Thirty-one years ago I was the junior prison officer at HMP Holloway, given the job of processing the arrival of a new inmate whose notoriety preceded her.
Her name was Beverley Allitt, a 24-year-old former nurse now labouring under a far grimmer label: the Angel of Death.
A child-killer, she had been sentenced to 13 concurrent terms of life imprisonment after being found guilty of the murder of four babies and the attempted murder of 11 others.
Driven into the jail amid a riot of photographers’ flashbulbs, Allitt looked like a rabbit in the headlights by the time she arrived at my desk escorted by two prison officers.
When I read out her convictions – you have to ensure that any arriving prisoner understands what is happening to them – her responses were given in a voice so quiet that I had to ask her to speak up.
I remember being struck by how ordinary this serial killer looked, standing there in her prison-issued clothing.
Vanessa Frake MBE, the former head of security and operations at Wormwood Scrubs, recalls the arrival of child killer Beverly Allitt, also known as the Angel of Death, at the prison in 1993
That said, by then I had already learned never to judge a book by its cover, a lesson that would come in handy over the course of my 27-year prison career, latterly as head of security and operations at HMP Wormwood Scrubs.
During that time, I encountered many other women who had been responsible for heinous crimes – among them Moors Murderer Myra Hindley, and serial killer Rose West – and been struck by how normal, mousy and unimpressive they looked.
I was reminded of it again last August, 30 years after Allitt was sent down for life, when another nurse was found guilty of killing the helpless babies in her care.
Lucy Letby – the angelic-looking blonde with a winning smile – was deadlier still: last year she was convicted of murdering seven babies and the attempted murder of six more, a grim tally, which increased earlier this month when she was also found guilty of the attempted murder of another baby in her care.
Unlike Allitt, who is now eligible for parole, 34-year-old Letby was given the harshest possible sentence under British law, making her one of only four female prisoners in British criminal history to be given a whole life order.
The first was Moors Murderer Hindley, who alongside her lover Ian Brady was responsible for the murders of five children in and around Manchester, from July 1963 to October 1965. She died in prison in 2002 at the age of 60.
Serial killer Rose West, who collaborated with her husband Fred in the torture and murder of ten young women between 1973 and 1987, was the next to be given a whole life order when she was jailed in 1995. Joanna Dennehy was next. Dubbed Britain’s most dangerous female killer, Dennehy will never taste freedom after slaying three men in 2013. After stabbing them, she dumped their bodies in ditches, and later described murder as ‘moreish’.
Now, Letby has become the latest name on this ignominious list.
Lucy Letby was convicted of murdering seven babies and the attempted murder of seven more and is serving a whole life sentence
Some will feel that even this most severe of punishments is still not enough to fit the enormity of her crimes but, in my experience, total loss of liberty is no small torture.
Until the day she dies, she will never again be able to decide when she has breakfast, what time she goes to bed and whether to go for a walk – or any of the other myriad everyday freedoms the rest of us take for granted.
Until she takes her last breath, these activities will all be determined for her by others. Believe me, it takes some adjusting to, and I have no doubt that Letby will currently be on suicide watch.
Letby’s whole life term also makes her a restricted-status prisoner – the female equivalent of a Category A inmate – a classification imposed to minimise the possibility of escape and therefore protect the public.
Prisoners of this level are kept on a landing under maximum security conditions, with restrictions on how they operate in prison and strict vetting of their visitors. There are only three prisons nationwide equipped to deal with such status, and Letby is at one of them: HMP Bronzefield on the outskirts of Ashfield, Surrey.
As a baby-killer, Letby is also likely to be classified as a ‘VP’, or ‘vulnerable prisoner‘. Female child-killers are considered the lowest of the low and sit at the bottom of the hierarchy of the most heinous offenders.
Society expects its women to be nurturers and it judges those who deviate so monstrously from that path more harshly than men. For sure, Letby will have a target on her back. Gossip spreads quickly in prisons and, from the moment she walked through the door, her fellow inmates would have talked eagerly as to how anyone could ‘get to her’.
Letby is only the fourth woman in the UK to have been sentenced to a whole life term, the others being Myra Hindley (pictured), Rose West and Joanna Dennehy
Letby will be forever looking over her shoulder, even though she will spend her years inside separated from the majority of her peers.
Violence is a real issue in women’s prisons. Apart from being bitten and punched, I’ve discovered razor blades embedded in toothbrushes and confronted women holding a sock stuffed with a pool ball – a deadly pendulum waiting to be cracked against a prison guard’s skull.
However, it was a male prisoner who subjected me to my worst incident – when he hurled a plastic bottle of faeces at me in a grotesque practice known as ‘potting’.
Women prisoners are more than capable of rioting, too: in the late 1980s I was one of a team of 15 called from Holloway to HMP Bullwood Hall in Essex – now a young offenders institution but then a women’s prison – after a group of inmates collectively stormed a landing and rained bottles, cans and burning missiles on officers below.
