Killers Behind Bars. Kate Kray
narrowed and blank. Twice he has been turned down for parole and it is doubtful whether he will ever be released. He is a lonely figure just waiting to die.
Many of the people I’ve met while writing this book, like Colin Richards and Avril Gregory, have been sad and, after meeting them, you feel very low – their sadness is contagious. I think the Nottingham scheme for youngsters is a great idea. Let them see sad figures like John Straffen so that they can decide for themselves that they’ll never end up like that. Let them see the cells. After visiting so many prisons while researching for this book I can tell you that what I’ve seen has convinced me to stay forever on the straight and narrow.
The worst place I visited was Rampton, when I went to see Richard Dennick. Rampton Hospital is a deceiving place. On the outside it has the look of a military barracks but, once inside, it has the coldness of a Victorian asylum. The long corridors seem to wind for miles. It’s like a rabbit warren. On the walls hang paintings done by the inmates, and down each side of the corridors are big, bolted doors, behind which are the patients.
I was taken into the depths of Rampton, to Concord Ward, to see Richard Dennick. The thing that struck me was the cold emptiness of the place. I had visited my husband Ron at Broadmoor but it was nothing like Rampton.
A burly officer unlocked the heavy steel door leading into Concord Ward. As I stepped in, there was a stale smell of confinement.
Every home has its own individual smell but Concord Ward has its own pungent odour, created by 16 men living in a closed environment. The sickening smell is a mixture of stewed tea, tobacco and body odour. The whitewashed walls are stained brownish-yellow from years of cigarette smoke. It looked like a geriatric ward in a general hospital. The big, swinging doors leading into the dorm were open and rows of unmade beds stood on either side. At the end was a room with a small glass window. I peered in. The room was empty apart from a bed; on the door was a big brass lock. It must be where the patients are put if they get ‘upset’.
I was led into a small dining room alongside the kitchen. Under the watchful eye of a screw, Ricky unlocked the fridge to get the milk. I sat down at the table. A small vase of artificial flowers stood on the tea-stained gingham tablecloth. As he started to talk, Ricky poured the piping hot tea. Like young Avril, his voice seemed flat and dull. Not surprising for a 27-year-old man who was given a life sentence at the age of 15.
He has grown from boy to man inside. The crime that Ricky committed was terrible. He killed a vicar in a vicious, brutal attack. In his chapter, Ricky talks openly about the attack and leaves nothing out. After all these years, he still thinks he was right to kill him. He said that, in court, they portrayed the killing as done for pure gain. Ricky explained with anger that they wasn’t interested that the vicar, a pillar of society, had died trying to abuse him. ‘Oh no, they didn’t want to hear about that,’ he said.
I was very struck by how different Rampton is from Broadmoor. I know Broadmoor well from visiting my husband Ronnie and my brother-in-law Charlie Smith who married my sister Maggie.
I had been visiting Ron for a few months when he told me about young Charlie who was on the same ward as Ron, called Somerset Ward. Ron asked me if I had a friend who would visit Charlie. My sister had just left her husband and was staying with me. I said I would ask her. The very next day she made the long trip up to visit Charlie Smith. Little did we know that that visit would lead to marriage.
Charlie was 35 years old. He had never really known anything other than life in an institution of one kind or another. He was even born in a prison. After a traumatic childhood filled with abuse, he killed for the first time at the age of 17, then again in prison, and was sent to Broadmoor indefinitely.
Eighteen years later he met Maggie and things changed for him. He went out on shopping trips and on a day visit home – under escort, of course – before applying to be transferred to the Trevor Gibbons unit at Maidstone psychiatric hospital. However, these things take time. For Maggie, as well as Charlie, it will be a long wait.
All the lifers in this book have very different stories to tell. I was very aware when I was writing it that some people think such criminals shouldn’t have the opportunity to tell their stories at all, for fear that they will glamorize their crime and, of course, themselves. These people will say, ‘What about the victims? These murderers may be spending their lives in prison but at least they’re still alive, unlike their victims.’
I do know, or at least I can imagine, that this is hard to take, especially for the families who lost someone they loved through someone else’s act of violence. But we can’t pretend that these people don’t exist. They do. They made the headlines, they were found guilty of murder and, quite rightly, they have been locked up. However, after talking to so many lifers and hearing their stories, I don’t think that murder should carry a mandatory life sentence. I do think that if you commit murder you should go to prison, but I think that each case should be judged on its own merits. Take the case of young Avril. She should have been punished – she admits that – but not with a life sentence.
In her chapter she openly admits taking the knives that killed the boy, but she didn’t kill him. Someone else did. Ricky, too, should be punished for what he did, but doesn’t the fact that the vicar tried to abuse him count for anything? He was a young, impressionable boy who hadn’t even discovered his own sexuality. The 64-year-old vicar was a man of the cloth – a man to look up to. Ricky was confused – and still is.
In a strange twist of fate, these lifers have become victims themselves. I haven’t set out to glamorize them or excuse their crime in any way and I haven’t made heroes of them. They’re not heroes. However, this is probably the first time they’ve told their own stories in their own way and in their own words. If you read their stories, it makes it easier to understand how such terrible things can happen. Surely, that’s no bad thing.
It was a cold, grey November day; the early morning air was freezing. The thin, chilling rain was still falling as I parked my car in the visitor’s bay. I pulled my collar up, ducked my head down against the icy drizzle and walked towards the prison. I had come to Long Lartin high-security jail in Evesham, Worcester, to visit Europe’s longest-serving prisoner – John Thomas Straffen.
It was in 1951 – Winston Churchill was Prime Minister and the scars of the Second World War were still evident – when the name Straffen first caused nationwide revolution. In July of that year, Straffen came across a little girl named Brenda Goddard, aged six, in a field and offered to show her where to find some flowers. It was there that he strangled her.
On 8 August the same year, he strangled Cicely Batstone aged nine.
At Winchester Assizes, doctors declared that Straffen, then aged 21, had a mental age of nine, and was found unfit to stand trial for the double murder and was subsequently sent to Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Seven months later, he escaped from Broadmoor. He gave the guards the slip, climbed on to a shed and scaled a wall to freedom. After just four hours on the outside, he murdered his third victim, five-year-old Linda Bowyer. Linda was found strangled in a wood near her home at Farley Hill, ten miles from Broadmoor. This time, Straffen was deemed fit to stand trial and was sentenced to death by Mr Justice Cassels, but reprieved from the gallows just five days before his execution by the then Home Secretary, who advised the Queen to exercise her prerogative of mercy.
The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The judge at his trial said, ‘You might just as well try a babe in arms.’
Straffen has been imprisoned since 1951 making him the longest-serving ‘lifer’ in Britain and Europe.
As I waited in the visiting centre prior to meeting John Straffen, I thought about his crime and felt somewhat apprehensive and doubtful about visiting a child murderer. I admit that, after reading the newspapers and watching news bulletins about a