7

‘Selfish, self-pitying and grotesquely violent’

David Oakes and Daniel Restivo

Another case that confirmed just how determined the Court of Appeal in England and Wales was to protect the right of the English judiciary to pass a whole life sentence on the most heinous murderers concerned a vicious, bullying, former nightclub bouncer and unemployed builder named David Oakes, aged fifty, who lived part of the time in a static caravan near Braintree in Essex. His crime also shocked the nation and the Court.

In July 2005, when he was still only forty-four, the swaggering, bald-headed Oakes, who had a reputation in the local area for being a man who would resort to violence at the slightest opportunity, started a relationship with a round-faced, cheerful, outgoing thirty-two-year-old woman named Christine Chambers. She already had three children with her previous partner, a close friend of Oakes called Ian Flitt. These three were Levi, Gary and Abigail, but Chambers went on to have another daughter with Oakes, called Shania, who was born in October 2008. Chambers and her children lived in a plain, white-painted, semi-detached house on the outskirts of Braintree.

Never exactly conventional and, indeed, distinctly stormy, the relationship between Oakes and Chambers began to break down in the first months of 2011. There were fights between them, he dragged her out of her house by the hair on several occasions and attacked her repeatedly – all because Oakes sensed that she might be the one person who would not be bullied by him into doing exactly what he wanted. By the end of March the couple had broken up completely, but that did not stop Oakes harassing Chambers.

As a result, Chambers made an application to the Court for a non-molestation order, and on 21 April 2011, on the basis of a number of allegations of Oakes’s persistent violence towards Chambers, the order was made. It did not deter Oakes for one moment. If anything, it made the man who had a gunshot for a ringtone on his mobile phone even angrier, so determined was he to show that he controlled his partner and their now two-year-old daughter Shania. In the seven weeks after the non-molestation order was granted, Oakes lost control completely.

In spite of the order, and repeated police warnings to Oakes about his breaches of it, which included a ruling that he could not come within one hundred yards of his partner and their daughter, his violent threats continued. In one week, Chambers received no fewer than a hundred arrogant, bullying text messages from Oakes, many of them threatening to kill her. Finally, just before midnight on the evening of 5 June 2011, he decided to act.

Oakes left his caravan and arrived at Chambers’s house carrying a blue holdall containing an axe, a bottle of petrol, a Stanley knife, some scissors and a pair of pliers, as well as a length of wire threaded through rubber tubing that could be used as a garrotte. He was also carrying a double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun together with cartridges for it. Oakes had bought it from a ‘friend’ for £300 just a few days earlier.

Most significant of all, this was the evening before Oakes and Chambers were due to go to court to confirm the custody arrangements for their daughter Shania.

At about 11.55 on that June evening Oakes let himself into Chambers’s house with a key that he had kept from the time that he had lived there and walked up the stairs to the bedrooms where she and her daughters were asleep in bed. Oakes turned the lights on, waking everyone, including ten-year-old Abigail and her two-year-old stepsister. He then subjected his former partner and her two daughters to one of the most terrifying and brutal ordeals it is possible to imagine.

When Christine Chambers told Oakes to ‘get out’ of the house, he opened the holdall and took out the axe. He then showed her the shotgun and said he would burn the house down and that he had petrol in the holdall as well as a lighter to do the job. Oakes then punched ten-year-old Abigail in the eye and hit her with the butt of the shotgun, but when she tried to use her mobile phone to get help, he snatched it from her and broke both it and her mother’s phone.

Oakes then ordered his former partner to cut off chunks of her hair with the pair of scissors he had brought along in the holdall. He made her remove her top and walk about without a bra, before insisting that she hug and kiss him, and say that she loved him. For her part, Christine Chambers pleaded with him not to touch her children, saying that she would do anything he wanted. It did nothing to placate Oakes whatever – quite the reverse.

By now in an unimaginable rage, Oakes proceeded to threaten Chambers with a knife before telling her that he would blow her ten-year-old daughter’s leg off with his shotgun and rip off her nipples with pliers. At one point he put his gun into Abigail’s mouth, but removed it, and her mother shouted, ‘Run, run, save yourself while you can!’ In a panic the girl managed to climb out of her bedroom window, drop down on to a flat roof beneath, and then jump down a further ten feet to the ground below. No sooner had she got there than she ran to her father, who lived near by, for help.

