Roy Whiting

Roy Whiting
Born	(1959-01-26) 26 January 1959 Horsham, West Sussex, England
Occupation	Car mechanic, delivery worker, building labourer
Criminal penalty	Life imprisonment (minimum 40 years, not eligible for parole until 2042)
Criminal status	Incarcerated
Spouse(s)	Linda Booker (1986–1990)
Children	1
Conviction(s)	Indecent assault, theft, dangerous driving, abduction, murder

Roy William Whiting (born 26 January 1959) is an English convicted child killer, from West Sussex. In December 2001, he was convicted of the abduction and murder of 8-year old school girl Sarah Payne, which occurred in July 2000.

Early life

Whiting was born in Crawley, West Sussex, in January 1959 and grew up in the town. His parents were George and Pamela Whiting, who divorced during the 1970s. He had five siblings but three of them died in infancy; an older brother and younger sister survived.

He left Ifield Community College in 1975 with no academic qualifications and over the next few years found employment in several different jobs, including working as a delivery man for the local Co-operative store and later working as a car mechanic and paint sprayer at a local garage.

In 1986, he married Linda Booker. however, they separated the following year just before the birth of their son, and were divorced in 1990.

1995 conviction and imprisonment

On 4 March 1995, Whiting abducted and sexually assaulted an eight-year-old girl in the Langley Green district of Crawley. He was arrested a few weeks later after a man who knew Whiting came forward after hearing that the abductor's car had been a red Ford Sierra with a Bart Simpson sticker on one of its windows, identical to the vehicle that Whiting had just sold. Three months later, he admitted the charges of abduction and indecent assault and was sentenced to four years in prison. The maximum sentence for the crime was life imprisonment. However, he received a lesser sentence as credit for admitting to the crime. A psychiatrist who assessed Whiting after his conviction said that he was likely to re-offend once he was released.

Release

Whiting was released from prison in November 1997, having served 2 years and 5 months of his original 4-year sentence, and was one of the first people in Britain to go on the sex offenders' register. Whiting, knowing that he would not be welcomed back in Crawley, moved some 25 miles (40 km) away to Littlehampton on the West Sussex coast, where he rented a flat in St Augustine's Road. Two years later, he moved into another flat in the same road. On 2 July 2000, officers from Sussex Police visited his flat making inquiries into the disappearance of Sarah Payne, who had gone missing in the Kingston Gorse area of Littlehampton the previous evening.

Sarah Payne murder investigation

Whiting was questioned about the disappearance of Sarah Payne some several miles from Whiting's flat. Whiting was routinely questioned as he had been placed on the sex offender registry. The officers left Whiting's flat but were suspicious of his lack of concern for Sarah - something that some of the worst offenders had shown when questioned in connection with Sarah's disappearance. When Whiting re-appeared soon after and attempted to drive away in his van, he was stopped by the police and arrested. He spent two days in custody but the police had no concrete evidence to press any charges, although they had found a receipt for fuel at Buck Barn garage near Pulborough which contradicted his alibi of being at a funfair in Hove at 5.30 p.m, and then returning to his flat by 9.30 p.m on the night Sarah disappeared.^[1]

When Whiting was released on bail, he went to live with his father in Crawley while his flat in St Augustine's Road was being examined by forensic scientists. No evidence was found in Whiting's flat to suggest that Sarah had been there previously.

Whiting was released on police bail. On 17 July 2000, Sarah Payne's body was discovered and identified within 24 hours. Roy Whiting was subsequently re-arrested on 31 July 2000 on suspicion of murder. Despite Sarah's body being discovered within 3 miles (4.8 km) of the service station where Whiting had bought fuel on the night Sarah disappeared, along with Whiting's failure to confirm his alibi, there was still not enough evidence to press charges and Whiting was released without charge for a second time.

A few days after his second arrest, Whiting moved out of his father's house after a vigilante mob smashed the windows with bricks, and went to live in a tent in woodland behind a housing estate in Crawley. He then took to the road in a stolen Vauxhall Nova and was pursued by police at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour (110 km/h) before he crashed into a parked vehicle and was arrested on dangerous driving charges, for which he was remanded in custody to appear in court two months later. On 27 September 2000, Whiting admitted taking the car and driving dangerously. He was sentenced to 22 months' imprisonment.

