The Death of Prisoner DB3178

Last month a young man hanged himself in Armley prison, Leeds, the latest in a growing list of suicides by young men on remand. Another, Phillip Beckett, was only 18 when he took the same route out of his troubles. Phillip was an abused child, rescued by a foster mother who brought him up with her younger son, Paul. But when Phillip strangled Paul during a quarrel, Clare Beckett saw the system lead to the end of a second life.

PRISONER DB3178 had long since stopped pulling threads out of his shirts, a nervous habit he'd picked up as a child. Frightened and withdrawn, the little boy would pick up a toy, tie it to the end of a thread, and spin it round and round all day. Now, years later, he was pulling at his shirt again. Not the colourful shirts he wore at home. This one was prison grey.

In cell B4/14, the day had finally come to an end. For 15 hours, the prisoner and his two cell mates, Sean Kennedy and Mark Brownsett, had been sitting on their beds with nothing to do. Slopping out at 7.30am seemed a long time ago. Since then, they had been to a class during the morning, and had been due for some exercise afterwards. But it rained that day, so they stayed in their cells. With their last meal at 4.15pm, it had been a long evening for the three young men on remand.

They'd done their best to pass the time. Even Prisoner DB3178 had tried to join in, an unusual occurrence over the previous few days. He had been staring at the walls, replying to questions long after they were asked. His trial was only weeks away. But on this night, he chatted a bit, and even laughed sometimes. At 6.45pm, a prison visitor collected him from the cell, and talked to him for three-quarters of an hour. He got back, and he didn't say a word. When he did speak, he told Mark he was thinking about someone in his family who had died. Mark ruffled his hair to cheer him up. The young men wrestled with each other, and cracked some jokes. At last, midnight came, and Sean put out the light.

Sean and Mark lay awake on their bunk beds, one bed on top of the other, and waited for sleep. Prisoner DB3178 also waited, but he had no plans for sleep. From his bed on the other side of the cell, he could see his two cellmates in the half-glow given off by the floodlights through the window. Soon he was listening to their regular breathing. He got up and started work on his shirt.

Tearing off a sleeve, he split it vertically from the cuff, tying the two ends together with a reef knot. The hole was 14 inches round. Pulling back his blankets, he tore a 26-inch strip from the bottom of his sheet and secured it to the shirt sleeve at right angles. It would pull on to the knot of the cuff, and tighten. Then he pulled up a chair and placed it under the window. He stepped on to the chair, tied the rest of the shirt round the bar, and tied the shirt to the sheet.

Anyone looking through the cell flap would have seen a frail young man with fair hair and a noose round his neck, silhouetted against the bars. But no one was looking through the flap. For 140 cells on the landing, one officer was on patrol. When the officer took his meal breaks, no one replaced him. The coast was clear. Prisoner DB3178 kicked away the chair. He was 18, and he was dead, hanging from a bar.

THE FILM was only three-quarters of the way through, and Clare Beckett had promised her son Paul that she would be home by half past one in the morning. She had left shortly before 11pm, when it was not quite dark, leaving the 12-year-old Paul to watch the basketball on television before going to bed. For weeks, the sun had scorched the city, and she was grateful to get out in the cool of the night. Barefoot, she had walked to her friend John's flat 200 yards away, and then on with him and another friend, Marcus, to the Hyde Park Picture House, an art deco cinema on the outskirts of Leeds. Sitting upstairs in the gallery, the three settled down to watch Maurice, the screen version of E M Forster's novel; the pace of the film was as languid as the night.

It was a few minutes after one o'clock when she looked at her watch. The film was longer than she had expected. She thought about Paul. He was scared of the dark and didn't like being on his own. She had left him on his own twice before, and each time he had rung her to say he was frightened. She had only done so this time because she had assumed Phillip, her 18-year-old adopted son, was going to be in. However, Phillip had told her that evening that he had arranged to play snooker, so she gave Paul the telephone number of the cinema, and he wrote it down on a board in the kitchen just before she left. As she did so, walking into the small garden at the back of the house, Paul was closing the kitchen window. He had already locked the front door. She'd checked that.

