Maidstone Crown Court
20 May 2022
Before:
Mr Justice Cavanagh
Between:
The Queen
-v-
Gregory Hawley
Lamech Gordon-Carew
Alize Spence
Dushane Meikle
1. On New Year’s Eve 2019, Bill Henham was a 24 year-old University student. He was home for the Christmas holidays and had decided to go out for the night in central Brighton on his own. He had a bit too much to drink but he was friendly and amiable and entirely non-threatening. At about 4.30 am that night he was at a loose end and he saw that there was a party going on in a squat in a derelict office building at 30-31 North Street. He went in to join the party. Less than 3 hours after entering the building, he was dead, having been beaten to death, in a sustained and brutal attack, by a group of young men to whom he was a complete stranger.
2. Gregory Hawley, Lamech Gordon-Carew, Alize Spence, and Dushane Meikle have each been convicted of the murder of Bill Henham after a trial in this Court. This is the sentencing hearing. Two of the Defendants, Gregory Hawley and Dushane Meikle, refused to leave their cells this morning to come to Court to be sentenced. Having carefully considered the matter, I have decided to proceed to sentence these Defendants in their absence. I am satisfied that Hawley and Meikle have each voluntarily waived their right to attend today. To adjourn again would cause great inconvenience for the Court and other Court users, and, most importantly, it would exacerbate the distress of their victim’s family. Their ordeal has gone on long enough. I have no confidence that Hawley or Meikle would attend if I adjourned sentence yet again. Moreover, both Hawley and Meikle have had ample opportunity to give instructions to their solicitors and counsel in advance of this sentencing hearing, and each have provided a Sentencing Note. Sensibly, counsel for Hawley and Meikle have not applied for an adjournment. I should add that it is not possible to provide a CVP link from the prison to the Court but, in any event, since they have refused to come out of their cells for sentencing, this would have made no difference.
3. I will direct that a written copy of my Sentencing Remarks to be given to Hawley and Meikle.
4. Accordingly, I will now proceed to pass sentence. I will address the Remarks to Hawley and Meikle, along with Gordon-Carew and Spence, even though Hawley and Meikle are not here.
5. I was the trial judge. Whilst each of you admitted to being present at the squat on New Year’s Eve 2019, you all denied being present at, let alone participating in, the assault upon Bill Henham. There were no other eyewitnesses to the assault. Therefore, there was no direct witness evidence before the Court of the way in which the assault unfolded, apart from one witness who had a brief glimpse of part of the attack. Nevertheless, there was a great deal of forensic evidence, and this, together with the evidence of witnesses who were present at the squat or to whom one or more you disclosed details of the assault in the days that followed, means that I am in a position to be satisfied so that I am sure that what follows is an accurate description of the circumstances of the murder, and of the part in it that was played by each of you.
6. Gregory Hawley, you were an experienced squatter and were the leader of the squat at 30-31 North Street. Lamech Gordon-Carew and Alize Spence, you had travelled down together to Brighton from London to sell drugs, and you were staying at the squat. You, Dushane Meikle, were a well-known figure in the homeless community in Brighton and had visited the squat on New Year’s Eve 2019 to attend the party and to provide security. Your street name was Flames. All of you had been taking drugs and drinking alcohol throughout the evening. You, Gregory Hawley and Dushane Meikle, were in your mid-twenties and were considerably older and more worldly-wise than Lamech Gordon-Carew and Alize Spence, who were 18 and 16 years old, respectively. I have no doubt that Gordon-Carew and Spence took the lead from you and followed your instructions in relation to the assault on Bill Henham, but they did so enthusiastically and without scruple.
7. The precise reason why you decided to beat up Bill Henham will remain a mystery. You, Gregory Hawley, told a friend that the boy who died had been acting in a lairy and mouthy manner at the party. I am fully satisfied that Bill Henham had done nothing that could possibly have justified the four of you taking offence against him. As I have said, he was intoxicated, but he was friendly and non-threatening. At most he may have said something that annoyed or upset your girlfriend, Gregory Hawley. There was nothing that comes anywhere close to provocation. The motive for the assault appears to have been to punish your victim for some trivial or imagined slight.