When Whiting began his jail term for the car theft, detectives carried out forensic tests on his white F-registered Fiat Ducato van, which he had purchased on 24 June 2000, exactly a week before Sarah Payne's disappearance. On 6 February 2001, following a police enquiry, Roy Whiting was formally charged with the murder of Sarah Payne.^[2]

The trial

By 6 February 2001, Sussex Police had found enough evidence (namely forensic evidence on items found in the Fiat Ducato van) to charge Whiting, and he appeared at Lewes Crown Court on charges of abduction and murder. He denied the charges and was remanded in custody to await trial; he was still serving his sentence for the motoring offences at the time.

The trial began on 14 November 2001 at Lewes Crown Court and the jury heard from several witnesses. The key witnesses included Sarah Payne's oldest brother Lee, who had seen a scruffy-looking man with "yellowish" teeth drive past the field where he and his siblings had been playing at the time Sarah vanished. A female motorist had found one of Sarah's shoes in a country lane several miles from where her body was found, and forensic scientists had found fibres from Whiting's van on the shoe. The damning piece of evidence was a strand of blonde hair on a T-shirt found in Whiting's van - the forensic experts who made this discovery said that DNA test results meant that there was a one-in-a-billion chance of it belonging to anyone other than Sarah.

This case is particularly notable for the extensive use of forensic sciences in establishing the prosecution case against Roy Whiting. 20 forensic experts were employed during the inquiry from a variety of fields including entomology, pathology, geology, archaeology, environmental profiling and oil/lubricant analysis. It has been estimated that the cost of the investigation involved a thousand personnel and cost more than £3 million.^[3]

On 12 December 2001, Roy Whiting was convicted of the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The trial judge, Mr Justice Curtis, said that it was a rare case in which a life sentence should mean life. This was only the 24th time in British legal history that such a recommendation is believed to have been made.

After Whiting was convicted of killing Sarah Payne, it was revealed that he was already a convicted child sex offender; this proved correct the Payne family's belief that Sarah had been killed by a child sex offender, which had already led to them co-operating with a media campaign (led by the News of the World) for public access to the sex offenders register. Whiting's previous conviction had until then been kept from the jury at the request of the police, who felt that if they had heard details of his previous conviction and he had been found guilty, it would allow him to claim that he had been convicted on the basis of an earlier offence rather than the one for which he was being tried, paving the way for a potential successful appeal.

There were renewed calls for the government to allow controlled public access to the sex offender's register. This became the campaign for what is known as Sarah's Law, after the introduction of Megan's Law in the United States following a similar case several years earlier.

Attacks in prison

On 4 August 2002 Whiting was attacked with a razor by another prisoner while fetching hot water at HMP Wakefield. Convicted killer Rickie Tregaskis was found guilty of carrying out the slashing which left Whiting with a six-inch scar on his right cheek.^[4] Tregaskis, serving life for the murder of a disabled man in Cornwall, received a six-year sentence for the attack.^[4]

In July 2011 Whiting was again attacked in prison, this time stabbed in the eye with a sharpened toilet brush. No charge was pressed by Whiting and consequently a police investigation into the assault was not undertaken. Whiting's injuries were not life-threatening.

David Blunkett's ruling

On 24 November 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett ruled that Roy Whiting must serve a minimum of 50 years in prison. This would make him ineligible for parole until 2051, when, if he survived that long, he would be 92 years old.

Within 48 hours of the ruling being made, the High Court and European Court of Human Rights had ruled in favour of another convicted murderer who was challenging the right of politicians to decide how long a murderer must spend in prison before being considered for parole. In June 2004, it was reported in the media that Whiting would be appealing to the High Court for his sentence to be reduced, but his appeal would not be heard until six years afterwards.

Whiting's appeal against the ruling was heard on 9 June 2010 at the High Court, which now has the final say on how long a life sentence prisoner must serve before being considered for parole. His lawyers argued that Blunkett's decision was politically motivated, as he knew he was on the verge of being stripped of his powers to decide on minimum terms for life sentence prisoners, and that the government was under fire from the British public due to a firefighters strike, and saw the opportunity of setting a 50-year order for Whiting as something which would prove popular with voters. The High Court reduced Whiting's minimum term to 40 years, bringing forward his parole date to 2041, making him eligible for parole at the age of 82.^[5]

References