An easterly wind brought with it snow flurries and subzero temperatures to northern England. The icy blackness of the park was bathed in the white glare of a spotlight from a police helicopter hovering overhead, picking out the ghostly, skeletal branches of the trees, as teams of emergency service workers and volunteers called out his name. Only the echoes of their voices could be heard across the stillness of the frozen landscape.
Joe Geeling was missing and fears for his safety were heightened by the eleven-year-old’s poor physical condition. He’d fought a lifelong battle against cystic fibrosis, a crushing degenerative illness that caused him at times extreme physical weakness and severe lung and chest infections. The frost-encrusted night of 1 March 2006 was no time for Joe to be missing from home. If he was still alive, his chances of surviving were diminishing by the minute.
As first light broke the following day, searchers resumed their desperate race against time to find the schoolboy and reunite him with his loving family. At 10.45 a.m., their worst fears were realised. A body had been found by a sniffer dog.
But this was no accident, no mundane yet tragic occurrence of a child lost and overtaken by the unforgiving elements. The stabbed and bludgeoned corpse had been deliberately buried in a shallow grave in a wooded gully, hidden from sight under a mound of rocks, twigs, bricks, discarded sofa cushions and bed springs. The frail schoolboy had been brutally murdered.
News of the grim discovery was immediately relayed to his frantic parents, Tom and Gwen Geeling, who’d returned home exhausted after spending much of the night out helping the search teams. Joe’s distraught father rushed to the park but was held back by police officers while scene-of-crime forensic officers started a fingertip examination of the death scene.
Locating the body was to be just the start of the shockwaves felt around the close working-class community bordering the 16-acre Whitehead Park in Bury, Greater Manchester. Only an hour later, as heavy snow fell across the white canvas tent erected over the boy’s body, detectives arrived at Joe’s Roman Catholic high school, St Gabriel’s, and pulled fourteen-year-old Michael Hamer out of a religious education class to be questioned as the prime suspect in the killing.
Almost from the moment Joe failed to return home at 4.30 p.m. the previous afternoon, CID officers conducting background enquiries had obtained damning evidence clearly pointing to Hamer’s involvement in his disappearance.
In a police interview room and accompanied by a lawyer, Hamer quickly broke down and confessed. On tape, the sallow-faced pupil, showing little remorse, spilled out conflicting accounts of how and why he lured slightly built Joe to his home, where he launched a deadly attack before disposing of his body. On 4 March, the spotty-faced kid with the mean eyes and bad haircut was formally charged.
The measure of malicious premeditation that went into the murder, and the frenzied manner with which it was executed, propelled Hamer into the annals of Britain’s most notorious child killers.
Comparisons were swiftly made with other atrocious crimes – notably those of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the ten-year-olds who tortured and murdered three-year-old James Bulger; and sociopath Mary Bell, who, aged only eleven, strangled and mutilated four-year-old Martin Brown and Brian Howe, aged three.
The contrast between the lives of the victim and perpetrator could not have been greater.
During his short, physically afflicted life, Joe Geeling’s courage had overcome huge obstacles. Despite his debilitating disease, which required daily medication and regular hospital treatment, he remained good-natured and lively, attracting a wide circle of friends. The playful, chatty youngster loved kicking a football about and riding his bike. Indoors he gladly helped around the house he shared with his parents, brothers Sean and James and sisters Danielle and Kelly.
Joe never wallowed in self-pity and always had a cheery smile and greeting. He had an old head on young shoulders and, in his father’s words, ‘was an eleven-year-old going on fifty’. At school, he excelled in French, science and maths and was a member of the choir as well as appearing in end-of-term plays and pantos.
Hamer was the total opposite. Sullen and disruptive, he was an embittered and friendless loner whose schooldays were spent either avoiding bullies or picking on those weaker and smaller than he was. Of the thousand pupils at the sprawling coeducational religious school, only thirteen were judged by the local diocese to have ‘special educational needs’ – among them the deeply disturbed teen.
Whereas Geeling – fondly nicknamed Joey G – basked in the warmth of a close and loving family, Hamer’s distant policeman father Phil Brimelow had never lived with him since he was born and contact with his emotionally stunted son was sketchy. Life at home with his working mother Julie was punctured with screaming rows and slamming doors. Hamer’s refuge from a hostile world was his tiny cramped bedroom, where he spent hours nurturing sick fantasies about taking lethal revenge for all the perceived slights and slurs from schoolmates.
