Harry Roberts was once the most famous man in Britain. It was the summer of 1966: England had just beaten Germany in the World Cup; Harold Wilson was talking to the TUC about a wage freeze; Francis Chichester was getting ready to sail round the world; and at 3.15 on a Friday afternoon, on a street in Shepherd’s Bush, three London policemen were shot down dead in the sun.
It was an earthquake of a crime, the most lethal attack on British policemen since the Siege of Sidney Street. Scotland Yard received 50,000 letters and calls of sympathy. Spontaneous public donations for the dead men’s families reached £70,000. The Home Secretary Roy Jenkins spoke of “a threat to the whole fabric of society”. Within a week, the police had arrested two men, but the man they wanted most was still free. He was the one who had started the shooting. He personally had killed two of the officers. His name was Harry Roberts.
For three months, he was the target of the biggest manhunt that Scotland Yard had ever mounted: 16,000 wanted posters; border alerts in 95 countries; televised appeals; rewards. There were more than 6,000 sightings – stealing sandwiches from a picnic in the Lake District, posing as a woman to get his hair dyed in west London, working in a strip club in Soho. Police searched restaurants, flats, Sadlers Wells Theatre, a cargo vessel leaving the London docks. Five hundred officers with guns and staves combed Epping Forest. When George Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in the middle of the hunt, the press blamed Roberts.
Finally, on November 11, they found him in woods near Bishop’s Stortford, living in a camouflaged den made out of plastic bags and branches. Within weeks, he was on trial at the Old Bailey, alongside his two co-accused, John Duddy and Jack Witney. On December 12 1966, they were all convicted of the murder of the three policemen and all jailed for life. John Duddy died in prison. Jack Witney was released two years ago. Harry Roberts is still there, now serving his 27th year.
The face on the man in the visiting room at Dartmoor Prison is recognisably the same as the one that used to sneer down from the police posters, but now it looks as though it has been doctored by a cartoonist. The flesh on the face has started to sag, the corners of the mouth have dropped and pulled dark lines down through the skin above them. The thick black hair is grey. He has trouble with his back. His hands are stiff. His eyes are going; he says he has glycoma. He is 56, he looks older and inside himself, as he talks, it begins to seem that the decay runs even deeper.
Harry Roberts is being considered for parole. Police groups say he should never be released. Maybe they are right. Maybe Harry Roberts deserves to rot there for ever – to deter others, to console the bereaved, simply to hurt him for what he did. Maybe this society wants to say that there is no limit to the incarceration of prisoner number 231191. But maybe it is not quite that simple.
It is not just about Harry Roberts. There is a bigger issue which is subtle and difficult and which goes to the heart of criminal justice. If Harry Roberts had committed his offence a year earlier – before the 1965 law which abolished the death penalty for the murder of policemen – he would certainly have hanged. Instead, he was locked up and thus became one of the first examples of a new problem. If hanging is wrong, how much jail is right?
The question is striking not only because it raises the same clash of emotive issues as the death penalty but also because in all the years that have passed since abolition, it has never been answered. While hanging has been debated to the point of exhaustion in the press and on the floor of the House of Commons, the definition of justice for men like Harry Roberts has been decided in private by officials of a section of the Prison Department known as DSP2/LSRS. And they don’t talk – not about the rules on which they operate, nor about individual cases, not even to the murderers whose fate they are deciding.
When Harry Roberts starts to talk, he seems at first to be as hard now as he was on the day he shot his victims. “They keep asking me ‘Do you feel remorse, Harry?’ And I say no. We didn’t want to murder anyone. That was the last thing we wanted. We shot them because we thought they were going to nick us and we didn’t want to go to jail for 15 years. We were professional criminals. We don’t react the same way as ordinary people. The police aren’t like real people to us. They’re strangers, they’re the enemy. And you don’t feel remorse for killing a stranger. I do feel sorry for what we did to their families. I do. But it’s like people I killed in Malaya when I was in the army. You don’t feel remorse.”
The hardness has an edge of bravado. Why were they carrying guns that day? “Because we were gangsters.” How does he feel each time he arrives at a new prison? “I’m going in there, with my shoulders back, saying ‘Right, which one of you lot’s done more time than me?’” He chuckles like an indulgent father at the football fans who still chant his name to aggravate policemen – “Harry Roberts, he’s our man; he shoots policemen, bang, bang, bang.”
And maybe that’s the end of the argument: if he’s still so full of himself, he should stay where he is for another 27 years. Maybe that is why he has not been released. Harry Roberts says he does not know. “They won’t tell me. Every time I ask, I get something different. They say ‘Look at you Harry. You’re too fit to go back on the streets’. I say ‘I’m old. My friends are old. No one’s going to take me on a robbery.’ Be serious. Who’s going to want me along on a job? I’m a liability. They’d get an extra 15 years just for talking to me. I’m past it, aren’t I?
