MANY GRIZZLY and shocking crimes have taken place across the country- and some of the criminals have served their sentence in Worcestershire’s HM Long Lartin prison.
This is a category A men's prison, located in the village of South Littleton in the District of Wychavon in Worcestershire.
Reggie Kray and Jeremy Bamber are just some of the killers who served part of their lengthy sentence behind the prison's bars.
Here are some of the prisons most notorious inmates, past and present, and the horrific crimes they committed in order to be placed here.
Vincent Tabak
Back in 2011, Vincent Tabak was found guilty of the murder of Bristol landscape architect, Jo Yeates, and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in jail.
The Yeates was last seen alive on 17 December 2010 in a case that dominated the headlines.
Her body was found on Christmas Day in Somerset.
Tabak, a Dutch-born architect who was 32 at the time of Yeates’s disappearance, lived next door to her in the Clifton suburb of Bristol.
He was held at Long Lartin in 2011 but has since been moved; it’s thought that he is currently serving his sentence at Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire.
Ian Watkins
Former Lostprophets singer, Ian Watkins was jailed at Cardiff Crown Court in 2013.
He was sentenced to 29 years in prison for sexually abusing children.
He was sentenced alongside two women who are the mothers of the children he abused.
Known only as Woman A and Woman B, they were jailed for 14 and 17 years respectively.
At the time, the judge said his vile actions “defied belief” adding that Watkins showed "evident delight" in abusing children and showed an "almost complete lack of remorse" for his behaviour. He said: "It's difficult to imagine anything much worse."
He was initially sent to ‘Monster Mansion’ in Wakefield but was later moved to Worcestershire’s Long Lartin fin 2014 so he could be near his ill mother- he later moved to HMP Rye Hill in Warwickshire.
Christopher Halliwell
Halliwell ws handed a life sentence after murdering Sian O'Callaghan, 22, and Becky Godden-Edwards, 28, in Wiltshire- but he is believed to have murdered more.
The 52-year-old former taxi driver confessed to murdering 22-year-old Sian, after abducting her in his taxi as she made a 15 minute walk home from a nightclub in Swindon in March 2011.
Years later he was also found guilty of Becky's murder in March 2016.
He has been handed a whole life order and he’s likely to die behind bars without ever being eligible for parole.
Nathan Matthews
Becky Watts was 16-years-old when her body was discovered in 2015.
It later emerged that the teen had been murdered by her own step-brother, Nathan Matthews and his girlfriend Shauna Hoare.
After being suffocated, her body was discovered after being chopped up with a circular saw and hidden by the pair.
Nathan put the body in a red suitcase to take back to his home, before offering a friend £10,000 to store items for him.
After the sickening act, the pair ordered a takeaway and played a game of Monopoly.
Matthews was sentenced to 33 years and his girlfriend Shauna Hoare was given 17 years for manslaughter.
In 2017, Matthews suffered burns after allegedly being scolded with a jug of boiling butter by a fellow prisoner.
Jeremy Bamber
Before being incarcerated in Wakefield, Jeremy Bamber spent some of his sentence in HMP Long Lartin.
Bamber was convicted of a crime that became known as ‘The White House Farm Murders’.
He was found guilty of murdering his adoptive parents, sister and her twin sons after all of them were found with gun shot wounds in 1985.
The scene had been made to look like a murder-suicide, with his sister Sheila Caffell, who had schizophrenia, initially thought to have carried out the killings before turning the gun on herself.
To this day, Bamber maintains his innocence despite his life sentence.
In 2020, he lost a bid to bring a legal challenge over a refusal by the Prison Service to downgrade him from maximum security.
Reggie Kray
Notorious gangster, Reggie Kray, was one half of the Kray twins.
Reggie Kray and his brother Ronnie carved out an infamous crime empire through their gang The Firm in the 1950s and 60s and were both given life prison sentences for murder in 1969.
Reggie was moved to Long Lartin in 1981- and gangster Patsy Manningham spoke about his encounters with Reggie Kray in a book.
Get Behind Your Door: The Forgotten Manuscript, was compiled from Patsy’s handwritten notes over the course of 30 years and was under strict instruction not to be published until after his death, to protect the people he mentioned in it.
In it he describes how Reggie suffered from bouts of depression and became paranoid that Patsy was plotting with prison officers to have him poisoned.
On the day of the attack, Patsy says he was on his way to see his welfare officer when he passed Reggie on the stairs and greeted him.
He wrote that Reggie then jumped on him “without any warning” and smashed him on the head with a glass cup.
Patsy, who escaped with cuts and bruises, said he later lied to officers to stop Reggie from getting in trouble.
Reggie Kray had spent time in several prisons before being released from Wayland Prison on compassionate grounds in August 2000.
He died eight weeks later from cancer, aged 66.
Steve Wright
Also known as the Suffolk Strangler and the Ipswitch Ripper, wright is a convicted serial killer who murdered people at the end of 2006.
He is serving a whole life sentence out HMP Long Lartin after murdering five young women and dumped their naked bodies in spots around Suffolk.
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