Ian Flitt later remembered that his daughter banged on the window to wake him up and then started screaming, ‘He is there at the house with a gun!’ Flitt called the police, and armed officers arrived outside not long afterwards. Inside Christine Chambers’s house, however, things were rapidly disintegrating as Oakes’s anger showed no limits. The arrival of armed police made no difference whatever. He continued to subject his former partner to an ‘attack of horrifying violence’, as the Court of Appeal was to put it later.

Using the axe he had brought with him, Oakes cut deeply into Chambers’s scalp, and then – using the Stanley knife – proceeded to disfigure her dreadfully. He was clearly consumed with the thought that if he could not have her then no other man would. He cut a deep incised wound into her left eyebrow, to which he applied superglue, and a Y shaped laceration to the bridge of her nose. He also all but cut off the lower part of her left ear.

Even that was not enough for Oakes. He slashed both sides of her face, and used the Stanley knife to cut her from her lower abdomen to the vulva. She was then shot in the left thigh, and while lying on the ground in the upstairs of her house, he shot her again, this time in the right knee. It was only after that inconceivable torture that Oakes killed her, shooting her in the left side of her chest.

A few minutes later, Oakes raised his shotgun again and shot his two-year-old daughter Shania from point blank range in the left side of her forehead, just above her left eyebrow, killing her, though not instantly – and not until after she had been forced to watch the vicious, prolonged and remorseless attack on her mother.

In the wake of the defenceless child’s pointless killing, there was a stand-off between the armed police outside Chambers’s house and Oakes, which lasted until 5.45 am on 6 June 2011 when Oakes turned the shotgun on himself in an attempt at suicide. He failed. The gun’s powerful recoil skewed the barrel as he pulled the trigger, and resulted in a severe wound to the left side of his face, but he survived. The police took him to hospital, where he was later arrested and charged with the murders of Christine Chambers and their daughter Shania.

When it came to Oakes’s trial at Chelmsford Crown Court in April 2012, however, Oakes version of events was quite different. He pleaded not guilty to both charges of murder and maintained that it was Christine Chambers’ fault that she had died.

Nevertheless, the jury heard prosecuting counsel, Orlando Pownall QC, say that Oakes, ‘fuelled by jealousy, frustrated by the fact that his relationship with Christine Chambers was over and that he would only, in the future, have limited access to Shania, deemed that he would kill them and kill himself.’ Describing Oakes as ‘violent and domineering’, Pownall also pointed out that Chambers had been a ‘doting mother’.

When Oakes took the witness stand in his own defence, however, he told a completely different version of events. He insisted that Chambers had shot their daughter and that he did not have the shotgun at the time it was fired.

‘It’s like time was in slow motion,’ he told his defence barrister. ‘I went through the bedroom door and Chris is on her knees and she’s swinging the gun towards me and I grabbed the gun. I’m hitting and kicking her – I don’t care at that point.’

‘I’m not sure if I’ve shot Christine,’ Oakes went on. ‘I’m trying to stop her and get to my baby and then I feel a passing out sensation.’ It was a tissue of lies, but it did not end there.

Oakes also maintained that he had arrived at the house much earlier in the evening, and that Chambers had attacked him with a pair of scissors after an argument about money.

‘I slapped her around the face and she hit her head on the bedpost or the fireplace which made her bleed,’ he told the jury, then adding that she had been acting ‘like a lunatic’ and hitting her own head against the bathroom wall.

Oakes even claimed that in the last hour and a half of her life he and his partner had been getting on well. ‘I thought we were going to have sex,’ he said, before explaining that he had given the shotgun to Chambers three days earlier at her request.

‘I wouldn’t kill my family, I didn’t intend to either,’ he told the jury.

They were not convinced, not least, perhaps, because Oakes barely sat in the dock during his two-week trial, saying he did not attend the Court as a result of the ‘physical discomfort’ he was suffering after the shotgun wound to his face, and that he could not bear to hear the details of his daughter’s death.

‘It’s the stress of going through it,’ he told the judge, Mr Justice Fulford. ‘I’ve seen first-hand [what happened] and I can’t go through the pictures of my baby again and again.’

