolds stepped back once again and started taking photographs with his stepfather’s camera. The shutter clicked time after time, as he took frame after frame, and cajoled Georgia to smile for the camera.

Just a minute or so later, Reynolds photographed her with her hands tied behind her back. Georgia was still smiling, but tragically she did not know what was in store for her.

Far from being Georgia’s friend, Reynolds was about to become her executioner, for as soon as he briefly stopped shooting, he reached up and pulled the noose tight, tying it to the banister. That forced Georgia on to her tip toes and started cutting off the blood supply to her brain.

Now plainly terrified, Georgia, who had been head girl at her secondary school and was a corporal in the Royal Air Force cadets, started to struggle, but Reynolds showed the helpless girl not a shred of mercy. Instead, he applied further pressure to tighten the rope by putting his knee in her back and pulling downwards, shortly before kicking the box Georgia had been standing on away from beneath her so that she was left swinging helpless in the void, the noose tightening around her neck, her legs kicking in wild panic.

Then, as Georgia’s life ebbed away, he calmly stepped back and started taking pictures again – delighting in his power over her, relishing the horrific fantasy that he had created of killing a young woman by hanging, and doing nothing whatever to prevent her death. As the breath finally began to leave her body, he simply grinned in triumph and took yet another photograph. He gloried in his betrayal of the teenager and her horrifying, grotesque death.

Within a few minutes of Reynolds kicking the box away from beneath her feet, the pretty young woman, who was still legally a child no matter how mature she may have looked, was dead at the end of Reynolds’ rope. Yet, tragically, her ordeal did not even end there.

The twenty-two-year-old Reynolds carefully took Georgia’s body down from his makeshift gallows and laid it on one of the three beds upstairs in his family home. His parents were away in Italy for a week, and so there was no chance whatever that the lonely – but undeniably persuasive – Reynolds would be disturbed.

That was precisely how Reynolds had planned it, for Georgia’s murder was the culmination of a fantasy that had been playing out in his mind for months. He had even foretold it in one of the forty violent, sexual ‘stories’ he had written depicting what he intended to do to various young women he knew of in the local area.

Reynolds took pleasure in one story in particular, started on 27 January 2013 on his iPhone, five months before the murder. It was entitled ‘Georgia Williams in Surprise’, and it described in graphic detail exactly how he intended to abuse and kill the teenager after he had persuaded her to come to his parents’ house while he was alone there. He had revised the story repeatedly over the months, the last time in early May, three weeks before the murder.

In his story Reynolds went into pornographic detail about what he intended to do to the innocent seventeen-year-old, including a description of her hanging. ‘Her feet start kicking wildly as she hangs,’ he wrote. ‘She dances wildly at the end of her rope.’

Soon after he had written his story for the first time, he started texting Georgia, telling her how much he liked her and how interested he was in her. She displayed no interest in him whatsoever, but that did nothing to deter Reynolds as he went on to describe how he was interested in ‘artistic’ photography, and told her that he wanted to use a ‘simulated hanging’ as a scenario.

Just before that fateful Sunday evening, he sent Georgia a text saying, ‘Fake hanging. Just want to double check to make sure you are cool with it because it is “totally safe”.’

Along with his depraved written fantasies, which were also directed at other young women, this pasty-faced young man with a stubbly excuse for a beard also assembled a vast electronic library of violent pornography, including no fewer than 16,800 images and seventy-two videos of extreme pornography, including ‘snuff’ movies that depicted the death and sexual mutilation of young women.

Acting out these fantasies on the helpless body of Georgia Williams, Reynolds ruthlessly set out to destroy the dignity and grace of the young woman who had brought ‘light and joy’ into the lives of her family and friends, and had been a school counsellor to victims of bullying in her school, as well as a fine sportswoman.

In the last hours of that Sunday evening, Reynolds systematically sexually abused the lifeless body of Georgia Williams. He posed her body on all three beds in the house, including his parents’, and gradually stripped her until she was naked. He took photographs of her, and then of himself – by now also naked – as he violently assaulted her in every conceivable perverted way.

