A man serving life for murdering his wife will stay in prison after a High Court judge overturned a Parole Board decision to release him.
The case is the first of its kind. The Justice Secretary can send Parole Board release decisions to the High Court, and the court has now used such a referral to overturn one.
The man, now 66, received a life sentence in 2003. A jury convicted him of murdering his estranged wife, who had disappeared the year before. The court set a minimum tariff of 16 years. He maintains that he is innocent and has never revealed what he did with her body.
He had applied for parole three times before. In April, the Parole Board approved his release, finding that his imprisonment was “no longer necessary” to protect the public.
Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb said the case involved a history of intimate partner violence and coercive control. She noted recorded references to the missing woman’s “fear”.
The judge said the prisoner “has a propensity to violence against women and that without some recognition of that aspect of his personality he remains a danger to women who come within his milieu”.
She said his continued denial of the murder showed he is “not a man who will lightly admit when things start to go wrong in his life”. She also found that he could not be trusted to keep to licence conditions. That was “especially when to do so might endanger his idea of himself as a victim”, she said.
After the ruling, the man’s daughter said her father was still harming her family. She said he was “actively choosing to be controlling and abusive from within prison”.
She said he should stay in prison until he admits what he did and reveals where her mother’s body lies. The murdered woman was a mother of four.
