9

‘He kills coppers’

David Bieber

It was a grey, dull Boxing Day in 2003 and two traffic officers from West Yorkshire Police – PC Ian Broadhurst, aged thirty-four, who had been married for just two years, and PC Neil Roper, aged forty-three – were out on a perfectly routine patrol in Leeds, when they encountered a monster intent on killing them both.

The two men had been put together as partners just a few months earlier and had become close friends. They had even had breakfast together that morning with Broadhurst’s mother Cindy, and were in good spirits. ‘He was my mate, not just a policeman,’ Roper was to say later of Broadhurst. ‘He was just a genuine fella that got on with everybody.’

‘Boxing Day is generally a quiet day,’ Roper remembered, and as a result the officers were spending their time on patrol looking for stolen cars, or ‘anybody that is doing something that draws our attention’. In the short time since they had joined forces the two constables had developed an almost uncanny ability to spot stolen vehicles – and this day immediately after Christmas would be no different. Yet it would cost Broadhurst his life.

In their easily identifiable police car, they were touring the border between the Gipton and Oakwood areas of Leeds in south Yorkshire when they spotted a car parked down an alley at an unusual angle – and outside a post office. A large man, with a dark moustache and dark hair, was sitting in the driving seat reading a newspaper.

‘I just basically saw this black 3-series BMW parked up on the causeway in a – how can I put it – a peculiar position,’ Roper recalled. ‘We went slowly past the passenger side of the vehicle. I looked in and saw this white man reading a Racing Post.’

Broadhurst and Roper instinctively thought the car might have been stolen and radioed in to the control room to check. Their instinct had been right. The BMW had been stolen. The two officers climbed out of their police car and walked towards the car and its driver, but as they did so Roper became increasingly nervous. The man was huge and well-muscled. The two officers politely asked him to get out of his car and join them in their police car. He was then asked to sit in the back, while they sat in the front.

‘In the police car there is a button that you press which gives you the facility to record anything that’s being said in the car,’ Roper explained later, and a record of what happened next was caught on the tape. The man from the BMW confidently told the two officers that he was from Leeds, but that he had been born in Canada, and added, ‘Just to let you know – I did not steal the car.’

His dismissive, almost arrogant, attitude did nothing to calm Roper’s nerves, and he decided that the safest thing was to handcuff the man, who was now clearly a suspect in a case of car theft. So Roper, the older of the two officers, got out of the police car and called another officer on his personal radio before he climbed into the back to handcuff him.

This left PC Ian Broadhurst alone with the suspect in their police car. Moments later, another uniformed officer, PC James Banks, arrived and PC Broadhurst also got out of the police car to join his two colleagues. None of the three officers was armed in any way – apart from their truncheons.

‘I said to James,’ Roper recalled, ‘“When I’m cuffing him, can you just watch my back?” But then, as I’ve looked forward, I’ve just seen this gun coming up to my face.’

‘He’s got a gun!’ Roper shouted at the top of his voice, but at that very moment the man in the back of the police car fired four shots in the space of three seconds. The shots were all recorded on the tape inside Broadhurst and Roper’s police car.

Roper was hit in the shoulder and stomach, but somehow made it to a nearby building and radioed for help.

‘I’ve been shot twice,’ he told the control room. ‘I don’t know about Ian, he’s down on the floor.’

Broadhurst had been shot in the chest and had slumped to the pavement.

The fourth bullet hit PC Banks, but he was saved from injury by the simple fact that the bullet had ricocheted off his police radio.

Five seconds later, and with Roper and Banks now taking cover, the man in the back of the police car got out and calmly walked across to Broadhurst’s prone body. He shot him one final time, in the head, executing a defenceless serving policeman on duty without the slightest sign of panic or remorse.

Even more terrifying, the tape-recording from the police car revealed PC Broadhurst pleading for his life. As the man pointed his revolver at his head, he is heard saying, ‘No don’t, don’t. Please, please no.’

It made no difference whatever. The young officer was dead, and his killer simply ran off down the alley, abandoning his stolen car. Minutes later he hijacked a car at gunpoint outside a nearby betting shop and disappeared.

