Russell Bishop (murderer)

Russell Bishop grew up in a respectable family with his parents and his four brothers. His mother, Sylvia—an internationally renowned dog trainer—was described in court as "domineering". After educational problems and dyslexia, Bishop was sent away to a special needs school called St Mary's Horam East Sussex aged 15; he ran away and hitchhiked home to Brighton. At the time of the murders of Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, Bishop, who was 20 years old, was working as a roofer and living in a ground floor flat in the Hollingdean area of Brighton.[1]

Bishop was fined £200 for burglary in 1984. He also stole car radios and hot-wired vehicles. His 2018 defence barrister admitted that, in 1986, he was "a semi-literate, occasional, not very successful car thief ... an occasional burglar."[2]

Bishop is serving life imprisonment for the murders of Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, and the abduction, molestation, and attempted murder of a 7-year-old girl in the Whitehawk area of Brighton.[3] He committed the latter crime on 4 February 1990, and was sentenced on 13 December 1990. By 2007, Bishop was still in prison and one of the longest-serving prisoners in Britain not serving a sentence for murder, despite the trial judge recommending a minimum term of 14 years, which could have seen him out of prison in 2004. In 2005, there was debate over whether he should be classified as mentally ill.[4]

Bishop first became the centre of media attention in October 1986 when he was arrested on suspicion of the murders and molestation of two 9-year-old girls, Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, whose bodies were found in Wild Park, Brighton. The murders became known as the Babes in the Wood murders after the children's tale.[5] He was cleared on both murder charges at his trial in December 1987.[6] Double-jeopardy rules had seemed to eliminate any possibility that Bishop might one day face a new trial for the murders, but new legislation in 2005 meant that a criminal could face a new trial for a crime if substantial new evidence came to light.[7] In September 2006, the High Court decided that there was not enough evidence for Bishop to face a second trial for the murders.[6]

On 10 May 2016, however, a man, initially not named for legal reasons, was arrested.[8] On 2 February 2018, the Press Association reported that Bishop was to stand trial at the Old Bailey accused of the murder of the two girls killed in Brighton in 1986. Bishop was charged and pleaded not guilty; on 10 December 2018, he was found guilty of murder.[3][7][9] The jury was told that in 2014 samples, taken from the left forearm of one of the victims in 1986, had been re-examined in the hope of finding traces of DNA. This yielded skin flakes which were subjected to ultra-modern profiling techniques, to produce a result that was one billion times more likely if Bishop's DNA was present than if it was absent.[2] On 11 December 2018, Bishop received two life sentences; he will serve a minimum of 36 years in prison.[10]