Peterhead (24 page)

Another resident of Peterhead was Robert Black the infamous child killer. In 2012 in a Channel 5 TV series
Killers Behind Bars
Professor David Williams says he believes Black may be the most prolific child killer in British criminal history. Black had already been convicted of four murders. Professor Williams said, “I am convinced this is just the tip of the iceberg.” The eminent criminologist had met a Scottish policeman, DCI Andrew Watt, who had investigated the murder of one of Black’s victims. Similarities to unsolved child murders were noted. He also studied interviews with Black recorded in Peterhead. In the programme Professor Williams called for a series of unsolved child murder cases to be reopened.

The enormity of the crimes committed by such men as those shows the significance of the unit that went from a low-key start to end up being named as a “centre of excellence” in dealing with sex offenders. To receive such an accolade for containing and attempting to treat such dangerous deviants was a remarkable achievement and a tribute to the staff. But it is dispiriting to note that the first transfer of sex offenders to Glenochil in Clackmannanshire met with criticism in some quarters, as it raised that old prison bogey: overcrowding. The problem was highlighted in a report by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons Brigadier Hugh Munro late in 2010. He said that the impact of the transfer of sex offenders from Peterhead (to Glenochil) had been “considerable.” His report stated: “There is very strict segregation of these prisoners from others within the regime and this causes restrictions, particularly in terms of access to activities and programmes.

“Inevitably each of the two different populations perceives that they have lost out. Overcrowding has become more acute and the instances of ‘doubled-up’ single cells in Harviestoun Hall caused a disproportionate number of complaints to inspectors.”

This problem occurred when the first tranche of prisoners was transferred and the report concluded it was a problem that needed to be addressed. But I fear that the old bugbear of “doubling up” will linger on even in the modern prison system until any new build prison programme is completed. And the policy of having two communities – sex offenders and run of the mill cons – in one establishment is never going to be without problems. Mind you, it would be naïve to expect the reorganisation of penal affairs in the North-East brought about by the demolition of Peterhead and the building of Grampian not to have hit rough waters at some time or other. Or to have an effect on the penal system in the country as a whole.

The resolution of the dispersal v. concentration argument is interesting in that the authorities ended up putting so much weight on the visiting facilities. Down the years the remoteness from the Central Belt has been a huge disadvantage for Peterhead prisoners of all types, not just the sex offenders. In an interview for a book on his life, TC Campbell, one of two men cleared after years in jail for the Ice Cream Wars murders, said when questioned about the effect the sentence had on his family life: “There was no relationship at all. When I was in Peterhead prison I was only allowed one visit a month that lasted only half an hour and at that time there was no motorway to Peterhead or Aberdeen. There were only country roads and narrow lanes to get there, so my family had to travel 300 miles on bad roads in terrible weather to see me. By the time they got there they were so exhausted that all they could do was sit down and rest. They were not fully rested from their first journey before they were on the road back. I would say that the relationship was torn apart by the whole experience.”

But even though the new Peterhead, HMP Grampian, will be a general prison for prisoners from the North-East of Scotland there may well be a few sex offenders in it if they come from that area. Currently approximately half of the sex offender population is located at Glenochil, the rest being distributed throughout other prisons. Actually, it was only about half of the sex offender population that was ever housed at Peterhead anyway, since the sex offender element of the population is around 600 and the most that Peterhead took was 300. The full-scale sex offenders unit is now history. But the role it played in the treatment and rehabilitation, if possible, of such people will not easily be forgotten.

As the old prison, totally unfit for purpose as they say, staggered and stuttered to final closure in the dying days of 2013 there was one part of the regime that had improved on the harsh old days of the 1930s. With a couple of interesting exceptions, escapes were a thing of the past. The warning prison bell no longer tolled as frequently as it once did. Governors in the final years slept more peacefully than their predecessors, unworried that a sudden phone call would alert them to an escaper. The good folk in the town and in the countryside around the prison were also less likely to be disturbed by a radio newsflash indicating that it might not be safe to walk the dark streets or open a shed in the garden or search a hayloft in a farm. Actually, only one of the final escapes in Peterhead’s history was what a connoisseur of such things would call a proper “over-the-wall” episode. The other could be more accurately described as a prisoner absconding.

