Gary Vinter, the killer who won the right to hope

On the first day of July 2011, in the high-security prison at Wakefield, Gary Vinter took the handle of a plastic toilet brush, sharpened it to a point and drove it into Roy Whiting's eye.

Whiting was serving life for the abduction and murder of an eight-year-old girl in West Sussex in 2000. Few names in the English prison system were hated more. There were men on those landings who would have shaken Vinter's hand. He did not do it for them, and he did not do it for the girl. He pleaded guilty to wounding with intent, and his prison file went on growing.

Two years later he won the biggest legal victory of his life. The judges who gave it to him had no way of knowing what he would do with it.

You must be one of the most dangerous individuals within the prison system today

Judge Richard Foster, Luton Crown Court, 2016

Vinter came from Middlesbrough. He left school at sixteen and went on the railway, and by his mid-twenties he was a signalman at the freight yard at Grangetown, working nights in a box above the steelworks lines. He was very big and very careful. A prosecutor would later call him meticulous.

On the night of 2 August 1995 a young train crewman called Carl Edon cut across the tracks instead of walking the long way round to his cabin. He was twenty-two, with a little daughter and another baby on the way. Vinter saw him do it from the box.

The two men ended up in Carl's cabin. The Crown said Vinter attacked him over the short cut. The Court of Appeal later accepted that Carl had been holding a knife first, and that Vinter took it off him. Either way, Carl was stabbed at least thirteen times.

Then Vinter did something that frightened people more than the killing. He went back to his box and made the signals safe. He locked it. He drove to the police station at South Bank, covered in blood, and asked a detective to let the railway control room know the box was unmanned. Only after that did he tell her he had killed somebody.

A jury at Teesside convicted him of murder in 1996. Because of the knife, his minimum term was ten years. Carl's mother never accepted that a decade was a life sentence.

In prison Vinter gave nobody any trouble. He worked his way down the categories, the way a lifer does, and on home leave he met a beautician called Anne White, a mother of four. He was released on licence in August 2005, moved in with her, and married her the next summer.

Her family saw him hurt her. On New Year's Eve 2006 he was in a pub fight and went back to prison on recall, where the reports again called him a model prisoner. The Parole Board released him in December 2007. In early February 2008 he moved out. Anne told a friend she wanted to leave him and was too frightened to do it.

On the night of 10 February she went out with friends. Vinter followed her round four pubs, full of drink and cocaine. Outside the last one he forced her into a car and pulled her sixteen-year-old daughter back out of it onto the pavement. When the police rang Anne's phone, she told them she was fine. Then Vinter rang the police himself to say she was home safe. The Court of Appeal called it a kidnap, and said he had put the police off the scent on purpose.

He took her to his mother's house in Normanby. He tried to strangle her, then stabbed her with one knife and then another. Anne White was forty. His mother found her on the kitchen floor.

"I'm solely responsible for the death of my wife," he told the police. "That's all I'm prepared to say." At Teesside Crown Court he pleaded guilty, and the judge gave him the sentence kept for a man who murders a second time. "Regrettably you are incapable of self control," the judge said. "It is a whole life sentence."

A whole life order means there is no date. An ordinary lifer can earn his way towards a parole hearing. A whole lifer has nothing to earn.

Vinter said so in a letter to the Guardian. "I'm young and fit and I've maybe got another 50 years of life as a category A prisoner left," he wrote. "Torture every single day. I actually pray for a heart attack or cancer."

He took his case to Strasbourg, with two other whole lifers. On 9 July 2013 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights ruled for them by sixteen votes to one. A whole life sentence with no prospect of review, the court said, broke Article 3 of the Convention, the article against inhuman and degrading treatment. It would be "capricious", the judgment said, to expect a prisoner to work towards his own rehabilitation without knowing whether that could ever lead anywhere.

One of the judges, Ann Power-Forde, explained her vote in a phrase that went round the world. Article 3, she wrote, covered "the right to hope".

Anne's mother, Peggy, had a question of her own. "His human rights? What about our human rights?" A year earlier, when she heard about the Wakefield attack, she had put her feelings more plainly to the local paper. "I wish they had just killed each other."

The ruling opened no doors. In February 2014 the Court of Appeal in London decided that whole life orders were still lawful, because the Justice Secretary kept a power to release a prisoner in exceptional circumstances. Strasbourg later accepted that. Vinter was no nearer the gate. The hope the court had given him came down to something smaller. A different prison. A better gym.

In May 2014 he was moved to the Close Supervision Centre at HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes, the small unit where the system keeps men it cannot hold anywhere else. That September he asked to go to Long Lartin in Worcestershire, because the gym was better. He was told it was agreed in principle. Then nothing happened.

He began to count the days. He told staff that if he was not out by the weekend, he would be out by the end of the weekend. He asked one officer how long it had taken another prisoner to be shipped out "after what he did". He named a date, Friday 21 November, after which he would be "kicking off". If anyone came to tell him he was not moving, he said, they had better do it from behind a shield.

The Friday came and went. The following week he asked an officer, as a joke, whether the bus was there yet.

On the unit that month was Lee Newell, a double murderer who would also die in prison. He had been struggling, and Vinter had been heard telling him to calm down. On 26 November the managers put Newell back into his old exercise group. The group included Gary Vinter.

At about twenty-five past nine on the morning of Thursday 27 November 2014, after ten minutes of walking and talking in a concrete yard, Vinter hit Newell on the side of the head. Newell went down and never got up.

A High Court judge later went through the camera footage. Vinter punched Newell in the head about sixteen times in seven seconds. Then he kicked him in the head, eight times. He walked away, came back and kicked him again, walked away, and came back once more. From the first punch to the moment staff took him out of the yard was ninety-eight seconds.

Newell lost his right eye. His skull and face were broken, and he was left with a serious brain injury. He has no memory of the attack.

As he was led away, Vinter turned to a senior officer and said the line the officer would repeat to a jury. "I bet you're glad that was another prisoner and not a member of staff."

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At Luton Crown Court in February 2016 Vinter denied attempted murder, then changed his plea to guilty two days into the trial. His barrister was candid. Because his client had no hope of release, he said, he had no incentive to co-operate with the prison regime.

Judge Richard Foster gave him a third life sentence, and told him it would make no difference, "a fact which you well knew when you tried to kill Lee Newell." He did not stop there. "You must be one of the most dangerous individuals within the prison system today," he said. "Your record is truly shocking."

Then he named the motive. "You were prepared to sacrifice the life of a fellow human being just so you could move prisons."

A man who will never be released cannot be frightened with more prison. The only thing the system still controls is where he sleeps, and Gary Vinter had worked that out with a signalman's care. In 2021 a High Court judge ruled that the prison had failed to keep Newell reasonably safe, and the Ministry of Justice paid him £85,000.

The man who once locked his signal box before handing himself in now has three life sentences and no date. The full story is in our film on Gangland.