In spite of his protestations of innocence, the jury convicted Oakes on both counts of murder.

Passing sentence on 12 May 2012, Mr Justice Fulford told the defendant – who by now was in the dock of the court – that he was a ‘bullying and controlling man who had frequently inflicted serious violence on Christine Chambers during the course of their five- or six-year relationship, killed his partner and young daughter simply because he was unable to accept that Ms Chambers could no longer bear to be with him and wanted to start a new life.’

The judge added, ‘Ms Chambers had, for her part, made it clear that she wished to treat the defendant generously. She recognised that he was important to Shania and that contact between father and daughter ought to continue.’

That was not the way that Oakes had interpreted the three weekends a month access that was the likely outcome of the custody hearing they were both to attend on the morning that he killed his daughter and her mother. As Mr Justice Fulford put it, Oakes reaction ‘was purely selfish, self-pitying and grotesquely violent’.

‘Instead of thinking about his daughter whom he has claimed to love,’ the judge went on, ‘he concentrated on himself alone and most particularly his desire for revenge and his determination, that he had expressed quite clearly on more than one occasion in the past, that no other man was going to be Christine’s partner or was going to act as Shania’s father. He resolved that if the family was at an end, then they would pay for leaving him with their lives. And worse still, he decided that their last hours of life would be terrifying, and in the case of Christine Chambers, extremely painful.’

Pointing out that Oakes had carefully planned the murders and arrived at Chambers’s house complete with a holdall filled with weapons that he intended to use against her, the judge continued, ‘Drink and drugs may well have played their part, but this defendant knew exactly what he was doing, particularly having clearly prepared and planned these deaths for a not insignificant period in advance.’

But it was the torture inflicted on Christine Chambers before her death that drew Mr Justice Fulford’s gravest condemnation.

‘Two final aspects of this terrible history need emphasising,’ the judge told the Court, whose public gallery included members of the Chambers family. ‘First, it is apparent that before she died, Christine Chambers would have been in agony. The injury to her head and the shotgun wound to her knee would have been excruciatingly painful. I am certain that Oakes delayed delivering the fatal gunshot wound as an act of deliberate sadism. She had made him suffer by ending the relationship … and this was his revenge.’

The second aspect was Oakes’s treatment of his baby daughter, Shania, who had been asleep in her cot when he first burst into the house and began to attack her mother. He had taken the trouble to lift her out of the cot and wake her up so that she could witness the attack on her mother.

‘Throughout, she would have been aware of her mother’s cries and tears,’ the judge concluded. ‘In my judgement the defendant allowed his daughter to see at least part of what he was doing and she would have seen the appalling injuries to her mother. The next door neighbour heard Shania crying for at least five minutes after Christine Chambers had been shot. That little girl must have been terrified. He then put the barrel of the twelve-bore shotgun against her head and pulled the trigger. No civilised, decent human being could ever describe that as being the result of love.’

Mr Justice Fulford concluded by passing a whole life sentence for the two murders, and added, ‘The defendant will never be released from prison.’

That was certainly not how David Oakes saw it, however. Barely five months later, his legal team brought an appeal against his whole life sentence to the Court of Appeal in London. They argued that the fact that the by now fifty-one year old would be condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison was ‘grossly disproportionate’ to the crime. They also argued that the whole life sentence was incompatible with Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The hearings were held on 10 October 2012, and the Court released its decision on 21 November 2012.

Led by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, the Court of Appeal took the opportunity to outline its view about the Vinter, Bamber and Moore appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, and Oakes’s attempt to piggyback on it.

They also dealt – exceptionally firmly – with Oakes, and his appeal against his whole life term. The specially convened Court, which included Lady Justice Hallett, Lord Justice Hughes, Lord Justice Leveson and Lady Justice Rafferty, used the Oakes case to underline again the Court of Appeal’s support for whole life sentences – regardless of what the European Court might say about them.

Dismissing any suggestion that the gruesome murders of Christine Chambers and her daughter were anything but ‘sadistic’, the Court concluded, ‘It seems to us clear that Oakes did not simply explode into violence as a result of the stresses and strains of the breakdown of his relationship. Rather, he decided to revenge himself on Christine Chambers.’

