Three given whole-life orders for inmate murder

Three jailed men who murdered a fellow inmate by stabbing him 25 times in his cell will never be released from prison.

Mark Fellows, 45, David Taylor, 64, and Lee Newell, 57, were found guilty of killing Kyle Bevan at HMP Wakefield on 4 November, using makeshift weapons including one made from a metal part from the back of a television.

Fellows and Newell were already serving whole-life orders for previous convictions, with judge Mrs Justice McGowan imposing "new and separate" life terms for them at Leeds Crown Court.

Taylor was given a whole-life order for Bevan's murder, on top of the offences he was on remand for at the time.

Bevan, 33, was serving a life sentence with a minimum tariff of 28 years for murdering his partner's two-year-old daughter Lola James in Pembrokeshire in 2020.

The court heard how Fellows, Taylor and Newell were seen on CCTV at about 17:30 following Bevan into his cell and "cornered him".

They emerged less than five minutes later in "a satisfied, job-done mood".

They put Bevan into bed to give the impression he was asleep, jurors were told, so his death remained undetected until the following morning.

The judge said Fellows was seen near Bevan's cell twice that evening, "probably to check that he was dead".

"You chose him as your target as he had been convicted of the murder of a child," she said.

"Acting together you wounded him more than 25 times, several of those wounds were fatal."

Judge McGowan added: "There were congratulations when you returned to your own landing. Word had spread.

"Fellows tried to dispose of his bloodstained trousers. All three had blood on your shoes. All of you had killed before."

The court heard Newell was first jailed for murder in 1989 after strangling his female neighbour, who was in her 50s, after she refused to give him money.

He was then given a whole-life order in 2013 after killing a prisoner who had murdered a child.

He left the strangled inmate in his bed with "a chilling similarity" to the circumstances of Bevan's death, the court heard.

Fellows committed two gangland murders and was given a whole-life term in 2019.

He shot notorious crime figure Paul Massey, 55, with an Uzi sub-machine gun outside his Salford home in 2015 and killed mob "fixer" John Kinsella, 53, from Liverpool, three years later.

Taylor, who had recently been transferred to HMP Wakefield, was also sentenced on Friday for the murder of 24-year-old Alisha Apostoloff-Boyarin, a vulnerable woman he had been in a relationship with.

Apostoloff-Boyarin, from Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, was reported missing by her family in February 2022 and her body has never been found.

Taylor was remanded into custody awaiting trial for her murder when he told police he had fresh information on her whereabouts, with Det Con Darren Bratby visiting him at HMP Frankland in Durham.

Taylor took an improvised weapon and stabbed the officer in the chest during the meeting in a prison interview room, "narrowly missing his heart" and leaving him with serious injuries.

He has since made a full physical recovery.

The judge jailed Taylor for life with a minimum term of 20 years for Apostoloff-Boyarin's murder and handed him a 30-year sentence for the attempted murder of the police officer.

Discussing Bevan's murder, Ch Insp James Entwistle, senior investigating officer, said: "This was a premeditated brutal attack carried out inside a prison by three long-term inmates.

"Fellows, Taylor and Newell's actions showed a complete disregard for life and for the rules designed to keep people safe in custody.

"By their very nature, prisons are designed to deny offenders of their liberty, but they also need to be environments that are kept safe from unlawful violence."

There had been two other serious attacks at HMP Wakefield in the weeks leading up to Bevan's death, including the fatal stabbing of disgraced Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins.

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