Britain's Most Notorious Prisoners Read online

  First Published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  Wharncliffe Books

  an imprint of

  Pen and Sword Books Ltd.

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

  S70 2AS

  Copyright © Stephen Wade 2011

  ISBN: 978-1-84563-129-1

  eISBN: 9781844685189

  The right of Stephen Wade to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

  Typeset in 11/13pt Plantin by Concept, Huddersfield.

  Printed and bound in England by

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  Contents

  List of Plates

  Introduction

  Timeline of Prison History

  Chapter 1 Inside Oblivion: Then and Now

  Chapter 2 Florence Maybrick: Ready for the Noose

  Chapter 3 The Ballad of Oscar Wilde

  Chapter 4 Sir Roger Casement: Hanged by a Comma

  Chapter 5 Eamon de Valera: Sprung from Lincoln Prison

  Chapter 6 Her Ghost Haunts the Death Cell

  Chapter 7 Lord Haw Haw: Germany Calling

  Chapter 8 A Spy and a Rogue in the War

  Chapter 9 Mutiny in North Yorkshire

  Chapter 10 Ruth Ellis: Crime of Passion

  Chapter 11 Harry Roberts: 1966 and All That

  Chapter 12 Dennis Stafford: Escape from Dartmoor

  Chapter 13 Dennis Nilsen: Nice to be Loved

  Chapter 14 Ian Brady: Keeping Shtum

  Chapter 15 Jeremy Bamber: Endless Campaign

  Chapter 16 John Straffen: Fifty-five Years Inside

  Chapter 17 Sutcliffe: Every Day a Torment

  Chapter 18 Beverley Allitt: Bring Me The Innocents

  Chapter 19 Charles Bronson: Prison Superstar

  Chapter 20 Noel Razor Smith: Best-selling Writer

  Chapter 21 The Krays Inside

  Conclusions

  An Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  The History of Newgate, from 1890. (Author’s collection)

  Florence and James Maybrick.

  The entrance, inside Marlborough Street police court, where Oscar Wilde appeared. (The author)

  Reading Gaol in 1848, from an old print. (Author’s collection)

  Detail from the Lincolnshire Echo newspaper report of the De Valera escape. (Lincolnshire Echo)

  ‘Lord Haw Haw’ under armed arrest. (Author’s collection)

  Cover of the first biography of Neville Heath by Gerald Byrne. (John Hill)

  Ruth Ellis. (Author’s collection)

  The Magdela, where Blakely was drinking before his murder by Ruth Ellis. (Vicki Schofield)

  Extract from The Times, 23 March 1973, on Harry Roberts’ tunnel. (The Times)

  A portrait of Dennis Nilsen. (Vicki Schofield)

  The box: evidence from Nilsen’s flat of body parts. (Vicki Schofield)

  HMP Durham where Staffen was observed. (Author’s collection)

  The Blind Beggar, where Cornell was murdered. (The author)

  A scene after the Hull prison riot of 1976. (HMSO)

  Cover of Noel ‘Razor’ Smith’s book, Warrior Kings. (Apex Publicity)

  Introduction

  The word ‘notorious’ implies a high level of very doubtful and often disturbing fame; it refers to the kind of fame that most of us would wish to avoid. Yet, in the world of true crime, it often has a reversal of those implications, and that is not merely because of the often wrongful assumption that readers of the genre go to it for the unhealthy frisson of blood and suffering in the tale. In fact, history shows that ‘notorious’ may imply all kinds of references, including the humorous and bizarre.

  Notorious may be local, but also be so bizarre that the weirdness spreads across culture, as with the case of Allison Johnson, who stood in Lincoln Crown Court in 1992, charged with aggravated burglary. He was known across the prison establishment and beyond as ‘the cutlery man’ because he tended to swallow knives, forks and spoons. Johnson was a repeat prisoner but actually spent more time on the operating table than in a ‘pad’. Peter Seddon, writing about the case, joked that as the man walked from court, he was ‘severely rattled’.

  There are humorous and strange tales in this book, but often only incidentally. In a prison community in Britain, there is an unusual kind of humour, parallel in some ways to the ‘canteen culture’ of those professions that deal with the less pleasant and normal side of life. It is hard but also somehow infantile, basic and sometimes witty and inventive. A notorious prisoner, in that context, can actually be an entertaining one, but that is something we have to understand in a way completely separate from his or her crimes. The truth is that a criminal’s life, if a long jail stretch is involved, is an odd mix of surreal adventure and crushingly tedious routine.

  Of course, the stories here will not all be of this kind in the range of meanings of the word ‘notorious’. My tales include the prison lives of serial killers: terrifyingly deviant minds who need the fantasy in their sick imaginations to be lived out in a horrendous drama involving real and innocent victims. But, paradoxically to those who do not know a prison community, the two sit quite easily together: the crazy, entertaining and the horrible aspects can live together in that complex establishment, the prison.

