Worboys victims accuse minister of ‘disgusting’ attempt to shift blame
♦‘Black cab rapist’ denied release by High Court judges ♦ Justice Secretary faces calls to resign as parole chief quits
THE Justice Secretary is facing demands to resign after victims of John Worboys, the black cab rapist, accused of him of a “disgusting” attempt to divert blame over the scandal.
David Gauke refused to apologise directly to the women for his department’s failings, identified by three High Court judges yesterday when they overturned a decision to grant Worboys early release.
Instead, he forced Nick Hardwick, the Parole Board chairman, to resign after telling him his position was “untenable”, leading to claims that Mr Hardwick had been made a scapegoat.
Tory MPS and Mr Hardwick himself suggested Mr Gauke, who refused to challenge the Parole Board’s decision to free Worboys, should consider his own position. Mr Gauke has announced a review of the parole process and said he would bring in new rules to allow the reasons for parole board decisions to be made public.
Two victims mounted a crowdfunded legal challenge against Worboys’ release after Mr Gauke decided against launching a judicial review. The women won their case after the judges said both the Parole Board and the Ministry of Justice made errors at the parole hearing last year, when David Lidington was justice secretary.
It means Worboys remains in prison pending a fresh hearing. The judges said the Secretary of State’s representative had failed to ask the serial rapist, who is thought to have drugged and assaulted more than 100 women, whether he had committed more than the 12 rapes for which he was convicted.
They said the “credibility and reliability” of Worboys’ account “was not probed to any extent, if at all”, and the Ministry of Justice failed to include vital details such as the discovery of a “rape kit” at Worboys’ home. One of the victims who brought the case, known as DSD, called the decision to force out Mr Hardwick “disgusting”. A Tory backbencher described Mr Gauke as “weak and pathetic”, adding: “It’s all very well to sack Nick Hardwick but he himself has to take responsibility.”
Zac Goldsmith, Tory MP for Richmond Park, said: “There is no escaping the fact that the criminal justice system failed them, or that the Government failed to show leadership.”
Mr Gauke told The Daily Telegraph he had not considered resigning. The Prime Minister’s spokesman said Theresa May retained full confidence in him. The Justice Secretary insisted he had been right to follow legal advice and saw no reason to apologise to the victims for his department’s failings.
He said: “Collectively, I am sorry; if you look at the system as a whole it didn’t work as it should have done.”
He said he had “huge sympathy” for the victims and accepted that “there were clearly things that the MOJ didn’t get right” but insisted the judges had mainly “identified failures by the Parole Board”. In January Mr Gauke initially indicated he would seek a judicial review, only to change his mind following legal advice. MOJ sources admitted he had been “naive” to build up victims’ hopes. Asked why he had not mounted a legal challenge, he said: “I didn’t want to bring a case as a political gesture.”
Phillippa Kaufmann QC, who represented the victims in court, said the forced resignation of Mr Hardwick was “disappointing and it looks as though he has been scapegoated”. Mr Hardwick told friends: “If my position is untenable then why isn’t his?” He was said to be “frustrated” and believed the ministry “failed” by submitting a weak dossier to the parole board.
Mrs May later said the decision to quash the release gave rise to “serious concerns”, and she praised the “brave” victims who brought the legal action.
‘The credibility and reliability of Worboys’ account was not probed to any extent, if at all’
JOHN WORBOYS began to cry, fake tears accompanied by a fake admission of regret. The members of the Parole Board panel and three senior qualified forensic psychologists would fall for it.
Worboys, perhaps Britain’s most prolific sex offender, had conned the lot of them into authorising his release following a parole hearing at the end of last year.
What’s more, the “black cab rapist” responsible for more than 100 sex attacks, was aided and abetted in his bid for freedom by the failures of officials working for the Ministry of Justice (MOJ).
Their job was to probe his claims of reform and expose the lies he told at the hearing and to psychologists. But Worboys’ sanitised version of events was not sufficiently challenged at the November parole hearing.
Sir Brian Leveson’s 91-page judgment detailed a catalogue of errors that led the Parole Board – whose chairman, Nick Hardwick, was forced to resign yesterday – to authorise Worboys’ release. Only the courage of two of his victims and their legal team in bringing a judicial review brought the problems in the case to light. The judgment paints a picture of a parole system open to abuse by an arch-manipulator such as Worboys.
His attempt at release began in earnest in early 2015. Worboys, now 60, had been jailed in 2009 for offences committed against 12 women and sentenced to an indeterminate sentence and ordered to serve a minimum of eight years. By May 2015, Worboys – who had by then changed his name to John Radford – was within nine months of becoming eligible for parole.
Up until then, the former male stripper turned London cab driver had maintained he was innocent, the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice.
On May 18 2015, he admitted responsibility for the first time but only for the offences of which he had been convicted. In July 2015, the first psychologist to examine him wrote: “[Mr Radford] said that he had ‘always felt guilty’... [Mr Radford] appeared nervous throughout, on occasions becoming tearful and regularly telling me that he wanted to be honest and wanted to talk about ‘everything’.”
