2

Should Life Mean Life?

The words of fifty-four year-old Detective Constable Steve Williams should haunt us all.

It was April 2014, with his wife Lynette beside him, when he told reporters bitterly that Reynolds’ claim that his age had not been taken sufficiently into account when he was sentenced, and neither was the fact that he had pleaded guilty, made a mockery of everything he and his wife felt about their daughter’s brutal murder.

‘He’s probably taken about seventy years of Georgia’s life,’ Williams said, ‘and that’s what we should have taken – the whole of his life.’

In that one sentence Williams precisely encapsulated how millions of people in Britain feel about how the worst of the worst murderers should be dealt with. ‘Lock them up and throw away the key,’ is the cry time and time again from the families of victims of murder.

The political cries ring out meanwhile: ‘Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime,’ – and so the demand for longer and longer sentences for murder grows ever louder. ‘There are no votes for being soft on crime,’ politician after politician tells the world, and so the prison population expands and expands exponentially.

But is that the correct response? Should a just and humane society be sentencing a twenty-three year-old young man to spend what could be the next seventy years behind bars?

That is what this book is about. Are we right to answer the demands of the families of victims and allow men and women to spend half a century or more locked away?

Is anyone who commits multiple murder necessarily sane – or should their mental health be taken into account in their prison sentence? Will the prison system be able to deal with an ever-ageing population of killers? Are prison officers correctly trained to deal with the worst of the worst? Should we create a ‘supermax’ prison to house the worst offenders? What do other countries do about prisoners who commit the worst of offences? Does every other country lock them up and throw away the key?

Those are some of the questions this book will seek to examine and answer. Because the reality is that ever since the suspension of the death penalty for capital murder in 1965, British society has never been quite sure how it feels about ‘whole lifers’, a phrase coined by the distinguished legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg to mean those men and women who are given ‘whole life terms of imprisonment’.

The Ministry of Justice declines to give a precise figure for the number of prisoners serving that tariff, but this book can reveal that there are more than fifty, if not sixty ‘whole lifers’ – including two women. Each and every one of those prisoners is effectively destined to end their lives in jail, even though some of them were never formally sentenced to serve a ‘whole life’ term in the first place.

They range from the eighty-seven-year-old paedophile Sidney Cooke (also known as ‘Hissing Sid’), who is now largely bed-ridden in Wakefield Prison, to Robert Maudsley (whose nickname remains ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’, even though it is highly unlikely that he actually did eat the brains of the prisoner he killed in jail), who also lives in Wakefield Prison in a specially constructed ‘glass cage’ in the basement with his own staff of six prison officers and no contact with any other prisoners.

They include the tattooed Peterborough killer Joanna Dennehy, who stabbed and murdered three men in 2013 and claimed afterwards, ‘I killed to see how I would feel, to see if I was as cold as I thought I was. Then it got moreish’; Steven Wright (the Suffolk Strangler), who killed five prostitutes in 2006; and former abattoir worker Mark Bridger, convicted of killing five-year-old April Jones in 2013, even though her body was never discovered.

They also include Rosemary West, convicted of the killing of ten young women, including her daughter Heather; and Ian Brady (the Moors Murderer) who has been on hunger strike and demanding the right to die for more than a decade, while firmly refusing to tell the authorities the whereabouts of the last of his five victims, fourteen-year-old Keith Bennett.

Each and every one of them has their own depraved story to tell, but they each confront society with the same perplexing dilemma – should they spend the rest of their lives imprisoned with little or no hope of release?

Some argue that it would be better to reintroduce the death penalty – as their crimes are so odious that imprisonment, at the state’s considerable expense (about £90,000 a year), is ‘too good’ for them. It is not an argument I agree with – the concept of one innocent man or woman being sent to the gallows, or given a lethal injection, is simply too repugnant to consider. You can set an innocent prisoner free, but you can never bring them back to life.

Yet, for half a century, Britain has puzzled over what the supreme penalty for taking a human life in a heinous crime should be. The truth is that there is no truth. There is no correct answer. There will only ever be a debate – but it is a debate that must be had, for it is not enough to ignore it and allow the present muddle to continue for another fifty years.

For my part, I believe that rehabilitation can, sometimes, be possible – but, equally, that many of the very worst offenders will never be redeemed. The very worst have no conscience or regret about their crimes and would commit them again tomorrow – given the chance. That may not be what they tell the Parole Board when they are being considered for release on licence, but, as this book will show repeatedly, more often than not they cannot resist the urge to kill again.

To my mind, the concept of an eye for an eye – that a murderer should pay for his or her crime with their own life – was rightly suspended in Britain in 1965. For the previous eight years there had been two degrees of murder, ‘capital murder’ which carried the death penalty and ‘murder’ which did not, although it carried a mandatory sentence of ‘life imprisonment’.

That was abandoned in the wake of Labour MP Sydney Silverman’s Private Members’ Bill in 1965 that saw the death penalty suspended for five years. It remained theoretically in place for offences including espionage, treason and piracy, but was never used. The suspension became permanent on 16 December 1969, when the then Home Secretary, James Callaghan, proposed it to the House of Commons. It was not finally abolished in Northern Ireland until 25 July 1973.

The firm understanding in the House of Commons when the death penalty was suspended was that murder of any kind should always attract a life sentence, providing the killer was over twenty-one years of age. Yet in the years that followed, a life sentence for murder seldom meant life. Indeed by the late 1970s, the average term of imprisonment served by a murderer was around nine years. Many of those sentenced to life for murder emerged from prison to resume normal lives, but a substantial minority did not, and often went on to commit further crimes, including murder. That infuriated many members of the public, as did the fact that the sentence did not seem to deter murderers who might fairly be called ‘the worst of the worst’.

There emerged a strange confusion about what a life sentence meant, not least because it no longer seemed a sufficient penalty for the most depraved and ruthless killers, many of whom killed more than one victim, or were responsible for the deaths of children. As a result, trial judges started to add a ‘minimum term’ to a life sentence in the worst cases of murder – by specifying, for example, that a convicted killer sentenced to life should serve a minimum period (say twenty-five years) in prison before he or she could be considered for parole.

Then, gradually, the politicians of the day started to override the judges’ decisions about a minimum term and insist that particularly heinous offenders should receive a ‘whole life tariff’, regardless of the judicial view. That reflected an ever-increasing clamour from the general public, often incited by the media, for harsher and harsher sentences for those who had committed the worst crimes.

