Minimum terms
High Court setting of minimum terms for mandatory life sentences under the Criminal Justice Act 2003
Neutral Citation Number:[2007] EWHC 245 (QB)
Case No: 2004 / 617 / MTS
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISION
Date: 27th February 2007
Before:
THE HON MR JUSTICE DAVID STEEL
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Between:
Regina
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ANTHONY JOHN ALLEN
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APPROVED JUDGMENT
I direct that no official shorthand note shall be taken of this Judgment and that copies of this version as handed down may be treated as authentic
ANTHONY JOHN ALLEN
Mandatory life sentence
Setting of minimum terms pursuant to schedule 22 Criminal Justice Act 2003
On 16 December 2002, at Exeter Crown Court, the Defendant was convicted of the murder of his wife and two children.
In May 1975, all three disappeared from their home in Salcombe where they lived with the Defendant. They left behind their clothes, the childrens’ toys, his wife’s car and jewellery and the family dog. They had no apparent means of support. None of them had a passport. However none of them has been heard from since.
Some 30 years have now passed since they were last seen. The details of the killings will never be known. There is no direct evidence of the timing or manner of death. The Defendant denied that the victims were dead. No bodies have been found nor has the Defendant volunteered any information on their whereabouts.
Originally, following the Defendant’s arrest in 1976, the DPP concluded that there was an insufficient prospect of a conviction. Further matters came to light after the principal prosecution witness published a paperback in 1992 setting out her recollection of the events and subsequent matters.
The circumstantial evidence was as follows. In May 1975 the Defendant was living in Salcombe with his wife and two children, aged 7 and 5. He had recently started an affair with the proprietor of a local restaurant. On the Bank Holiday Monday 26 May, he attended a local fete with his family.
Later that evening the Defendant met with his mistress and told that his wife was on the point of leaving him. His request that she should look after his children in that event was refused. The Defendant returned to his flat. During the night several witnesses heard a frightened child screaming in the flat. The following morning the Defendant arrived at his mistress’ premises with two children in tow. He was in a shaken condition and had scratches on his wrists and arms.
The following afternoon, there was a sighting of the Defendant’s family car parked near another village in the area with his children standing in the back and his wife in a parlous state in the front passenger seat being “tended” by the Defendant. No-one else has seen his wife, Patricia, since.
The Defendant arranged for someone to take over his evening shift. His mistress went to work but later that evening she went to the Defendant’s flat. She saw the Defendant and his daughter who had an earache. When the daughter had been put back to bed, the Defendant asked to borrow his mistress’ car to meet his mother from the station. In fact this cannot have been his purpose since his mother, as planned, arrived by car the next morning, leaving in the evening.
The children were seen on a couple of occasions during the day, once at some distance from the flat with the Defendant. Like Patricia, they have never been seen since.
At one stage in his police interview the Defendant claimed that his mother had stayed overnight and that at some stage he and his mistress had gone out in his boat in search of his dog. This account was untrue although interestingly involved use of his boat, the oars of which were later found in the family car in a car park in Salcombe itself. In fact, his mother had left and his mistress did not see him that day.
Equally untrue was his explanation to his mistress that his two children had gone off with his mother. This latter lie was maintained until police inquiries began 5 months later. He then conceded that they were not, and never had been, with his mother but claimed that his wife had returned to the flat after his mother had left and taken the two children away in the family car late that night.
Various permutations of this new account were given to other inquirers, including the suggestion that she had gone to the US by arrangement with a former boyfriend who had been with US forces in England in the mid 60’s.
This account, or any variation of it, was clearly incredible:-
a. Patricia was not seen returning to the flat at any stage. Patricia and her car were not seen or heard leaving later that night. Patricia and her car were not sighted during the following 48 hours or on returning to Salcombe.
b. There was no reason to pick the children up in the dead of night. They were not reported as arriving late at a local hotel and they were not reported as boarding a train at Totnes. In any event, the car was discovered, not in the station car park, but in a car park in Salcombe itself, unlocked with two dingy oars sticking out through a window.
c. The Defendant made no inquiries as to their whereabouts until a year later, well after the police had commenced investigating their disappearance, suggesting without reason that they might be in New Hampshire, USA.
d. The entire wardrobe of both his wife and children having been “left” intact in the flat, together with the childrens’ toys, the Defendant simply gave them away that autumn. He also gave away the family dog. Prior to that, he had offered his mistress some or all of his wife’s jewellery.
e. Patricia had no source of income and no place to live other than the flat in Salcombe. Her bank account (with a credit of £28) has remained dormant ever since.
f. None of Patricia’s relatives or friends have heard from her again. Patricia and the children remain unknown, under any variation of their name, to the tax, social security, educational and medical authorities in the UK nor have they responded to the massive publicity the case has attracted if for some obscure reason they had changed their name.
n. They had no passport. Nor have they applied for one. Under no variation of their name do they appear in any US database searched. Her former boyfriend suffered a stroke in 1972 and became wholly incapacitated in 1975.
The only mitigating factor is the Defendant’s age but for which my view on the appropriate tariff would have been materially longer. Indeed the difficulty of the case, and the enormous period that has elapsed since the matters in question, is simply attributable to the Defendant’s success in disposing of the bodies.
The motive for the killing of his wife appears to have been simply the desire to move on to a new life with a woman running a promising business. (He had disposed of his previous family in the opposite manner - by faking his own suicide.) The (subsequent) killing of his two young children may have been promoted by the same callous motive: it is also possible that they presented a threat to him having seen or heard matters relating to the death and disposal of his wife.
The Defendant is now 72 and in poor health. Nonetheless the only factor that might have resulted in a reduction of the tariff would have been disclosure of the whereabouts of the bodies.
In my judgment, the appropriate tariff period is 18 years (less the time spent in custody on remand of 10 months 9 days).