Lonely and rejected, he fantasised about exerting unbridled power over vulnerable younger boys. The death plot against his chosen target was hatched with cold and calculating determination.
The night before Joe vanished, Hamer studied the homework set by his tutor, ironically on the Ten Commandments, and then completed the final draft of a fake letter written in red ink, intended to lure the innocent schoolboy into a deadly trap.
Purporting to come from the school’s deputy head, it named Hamer as Joe’s ‘mentor’ and urged the boy to call round at Hamer’s home. At lunchtime the next day, he handed the note over to his intended victim.
Addressed to ‘Joseph’, it read,
You may have heard year 10s have started to mentor years 7s and they have been told to take some books to understand the difficulties some people may have been having.
As you know Michael is your mentor and will start next week.
Unfortunetely [sic] Michael has got some of your books, but will be unable to return them to you for two months due to surgery. So I have spoken to your mum and told her the situation and I have asked her if you could go with Michael to his house and collect them with the permission of your mother.
I have given the address to your mum and she will meet you at the house at 4.30p.m. tonight.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
LFoley Deputy-Headteacher.
Do not discuss this with anyone else as this will cause confusion. Thanks.
What followed were a tragic series of fateful blunders that sent Joe unwillingly on his final journey to a terrible death.
Curious about its contents, the boy handed the letter around to classmates during a history lesson. Spotting the huddled group, a teacher intervened and demanded to see the letter. Immediately realising it was a fake, the teacher showed it to a colleague and they both told Joe to take the letter to the deputy head.
They also warned him in no uncertain terms to go straight home after school and to take no notice whatsoever of the instruction to visit Hamer’s house.
Dutifully, Joe obeyed the order, and was seen waiting outside deputy Linda Foley’s office around 2.30 p.m. At the same time, in a bizarre coincidence, Michael Hamer, who had also been asked to deliver a note by another teacher, chanced across Joe in the corridor. Fearing his homicidal plan was about to be foiled, the sinister teen started to coax Joe away towards the exit.
Seen walking with Hamer by the same two teachers, Joe was confronted by them and asked whether he had handed over the bogus letter. Intimidated by Hamer’s hulking presence, Joe lied that he had, looking anxiously to the older boy as if to check he was answering the questions the way he wanted.
Although they were dissatisfied with the evasive replies they got, the teachers’ attention was suddenly distracted by a fire alarm being set off. A safety drill was activated to usher all the children into the playground. Under cover of the ensuing confusion, Hamer grabbed his chance and, gripping Joe tightly by the arm, steered him out of the school grounds. Witnesses later reported seeing Joe walking along the street behind Hamer in completely the opposite direction from his own house.
His doom had been sealed.
After Joe’s body was discovered – the fraudulent letter still lodged in the pocket of his blood-soaked uniform trousers – a pall of mourning settled over the neighbourhood. Floral bouquets were placed outside the school and piled up against the railings of the park.
Shattered with grief, his forty-eight-year-old father, Tom, drew a picture of Joe as a fighter who never succumbed to the frailty of his illness, first diagnosed when he was just six weeks old. It was an illness that required him to spend two weeks of every three months in hospital undergoing intense physiotherapy and medication.
‘None of you have enough time to hear how much he meant to us. How do you condense eleven years of fun and love and heartache, worries and accomplishments into a few words?’ sobbed Tom.
‘Without exaggeration I can say that Joe was one of those special people that if you ever met him and spent even five minutes talking to him, he would leave an impression on you that you would remember and usually with fondness. We were spoilt, we had him every day.
‘He had a few problems, being a child born with cystic fibrosis, but all those who knew him know that he refused to be restricted by that. He got on with life and made minimum fuss about his condition.
‘He loved all the things every other little boy likes – like football, computer games, Bart Simpson – but he was also amazing when it came to problems of any sort.
‘You always came away from him thinking to yourself, How come I couldn’t think of that? You really needed to know him to appreciate his potential and now some of you will never know him. He loved tinkering. He made a rack for all my tools. He was good at problem solving.’