That fervour came into full flood a few weeks after the death penalty had been legally suspended. Just one month later, Greater Manchester Police arrested two of the most notorious killers in British criminal history, Ian Brady and his female accomplice Myra Hindley, who would become known as the Moors Murderers for their killing of five children between the ages of ten and seventeen, four of whom they also sexually assaulted.

The crime shocked the nation, a shock that deepened still further when Brady and Hindley came to trial in April 1966. The prosecution played the jury a fifteen-minute tape recording of one of their female victims, ten-year-old Lesley Anne Downey, being tortured by the pair and pleading for her life. It left even the most hard-nosed reporters in the press gallery traumatised and in tears.

At the end of the trial, after the jury had convicted them both, the judge, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, described them as ‘two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity’ and Brady as ‘wicked beyond belief’. He recommended that they should both spend ‘a very long time in jail’ but, significantly, he did not recommend a ‘tariff’ – or minimum term – for Brady. He did, however, recommend that Hindley serve a minimum of twenty-five years.

In fact, due to a series of decisions by successive Home Secretaries, Hindley was never released and died, still a prisoner, in 2002 at the age of sixty – from bronchial pneumonia. Brady too was destined never to be released, again through the intervention of the Home Secretary, being declared criminally insane in 1985 and transferred to the Ashworth high security hospital near Liverpool. Brady died in May 2017, at the age of seventy nine, after spending the last seventeen years of his life on hunger strike, although one that allowed him to make toast and drink packet soup – ‘to help him to survive’.

It was the Moors Murders that first brought into clear focus the difficulties of just having a simple ‘life’ sentence for murder. Surely, some argued, there had to be a distinction between a domestic argument that led to a single death and a determined effort to kill a police officer, for example, or several people, especially children?

That question came into sharp focus again just a few months after Brady and Hindley were convicted when a small-time armed robber named Harry Roberts was caught after the killing of three Metropolitan Police men in East Acton, London, in what became known as the ‘Massacre in Braybrook Street’. On the afternoon of 12 August 1966, just a few days after England had won the World Cup at Wembley, Roberts and two associates were on their way to commit a robbery carrying two handguns, when they were stopped by an unmarked police car carrying two detectives and a young constable.

Convinced that the officers would discover the guns, Roberts, then aged thirty, shot first one and then a second officer dead, while one of his accomplices shot and killed the third. Desperate to escape justice, Roberts went on the run, hiding out in east London’s Epping Forest using the military training he had been given as a soldier during the Malayan Emergency between 1948 and 1960. He was finally captured after ninety-six days on the run, sleeping in a barn on the edge of the forest.

At his trial in 1967 Roberts was sentenced to life imprisonment for killing the officers, and the trial judge recommended that he serve a minimum of thirty years. In fact, once again, after the repeated interventions of a succession of Home Secretaries, each fully aware of how strongly the police service felt about the killing of policemen, Roberts remained in prison until November 2014.

By then aged seventy-nine, Roberts had been refused parole on a number of occasions after repeated attempts to escape and a five-year campaign of brutal intimidation, ending in 2006, against the female owner of an animal sanctuary, where he was on ‘day release’ in preparation for his potential freedom. Eight years later the Parole Board allowed his release on licence.

Both the Moors Murderers and Roberts concentrated the public mind on what a life sentence truly meant – especially when it came to multiple murders – but there was no political appetite to revisit the whole issue so quickly after the formal suspension of the death penalty under Harold Wilson’s Labour Government. For the most part, both politicians and the public were prepared to allow the uncertainty of whether ‘life should mean life’ to continue.

This typically British compromise was sustained because the public were prepared to accept that politicians – and particularly the Home Secretaries of the day – could and should decide whether a murderer should remain in prison, regardless of what the trial judge may have said. This left the issue to be decided on a case-by-case basis, usually depending on the political assessment of how far the public would be appalled if a particular prisoner were to be released.

The contradiction is that by allowing the compromise, British society – so determined to suspend and then abolish the death penalty – covertly accepted a system that allowed some killers to spend their entire lives behind bars, while others were deemed sufficiently rehabilitated to be freed ‘on licence’.

There is no finer example of that covert acceptance of the confusion than the case of Britain’s longest-ever serving prisoner, John Straffen, who spent more than half a century in jail. The Hampshire-born Straffen, son of an army officer, killed two young girls, aged five and nine, with no apparent motive in 1951. At his trial that October he was found ‘unfit to plead’ because of his mental health, and sent to Broadmoor Special Hospital in Berkshire.

Just a few months later, in April 1952, he escaped and, during his four hours of freedom, killed another five-year-old girl. At his subsequent trial he was convicted of murder – as the jury were apparently convinced that he was sane. Straffen was sentenced to death, but was reprieved due to his mental deficiencies. He was to spend the rest of his life in prison, before his eventual death in November 2007. He had served a total of fifty-six years, and had become the oldest prisoner serving a whole life term. Yet at no point had he ever received that sentence from a judge.

Straffen was an exception. For the majority of other prisoners convicted of murder during the 1970s and 1980s, a life sentence meant serving an average of nine years or so in jail. Yet, as they did so, the public clamour of being ‘tough on crime’ and especially murderers steadily gathered in pace. As the years passed and the twentieth century drew to a close, so the public, and therefore political, demand for longer and longer sentences for murder grew and grew. Slowly but surely, a form of ‘sentence creep’ began to take hold, so that murderers, and especially multiple ones, received ever longer terms of imprisonment.

One reason for that lay in a group of high-profile cases that increased public revulsion at what a murderer could be capable of – thereby increasing the call for ‘life to mean life’.

The first major crime to accelerate the growing call for ‘whole life’ terms involved the balaclava-clad ‘Black Panther’, Donald Neilson, who shot dead three sub-postmasters during robberies in various parts of England between 1971 and 1974. Then, early in 1975, he abducted seventeen-year-old heiress Lesley Whittle from her home in Shropshire.

Neilson attempted to ransom the terrified daughter of the owner of a successful coach hire business for £50,000, while keeping her hostage in a water drainage shaft in Staffordshire. The ransom attempt failed and her body was finally recovered almost seven weeks later. She had fallen, and the tether that Neilson had placed round her neck to restrain her from trying to escape had strangled her to death. In July 1976 Neilson was given four life sentences, and the judge recommended he be given a ‘whole life’ term, which the Home Secretary accepted.

