Bereavement due to traumatic death

One of the hardest things about it was the issue about the whole court proceedings, which the children were very desperate to go to, and because of lack of communication with the crown prosecution service we actually missed all of those [court proceedings].

 

The first time we were told he was summonsed and he didn’t turn up. And the judge at the time said, “I’m not prepared to go any further until he does turn up.” So the second time he did turn up, and said he’d changed his lawyer so he wanted an adjournment. And the third time they told us it would just be a charge and then you, you come back on a second occasion for sentencing. And the police had said to us, well the charge only takes five minutes, you turn up, they say, “you’re charged”, and the time for you to attend is to come the second time when its, when it’s sentencing. But what in actual fact happened, because by this stage he’d been three times, when he turned up they actually did the charge and the sentencing and everything, so we just got a phone call three days later saying, it’s all happened, it’s over and done with, and that’s what happened. And again, that was something that made us all very, very angry.

  

 

He just got a fine yes.

 

We did yes. And to be absolutely fair to the police, they were equally angry about it because they too hadn’t had communication from the Crown Prosecution Service about it. It wasn’t entirely; it definitely wasn’t entirely the police fault. And in fact we had a family liaison officer, and then his sergeant, they came to the house and apologised actually, about it all. And I, I actually wrote a letter to the Chief Constable to say, look this family has had, is experiencing this traumatic situation which has been exacerbated by all this nonsense. 

Yes, we had a meeting with the CPS first, that was with all the family involved. We were told in, in as much detail as they could tell us that they thought it was unlikely it was going to be successful. And they said they would do their best, but its, but it was actually finding out where the “dangerous” was in the charge “death by dangerous driving”. It’s where actually the “dangerous” was, despite the fact he’s killed my wife, he’s gone onto the wrong side of the road and killed her with no explanation. Proving it proved to be exceptionally difficult as things turned out. So we were prepared for that. I was given a tour of the courtroom, it’s a big old Victorian courtroom in another town, just to get a feel of the place, the size of the building, because I’ve never been in a courtroom myself, just to, the smell of it, everything, just the feel of the seats, and just, just things like that so we were, I was I was prepared for it yes, I was prepared for it.

 

I just wanted to, all I was thinking about was visualising the final day, when a member of the jury would stand up and say guilty or not guilty.

 

That’s all I kept thinking about for months, that, that moment, as it transpired it never even got that far, the court case had collapsed after four days, but you felt very removed from everything, even though the man who’d killed my wife was sat just below me in his little thing he has to sit in, it didn’t really register with me.

 

No. No. He never said a thing in the court.

And we’d been told from the beginning that he’s stabbed her once in a carotid artery. And actually it turned out that he’d stabbed her once in a carotid artery, but he’s actually stabbed her a few other places as well.

 

I think it turned out she had about thirteen… I could be wrong… it might not be as many as that… wounds. It looked like he’d been holding the knife towards her and he stuck the knife in a few places. And this particular day [in court], they were talking about the fact that she’d actually sat after he’d stabbed her. She’d managed to get off the sofa. But she must have sat there for a while. And then she collapsed on the floor. And his auntie she were crying, she was still crying outside and she was saying, “It was awful, it was really awful. I can’t believe he did that to her.”

 

 

He pleaded not guilty. He, he said… he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but not guilty to murder. He said she’d provoked him.

 

She’d made him do it. She’d gone for him first. She was… according to him she was sat on the sofa peeling potatoes and they’d had a row. And she’d gone for him with a knife. And he said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I just saw red and took the knife off her and stabbed her once and then she were dead.” But then he went out and bought some heroin and took a heroin overdose and lay down beside my sister. But that’s him that wasn’t thinking straight. And then like I said in court it came out that he’d stabbed her more than once. And they’d actually done some, some sort of test on her hands to see if she had been peeling potatoes. And they said, no, the only fingerprints that were on the knife were his. There was no starch on my sister. There was no starch on the knife. They just… even the judge in his summing up said, “You’ve just told us one pack of lies after another to save your own skin.” He said, “At the end of day an eleven year old child is without his mother and a newborn baby was never born because you’ve taken the mother away.”

 

 

Yes within a couple of hours. I think it was probably about three hours. They found him guilty of murder. And he got fourteen and, fourteen years so many days because he’d done so long on remand.  

Yes, these brothers were charged jointly with Westley’s murder. Sadly the one that had caused the whole thing to unfold in the first place, the brother that had unreasonably tried to push in front of Westley, we subsequently came to realise that they had both been involved in violence, in carrying knives, and probably now they both would have been found guilty of murder. But as it happened the one that caused the whole thing was found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter, and is due to be released in March of 2009. That’s very hard for me and the rest of the family. I’ve tried very much to protect Westley’s brother and sister from that knowledge or from the awareness too much of that situation because Westley’s sister’s birthday is in March, I will probably have to speak to them nearer the time, because I don’t know how much of it will be reported in the papers. When the actual appeal, the last appeal went ahead earlier this year because the appeal was being heard in London, and it wasn’t common knowledge, I didn’t think for one moment that it would be reported in the local papers, and it was splashed all over the papers so once again you know, as much as I try and protect the family, invariably it creeps up to bite you somewhere.

 

The other one was found guilty of murder. But he was given a life sentence, but that life sentence means that he will serve 15 years before he can apply for parole. Now, he had previous history of violence. Why has he only got a tariff of 15 years, a starting tariff effectively, under the present rules through the criminal justice act of 2003, that is the starting tariff for a life sentence for someone over 18 years of age.

 

That’s the minimum. Now if they had shot my son they would probably have, or he rather, the one that was found guilty of murder, would’ve probably got 20 to 25.

 

Well exactly, why does it make a difference? And that’s been the main reason why, where I started out with the campaign, and that is a) to raise the awareness of the fact that if you stab somebody in the chest or in the neck the likelihood is that person will die, and therefore  that’s  almost an act of execution. That person hasn’t set out to harm the person; they’ve set out to most probably kill the person.

 

And in those circumstances, with a history of violence and a history of carrying knives, knife crime if you like, knife based murder and a murder to a gun should be a comparable life sentence. Now from the original campaign, of asking the government to deal with knife crime and gun crime in a similar sense, we have actually on the lower end, people that are found to be carrying a knife or a gun got close to the sentences that can be imposed, but invariably they’re not being imposed. But in terms of murder and manslaughter, they are still very far apart on  the actual life sentences, tariffs that are given.