Then he transported her naked corpse downstairs to the kitchen, only to resume the attacks and continued to do so for hours – after taking care to close the living room curtains. Reynolds was only too aware that suburban streets have many watching eyes. He was later to be described as both ‘narcissistic’ and ‘necrophiliac’, and there can be no denying that it is all but impossible for an ordinary human being to conceive of the depravity that Georgia Williams was subjected to during that evening.

Reynolds’ actions defied all human conscience. They were the work of a young man who can only be described as truly evil, and who glorified in being in charge of the body of a lifeless teenage girl and relished the humiliation he was subjecting her to. But just as Reynolds had taken care to ensure that no prying eyes would catch a glimpse of his depravity, so he had sculpted a plan that, he thought, would ensure that he got away with Georgia’s murder and monstrous violation.

Reynolds’ escape plan was every bit as careful and calculated as the fantasy that led to Georgia’s death. For, as the evening wore on, he used the dead teenager’s mobile phone to pretend to be her and sent a text message to her mother saying, ‘Ended up going out. Don’t know when I’ll be back.’ He then added a second message: ‘Phone about to die too,’ clearly intent on covering his tracks.

When Mrs Lynette Williams picked up that message the following morning she immediately texted her daughter to find out exactly where she was and what she was doing. Reynolds used Georgia’s phone to reply, texting, ‘Stayed with friends. I’ll see you tonight.’

The subterfuge did not end there. On the Monday morning Reynolds texted Georgia’s older sister Scarlett – using his own mobile phone this time – to suggest that he was worried about where Georgia might be and offering to help Scarlett to look for her. Reynolds then texted Georgia’s own phone from his own mobile, repeating his concern. It was a callous attempt to both conceal his own tracks and manipulate every member of the Williams family, while all the time privately gloating over his crime.

It had the additional benefit of ensuring that Georgia’s family did not contact the police at once, even though her father Steve was a detective.

But all the time Reynolds was sustaining the pretence that Georgia had left him the evening before, he was also executing his plan to escape the consequences of his actions. He used his stepfather’s white Toyota van, which was parked in the driveway outside the Avondale Road house – with its rear doors facing the front door – and secretly loaded Georgia’s naked body, wrapped in a cloth, into the back. He also loaded her underwear, some jewellery, as well as the clothes he had dressed her in, and the rope and the handcuffs he had used to subdue her.

Meanwhile, Reynolds deleted the incriminating pictures from his stepfather’s camera and loaded them instead on to an external hard drive for his computer, which already contained other examples of his obsession with extreme and violent pornography. He was clearly intending to relive the previous evening’s dreadful events at his leisure in the future.

Then, shortly before lunch on Monday 27 May 2013, after waiting for a visit from his sister – during which he pretended to Georgia’s sister Scarlett that everything was completely normal and explained that he was going off on a ‘camping trip’ for a few days – Reynolds set off in his stepfather’s van to dispose of Georgia’s body.

He even knew exactly where he was taking her. Reynolds crossed the border and drove into North Wales, and then through the picturesque Nant-y-Garth pass to the upright little market town of Wrexham. He parked the van – with Georgia’s body in the back – had something to eat, and went to the Odeon cinema while waiting for dusk to fall, so that he could play out the final act in the tragedy of Georgia’s young life.

That evening, as the light began to fade, Reynolds drove back to the remote woodland valley of Nant-y-Garth and up a track into an isolated wooded area. But he did not get very far as the van got stuck in the mud. So he hauled Georgia’s body out of the back of the van and dragged it deeper and deeper into the trees before depositing it in a remote stream – clearly hoping that it would never be discovered, and not caring what animals or insects might do to her naked body in the wilderness.

But then came the first hitch in Reynolds’ careful plan. His stepfather’s van was stuck in the mud and he needed help to get it out. A passing motorist finally stopped, but then happened to take a photograph of the van. Realising that the picture placed the van in North Wales, Reynolds slipped into a panic – so much so that he immediately drove north to Glasgow in Scotland, where he bought a new watch, once again went to the cinema, and then checked into the Premier Inn in the city centre for the night.