What had started as a perfectly ordinary traffic incident over Christmas suddenly became a national tragedy. PC Broadhurst was the first British police officer to be killed while on duty for seven years, and his murder sparked a frantic, nationwide manhunt for his executioner. Yet all the police truly knew about the killer was that he was armed and ruthless.

Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg, the senior detective on call that day, remembered exactly what happened. ‘It was as cold-blooded an execution as you can imagine,’ he said later. ‘This was a dangerous criminal who was on the run.’

The only evidence DCS Gregg had that might help to establish his identity were two newspapers and a half-eaten chocolate bar, all of which had fingerprints on them and which he had left behind in the stolen BMW.

Those fingerprints yielded no match to anyone in the police database, but a videotape from the inside the post office showed the driver inside the shop just minutes before the shooting. That, at least, gave the police an image of the man they were looking for. And there was also the recording of the man’s voice in Broadhurst and Roper’s police car.

An audio expert, Dr Peter French, was called in to analyse it. ‘He’d made a claim during the course of the arrest that he was, in fact, Canadian,’ French explained. But to his trained ear it was clear that the man was American, not Canadian, and came from the southern states of America, although Dr French could not be sure exactly which of the southern states. He suggested to the police that the accent might be found in ‘Georgia, Alabama and, of course, Florida’.

Then, in an effort to pin down the identity of PC Broadhurst’s killer, the police made a series of appeals to the public for their help to identify him. They got it.

‘We received an anonymous phone call, from a man who said, ‘I know an American guy. He has a gun and he has a black BMW.’ DCS Gregg recalled, ‘He just gave us the name Nathan. And a mobile phone number. Through that mobile phone number we tracked down a man using the name Nathan Wayne Coleman.’

The police now had a name, and some idea of where he had been living, but they knew little else about him. They were soon to discover that he was a very dangerous man indeed, but that his name was not Nathan Wayne Coleman. It was David Francis Bieber, then aged thirty-seven, a 220-pound professional bodybuilder who had been on the run from a charge of conspiracy to murder in Florida for the past eight years.

‘He could’ve been a model. He was a good-looking guy,’ recalled Bobby Ammons, who grew up with Bieber in Fort Myers, Florida. ‘The kinda shape he was in is phenomenal. Of course, he drove around in, you know, a nice car. And he always had money.’ Bieber had also become addicted to steroids as a teenager, desperate to become an American Marine.

By the age of eighteen, in 1984, Bieber had transformed himself into a muscle-bound hunk, but one with no appetite for authority. After joining the Marines he rapidly realised that taking orders was not for him, and after just two years he was discharged from the service. Bieber turned to bodybuilding full time, entering professional contests and winning them. But he also developed a sideline in selling the steroids he had become addicted to illegally.

Spending more and more time at the gym, Bieber had encountered fellow bodybuilder Markus Mueller, a German immigrant to the United States and as large and muscled as he was. The two men had become friends. Mueller had a small career as an actor, playing heavies in low-budget movies, but he also had a sideline in importing steroids from Europe – illegally.

In October 1994, Mueller and his girlfriend, Danielle Labelle, were arrested on drugs charges, and both pleaded guilty. What did not emerge in Court, however, was that Bieber was also part of their operation. Indeed he had ambitions to take over from Mueller and run the entire business himself. As it turned out he also wanted Mueller’s girlfriend Danielle. They started an affair, and after just a few weeks got married.

When she spoke on Fox Television’s show, America’s Most Wanted, Danielle explained, ‘I was seeing both Markus and David. I loved Markus but David was just fun to hang out with.’

Just after noon on 10 February 1995 this love triangle came to the attention of the Florida police, when Markus Mueller’s dead body was discovered. He had been shot in the head and in the stomach. The body was found by Bieber’s wife – Mueller’s former girlfriend – Danielle Labelle, and it was she who called 911.

In fact it was Bieber who had driven her to Mueller’s house – ostensibly to collect something she had left there when they were still together – and he was still there with her when the Florida detectives arrived, looking relaxed and as if nothing unusual had happened. The reason was that he had arranged for a hitman to kill Mueller, and thereby provided himself with a perfect alibi for the time of the murder.