So he'd be safe. And he hadn't rung. And although she'd promised she would ring if she was going to be late, he'd be asleep by now. And if he wasn't, Phillip would probably be back from the snooker hall. Phillip had always been protective towards his younger brother, and would look after him, if necessary, until she got home. She'd enjoy the rest of the film.

Then, at 1.12am, a man's voice came over the cinema's Tannoy system. 'Will Anne Clare Beckett please come to the manager's office,' the voice said. Clare leaned forward and whispered down the row. 'Paul's panicked, I'll have to go home.' She told John: 'You stay, it won't be anything serious.' But John went with her. Leaving Marcus behind, they walked out into the corridor. Clare didn't know where the manager's office was. She started walking down the stairs, with John beside her. When she was halfway down, a man stepped out of the shadows. A man in uniform.

Sergeant Mark Smith: 'Are you Mrs Beckett?' Clare: 'Yes.' The policeman went quiet. Then he said: 'I don't know how to tell you this.' Put the man at his ease, Clare thought. Suggest the worst possible news, and it won't be so bad. 'Is Paul still alive?' she said. 'No,' said Sergeant Smith.

FORTY-SIX minutes earlier, nearly an hour and a half after the film started, Constable Raymond Dawes picked up a telephone in the police operations room in The Tyrls, Bradford.

'Hello, police,' he said. Caller: 'Hello, there's been a murder.' PC Dawes: 'Where?' Caller: 'Kings Road.' PC Dawes: 'Kings Road, where?' Caller: 'Hyde Park.' PC Dawes: 'Hyde Park.' Caller: 'Yes . . .' PC Dawes (not understanding the next few words): 'Slow down, where are you ringing from? Are you ringing from home?' Caller: 'Yes.' PC Dawes: 'Is that the address you're at?' Caller: 'Eh?' PC Dawes: 'Is that the address you're at?' Caller: 'Yes.' PC Dawes: 'Who are you?' Caller: 'Phillip Beckett.' PC Dawes: 'Who has been murdered?' Caller: 'My brother.' PC Dawes: 'Your brother.' Caller: 'Yes.' PC Dawes: 'Who by?' Caller: 'I don't know. I've just come in.' PC Dawes: 'And where is he?' Caller: 'He's in bed.' PC Dawes: 'Is he dead?' Caller: 'Yes.' PC Dawes: 'Are you sure?' Caller: 'I think so.' PC Dawes: 'How old are you, Phillip?' Caller: 'Eighteen.' PC Dawes: 'You're 18.' Caller: 'Yes.' PC Dawes: 'How old is your brother?' Caller: 'He's 11.' PC Dawes: 'He's 11 years and he's dead.' Caller: 'Yes.' PC Dawes: 'And you're sure about that.' Caller: 'Yes.' Pause. Caller: 'If only I'd come in earlier.' PC Dawes: 'Yes, all right, Phillip, just calm down and hold on to the phone, there's a lad.' Caller: 'I don't know who could have done such a thing.' PC Dawes: 'Sorry.' Caller: 'I don't know who could have done it.' PC Dawes: 'I'm sorry, I can't quite understand you.'

Phillip began to cry.

FOURTEEN years earlier Phillip had done a lot of crying, and all Clare could do was listen as she waited for her bus outside the gates of the children's home in Raynel Drive, Leeds.

He had been a battered baby. When he was less than two months old, his parents had fractured his skull and broken his arms. Placed in a home for under-fives, he had returned home to his parents when he was nearly four. Within a few weeks, his back and buttocks had been severely bruised.

When he had arrived at Raynel Drive, you could see his ribs. He couldn't eat anything he had to chew. To stop him straying too far in the house, his parents tied his legs to a bed with flex from a kettle. In later years, he screamed when he was tucked up too tightly in bed.

Phillip had been at the children's home a few months when Clare arrived as a 'house mother'. A bright middle-class woman who loved children and teaching, she had been brought up in Hertfordshire and London; now, in Leeds, she fell in love with a thin, fair child with a captivating smile. But she wanted to do more than just love Phillip. She wanted to take him home as her own.