As a result of Reynolds’ delaying tactics, Georgia’s parents did not inform the police of her disappearance until Tuesday 28 May – by which time Reynolds had disappeared with her body – but an alert was put out for him that day and he was quickly located on the morning of Wednesday 29 May, three days after the murder, at the Premier Inn he had chosen in Scotland’s second city.

The following evening, West Mercia Police launched an appeal on BBC Television’s Crimewatch programme in an effort to track down the white van’s whereabouts. Their appeal was an immediate success, and by Friday 31 May, Georgia’s body had been located – though sadly not before it had suffered dreadfully during the three days and nights it had lain naked in dense woodland. At a nearby layby police found the rope used to kill her; the leather jacket and shorts and the handcuffs were also discovered, although her jewellery and mobile phone were never found.

When Georgia’s parents went to identify the body formally they were traumatised by the damage she had suffered, so traumatised, indeed, that they would never be able to eradicate the vivid images of her dreadful fate from their minds in the months to come.

In the days that followed his arrest, Reynolds repeatedly insisted during his police interviews that it was all a mistake, and that Georgia had gone to see a friend and he did not know where she was. But when the officers revealed that they had found the external hard drive with the pictures of Georgia both alive and dead, Reynolds claimed total memory loss – until, as a result of the Crimewatch appeal – they also told him that they had photographs of his van stuck in the mud in Wales and of Georgia’s body.

Asked if he accepted responsibility for her death, Reynolds only replied, ‘Even though I don’t remember it, it does certainly look that way. I hate myself for it … I never wanted to hurt her.’ It was the only remorse he was ever to admit to in the months that followed.

Then, and only then, did Reynolds, the former shop worker and petrol pump attendant, finally admit that he had ‘little flashes’ of memory in which he thought he might have dragged her naked body into the woods.

For almost seven months Reynolds firmly denied his responsibility for the murder and mutilation of Georgia Williams. It was not until five days before his trial at Stafford Crown Court was due to begin in December 2013 that he accepted his own guilt and admitted that he had indeed killed her. But he did not claim that he had done so in an act of ‘madness’ that might diminish his culpability for the crime.

Reynolds simply stood in the dock of Stafford Crown Court, before Mr Justice Wilkie, and replied, ‘Guilty,’ when he was asked how he responded to the charges put to him. There was no emotion on his face, no weeping or cries of remorse, not even a plea for mercy from the Court. It was as if Georgia was merely a memory that he had wiped from the hard drive of his brain.

After Reynolds’ plea of guilty it was revealed that he had attempted to commit similar crimes in the past, luring girls he knew from the local area to his house and subjecting them to brutal sexual attacks.

In January 2008, when Reynolds was still only seventeen, he had persuaded a red-haired young woman to come to his home to pose for photographs which had an eerie similarity to those he finally took of Georgia. When she refused to go upstairs with him, he attacked her and attempted to strangle her. She only escaped by fighting Reynolds off, which left her with red marks and swelling on her neck. When the police were called, they discovered that he also had photographs of other unknown, naked young woman being strangled, as well as two pictures to which he had digitally added a noose around their neck. One of those photographs depicted the young woman he had just attacked.

Astonishingly, in the light of what was to happen five years later, and regardless of the apparent seriousness of the attack, West Mercia Police did not insist that he stand trial for the attack. Instead they issued the seventeen-year-old teenager with what they called ‘a final warning’. He was also referred to the Youth Offender Service and monitored by the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service. It did nothing whatever to stop him.

In 2010 he began contacting a second red-haired young woman. She turned him down flat, but he continued to pester her. Finally in August 2011, she confronted him in a car park and told him to his face to stop. Reynolds responded by reversing his car straight into hers at considerable speed. She went on to feature in one of his forty ‘stories’, as well as appearing in a digitally created image with a noose around her neck.

