In the British prison system there are men to be feared, and then there are men to be avoided at all costs. Gary Vinter is one of them. He stands six foot six, but it is not his size that sets him apart. It is how readily he uses violence. He is one of very few prisoners ever released while serving a life sentence who went on to kill again, and the second killing made sure he would never be released. A former prisoner who knew the high-security estate calls him one of the most dangerous men he has ever heard about or seen.
The signal box, 1995
Before his name meant anything, Vinter was known for work. He left school at 16 and went straight onto the railway, one of the few stable employers left on Teesside by the mid 1990s. Colleagues described him as diligent and meticulous, a stickler for the rules, especially around safety.
On a summer night in 1995 he was working as a signalman. So was Carl Eden, a 22-year-old freight worker. The court would hear that Eden had taken a short cut across the tracks, a breach of safety rules that most railwaymen would have shrugged off. Vinter did not. The argument in the signal box turned physical. He beat Eden with a broom handle until it snapped, then armed himself with kitchen knives. Eden was stabbed 13 times.
Vinter did not run. Covered in blood, he locked up the signal box, drove to South Bank police station and told officers he had just killed somebody. He later said he could not explain it, that Eden had done nothing to him. The court did not accept diminished responsibility. He was convicted of murder and given a life sentence.
The model prisoner
Inside, Vinter settled. He followed the rules, completed courses and said the right things to the right people. Risk assessments softened, and the killing of Carl Eden came to be treated as an isolated event. After nine years, the authorities decided he was suitable for release, and it was presented as a success.
Released on licence, he began a relationship with a woman he met while still under supervision. When he was formally released in August 2005 he moved in with her and her four children, and within a year they were married. Away from the official reports, friends and family later spoke of injuries and arguments, and of concerns about domestic violence. None of it triggered intervention. In December 2006 he was charged with affray after a pub fight and sent back to prison. Once again he was described as a model prisoner, and within a year he was out on licence a second time.
Middlesbrough, February 2008
On the evening of 10 February 2008, his wife went out with friends in Middlesbrough. More than once they left a pub after realising Vinter was there, and each time he appeared again. Later he waited at a pub where her daughter worked, and an argument outside went on for some time. Her daughter, fearing for her mother, called the police.
Vinter ordered his wife into a car driven by men he had been drinking with, and pulled her daughter out when she tried to get in with her. He took his wife to his mother's house nearby. When police and friends tried to check on her, they were told she was safe, and Vinter himself phoned police to say she was safe and well. She was not.
Later that night he called again, using her phone, to report a murder. He told officers he had tried to strangle her and, when that failed, used a knife. The post-mortem found multiple stab wounds to the chest, one through the heart. The Court of Appeal would later call it deliberate and sustained, marked by calculated attempts to keep others away and to mislead police. Vinter pleaded guilty and was given a whole life order.
The whole life prisoner
With nothing left to lose, the compliance went. A former prisoner who served on the same unit says Vinter, short of money and a heavy drug user, carried out attacks on other inmates for people who paid him in drugs.
At HMP Wakefield, which holds some of the most reviled offenders in the system, Vinter agreed to be located alongside them. The same former prisoner says that on the hospital wing Vinter was a few doors from Roy Whiting, and that he sharpened a plastic toilet brush into a jagged weapon, went into Whiting's cell as the doors were unlocked for breakfast, and took out his eye. He says it was an attempt to kill him.
By 2014 Vinter was in the closed supervision centre system, assessed as a high risk of harm to other prisoners. In the exercise yard at HMP Woodhill he attacked another whole life prisoner, Lee Newell, leaving him with brain damage and the loss of sight in one eye. The High Court later found the risk he posed was real, immediate and known.
That is the pattern the film draws out, and the one it shares with David Bieber. Both men could comply for years and present as settled. When they felt challenged or denied, that restraint gave way at once. For the prison system the answer is containment, not progression, and Gary Vinter remains where he is.