(b) the murder of a child if involving the abduction of the child or sexual or sadistic motivation,
(c) a murder done for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause, or
(d) a murder by an offender previously convicted of murder.
Schedule 21 also states that to qualify for a whole life tariff the offender must have been aged 21 or over at the time of the offence.
Soham murderer Ian Huntley, who killed 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in his home in August 2002, did not have his minimum prison term set at his 2003 trial because the system on serving life sentences was being altered at the time. Instead sentencing was postponed until 29 September 2005 when the trial judge, Mr Justice Moses, had to consider the new principles set out under the Criminal Justice Act.
In deciding whether to issue Huntley with a whole life tariff, the judge had to consider the principles set out in Schedule 21. Explaining his decision not to issue such a sentence, Mr Justice Moses said the Huntley case lacked a proven element of abduction because the meeting between the girls and Huntley, while his then girlfriend Maxine Carr was away, had been by chance.
The judge explained: ‘It is likely that the defendant took advantage of the girls’ acquaintance with Carr to entice them into the house, but that could not be proved.’ He added: ‘Their presence in the house thus remains unexplained. There is a likelihood of sexual motivation, but there was no evidence of sexual activity, and it remains no more than a likelihood. In those circumstances, the starting point should not be a whole life order.’ Instead, the judge chose a starting point of 30 years and added an extra 10 years because the murders were ‘aggravated’ by Huntley’s abuse of the girls’ trust and his deceitfulness afterwards. He said: ‘The two children were vulnerable and obviously trusted the defendant because of his position in the school as caretaker and relationship with Carr.’
Sentencing Huntley, Mr Justice Moses emphasised: ‘I have not ordered that this defendant will not spend the rest of his life in prison. The order I make offers little or no hope of the defendant’s eventual release.’ Huntley will be eligible for release in 2042, by which time he will be 68 years old. Even then, he will have to convince the parole board that it is safe to release one of the most publicly despised killers in recent history.
The latest case to call into question the rules governing whole life tariffs came in August 2008, when cop killer David Bieber won an appeal against his sentence to die behind bars. Bieber, a former US marine, shot dead PC Ian Broadhurst during a routine check on a stolen vehicle he was driving in Leeds on Boxing Day, 2003. The gunman shot the policeman point-blank in the head as he lay injured on the ground pleading for his life. Bieber was also convicted of the attempted murder of two of Broadhurst’s colleagues as they attempted to flee the shooting. Three Court of Appeal judges held that the facts of the case,‘horrifying though they were’, did not justify a whole-life term because the ‘substantial degree of premeditation or planning’ detailed in Schedule 21 was not involved. Instead, Bieber was given a minimum term of 37 years.
Among the murderers featured in this book are a number of notable omissions, the most obvious being Britain’s most notorious serial killer, Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, who was convicted in 1981 – before the inception of whole-life tariffs – of murdering 13 women. At his trial at the Old Bailey, Mr Justice Boreham ‘recommended’ Sutcliffe should serve at least 30 years before being considered for parole.
The Ministry of Justice says Sutcliffe is not on its official list of 36 whole-life sentence prisoners because his tariff has never been ‘formally’ set. As detailed earlier, from their inception in 1983 until November 2002, the tariffs for mandatory life sentence prisoners were set by Home Office ministers. As part of this process, prisoners were entitled to submit written representations to the Secretary of State before their recommended tariff was officially set. The representations gave the prisoner the opportunity to say what he or she thought the tariff should be and were typically prepared by a solicitor.
The Secretary of State would not set a prisoner’s tariff until the written representations had been made. Solicitors acting on Sutcliffe’s behalf did not submit these representations, presumably because they were well aware that his sentence would inevitably be increased from the judge’s recommended 30 years.
By virtue of Schedule 22 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, the High Court is responsible for setting minimum terms for all those prisoners who, like Sutcliffe, were sentenced before the Act came into force but did not receive a tariff from the Secretary of State under the previous arrangements. There were almost 720 such prisoners when the Act came into force. The majority of these cases have now had a minimum term set by a High Court judge and several of them feature in later chapters of this book. Decisions on some cases have yet to be made. According to the Ministry of Justice, it is impossible to predict when individual tariffs on these prisoners are likely to be set.
Many of the killers on the official list of whole-life prisoners have appealed, without success, against their sentences. Others have accepted from day one that their crimes warrant the ultimate penalty available to British courts. Some are murderers who have killed again while out of prison on life licence, others are psychopathic serial killers who hunted strangers to satisfy an uncontrollable bloodlust. Several men featured within these pages are sexual perverts who killed to indulge their sick desires; other sexual killers snuffed out the lives of their victims simply to avoid identification. A few murdered purely out of greed.
Some of the killers you will have heard of, others you will not. What they all have in common is the fact that they will die behind bars.
‘I know where you live. I murdered a young girl in Iffley Road four years ago.’
Andrezej Kunowski (to a stranger in the street)
Name: Andrezej Kunowski
Crime: Multiple rape and murder
Date of Conviction: 31 March 2004
Age at Conviction: 47
Like many thousands of Poles before him, Andrezej Kunowski arrived on a coach at London’s Victoria Station in October 1996. He’d endured a bus journey of more than 30 hours from Warsaw and carried with him a tourist visa. But he intended to work in the UK illegally.
Kunowski had £500 in his pocket – a fortune in his homeland but a pittance in one of Europe’s most expensive cities. A tiny man at a diminutive 5ft 3in tall, the former cosmetics salesman would have been rather smarter than his fellow down-at-heel passengers. He tried to dress well and smell sweet, with a fondness for cheap cologne. When his neatly combed brown hair began to thin, he took to wearing a hairpiece. In his homeland, this dapper, shiny-shoed man was dubbed the ‘Little Doctor’.
But there was another difference between Kunowski and the other Poles who arrived at Victoria that unusually-warm morning: he was a psychopathic sexual predator, later described by one senior Metropolitan Police detective as: ‘The most dangerous, and certainly most prolific sex offender I’ve ever met.’
On Thursday, 22 May 1997, foreign student Trajce Konev was delayed while sitting an English exam at college. For the first time ever, he had left his 12-year-old daughter Katerina home alone. ‘I raced home fast on my bicycle,’ recalled Trajce, who two years earlier had moved to the UK with his family from the war-torn Balkans. He was already worried because his daughter hadn’t answered the phone when he called to check she was OK before setting off. He arrived at his first-floor flat in Iffley Road, Hammersmith, West London, at 4.30pm to find the front door open and the living room door jammed shut.
Trajce continued: ‘I knocked on the door in case Katerina was changing and said, “It’s Daddy, open up!” There was no answer. I thought