“But I can’t prove I’m not a risk. I volunteered to go to Grendon Underwood to let the psychiatrists have a look at me. They said I wasn’t suitable material. But how can they say that if they haven’t looked? Or they say I should go to church. I ask you. I could do it for six months then I’d have a row with the vicar.
“Once, I asked a governor why they wouldn’t let me out. He said it was because I was institutionalised. They keep me in here all these years – and then they tell me that!”
At the trial, the judge said that Roberts, Duddy and Witney should all serve at least 30 years. Yet Witney was released after 26 years. Roberts tried to find out why, but he got no answer. He tried to find out if the judge’s recommendation was binding in his case. No one would tell him. He put in a petition to ask for the “tariff” for his offence – the official view of the time he should serve. The reply came back, telling him that a tariff had been set but he would have to apply to a different official to find out what it was. He applied, but he got no answer.
Several years ago, he was told he would be considered for parole in July 1992. July passed and he heard nothing. “So I stuck in a petition to find out the result. It turned out they had cancelled it or never bothered with it. But they hadn’t told me that. So then they said they’d review me and give me a result in January 1993. I went ahead and I had this interview with the Lifer Review Committee in November, then another one with the Local Review Committee after Christmas. They said I’d get the result in January. Middle of January, I asked the wing governor where it was. He says ‘Oh, we haven’t even put the papers in yet. You’re not due for anything in January.’ So what’m I supposed to do? I’m not lost. I’m trapped.”
He says that for years after he was jailed, he thought of nothing but escape. He forced himself to stay fit so that he was ready to run and he came up with 22 different escape plans. Most of them simply failed. Once his mother was caught on a visit with a pair of bolt cutters in her bra. Three times he was caught and punished. He never came close to freedom. During all the years in his cell, he has never really come close to anything.
He has no radio and no newspapers. For the first 18 years he was a top security Category A prisoner, barred from most opportunities for work or education. When finally he was allowed to mix with other prisoners, he took a couple of O levels in English Language and Literature and passed two engineering exams with distinctions. Then they put him to work in the sock shop, sewing up the toes of hundreds of socks so he stopped messing about with exams. He couldn’t see the point. For a while, he painted. He stopped that, too. He says he was no good at it.
Harry Roberts has lost everything. His wife abandoned him soon after his arrest. He had a woman friend, Lillian Perry, but he told her to stop visiting him. “I got chivalrous. I said ‘don’t waste your life’. Mistake. There you go. She’s gone.” His mother, Dorothy, visited him for years but she died in 1984. “We were very close. Then one day they opened the cell door and said ‘Your mother died yesterday’. Suddenly she’s not there any more. I tried to go to the funeral, but they were talking about a security escort and police outriders and I said ‘This is a circus – forget it’. Someone sent me a couple of photos of the funeral, but they wouldn’t let me have ‘em. So that’s the end of that.”
And as he talks, the truth about the hardness begins to become clear. He remembers a budgie which he kept a few years ago. In the beginning, he only got it because he needed the wire from its cage for an escape plan, but then he started to like the bird. It would sit on his shoulder and he’d stroke its beak and feed it bread crumbs. He told jokes about this bird trying to set up robberies. “I turned it down. The money he was offering was chickenfeed”. Then the bird died, and that hurt him. “I could see it was ill. I spent money on a vet. But it died. I nearly cracked up. I’d never have another one. I was really choked and you can’t go getting upset in this place.”
He talks about the months after they released him from 18 years in security blocks, when he couldn’t focus his eyes on the end of a corridor, when he got lost in the wing because he couldn’t cope with the space, when he simply spent hours staring out of his new cell in Gartree watching the fields for the first time in nearly 20 years. It was around then that his mother died. He knew it was all getting to him one night when he was watching athletics on television and he saw Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe racing for the finishing line, and he started to cry.
Prisoners often say that the system is out to break their spirit and the truth is that Harry Roberts is all but broken. He talks tough, but inside he has been hollowed out. He boasts about being a gangster, because he has nothing else to do. His notoriety is all he has, the nearest thing to self-respect. Maybe that is all they want from him now – not simply to be broken but to admit it. If he does that, maybe they will let him go.
“I’m a criminal. All my life, I’ve been involved in criminal things. If there’s a fiddle in the kitchen in here, if there’s a bit of booze, if there’s a crooked screw bringing in some gear, I’m going to be there. And, of course, they all say ‘Oh, he’s carrying on his criminal life’. But it’s a game. It’s a way of surviving. How can you accept 27 years in jail? A lot of these escapes were a means of surviving. Mentally. I mean, it’s a terrible thing they do to people. You know? I want to say to them ‘Why are you still punishing me?’ I don’t know the answer.”