At first, she did so at weekends. During the week, Phillip was bullied in his dormitory. He was difficult to touch, and impossible to cuddle. He didn't understand what affection was. But he did like Clare, and he loved the weekends. He kept his toys in a black leather suitcase and left it at her flat before returning to the home. It was his proof that he lived somewhere. When Clare returned him on Sunday nights, he cried himself to sleep, and she would try not to listen as she waited for her bus.

In 1976 she had a son of her own, Paul. The next year, she decided she wanted to look after Phillip full-time, but Leeds Social Services rejected her application to foster him, saying she should consider herself no more than an aunt. Clare was devastated. Thirteen months earlier, she had told them that she and Paul had become the most consistent features in Phillip's life. 'I feel very strongly that it is unfair to all three of us to keep in such close touch with Phillip without giving him some definite assurance of where he will be living in the future,' she had written. 'It becomes increasingly difficult to answer the questions asked by an active seven-year-old. Also, my son is now nearly two, and is having difficulty understanding Phillip's place in our house. He is very fond of Phillip: we would both prefer not to leave him during the week.' She reapplied, and was successful.

Phillip was still severely affected by the events of his early years. He used to steal, and did so long after the rest of his behaviour had improved. Not big stealing, but pilfering round the house, or at school. His behaviour was so difficult that he was taken away from his primary school, and handed over to West Oaks, a special school for children with learning difficulties. There, tests showed that this seven-year-old boy had a mental age of five. The school concluded his brain had been damaged.

But Clare Beckett's attention, and the skill of the school, brought about an improvement in Phillip's work. His behaviour also improved: he was kind to other children, particularly those more handicapped than himself. By the time he left, at 16, the school was describing him as 'a sensitive boy who . . . took advantage of opportunities offered to him'.

It was only when Phillip left school that he wanted to be adopted. Until then, he had nursed a fantasy about an eventual reunion with his family. Although he remembered the beatings and being tied to the bed, he couldn't totally reconcile the violence and the perpetrators. Clare waited for the decision to come from him, and was delighted when it did. Recommending the adoption, Andrew Holloway, a social worker, wrote: 'During his time in the children's home, Phillip was a very disturbed child. It was felt that it would be extremely difficult to find prospective or adoptive or foster parents who would be able to cope with him. Since living with Miss Beckett, he has developed into a pleasant, well integrated, and reasonably happy young man.'

When Phillip was 14, Clare fostered another boy, Craig; he was a few months older than Phillip, and the two boys got on well. The house was noisy, full of music and fun, with children in a rush all day. Noise: it was inconceivable that one day it wouldn't be there.

NOISE IS the first thing that hits you in the visiting room at Armley prison, Leeds. Several people encountered it when visiting Prisoner DB3178 in the months before his suicide. It was so loud that sometimes you couldn't hear the prisoner speak.

The prisoner sat at a table, one of 15 in four rows across the room. You would sit in front of him, close enough to look into his eyes, but you were not allowed to touch.

Visitors were soon horrified at the change in Prisoner DB3178. A few weeks before arriving at Armley, he had started a job in a foundry, where they had been pleased with his progress. He lacked confidence, but he was kind and sensitive, and people liked him. His colleagues were astonished to hear he was in prison, because he had never been in trouble before.

Liz Taylor, a family friend, visited him almost every week before he died. When she first saw him, he was shaking, and had been biting his hands. 'The first times I went to see him, he was in quite deep shock. He found it difficult to talk. He wasn't given the sort of support that somebody of his vulnerability needed. He was given too much time to think, and not enough support to think positively. He needed caring for before he was in prison, and he doubly needed it after he went there.'

Jane Fewtrell, another family friend who visited him, said: 'He had a tendency to bottle things up. I mean, not just for a short time, but for months and months. He would be incredibly vulnerable to bullying, and yet he was stuck in a place like that. If you stick someone on remand in a place like Armley, people either come out severely psychologically damaged, or dead, or they come out so hard as nails that if they weren't criminal when they went in, they bloody well are when they come out.'

