Some men treat prison as a hunting ground. Lee Newell has been in continuous custody since January 1989, more than two thirds of his life, and in that time he has killed twice more. Both of his victims in prison were men who had murdered a child. Both were killed in their own cells, and both were tied up first. Two judges, twelve years apart, have each told him he will die in prison. In between, the state paid him £92,000.
Norwich, 1988
Lee William Newell was born on 5 October 1968. Before the age of 20 his record shows only two convictions for theft, in 1986 and 1987. Then, in the winter of 1988, he talked his way into a woman's house in Norwich. The Court of Appeal summed it up: he obtained entry by deception, told the victim he wanted money, and then strangled her to death. She was in her fifties.
On 17 January 1989 at Norwich Crown Court, Newell was convicted of murder, sentenced to custody for life and given a tariff of 15 years. He had a date to work towards.
He never got near it. Between 1999 and 2011 alone he collected 47 prison disciplinary adjudications, and at least once before 2013 he took a hostage inside a jail purely to force a move.
Long Lartin, February 2013
By early 2013 Newell was at HMP Long Lartin in Worcestershire, on a wing for vulnerable prisoners. He was not there for his own protection; he owed money for drugs. On the same wing was Subhan Anwar, 24, who four years earlier at Bradford Crown Court had been convicted of murdering his partner's two-year-old daughter. The child had 107 separate injuries.
On 14 February 2013, Newell and Gary Smith, also serving life for murder, followed Anwar into his cell, pulled the door shut and engaged the privacy lock. They bound him with tape, and Newell strangled him with his own tracksuit bottoms. The judge found it took significantly more than half a minute. When staff asked why, they said they were bored and it was something to do. When they were searched, Smith was wearing Anwar's earring and Newell his watch. The judge called them trophies. A jury took less than four hours to convict them both.
In September 2013 Newell was given a whole life order, the heaviest sentence an English court can pass: no date, no review, nothing to work towards.
The exercise yard at Woodhill
A few weeks earlier, another whole life prisoner had taken the British government to court in Europe and won. His name was Gary Vinter. He had murdered a work colleague in 1996, been released, and murdered his estranged wife in 2008. In 2011 at HMP Wakefield he had stabbed the child killer Roy Whiting in both eyes with a sharpened toilet brush handle, on his own account to force a transfer.
On 27 November 2014, at HMP Woodhill, Vinter and Newell were let out into the same exercise yard of the Close Supervision Centre. A High Court judge later described the recording second by second: sixteen punches and eight kicks to the head of a man already on the floor, in about fourteen seconds.
Newell survived, but lost the sight in his right eye and suffered a traumatic brain injury and fractures to his skull and face. Vinter pleaded guilty to attempted murder and received a third life sentence.
Newell v the state
Then Newell sued. He took the Ministry of Justice to the High Court, and in March 2021 he won. The prison knew exactly what Vinter was, and it let him into a yard with Newell anyway; the decision had been signed off at a meeting the day before. The judge found the prison had failed in its duty to keep Newell reasonably safe, and that what was done to him amounted to cruel and degrading treatment by the state of a man in its care: the same principle Vinter had won in Europe, now belonging to the man he had left face down on the concrete. Newell was awarded £85,000 and £7,000 in interest.
Wakefield, November 2025
HMP Wakefield had already been warned: inspectors that summer found violence up 62 per cent and serious assaults up 72 per cent.
On 4 November 2025, three men climbed two landings and walked into a cell: Mark Fellows, a contract killer already told he would die inside; David Taylor, who had stabbed a police officer the year before; and Lee Newell. The man in the cell was Kyle Bevan, who in 2020 had murdered his partner's two-year-old daughter. The judge's finding on why he was chosen was one line: "You chose him as your target because he had been convicted of the murder of a child." He was wounded more than 25 times and left to bleed to death, and his body was arranged in the bed as though he were asleep. They were in the cell for under five minutes.
On 19 June 2026 Lee Newell was told for a second time that he would die in prison, for doing the same thing to the same kind of man, twelve years later. At 20 he had been given fifteen years and a date. He turned it into life, and then into dying in prison.