‘He did not merely plan to kill her and their daughter,’ the Court went on, ‘but he planned and then carried out his deliberate intention to make the death of his former partner the most terrifying and agonising ordeal that he could envisage, and this was exactly what he did. He was utterly merciless, and took pleasure at her prolonged suffering. Thereafter, quite deliberately, and in cold blood, he deliberately executed their daughter, as she was screaming with fear at witnessing what he had been doing to her mother.’

There had been ample opportunity after the murder of his former partner, the Court argued, for Oakes to allow a moment of compassion for their daughter – but he turned it down. ‘We agree with the judge that there was not a shred of mitigation,’ the Court concluded. ‘The analysis made by the highly respected judge is not open to criticism. There is no reason to interfere with this sentence.’

In a supreme irony, by the time David Oakes learned that his appeal had been refused he had been given another sentence, but this time a medical one. He had been diagnosed with a terminal cancer that had spread from his lungs. ‘We used to write,’ his father said when he broke the news of his son’s illness. ‘He was still my son, despite being a killer.’

David Oakes died on Tuesday 12 February 2013, less than two years after he had viciously murdered his former partner and their daughter. The day before, he had been taken from Frankland Prison to a local hospital, and he died within a matter of hours.

As Ian Flitt, Christine Chambers’ former partner, told one reporter the next day, ‘His death is probably the best thing for everybody concerned, including him. He was a monster, but I remember him being my best mate as well.’

In their judgement on the Oakes murders, the specially convened Court of Appeal also considered three other recent cases that had attracted whole life sentences, but – in stark contrast to the case of Oakes – they did not confirm any of them as appropriate.

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, was at pains to describe the reasoning behind whole life terms, not least because the Court of Appeal was well aware that the European Court would be considering the issue in just a few months’ time, at some point in 2013.

At the outset, Lord Thomas carefully summarised the background to the whole life term. ‘Whatever the judicial views about the whole life minimum term, it was incorporated in express legislative terms in the 2003 Act,’ he said. ‘This statutory provision reflects the settled will of Parliament. Simultaneously, the legislation removed the possibility of imposing it from the executive and placed it full square in the hands of the judiciary, we emphasise, as a discretionary element of sentencing.’

He then went on to say that it was ‘reserved for the few exceptionally serious offences in which, after reflecting on all the features of aggravation and mitigation, the judge is satisfied that the element of just punishment and retribution requires the imposition of a whole life order. If that conclusion is justified, the whole life order is appropriate: but only then. It is not a mandatory or automatic or minimum sentence.’

That meant the whole life sentence was ‘not incompatible’ with Article Three of the European Convention on Human Rights, he said firmly.

The other three defendants appearing before the Court of Appeal had also been given whole life sentences by the judge in their original trials, but the Court saw fit to replace each of those sentences with shorter minimum terms, while taking some pains to point out that this did not mean that any of the three would be released once their minimum terms had been served. In doing so, the judges reaffirmed their view that life should only mean life in ‘exceptionally serious offences’.

One of the three men concerned was the Sicilian-born, Bournemouth-based hair fetishist, Danilo Restivo, who was aged fifty at the time of his appeal, and had escaped justice for a full ten years before being arrested and tried for the exceptionally ugly murder of Heather Barnett, who lived across the road from him in Dorset, where she worked from home as a seamstress.

Barnett, a single mother aged forty-eight, lived with her three children in Bournemouth when she was killed on 12 November 2002. At 8.30 am she had driven her children to school, then returned and parked her car outside her house about ten minutes later. When the children come back from school shortly after four that afternoon, her son Terry, aged fourteen, along with his sister Caitlin, aged nine, discovered her body.

Barnett had been hit on the head, most probably with a hammer, though the murder weapon was never found. There were at least ten lacerating blows, causing skull fractures, while it was also clear that she had fought with her attacker, as there were defensive wounds to her left hand.

It turned out that Restivo had visited Barnett six days earlier using an excuse that he wanted her to make some bedroom curtains for him as a surprise Christmas present. After that visit she told some friends that she thought he might have taken the key to her house, but she was not certain. What is certain is that there was no forced entry into her home when her children got back from school and found her body.