The detective in charge of the case, Barry Futch, quickly concluded that Bieber was behind the murder. ‘He had two reasons for knocking Markus off,’ he said afterwards. ‘One was the steroid business. And two was Danielle. So he just decided to get rid of him. And then he would have the girl and he would have the drugs … I told him that day, “You know you’re involved in this. And we’re gonna prove it.”’

Bieber was to go to great lengths to make sure he was never caught, just as he was later to make sure that Danielle did not tell the world that he had arranged for the killing of her former partner, and had stolen thousands of pounds worth of illegal steroids from Mueller after the killing. It was to take the Fort Myers’ police several months to unravel the grim reality behind Mueller’s murder – but when they finally contacted him, David Bieber realised that the game was up and promptly disappeared.

While the Florida police had been examining his alibi, Bieber had been setting about giving himself a completely fresh identity. He did so by visiting a cemetery in Georgia and finding the grave of a six-year-old boy named Nathan Wayne Coleman who had died in 1975. Using a technique outlined in Frederick Forsyth’s best-selling thriller The Day of the Jackal, Bieber bought a copy of the child’s birth certificate and got himself a passport using the dead child’s name.

In the autumn of 1996, Bieber, now known as Nathan Wayne Coleman, left the United States and came to England, arriving through the Kent coastal town of Ramsgate on a channel ferry on 26 September, where he used his fake passport to obtain a six-month visa to remain in the United Kingdom.

The drug dealer and bodybuilder was not worried about the time limit. He had already planned to marry a British woman, which would allow him to stay in the country indefinitely, and in March 1997 – shortly before his visa expired – he did indeed marry British girl Denise Horley in Cumbria.

This then was the man that West Yorkshire Police were searching for in the wake of the killing of PC Broadhurst, and it did not take them long to find out more.

DCS Gregg discovered that Coleman/Bieber had been living in England for the past seven years, working as a nightclub bouncer, while sustaining his addiction to steroids and bodybuilding. But he had also become a heavy gambler, spending about £300,000 in the three years leading up to the Boxing Day shooting in 2003. Gregg also learnt that Bieber had divorced Denise Horley in May 2002 and that this vain, over-muscled man, who wanted to become known as a gangster, had been living on the edge of the law for years, longing for what he called ‘respect’.

On 28 December 2003, two days after the killing of PC Broadhurst, Gregg’s team of officers raided Bieber’s apartment. He was not there, but he had left substantial amount of evidence behind. ‘We found items in there which we knew were connected to the shooting,’ Gregg said. ‘Whoever had this flat had got an interest in gambling. A gun-cleaning kit was under his bed. There was a bulletproof vest.’

Meanwhile, Coleman/Bieber was popping up on security cameras around Leeds; in particular he had been to several banks, withdrawing £2,900 in cash over a series of visits.

Then the police got another tip from a member of the public. The manager of a storage warehouse in Leeds recognised the name of Nathan Wayne Coleman, and told them that he had a unit there. When the police arrived to examine it, they made a second discovery. It contained hundreds upon hundreds of 9mm bullets, as well the means for creating home-made bullets, including gunpowder and cartridge cases.

The warehouse’s video-surveillance footage revealed that Bieber had been there recently, apparently arming himself. ‘It showed this character going in with one bag and coming out with another,’ DCS Gregg explained. ‘And we thought that rucksack was probably packed with ammunition. We were very, very concerned that now there is a man on the run, he is dangerous, and he has killed one cop and shot another. He is probably realizing that he’s going to be facing the rest of his life in jail. What has he got to lose?’

At the same time as they were searching the warehouse, the police had submitted the fingerprints they had found in the BMW on Boxing Day to the FBI in the United States, having found no match on any British database. On 30 December 2003 they discovered that they belonged to the man originally known as David Bieber.

The American authorities told the Yorkshire police a great deal about David Bieber, not just that he was wanted for conspiracy to murder, but also that he had disappeared completely in 1996. This knowledge made the British police even more anxious to locate their suspect – in case he tried to leave the country again to escape another crime.

Ironically, on the very day that the Yorkshire police heard from the FBI about the true identity of their suspect, a member of the British public finally found him.

