Three prisoners who stormed a cell and murdered a child killer will die in jail after being handed whole life orders. Mark Fellows, 45, Lee Newell, 57, and David Taylor, 64, stabbed Kyle Bevan to death at high-security HMP Wakefield in West Yorkshire last November before tucking him up in bed and leaving him to bleed out.
The Crime
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 Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, in 2020. Fellows and Newell were already serving whole life orders when they killed Bevan, meaning they will never be released. The judge, Mrs Justice McGowan, imposed ‘new and separate’ whole life orders on both of them for Bevan’s murder.
Taylor was given a whole life order for Bevan’s death, on top of the offences he was on remand for at the time. These were the murder of missing 24-year-old Alisha Apostoloff-Boyarin – a vulnerable woman he was in a relationship with but had grown tired of – and attempting to murder a police officer in an interview room at another high-security jail.
Prison Regime
Jurors heard that unlike other jails, vulnerable prisoners were not separated from other inmates at Wakefield. The regime at the time meant ‘main prisoners’ such as Fellows, Newell and Taylor ‘had to mix with, in a distorted moral hierarchy, other criminals that were beneath them’ such as child killers, prosecutors said.
The court heard the three defendants had a hostility to people who had committed offences against children and Fellows and Newell had expressed a desire to be transferred away from Wakefield. Bevan ‘kept himself to himself’ and would mainly stay in his cell, often asking to be locked inside, jurors were told.
On the day of his death, he was seen on CCTV walking to his cell, followed by the three defendants, who were just seconds behind. Taylor could be seen taking something from his waistband as he went in.
