Twenty years of seeing justice, done
From the quarter sessions in Carmarthen to the Old Bailey in London, Adele Williams has seen many courtroom changes throughout her distinguished career.
But the judge, who once imagined life as a barrister, never dreamed she would be sentencing villains from her own kitchen in Ashford.
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced courts to rethink how cases are organised and how trials and sentences are dealt with. And that has meant many of Kent’s judges having to turn their homes into courtrooms with barristers and defendants appearing via videolink.
Judge Williams, who grew up in Wales, has just retired after 20 years as a Kent judge - eight of them as resident judge at Canterbury Crown Court.
And by her side during her career has been husband Andrew - who was resident judge at Maidstone Crown Court for many years until his retirement.
The couple first met at the Old Bailey when the two were co-defending - and Adele was a trainee barrister.
The two also successfully defended two defendants charged with looting during the Broadwater Farm estate riots in Tottenham, in 1985.
In October that year, four policemen burst into the home of resident Cynthia Jarrett looking for stolen property.
They did not find any, but Ms Jarrett had a heart attack and died.
In the ensuing violence police were pelted with bricks, bottles and petrol bombs and PC Keith Blakelock was stabbed to death. Three people were jailed for his murder in the late 1980s, but their convictions were overturned and another murder trial in 2014 ended with a not guilty verdict.
After marrying, Adele and Andrew moved to Kent where they became one of only a handful of married couples to become resident judges at the same time. She recalls: “I didn’t know of Kent in any real sense until I started coming here to do work and just loved it.”
It was in the county they raised their family, daughter Louise, who now lives in Australia and son David, who followed his parents into law and is now a well-respected barrister. Among a plethora of trials and bizarre cases she has presided over, the one which stands out was the attempted murder of Ray Weatherall, which she described at the time as “cold, calculated and chilling cruelty”. The case had involved Mr Weatherall’s cheating wife, her lover and his daughter.
In 2018, the three plotted to shoot him at Sandwich Marina after a number of bizarre failed attempts to kill him, which included giving him an insulin overdose and pushing him overboard while on a fishing trip. He was shot in the face but survived, with all three defendants convicted of conspiracy to murder and handed life sentences. Judge Williams also presided over the case of a notorious sex offender called Dale Bolinger, dubbed the ‘Canterbury Cannibal.’
Bolinger, a nurse, was 62 when he was convicted in 2014 of plotting to rape, decapitate and eat a 14-year-old girl. He had had even bought an axe for his meeting with the girl - but she did not show.
He photographed himself holding the weapon in front of a mirror.
He was jailed for nine years in September 2014, with Judge Williams telling him “You have shown no remorse and indeed cannot understand why anyone should find your behaviour in any way abnormal or perverted, let alone criminal.”
Bolinger, an American citizen, was released early and tried to set up home in the small backwater of Blair, Nebraska.
The judge has also had a link with a case which still continues to cause debate today in Kent, following an horrific murder 24 years ago.
She tried Damian Daley, the man who helped convict Michael Stone of the killing of Lin and Megan Russell in Chillenden in 1996, for the murder of a drug dealer.
Daley was himself given a life prison sentence and told he must serve at least 20 years. Fourteen years ago Stone was found guilty of killing Lin and Megan Russell in Chillenden – after Daley gave evidence for the prosecution.
Daley told the court that Stone had confessed to him in Canterbury prison that he had carried out the dreadful attacks on the 40-year-old mother and her six year old daughter.
No DNA linked Stone to the scene and he was largely convicted on Daley’s evidence. Stone has always maintained his innocence and in 2017 a legal team assembled for a TV documentary backed Stone’s attempt for a third appeal and cast doubt on Daley’s evidence, saying much of it had already been published in press reports. In 2014, a jury convicted Daley of helping in the murder of drug dealer Gus Allman in Folkstone. Judge Williams described Daley as a violent and manipulative man.
She told him: “You armed yourself and joined in the attack on Mr Allman, even to the extent of following him out into the street.
“This was a drug-related argument during which each of you used a knife. This was a brutal murder.”
And one of the most dreadful cases she recalls was the killing of University of Kent student Molly McLaren.
Her ex-boyfriend, Joshua Stimpson, slit her throat while she sat in her car at the Dockside Outlet shopping centre in summer 2017.
Stimpson was jailed for life, with the trial hearing how he had embarked on a terrifying stalking campaign of the 23-year-old student. He’d followed her to her gym, moments before killing her.
“That was just horrible,” Judge Williams recalls. She had told Stimpson in court: “This was an act of wickedness. You took away Molly’s life quite deliberately in the most vicious fashion to punish her for finishing the relationship with you.”