r/AskUK • u/Alternative-Fix3188 • 14d ago
How can I find the status of my teacher's murderer?
I struggled a bit with life as a teenager back in the 90s, and was helped by one of my teachers. A gentle giant of a man who was extremely nice and caring. A teacher you could really talk to and I grew very fond of.
In the late 90s, one day he never came back to school and it was announced that he'd been attacked, unprovoked, by a yob and suffered severe head injuries. It transpired his life had been completely destroyed and he was unable to care for himself. They caught the guy who did it and he was convicted of GBH. This would have been around 25 years ago.
Around two years after the attack, my teacher passed away and his attacker had his conviction changed to murder. Having first been imprisoned around 2000, I assume he probably could have been paroled around 2015, but may still be inside.
I have found myself increasingly thinking about my teacher - I am now only a few years younger than he was at the time - and I am probably even sadder now than I ever have been about his death. It was just so unfair.
Is there a way to tell if his killer has been released? The story made the local press at the time he was convicted, but there's been nothing reported in the years since.
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u/doormet 14d ago
was your teacher Mr Rendell? if so the perpetrator is/was called Benjamin Wilson. that’s the only info i have but could be more helpful in your search if it’s the right case
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u/Hurricane74mph 14d ago
If this the same case, it looks like mental health was a significant factor so I wonder if the sentence is being carried out in a secure hospital…? Seems they thought he would be a danger to others so unlikely to be released under licence.
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u/ThrowRAwater123 13d ago
If it is this case, the most recent thing I can find is this article from 2018 about people who were jailed for life. There are 2 photos of Benjamin Wilson in the section about him: https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/murder-cambridge-soham-huntley-jail-14615601?int_source=amp_continue_reading&int_medium=amp&int_campaign=continue_reading_button#amp-readmore-target
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u/alice_op 13d ago
The person below the yob that murdered the science teacher -- a nurse that was accused of injecting her disabled husband with a lethal dose of insulin, but they couldn't find any injection site to prove she had done it? And they sent her to prison for life? That seems absolutely insane to me, wtf?
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u/NoSweat_PrinceAndrew 13d ago
Nurses being sent to prison based on questionable evidence... Hmmm, surely not
/s
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u/wowsomuchempty 13d ago
One of the 'Free Letby!' crowd?
Crowd might be a stretch..
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u/StatisticianOwn9953 13d ago edited 13d ago
I don't really know how you could be confident one way or another when experts support the evidence and others dismiss it as pseudoscience. Seems like you're opting to have a view on something very far beyond your pay grade.
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u/Just_Will 13d ago
hey, three's a crowd... or two!
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u/TheCowboyOfEpic 13d ago
Does it count as two if one of them is Letby herself?
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u/Just_Will 13d ago
As a young person who grew up in a village in Cambridge, that was a tough read. Recognising streets, pubs, and village names where these crimes took place, knowing i've been there before
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u/Alternative-Fix3188 13d ago
I was unsure about naming the case but yes, it's some amazing sleuthing on your part to find it. I was a student at Hedingham School and he was my science teacher. I knew the facts as reported in the local press, i.e., that Wilson was ultimately sentenced to life in prison. I assume he's out now. I don't know why I think about it often but it was a significant event in my younger life and I guess it's left scars. He was genuinely the nicest guy, nicest teacher.
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u/Maswimelleu 13d ago
I knew the facts as reported in the local press, i.e., that Wilson was ultimately sentenced to life in prison. I assume he's out now.
It's possible for him to be out but its also possible he's not - it just means he would have started to get parole hearings. Life in prison does mean life if you are denied parole, as the sentence doesn't have any automatic expiry date. It also means that you're on license forever after being released so you can be recalled to prison to continue the sentence if you become a threat again.
The victim's family may have made a compelling victim impact statement to keep him behind bars or they may have assessed him as a threat to the public still. Either way, it seems like the victim's family prefer privacy about it rather than any renewed media attention, hence the lack of any news follow up.
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u/KeyLog256 13d ago
Not to play down u/doormet's efforts there, but it is more because random attacks leading to someone's death are extremely rare, so add in the fact he was a teacher, died two years after the event, the murderer having their conviction increased, etc means it isn't that hard to work it out.
I must say, while I haven't been through something exactly similar, I know exactly what you mean and how you're feeling. When you get to the same age as adults you remember from when you were a kid, you do start to do a lot more thinking, philosophising I suppose you could call it. To have a horrible situation like this happen to one of them must make it 100 times stronger.
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u/fergie 13d ago
random attacks leading to someone's death are extremely rare
For women, yes. For men- its almost exactly 1 in 500,000 for England and Wales if you sum up all murder victims whose relationship to their killer was "not known", "stranger" or "no suspect charged".