Vicky Brown, a night receptionist at the mock-Tudor Royal Hotel in Gateshead, in the north east of England, recognised a man who had checked in at 3.00 that afternoon, calling himself ‘Mr Harris, from 2 Law Street, Notts’, as the man she had seen in newspaper stories about the manhunt for the killer of PC Broadhurst.

Indeed Vicky Brown remembered exactly what Bieber looked like. ‘Very big, very tall,’ she said, ‘and he looked quite broad. He was wearing this black, woolly hat pulled right down over his ears, and a big pair of old-fashioned glasses’. She called the hotel owner at home and he telephoned the police.

A team of officers arrived at the Royal Hotel shortly before 2.00 in the early hours of 31 December, 2003, New Year’s Eve. Bieber was in a front bedroom upstairs, alone and – the police assumed – prepared to shoot his way out. After all, he had nothing to lose. But this time Bieber was not facing three unarmed officers, he was confronting a fully armed police team, including marksmen with high-powered rifles.

‘When he first came to the door, we didn’t actually see him,’ one of the arresting officers said later. ‘The door opened by about an inch, an inch and a half, and then slammed shut quickly after that.’ For several minutes there was tense silence, but the police knew that Bieber could not climb out of the window, and that his only way of escape was through the room’s front door.

In the end Bieber decided against committing what would have been certain suicide in a shoot-out with the police, and opened the door, dressed in his underpants, with his hair dyed an extraordinary shade of ginger. His first words were, ‘You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man, would you?’

Under the bed in Bieber’s hotel room the police found the 9mm pistol that had killed PC Broadhurst – fully loaded with fourteen rounds of ammunition – along with another 205 home-made bullets. Bieber refused to utter a single word to the officers in his hotel room after his first question at the entrance. Indeed, from the moment of his arrest and removal to a local police station under armed guard he said nothing.

But when Bieber was brought for trial on one count of murder and two of attempted murder at Newcastle Crown Court in late November 2004, almost a year after his arrest, he comprehensively broke his silence about the killing of PC Broadhurst, testifying in his own defence before the jury, and denying that he killed him.

Towards the end of his eleven-day trial, Bieber admitted being on the scene when PC Broadhurst was murdered – but insisted that the actual shooter was a friend of his from Florida, whom he refused to name. Bieber also denied being in the police patrol car with Broadhurst and Roper.

To refute Bieber’s extraordinary denial, the prosecution, with the help of West Yorkshire Police, tracked down one of the telephone gambling companies that Bieber used frequently and asked their voice expert to compare the two recordings. He found the two voices ‘very similar’ in pronunciation. That evidence, together with the fingerprints found in the BMW that matched Bieber’s from the United States, clearly convinced the jury of six men and six women. It took them less than three hours to reach a verdict of guilty.

On 2 December 2004, the trial judge, Mr Justice Moses, told Bieber he had shown ‘no remorse or understanding of the brutality’ of his crime. He went on to condemn his ‘cool and detached approach’ in attempting to explain away the evidence against him, and emphasised that both PC Broadhurst and PC Roper had treated him with ‘conspicuous fairness and consideration’.

‘You repaid their courtesy by killing PC Broadhurst and attempting to murder PC Roper,’ Mr Justice Moses went on. In particular he drew attention to the fact that there was no need whatever to shoot PC Broadhurst a second time, in the head.

‘You had already disabled him and he was defenceless,’ the judge concluded. ‘You could have escaped then but you chose to wait and fire a second shot at point-blank range … It must be acknowledged that he might have died as a result of your first shot, but you made certain of his death. To shoot and kill an officer in such circumstances, doing no more than trying to serve us all, is an attack on all of us.’

An emotionless Bieber, who stood unblinking in the dock, was given three life sentences, and Mr Justice Moses exercised the power the judiciary now had – under the Criminal Justice Act 2003 – to recommend that he should never be released.

The ever-arrogant Bieber had no intention of taking his conviction, or his sentence, lying down, however. He immediately instructed his legal team to launch an appeal, which was heard almost two years later, on 24 October 2006. At the Court of Appeal Bieber failed to secure the right to appeal against the conviction, but he was granted leave to appeal against his whole life sentence.