Thirty-two years later, in 2008, Neilson attempted to have his sentence reduced to a minimum of thirty years, but his appeal was refused. That same year he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and he died, still a prisoner, in December 2011, at the age of seventy-five. He had spent more than thirty-five years behind bars. For millions of people throughout Britain Neilson epitomised a man who would have been a candidate for the death sentence, had one still existed.

Perhaps more than any other, Neilson’s was the case that began the escalation in the length of imprisonment meant when a life sentence was imposed. He ushered in an era in which a life sentence increasingly came to mean exactly that – and his case was followed just five years later by another which would confirm public opinion about the treatment of serial killers. It was the conviction of the thirty-five-year-old lorry driver, Peter Sutcliffe, ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’, who was charged with the murder of thirteen women and the attempted murder of a further seven, after a killing spree that had lasted for five years and terrified the female residents of Leeds and Bradford in Yorkshire.

At Sutcliffe’s trial in May 1981, he pleaded guilty to the murders, but claimed diminished responsibility on the grounds of his paranoid schizophrenia. Sutcliffe claimed that he had killed as a result of a ‘divine mission’ and as the result of hearing the ‘voice of God’. The jury heard some horrifying details of his killings – many of his victims were prostitutes who were beaten about the head and their bodies mutilated after their deaths – and declined his argument of diminished responsibility. They unanimously found him guilty of murder and attempted murder and the trial judge at the Central Criminal Court in the Old Bailey, Mr Justice Boreham, imposed a sentence of thirty years, calling Sutcliffe ‘an unusually dangerous man’ and recommending that he serve the full term before even being considered for release.

In fact, Sutcliffe only spent the first three years of his sentence in prison. He was transferred to Broadmoor Hospital, a top-security psychiatric unit, in 1984 as a result of his paranoid schizophrenia and he has remained there ever since. As the end of his thirty-year minimum term approached in July 2010, he appealed against his sentence, but was told by Mr Justice Mitting at the Court of Appeal that, in his case, life would indeed mean life. The families of some of his victims were appalled that there should ever be a chance that he be released, not least because of his mutilation of his victims with a hammer, a sharpened screwdriver and a knife.

In March 2011, Sutcliffe returned to the Court of Appeal once more, on the grounds that his incarceration without a fixed period raised major issues of law, but the Court, this time led by the then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, rejected his bid for the case to go to the new Supreme Court because of the serious issues of law that it raised. Sutcliffe also claimed that he was now ‘much better’ and no longer ‘uniquely dangerous’.

Lord Judge accepted Sutcliffe was ‘disturbed’ when he went out to commit the murders, but then added, ‘There is no reason to conclude that the appellant’s claims that he genuinely believed he was acting under the divine instruction to fulfil God’s will carries any greater conviction now than it did when it was rejected by the jury,’ before suggesting that Sutcliffe’s crimes were ‘criminal conduct at the extreme end of horror’.

As a result Lord Judge confirmed that the Court’s view was that ‘the interests of justice require nothing less than a whole life order. That is the only available punishment proportionate to these crimes.’

During Sutcliffe’s years of incarceration, the atmosphere and culture that surrounded the worst offenders changed significantly. Sutcliffe may have gone to prison originally in a less ferocious climate of public opinion, but over time that had been transformed beyond recognition by a string of high profile cases, of which his was one of the earliest and most significant.

Sutcliffe too had changed during his years in Broadmoor, where he has spent the last thirty years. Still diagnosed as suffering from mental health problems, he adopted his mother’s maiden name of Coonan, became a Jehovah’s Witness and struck up a long-lasting friendship with the late – and now disgraced – radio disc jockey Jimmy Savile.

Only a matter of months after Sutcliffe’s conviction, however, the British public were presented with another infamous serial killer, the Scottish-born ex-policeman Dennis Nilsen. In his own way, Nilsen became every bit as notorious as Sutcliffe had in 1982, when it was discovered that he had murdered and dismembered no fewer than twelve young men – most of whom were homeless, homosexual or prostitutes – in two north London flats over a period of five years between 1978 and 1983. He then stored their body parts in the flats – by doing so, he was, in his own words, ‘killing for company’.

Nilsen later told the police, ‘I wished I could have stopped, but I couldn’t. I had no other thrill or happiness.’ But he did not deny that he washed, clothed and retained his victims’ bodies within his two flats for weeks or even months at a time, before burning some of them on bonfires and hiding others under the floorboards, or flushing their bones down the lavatory. He did deny that he was a necrophiliac, though accepted that he had engaged in sexual acts with the bodies of six of his victims. The revelations shocked the British public to the core.

After his conviction on 3 November 1983 at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, the judge, Mr Justice Croom-Johnson, recommended that he should serve a minimum of twenty-five years as part of his life sentence. But successive Home Secretaries – again reacting to public and media opinion – decided that the extreme seriousness of his crimes and the public revulsion that accompanied his trial meant that he should never be freed. He remains in prison today more than thirty years after his conviction, and complains that he has been denied the right to publish his autobiography, History of a Drowning Man, as well as some music and poetry that he has written.

Just three years later came another equally controversial case that again underlined the public desire for killers to be locked up forever. It involved a twenty-five-year-old former waiter in a Little Chef restaurant called Jeremy Bamber, who was charged with shooting dead his adoptive parents, his sister and her twin six-year-old sons at the family home, ‘White House Farm’ in Essex, so that he could claim a large inheritance. He shot the boys twenty-six times.

The killings became one of the most dramatic multiple murder cases in Britain, but Bamber insisted that his sister, Sheila, who was a diagnosed schizophrenic, had actually committed all four of the other murders before turning the gun on herself. At his trial in October 1986 the jury decided that Bamber’s story about his sister was concocted to save himself, and found him guilty of the five murders.

In sentencing Bamber to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of twenty-five years, the judge suggested that he found it ‘difficult to foresee’ that he would ever be released, and in 1994 the Home Secretary let it be known that he would indeed never be released.

Now, almost thirty years later, Bamber remains in prison. But he is exceptional in that he is the only ‘whole life’ prisoner who has never accepted his guilt. Indeed he has vigorously protested his innocence from the day of his conviction, and is continuing to appeal against his sentence – and his continued imprisonment – to this day.