The escaper in the late ’80s was a guy called Bill Varey, who was a real hard ticket, a military man who, it was rumoured, had been at one time in the legendary French Foreign Legion, not an outfit famed for attracting wimps or shrinking violets. But tough enough for the Legion as he was, big Bill had an unsuspected side to his character – like that famous resident of Alcatraz, Robert Stroud, he had a love of birds. This harmless and seemingly constructive part of Bill’s character seemed to pose no threat of escape and the prison authorities positively encouraged his hobby – so much so that he was allowed to build an aviary inside the prison.

Birds, like tropical fish, are judged by some to have a calming influence, though I am not sure you can compare dentists’ surgeries with prison. Aviaries are generally constructed of wire and when building one you need to cut wire and to do that it seems obvious that you need wire-cutters. Such tools are self-evidently not a good idea to hand out to enterprising prisoners! But in the case of Birdman Bill the obvious danger of escape was ignored, as the aviary was to be situated behind high wire walls which were themselves encircled by the daunting stone walls of the prison so that the actual chance of escape seemed remote. In any case, the prison officers were around to keep an eye on things.

Varey was tall, fit and strong, but his captors were not hawk-eyed enough to see what was going on and somehow Bill managed to cut a tiny hole in the first fence, and eventually run across the intervening space in the dark and clamber onto the roof of buildings behind the main gate and then scramble across them on to the top of the perimeter wall. There he faced a frightening jump of around thirty feet onto flower beds below. The soft earth of the beds had some cushioning effect. But not enough to prevent him severely damaging an ankle and not long after the daring and cleverly contrived escape he was hunted down – something of a lame duck, you might say – in the Hatton Hotel just a few miles down the main road south. It was an achievement in itself to get out but if Bill had any notion of a long spell of freedom or a return to the Legion he must have been disappointed in that he did not even make it to Aberdeen.

The fact is these days every governor is pretty safe in assuming that his guests are unlikely to escape when held in the actual prison. Modern jails with smooth unclimbable walls, dozens of CCTV cameras, recessed rone pipes and enough barbed wire to secure a herd of Texas longhorns are not the easy touch of the old days. And though the continental criminal classes seem to have a penchant for helicopters dropping in on prisons and removing thugs from behind bars, there have been no such aerial spectaculars in Scotland. Though, ironically, one of the most noticeable things about Peterhead is the almost constant buzz of the choppers ferrying men and supplies to the North Sea rigs. Good cover for an enterprising mobster planning an escape?

Any trip outside jail, for whatever reason, is when the wily take the chance to do a runner. The story of Thomas Gordon is a good example.

Gordon was a convicted murderer who escaped from Peterhead Community Hospital in October 1996. He had been taken there from the prison for treatment to stab wounds after an incident in the prison. He managed to slip away from his guards and was on the run for eleven days before being recaptured in London. In this he had beaten the legendary Ramensky, who was generally recaptured a few miles from the prison.

Gordon’s piece of enterprise in giving the two officers who had taken him to hospital the slip was rewarded with a classic “WANTED” poster showing a drawing of him as a dangerous-looking fellow and wording to the effect that he was on the run from prison and should not be approached. It was a dramatic piece of artwork that would not have looked out of place in Dodge City and it is still held in the prison records. But despite its artistic merit, I doubt if its circulation around the Peterhead and Aberdeen areas and the countryside nearby played a role in his recapture when he hid amid the teeming millions of the English capital.

The Varey and Gordon affairs were interesting events in the post-Second World War history of the prison but they do nothing to challenge the record of Gentle Johnny Ramensky as the escaper supreme – he stays at the top of the “over-the-wall” league.

Gordon’s escape led to disciplinary action. The senior of the two officers who had taken him to hospital was sacked and took the authorities to court for unfair dismissal. The case dragged on for a couple of years before it was finally ended with a financial out of court settlement. Reinstatement was not deemed to fit the bill in the case of this officer, although the junior officer escaped with a fine of £1,000 and had his period of probation extended.