What made the murder quite exceptional was the mutilation that her body had been subjected to over a period of time after her death. Her throat was cut from ear to ear, she had been cut down her spine and both her breasts had been cut off. The zip of her jeans was unfastened and her underwear and part of her pubic hair was exposed. A hank of cut hair was found in the palm of her right hand which lay over her stomach near her groin. This hair came from someone else, but the victim’s own hair was cut – some was placed in her left hand, and some left on the floor beside her.

After the discovery of her mutilated body in the bathroom, and desperately upset, Barnett’s children ran into the street to look for help. Restivo, who had been watching from his house across the road, then emerged with his then girlfriend to help them. Quite calmly and deliberately, he comforted them, even though he knew perfectly well that it was he who had killed their mother. It was an act of the most wretched disingenuousness, for behind his caring face lurked the foulest killer.

Unsurprisingly, the police quickly concluded that Restivo could have been the killer as he was the first person on the scene. Indeed, they took him in for questioning, only to release him without charge after three days. One reason for his release was that he produced a bus ticket timed at 8.44 on the morning of the murder to prove that he had been on his way to a computer course at the time. Another was that the police regarded him as ‘bumbling’ and therefore possibly not competent enough to commit such a vicious crime without leaving any forensic evidence.

The police investigation revealed that the killer had left very few traces at the crime scene. Their Luminol tests, for example, showed a trail of bloody shoe-prints that ended suddenly, which they concluded might mean that the killer was clever enough to change his shoes before leaving Barnett’s house that morning. The detectives clearly wondered whether the apparently harmless and slow Restivo could have managed that subterfuge.

Even though the dead woman’s son told them that his mother’s keys had disappeared after Restivo’s visit on 6 November, and he was found to have soaked the trainers he had worn on 12 November in bleach – possibly to remove any traces of blood on them – he was dismissed as a prime suspect partly because of the bus ticket and his unthreatening manner.

After Restivo’s release the investigation to identify Heather Barnett’s killer stalled. It was not until March 2004 that it was to start again in earnest – when it emerged that he was a suspect in the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl named Elisa Clap in southern Italy in 1993. Restivo was placed under close surveillance using electronic tracking and listening devices, and as a result the police heard Restivo being spoken to as a child by his parents on the telephone. He was also observed making regular visits to a local beauty spot where he took a close interest in women there on their own.

On 12 May 2004 the police surveillance team became alarmed, because although it was a warm day Restivo was seen wearing waterproof over-trousers. A uniformed patrol car was ordered to stop and search Restivo. In his car they found an identical change of clothing, filleting knife, scissors, a balaclava helmet and more than one pair of gloves. The following month a local schoolgirl identified him as the man who had cut her hair on a bus in the town without her permission and without her initially noticing that he had done so.

But Restivo was not arrested. Indeed it was not until November 2006, more than two years after the beauty spot incident, and four years after Barnett’s murder, that he was finally rearrested and his home searched. It was then that the police found a lock of hair and discovered that the trainers he had worn on the day of Barnett’s murder had minute traces of blood on them. The problem was it could not be identified as hers.

Once again, Restivo was released without charge, and it was not until 2008, when new techniques revealed a blood-stained towel left at the murder scene had a DNA match for Restivo, that he was to be taken in for questioning again. Even then, he claimed to have left the towel on his visit to order some curtains from Barnett on 6 November 2002. Once again, it was decided that there was still insufficient evidence to justify his prosecution for murder.

It was not until the body of sixteen-year-old Elisa Clap was finally discovered in the loft of the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in Potenza, Italy in March 2010 that the case against Danilo Restivo strengthened decisively. She had disappeared in September 1993, and was well known to Restivo, whom she had ‘taken pity on’ before going missing. The Italian investigators found that Clap’s bra had been broken in exactly the same manner that Heather Barnett’s had, while her trousers had also been damaged and disarranged in the same way.

Every bit as tellingly, Clap’s hair had been cut shortly after she had been killed and her body placed in the loft, where remnants of her hair were left with it. The last person to see her alive had been Restivo.

