Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (34 page)

We tried everything to get that bird back but nothing seemed to work. Rose returned around four and Jack was still high up on the bars near the ceiling of H-wing, chirruping and laughing at us. Rose did not look happy.

‘Rose,’ I said, ‘I can’t get Jack back. I’ve been trying all after- noon.’

‘Right!’ she shouted, ‘I’ve had enough of this. Jack, get in that cage, it’s teatime. Get in that cage.’

Instantly Jack flew down from his perch, over my head and into his cage. I was amazed. Rose just laughed.

Initially you perceive people for their case and your judgements are made accordingly. My impressions of Rose were challenged constantly.

It was the same with Rena. She was in her early twenties and as cute as a button to look at. She also possessed that elusive spark of a bright young woman who is ready to meet life head-on. But there was another side to her.After years of neglect and torture her three-year-old son was found dead, tied up in her bedroom, as she slept with her boyfriend. The baby had numerous broken bones and his battered body was dehydrated, malnourished, covered in cigarette burns and black with bruises. Rena was serving a
10
-year sentence.

The case was shocking. Everyone in the prison, as you can imagine, treated her dreadfully. Inevitably I was forced to speak with her. If you are housed in the same facility, your path will eventually cross with that of someone you have no intention of ever conversing with. Most of the time your feelings towards that person are formed by the case in question.The curious thing with Rena was that her personality never really tallied with her actions.

She had an acceptable face. Sometimes we even laughed together. It was the same with Rose.

She never actually said to me that she was innocent, but when she talked about Fred I would just sit there and think to myself, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. She was spouting all this stuff about the trial, about her treatment during the trial and what a psychopath he was.

‘Sandra,’ she would say, her voice lifting, ‘He [Fred] was a fucking psychopath. Do you know what a psychopath is?’

‘No, Rose,’ I replied,‘I don’t think I do, but I think you’re going to tell me.’

‘Do you know why he fucking hung himself?’

‘No.To protect you, I suppose. Or he wanted to take the easy way out?’

She was foaming at the mouth by now. This is what she did when she was excited.

‘No, no, no,’ she screamed, ‘none of those. I’ll tell you why, because all their lives they are planning the ultimate fucking murder. Do you know what the ultimate murder is?’

‘No, Rose,’ I replied, nervously,‘I don’t.’

‘Their own.Their own murder.That’s the ultimate murder for a fucking psychopath. He planned all his life to kill himself.When it came down to it, he carried out the ultimate murder and hung himself. Not for me. For himself.’

I was stunned by her conversation, the chill of it and the matter- of-fact common sense of it. It seemed quite a profound analysis from an uneducated woman.

I am still not at all sure whether Rose West is mad, sad, or just down right bad. Never once did she speak highly of FredWest, but perhaps my own mind was so frazzled that I could no longer think rationally. What does go through my mind, now that I have met her, is whether or not she received a fair trial. I am not saying I believe she is innocent – far from it – but I don’t know whether she knew for sure whatWest was doing in the cellar of their house.

‘Why was it only Rose who was arrested,’ she constantly asked, ‘when that house was full of people for years? Why weren’t any of the lodgers ever arrested as well? If I’m supposed to have known what he was doing why wasn’t any one else supposed to have known?’

Until very recently her lawyer was preparing a fresh attempt to clear her name. However, Rose decided that she would resist the temptation to appeal, knowing that if she ever were released she would never be accepted back into society…

After months of feeling it was impossible to continue I calmed down, accepted being on H-wing and accepted I was no different from many of the other women being held there. Home Office ministers, prison ministers and prison staff had all told me there was no chance of me getting a transfer out for at least three years so I had no choice but to deal with it.

‘Gregory,’ barked one of the screws one afternoon, after I’d been called down to the wing office, ‘you’ve been placed on a
20
–
52
order.’

In layman’s terms, this basically meant I was now considered a potential suicide risk. If I hadn’t known the consequences of that I would have found it hilarious. I was now feeling OK about things and yet now they were putting me on a
15
-minute suicide watch!