Tom went on, ‘We used to say how good he was but, like all lads, he was no angel – somebody has just changed all that for us. Now we’re sure he truly is a little angel. God bless him and may he rest peacefully now.
‘Joe had a huge circle of family and friends, all of whom are equally devastated and like us they will never ever be quite the same again.’
His thirty-eight-year-old mother Gwen and other close relatives rushed to heap tributes on the once lively boy now lying lifeless in the morgue. ‘He would talk to anyone and made a lasting impression wherever he went. Everyone remembers his infectious smile. One of the toughest tasks we’ve had is to explain what happened to Joe’s six-year-old brother James. Joe was patient and loving towards James. They got on so well. Joe was always looking after him,’ she said.
The noon funeral cortège carrying Joe’s coffin from his home in Devon Street towards the Guardian Angels Church brought the windswept former cotton mill town of Bury to a standstill as mourners, many of them wiping away tears, lined the streets to say a sombre farewell. Flanking the hearse were outriders from the Crusaders Motorcycle Club, of which both Joe and his father were members.
In his eulogy during the Catholic mass, Tom confessed he struggled with thoughts of revenge and hate but added, ‘All that pales into insignificance with the thought that nothing will ever bring him back. God bless you, Joe – nobody can now hurt you.’ A ripple of applause from the packed congregation, picked up by two hundred more mourners watching the proceedings on a video link from outside the church, signalled the end of the ninety-minute service. Joe was then laid to rest in Bury Cemetery.
Detectives, meanwhile, had their suspect nailed. What was proving much more difficult to establish was Hamer’s exact motive for the murder. His confessions were laced with deception, contradictions, subterfuge and excuses.
To this day, no one in authority is 100 per cent sure what finally lit the fuse that led to the explosion of violence. Was it because the tormented turned tormentor? The day before the killing, Hamer had been threatened by schoolmates for having sneaked on school bullies and was warned he was a ‘dead man walking’. He told psychologists he wanted to make the frightened and totally innocent boy in his grasp feel what it was like to be isolated and scared.
His own life, he suggested, had been one of suffering, littered with cruel taunts, violence, extortion and alienation from other children throughout primary and secondary school. Psychologists examining Hamer concluded he was ‘unloved, denigrated and humiliated’.
Or was it because – as Hamer explained in another version – he snapped after Joe picked up a photo of his stepbrother Mark, who had died from cancer, and defiantly refused to put it down? Since no photo was ever found by police, they quickly concluded it was just a device by Hamer to try to elicit sympathy.
Lie followed lie. Joe, he claimed, had willingly returned home with him to use a mobile-phone charger. The hoax had been a ‘wind-up’ to trick him into thinking he’d be met there by Hamer, only to find the house empty.
Or was the real truth, according to the accused’s defence counsel, more likely to be a surprise revelation that emerged much later during the enquiry.
According to Michael Hamer’s eleventh-hour admission to his legal team, he made an ‘adolescent’ sexual advance to Joe, which was immediately rebuffed. When his victim then ridiculed him for being gay and threatened to spill his sexual secret to all his schoolmates, Hamer killed him in a panic to keep him quiet.
Explaining why ‘maladapted and psychologically flawed’ Hamer had given so many conflicting stories, his barrister, David Steer QC, told the murder hearing, ‘We submit he did not feel able to admit that his motive was a sexual one. He found it easier to give these accounts.’ This explanation was given credence by the police finding a note in his room that showed in his own crude words that he was clearly interested in ‘bum sex’.
Whatever the trigger, the reaction was one of sustained savagery.
After Hamer entered a whispered guilty plea to Joe’s murder at a court hearing in Manchester on 16 October 2006, the prosecutor, Alistair Webster QC, delivered an unflinching account of Joe Geeling’s final seconds of life as his parents and relatives sat rigid with horror in the public gallery, separated by only a few feet from Hamer’s equally shocked mother.
During the planned and premeditated murder, Joe was beaten as many as ten times around the head with a heavy frying pan, with such force it broke in two. Leaving Joe lying semiconscious on the floor, his eye socket shattered from the onslaught and head and face badly bruised, Hamer went downstairs to the kitchen and returned with two knives – one with an 8-inch blade – which he used to stab Joe sixteen times in the neck and back of the head. One of the gouging wounds penetrated so deeply it struck the spinal cord. His windpipe and a major artery were slashed. Postmortem evidence showed Hamer had viciously twisted the knives inside Joe’s body.
