Inseparable Bond (5 page)

He was
sentenced to thirty years for his crimes, with refusal of any
parole.

He had only
served two years of his sentence when he was now eating his
breakfast next to John Bell, whose crimes had a similarity to his
own.

They walked
together to the exercise yard and joined three hundred other
inmates walking around at the command of a group of screws.

‘Watch that
bastard over there, Bell,’ Cole said as he pointed to a shaven
headed ugly man who was kicking a ball fiercely against the high
wall of the compound.

He was
pointing at Peter Booth, another lifer who killed men, women,
children and animals, in fact he would kill anything he found.

Peter’s
criminal life started at an early age when he witnessed the
exploits at first hand in the tiny village of Spofforth in North
Yorkshire. His father would arrive home drunk every afternoon, he
beat the three children and sexually violated his wife in front of
them.

He also
committed incest with his 13-year-old daughter, Peter Booth
followed his father’s example a few years later. From the age of 9,
he also had another teacher; the local dogcatcher introduced him to
torturing animals. Peter was an enthusiastic pupil, and progressed
from dogs, sheep, pigs, goats, geese and swans; what excited him
most was the sight of their blood. He frequently cut off the heads
of swans and drank the blood that spurted out.

He soon
switched his attentions to human victims.

As a boy he
had drowned two playmates while all three, swam around in a lake a
few miles outside the village. By the age of 16 he was living in
York with a masochistic woman who enjoyed being beaten and half
strangled. She had a daughter of 16 also and all three enjoyed a
sordid co-existence, which was interrupted when his attempts at
theft and fraud landed him a short spell in Wakefield Young
Offenders Institute.

He always
thought that the injustice and inhumanity of his treatment in the
institution led to his blood-soaked career as a sadistic
killer.

He was not the
ideal prisoner; he would deliberately break prison rules to gain
solitary confinement, where he indulged his erotic reveries.

When he was
released from prison, Peter Booth began to turn his daydreams into
nightmare reality, He became an arsonist, the sight of flames
delighted him but above all it was the excitement of seeing
people’s desperate attempts to extinguish the fire and the
agitation of those who saw their property being destroyed.

His first
attempts of murder were unsuccessful, as after meeting a girl in a
local coffee bar in York, he assaulted her during intercourse at
the back of the Minster. He left her body for dead but no body was
ever found. It was assumed that the girl recovered enough to crawl
away, too ashamed or scared to report the incident to the
police.

Eight-year-old
Janet Richmond was not that lucky, She was found in bed, violently
raped with her throat cut, her father was arrested and tried but
through the lack of evidence against him, he was released, but the
shame of the charge stuck with him and he committed suicide shortly
afterwards.

Starting his
spree of killings and avoiding arrest at such an early age, he was
now on a mission. He broke in to the Cow and Calf public house in
Fishergate in York, where the owners lived upstairs.

As he climbed
into an open toilet window on the ground floor, he went up the
stairs to discover a child asleep. Her little head with blonde hair
was facing the window as she slept; he put his hands around her
tiny throat and strangled her for about a minute. The child woke up
and struggled but lost consciousness. He took out a small
pocket-knife and slit her throat. He sipped the blood as it
trickled onto the mat beside the bed.

It lasted a
couple of minutes, then he left the room and climbed back through
the open window. The next day he was sitting in a café and read all
about the murder in the newspaper, people were talking about it all
around him, the horror and indignation fuelled his appetite for
more.

He met a
string of women and married one of them. For a time, he gave up
petty crime and murder and got a job in Rowntrees chocolate works
where he became a popular person and a respected pillar of society;
quiet, charming, carefully dressed and meticulous about his
appearance.

With his
vanity, he had affairs with many women but his friends never told
his wife and his conquests were not prepared to confide that Booth
was a rough lover who enjoyed beating and half-choking them, always
preferring painful anal sex.

Soon his
attacks on his mistresses became more and more violent; soon he was
attacking innocent strangers with scissors and knives, aroused by
the sight of their blood. As he constantly escaped detection, he
stepped up the rate of attacks, varying his style to cover his
tracks.

A few months
later, the City of York was in the grip of terror. Police had
pinned twenty perverted crimes, including four killings, down to
someone who seemed to have vampire tendencies, but they had no
clues to the monster loose in their city.

With the
police frantically searching the city and surrounding area as far
away as Harrogate, two girls, one 14 and her 5-year-old sister,
walked from the playground and down the lane through the woods
towards a row of shops. Booth approached the girls and said, ‘I’ve
forgotten my cigarettes, would you run to those shops and buy me
some and spend the rest of the money on sweets for you, I’ll look
after your little sister while you go.’ Off she ran skipping down
the lane holding the £5 note as she ran.

Booth picked
up her 5-year-old sister, carried her into the dark woods and
efficiently slaughtered her, strangling her and cutting her throat
with his pocket-knife. When her sister arrived with the cigarettes,
he took the cigarettes and did the same to her.

Twelve hours
later, he drove to the other side of the city where he noticed a
teenager heading towards a wooded area. He stopped the car and
followed her, He grabbed her and threw her to the ground and he
attempted to rape her, but she fought him off. He produced his
pocket-knife and began stabbing her in a frenzy, piercing her neck,
shoulder and back. As she rolled over, the knife snapped leaving
the blade wedged in her back. She was lucky, her screams alerted a
passer-by and she was rushed to hospital, but Booth had escaped yet
again. The newspapers and local radio continued to report his
exploits with mounting hysteria.

The police now
had their first clue of the broken knife blade, which doctors
retrieved from the girl’s back, but Booth’s appetite, for blood,
was increasing.