For the following week I had officers coming to look in my cell at
15
-minute intervals and a file followed me everywhere I went. Written into that file went any observations regarding mood swings, behavioural traits, and changes in attitude, communication problems and any comments I happened to make.

Guards came by and sat with me, while others enquired about my birds, my family, my friends and prison life. A certain shame hung over me. I didn’t like their attention and felt that most of them were insincere, but I was no longer feeling the way I had been feeling previously.Why had they not noticed then?

During this time, late one Sunday night, Sue and I stood at our cell windows, watching an ambulance crew walk into the men’s prison. Shortly afterwards the governor came in and then they called the prison chaplain.An hour after the ambulance crew had arrived, they took out a young man on a stretcher covered by a sheet. He was
26
years old and had served
16
months on remand. His cellmate had woken to find him hanging from the top bunk. Obviously the suicide-watchers had neglected their duties.

Every night, during my
20
–
52
, officers appeared in my cell, turned the light on and woke me up to see if I was alive.

‘If I’m dead, can’t you deal with it in the morning?’ I’d shout. ‘Why do you have to know now?’

A suicide watch is enough to encourage anyone with even the remotest suicidal tendencies to just go ahead and do it.

‘Bang, bang, bang.’ Depending on the occasion, officers would appear every day early in the morning and do their LBB checks – locks, bolts and bars.They would bang on all the bars of the cell to make sure they hadn’t been sawed through during the night.Then they would thump on all the walls. Fists thudded against steel and bricks.They checked all the bars, then they checked to see if there had been any security violations; they looked under the bed and thumped any pictures stuck on the wall.

Every day they would come in and thump around, sometimes even twice a day. If they came early on a weekend morning, I tried hard to ignore them and would usually get a poke in the side to make sure I was still there and not just a bag of pillows. Most of the officers, I think, watched too many bad prison movies.

There were so many difficult people in this prison, and the events that took place on an almost daily basis were shocking, frightening and, occasionally, funny. I don’t want to identify all the women I came across in Durham, who caused certain things to happen, but their stories give a flavour of the kind of place Durham is.

L never said much about her case or why she was serving a life sentence, but her heavy eyes and general air of despair told their own stories. Once, I remember, we were walking together in the exercise yard and she was rambling on about how much she was looking forward to her visit at the weekend. Politely, I asked who was coming to see her.

‘Just some Christians,’ she replied. She proceeded to tell me how she had brought some lads round to her house and together they had killed her father.

‘He must have been a bad guy, your dad, eh?’ I asked, a little shocked.

‘No, not really,’ she smiled,‘it just kind of happened.’

Often in prison stories there’s really no point to them at all. They’re just too crazy to explain.That’s why these people are here.

Durham became more than a synonym for horror to me; it became a category of it.

Another time two prisoners were arguing over something, and one screamed at the other,‘At least I didn’t kill my own children.’ One of them had stabbed her husband to death, and the other had poisoned her two young children. Can you imagine, two women using the deaths of two children to win an argument about their own morality? Before long their voices faded. Even horror turns to dust.

Zeena went to Asia and bought a matchbox full of arsenic and poured it in a samosa that she had cooked for her abusive husband. He had been making advances on her
14
-year-old daughter so, rather than have her daughter go through the abuse she had herself suffered, she poisoned him. She is serving life for pre- meditated murder.

Then there was Jane who had stabbed her boyfriend’s wife. She had been sleeping with this man for several months and, in a fren- zied attack, she had stabbed the woman over
30
times, in front of their two young children. Just a few months after she arrived on the wing, she decided to turn into a Christian. A short time later

she was confirmed and organised a ‘party’ for everyone on the wing. I declined the invitation although one tabloid newspaper, the following Sunday, included an article about me having gone to the party virtually hand in hand with RosemaryWest. Rose hadn’t gone either.

