A third prisoner involved in the murder of a child killer within his cell has been handed a whole life order, a sentence his two accomplices were already serving.
Convicted killers Mark Fellows, 45, Lee Newell, 57, and David Taylor, 64, fatally stabbed Kyle Bevan at high-security HMP Wakefield in West Yorkshire last November. They then tucked him into bed, leaving him to bleed out.
Bevan, 33, was serving a life sentence with a minimum 28-year tariff for the 2020 murder of his partner’s two-year-old daughter, Lola James, in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire.
Fellows and Newell were already serving whole life orders when they killed Bevan, meaning they will never be released.
The judge, Mrs Justice McGowan, imposed “new and separate” whole life orders on both of them for Bevan’s murder.
Taylor was given a whole life order for Bevan’s death, on top of the offences he was on remand for at the time.
These were the murder of missing 24-year-old Alisha Apostoloff-Boyarin – a vulnerable woman he was in a relationship with but had grown tired of – and attempting to murder a police officer in an interview room at another high-security jail.
Mrs Justice McGowan jailed Taylor for life with a minimum term of 20 years for Ms Apostoloff-Boyarin’s murder and handed him a 30-year sentence for the attempted murder of the officer.
She then imposed a whole life order for the death of Bevan, as it was a second offence of murder.
After thanking the trial jurors who had attended the sentencing hearing, the judge said: “I’ve never had to sentence someone for a third murder, and in two of these defendants’ cases that’s what just happened.”
Fellows was the only one of the three to attend court for the hearing, with Newell and Taylor joining by video-link from prison.
The court heard Newell was first jailed for murder in 1989 after strangling his female neighbour, who was in her 50s at the time, after she refused to give him money.
He was then given a whole life order in 2013 after strangling a prisoner who murdered a child and leaving him in his bed, with “a chilling similarity to… the circumstances of Kyle Bevan’s death”.
Fellows, a hitman known as “the Wakefield Dexter”, had committed two gangland murders and was given a whole life term in 2019.
He had formally applied to move from Wakefield not long before Bevan’s killing because of his dissatisfaction with the regime there.
Taylor had recently been transferred to Wakefield.
The court heard Taylor boasted about his ability to make makeshift weapons “out of all sorts”, and after Bevan’s death some were found in a bottle of chilli sauce in his cell, although they could not be matched to the fatal attack.
When Taylor appeared on video-link for hearings before the jury was sworn in, he was escorted into a room at Full Sutton prison, near York, by a number of officers in full riot gear.
They had to remove two sets of handcuffs from him before he was allowed to sit and listen to lawyers discuss fears over the danger he posed.
The judge was told there had been concerns from prison authorities that Taylor had somehow managed to secrete a weapon in his body – for some weeks – but this could not be found.
The judge was also told prison authorities wanted all three defendants to be handcuffed if they gave evidence in the witness box but, in the end, none of them took to the stand.
The trial heard there was “a lot of tension in the prison at the time” and there had been two other serious attacks in the weeks leading up to Bevan’s death – one in which paedophile Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins was stabbed to death and one in which David Minto, who murdered 16-year-old Sasha Marsden in Blackpool in 2013, was seriously injured.
Jurors heard that unlike other jails, vulnerable prisoners were not separated from other inmates at Wakefield.
The regime at the time meant “main prisoners” such as Fellows, Newell and Taylor “had to mix with, in a distorted moral hierarchy, other criminals that were beneath them” such as child killers, prosecutors said.
The court heard the three defendants had a hostility to people who had committed offences against children and Fellows and Newell had expressed a desire to be transferred away from Wakefield.
Bevan “kept himself to himself” and would mainly stay in his cell, often asking to be locked inside, jurors were told.
On the day of his death, he was seen on CCTV walking to his cell, followed by the three defendants, who were just seconds behind.
Taylor could be seen taking something from his waistband as he went in.
The court heard it is not known “who did what” inside the cells, but that Bevan was likely held by his arms while being stabbed 25 times with at least two weapons.
The court heard the three defendants left the cell less than five minutes later “as if nothing had happened”.
They could be seen shaking hands and apparently congratulating each other.
Newell had an injury to his hand while Fellows could be seen rolling up his tracksuit bottoms after realising they had blood on them, and later disposing of them.
Jurors heard one weapon, made from a folded piece of metal from the back of a television, was thrown from Bevan’s cell and found on the ground outside. It had Bevan’s blood on it.
The weapon which caused the fatal injuries has never been found.
The trial heard that, as Taylor was being transferred out of Wakefield, he was heard to shout in the vicinity of Newell: “Nice working with you and the Iceman” – a nickname for Fellows.