In 2003 Bamber won a case in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, stating that his whole life term was a breach of his human rights, and he is still pursuing that argument with the British Courts from his prison cell. Indeed, it was Bamber’s appeal which led indirectly to the ECHR deciding that whole life terms were ‘inhuman’ in 2013.

Two cases in the 1990s further underlined the ever-increasing demand from the public – and the families of the victims – that ‘life should mean life’, especially for the most heinous crimes. The first major case to escalate the steadily increasing appetite for whole life terms of imprisonment, handed out by successive Home Secretaries, was that of the paedophile Robert Black.

Finally tracked down in 1990, Black abducted, raped and murdered four schoolgirls aged from five to eleven between 1981 and 1986. He was also convicted of the kidnapping of a fifth schoolgirl and the attempted kidnapping of a sixth in the years before his eventual capture.

Black was finally caught by the police after he was seen snatching a six-year-old girl off the street in Stow, in his native Scotland, and throwing her into the back of his van. The police chased the van and finally caught up with it, but not before Black had sexually assaulted the girl. The police officer who saved her turned out to be her father. The case made headlines around the country. He was in jail for the abduction when he was finally charged with murder.

Black finally went for trial in April 1994 and denied all the charges against him, but the jury disagreed and in May 1994 he was convicted. The judge recommended that he serve a minimum of thirty-five years before he could even be considered for release, which meant that he would not have been considered for parole until 2029, by which time he would be eighty-two years of age. But in October 2011 Black was found guilty of the murder of another schoolgirl, this time in Northern Ireland in 1981, and given a further life sentence. Robert Black died in January 2016, shortly before he would have been charged with the murder in 1978 of Genette Tate.

The other case in the 1990s that confirmed the public desire for whole life sentences concerned the only woman, apart from Myra Hindley, to be given a whole life term at that time. She was, of course, Rosemary West, wife of the Gloucester-based serial killer Frederick West, who killed himself on 1 January 1995, before he could stand trial. She was charged with the murder of her daughter Heather, aged sixteen, eight other young women who had visited her husband’s house at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, and West’s daughter by his first marriage, eight-year-old Charmaine.

When Rosemary West was convicted at Winchester Crown Court of the murder of ten young woman and children, in November 1995, the trial judge Mr Justice Mantell memorably concluded: ‘If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released.’ In fact, West was officially given a life sentence with a minimum term of twenty-five years before she could be considered for release. It was the Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw who decided two years later that she should serve a ‘whole life tariff’ and die in prison.

West has since decided that she has no wish to appeal against her sentence. Now aged sixty-two, she is reportedly content to spend the rest of her life in prison, although, of course, she would be entitled to change her mind as the years continue to pass. She has, after all, spent two decades already behind bars and there is every possibility, given reasonable health, that she may spend a further three decades in the same predicament. The difficulty, of course, is that her very notoriety will make any decision to release her a matter of great controversy – just as it was for Myra Hindley.

But it was the European Court of Human Rights that ended the twentieth-century discussion between judges and the Home Secretary over who should decide how long the worst murderers should serve in prison. In November 2000, in the wake of an appeal to the ECHR on behalf of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the ten-year-old child killers of two-year-old toddler James Bulger, the European Court ruled that the Home Secretary should lose the right to set a tariff for defendants under the age of eighteen as it did not consider it was appropriate for a politician to interfere in the judicial process. At their trial in 1993 the judge had sentenced Thompson and Venables to eight years each, but the then Home Secretary, the Tory Party’s Michael Howard, set a tariff of fifteen years – partly as a result of the public outcry over the case. The House of Lords overturned that increase, criticising Howard for putting too much weight on public opinion.

Two years later a similar decision in respect of adult offenders followed an appeal on behalf of the convicted double-killer Arthur Anderson, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1988 with a recommended minimum term of fifteen years – only to be told by the Home Secretary of the day, Labour’s David Blunkett, that he would have to serve twenty years. Anderson appealed to the House of Lords who decided that the decision breached his human rights. Their decision was upheld in the European Court of Human Rights.

These two cases effectively cost the Home Secretary any discretion over the length of life and other sentences. In response to the change in the powers of the Home Secretary over sentencing, David Blunkett, as Home Secretary of the Labour Government, introduced the Criminal Justice Act of 2003 which responded to the loss of the Home Secretary’s sentencing power, and gave the judiciary detailed guidance about what factors they had to take into account in their sentencing decisions. Many commentators saw it as David Blunkett’s revenge for the decision to strip the Home Secretary of his powers. Judges are not formally obliged to stick to the guidelines, but must explain the reasons if they depart from them.

Now the only occasion when a politician may intervene in the judicial sentencing process comes when the Government’s Attorney General exercises his right to petition the Court of Appeal if he thinks that the sentence passed by a judge has been ‘unduly lenient’. Only judges can now set a minimum term for life imprisonment, and only the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court can amend their decision.

The sentencing guidelines laid down in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 are still the subject of debate between judges and politicians, and have given rise to further appeals to the European Court of Human Rights, but they nevertheless lay the foundations for sentencing the worst offenders in Britain.

Under the 2003 Act a minimum term (which was formerly called a ‘tariff’) became the minimum number of years a prisoner serves before he can even be considered for parole – it does not mean that the prisoner will be released after the minimum period has passed. That will only take place when the prisoner ‘is judged no longer a risk of harm to the public’, by the Parole Board.

The starting point for a ‘whole life’ order is that the offender must be aged over twenty-one – Jamie Reynolds, for example, only just came within its terms at the age of twenty-three, and Schedule 21 of the Act lays down the types of murder that might attract a ‘whole life’ term. They include multiple murders, where each murder involves premeditation, abduction, or sexual or sadistic conduct; the murder of a child involving abduction or sexual or sadistic conduct; any assassination committed to further a religious, political, racial or ideological cause; and any murder by a person previously convicted of murder.

The trial judge can also pass a whole life order if he considers the offence so serious – or the combination of offences that make it so serious – to be exceptionally high.