In February 2013 Reynolds invited a third red-haired young woman into his parents’ house, having modified a Facebook photograph of her to show a rope around her neck, her arms and legs tied, and yet more sexual violation. After she arrived he locked all the doors and pretended not to know where the keys were.

As a result, the young woman was trapped in the house for almost an hour, screaming, shouting and threatening to climb out of the window, while Reynolds attempted to persuade her to stay the night. In the end he pretended to ‘find’ the keys and she left. She was extremely fortunate, because Reynolds had left himself a note to remind him to remove the oar from the loft’s hatch. She was clearly intended for the same fate as Georgia Williams.

Four more digitally altered images created by Reynolds of local young women with nooses were found in his bedroom, and in the week leading up to Georgia’s death he sent messages to some sixteen young women, trying to persuade them to come to his house on Sunday 26 May. Astonishingly, two or three of them showed an interest, but could not make that evening. On the morning after Georgia’s murder he contacted them to say that he had a mechanical problem with his camera, and that they should postpone their visit for twenty-four hours.

In the weeks before Reynolds pleaded guilty in December 2013, he was examined by the distinguished forensic psychiatrist, Professor Bob Peckitt, in a series of interviews. In his report the professor explained that although Reynolds had experienced some physical and emotional abuse as a child – his mother had escaped from the relationship with her first husband and married again. But the professor also noted that his stepfather and mother had given him a ‘comfortable and supportive’ home.

Professor Peckitt concluded that Reynolds did not have ‘a sufficiently disturbed upbringing’ to account for his adult behaviour, and he also discounted the possibility that he had a ‘recognised mental disorder’ or an ‘abnormality of mental functioning’. In other words, he was clinically sane.

But the professor also stated firmly that Reynolds suffered from a ‘long-standing necrophiliac fantasy’ which involved hanging a young woman and having sex with her corpse. He concluded that he was an ‘intelligent and plausible’ young man who had the potential ‘to progress to being a serial killer’ who posed a ‘grave risk to women’ and would continue to do so for the rest of his life.

It was one of the bleakest statements ever made about a convicted killer of a single human being in a British criminal court, and it was about a young man who was not even twenty-four years of age. It sealed Reynolds’ fate.

When Jamie Reynolds was summoned back to the dock of Stafford Crown Court on 19 December 2013 to hear Mr Justice Wilkie pass sentence, he knew that he faced a life sentence for the murder of Georgia Williams seven months earlier. The only question in his mind was how long the minimum term that the judge would recommend would be.

He thought that the fact that he had pleaded guilty (although only after waiting six months before deciding to do so) and thereby not putting Georgia’s family through the ordeal of a trial, and that he was still only twenty-three years of age, would weigh in his favour.

But Reynolds’ legal team would have warned him that in the past fifteen years the minimum terms of imprisonment for a life sentence had been growing steadily longer. In 1997, for example, the average length of time a prisoner served under a life sentence before being released on licence was only some nine years, now it was almost double that – at seventeen years or so.

The atmosphere in the well of Stafford Crown Court on the chilly morning of Friday 19 December 2013 could hardly have been more charged, and the tension grew even more dramatically when fifty-four-year-old Detective Constable Stephen Williams stood in the well of the court to read his ‘impact statement’ to the judge before sentencing. Unable to hold back the tears, his whole body appeared to be trembling as he stood up to read the brief statement that he held in his hand.

The grey-haired police officer was in such obvious distress that Mr Justice Wilkie offered to read the statement for him, but Stephen Williams bravely replied, ‘Thank you for your consideration but I’d like to do it myself.’ Struggling to control himself, he said in a voice on the verge of breaking: ‘I cry endlessly from morning to night … we have been damned by evil to endure this misery to the end of our lives.’ The loss of the young woman who had been his ‘truly wonderful daughter’ was clearly almost too much to bear.

Mr Justice Wilkie began his sentencing remarks by addressing Reynolds directly, and telling him, ‘You have, for at least five years, been obsessed with sexual violence against women, particularly in the form of hanging, or strangulation, and by sexual violation of them in death. Repeatedly you have sought to engineer situations where you were not simply the viewer of fictional fantasies but were the real life assailant.’