8. The assault on Bill Henham was prolonged, and took place in two locations. First, he was taken up to a room on the second floor of the building at 30-31 North Street and was savagely beaten. At this stage, the forensic evidence suggests that the main attackers were you, Lamech Gordon-Carew and Alize Spence. I am satisfied that you did not do this on your own volition but were acting on the instructions of Gregory Hawley and Dushane Meikle. You hit and kicked Bill Henham in the head and body, and he was left bleeding on the floor. You then dragged his body along the ground and took him down a staircase to the first floor. From there, the four of you were involved in taking him to a small room at the back of the first floor. Gregory Hawley and Dushane Meikle, you arranged for other party-goers to stand on the first floor landing to block the way so that you could continue the attack on Bill Henham without interruption, although in fact two people who were staying at the back of the squat insisted on pushing through, and one of them bravely gave evidence to the jury about what he saw when he arrived at the back of the building.
9. The four of you took Bill Henham into the small room and set about attacking him with sections of wooden spindles that had been torn from the staircase, and with your shod feet. You attacked him in the face, head and body. You Dushane Meikle, left the room at one stage to frighten the witnesses off from inquiring into what you were doing. One of the witnesses said that he could hear screaming coming from the room.
10. It is clear from the injuries that he sustained that the attack on Bill Henham lasted a very considerable time. The beating suffered by Bill Henham resulted in 67 areas of external injury on his face, torso and legs, each of which was consistent with blunt force trauma, and a total of some 80 injuries altogether, when internal bruising is taken into account. These injuries included 11 fractured ribs, a very large cut on his forehead, and very severe brain injuries which, on their own, were probably enough to have killed him. Very few, if any, of the injuries were caused by the placing of Bill’s body in the recess.
11. I cannot be satisfied that, when the assault began, you intended to kill Bill Henham, but at some point during the course of the assault you took a collective decision to “finish him off”, that is, to kill him. This was either because you realised that you had gone too far and decided to put him to death rather than leave him badly injured but able to give evidence against you, or because you realised that he had heard one or more of your names and would be able to identify you if you left him alive. Either way, I sentence you on the basis that, by the time the assault came to an end, each of you intended to kill Bill Henham.
12. As I have said, this was a prolonged assault, carried out in two locations. There can be no doubt that the pain and suffering that you put Bill Henham through was agonising and terrifying. The medical evidence showed that Bill became unconscious an hour or so before he died, but his last moments of consciousness must have been awful.
13. It is clear from the forensic evidence that each of you was involved in landing blows on Bill Henham with wooden spindles or shod feet (although there was no forensic evidence directly linking you, Hawley, to a spindle).
14. It is very likely that, when Bill Henham fell unconscious in the small room at the back of the squat, you thought that he was already dead. The four of you then carried Bill Henham’s body some distance within the building and took it out onto a balcony surrounding an internal Courtyard. There, you tipped Bill’s body into a small and dirty outdoor recess. You also removed Bill’s clothing and wiped down his body with disinfectant in an attempt to hide evidence of your involvement. The medical evidence suggests that Bill may have been still alive, though unconscious, when he was placed in the recess. This was done in the hope that it would delay the point at which his body would be found. Indeed, you may even have hoped and believed that it would be a long time before his body was found and that it would not be linked to the New Year’s Eve Party. You decided to clean up the scene with disinfectant in an attempt to remove potential evidence of your presence. You, Gregory Hawley, took the lead in this. At one point, Gregory Hawley, you talked to a witness about burning down the building to conceal your crime, though in the event you did not attempt to do this. As a final act of degradation, you, Dushane Meikle, took photographs of Bill’s partially naked and then fully-naked body, which you then tried, unsuccessfully, to delete from your phone.
15. You then all left the scene. None of you attempted to provide first aid to Bill, and none of you took any steps to notify the authorities of Bill Henham’s fate. As it happened, the police found Bill’s body after a tip-off some 36 hours after his death, but if it had been left to you, his family would have been left in limbo, wondering what had happened to him,...