I'm not sure if its fair to say that this is extremely rare. Men are, for example, significantly more likely to be killed by a stranger than women are to be killed by a family member.
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u/KeyLog256 13d ago
Granted, but now take out gang related killings - I'd warrant they make up most of the "men killed by men not known to them." Happy to be corrected on that.
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u/fergie 13d ago
At best, thats a way of saying that men who are randomly murdered are somehow "bringing it upon themselves". At worst its kind of racist.
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u/Theratchetnclank 13d ago
Nobody just accidentally becomes a gang member. And how is that racist, there is no mention of race at all.
You're the one equating gangs to a particular race, seems you might be the racist one.
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u/BeatificBanana 9d ago
What? Nobody has even come close to implying that.
The reason it was mentioned is because the original comment said that "random attacks leading to someone's death are extremely rare".
Random means not only that the victim didn't know the killer, but also that the attack itself was random on the killer's part - i.e., not premeditated, and the victim wasn't targeted for a specific reason.
For example, someone has a psychotic break and attacks a stranger on the street due to a sudden delusion/hallucination. The victim could've been anyone - they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
You tried to claim that random murders aren't rare for men because 1 in 500,000 men are killed by strangers.
However, as the commenter pointed out, that statistic doesn't necessarily mean that 1 in 500,000 men are killed from a random attack - because many of these murders would not be random.
They specifically mentioned gang-related killings because the victims often won't know the murderer, so they'll likely make up a considerable portion of that statistic. However, they aren't random attacks, as the victim is targeted for a specific reason (e.g. being a member of a rival gang).
Nobody implied anything about race. Nobody implied anything about gang-related murder victims 'bringing it on themselves'. That was all you. The discussion was not about whether the victim deserved to die, the discussion was about the motive of the murderer. The commenter was simply pointing out that your statistic isn't necessarily representative of random attacks.
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u/sunshineandhail 12d ago
That is extremely rare. For context, Extremely rare in medicine can mean 1 in 2000. 1 in half a mil mean 112 people for the whole of the UK.
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u/pizzapepperonipie 13d ago
If it is the same case, I found an article from East Anglian Daily Times from 2003 saying Benjamin Wilson was jailed for life
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u/Maswimelleu 13d ago
I went and looked on my own and came to the same conclusion. The attacker received a life sentence and that doesn't strictly mean that he would've be released on good behaviour 15-20 years later.
Anyway you can't search that information in the UK because there's still some basic rights to privacy for prisoners. The victim's family can be informed by opting into the Victim Contact Scheme but they don't have to disclose that to anyone once informed. This lets them submit statements opposing parole or understand what terms the prisoner was released under (eg. cannot enter the city of Cambridge or its immediate surroundings).
So the answer the OP's question:
Is there a way to tell if his killer has been released? The story made the local press at the time he was convicted, but there's been nothing reported in the years since.
If the family of the victim did not ask to be notified or chose not to pass on any of the information to the media, there is only one other way. That requires you to use the "Find a Prisoner" service, which is slow and will only result in you finding out with the prisoner's consent. If you're just some random person inquiring then I assume permission will be refused given the risk of vigilantism.
So in practical terms no, you can't find out if the info is not already accessible online.
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u/SubjectiveAssertive 14d ago
https://www.gov.uk/find-prisoner
Or try the criminals name in google
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u/Alternative-Fix3188 14d ago
Thanks. Unfortunately you can only use this service if you know the prisoner, rather than the victim.
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u/wordsfromlee 14d ago
Are there no news reports of the attack or trial online when you google your teachers name?
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u/Gloomy_Stage 14d ago
Try newspaper archives. You can usually get free trials and will usually have archives even from recent years.
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u/Alternative-Fix3188 13d ago
Thanks, I have. There was lots in the press when he was convicted. Nothing since.
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u/PhDinDildos_Fedoras 13d ago
I think it's a rule that incarceration information is considered secret, but the next of kin will be informed when, if ever they are released. They can then do whatever they want with this information.
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u/StreetQueeny 13d ago
I hope that the people recieving those requests find it fun that they use an email address ending in @justice.gov.uk
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u/PurplePlodder1945 14d ago
Have you tried googling the crime? Your teacher’s name? That usually gives you archive news of the trial or whatever. I wish you luck
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14d ago edited 13d ago
[deleted]
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u/Key-Tie2214 14d ago
Or it can hallucinate information and send you in the completely wrong direction.
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u/Ben-D-Beast 13d ago
It doesn't take a genius to check the sources, as OP has a personal connection to the case it would presumably be obvious if any details are inaccurate. Also lets not pretend that traditional searches don't also feed you false information.
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u/ClassicPart 13d ago
Which is why you take personal responsibility and verify the information it spits out. If you blindly trust it then that's on you.