After death, Hamer inflicted a stab wound into Joe’s buttock as a final act of degradation. One of the knives was left in the bedroom, another on the upstairs landing.
Dragging Joe’s body downstairs, he stuffed the boy’s lightweight corpse into a wheelie bin containing piles of refuse and pushed it half a mile from his home in Dalton Street to Whitehead Park, where he hurriedly concealed it under leaves and household rubbish.
While he was setting about his diabolical task, his mother phoned him on his mobile and harangued him for not being home when she had called in there.
Returning home, he coolly tried cleaning away the blood spattered across the walls and carpet, telling his mother the indelible stains were caused by a leaking red pen.
Then he sat down quietly – and completed his studies on the Ten Commandments for the following day’s class. By now he had broken the sixth and most serious Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’
The ferocity of the assault had lasted only ten minutes. By the time Joe’s mother’s reported him missing at 5.24 p.m., her son was already dead, disposed off like a piece of trash.
During a search of the murder flat, officers discovered Hamer had written four drafts of the letter used to lure Joe away. Two were found in his bedroom and one in the back garden. And the note in which he scribbled out his fantasy of having gay sex had been jotted down at least three weeks prior to the murder.
But the prosecutor conceded that the case against Hamer – although solidly backed by a wealth of indisputable forensic evidence and the defendant’s own utterances – was unsatisfactory in that none of the killer’s accounts neatly dovetailed with the evidence. ‘One of the many distressing features in this all-too-distressing case is that Michael Hamer has never given a consistent and credible account of why he did what he did. Joe’s parents still don’t know why their son was taken from them and, like the rest of us, they can only seek to tease the truth from the evidence,’ said Webster.
‘The evidence clearly demonstrates that, despite his young years, it was a murder that was targeted. Why he chose Joe can only be conjecture.’
Tom Geeling was allowed to deliver a victim impact statement in front of twenty sobbing relatives.
Our son meant everything to us. We spent many happy years grooming him into the smart, witty, loving, young man he had already started to become. In spite of the drawback of being born into this world with cystic fibrosis and enduring more than his fair share of hospital visits, we had managed to instil in him a ‘no self-pity’ attitude.
He understood that those were the cards God had dealt to him and together we made the best of what we had. On occasions he would even remark on other youngsters at the hospital as being a lot worse off than he was, which would make us silently very proud of him. He was indeed a very brave and kind-hearted little lad.
Joe loved school and was coming along well. He had many friends and loved playing. Even though we have another little boy, Joe was always the centre of attention with his corny jokes and his comical outlook on things. Because of his size, older people were often surprised by the way he could hold a long and meaningful conversation with them; indeed, once you met Joe he generally left an impression on you.
Since the day when our son never returned home from school, things just went from bad to worse to unbearable. The facts of the case you may already know but in our case the drip feed of information regarding his suffering throughout his ordeal has been enough to break any man, let alone a loving and devoted mother.
We have no choice but to stay strong for the sake of James and in my case for the sake of my older children, who loved and cared very much for Joe. Unfortunately, I was made redundant just prior to this happening but dealing with this has for a long time left me unable to pursue a career again. I have never been out of work from leaving school thirty years ago, and in fairness I have been offered a few responsible jobs but I cannot take them, as I know I would let them down at the moment. I do work now but just driving a van. Work these days is nothing more than a distraction to try and stop me thinking about this.
My wife and I privately weep all the time. We weep about what we could, would and should be doing with Joe now. We cry whenever we reminisce over every little thing he has done or made in the past and the grief and the bitterness all comes back over and over and over.
We each have some very bad days where you simply cannot function and you just can’t explain to anyone what the problem is. Our son James often gets upset when he comes to situations where his big brother would have helped him or played with him and nobody has realised he is all alone again. Sometimes he is inconsolable and putting him to sleep some nights can take an eternity. James has just turned seven and, although honesty is our policy, we have not yet been able to tell him the fuller facts.
It was so painful and upsetting to tell him that Joe was lost, that Joe was found but he was dead and later that he was stabbed by someone. James still has worse to come because as he will inevitably find out if we don’t tell him. At his tender age his perception – rightly in our opinion – is that if you do something really wrong, like murdering somebody, a policeman will catch you and you will go to jail and the key would be thrown away.