Two more years passed until Bieber’s second Court of Appeal hearing – this time on his whole life sentence. The result was something of a victory for Bieber.

On 3 August 2008, the Court of Appeal, led by Lord Phillips, then the Lord Chief Justice, decided to replace Bieber’s whole life term with a fixed term of thirty-seven years. It meant that he would have to remain in prison at the least until 2041 and the age of seventy-five, and even then there was no certainty that he would be released immediately. But there was now at least a glimpse of freedom for this merciless killer of a policeman.

It was a decision that surprised some in the judiciary, and infuriated both PC Broadhurt’s family and the British Police Federation.

The Federation’s chairman, Paul McKeever, bitterly condemned the three Court of Appeal judges’ decision. In a letter to Lord Phillips, he said, ‘Granting an evil, calculating killer any kind of dispensation is criminal and leaves the judiciary with blood on its hands. The decision to surrender to the appeal of this cold-blooded murderer is nothing but unforgivable. I urge you to do whatever is needed to reverse this travesty of justice.’

Explaining that his heart ‘goes out to PC Ian Broadhurst’s family’ he went on, ‘This is shockingly disrespectful to his memory and illustrates the utter travesty of our criminal justice system, where the rights of a cop killer outweigh the rights of a fallen officer’s family, friends and colleagues. David Bieber is a monster with no consideration for life.’

PC Broadhurst’s mother, Cindy Eaton, told one newspaper, ‘I feel cheated and let down on behalf of my family. I brought them up to believe that for every choice you make there is a consequence and you live by it. I don’t see Mr Bieber in any other light. He chose to do what he did and this is the consequence. I don’t think he has any rights. We can never go back to the life we had. He has no idea about our pain.’

The fact that the Court of Appeal’s decision might have been influenced by Bieber’s legal team’s argument about the European Court’s suggestion that a whole life term might be ‘inhuman’ only served to heighten the sense of injustice that the Federation and PC Broadhurst’s family felt.

Meanwhile, Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg said, ‘As a police officer one of the most frustrating things is when killers who have shown not one ounce of compassion for their fellow human beings start trying to have the shield of human rights drawn around them.’

Privately, Bieber was not intending to wait until he was seventy-five before leaving the English prison system. Even before the Court of Appeal’s decision to quash his whole life term, he had been planning escape attempts, some of them involving the use of firearms. In one he had asked a former inmate, who had become a friend, to organise a helicopter to send down a revolver on the end of a rope which he could use against any prison officer that attempted to prevent him being lifted up and out of the prison on the same rope.

In one of four other known attempts, Bieber arranged for a gun to be smuggled in to a prison wedding, which he intended to use to hold at least one prison officer hostage to leverage his release. In another he faked high blood pressure to encourage the prison authorities to allow him out of prison to visit a hospital near by, having arranged for a gang of armed men to snatch him from the prison officers’ hands. The prison authorities did not fall for his scheme.

Bieber discussed getting false passports and driving licences with another former cell-mate who had also been released, as well as plans to travel to Scotland, and later Ireland, where he would undergo plastic surgery to disguise his appearance still further. None of these plans succeeded – after his former cell-mate sold the story to the media.

In 2010 Bieber was suddenly moved from the high-security Full Sutton Prison near York to the equally high-security prison at Belmarsh, south-east London after the Serious Organised Crime Agency received information that there was a ‘serious threat’ that he might attempt to escape. Typically, Bieber reacted by launching an appeal for a judicial review against the move, claiming that it was ‘unlawful’. The claim was rejected in May 2011.

That did nothing to lessen Bieber’s sense of his own importance. After the quashing of his whole life term he launched a series of four legal appeals – all of them brought using public funds under the legal aid scheme and costing the taxpayer at least £12,000. He argued that he should not be categorised as a ‘high security risk’.

On 22 July 2014 at Newcastle Crown Court, Mr Justice Mostyn pointed out, ‘Since his incarceration, Bieber has occupied himself by making numerous applications to the High Court about the conditions in which he is being held.’ Each one of Bieber’s previous legal challenges, the judge added, had been designed to make sure that ‘his life is a little more comfortable’ in prison.