  Writing about prisoners invariably entails explaining prisons, so I begin with that explanation as a prelude to the stories. These stories also involve some crime history: I begin with some late Victorian cases simply because they are compelling stories, and then move into the more recent sensations of such guests of Her Majesty as Charles Bronson and Ian Brady. The Victorian and Edwardian stories necessarily bring together the shadow of the noose and the horrors of a prison system that was effectively compared to a miserable purgatory as sick and inhuman as anything in Dante’s vision of that state of limbo. To be in a prison is to forget time, or at least to see it differently. But when the prisoner in question is Florence Maybrick, for example, waiting for the day when the hangman would call, it is a very different matter to that of the modern serial killer who, for whatever reasons, will rot in jail, but with regular meals, a well-stocked library at his disposal, and some of the wonders of the age of the machine.

  The selection of stories here was difficult to make; the emphasis had to be on people living between c.1950 and today, with some earlier examples which were too interesting to resist. What added piquancy and not a small amount of vicarious pleasure was the fact that some of the subjects here have spent decades behind bars and, common sense will tell us, that changes people in radical way
s. There are sometimes complete transformations.

  In my years working as a writer in prisons, with both men and women prisoners, I met dozens of lifers, and some who were destined to be ‘life meaning life’ prisoners. In one case, I had the clearest transmutation of a personality I ever met with. This was a man who had committed a double murder and who had been inside for eighteen years when I met him. He had amazingly changed his life and thought; he was a Buddhist; he had learned to play a musical instrument, and he taught and led meditation sessions in the jail. His body was lithe and supple; he worked out with his mind, not always his body, and he gave gentle, direct advice to those who asked for it. He was the most quiet, restrained and self-controlled person you could ever meet. Yet, as some readers will be thinking, what would he be like outside? That question nags at you like a child tugging at its mother’s coat.

  How can we know for sure about that transformation? The tabloids are always eager to tell the public about the latest psychopath who has been released from prison, not considered to be a danger to the public, who promptly slits the nearest throat or who rapes the first woman he meets. Not only that, but the nature of expert testimony in the dock has been challenged and has become a flexible concept rather than a reliable forensic element in a trial. Only DNA has superseded the traditional ‘boffin’ who presents the arcane learning relevant to an extreme and repulsive crime.

  In the end, the choice of subjects was dictated by their sheer inescapable notoriety: I do not mean that simply in the sense of their list of killings or robberies. The notoriety has been partly the result of the media interest of course. A person is made notorious by those who wish to disseminate interest and sensation around the personality. For that reason, there is an element of eccentricity sometimes as well as the shuddering personality we know from creations such as Hannibal Lector on the screen, or from the pages of the crime novelists who feel drawn to invent repulsive tales where there is no need to elaborate on the evil that is clearly there in the real narratives of crime.

  In a book such as this, we also need to be sure about some basic concepts. Some of the people in these pages have done the most shocking and amoral acts the twisted imagination could invent. We therefore ask, is there such a thing as evil? I have no hesitation is saying yes. I offer a very confident affirmative here. I have met and worked with murderers of all kinds, from the men and women who kill from within the routine framework of their normal lives, and kill with intention – with what the law calls ‘mens rea’ and an ‘actus reus’ – that is they make a decision to take a life and they do so. But those occasions are often when a person is pushed to an extreme or suffer from a moment of irrational urge, something outside their personality profile. Then there are the others, and at times I have looked into their eyes. They have evil living in them like a birthmark stain on the skin. It is there, it is apparent, and it cannot be washed away.

  I have worked with some killers who have no notion of remorse. One man painted and drew his crime scenes, but in disguise. He found a way to depict them by indirect means; others have spoken to me about how and why they took lives, and made it seem rational, as if anyone would have killed the person in question. There are also inexplicable elements here, such as the man who walked into my creative writing class, a broad smile on his face, and said, ‘You’re the right bloke aren’t you? Well, here’s what I’ve written … it’s about when I killed my wife!’ The smile never left his face, and he walked out, leaving the two sheets of neatly-written words of murder for me to chew over.

  The chapters therefore include some prisoners whose lives are generally well known, but also others whose prison lives are less familiar. The stress here is on their prison lives. For instance, there are libraries of books available on Peter Sutcliffe and his crimes, but not so much on his prison life. There are interesting sources too, some previously unknown. For example, I was once in a jail when I read a file of letters, and one of these, to the extent of four pages, was from Charles Bronson, to the Education manager, describing, clearly and powerfully, how much he had derived great satisfaction from working with a group of special needs people who had come into the prison to spend time in the gym with selected prisoners. Mr Bronson was lyrical in his expression of delight and satisfaction at being of some help to those guests of the jail.