Tiny Tears and Winnie had both taken ‘hits’ out on their hus- bands. Both men had been murdered because the wives had preferred the new men in their lives and they didn’t want to share the proceeds of the marriage out between them.

Do these stories matter? Are they even true? In prison, espe- cially in Durham, the answers are never meant to be easy.A lot of the time there’s no point; they’re just stories. But they’ll probably stick with you for another
20
years.

Not all the women I met in Durham were mad, bad or evil.When I first met Sue May I thought she was just one of the many nutty jailbirds I’d come across so many times over the years. Sue con- stantly went out to exercise, whatever the weather, wearing a pair of cycling shorts and carrying a bag of bread to feed the sparrows.
This mad old jailbird
, I thought to myself,
going out in shorts to feed the birds
. A number of times I walked around the yard with her. Sue’s a talker and every day she’d tell me about her case, the way the police had handled it and how her lawyer had not offered any defence at her trial. She was innocent of the crime she’d been accused of, she said, and I took absolutely no notice of any of it because you hear these stories all the time inside. I sometimes used

to think I was the only guilty person in prison.

After a while I thought about the things Sue was saying. I’d question her at length, trying to catch her out with something she had said earlier. But her stories always added up. Out of the blue, I’d quiz her on some small detail, pretending I was a little con- fused, but the responses always flowed without her having to think about it and always linked in perfectly with something she had said earlier.

On
12
March
1992
Sue discovered the body of her aunt, Hilda Marchbank, a frail
89
-year-old woman, in her aunt’s house, which had been ransacked. Immediately a neighbour called the police. Eighteen days later, Sue was arrested and charged with murder. For several years, Sue had been her principal carer, visiting several times a day to provide meals and clean up.

The police initially claimed Sue had killed her aunt for money; it was later shown, however, that Sue had been given power of attorney over her aunt’s affairs some years previously, so the police dropped that claim, arguing, instead, that the two women had rowed. There were clear indications of an attempted burglary at the house but the police failed to pursue this.

Typically, her inexperienced lawyer did not present evidence that would help her to the jury, and much evidence against her went unchallenged. An unidentified male footprint was found in the wardrobe and unidentified fibres were found on Hilda’s hand.

Similarly, an unidentified red car was seen parked outside the old woman’s home for
15
minutes at a time when the murder could have taken place. Incredibly, a man with a record for burglary informed his wife of Hilda’s murder one hour before Sue discov-

ered the body.The jury knew none of this.

There is no evidence to prove Sue guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Sue had no history of violence of any kind and she had no motive to kill her aunt. It didn’t take very long for me to realise she was serving a life sentence for a crime she hadn’t committed and, the more I listened, the more my faith in the British system of justice shattered. Was it possible that the police in this country could be as corrupt as they are in other countries? Before Sue’s story I would never have believed it. Sue will never be released unless she admits guilt and shows remorse, something that she will never be able to do.

I cannot possibly do Sue May’s case justice in this book, the details need a book of their own. But I defy anyone to read about her case and still say that they think she murdered her aunt. I have

no idea how Sue manages to cope with the massive injustice she has lived with for a decade. Sue lost her appeal in London on Friday
7
December
2001
.

My grandfather had not been well for a long time. On the day before New Year’s Eve
1998
, I telephoned home and my dad told me that he was in hospital but they had been to see him and he was fine. Fine! How the hell can he be fine, I wanted to know, if he’s in hospital? The following day, at
4
o’clock in the morning, a guard came banging on the cell door.

‘Get up,’ he shouted,‘get up.’ Bang, bang, bang. ‘What’s the noise about?

‘Out.You’re going out today,’ was all that the guard said.

Christ, where the hell was I going?
At 5 o’clock I was taken out of the prison in a Category-A bullet-proof van, flanked by five prison officers wearing bullet-proof vests, and driven to the Victoria Hospital in Dundee, Scotland.An armed police escort led the way. No sooner had I walked in to the room where my grand- father lay than I had to walk straight out again. I knew he was dying.