In 2011 three prisoners sentenced to whole life orders, all of them murderers, Jeremy Bamber, Peter Moore and Douglas Vinter, disputed the rights of the British Courts to pass a ‘whole life’ term, and appealed to the European Court of Human Rights that whole life orders breached their human rights. They argued that to sentence them to spend the rest of their life in jail was ‘inhuman’. The three killers lost their case in 2012 when the ECHR found that the whole life prisoners could apply to the Home Secretary for compassionate release, and therefore their human rights were not breached.

But on 9 July 2013, after a further appeal by the same three men, the ECHR found that there had to be the ‘prospect of review’ for prisoners subjected to whole life orders, and that any impossibility of parole would violate their human rights under Article Three of the European Convention.

Just seven months later, on 18 February 2014, the Court of Appeal in England and Wales fundamentally disagreed with the European Court in their ruling on appeals by three different whole life prisoners, Mark Bridger (killer of five-year-old April Jones in 2013), Lee Newell (guilty of murdering a fellow prisoner, while in jail for murder) and Matthew Thomas, whom it was later discovered had not been sentenced to a whole life term and whose case was, therefore, not considered.

Led by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, the five-strong Court, which included Lady Justice Hallett, found that the ECHR in Strasbourg was not correct when it concluded that English and Welsh law never allowed whole life orders to be reduced. Lord Thomas specifically pointed out that the Home Secretary could review them in ‘exceptional circumstances’.

On behalf of the Court, the Lord Chief Justice explained that they believed there are some crimes which were so heinous that Parliament was entitled to allow ‘a sentence which includes a whole life order’. He concluded: ‘In our judgement the law of England and Wales therefore does provide to an offender “hope” or the “possibility” of release in exceptional circumstances … Judges should therefore continue as they have done to impose whole life orders in those rare and exceptional cases.’

In effect, the Court of Appeal denied the European Court’s assertion that there was no possibility of parole or release under a whole life order, no matter how exceptional the circumstances might be. This did not, therefore, breach an offender’s human rights under the European Convention.

Interestingly, only four prisoners serving ‘whole life’ terms have ever been released on compassionate grounds by a Home Secretary. Three of them were Irish Republican Army sympathisers released as part of the ‘Good Friday’ agreement for peace in Northern Ireland, including the infamous Paul ‘Dingus’ Magee, who originally escaped during his trial for the murder of an SAS soldier in 1981, and was sentenced to a term of thirty years in his absence. Magee was finally imprisoned for killing a policeman in England in 1992, but was repatriated to Northern Ireland in 1999 as part of the ‘peace process’ and eventually released in December 2000, when he was given a pardon under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy.

The only other theoretical ‘whole life’ prisoner, whose existence in that category was never officially confirmed, was the London gangster Reggie Kray, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer when he was released by the Home Secretary on 1 October 2000. He died within a matter of weeks. The reality is that the possibility of release on compassionate grounds is, to put it politely, remote – unless the prisoner is facing a terminal illness.

It was against this background that Jamie Reynolds’s legal team came to the Court of Appeal in London on Thursday morning 16 October 2014 to argue that his whole life order should be amended because the trial judge had not taken into account his young age and the fact that he had pleaded guilty to the charges. His legal team knew the Court’s ruling that whole life orders were legal, in spite of the European Court’s decision, but they also knew that the weight of the argument would once again revolve around whether life should indeed mean life for the twenty-three-year-old convicted murderer.

In the low-key atmosphere of the wood-panelled Court Five on the first floor of the Royal Courts of Justice, Reynolds’ case was placed before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, sitting with two other Appeal Court judges, by Reynolds’ defence team. The Court’s attention was drawn to his eventual plea of guilty – though it had not taken place until a psychiatrist had warned that he could not claim any ‘diminished responsibility’ for his crime as a result of the meticulous planning he had demonstrated.

The Court also heard that the closeness of age between Reynolds and his victim should play its part in weighing the length of his term of imprisonment as it was not the murder of a young child, but rather one of a mature teenager. The Court was then told by the Crown, on behalf of the prosecution, that the closeness of age between Reynolds and Georgia Williams had effectively helped him commit murder and in no way mitigated against the sentence.

Sitting in Wakefield Prison, watching proceedings by video link from the Court of Appeal, Reynolds looked pale and uncertain. No longer sporting the partial beard he had worn during his trial, he looked for all the world like a terrified schoolboy, rather than the depraved killer that he had appeared at trial. Only speaking when asked to confirm his name, his voice was high-pitched, almost strangled, and he sat there watching the proceedings, staring blankly at the screen in front of him showing the London hearing, while nervously biting his nails.

No judgement was reached on that Thursday morning, however. The Lord Chief Justice and his two colleagues promised to hand down a written judgement on Reynolds as soon as they could – although they did ask if they could see the photographs of Georgia Williams’ ordeal that the trial judge had seen when he sentenced Reynolds to spend the rest of his life in jail.

It was an ominous harbinger of what their decision would be. If the Court of Appeal was as appalled by Reynolds’ detailed record of his crime as the trial judge clearly had been, then the chance of his receiving a shorter sentence seemed less and less likely. Two weeks were to pass before the Court of Appeal handed down their judgement on James Reynolds’ appeal against his whole life term. Their decision would confirm whether or not there was any judicial sympathy for sentencing a young man barely in his twenties to spend six decades in prison.

ROT IN HELL

Barely two months after Mr Justice Wilkie sentenced Jamie Reynolds to a whole life term of imprisonment at Stafford Crown Court in December 2013, another judge passed exactly the same sentence on a thirty-three-year-old former soldier and alcoholic drifter named Anwar Rosser.

At Bradford Crown Court on the morning of Thursday 13 February 2014 – ironically, the day before the Court of Appeal was to make its historic judgement that whole life orders in England and Wales did not contravene the European Convention on Human Rights – Mr Justice Coulson ruled that Rosser too should spend the rest of his life behind bars.

In some ways Rosser’s crime was even more heinous than Jamie Reynolds’ sexual and sadistic killing of teenager Georgia Williams – because it involved the death of an innocent, cheerful, loving four-year-old boy called Riley Turner. The facts alone chill the bones.

Shortly after 4.00 on the snowy morning of Sunday 20 January 2013, Rosser, for no clear reason other than sexual perversion, savagely murdered this little boy in his own bedroom in the house he lived in with his mother, Sharon Smith, and stepfather, Guy Earwaker, in Keighley, Yorkshire. His twin brother and eighteen-month-old baby brother were also asleep in the house when he was killed.

