A child killer was stabbed 25 times in his prison cell and left to bleed to death in his bed, a jury has been told. Inmates Mark Fellows, 45, Lee Newell, 57, and David Taylor, 64, went on trial at Leeds Crown Court on Wednesday accused of murdering 33-year-old Kyle Bevan at high-security HMP Wakefield in West Yorkshire.
The jury was told how Bevan had been convicted of murdering his step-child Lola James and was serving a life sentence with a minimum tariff of 28 years. Jason Pitter KC, prosecuting, showed the jurors CCTV footage of Bevan entering his cell on November 4 last year, followed by the three defendants who, he said, came out four minutes and 39 seconds later.
Mr Pitter said the trio emerged displaying “something of a satisfied, job-done mood”. The prosecutor said Bevan was put in his bed after the attack and was not discovered until the following morning when it was found he had bled to death. He had suffered 25 stab wounds which penetrated his jugular vein, aorta and his heart, plus other injuries which are thought to have been caused by a different pointed weapon.
Mr Pitter said a folded piece of metal was later found with Bevan’s blood on it, which had been made from a piece of a television. He told the jury of seven women and five men that, at the time of Bevan’s death, around 77% of the inmates at Wakefield were classed as vulnerable prisoners (VPs). The prosecutor said that, unlike other prisons, vulnerable prisoners were not separated from other inmates, called main prisoners (MPs), and the wing had an “open door” policy which allowed prisoners to freely interact during “association”.
Mr Pitter told the jury: “Whilst there may be an obvious temptation to question the need and wisdom of that regime, the mixing of the prisoners, that is not a question for you in this trial. What it did, though, was to contribute to a situation where there was tension, in an obvious direction, between those groups of prisoners.”
