Convicted murderer ‘ordered by God’ to kill fellow prisoner
INMATE HANDED A FURTHER LIFE SENTENCE
A CONVICTED murderer from Hayes has been given a further life sentence after the murder of a fellow prisoner, which he claimed was “ordered by God”.
Billy White murdered his partner by stabbing her through the neck as she slept at their home in 2015 and was sent to Long Lartin prison, in Worcestershire, where he murdered fellow inmate Brett Rogers.
The 24-year-old Christian and Gary Lindley, a Muslim, tried to “snap” Rogers’ neck and then smothered him with a pillow when he did not appear to be dead.
White and Lindley prayed after the pre-planned killing of Rogers, who was serving 32 years for murdering his mother and her friend. They believed the killing would “exorcise a demon” from him and “cleanse” him of his crimes.
Worcester Crown Court was told staff at HMP Long Lartin were then handed a note by Lindley saying the killers had decided to “free” their victim from “darkness”.
The note reads: “I was ordered by the Lord My God to free Brett Rogers. I know you will not see it this way but that is between you and God. I am of sound mind. Please can I speak to the Governor.”
White had been jailed for at least 15 years at the Old Bailey in May 2016 while Lindley, aged 42, was serving an indeterminate sentence after being jailed at Nottingham Crown Court in 2007 for his part in a violent distraction burglary.
The men were captured on CCTV entering Rogers’ cell at 3.21pm on June 7 and leaving the cell at 3.54pm. His body was discovered by prison officers after he failed to turn up to collect medicine.
It was the fourth murder at the Worcestershire prison in five years.
Judge Robert Juckes QC ruled that the prisoner’s murder had not been committed in the “furtherance of a religious cause”.
Both men had pleaded guilty to the murder at a previous hearing and admitted to having decided to kill Rogers a week before his death.
White told police that after killing Rogers he used a blue marker to draw yin and yang signs on the man’s cheek.
The judge ordered Lindley to serve a minimum term of 17-and-ahalf years for killing Rogers and gave a further life sentence to White on Monday.
The judge said: “This is his sec- ond offence of murder. This was a determined and premeditated killing of a particularly cruel kind of a man in his own cell by two men who overpowered him. They picked on him because of what they had come to believe about him.”