Jane visited the prisoner because her daughter Susan, then aged 13, had persuaded her that something was wrong. Susan had been his friend since infancy. She had helped him with his homework, and later with his job applications. He had always been quiet, but not this quiet, she thought as she came up to him in the visitors' room and smiled. What she found was a wreck who could only speak in whispers. She was staring at a stranger.

'As soon as I got inside, I was shivering,' she said. 'It was the cold and heartless atmosphere. He answered questions only with the odd word. Mum started showing him my holiday photographs, and he got upset because he thought he wasn't allowed to see them. Mum had to ask a prison warder. When the warder came up, he stared straight at the desk and didn't look up. He was frightened.'

WHY DID Prisoner DB3178 kill himself? He was one of five remand prisoners to commit suicide at Armley in 1988/89, a figure that prompted an inquiry by the Howard League for Penal Reform. It concluded that the B Wing regime took little account of the age and status of its inmates. 'This regime is much worse than any which a young person is likely to experience if subsequently convicted and given a custodial sentence. This state of affairs we consider makes a mockery of the policies inherent in our criminal justice system in dealing with young adults.'

Judge Stephen Tumim, chief inspector of prisons, visited Armley in December 1989, 10 months after Prisoner DB3178's suicide, and reached similar conclusions. He said of B Wing: 'There was far too much 'lying on beds' and very little seemed to be expected of them . . . There were too many sullen faces on all sides and very little to lighten the atmosphere . . . it seemed clear to us that it was the absence of sufficient activities which provoked much of the self-harm. We have little doubt that the biggest contributing factor to the number of night incidents was the extent of being locked up during the day.'

Since these reports, young remand prisoners are no longer detained in B Wing, and a new remand centre has been opened near Doncaster. But prison suicides continue to take place. Last month, a 22-year-old man charged with criminal damage was found hanging from bars at Armley. And in the past 12 months four suicides have occurred at the young offenders' institution in Feltham, south-west London. General criticism of the treatment of young people on remand is unchanged.

Prisoner DB3178's family are unhappy with Armley and the inquest into his death. They feel both ignored the evidence of the prisoner's letters and diary, which reveal the effect of a prison regime on a young man. At the inquest, Dr John Longfield, the prison medical officer, said that if the contents of a letter dated 20 January 1989 had been brought to his attention, containing the prisoner's thoughts about killing himself - a letter which was brought to the attention of the prison censor - he would have taken some further action and called the prisoner back into the hospital wing. Despite this failure, the inquest merely concluded that Prisoner DB3178 had killed himself out of 'deep remorse' for the offence that had put him in prison. But the prisoner's mother cannot get out of her head the words of the prison officer who cut her son down from the bar. Principal Officer Brian Shaw had told the inquest: 'I did not know he even existed.'

Doctors and psychiatrists said the prisoner had denied feeling depressed or having suicidal thoughts; although they had noticed that he bit his nails, they didn't regard it as significant. The family point out, however, that the prison had known the prisoner was desperately worried by the fact that he faced a charge of murder rather than manslaughter (although it seems most unlikely that a conviction would have been secured). The murder charge was still being pursued because the prosecution insisted that the prisoner's first statement, not made with a solicitor present, had suggested the intent to kill - despite expert opinion that he had not been in a 'sufficiently stable mental state to give a reliable statement to the police'. As the trial grew near, the prison should have been more sensitive to his apprehension.

In any event, if the case had reached court, Prisoner DB3178 would probably have been treated leniently. In a report drawn up before the prisoner's death, Keith Rix, consultant psychiatrist at St James's University Hospital, Leeds, said the alleged offence had been a remarkable event. 'I have no doubt that the educational services responsible for his care over his childhood and early adolescence would have regarded him, when he left school, as one of their successes. The aggressive behaviour . . . which characterised him when he started school has been replaced by placidity, thoughtfulness, an avoidance of aggression and a particularly caring attitude towards others, especially those more disadvantaged than him. This makes what has happened seem very much out of character.'