At the time, Rosser was living in a flat just across the road from Riley’s parents in Harewood Road, Keighley. The couple had befriended the ex-soldier – even to the extent of helping him to furnish his flat – but on that bleak Saturday night which turned into an even bleaker Sunday morning their friendship fractured forever.

On Saturday evening, 19 January 2013, Rosser had gone to his local pub, the Bracken Arms, and got drunk, though not incoherent or incapable. Filled with alcoholic bonhomie – and lust – he met two local women there and invited them to ‘make a party of it’, but instead of going back to Rosser’s flat he suggested they all went to visit Riley’s parents instead.

Things did not go to plan for Rosser, however. As the evening turned into the first hour of Sunday morning the two women left, and Rosser asked Riley’s parents if he could sleep on their sofa in the living room instead of walking back to his flat across the road. His excuse was that he was afraid that some people to whom he owed money might be waiting outside his flat intent on beating him up.

Out of compassion, Riley’s parents agreed that their neighbour could stay on the sofa and went upstairs to bed themselves at about 1.00 on that Sunday morning. What Riley’s parents did not know was that Rosser had another, far darker, reason for wanting to stay in their house that night – he almost certainly wanted to seriously injure one or more members of the family. To do so, he had even brought with him a four-inch knife with a brown handle, which he had stolen from the pub where he worked as a part-time chef.

Rosser may have been carrying the knife partly out of a sense of paranoia about the men who he claimed could be waiting for him outside his flat, but that was certainly not the principal reason, as he was soon to reveal. Shortly after 4 am, Rosser got up from the sofa and crept upstairs armed with no fewer than four knives, including the one that he had brought with him. The other three he had taken from the family’s downstairs kitchen.

Rosser looked into Sharon Smith and Guy Earwaker’s bedroom, but he did not wake them – nor did he attack them. For reasons known only to himself, he had decided to attack their son Riley. So he crossed the landing and entered the bedroom of the four-year-old, who was sound asleep.

Quite without warning, Rosser attacked the little boy in the most depraved and brutal way, repeatedly stabbing him in a frenzy as the boy lay in his bed. In total Riley suffered no fewer than thirty stab wounds, all inflicted by the brown-handled knife Rosser had brought with him that evening.

But Riley’s ordeal did not end there. Rosser also attacked the boy sexually, stabbing him in the scrotum and then inserting objects into his rectum when – according to the report of the coroner – he was still alive. He finally removed Riley’s pyjama bottoms when they were soaked with urine, and one of the objects found nearby contained traces of the child’s faeces and blood.

Riley endured fourteen stab wounds to his neck – one of which severed his windpipe – while another almost severed his spine. There were five stab wounds to his back, and five to the chest, which had punctured the toddler’s lungs. There were also six wounds in the abdomen, one of which had penetrated his stomach wall. Yet even that grotesque violence was not enough for Rosser. There was also a deep bite mark on Riley’s upper left thigh, a mark that matched the former soldier’s teeth.

Finally thirty-two year-old Rosser placed his hands around the little boy’s neck and strangled him. Yet Rosser did not flee into the night after committing such a dreadful crime: quite the opposite. After destroying the tiny, innocent toddler’s body and covering his bed with his blood, Rosser went into Riley’s parents’ bedroom and curled up on the floor on Sharon Smith’s side of the bed.

At about four thirty that Sunday morning, Sharon Smith woke up suddenly to discover Rosser lying beside her on the floor. She quickly woke up Guy Earwaker, who told Rosser to get out, which he did, but only after apologising and asking for some tobacco. But he did not leave the house. Rosser simply went downstairs and waited. He wanted to hear the devastated reaction of Riley’s parents when they found his body.

That only took a few moments. Guy Earwaker looked out into the hallway after Rosser had gone downstairs and saw that the light was on in Riley’s bedroom. He went to investigate and discovered Riley’s blood-soaked corpse lying on his bed.

Unable to speak, Earwaker went back to find Sharon Smith, who followed him into Riley’s bedroom. She screamed, and it was only then that the couple heard the front door slam downstairs as Rosser finally left. Earwaker chased him outside into the street, but lost sight of him in the darkness and returned to the house to comfort his wife and call for an ambulance and the police.

Later that morning Earwaker joined in the police hunt for Rosser, and within just a few hours he found him hiding in a caravan that he had broken into on a smallholding not far away from Harewood Road. There was blood on the snow outside the caravan, and smears of blood inside the caravan itself.

‘I have ruined my life,’ Rosser told Earwaker. Then, after the police arrived and he had been arrested he said, ‘I know I have done summat but I don’t know what. After what I have done I am a piece of shit.’

Nevertheless, in spite of the blood smears in the caravan and the fact that he had clearly been in the house when Riley Turner died, Rosser continued to deny any knowledge of the boy’s death. It was to be a year before Rosser finally pleaded guilty to killing Riley Turner.

Throughout those months, Rosser took legal refuge behind his defence team’s call for expert reports. Time and again the deadlines for delivery were missed and those delays saw his trial postponed from July 2013 to October 2013 and finally until February 2014. It was only after the experts concluded that his ‘antisocial personality disorder’ and psychopathic personality did not mean that he had not known exactly what he was doing when he killed the four-year-old, that Rosser accepted that he could not hide behind his mental condition to diminish his responsibility for the killing.

Sentencing Rosser on Thursday 13 February 2014, Mr Justice Coulson referred to two ‘victim statements’ about the effect the slaughter of this ‘bright, lively, happy, innocent four-year-old’ had had on his family. They were made by Riley’s mother Sharon Smith and her own mother. They make heart-rending reading.

‘I wish I had told that monster “no” that night when he asked if he could sleep,’ Sharon Smith wrote to the Court. ‘He said people were outside his house and were going to beat him up and I believed him. I didn’t want him to get beaten up, but all along he had a knife in his pocket, plotting to hurt one of us, or all of us. I feel so much guilt that my poor son had to go through such horrific things because my kind heart didn’t want to let that monster get beaten up. Now my kind heart cost me my son’s life.’

But Sharon Smith did not end there. ‘The guilt eats away at me every day,’ she went on. ‘What he’s done is unforgiveable, he’s ruined our lives. I don’t look forward to life any more. I wake up now and just want to be with my son Riley so that he’s not alone. I can’t bear to think he’s sad and alone.’

