Whole-life orders have been imposed on three inmates who murdered child killer Kyle Bevan at HMP Wakefield last November. Mark Fellows, 45, Lee Newell, 57, and David Taylor, 64, were convicted of inflicting 25 stab wounds on Bevan before leaving him "tidily tucked up in bed" to bleed to death.
Bevan, 33, was serving a life sentence with a minimum 28-year term for murdering his partner's two-year-old daughter, Lola James, in Pembrokeshire in 2020. Fellows and Newell were already under whole-life orders when they carried out the lethal assault.
Taylor was on remand at the time for murdering missing 24-year-old Alisha Apostoloff-Boyarin and attempting to murder a police officer. He received a whole-life order for Bevan's murder, as it constituted a second murder conviction. The judge, Mrs Justice McGowan, also handed down "new and separate" whole-life orders to Fellows and Newell for Bevan's murder.
Fellows, known as "the Wakefield Dexter," had carried out two gangland murders and was handed a whole-life sentence in 2019. Newell's first murder conviction came in 1989 after he strangled his female neighbour. He received a whole-life tariff in 2013 after strangling a fellow inmate who had killed a child.
The court heard there was "a lot of tension in the prison at the time," with two other serious attacks occurring in the weeks leading up to Bevan's death, including the stabbing of paedophile Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins. Vulnerable prisoners were not separated from other inmates at Wakefield, leading to a "distorted moral hierarchy."
Bevan "kept himself to himself" and would mainly stay in his cell. On the day of his death, CCTV showed him walking to his cell followed by the three defendants. They left less than five minutes later, shaking hands and apparently congratulating each other. One weapon, made from a folded piece of metal from a television, was found outside the cell, but the weapon causing fatal injuries has never been found.