It was the similarity between the two cases that finally convinced the police and the Crown Prosecution Service in 2011 they should proceed against Restivo. Two months after the discovery of Clap’s body he was arrested and charged with the murder of Heather Barnett – almost a decade after the crime had been committed. The Italian case played a central part in Restivo’s trial, once the judge, Mr Justice Burnett, had ruled that the foreign case could be mentioned as part of the prosecution’s case against him, even though – at that point – Restivo had not been convicted of the Clap murder. (That was not to happen until several months later.)

At the opening of Restivo’s trial at Winchester Crown Court in June 2011, prosecuting counsel Michael Bowes QC told the jury, ‘… the circumstances in which Elisa Clap was killed so closely resemble the circumstances in which Heather Barnett was killed that you can have no doubt that both of the killings must have been the work of one person – Danilo Restivo.’ He described her killer as ‘depraved’ and ‘callous’.

The jury then heard one psychiatrist’s assessment of the reasons for Restivo’s actions and, particularly, those parts of his life that may have led him towards a hair fetish and anger at women. The psychiatrist referred to an occasion when Restivo had responded aggressively to bullying when he was thirteen; that he had admitted to voyeurism as a teenager; and that from the age of fifteen he liked to touch and smell the hair of women he came across in public, for example on a bus, and had started to cut it secretly.

The prosecution’s psychiatric expert then offered the jury a motive for Restivo’s killing. He suggested that the Sicilian, whose family had moved to Potenza when he was a child, may have decided to kill a mother in circumstances that would leave her children to ‘fend for themselves’ as he felt he had been forced to do himself. This meant he had directed the anger he felt at his own mother’s treatment of him on to Heather Barnett and her children. The psychiatrist also maintained that his habit of cutting hair was sexually driven and sadistic, and the murder itself was a sexually sadistic act. Nevertheless, he also concluded that Restivo was mentally fit to stand trial.

Indeed, Restivo did not claim ‘diminished responsibility’ at his trial, instead he simply pleaded that he was innocent of Barnett’s murder and mutilation.

During his trial in June 2011, the jury heard evidence from two local schoolgirls in Bournemouth who had come across Restivo’s fetish for cutting the hair of young women. One, Holly Stroud, who had been seventeen in 2003, told the Court that he had cut her ponytail while travelling on a bus around 8 am on 13 March 2003: ‘I first thought my hair had got caught on the bus seat, so turned around and was expecting a child from my school teasing me, what I saw shocked me because it was a grown man.’ It was not until later that she realised her hair had actually been cut. A year later she identified Restivo from a set of photographs the police showed her of possible suspects. Another local girl, Katie McGoldrick, who was fifteen at the time, also told the Court that she had felt her hair being tugged while travelling on a bus in Bournemouth. It too had been secretly cut.

For his part, Restivo maintained that he had started cutting hair in Potenza at about the age of fifteen for a bet. ‘I started liking it,’ he told the jury, ‘and I kept doing it. The problem was that I liked touching the hair and also smelling it. It was not a sexual attraction.’ But the jury did not believe him. They clearly saw the fetish for what it was – a means of sexual arousal.

The schoolgirls’ evidence about his hair fetish, together with the similarity between Restivo’s behaviour in Bournemouth and in Italy, clearly weighed heavily with the members of the jury. On Wednesday 29 June 2011 they found him guilty, and the following day he was sentenced to life imprisonment – with a whole life term – not least because the judge concluded firmly that he must indeed have killed Elisa Clap.

Sentencing Restivo on Thursday 30 June Mr Justice Burnett told him, ‘… you have not been convicted of that murder and I do not sentence you in respect of it. But it is important background, because I approach this sentence on the basis that you had killed before. It would be quite unrealistic to pretend that you had not.’

The judge then told him, ‘You are a cold, depraved and calculating killer,’ and went on to describe the killing of Heather Barnett as ‘inhuman depravity’.

‘I can find no mitigation in this case, none has been advanced on your behalf,’ he added. As he spoke some members of the jury, who had returned to hear the sentencing, wept – just as they had done when they had heard the impact statement read to the Court on behalf of the victim’s son and daughter.

At the end of his remarks, Mr Justice Burnett said simply, ‘You will never be released,’ before telling the prison officers in the dock beside him, ‘Take him down.’

Restivo received his sentence without a trace of emotion showing on his face.