She ended by explaining the impact of his death on his twin brother. ‘It’s very upsetting,’ she wrote, ‘to hear my boy cry for his brother all the time and wonder where he’s gone and why he isn’t coming back. Some questions I can’t answer to my boy. I try my best but I don’t understand myself and I never will.’

Mr Justice Coulson was clearly deeply moved by Riley’s mother’s testimony, but it was the horrors of the crime itself that made the strongest impression. In particular, he drew attention to the sexual and sadistic elements of the killing. He pointed out that both the prosecution’s and defence’s psychiatrists had expressly identified the ‘sexual element’ in Rosser’s motivation and conduct.

‘On any view, this murder involved a strong sexual component,’ Mr Justice Coulson said. ‘That can be seen from the removal of Riley’s pyjama bottoms, the slicing open of his scrotum, the biting, and, in particular the repeated insertion of items into his rectum.’ He went on to point out that the sadistic element included Rosser’s determination to stay in the house until he had heard Riley’s parents’ reaction to the killing.

Mr Justice Coulson also suggested that the killing was ‘a gross breach of trust’ because Riley’s parents had specifically invited Rosser to stay that night. He added that the murder was clearly premeditated because he had brought one knife with him, and remarked that Rosser had a history of violence, including a December 1996 assault that resulted in actual bodily harm – although he had only received a police caution for the offence.

The reality was that from the age of eight, Rosser had been a ‘poorly controlled’ boy with a penchant for starting fires. At the age of sixteen he had attacked a boy when he was sleeping, smashing a sporting trophy into his head, a wound that demanded four stitches. Shortly after that attack, for which he received a police caution, Rosser joined the Fifth Regiment, Royal Artillery, but he never saw active service, ending up spending time in an Army jail for his violent behaviour when drunk. He was discharged from the Army as a result.

‘Thereafter, your life was punctuated by drink-fuelled outbursts and anger and violence,’ Mr Justice Coulson told Rosser, ‘something of which you were aware but seemed incapable of doing anything about.’

For his part, Rosser remained motionless in the dock, his thin, pale face expressionless.

When it came to the details of the sentence, Mr Justice Coulson – taking a lead from Mr Justice Wilkie’s decision in the case of Jamie Reynolds just two months earlier – saw no reason why the European Court of Human Rights’ decision should prevent him passing a whole life order.

Mr Justice Coulson bluntly told the prisoner before him: ‘The evidence demonstrates beyond doubt that you are an exceptionally dangerous man, and there is nothing to say that such a condition could ever be modified or improved.’

He pointed to the evidence from the forensic psychiatrist appointed by the prosecution, who considered that he posed ‘a real risk of further acts of sadistic homicide which could involve further child victims’. Rosser did not blink. He simply remained impassive as Mr Justice Coulson told him, ‘You must go to prison for life. I therefore impose a whole life order. That means you will remain in prison for the rest of your natural life.’

At that moment Riley Turner’s parents, who had been in Court throughout the brief trial and the sentencing, leapt to their feet, clapping and shouting, ‘Yes, rot in hell.’

As he was led down to the cells by the five guards who surrounded him in the dock, Rosser showed no trace of emotion, he simply looked blank, almost as though he could barely understand the significance of what had just happened to him.

Outside the court, the senior investigating officer in the case, Detective Superintendent Mark Ridley, told a group of reporters that Rosser had never offered any explanation whatever ‘for his savage and gratuitous actions’. The superintendent added: ‘He has shown no remorse or compassion for the pain suffered by Riley’s family … Today brings to an end what has been a very sad and disturbing case.’

It was not to be the end, however. On Thursday 16 October 2014 Rosser sought leave to appeal against his whole life sentence at the Court of Appeal in London.

It was here that Rosser’s case and that of Jamie Reynolds came together as they were both considered by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, sitting with Mr Justice Wyn Williams and Mr Justice Sweeney in the book-lined and wood-panelled Court Five in the Royal Courts of Justice. Both Rosser and Reynolds appeared in Court by video link from the prison in which they were serving their sentences – Wakefield in Yorkshire.

But it was Anwar Rosser’s appeal that was heard first.

Looking drawn and still a little numb on the video link, he sat there in silence as his legal team raised their concerns about the sentence that he had received from Mr Justice Coulson. Rosser said nothing – beyond confirming his name. His barrister explained to the Court that they felt his whole life sentence was ‘manifestly excessive’, and that Mr Justice Coulson should have sentenced him to a ‘very long but finite’ period instead.

In particular, they questioned whether there was indeed a ‘sexual element’ to the murder of Riley Turner and whether there had been any ‘premeditation’ to the crime. They also pointed out that he had pleaded guilty ‘at the earliest possible opportunity’, and that he suffered from a ‘severe personality disorder’, which led him to suffer from fits of paranoia. The conclusion, Rosser’s defence suggested, was that his case was only ‘borderline’ for a ‘whole life term’.

For their part, the prosecution, on behalf of the Crown, firmly told the Court that there clearly had been a ‘strong sexual component’ to the death of Riley Turner, not least because his pyjama bottoms had been removed, and that there had been premeditation because Rosser had carried a knife to the crime.

‘The judge took the view that he decided to stay the night because of what he intended to do,’ the prosecution insisted, before adding that there was clearly also a ‘sadistic’ element to Riley’s killing because of Rosser’s decision to stay and listen to the reaction of his parents when they discovered the body – which clearly showed his desire to derive a sadistic pleasure from their suffering.

Briefly rebutting the Crown’s arguments, Rosser’s barrister told the Court that it was clear that he was in an ‘immensely disordered state’ and that there had been earlier examples in the last days of 2012 and the first days of 2013 of his suffering from bouts of paranoia, and a fear that ‘money lenders’ were going to attack him.

Lord Thomas, the Lord Chief Justice, then announced that they would not pass judgement that day, but would hand down their written conclusions at some point in the future. When Jamie Reynolds’ appeal was heard immediately after Anwar Rosser’s, the Court also explained it would pass down a written judgement of both cases at some point in the future.

That came just two weeks later. On 31 October 2014, the Lord Chief Justice and his fellow judges in the Court of Appeal found, in the case of Rosser, that: ‘There is no basis on which it can properly be argued that a whole life order was wrongly imposed.’