In the pitch black – they’d smashed the lights and the air was acrid with smoke from burning mattresses – we used batons like light-sabres, swatting away missiles. The priority during a riot is to escort those prisoners who want no part of it to safety before tackling the ringleaders.
The latter requires force and that’s where our training comes in: as a team we subdued one person at a time, leading them away with an arm behind their back.
By the time order was restored, the wing was so badly destroyed that all the inmates had to be rehoused in different units around the country.
In truth, though, female prisoners are generally a greater danger to themselves. Self-harm is a bigger problem than in male jails, and some of the morbid ingenuity with which they can inflict damage is too graphic to describe.
So what of Letby’s day-to-day life? HMP Bronzefield is a relatively modern prison and, much as we may want to picture her in a rat-infested cell with water dripping down the bare-bricked walls, the reality is that her small 9ft-by-5ft cell will be functional and comfortable enough.
Alongside the bed, it is likely to have a desk, chair, television – every prisoner has their own these days – and a small toilet and shower, the latter installed in newer prison cells to minimise the chance of violence that comes with trips to communal shower rooms.
As a restricted status prisoner, Letby’s schedule in prison will remain extremely rigid for the rest of her life
Letby’s routine will be unshakably rigid. Regimes vary from prison to prison but, generally, wake-up is 7am and doors are unlocked at 8am for breakfast and exercise. By 9am, prisoners must undertake some form of education or work. This is a stautory requirement for all convicted prisoners, with duties involving anything from gardening to cleaning and maintenance.
Given Letby’s status, anything she does will be carefully risk-assessed to keep her – and others – safe.
Lunch is early, at 11.30am, then prisoners are locked up once more until staff lunch is over at 1pm, when they return to work or education – although half the time this is cancelled because of staff shortages. Visits – if inmates have them – also take place during this early afternoon slot. At 3.30pm, they are returned to their cells until 5pm, when the majority of prisoners – but not all – are allowed some association time. Final lock-up comes at 8pm.
This is on a good day, when unexpected staff absences haven’t meant that each inmate should remain in their cell indefinitely. Weekend staffing isn’t much better and often prisoners can be locked up for 18 hours at a time.
The current crisis in prisons doesn’t surprise me when budgets are shaved each year, reducing the number of wardens on the wing and undermining the schemes designed to help released prisoners from re-offending.
The early release of prisoners who have been convicted of less serious offences is a bitter pill we have to swallow. Letby, of course, will not be a beneficiary of this scheme.
I’ve been asked whether officers on her wing will treat her with contempt. I am certain not. Our training tells us that if you treat people like animals, they behave like animals, so whatever monstrosities prisoners have committed, you have to remain professional.
Of course, on occasions, the headlines tell us that not everyone toes that line: last month, we heard of the 30-year-old prison officer who was arrested after the emergence of a social media video apparently showing her having sex with a male prisoner in HMP Wandsworth.
If this is proven to be true then it is of course a shameful episode, although while media headlines would suggest that there is an epidemic of female officers indulging in which heinous conduct I am minded to think that it is a case of a few bad eggs – just as it is with male officers when they do the same, to my mind much less outcry.
Most of the time, of course, it is not physical interaction with prisoners but verbal which dominates our day – conversing with them, exchanging pleasantries, and even accepting a cup of tea from them, as I did from Myra Hindley in the late 90s.
I’d been asked to escort four prisoners from Holloway to HMP Cookham Wood in Kent and, on arrival, one of them had been asked to make all the officers a cup of tea. I’d barely given the dowdy-looking prisoner with a bobbly old sweater and mousy hair a second glance as she served me my cuppa, until an officer said: ‘You do know who that is don’t you?’
She looked a world away from the woman with a bleached bob and intense gaze who had stared out of the front page of every daily newspaper.
Vanessa Frake remembers how Rose West (pictured) looked like the auntie who’d offer you a plate of French Fancies on a Sunday afternoon while in prison
She was infamous in Holloway for wrapping female officers around her little finger and I wasn’t going to be one of them. As she asked me, almost shyly, if she could get me anything else, I made sure not to catch her eye as I told her: ‘No thanks.’
Rose West, too, was under my command at Holloway while awaiting trial. Constantly knitting, she looked like the auntie who’d offer you a plate of French Fancies on a Sunday afternoon.
I was present when, on New Year’s Day 1995, Rose was told her husband Fred – also on remand – had killed himself in prison. Nothing altered in her expression. There were no tears, nothing, just a blank stare. In all my dealings with her, I rarely saw a flicker of emotion. In those circumstances, it’s hard not to wonder what is going through a prisoner’s mind.
I could say the same of Letby, as she stares down the barrel of multiple life sentences – like West, another female mass murderer who will die behind bars. Is this justice? I believe so.
Not everyone sent to prison is beyond redemption. Many have made stupid mistakes, often through drug and alcohol dependency, and with a bit of help they can – and do – make a better, more useful life for themselves when they come out.
Letby isn’t one of them. She is there to keep our society safe, and there she must remain.
Vanessa Frake MBE is author of The Governor: My Life Inside Britain’s Most Notorious Prisons