  There is also the question of the time spent behind bars. Some of the subjects here were waiting in jail only a few days or weeks, before they walked to the scaffold. But today, the issue of ‘life meaning life’ presents knotty legal and penal features in a life sentence. The basic pattern is that a life sentence is given and then the judge sets a minimum time of incarceration, or a definite time period. After that it is a matter of appeals and parole. A determinate sentence is such that the prisoner must be released after that set period of time or ‘tariff’. An indeterminate sentence means that the person has been sentenced to life for public protection (IPP abbreviation is often used); an IPP prisoner will serve the minimum stated, and there will only be a release when the Parole Board is satisfied that the person is no longer a danger to the public.

  Life sentences have to be given if the conviction is for murder, but life may be given for many other offences such as rape, man-slaughter or arson. But some of the prisoners here are under a mandatory life sentence. This is the only sentence which can be given to an adult convicted of murder. There is also the sentence entailing ‘during Her Majesty’s Pleasure’ and this can be given to anyone over ten years of age but under eighteen years when the offence was committed. Murderers between eighteen and twenty-one at the time of the offence may have a mandatory sentence of custody for life.

  Before April 2005 there were ‘automatic life sentences’ – applying to people who were over eighteen on or after the 1 October 1997, and convicted of a second serious, violent or sexual offence. This was replaced by the notion of IPP in 2005, but some lifers in the system are still there under the automatic sentences.

  Lifers and others with long sentences are also subject to the confusion which has arisen over the last ten years with regard to laws on sentencing. In a ruling at the Court of Appeal, Criminal Division, in December 2009, for instance, Lord Justices Hughes, Rafferty and Hedley removed a ridiculous unfairness: owing to the way in which sentencing legislation had been effected, there was a distinct anomaly: a defendant sentenced with two consecutive periods under two different regimes would not have the same eligibility for release on a tagging/curfew mode as early as a person with one single sentence of the same length. With these situations in mind the judges ruled that this be corrected and made just. Prisoners doing a long tariff are faced with these complexities, and in the prison newspaper, Inside Time, there is a regular and lengthy feature explaining sentencing legislation in layman’s terms.

  There are a small number of prisoners who have to be locked up under a whole life order. The Prison Service defines this with these words: ‘Where the trial judge has decided that the requirements of retribution and deterrence can be satisfied only by prisoners remaining in prison for the rest of their lives, the trial judge will not set a minimum term of imprisonment …’ In July 2009 there were 10,900 prisoners serving an indeterminate sentence and just over 300 of these were women.

  In my own life ‘inside’ I was always gathering material for what I knew was to be a book about prisons in some way. I never thought it would be this one, but my experiences have naturally fed into it. My own incarceration was accidental: I was locked up for an hour, with an inmate who was also a keen writer, and I never noticed that the key had been turned. Trying to imagine what that must be like for forty years is beyond imagination, yet that happened to John Straffen, and he had no other fellow writer to talk to and pass the time.

  Timeline of Prison History

  1777 John Howard published The State of the Prisons, a survey and critique of all local gaols

  1791 Jeremy Bentham proposes his idea for a penitentiary

  1811 The Select Committee on P
enitentiary Houses recommends a penitentiary be built at Millbank (the current site of Tate Modern)

  1820 The flogging of women prisoners is abolished

  1830s The ‘Silent System’ introduced

  1843 The Millbank experiment fails: the prison is closed

  1856 The first recommendation that hanging is done in private, inside the walls

  1863 The Carnarvon Committee recommends a regime more attuned to punishment

  1863 Broadmoor opened as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum

  1867 The end of convict transportation

  1868 Hanging is made private

  1895 The Departmental Committee on Prisons indicates that there should be another switch, from a stress on punishment to an investment in rehabilitation

  1898 The crank and the treadmill were finally abolished

  1908 The Borstal Act establishes the first juvenile offenders scheme with the new ideas of a standardised regime in place. This was for people aged between sixteen and twenty-one

  1917 Dartmoor receives over a thousand ‘conscientious objectors’

  1932 Mutiny at Dartmoor

  1946 A serious mutiny at Northallerton prison

  1948 Military drill introduced at detention centres

  1976 Serious riot at HMP Hull

  1983 Charles Bronson stages a rooftop protest at Broadmoor

  1990 Riots in Dartmoor

  1991 The Criminal Justice Act: ‘integral sanitation’ introduced. In other words, ‘slopping out’ ended

  1995 Ronnie Kray dies

  1999 Charles Bronson takes an education officer hostage at HMP Hull

  2000 Reggie Kray is released from prison on compassionate grounds, and dies a few weeks afterwards

  2007 ‘The Istanbul Statement’ – puts forward the guideline that solitary confinement should be prohibited for death row prisoners and life-sentenced prisoners, for mentally ill prisoners and children under eighteen