Lee Newell, the prisoner who killed two child killers twelve years apart

At nineteen minutes to seven on a Thursday evening in February 2013, a light came up on a screen in the control room at HMP Long Lartin, and a calm voice came over the cell intercom.

"Miss, I have taken the guy in this cell hostage."

The woman on duty asked him to say it again. He did, and told her it was not a joke. After a pause he added something else. "I think he is dead." She asked him why he had done it. "I am bored and it was something to do."

I am bored and it was something to do

Lee Newell, on the cell intercom, 14 February 2013

She said afterwards that what made it hard to believe was the voice. There was no panic in it at all. The man on the line was Lee Newell. The man in the cell was a convicted child killer called Subhan Anwar.

Twelve years later, in another high-security prison, Newell walked into another child killer's cell.

Lee William Newell was born in October 1968 and grew up in Norwich. He was expelled from school at twelve and picked up two convictions for theft in his late teens. At nineteen he was out of work and living in Gateley Gardens.

Mary Neal lived in the same street. She was fifty-six, a divorcee from King's Lynn, and she had never done him any harm. In March 1988 he talked his way into her house. Once inside, he told her he wanted money. She refused. He strangled her, shut her body in the cupboard under the stairs, and went to Jersey.

She lay there for ten days before she was found. He was arrested the next day. "I just kept going," he told the police.

At Norwich Crown Court in January 1989 the jury took twenty-five minutes to convict him of murder. Because of his age he was given custody for life, with a minimum of fifteen years. Mary's sister told the local paper that life should mean life. In his case it would.

Newell did not settle in prison. He cut himself, went on hunger strike and collected forty-seven disciplinary charges. He tried to escape and failed drug tests. His fifteen years came and went, and the Parole Board turned him down eight times.

In September 2007 he and another prisoner held a man hostage for several hours. Newell said he only wanted to be moved to another jail. It was a trick he would use again.

He arrived at Long Lartin in Worcestershire in 2010 with a drug habit and debts to other prisoners. He asked for protection and was moved to D wing, a unit for vulnerable prisoners. Most men on a wing like that are there because of what they did to women or children. Newell was there because he owed money.

Subhan Anwar was from Batley in West Yorkshire. In 2009 a jury at Bradford Crown Court had convicted him of murdering his partner's two-year-old daughter, and he was given life with a minimum of twenty-three years. His family always said he was innocent.

At his last prison he had been attacked so badly on the exercise yard that he needed hospital treatment. At Long Lartin he was bullied and robbed at first, then found his feet. The other men elected him wing representative. Staff described him as well liked.

On D wing that winter there was also Gary Smith, a Leicester man serving life for killing a man he believed was an informer. Like Newell, Smith had taken a hostage in prison before. Both men had stayed out of trouble for a while, and both were working towards extra privileges.

On the evening of 14 February 2013 the cameras caught Newell and Smith going in and out of each other's cells on the top landing. Then Newell went down to the kitchen where Anwar was cooking with a friend. Anwar came out and went up the stairs. On the landing he glanced back at Newell over his shoulder, and walked on to his own cell. Newell and Smith followed him in. There was no struggle in the doorway.

Inside, the court found, they told Anwar it was a hostage-taking, so that he would keep still. They taped his legs. Then Newell put a pair of Anwar's own tracksuit bottoms round his neck and pulled. It took, the Court of Appeal said, "significantly in excess of half a minute".

Anwar's friend came to the door with his dinner. A voice that was not Anwar's said "One minute". The friend came back later. "Put it in your tub," the voice said.

The senior officer on the wing reached the cell at about a quarter to seven. Newell told him Anwar had been dead for about an hour, and that they were ready to go down to segregation whenever the staff liked.

The prison could not be sure the man inside was dead, so it ran the incident as a hostage siege. Officers listened at the door for nearly an hour. They heard Newell say the spur would be locked down and "like CSI up here". When the observation panel was finally uncovered, a negotiator who knew Newell asked if the man on the bed was alive. "He's gone," said Newell. "He is with Allah."

While they waited, Smith made Newell a hot chocolate and sweetened it with icing sugar.

When the restraint teams took them out, both men were calm. Newell was wearing Anwar's watch, and Smith his earring. The judge called them trophies.

At Warwick Crown Court that September a jury convicted both men in about three and a half hours. Mr Justice Baker gave each of them a whole life order. When Newell appealed, the Lord Chief Justice dismissed it in a paragraph. "The deceased took a significant time to die," the court said. "There was no mitigation."

Nine months after his appeal failed, Newell was the man on the ground. In November 2014, in an exercise yard at HMP Woodhill, the double murderer Gary Vinter knocked him down and kicked him in the head again and again, to force a move to another prison. Newell lost his right eye and was left with a brain injury. In 2021 he sued the Ministry of Justice and was awarded £85,000. The prison, the judge found, should never have put the two men in the same yard.

The damages changed nothing else. He was still a whole lifer, now with one eye.

By the autumn of 2025 Newell was at HMP Wakefield, where men convicted of crimes against children mixed with everybody else. Two other killers lived on his landing. Mark Fellows, known as the Iceman, was serving a whole life order for shooting dead Paul Massey and John Kinsella. David Taylor was on remand for the murder of a young woman and for stabbing a detective during an interview at another prison.

Kyle Bevan was thirty-three. In 2023 he had been given life, with a minimum of twenty-eight years, for murdering his partner's two-year-old daughter in Pembrokeshire. At Wakefield he kept to his cell and often asked to be locked in.

A little after half past five on the evening of 4 November, Bevan walked along the fourth landing to his cell. The cameras show the three men a short way behind him, Fellows wearing blue plastic gloves. Bevan looked back over his shoulder, as Subhan Anwar had done twelve years before, and went in. The three followed him.

They were inside for four minutes and thirty-nine seconds. Bevan was stabbed about twenty-five times in the neck and body with at least two weapons, one of them folded metal from the back of a television. The prosecution said he was put in his bed under a blanket, so that he looked asleep. On the landing outside, the footage shows the three men shaking hands. Later that evening Fellows went back up and checked the cell twice. The judge believed he wanted to see how it would look to an officer peering in during the night.

Staff found Bevan dead at unlock the next morning. Taylor was heard to say, "Nice doing business with you."

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At Leeds Crown Court in June 2026, Newell's barrister pointed out that no weapon and none of Bevan's blood had been linked to his client. Mrs Justice McGowan told the jury plainly that nobody knew who did what in the cell. "At least one person must have inflicted the fatal injuries," she said. On 18 June the jury convicted all three of murder.

At sentence the next day she gave the reason in one line. "You chose him as your target because he had been convicted of the murder of a child." She had already told the jury what she thought of that. "Nobody has a right to kill anyone else because they disapprove of what they have done, or because they hate them."

Then she gave Lee Newell a new and separate whole life order. "I've never had to sentence someone for a third murder," she said, "and in two of these defendants' cases that's what just happened."

He went into prison at nineteen with a date to aim for. He is fifty-eight now, with one eye and two whole life orders. The full story is in our film on Gangland.