The previous year had been notable in news terms for the bizarre death by hanging of a serial pervert called Graham Anderson. Anderson, forty-five, was said to be one of the most hated men in the prison, which is saying something. He had ended up “up north” after a series of sex offences. These included exposing himself to young boys and chasing a woman up a street while naked. These particular offences took place just weeks after his release after a sentence imposed for indecent assault. So much for jail as a deterrent!

Always a problem inmate, he was said to have on one occasion tried to castrate himself with a razor blade when in his cell. On the day of his death warders had been concerned about him and burst into his cell to find him partially clothed and hanging with a bin bag over his head. According to a prison source items used in kinky sex games lay near the dangling body. How these objects found their way into a cell is another story but one that seemed to be ignored at the time. It was thought the death was not suicide but a sex game that had gone wrong.

The incident may have been unique in Peterhead but auto-erotic asphyxiation which is aimed at heightening sexual pleasure kills around a hundred or so tormented souls in Britain each year. And it is not a phenomenon confined to prisons. There are many other occasions when people die accidentally this way playing kinky sex games. Notable examples have included politicians and show-business celebrities. No matter, the shock of what the officers found when they entered the cell is another example of the pressure on men and women in the prison service. The hardened cons in the jail at the time had no sympathy for Anderson, indeed they thought that death by hanging was an apt end for such a “monster.” It was deemed that it was a fitting way for Anderson to end his existence.

There is a further irony in this hanging in that Peterhead itself was never a place of execution. That infamy belongs to Craiginches prison, also bound for history via the wreckers’ ball, at the end of 2013. This was where the last execution in Scotland was carried out. On the morning of 15 August 1963, twenty-one-year-old Henry Burnett took the drop on new gallows specially built in the prison to Home Office specifications. It was the first hanging in Aberdeenshire since 1891. The youngster had at his trial pleaded insanity at the time he had killed a love rival with a shotgun blast full in the face. The court heard of a violent past and attempted suicide. But they only took twenty-five minutes to decide not to accept the claim of insanity or diminished responsibility. After the grim ritual of donning the black cap and the pronouncing of the death sentence both his own family and that of the victim petitioned for a reprieve but Burnett himself, clearly from reports at the time a mixed-up and mentally troubled young man, made no appeal.

So into Craiginches on that summer day stepped hangman Harry Allen, the man who had despatched serial murderer Peter Manuel in the Barlinnie hanging shed five years before. Allen was one of the last to ply his trade and came to prominence in the years after the more famous Albert Pierrepoint had retired after a falling out with the authorities over the size of his fees as a paid killer. Incidentally, in a bizarre change of opinion before he died, Pierrepoint went on record as saying he did not consider hanging a deterrent.

Some of the horror of legal killing is exposed in the tale told about Allen, a cool customer, and his visit to Aberdeenshire. Shortly before escorting Burnett to the gallows and putting a hood over his head then the noose (this sequence was followed to prevent the up draft from the falling body blowing the hood off the head), he lit a cigarette and left it burning in an ashtray. Executions by such as Allen and Pierrepoint were swift and efficient affairs, sometimes taking just a matter of seconds, sometimes less than ten after the victim had been led or dragged into the hanging chamber. After Burnett had disappeared down the trap to eternity Allen was soon back in the holding cell finishing off his cigarette and asking if there was any tea on the go. A sickening little detail of the nature of legal killing.

The Varey and Gordon affairs and the death of Anderson were isolated incidents in the later years when most of the media spotlight and the interest of the public tended to centre on the sex offenders unit and its future. It is interesting that in some way the unit was thought to have contributed to diluting the old wild “Hate Factory” wars, easing the conflict between staff and inmates. In the bad old days the real hard cons let their hatred simmer and then suddenly boil over. One veteran prison officer told me that he believed some of the prisoners took a perverse pride in the place’s reputation as the toughest jail in the land. He said some of the guys “needed a good smash-up” every year or so to maintain the prison’s top of the league place in the list of hard jails. Some of the officers themselves I suspect took a little secret pride in their status in such a legendary place filled with hard men.