The early demonstration of remorse was not enough. In September 2015 the Parole Board judged his risk of offending “too high” and ordered he remain in Wakefield Prison.
Worboys knew he had to do more. Two months on he completed a sexual offender treatment programme to demonstrate his commitment to change. The problem was studies showed the programme can actually increase offending rates.
By spring 2017, Worboys was ready to have another go at parole. In a seeming conflict of interest, a psychologist hired by him for his 2015 hearing was now employed by the Government’s own offender management scheme.
The unidentified psychologist con- cluded Worboys had “responded well to treatment and he has reduced his risk to some degree”.
But David Lidington, the then justice secretary, decided he should remain in Wakefield jail. A day later, Worboys’ lawyers hired a second forensic psychologist.
Over the course of three-and-a-half hours, Worboys proceeded to obfuscate and lie. In the interview, he was “very precise about dates”; his offending had only begun in September 2006. It was an outright lie.
The earliest report brought to police had been in 2003. The case had been widely reported at the time of Worboys’ conviction. It was easily checked and police had accepted the woman had been a victim. Worboys had even paid her compensation.
In the interview Worboys insisted his attacks only began in September 2006 after he had been taken to strip clubs by an older man and after watching a pornographic video in which an actress was drugged and raped.
Worboys minimised his offending. “He was concerned not to cause them [his victims] too much harm,” the psychologist reported. Worboys was convicted of only one rape. He seemed to suggest that was the victim’s fault. “Mr Radford maintained that she boasted that she could take any drug, so he decided to give her a whole Temazepam tablet. Consequently he was able to go further,” the judgment reports him telling the psychologist.
The second psychologist deemed Worboys a “low risk” and recommended he be transferred to an open prison.
Worboys’ lawyers hired yet another psychologist – the third in all – in September 2017. Worboys changed his story but the inconsistencies were seemingly not picked up by the Parole Board and not challenged by the Ministry of Justice official tasked with doing so.
This time, Worboys claimed he had first begun offending in December
2005 as a result of a girl- leaving him. The latest psychologist concluded: “I find it difficult to justify why Mr Radford should remain in custody given his low risk of recidivism.”
The senior prison psychologist at Wakefield was not convinced. In October, he expressed concern about Worboys, not least his “narcissism”. To the prison service, Worboys remained a “high risk of harm”.
At the Parole Board hearing on Nov 8 last year, Worboys’ evidence lasted barely 50 minutes. Sir Brian in his judgment notes that the Justice Secretary’s representative “asked few questions”.
Worboys was not challenged on his inconsistent claims; his minimising of the seriousness of his offending; his false dates; and crucially on the scale of his offending. He admitted to attacks on 12 women and nobody seems to have raised the 100 or so further complaints made against him.
The MOJ dossier had surprising omissions, not least the sentencing report of the judge, which had been damning and suggested he serve a very long, “indeterminate” sentence.
Also absent was the police report which “contrasted” to Worboys’ own account and would have highlighted the scale of his offending. Material from a civil case brought against the Met by Worboys’ victims was also missing. That evidence showed that Worboys had begun his reign of terror in 2002.
Also missing was the damning evidence of the “rape kit” that Worboys carried in the boot of his cab that included champagne (Worboys would tell his victims he had won the Lottery and asked them to toast his success); powerful sleeping pills and a sex toy. Then there was the civil case that Worboys had settled with 11 claimants, paying out a total of £241,000. Worboys said in a witness statement on March 5: “I settled those on a ‘no fault’ basis... I settled because I wanted to deal with the litigation and move on.”
Of the cases settled, only three involved victims for
offences in which he had been found guilty. In other words, Worboys was making payments on other cases outside the trial.
Sir Brian is scathing of the failure to question Worboys properly at the hearing.
“It is a fair reading of the notes of the hearing that the credibility and reliability of Mr Radford’s account was not probed to any extent, if at all,” concluded Sir Brian, adding: “Bearing in mind the size of the payment [£241,000], such answers should have generated a modicum of scepticism...”
On Boxing Day the Parole Board wrote to Worboys confirming his release, telling him that the panel “determines that it is no longer necessary for you to be detained in custody in order to protect the public”. Incredibly, the
conditions of his licence made no requirement that he be tagged or kept out of London, where most of his victims lived.
He knew many of their addresses because he had been taking them home in his taxi when he assaulted them.
The two victims who brought the judicial review would only learn of Worboys’ release from press reports after the parole decision was leaked on Jan 4, four days before David Gauke took up his post as Justice Secretary.
Mr Gauke threatened a judicial review but backed down, not least because it would expose his own department’s extraordinary failings. It would be left to Worboys’ victims – whose case was paid for by internet crowdfunding – to keep the rapist in jail and Britain’s streets safe from him.