Tourist murderer used 'home leave' to travel the world and kill

STEVE BOGGAN AND

IAN MACKINNON

John Scripps had absconded from prison on at least two occasions before being given the home leave that allowed him to embark upon his round-the- world murder spree.

The Home Office acknowledges that he had escaped once before - when he used weekend leave to fly to Thailand to buy heroin - but Customs and Excise officials said that his last escape was actually his third. His family has suggested there were even more escapes.

Staff at the Mount Prison in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, were disciplined following a Home Office inquiry into how Scripps could have been given home leave when he had a history of absconding and when staff knew an application for parole had recently been turned down.

The Home Office told the Independent that Scripps's escape was among several considered by Michael Howard before he ordered his latest clampdown on home leave at the end of last year. Under the new rules which ban home visits for violent prisoners and those who have served less than half of a lengthy sentence, Scripps would not have been allowed out for home visits.

Customs records show that Scripps, 35, was serving a seven year sentence for possessing three kilos of amphetamines when, in June 1990, he failed to return to High Point prison, Suffolk, after being granted weekend leave.

Later that year, he was granted leave from Camp Hill jail on the Isle of Wight and used his freedom to fly to Bangkok and buy pounds 40,000 of heroin.

Customs officers caught him at Heathrow airport with 2kg of the drug. A judge at Winchester Crown Court sent him back to prison after sentencing him to an extra six years, making a consecutive total of 13.

Despite his history, Scripps was again granted home leave from the Mount in October 1994, and failed to return. His family said his application for parole had only recently been turned down, giving him little incentive to go back.

In an interview with the News of the World, his mother, Jean, who lives on the Isle of Wight, said: "At the end of John's October leave he just told me: 'I'm not going back, mum'. I pleaded with him to return but in the end I said: 'If you're going you'd better have a little help.' So I gave him about pounds 200.

"The next I heard of him was a card from Mexico and a birthday present - a silver sombrero. John's been in and out of jail all his life. Whoever he is now he's the person the prison service trained him to be."

Mrs Scripps said that she had warned the prison three times not to let him go, but they "wouldn't listen".

Scripps used his six months of freedom to criss-cross the world. From Europe, probably Spain, police believe he flew to Singapore for the first time in December, then on to Mexico where Timothy McDowall, an economics graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, went missing in January.

A month later, pounds 21,000 was transferred from his English bank account into that of a Simon Davis, the name in Scripps's false passport. Scripps carried on travelling, stopping for a week in Thailand where the Canadian mother Sheila Damude and her son, Darin, were killed.

Scripps was arrested in Singapore on 19 March on suspicion of the murder of Gerard Lowe, the married man from Johannesburg who shared a twin room with him at the River View Hotel. He was seized at the airport when he tried to use Mr Lowe's credit card.

It is alleged that Scripps would befriend travellers on flights or in airports, size up their financial worth, and then check into their hotels where he would visit on some trivial pretext, only to immobilise them with the stun gun and kill them with a hammer.