Jamie Reynolds must have realised at that precise moment that his fate was likely to be far worse than a simple life sentence with a fixed minimum term.

A Scots-educated, thoughtful man of almost sixty-six, with a careworn face and the manner of an academic, Wilkie had dealt with serious murderers before. He had presided over the conviction and sentencing of the predatory wheel clamper and drug dealer Levi Bellfield for the murder of Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler just eighteen months earlier. He was no stranger to evil.

Not long after he began his sentencing remarks, Mr Justice Wilkie made it clear to everyone in court that the life of the prisoner in the dock was about to change forever when he told him firmly, ‘The only sentence I am empowered to pass is one of life imprisonment and I do so.’ But then he paused and added, ‘My next task is to consider whether this is a case which calls for a whole life term and, if not, to fix a minimum term before the expiration of which you, Jamie Reynolds, will not be considered for release on licence.’

The words would have chilled Reynolds’ bones to the marrow, for Wilkie had suggested that – even at his age – he might join the group of fifty or more men (and two women) condemned to end their lives in prison, with barely any hope of release beyond the onset of a terminal illness.

Reynolds was facing the ultimate punishment that the English law could pronounce on a prisoner – after the replacement of the death penalty by a life sentence which gave nothing but the slimmest chance of release. Only two men in recent memory had walked out of jail after receiving such a sentence – when their innocence was proven many years after they were sent to jail. There was no chance of that for Reynolds – he had pleaded guilty.

As the sentencing went on it became clearer and clearer that the judge had been strongly influenced by Reynolds’ meticulous planning of Georgia’s murder and his desire to keep a record of it. The pictures taken while Georgia was suspended with a noose around her neck, while she was still alive, clearly profoundly shocked and moved Mr Justice Wilkie, who said, ‘Seeing those photographs of her, totally trusting and helpless, unknowing of what you were about to do to her, has been almost unbearable … You then, as you had envisaged, enjoyed the spectacle of her final ghastly minutes as she struggled for life, knowing that she had been betrayed and that she was facing death. At no stage have you expressed any genuine remorse for your horrific actions.’ Mr Justice Wilkie added, ‘It follows that, whilst your plea of guilty has in fact saved Georgia’s family from having to endure a trial, in the context of this case, where the evidence against you is so overwhelming, that, as a mitigating factor, is of little significance.’

In his quiet, studious voice the judge then began to explain to Reynolds that basis under which the Court could sentence him to spend the rest of his life behind bars. It came under Section 269 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and allowed a judge to make this ruling where: ‘… the Court is of the opinion that the offence is so serious that no order should be made providing for the possibility of release’. In those circumstances ‘the Court must make a whole life order.’

But under the provisions of Section 269, the judge explained, the Court also had to consider factors that had to be taken into account when looking at the ‘seriousness of the offence’, using the guidelines laid out in Schedule 21. In particular, these pointed out that when the seriousness of the offence was ‘exceptionally high’ and the offender was over twenty-one, the starting point for the Court was a whole life order, especially if there was either the murder of two or more people, which included premeditation or planning, as well as sexual or sadistic content – or the ‘murder of a child involving abduction or sexual or sadistic motivation …’

After looking at the legal precedents in other cases involving a whole life order – and reminding Reynolds that whole life was a ‘draconian penalty’ reserved for cases of ‘exceptionally serious criminality’, he then touched on the debate going on between the European Court of Human Rights and the Courts of the United Kingdom about the legality of a whole life term of imprisonment – which had been brought to a head by a European judgement in the summer of 2013. After that Mr Justice Wilkie reached his conclusion. It did not make comfortable hearing for Jamie Reynolds, standing in the dock.

The judge reminded Reynolds that he had ‘long anticipated’ the murder of Georgia Williams, had planned it and decided what steps he would take to avoid being caught. It was also designed to give him ‘sadistic and sexual’ pleasure, that he had the opportunity to save her but instead allowed her to suffer ‘horribly’.