On Bieber’s behalf, however, his barrister argued that the director of high security, who took the decision as to his security clearance, had failed to disclose all the information he took into account when making his decision. He insisted that Bieber’s human right to a fair hearing had been violated.

In a handwritten document submitted to the Court, Bieber himself demanded that he be given more access to certain prison facilities – including the gym – and that he be removed from a secure underground unit. The unit, one of only three in the country, houses twelve of the most dangerous prisoners and is sealed off from the main jail and guarded round the clock.

Bieber argued that there is ‘no reason why I should be subjected to this environment’, claiming that he now exhibited ‘model behaviour’.

In the most extraordinary passage of his document, Bieber even complained about the ‘horrible effect’ the ‘foolish and disproportionate violence’ of his shooting had had on him as well as the victim. It was the first time an ‘exceptional-risk’ inmate had challenged their status.

Dismissing the claims as ‘completely untenable’, Mr Justice Mostyn declared, ‘The offence here was at the upper end of bestial. For someone to have committed such a grievous crime he must have no control when he has normal human contact.’ He added, ‘It is therefore perfectly reasonable to suppose that somebody who has committed a crime as grave as this, and who has accepted in no respect at all the reason for his incarceration, would make every effort to escape from prison at the first opportunity.’

Bieber is now categorised as one of only two ‘exceptional risk’ prisoners in prison in England and Wales, because of his determination to escape. It is all the more surprising then that his whole life term should have been quashed, given his propensity for violence and his utter contempt for the judicial system.

The Court of Appeal’s decision to quash Bieber’s whole life term underlines the confusion that haunts the system for the worst of the worst offenders in England and Wales.

To some members of the Court it would seem that the execution of a serving police officer on duty could not be described as sufficiently ‘heinous’ as to justify a whole life term. Indeed the Court has notably not insisted on a whole life term for other killers of on-duty police officers.

There could be no better example than Britain’s most famous police killer, Harry Roberts, a carpenter and armed robber from Essex who was convicted of killing three police officers in ‘cold blood’ at Braybrook Street in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, on 12 August 1966 at the age of thirty. Roberts was never sentenced to a whole life term of imprisonment for his crimes. Instead he was given life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty years. His killings came just eight months after the official abolition of the death penalty in England and Wales in 1965.

At his trial in December 1966 Roberts pleaded guilty to killing two of the police officers, while his two fellow robbers denied all the charges against them. All three were convicted of the murders of the three officers and sentenced to thirty years each.

The trial judge, Mr Justice Glyn-Jones, commented that the killings were ‘the most heinous crime to have been committed in this country for a generation of more’. John Duddy, who was convicted alongside Roberts, died in prison in 1981, while the other robber, Jack Whitney, was released in 1991 (after just twenty-five years), only to be beaten to death at his home in Bristol eight years later.

In spite of his thirty-year term, Roberts went on to become one of the country’s longest-serving prisoners, spending almost half a century behind bars before his eventual release in November 2014, at the age of seventy-eight. Interviewed in 2008 in prison, the grey-haired Roberts explained that he had changed in the more than forty years since he had committed the crime.

‘I am not that person any more,’ he said.

Speaking of his victims’ families, he went on: ‘Of course I regret it. If anyone had killed my mother I would never have forgiven them, and I totally understand why the families of the policemen could never forgive me and wouldn’t want me released. But I feel I have served my time.’

Commenting on the length of his sentence, and his continued incarceration long after his thirty-year minimum term had been completed, Roberts was careful to be non-committal. ‘I don’t think it’s political,’ he said. ‘I think it’s more to do with civil servants fearing what the papers would say if I did do something again. I think that’s what it is, but it’s ridiculous. I’m just not interested in anything like that any more. I want to get out of prison and just try to make something of the last few years of my life.’

Roberts did not always felt like that. In his first two decades in prison, he made no fewer than twenty-two escape attempts. ‘It was a hobby for me,’ he said. ‘I knew I wasn’t coming out for a long time, so I had nothing to lose.’ In one attempt his mother smuggled a pair of bolt cutters into the prison in her bra. ‘We cut through part of the fence, but there wasn’t time to finish the job, so we planned to go back the next night. What we didn’t know was that there was an informer on the team who grassed us up before I could escape,’ Roberts remembered.

