Terrified murderer desperate for protection from jail attacks RHYS KILLER ‘TURNED TO ISLAM FOR EASY LIFE’
THE killer of schoolboy Rhys Jones has converted to Islam, we can reveal.
Evil Sean Mercer made the move for protection after he was targeted by violent inmates in tough Wakefield jail, which is commonly known as ‘Monster Mansion’.
A lag who served time with Mercer, 26, said the murderer was “not in the same league” as some of the other prisoners.
He added: “You’re talking about a Category A prison with notorious lifers and international criminals.
“He killed a kid. He’s not a major criminal in that sense of the word. And he was targeted several times.
“He got into a few scraps but he ran into some of the wrong people – and he was going to get seriously served up if he didn’t get help.
“So he did what most other people do in the tough jails, he converted to Islam.
“Then the trouble went away because it’s the Muslims who run the big Category A jails.”
Mercer is now in top security HMP Frankland in Durham.
Fellow inmates include Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and Soham fiend Ian Huntley.
Mercer has been placed with a select group of cons in the prison’s PIPE unit (Psychologically Informed Planned Environment). The regime is EXCLUSIVE JOE HINTON for long-term Category A inmates who have not been given Category B status despite completing several offender courses.
Since Mercer got a minimum of 22 years for killing Everton-mad Rhys – hit by a bullet from the gangster’s gun as he walked home from football training in Croxteth, Liverpool, in 2007 – he has been begging for a move to a cushy prison.
The authorities have consistently refused to downgrade him to a Category B inmate.
Insiders say he is “struggling to hack” the strict regime and also thinks getting moved to a softer jail will help him get his sentence cut.
A source said: “Aside from the serial killers and nonces there are some heavy people in Frankland and Mercer is not one of them.
“He’s just a kid who made a terrible mistake and he’s not cut out for life with the big boys.
“You’ve got stone-cold killers, big league gangsters in Frankland and, while Mercer tried to act the big lad, it’s just a front. In reality he hates it and wants out.”
Cowardly Mercer also fears that the TV drama Little Boy Blue, telling the story of Rhys’ murder, has made him a target in prison. A source said: “He hoped to slip under the radar because so few people knew the appalling thing he had done.
“But the TV series has turned him into a celebrity.
“And celebrity inmates are simply dead men walking.”
A Daily Star Sunday World Exclusive told how Mercer’s only confession to the murder came in a letter he penned from jail.
He wrote: “It was an accident, I didn’t see the kid behind the car.”
Mercer added: “You ask me if I feel bad for what’s happened, listen mate I can’t put it into words how bad I feel. “I’m proper devastated. If I could swap places I would.” But he also said his sentence was “too long” and insisted he should have gone down for manslaughter not murder. Mercer was found with bodybuilding pills in his cell in maximum-security HMP Woodhill, Bucks, in January 2012. And he stabbed schoolboy Jimmy Mizen’s killer Jake Fahri at Moorland Young Offenders Institute, South Yorks, in November 2009.