We considered this a part of teaching what is right, what is wrong and what is totally unacceptable. When he discovers what really happened to his brother and that life imprisonment does not mean what it says, even we won’t come close to the horror and fear that he is going to suffer.
So far we have made it through without counselling. By talking everything out we are a strong family and our church, our relatives and friends and even some relative strangers have helped us where they could, but we fear for James’s future, and we fear about the time when Hamer would be released. Will he be safe? Will we be safe?
We could ramble on for ever giving endless examples of how this despicable crime has devastated our family, but, like we mentioned at the onset, we think any judge, in fact any parent, will know this is their worst nightmare and they only need to ask themselves, ‘How would they feel?’ We just pray to God that as the years pass the pain may ease and the happy memories return.
Preparing to pass sentence on Hamer, the judge, Mr Justice Richard McCombe, took the court completely by surprise when he told the defendant he was not convinced he’d planned the murder in advance, irrespective of the level of sly cunning and malicious forethought used to lure Joe to his home.
‘Joe had many friends and kept a humorous and comical outlook on life,’ the judge told Hamer, who had been excused having to stand in the dock and sat on a bench flanked by his lawyers. ‘He was clearly an intensely loved member of a close and devoted family. You have taken Joe from them.
‘You harboured significant feelings of distress from the absence of a relationship with your father and suffered a significant degree of bullying at school.
‘I am now told that, within the last few days, you have admitted to [your barrister] Mr Steer and to your solicitor that you made a sexual advance to Joe, who responded by referring to you as gay and threatening to tell others of what you had done.
‘Joe, as you accept, had done absolutely nothing to encourage any advance. The rejection of the advance was the immediate trigger event of what you did to Joe.
‘The attack was ferocious, occurring in a few frenzied minutes. You took away Joe’s life and damaged the lives of all those who loved him.’
The judge then sentenced Hamer to a minimum twelve years’ imprisonment, less the 229 days he had spent in custody in a secure youth offenders’ institution. Many in court that day, particularly his parents and the police, expressed bafflement at what they regarded as the leniency shown to the schoolboy killer. A wave of disbelief swept through the courtroom as Tom and Gwen glanced at each other in growing horror.
This was not the kind of swingeing hammer blow of justice they had hoped for.
Hamer could be out by the time he was twenty-seven years old – freed to get on with his life while they’d been sentenced to an eternity of grief.
Lawyers for the Crown Prosecution Service at once declared their intention to appeal against the ‘unduly lenient’ sentence. Outside Manchester’s Central Criminal Court, Joe’s bewildered mother and father spoke of their frustration with Hamer’s refusal to come clean about the true reason behind his murder plot. ‘We can’t make any sense whatsoever out of Hamer’s actions,’ they said. ‘We feel he’ll leave us never knowing the truth about the many gaps in his version of events. This we find extremely difficult to come to terms with.’
Detective Superintendent Martin Bottomley, assigned to head the murder enquiry, also attacked the tissue of lies the twisted teen had given during interrogation.
‘We have heard a version of events today about the circumstances leading to Joe’s death that is somewhat closer to the truth than some of the nonsense Hamer gave us. I don’t believe it’s the full story. It’s my view that Joe was never going to leave that house. This was a ferocious calculated murder, the like of which I have never seen before and hope I never see again. His actions were clearly premeditated and calculating. He lured Joe away from a place of safety.
‘Joe was a much-loved young boy with many friends and loving family who have been left absolutely devastated by his death. His school friends and teachers are still trying to come to terms with what has happened, and the whole community in Bury has been left in shock. Many of the police officers involved in the case have young children and have found this case incredibly upsetting.’
Three months later, on 31 January 2007, judges presiding at the Court of Appeal, reflecting the anger felt over Hamer’s prison sentence, increased the term by another three years to a minimum fifteen years following legal pleas from the Attorney General.
The increased punishment brought some consolation to Tom and Gwen, who personally thanked the court for its decision. Hailing the ruling as a ‘victory for common sense’, Tom admitted he had feared the overcrowding crisis in Britain’s jails and the Labour government’s desire to imprison fewer numbers for lengthy periods might have produced a different result.