In particular, the Court insisted, ‘It was not and could not be disputed that the murder involved sadistic motivation,’ and then added, ‘We cannot accept the argument that the judge was wrong in finding it also had a sexual component.’ The three judges pointed to the attacks on Riley’s rectum ‘before he died’ and the deep cut into his scrotum.

They also declined to accept that there had not been premeditation in Rosser’s actions: ‘Rosser went upstairs with four knives and the plain intention to kill,’ just as they turned down the significance of his plea of guilty, especially because ‘the evidence against him was irrefutable’, and finally the Court of Appeal dismissed the suggestion that Mr Justice Coulson had failed to take fully into account Rosser’s mental condition, saying firmly, ‘None of the experts suggested that the disorders significantly reduced culpability.’

Anwar Rosser was thereby condemned to spend the rest of his natural life in prison – or until the Secretary of State found enough ‘compassionate grounds’ on which to release him on licence towards the very end of his life.

The Court’s written judgement, dismissing Rosser’s right of appeal, then proceeded to detail their opinion on the fate of Jamie Reynolds.

The Court were no more sympathetic to Reynolds’ claim than they had been to Rosser’s. They found that Mr Justice Wilkie had indeed taken into account the reasons for the lateness of Reynolds’ plea of guilty, and that he had also given enough significance to his young age in his original sentence of a whole life term.

‘Reynolds did not admit he committed the killing until a few days before the trial,’ the Lord Chief Justice and his two colleagues concluded, even though ‘the evidence was overwhelming and we can find nothing in the psychiatric evidence that in any way justifies the failure to admit the killing.’ The Court then added the telling remark: ‘He showed no remorse’.

But that was not the only reason the Court dismissed the arguments put forward by Reynolds’ legal team in their appeal against his sentence. Turning to his young age, the three judges concluded firmly that his intention to commit ‘the kind of grotesque murder that he carried out was of long standing’.

‘The planning of the murder was very careful,’ they went on, ‘the suffering inflicted was indescribable and motivation both sadistic and sexual,’ while there was no psychiatric evidence that excused him from his sentence. ‘Reynolds was a clever, resourceful and manipulative man who was determined to carry out a murder for sadistic and sexual pleasure,’ and furthermore, Georgia was still a child in the eyes of law.

The Court did not feel it was necessary for them to elaborate on all the ‘aggravating factors’ that made Reynolds’ crime so particularly heinous – but they did point to ‘the long-standing desire to commit such a crime, the detailed planning, the females he had in reserve, the way in which he watched Georgia slowly die, his degradation of her body by his sexual violation of it, the taking of trophies and the dumping of the body.’

Given all that they had said in their summing up, the Court’s conclusion was inevitable.

‘Quite apart from the future danger Reynolds poses,’ they argued, ‘the judge was plainly entitled to conclude … that the only just punishment for the murder of Georgia was a whole life order. There is no basis on which it can properly be argued that a whole life order was not required.’

The fates of the twenty-three-year-old shop worker and occasional petrol pump attendant were confirmed. Jamie Reynolds was to spend the rest of his natural life behind the bars of an English prison, a period that could very well exceed sixty years, given the life expectancy of the average man in Britain. Arguably, it was the most draconian sentence ever handed down by an English Court.

Yet the Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas and his fellow judges were nonetheless careful to explain the background to their decisions in the cases of both Reynolds and Rosser. In particular, they sought to lay out the responsibilities of the Courts in whole life cases and the case law that lay behind their decision.

The three judges started by referring back to the decision taken on 18 February 2014 stating that the Court of Appeal in England and Wales had concluded that the Courts had every right to continue to impose whole life terms of imprisonment, no matter what the European Court of Human Rights may have concluded in July 2013. The ECHR had ruled then that whole life terms were incompatible with Article Three of the European Convention of Human Rights, as they offered an offender no ‘hope’ of release and should therefore be abandoned.

In their judgement on 18 February 2014, Lord Thomas, Sir Brian Leveson, Lady Justice Hallett, Lord Justice Treacy and Mr Justice Burnett had disagreed. Lord Thomas concluded firmly: ‘In our judgement the law of England and Wales … does provide to an offender “hope” or the “possibility” of release in exceptional circumstances which render the just punishment originally imposed no longer justifiable.’

The five judges pointed out that ‘circumstances do change in exceptional cases’, and that each case had to be treated quite separately ‘given that the heinous nature of the original crime justly required punishment by imprisonment for life’.

Now, just a few months later, in the 31 October judgement in the cases of Rosser and Reynolds, Lord Thomas pointed out that the Court of Appeal’s February decision had concluded: ‘A Court must only impose a whole life order if the seriousness is exceptionally high and the requirements of just punishment and retribution make such an order the just penalty.’ That was exactly why the Court of Appeal could now confirm the whole life sentences on Rosser and Reynolds.

But the Court was also aware that a detailed consideration of the brutal, ugly details in both cases was required in order to make their judgement, and explained: ‘It is therefore regrettably necessary to set out the horrific circumstances of each of the murders, because only by an objective analysis of the circumstances can a judgement be made as to whether the requirements of just punishment necessitated a whole life order in each case.’

Indeed, so aware were they of the horrors of the Rosser and Reynolds murders that the Court of Appeal took the exceptional step of suggesting that the details should not be made widely available. ‘The media, in reporting the decision of the Court,’ it suggested, ‘will, the Court knows, report the matter in such a way that the families of the two murdered children are not subjected to even greater anguish.’

The deaths of four-year-old Riley Turner and seventeen-year-old Georgia Williams had taken enough toll on the two families without making their suffering even more acute by replaying the horrific details all over again, and yet the Court knew that it could not render its judgement without describing the grotesque treatment that they had both been subjected to.

Sitting in Court Five of the Royal Courts of Justice that morning in October 2014, I felt once again that the legal system found itself caught in the paradox of insisting that the draconian term of a whole life in prison with little hope of release should be imposed while, at the same time, trying to protect the families – and, by implication, the general public – from the repeating the worst details that made that whole life order inevitable.

The worst murderers may justify the harshest treatment, but the general public should be protected from knowing too many details out of respect for the victims’ families. That was not to prove possible in the next case to provoke a whole life term of imprisonment – for that was to be played out in full view of the television cameras and the onlookers’ mobile phones – and involve the massacre of an innocent soldier in broad daylight.