Howard Hughes (murderer)
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Howard Hughes (born 1965) is a convicted child murderer.
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[edit] Early life
Howard Hughes was born in Llandudno, North Wales, in 1965, the youngest of four children born to Gerald and Renee Hughes. He had three older sisters, and his father was a wealthy businessman who ran a construction firm. He was born with a genetic disorder which caused him to grow at an abnormally quick rate, and on starting primary school in 1969 he quickly gained a reputation for being aggressive with other pupils. He was expelled from several primary and secondary schools for violent attacks on other pupils, and at one stage his father offered the headteacher of one private school double fees to keep him on, but the headteacher refused to allow Howard to remain at the school.
Hughes would regularly play truant from school, where he and other tearaways would steal items including bicycles from garden sheds. He would sell stolen bicycles from the garden of the family home. When his parents divorced, he moved into his mother's house.
[edit] Involvement in crime
Hughes came to the attention of police in 1981, when at the age of 16 he was arrested for strangling a seven-year-old boy so fiercely that he was rendered unconscious and had to go to hospital. He was convicted of assault and given a probation order.
After leaving home, he moved into a flat in Llandudno and began a lengthy feud with his female next-door neighbour. He would peer over the fence when she was sunbathing, threatened to 'blow her head off' with a gun, and regularly played loud music. In 1985, Hughes was briefly admitted to a mental hospital in Northamptonshire but failed to make any real progress. According to a friend, he continued to walk the streets of Llandudno and look up girls' skirts while standing below a footbridge, as well as peering into the dormitory at an all-girls boarding school. In 1987 he was charged with raping a 14-year-old girl but the case collapsed due to a lack of evidence.
[edit] The Sophie Hook murder
On 29th July 1995, seven-year-old Sophie Hook travelled to Llandudno with her nine-year-old sister Jemma, five-year-old brother Joe and three-year-old sister Ellie, as well as her mother Julie. It was the ninth birthday of her cousin Luke Jones, who lived at a house in Llandudno with his parents Danny and Fiona as well as his six-year-old brother Alex.
Sophie, Jemma and Luke were allowed to sleep in the back garden in a tent that night. When the two other children woke up in the morning, Sophie was missing. Her naked body was found washed up on the beach at Craig-y-Don at just after 7.00am, by a man walking his dog. Sophie's parents identified her body later that day, and a post mortem revealed that she had been raped and strangled. Her arm was also broken.
Hughes was arrested within hours of Sophie's body being found, and he was charged with murder two days later.
[edit] The trial
Howard Hughes went on trial at Chester Crown Court on 23rd June 1996, charged with abduction, rape and murder.
The jury heard no forensic evidence which linked Hughes to Sophie's death, but they received valuable information from three witnesses. Hughes's father Gerald told the jury that his son had admitted the murder to him shortly after he was arrested and being held in custody at a local police station. Jonathan Carroll, a 30-year-old thief who was in prison at the time he testified, told the jury that he had seen Hughes carrying a hessian sack along a Llandudno street on the night of Sophie's murder, and that he had caught a glimpse of a body in the sack. A third witness, convicted child sex offender Michael Guidi, testified that Hughes had boasted to him some time earlier that he would like to 'rape a girl of 4 or 5'.
The jury also heard details of the injuries that Sophie had sustained in the attack, many of which had been inflicted before she died.
On 18th July 1996, the jury returned a guilty verdict on all three charges against Howard Hughes. The 31-year-old was then given three life sentences by trial judge Mr Justice Curtis, who branded Hughes a 'fiend' and recommended that he should never be released from prison.
[edit] Fight for freedom
On 5th September 1997, the Court of Appeal gave Howard Hughes leave to appeal against his conviction for the abduction, rape and murder of Sophie Hook. Six months later he sparked further outrage by launching a £50,000 compensation claim against the Bryn Estyn children's home, where he claimed he was abused as a child. Two weeks later, the Court of Appeal rejected Hughes's bid to have his convictions quashed.