Outside the Court, Heather Barnett’s sister, Denise Le Voir, told waiting reporters that her sister ‘would have been horrified by the cruel and callous way Danilo Restivo designed her murder and mutilation so that her children would find her body on return from school.’

Ben Barnett, Heather’s brother, added, ‘Restivo has already had eight years of freedom that my sister never had. I’ve thought about the death penalty, but I think it’s too good for him. It seems like the easy way out. I think he’s going to have a miserable rest of his life in prison.’

But it was Heather Barnett’s daughter Caitlin Marsh, by then eighteen, who had found her mother’s body together with her elder brother Terry, who was by then aged twenty-three, who made the most dramatic and revealing statement about her mother’s murder. She said that her life had ‘changed forever’ as a result of the killing, and the ‘horror’ of their discovery of their mother’s body.

‘It was at that moment,’ Caitlin said, ‘that I felt as if my heart had been ripped out. I was in a state of complete and utter shock and it took months before I accepted the truth.’ Explaining that her brother had now become her ‘protector’, and the only person she could fully trust, she added, ‘I used to have nightmares and flashbacks reminding me of the events of 12 November 2002. I also don’t like going into bathrooms. I used to think that someone might be waiting for me. Now I just hold a fear of what’s behind the bathroom door.’

Having decided to sit in Court throughout the trial, in order to look Restivo in the eye – which provoked no reaction whatever from the defendant, who remained impassive – Caitlin Marsh explained how she felt when she saw the killer sitting just yards away. ‘I feel a great anger at him,’ she said. ‘Without him she’d still be here. How could he intrude into our safe and happy family home and then take everything from us in such a horrific and callous way? I still have no explanation for why this happened to Mum. What did she do wrong? Why was Mum the victim?’

Detective Superintendent Mark Cooper, who led the investigation, agreed with Caitlin Marsh. ‘This was a horrendous and brutal murder,’ he said, ‘and I cannot even begin to describe him.’

But the judge’s decision to allow the Italian case of Elisa Clap’s murder into Restivo’s trial in Winchester led Edward Fitzgerald QC, who had defended him, to raise the case at the Court of Appeal in the autumn of 2012, and it formed the principal reason for the Court’s decision to remove his whole life term.

‘We note in particular,’ the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, noted in their decision, ‘the extensive preparation for the killing (which included careful measures to avoid detection) and the display of sexual perversions and sadism, not least the appalling mutilation of the body, when the appellant knew perfectly well that it would be found by the victim’s children.’

The Court also pointed out that Restivo was capable of what it called ‘brutal hypocrisy’ in the expressions of ‘concern and assistance’ that he had offered to the children after their mother’s body was found.

Given those circumstances, which some, including the judge at his trial, felt fully justified the harshest possible sentence, the Court of Appeal nevertheless decided that instead of being condemned to spend the rest of his life in jail, they would reduce his whole life term to one of a minimum of forty years, although they were at pains to point out: ‘We think it highly improbable that it will ever be safe for Restivo to be released from custody.’ Even if he were to be released, which would not be possible under the Court’s ruling until 2051, Restivo would be seventy-nine years of age.

The decision to lower his sentence provoked a melancholy reaction from Heather Barnett’s brother Ben, who had said that he hoped Restivo would have a ‘miserable rest of his life in prison’.

‘I am not criticising those who have made this decision,’ Mr Barnett explained, ‘they must do as the law provides, however distasteful this is for all concerned.’ But Mr Barnett felt that life should have meant life in his sister’s case, as it would have given Restivo an opportunity to reflect on what he had done, although he concluded sadly, ‘Somehow I doubt that this would ever have been the case.’

The English judicial system was not finished with Restivo, however. In February 2014, the Home Secretary decreed that he should complete the remainder of his life sentence in Italy, where he had now been convicted of the Clap killing in his absence, and transfer the estimated cost of his imprisonment – some £5m – to the Italian Government.

But Restivo, by then aged forty-one, whose wife still lives not far from the scene of Heather Barnett’s murder, claimed he had the right to a family life in England. He launched an appeal in a special Immigration Court, and so far remains in the high-security Full Sutton Prison, near York.

As we know, however, Oakes and Restivo were not the only whole life prisoners dealt with by the specially convened Court of Appeal in the autumn of 2012.