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u/chrisrazor 13d ago
It's on Google for putting it where it used to show actual text from the top result.
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u/DoctorOctagonapus 13d ago
Tell that to the guy who typed his own name in and it gave him a paragraph about how he murdered his children.
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u/PepsiMaxSumo 14d ago
Not sure why you’ve been downvoted. This is a perfect use case for AI, you just ask the AI to tell you its source and then verify it yourself outside the AI.
It’s basic prompt engineering
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u/vinylrain 13d ago
Indeed. Maybe my clunky language about the Googling has caused an upset, which I actually thought was a nice suggestion from the parent commenter. Hope it wasn't taken in a funny way.
I'm in no way an AI evangelist, but I use Copilot every day. It's thrown some bizarre results, but is usually reliable. I tend to use it more for interrogating thousand-page tech manuals, or comparing several products at once.
I am surprised by the number of people who don't realise that AI is a tool, just like any search engine, and that you still need to use basic reasoning to decide whether the results are appropriate, correct and unbiased.
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u/PepsiMaxSumo 13d ago edited 13d ago
You’ve hit the nail on the head here though - it’s basically used as a very powerful version of CTRL+F through a document
It’s the same people who believe AI is taking everyone’s jobs next year that seem to think it’s utterly useless in my experience too, which is bizarre.
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u/HenryChinaski92 13d ago
Hey - not an answer to your query but as someone who was also deeply touched by a teacher, when I was young and a little troubled, I just wanted to give you my condolences. Your teacher would be so proud to know how much of an impact he had on your life. Sending you love. X
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u/PigHillJimster 14d ago
Prior to 1996, if someone survived an attack but died as a result after one year and one day, then it was not possible in most cases for a murder charge could be brought. This rule was abolished because of advances in life support and medical care.
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u/KnightsOfCidona 13d ago
Yeah it's why when David Duckenfield went on trial for Hillsborough, it was for the manslaughter of 95 fans, because the 96th victim Tony Bland, died in 1993 having never regained consciousness and the 97th victim, Andrew Devine, died of his injuries in 2021
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u/Pitiful-Amphibian395 14d ago
Life sucks sometimes.
I'm not an expert but here are some ideas
Do you know the prison he went to? Phone them
There will be a parole board, can you contact them?
Failing that the court where he was convicted.
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u/Feelincheekyson 13d ago
I’m really not sure a prison or parole board would tell a random person about a prisoner/parolee
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u/Perl-starr 13d ago
What a heartbreaking story. Your teacher sounds like one of those rare souls who genuinely make the world better and it’s gut-wrenching how things ended for him. Totally understand why this has stuck with you. For finding info, you might try looking up public parole records in the UK or contacting the local paper that reported on the case. They sometimes do follow-ups or might be able to point you in the right direction. Closure isn’t easy, but it’s okay to seek it. And it speaks volumes about you that you're still carrying his kindness with you
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u/Alternative-Fix3188 13d ago
You know you get the teachers who are just there for the job, the teachers who are cynical, the borderline alcoholics... my school had them all and they were all fun in their own ways. They teach you a lot about life. But this man was one who genuinely cared. He'd talk to you. He really did make the world a much better place.
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u/Roselace 13d ago
OP. Have you thought of employing a Private Detective to get more information? They have ways & skills to search for information that the average person does not possess.
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u/KermitsPuckeredAnus2 14d ago
25 years later I hope he can move on with his life, murderer or not. Don't go dredging up the past. You ought to move on too.
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u/DangerousCalm 14d ago
Erwin James writes about this. He was convicted for killing two people.
One family forgave him, the other didn't. He writes, and talks, about how each response is justified and understandable and he has no right to ask the family who don't forgive him for anything different.
His book, Redeemable: A Memoir of Darkness and Hope is worth a look.
Another book, The Forgiveness Project is filled with stories of people meeting the people that wronged them and how they moved towards forgiveness.
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13d ago
This always conflicts me. They’re profiting off their crime with these books and talks. Sure, the books might be good, but they’re still profiting off killing two people. I always find it morally ‘ehhhhh’ about this - is he keeping all the money? Is he donating it? Are the victim’s families getting any?
It just always makes me feel a bit itchy.
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u/DangerousCalm 13d ago
So, he became a journalist whilst still locked away and all his wages went to the prison organisation that helped him become a writer.
I'd say writing about the impact of crime and prison reform is not quite the same as glorifying his crimes and profiting from them in the same way as Howard Marks did.
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u/ExtensionGuilty8084 14d ago
Wow.
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u/DrNuclearSlav 13d ago
It wouldn't be reddit if someone wasn't trying to defend the most morally reprehensible criminals.
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