‘After the killing you took sexual pleasure by repeatedly violating her body,’ he added in the hushed courtroom. ‘You then treated her body with contempt, dumping it in a remote spot, far from home, naked, without burial, intending that it should not be found for a long time, during which it would be vulnerable to the ravages of nature.’

The catalogue of depravity did not even end there.

‘This was not a one off, directed at one person,’ Wilkie continued, proved by the fact that Reynolds had invited two other young women to come to his parents’ house the following day. Finally the judge reminded the twenty-three year old that his killing of Georgia was the result of his long-standing preoccupation with violent sadistic pornography, as was made clear by his collection of doctored digital images of young women, and the fact that he had attacked two of them, in January 2008 and February 2013.

The conclusion was inevitable, but it still must have chilled the heartless Reynolds to the core of his being. Mr Justice Wilkie said simply, ‘The sentence I pass is one of whole life imprisonment. The early release provisions are not to apply to you. I make a whole life order.’

At that moment Jamie Reynolds became the youngest person in British legal history to be sentenced to spend the rest of his natural life in prison. There was every prospect that he might end up staying there for more than sixty years, in a small cell, and with the opportunity for exercise a maximum of an hour a day.

As he was led back to the cells beneath the court, Reynolds’s pasty, white face was emotionless. Perhaps he was stunned, perhaps he did not care what he had done, but one thing is certain: he displayed not one ounce of remorse for his crime.

Outside the court, however, emotions were high. West Mercia Police’s investigating officer, Detective Chief Inspector Neil Jamieson, branded Reynolds ‘a sadistic, very dangerous and manipulative individual’.

But it was DC Steve Williams who somehow captured the sense of despair that had swirled around the courtroom.

‘There is no sentence that we can ever say that we’re satisfied with because it’ll never bring Georgia back,’ he told the assembled crowd of reporters and television crews, his voice still wavering. ‘She’s dead, she’s gone physically and lives in our hearts.’ Clearly still deeply hurt by his daughter’s murder, he went on: ‘The one thing that will always get to us and cause us grief is the fact that even though Jamie Reynolds is serving a full life sentence, he still has life to hang on to.’

Sadly, the suffering inflicted upon Steve Williams and his family was not to end there. Even though, in January 2014, Jamie Reynolds’ solicitors announced that he would not launch an appeal against his sentence, just three months later he changed his mind. On 14 April 2014, he announced that he would indeed be launching an appeal on the grounds that the ‘sentencing judge did not give enough weight to his age and plea of guilty,’ and that he intended to take the European Court of Human Rights’ view that full life sentences were ‘incompatible with the human rights convention’.

The Williamses were devastated. ‘We thought that was the end,’ Steve Williams announced. ‘But now it’s almost like there’s a new trial coming up. It makes you feel sick. It makes you feel angry and it devalues Georgia’s life.’

Every bit as distraught, his wife Lynette added: ‘It’s made us really upset and angry. You do worry how people can contemplate how he should serve anything less than full life.’

Moments later, her husband brutally summed up the feelings of all his family, and, quite probably, the millions more who had taken an interest in the case in the press, on radio and on television. ‘But to me, the pure evil of it all was how he orchestrated Georgia’s death to fulfil his own sexual fantasy – like I’ve said before, if you are going to kill somebody in cold blood for a few moments of perverted sexual pleasure you should accept the consequences. He’s saying his age hasn’t been taken into account, but you look at life expectancy now and he’s probably taken about seventy years of Georgia’s life and that’s what we should have taken – the whole of his life. He has never shown an ounce of remorse. He has never apologised. He could have stood up in court and said I’m really sorry. He knew us. We had contact with him. But he couldn’t face us in court. He didn’t even look at us.’

The ordeal of Georgia Williams’ parents would not end for another eight months – until Reynolds’ appeal was heard in the Court of Appeal in London. But their case would highlight for the world the importance, and significance, of a whole life term of imprisonment.