She was not
his last victim and the attempted murders and vicious attacks
continued around the city through the winter and early spring,
attracting continuous newspaper coverage and radio and television
broadcasts.

All women were
now on their guard and warned to stay off the city streets after
dark, but Sally Newsome, a 21-year-old waitress had read the
warnings about the vampire while working in Knaresborough twenty
miles away, but when she was sacked from her job, she boarded a
train to York, her desperation for employment outweighed any fears
of the vampire, as he had become known.

As she left
the train, she was approached by a man who offered to show her the
way to a girl’s hostel, after establishing she had no accommodation
for the night.

She
accompanied him happily but as they approached a group of trees,
she drew back. The man assured her she had nothing to fear, but she
refused to walk any further. As they argued, a man appeared from
the shadows of the trees and asked, ‘Is everything alright,’
Sally’s escort ran off and she was left alone with her rescuer –
Richard Booth.

She was
convinced that he had saved her from a fate worse than death, or
death itself.

Being shaken
by her ordeal, she felt safe with her rescuer and agreed to walk
with him to the hostel, unaware that she was being misled for the
second time in less than an hour.

Booth led her
along the dark path then lunged at her, gripping her throat and
attempting to rape her against a tree. Sally struggled but Booth
was too strong for her, then as she was about to pass out, he raped
her. She screamed hysterically, which frightened Booth as he ran
off in to the dark woods.

A woman
walking her dog found Sally Newsome half naked. She was taken to
hospital and was able to give a detailed description of Booth.

Booth realised
he had now blown his cover, as the net was closing in. He
approached his small house and went inside to his waiting wife. He
looked bedraggled, his clothes torn, with blood on his shirt. His
wife took one look at him and left the house.

She reported
this to the police immediately, although she had suspected for some
time that he could have been implicated in the crimes.

The police
visited the house to question him. Realising his murderous spree
was at an end, he confessed to all the attacks and murders.

The trial held
in Leeds Crown Court was almost a forgone conclusion; thousands
surrounded the court house to try and catch a glimpse of the
vampire, yet now John Bell was within arms reach of this monster as
he kicked his ball again the high perimeter fence of the prison
exercise yard.

Bell and the
other inmates were called back into the building where they all
returned to their working departments, Bell being in the prison
laundry.

He went into
the toilet before entering the laundry, when he heard a scuffling
sound behind one of the latrines. He slowly peered his head around
the partition to see a young inmate, no older than 25, being forced
to give oral sex to a prison officer where he was choking on the
penis being thrust down the lad’s throat.

Bell
immediately backed away and continued his walk to the laundry
room.

He had
disturbed the couple and was now being followed by the screw who
pinned Bell against the wall saying, ‘If you say anything about
what you saw, it will be down your throat next,’ and released his
hold and pushed him down the corridor.

Bell had soon
realised that all he saw and all he heard was not to be mentioned
and the sex offenders prison wing he was living on was a dangerous
and inhospitable place and to keep yourself to yourself at all
times.

He disliked
the laundry job, but all new inmates had to do their stint in that
hot and dirty atmosphere.

There were
certain other jobs which were much sought after and that may well
carry influences and power in the prisoner community, these are to
be found wherever things that are desirable – in the kitchen, in
the stores or to a lesser extent in the library. There is always a
black market in prisons; food, clothes, and books. This is apart
from the trafficking of tobacco and of course drugs, which find
their way into penal institutions.

The prevailing
values are criminal, the economy is characterised by a shortage of
money and of goods, satisfactions are few, a sense of grievance and
of importance abounds where there is little laughter but much
depression, boredom may often be punctured by spite and sometimes
by violence, thus is the society of inmates.

Bell wanted to
do his sentence in peace, where there is a good deal of
co-operation between prisoners and screws and the mutual interest
in preventing the breakdown of the normal functioning of the
institution, all the time each side has its own loyalty.

Being a model
prisoner does earn benefits and Bell wanted to keep well clear of
fights between rival leaders even though they are accepted as
normal behaviour.

Keeping his
nose clean could result in a job in the stores or the library, but
it was early days for him to prove himself.

After his
day’s work, he went back to his cell to see the bookshelf cleared
of magazines and no sign of his cellmate. The bed had been
stripped, revealing only a heavily stained mattress and pillow.

He was now in
his own cell, which was large in comparison to other single cells,
yet this was for three inmates and his privacy would soon be
disturbed with the arrival of two new cellmates.

He remained
alone for the next six weeks, still working in the laundry and
still without friends, as he began to feel the extent of separation
from the outside world where any links between prison and the
outside society consisted only of letters and visits which Bell did
not often receive either, and was restricted to newspapers,
television and radio to realise the developments as the outside
world continued to expand.

He spent his
nights in the television room, watching football or a film. Sundays
were often the worst days as some inmates go to a religious service
in the chapel, not necessarily out of religious conviction, and
then were given longer exercise periods as most of the screws had
their time off and the inmates spent most of the day being locked
up in their cells.

After yet
another day in the sweatbox of the laundry, Bell returned to his
cell to be confronted by a new inmate; he was a tall, thin white
guy dressed in the usual blue overalls and emptying his bag onto
the lower bed on the bunk.

‘Hi, I’m John
Bell, who are you?’ the guy turned to Bell with a frozen smile. ‘Hi
I’m Colin,’ as he quickly turned back to unpacking his bag.

Colin Palmer
had been sentenced to fifteen years for a string of crimes of
various natures.

He was from
Staffordshire and had been born into a respectable hard working
family, four of his brothers and sisters led perfectly normal
lives, but his eldest sister had turned to promiscuity and drug
taking and became an alcoholic in her early teens.