Welsh serial killer to die in jail, European court rules

Welsh serial killer Peter Moore will be kept in jail for the rest of his life, judges at the European Court of Human Rights have ruled.

Moore and two other convicted killers – Jeremy Bamber and Douglas Vinter – had asked the court to rule on whole life sentences.

The murderers said condemning them to die in prison amounts to “inhuman or degrading treatment”. They argued all sentences should be regularly reviewed.

When convicted the applicants were given whole life orders, meaning they cannot be released other than at the discretion of the Secretary of State on compassionate grounds, for example, if they are terminally ill.

Under the Criminal Justice Act 2003, all prisoners whose tariffs were set by the Secretary of State are able to apply to the High Court for review of that tariff.

Cinema owner Peter Moore, from Bagillt in North Wales, was convicted of murdering four men for his sexual gratification during a bloody three-month crime spree in 1995.

During his trial he was described by prosecutor Lord Carlile as the most dangerous man ever to set foot in Wales. He was jailed in 1996.

The High Court found that his case involved the murder of two or more people, sexual or sadistic conduct and a substantial degree of premeditation and that there were no mitigating circumstances.

The European court has now held that in the case of each of the three men the High Court had decided that an all-life tariff was “required, relatively recently and following a fair and detailed consideration”.

All three applicants had committed particularly brutal and callous murders, said the court, and it did not consider that these sentences were grossly disproportionate or amounted to inhuman or degrading treatment.

There had, therefore, been no violation of Article 3 in the case of any of the applicants.

Bamber, who was jailed for shooting five members of his family dead in Essex in 1986, has always protested his innocence, claiming his schizophrenic sister shot the victims before turning the gun on herself at their farmhouse at Tolleshunt D’Arcy.

Douglas Vinter, of Normanby, Teesside, killed both his wife and a work colleague.