ON SATURDAY, 18 June, 1988, the sun was beating down on Kings Road, Hyde Park. Phillip and Craig wilted, and spent much of the day slumped in front of the television. Clare and Paul went out together; they would never do so again. They visited a friend of Clare's, and went shopping; Paul played on the keyboards in a musical instruments shop; they bought food for a picnic the following day. For weeks, Paul had been asking Clare to take them all to Bolton Abbey - she had taken Paul there the previous year - and they were particularly looking forward to the day. When they got home, the house was in a mess. Phillip and Craig had done no clearing up and had done nothing about supper. Normally the house was democratically run. Phillip was an excellent cook, Craig was good at tidying up, and Paul was learning how to iron without burning the clothes. On this occasion, Clare was irritated with Phillip and Craig, and told them so. She decided she would go out that night.

This Saturday, Paul made the supper: a good cucumber soup. Craig was going out to a nightclub, as he always did on Saturday nights, and Phillip said he'd arranged to play snooker. Clare was irritated again. She'd arranged to go out only because she thought Phillip was staying in. But while Paul didn't like being left on his own, he had an adult view about what was fair. He felt Clare should be allowed to go out. He asked her whether he could watch television before he went to bed, and she said he could if he took it into the sitting room. Clare left by the kitchen door, and Paul settled down in front of the television.

Phillip had been out for less than an hour, playing snooker at the Northern Snooker Centre on the Kirkstall Road. He would often play there on his own. This time, carrying his favourite cue, he arrived to play with a friend called Dave. Showing his membership card to the woman on reception, he disappeared into the darkness of the hall. At table 22, the game began. After less than an hour, Dave left the table; and after a further 10 minutes' practice

on his own, Phillip walked home. He was not in a good mood: he had been difficult and argumentative for days.

When he walked into the house, Paul was still up, watching the portable black and white television in the kitchen. The basketball was over and a film was on. Immediately, the boys were scratching at each other. 'What you watching?' said Phillip. 'A film,' said Paul. 'What's it called?' asked Phillip. Don't know, said Paul. Why was he watching it then, demanded Phillip. 'Well, you're not watching the programme,' said Paul. 'If you're that fussed, go upstairs and play on the computer.' Paul took the television into the sitting room. He turned on the fire. Phillip turned it off. Paul turned it on. You're not my real brother, said Paul. And my mother is not your real mother.

It was not the first time Paul had fired this ammunition. Clare remembers an occasion in Wales when he turned to Phillip and said: 'You're only fostered, and if you don't do what I say, I'll tell my Mum to get rid of you.' But it was out of character. He never meant to hurt his older brother. If anyone was going to get hurt, it was Paul. Words hurt Phillip, introspective and withdrawn. But to Paul, they were playthings, and sometimes he didn't play with them very well. It was in the playground that he was most likely to get hurt. Bullies went for this small, verbal, sometimes aggressive youngster. Once Phillip told him what to do when confronted by the bullies: don't run away, he said, because if they catch you, things will be even worse. He loved his little brother, and he didn't want to see him hurt.

But on this night, the unreasonableness of adolescence had taken over. When Paul went into the kitchen to make a telephone call, Phillip followed him, demanding to know whom he was calling. 'It's none of your business,' Paul said. Picking up a kitchen chair, Paul hurled it at his brother. Then he went for him, hitting him, hitting him. 'Calm down,' Phillip screamed, grabbing him where he could. Phillip holding him, stopping him wriggling. Paul shouting. Phillip covering Paul's mouth. Then his brother's neck in his hands. The hands squeezing. Paul struggling. Phillip squeezing. Stop that noise, stop that noise. Then no moving. Paul was quiet, then still. No breath left, and he was still upright, clasped in his brother's arms. Phillip had killed his younger brother. He knew he was dead, and he laid his body on the floor in the hall.

AT THE TIME when Prisoner DB3178 wrote his first letter to his mother from Armley prison, he was so disoriented that he crossed out every word. But three weeks later he was more able to express himself. He wrote to Liz Taylor: 'I'm not in the ward anymore. I'm in the big world now with the big boys, so its a bit more frightening because theirs hundreds of prisoners on our wing . . .'

