The man Glen was sent to ‘sort out’ was Robert’s friend and housemate, Vincent Smart, who was not at home that night because he was house-sitting for his parents, a few streets away. What makes this case one of the most notable bungled ‘hits’ in British criminal history is that Vincent Smart was white-skinned and the murdered man was black.
Glen was hired by millionaire Robert Lotts, who wanted to end a long-running feud between Smart and his three sons: he believed Smart had been bullying them. Lotts was, for the most part, a legitimate businessman who did not want Smart killed – just hurt badly enough to ensure that he left his children alone. The builder was not used to employing men who commit acts of violence for cash but luckily his brother-in-law, Wayne Wright, was able to put him in touch with Glen, a brutal thug from Fleetwood, Lancashire, who had just the criminal CV Lotts was looking for.
At the trial at Norwich Crown Court in June 2005, Prosecutor Rex Tedd, QC, explained why Glen was more than up for the job. He said: ‘Glen had established himself the credentials that made him an ideal recruit for a contract killer: he had murdered before.’
Glen had previously been jailed for 13 years for viciously bludgeoning to death Ivor Usher, a Blackpool guesthouse owner, on 21 February 1989. He and an accomplice went with the intention simply to rob the gay bachelor of the £5,000 in his safe, but after tying him up Glen got carried away and smashed his skull to pieces with a bar stool and a wrench. In an effort to cover his tracks, he set light to the building. It was this reckless disregard for human life that would lead Glen to go way beyond Lotts’ original plan to scare Smart, and as the prosecution put it, to stab him to death in an ‘explosion of unanticipated violence.’ Robert was caught in that explosion.
Mobile phone records proved Glen was in Farcet village at the time of Robert’s killing and showed how he fled to Blackpool immediately afterwards. They also showed Glen, Lotts and Lotts’ brother-in-law had called each other in the build-up and aftermath of the bloody murder. This, and other forensic evidence placing Glen at the house at the time of the killing, meant that he could not deny being there. So, in a desperate attempt to save his skin, Glen claimed in court that the murder was committed by a shadowy figure named ‘Steve’, whose last name or address he did not know.
Glen told jurors he’d met ‘Steve’ to arrange a cannabis drug deal on the day of the killing and that he came to the house because it ‘seemed convenient.’ He insisted he was only going to the house to ‘have a word’ with Mr Smart, adding that he was there simply as a mediator and that Steve was meant to remain quietly at his side. He told the court: ‘I’m a sucker for a hard luck story – I don’t like to hear of people being subjected to violence or bullying. I planned to take some cannabis round as a peace offering. If I could reason with the guy, I’d sit down and reason with him. I was a peacemaker.’
According to him, his ‘peace-making’ efforts were scuppered because while he was upstairs, looking for the intended target Smart, his criminal acquaintance was busy knifing the man’s housemate. Glen testified: ‘When I got to the bottom of the stairs I saw Steve going through the back door. He [Robert] was trying to follow and I pulled him back. He fell down on the floor and slipped. The blood was everywhere on the floor – I stepped back and saw it all. He shot out of the door. It was all over in a matter of seconds. I was there, but I didn’t stab him; I wasn’t alone. That’s the truth.’
Despite his efforts, Glen’s smokescreen was torn apart by the prosecution. Barrister Tedd QC remarked that, as no unidentified footprints were found in the kitchen or indeed the rest of the house, ‘Steve’ would have had to have been wearing identical trainers to the dead man or identical footwear to Glen’s, whose size-10 Timberland prints were, according to the Forensic Sciences Service, imprinted in the blood which covered the kitchen floor. He said: ‘Otherwise this man, Steve, is not just a man with no surname, no address, no mobile phone – he is a man with no feet.’
Forensic technicians also found a shred of skin underneath one of Robert’s fingernails containing a DNA profile that matched Glen’s.
The prosecution argued that Bogle scraped away a piece of Glen’s skin as he fought off the blade pounding into his body. The murderer was not Steve, said Mr Tedd, but ‘a professional killer, who had travelled to an area where his identity and appearance was completely unknown. That man on the mission was Mr Paul Glen.’
At the end of the five-week trial, the jury of four men and five women was unanimous in their guilty murder verdict. Lotts was later jailed for four years and his brother-in-law, Wayne Wright, to five years in prison after they admitted conspiring to cause Mr Smart grievous bodily harm.
Judge Sir John Blofeld told Glen: ‘As a result of your actions a young man, who had a future before him and a devoted family, lost his life in circumstances which were terrible.’ He added that it was ‘immaterial’ to consider a release date as Glen would never be free. Outraged, the killer protested, ‘Do I not get a chance to say anything?’ as he was led from the dock by police.
Outside court, Robert’s father, Linford, his mother Joyce, brother Paul and sister Donna and close friends grouped together as Linford read out a statement about his much-loved child. He said his son’s killer had ‘got what he deserved’ but that the murder had had a devastating affect on his family. ‘It’s been very difficult,’ he told reporters. ‘My wife is only here in body, her spirit has disappeared somewhere. We will never forget Robert.’
Robert’s older brother Paul remembered a time when he had attempted to emulate his television hero Evel Knievel by riding his tricycle off the patio in the garden of their childhood home in Yaxley, Cambridgeshire. Paul said: ‘He went flying and cut his head open. He had to be taken to hospital, and of course, I got the blame as I was supposed to be looking after him. That has always stuck in my head.
‘He was just a wonderful person. It’s just a shame that he’s not here. There isn’t anything else I can say or do – he isn’t coming back. We will try to get ourselves together; try to move on with our lives as best we can. Robert’s death has left a huge void. It’s just a hole, a chasm, which just can’t be filled. They say time is a great healer. We’ll just have to test that theory for ourselves.’
After his whole life sentence, Glen stewed on the prospect for three months and then, in September 2005, his legal team launched an appeal with the Royal Court of Justice, in London, in a bid to have it reduced. But his sentence was ruled fair because not only had he committed a second murder, he’d again done it for profit.
On 3 February 2007, in an extraordinary ceremony performed by a Catholic priest, Glen was married inside the chapel at Whitemoor High-Security Prison in Cambridgeshire. The bride – 41-year-old Paula Kelly from Liverpool – stayed with friends and family at a threestar hotel prior to the service. Glen gave his address on the marriage certificate as 300–310 Longhill Road, March – the postal address of Whitemoor Prison. Under occupation he described himself as a ‘builder’. On the wedding night, the newlywed Mrs Glen and her entourage gathered again at the hotel, with only the bridegroom absent from the wedding breakfast.
The following month, it would appear Glen was missing his bride because he made an audacious bid to escape from prison. Along with cop killer David Bieber and another prisoner Keith Stewart, he aimed to break out by holding guards hostage with a gun smuggled into a prison wedding. The trio planned for a guest to secretly hand over the weapon at the ceremony of a prisoner to a former jail worker. They would use the gun to negotiate their release and then be picked up by a getaway car. But prison bosses somehow got wind of the plan and Glen, Bieber and Stewart were dragged from their cells and taken to solitary confinement by officers in riot gear.
All three were made to wear striped prison uniforms, only issued to convicts who have tried to escape. A fourth prisoner was placed on a protection wing, suggesting the three were ‘grassed-up’.
Glen was never to consummate his marriage and, under current legislation, never