Hughes's second appeal took place on 4th September 2001, but the Court of Appeal again decided that there were no grounds for his convictions to be quashed. The judges who made the decision also ruled that they would not allow Hughes to further contest his convictions unless any new evidence turned up. Hughes then decided to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights, but has so far yet to do this.
[edit] Blunkett's ruling
On 24th November 2002, the then Home Secretary David Blunkett announced that four convicted child murderers would each spend a minimum of 50 years behind bars before being considered parole. Howard Hughes was one of them, the others were Roy Whiting, Timothy Morss and Brett Tyler. This ruling meant that Hughes would not be considered for release until 2045 and the age of 80, but the Home Secretary's powers of setting minimum terms was stripped within 48 hours as a result of a legal challenge by another convicted murderer who took his case to the European Court of Human Rights.
[edit] Doubts over Hughes's guilt
- Hughes's unusual habits including cycling around Llandudno at night were long-standing and not unique to the night of Sophie's murder.
- Hughes was behaving calmly and following his normal daily routine the morning after Sophie's murder, as well as wearing the same clothes he had been seen wearing the previous night.
- Hughes was spoken to by patrolling police at 2.55am on 30th July 1995, 25 minutes after Sophie's last confirmed sighting (in the tent, by her sister Jemma). The pathologist who performed the post-mortem on Sophie's body believed that Sophie had died at around this time, and in this period of time it would have been virtually impossible for Hughes to have committed the crime on foot.
- It seems very unlikely that, if Sophie was murdered slightly later that the pathologist believed, Hughes would have committed the murder after speaking to the police, because he would have known that they were observing him.
- Hughes admitted to picking up (and then throwing away) a garment which was later identified as Sophie's night-dress on the night of the murder, it would have been stronger evidence against him if he had denied it.
- The garment was found outside a derelict house which may have been occupied by one of the witnesses who gave evidence against Hughes at his trial. This witness had spent five years in prison for child abuse, and had further unconnected charges against him dropped by the police in return for giving evidence.
- Police who searched Hughes's home after his arrest found indecent photographs of his niece, which undoubtedly influenced the suspicions of the police and possibly influenced Hughes's father into saying that his son had admitted to the crime.
- A six-year-old girl claimed to have been approached by Hughes in Llandudno just hours before Sophie's death. She picked him out of an identity parade, in which a group of suspects had been sitting down. This raised concern, as Hughes's height (6ft 8in) would probably be his most memorable feature. She then described the jacket which the man who approached her wearing, and it was quickly established that Hughes did not possess any clothing which matched the given description.
- Hughes's allegations that his father invented the confession were supported by the fact that several days after he supposedly confessed to the crime, his father was heard saying Whoever has done this and I only hope they find the person responsible.
- No DNA was found on the tent from which Sophie disappeared, which suggests that she was not directly abducted from the tent.
- A security light which was trained on the garden and the tent was proved to have been in working order before and after Sophie went missing, and was never activated during the night.
- The only piece of forensic evidence found on the tent was a footprint on the tent flap. All shoes belonging to both Howard Hughes and Danny Jones (Sophie's uncle) were examined, and none of them matched the print. It was never identified.
- No blood or fibre evidence was found on any of Hughes's clothes, nor in his home, which seems unusual considering the violent nature of the crime.
- Scratch-marks from the killer's fingernails were found on Sophie's body. Medical records proved that Hughes's fingernails had been bitten down to the extent that he could not have left scratch-marks for almost 20 years prior to the murder.
- The police reportedly failed to investigate other promising leads. One of them related to the suicide of a former soldier who had been suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, and had took his own life shortly after Sophie was killed. He had been residing at a psychiatric unit near the house where Sophie was staying. He had been absent from the unit for several hours that night and had returned with wet clothes which suggested that he had been in the sea. It is unlikely that this man murdered Sophie, as he had no history of violence or sexual offenses, but it is believed that the police failed to investigate the possibility that this man might have had something to do with Sophie's death.
- The prosecution and defence QCs at Hughes's trial were believed to have both been from the same chamber, and this would have made it very difficult for Hughes (or any other defendant in a high profile case) to receive a fair trial.