From that big world, in which he felt lost and alone, he wrote to his mother about his life in prison. They are letters seared with pain and love. On 1 August, he wrote: 'I wouldnt be surprised if you didnt want to see me again but I know that some day you will but right now I dont because it will only remind us what happened . . .' He then asks for a postcard or two of his favourite pop star. 'Please send them in a letter I know that Im asking for a lot but it is so lonly in jail that theres just nothing to do exsept look at the seeling most of the day . . .'

The boredom also comes across in a diary he kept right up until his death. It is different from the one he kept at home the previous year. His 1987 diary had been that of a typical teenager: a list of the posters, tapes, and Airfix models he had bought; films he had watched; girls he had seen - 'I saw Cathy Brag in town coming home from work.' His prison diary also lists films, but there are entries like these: 'Mr Calton the screw has been picking on me.' (This prison officer was subsequently dismissed after being found guilty of assault.) And later: 'Some one hung themselves on the 30/1/88.'

No one will ever know to what extent the other hangings at Armley influenced Prisoner DB3178. There is evidence, however, that he was at least trying to be positive about being locked up in prison. To his mother, he gave an adult assessment of what needed to be done: 'As Im writing this letter I think this is just a nightmare but I know for a fact that it isnt and wonering if I will ever get out of the mess that Im in . . . I want to change my self so badly and in time I will and I wont be the same person anymore I will be a different person and I will make sure I am by saying that I mean I will change my personalaty and looks and image but I think it will take time to do that as you will guess so because you know me dont you.'

In between the despair, the self-incrimination and the loneliness, there are jokes (Why did the frog cross the road? Because it's the chicken's day off); they are told not to keep himself cheerful, but rather his mother - 'if your feeling a bit sad at the moment'. The jokes touched his mother; she said they made her feel proud of him. She wrote to him about his assessment: 'When you're making all these changes, don't forget to keep all the good things about you, like how brave you are and how straightforward you are and how kind and funny you are sometimes. Maybe you need to change some things, but I need to change things about me, too, and so does almost everybody in the world. I don't have any jokes to tell you, but I love hearing yours. I hope you will write soon, because I love your letters. I miss you an awful lot, but I can't bear to come to prison to see you yet. I think you were right at first, when you said we shouldn't see each other for a while. I think of you every day, though.'

That mother now regrets not going to see her son in prison. Particularly because of a diary entry two days before he died. It read: 'My mum is forgetting me and its making me depressed even more every day it wont be long now befor I end my life I hate prison.'

She said: 'If I'd visited him, maybe it would have been different. Maybe it wouldn't. I don't know. I didn't realise for a long time what prison was, the institutional inhumanity of the way it runs. It was when I was told I couldn't send my son a Christmas present that I began to be aware of what was happening to him.'

WHEN CLARE and John arrived home from the cinema in a police car, Phillip was standing in a corner in the kitchen. The muscles on his face were bulging, and his brow was furrowed, rather like a clown. Clare put her arms round him, then handed him to John before going upstairs. She was going to see Paul.

Phillip had tried to cover his tracks. He had picked up the chair Paul had thrown, and put it back in its place. Then he took Paul by the wrists and dragged him on his back up 15 steps to his room. The body was heavy, and his brother's head bumped on every step. He put Paul in bed and pulled the duvet over his head. Then off into the night to raise the alarm. He was a fast runner. To John's flat; no one there. Back to a neighbour's house two doors away, but Phillip had gone by the time she answered the door bell. He went home and dialled 999.

For a while, he kept to his story. When Detective Constable John Dickens arrived, Phillip said he had gone to Paul's room when he returned home, and found he wasn't downstairs. He had pulled back the duvet cover, and seen blood coming from Paul's mouth. He tried to shake him, but Paul didn't respond. He thought he was dead. But the pretence didn't last. Challenged by Detective Sergeant Stuart Lawrence, Phillip broke down. 'I've lied,' he said. 'I killed him.'

