Mark Hobson
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Mark Hobson (born 2 September 1969, in Wakefield, Yorkshire) is a British murderer who killed his girlfriend and her twin sister in 2004 before killing an elderly couple who lived nearby. He later admitted four charges of murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he should never be released. He is serving his term in Wakefield Prison and is unlikely ever to be released.
Hobson, who was 34 at the time of the murders, was a former binman from Selby, North Yorkshire. He killed his girlfriend Claire Sanderson, 27, and her twin sister Diane at a flat in the nearby village of Camblesforth. The twins' mutilated bodies were discovered by Diane's boyfriend on 18 July, 2004. He subsequently murdered an elderly couple, James and Joan Britton, at their home in the village of Strensall, a few miles north of York.
He was arrested at a petrol station on 25 July 2004, in the village of Shipton-by-Beningbrough, near York, following a nationwide manhunt. At his subsequent trial in April 2005, Hobson admitted all four murders. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on 27 May 2005. The trial judge recommended that he should never be released - this was one of the first times such a recommendation had been made for someone who had admitted their crime at the first opportunity.
The court was also told that Hobson had stabbed a love rival five times in the chest in a daylight attack in front of shoppers in Selby in 2002, leaving him with a punctured lung. Hobson had admitted grievous bodily harm and avoided a prison sentence, instead receiving a community punishment. This lenient sentence came under much criticism in the light of Hobson's later offending.
Hobson lodged an appeal to a lower minimum sentence set, claiming that he should have been given a more lenient sentence because he had admitted all four murders at the earliest opportunity. He also backed up his case with the suggestion that no other murderer who admitted their crimes at the first opportunity had ever been recommended for lifelong imprisonment. This was not true, as a similar recommendation had been imposed on child killers Timothy Morss and Brett Tyler in 1996 even though they had admitted their crimes at the earliest opportunity.
But the appeal was turned down by the Appeal Court after Lord Phillips agreed with the trial judge's recommendation, saying that his opinion that Hobson should never be released was inevitable, regardless of a guilty plea, as the murders had been so horrific.
Shortly before this court case, Hobson was placed into Solitary Confinement for three months after attacking Ian Huntley (a former school caretaker convicted of murdering two female pupils at a Cambridgeshire school), and scalding him with a bucket of boiling water. A prison service spokesman said that due to the nature of high-security prisoners, "it's impossible to prevent incidents of this nature occasionally happening",
In January 2006, letters were released from Wakefield Prison where Hobson blamed alcohol for his killing spree. It had been revealed at Hobson's trial that he was an alcoholic who regularly drank as many as 20 pints a day. He also had a drug problem, and was addicted to heroin and cocaine.
In February 2007, some 15 months after Hobson's failed appeal, the European Court of Justice began a review of lifelong imprisonment to determine whether such sentences amounted to a violation of human rights. If the court outlaws lifelong imprisonment, then Hobson and all other prisoners serving such sentences would have their cases called back to court for a new minimum term to be set.
