Prisoner charged with jail murder of child killer

Damien Fowkes, 35, who is serving a life sentence for armed robbery, was arrested after Hatch was allegedly taken hostage and strangled at Full Sutton prison near York on Tuesday night.

Last night, Humberside Police confirmed Fowkes had been charged with murder and will appear before magistrates in Beverley, East Yorkshire, by video-link today.

A post-mortem examination has revealed Hatch, 38, who was 17 years into a life sentence for murdering a seven-year-old boy while on parole for a previous child sex attack, died of strangulation.

The Prison Service called police shortly before 7.30pm on Tuesday to alert them to an incident at the jail. They called again 40 minutes later to say Hatch had died.

Colin Hatch had already amassed a string of convictions for violent and sexual assaults on young boys when he was sentenced to life for the abduction, abuse and murder of seven-year-old Sean Williams in January 1994.

Detective Superintendent Duncan Macrae, who led the murder inquiry, described Hatch, following the trial, as a “frighteningly cunning criminal who had pulled the wool over the eyes of the authorities and would kill again if he was ever released”.

At the time of the murder, he was on parole from a prison sentence after assaulting a boy of eight and choking him until he lost consciousness. Despite his lawyer warning he could kill again on release and a psychologist saying he was a “menace to the public” who should be sent to Broadmoor top security hospital, he was jailed for three years.

Just 11 weeks after his release, in April 1993, Hatch spotted Sean cycling to see a friend at the tower block where he lived in Norfolk Close, Finchley, north London, and abducted him before sexually assaulting and strangling him. A postman discovered the youngster’s body taped up in bin liners and dumped in a lift.

The two-week trial heard fantasies “involving abduction, sexual abuse and the killing of young children” written by Hatch were found in a wardrobe in his mother’s bedroom after his arrest and the 21-year-old had previous convictions for attacks on six young boys dating back to when he was 15.

Judge Nina Lowry, who sentenced him at the Old Bailey, said: “It is not possible today to envisage when you could be safely released from prison and as of today life imprisonment should mean what it says - namely imprisonment for life. In my judgment, you should never be released back into the community while there remains the slightest danger you will re-offend.”

Following Hatch’s conviction, Sean’s mother and father, Lynn and John Williams, said others had to take some of the blame for their son’s death as well and questioned why Hatch was not more closely supervised by probation officers and why doctors had not discovered his true condition during more than 40 visits while he was at a young offenders’ institution.

Speaking at the time, Mrs Williams said: “Never again must a child be murdered by a pervert. Never again must a family have to suffer this experience and never again must Colin Hatch be released back into our community.”

The last unannounced inspection of Full Sutton jail, carried out in November 2007, found that the prison, which holds some of the most difficult and dangerous criminals in the country, was a “commendably stable and largely safe environment”.