Upstairs, his mother was talking to Paul. She felt she had walked on to a film set; Paul's face was floodlit - the police hadn't been able to work the dimmer switch, which she had been meaning to get mended for weeks - and the rest of the room was hidden in shadow. The police were there. Who was he, they wanted to know. He was bruised. What bruises did he have when she had left him that evening? 'I remember thinking, they think I've done it,' she said. 'And I think for a while they did. I also remember thinking that if I didn't stay in control of myself, nobody would tell me anything, and I would never find out what was going on. I kept thinking I've got to pinch myself and make myself wake up.'

Later, she returned to Paul's room, and asked the police to leave them alone. She spent 10 minutes with her son's body. 'I talked about what it had been like bringing him up, and that I should have looked after him better. That I wouldn't forget him. It felt important . . . Paul gave me more than anyone can know.'

In the police car on the way to the police station, there was one question Clare had to have answered. 'I said to one of the policemen, 'Was it Phillip who did it?', and he said, 'Yes, I think so.' I said, 'I don't want to see Phillip when I get to the police station.' ' She immediately wrote a statement, giving a detailed account of the family life, built up over 12 years, that had been snatched from her in no more than a few seconds of childish anger.

CLARE DID not want to see Phillip, but she forgave him; forgave him completely. At first, however, she couldn't bring herself to think about Phillip, who had been taken to prison and charged with murder. 'I couldn't deal with what he had done. It wasn't that I stopped loving him, or wasn't interested in him.

'There was also part of me that felt that locking him away from the world was right. There was a bit of me that thought maybe I was wrong about Phillip. Because I didn't get hold of his statements for a long time, I didn't know what he'd told the police. The police were saying to me that he'd intended to kill Paul. I lost faith in him. But when I read his statements, I knew for certain that he hadn't intended to kill Paul. He lost control in a way that we all could. I don't want people to think, no wonder he ended up killing his brother, he was obviously disturbed, and violent, and badly treated. That's not the way it was.'

Three years after the fight, Clare says she sometimes can't get out of bed in the morning. Craig now lives away from home and the house she lives in is empty. 'I'll never get used to it. There are days when I can't get out of bed still, probably always will be. I lie listening for them in the mornings. They're always in my mind.'

The evening after Paul died, Clare asked her brother to drive her to Ilkley Moor. She had initially fought off the need to sleep. 'If I went to sleep, I'd have to wake up,' she said. 'And then it would all be real.' She finally did sleep, and then, on the moor, she told her brother she'd get as far as Paul's funeral, and after that, she'd kill herself.

On the day of Paul's funeral, at Clare's request, the Rev Stanley Baxter took Phillip into the prison chapel, and they prayed. Earlier he had read him Canon Henry Scott Holland's treatise about death being nothing at all, and he sensed during several conversations with him that he was a 'very sensitive, caring person with a genuine spiritual dimension. I was surprised that he was charged with murder, and not manslaughter. I think it was appalling that an 18-year-old boy like that, sensitive as he manifestly was to everybody, should have been in there at all.'

The funeral came and went, and Clare didn't commit suicide. Her brother talked her out of it. Meanwhile, Phillip was making a similar suicide threat. Clare didn't know about it, because it was scribbled on the bottom of another prisoner's letter. It was stopped from going out by the censor, but the prison didn't do anything about it, arguing that the prisoner had obviously decided against suicide.

Phillip had written: 'I am very sorry for what I did and I could kill myself for it but I know that I cant do that because just think how much it would hurt my mum if I did that it would hurt her so much that she wouldnt know what to do with herself. Im in for the murder of my brother. I didnt want to do it was just a very tragic accident that went wrong . . .'

WHEN SEAN KENNEDY woke just before 2.25am, he saw Prisoner DB3178 hanging from the bar, and raised the alarm. Mark Brownsett woke up, and was told by two prison officers to hold the dead man's legs. The officers cut him down.

Then, going through his pockets, they found a note. 'Dear mum,' it read, 'I felt really depressed and now I'm going to join with Paul so Im really sorry that this had to happen so dont cry because I felt really bad about doing this but I felt that it was the only thing I could do because I couldnt stop thinking about Paul so now I will write off now and I will never have to worry about anything anymore.' -

(Photographs omitted)