Eventually Roberts gave up the struggle to escape. ‘I decided the best way to get out was to stay clean and do my time,’ he said.

His plan succeeded because in 2001 he was moved to an open prison and allowed to work daily at a nearby animal sanctuary in Derbyshire. But on 1 October 2001 he was recalled to a closed prison in the wake of allegations that he was involved in drug dealing for the prisoners, was actively engaged in other criminal activity and had made veiled but violent threats while working outside the prison.

In 2009 the Mail on Sunday newspaper revealed that a string of secret complaints against Roberts had been made by other workers at the animal sanctuary, who alleged that attacks on their animals after he returned to a closed prison had been co-ordinated by Roberts, and that he had subjected them to threatening telephone calls and promised the ‘tearing limb from limb’ of anyone who tried to block his release. The newspaper also disclosed that in December 2006 the Parole Board had written to Roberts, in the wake of these allegations, saying that it would not be recommending his release. For his part Roberts firmly denied the allegations.

The relatives of Roberts’s police victims felt strongly that he should die behind bars. The sister of one of the plain-clothed detectives he killed said: ‘Harry Roberts should never be released. There will never be enough time to make up for the terrible thing that he did. He is a dangerous man and, despite the time, he should remain in jail.’

The Metropolitan Police Federation agreed. Peter Smyth, the then chairman, commented, ‘There are some evil acts for which there is no forgiveness, Every police officer still considers these awful murders to be one of the most awful events in our history.’ He added, ‘There is no death penalty and we fully accept that, but there are some crimes where life should mean life and that includes the murder of a police or prison officer in the course of their duty.’

Nevertheless, late in 2014, eight years after their decision not to recommend Roberts for release, the Parole Board changed its mind and recommended that the seventy-eight-year old should indeed be freed. In November 2014 he left the prison system, although still on licence should he reoffend. Since then Roberts, temporarily at least, has disappeared into obscurity.

Significantly, four other murderers who have killed serving police officers while on duty have also not been sentenced to a whole life term of imprisonment – suggesting that, whatever the Police Federation might urge – the judiciary does not regard the killing of a single police officer as a sufficiently heinous crime to warrant the Court’s most severe penalty.

In 1993, for example, the Jamaican-born gangster Gary Nelson, now forty-three, shot and killed Ghanaian-born father of four and nightclub bouncer William Danso at his flat in Clapham. Hearing gunfire, PC Patrick Dunne, aged forty-four, who was attending a minor domestic dispute near by, went into the street to intervene but was shot and killed. Not convicted of the killings until 2006, Nelson has been told that he must serve life imprisonment with a minimum of thirty-five years – not a whole life term.

In another case, the illegal Algerian immigrant Kamel Bourgass killed Detective Constable Stephen Oake in January 2003 when Oake and other officers tried to arrest him in the wake of a plot to flood the London Underground system with the deadly poison ricin. Bourgass has been told that he must spend a minimum of thirty-seven years in prison as part of his life sentence, but again there was no whole life term.

In November 2005, two Somalian brothers, Mustaf and Yusuf Jama killed Woman Police Constable Sharon Beshenivsky during the course of a Post Office robbery in Bradford. Yusuf was arrested shortly afterwards, while his brother Mustaf fled back to Somalia, only to be extradited to England in 2007 after an undercover operation to locate him. Both men were sentenced to life imprisonment and to serve a minimum term of thirty-five years, not a whole life term.

Ikechukwu ‘Tennyson’ Obih, a Nigerian, stabbed and killed PC John Henry in Luton, Bedfordshire, when Henry attempted to arrest him after Obih had stabbed a window cleaner in the town shortly after 7 am on 11 June 2007. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Obih was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty-five years, once again not a whole life term.

Just one man has been sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life term by a judge for killing a police officer since 2003, and his name is Dale Cregan. The Manchester gangster killed not one but two female officers in September 2012. As we shall see, his case may help to define the nature of exactly what makes a ‘heinous’ crime.