TAXPAYER IS FUNDING MONSTER’S EDUCATION

IN 1992, Frank McCann murdered his wife and foster daughter for fear an allegation of paedophilia by the mother of a pregnant teenager, whom he’d coached in swimming, would come to light. It was his third effort to kill his family because, it seemed, his own standing in the community – and perhaps his access to underage girls, too – was more important to McCann than the lives of his wife Esther and 18-month-old Jessica.

I covered McCann’s trial back in 1996 and recall being struck by his curious detachment from the most gruesome of forensic evidence, and his utter lack of emotion as he was given two life sentences. But because they were concurrent and not consecutive, McCann only served time for one murder and is shortly to be freed.

His former sister-in-law Marian Leonard has spoken of his chillingly inappropriate advances to a couple of young female passers-by, as he drove away from the graveyard after burying his wife and baby, and is incensed by his imminent release. Ms Leonard is particularly horrified that the taxpayer is funding McCann to expand his computer skills – we pay to ferry him by armed escort to classes outside his prison – and effectively facilitating a double murderer and suspected paedophile boundless access to ‘the dark web’.

Rehabilitation is a commendable objective of our criminal justice system, but there’s more to rehabilitation than tutoring a murderer in IT: remorse should be prerequisite of parole and McCann has shown none.

The rights and concerns of victims should really be the law’s priority. Ms Leonard fears that the man who burnt his wife and daughter to death is perfectly capable of offending again; when James Bulger’s mother made the same prediction about the two boys who murdered her toddler, nobody listened to her, either.