And he used his high public profile to slam the soft approach to crime overwhelming areas of Britain. Smartly dressed in a suit and blue tie, wife Gwen by his side, the devoted father said, ‘In light of current debates on reducing the number of inmates nationwide, we were fearful that a weak decision may have been the route taken. We thank the courts for deliberating so long and reaching this ruling.
‘We still believe that in this country there is not enough deterrent for young thugs and would-be murderers, but the ramifications of this precedent should be far-reaching. We are proud of this news and we believe there is a massive silent majority of like-minded people out there.
‘Michael Hamer will still be a relatively young man when he is released from prison but obviously our own personal loss will remain for ever. At least for an additional three years, the nation will be a slightly safer place, especially for our young children.
‘Personally, we remain sceptical that offenders like Michael Hamer can ever be rehabilitated and we worry that he will reoffend. But, acknowledging the likelihood that he will be released back into society, we hope and pray he gets whatever help he needs so that one day he may recognise the devastation and consequences of his actions and can show some true remorse.’
Their muted feelings of triumph were echoed by Detective Superintendent Bottomley, the police chief so affected by Joe’s murder, who publicly stated, ‘The Court of Appeal has delivered a balanced judgment on the facts of this horrible case. They have recognised that the aggravating features of Joe’s vulnerability, the preplanning, the luring of him to his death, the sustained attack and the callous nature of disposing of Joe’s body, taken together, outweigh any mitigating features.
‘It has been a long and difficult process for all the Geeling family and I hope they can now take some comfort in the fact that Hamer will be in custody for an appropriate length of time and also that their feeling the original sentence was too lenient has been upheld.’
The silent majority had been heard, thanks in no small measure to the forcefulness of Tom Geeling in so vividly bringing Joe Geeling’s short yet full life and untimely death into the public consciousness.
The very strength of his love for his ‘brave little lad’, so vividly encapsulated in his statements, ensured his cry for justice had reached the highest levels of the judiciary. For once, the voice of the silent majority had been heard loud and clear.
In later months, the innate decency of the Geeling family was illustrated by a trust fund set up in Joe’s name. Fundraising events such as a sponsored marathon collected £5,000 for two charities close to the Geelings’ hearts: the Bury and District Cystic Fibrosis branch and the Booth Hall Children’s Hospital, where Joe underwent so much of his treatment. The donations, say his family, are Joe’s legacy.
Life for the pupils at St Gabriel’s remained overshadowed by the tragedy. Teachers questioned themselves as to whether they could have done more to prevent the tragedy. The headmaster, Eddie Robinson, stressed the school did all possible to ensure the safety and welfare of pupils. During periods of collective worship, staff and pupils prayed for Joe’s soul and a memorial bench to the tragic schoolboy was erected in the grounds.
Voices were raised within the community as to whether robust procedures were in place to stamp out bullying at the school. Local education authority officials and social service workers, who had collated a bulging casebook on Hamer from an early age, were questioned as to whether they’d failed to notice the danger signals in his behaviour.
A ‘serious case review’ was undertaken by the clumsily named Bury Safeguarding Children Board, coming up with few satisfying answers from officials designated to monitor Hamer’s attitude problems. The inquiry learned that, from the tender age of two, the killer was proving a handful. Two years before the killing, he’d told social workers he felt cut off from his family – he had once overheard his father saying he had no feelings for his son – and felt stressed out from rows with his mother.
He also related two occasions that had mentally affected him, including the death of his half-brother in 2002.
But the board of the inquiry said that, although ‘improvements’ were needed in communication among those working with disturbed children victimised by bullies, steps had already been taken to install a computer database logging bullying reports by an anti-bullying-in-schools coordinator. No one was to blame for Joe’s death.
The tragedy could not have been predicted or prevented, they concluded. Michael Hamer, the ticking time bomb, and he alone, was responsible for his actions.
From the Hamer family came this brief statement by Michael’s mother Julie: ‘We express our sorrow and deepest regret for what has happened.’
And, using the parlance of the day, the local authority’s Children’s Services Director exhorted, ‘It is time to let the families, pupils and school move on with their lives.’
For the Geelings, however, the clocks stopped for ever on that bleak, snowbound day.