CCTV footage captured the moment three inmates followed child killer Kyle Bevan to his cell at HMP Wakefield before stabbing him more than 25 times and arranging his body to look as though he was asleep.
Mark Fellows, 45, Lee Newell, 57, and David Taylor, 64, attacked Bevan with makeshift weapons including a blade fashioned from metal taken from the back of a television over a period of four minutes and 39 seconds. The 33-year-old was stabbed repeatedly to the neck and body, with damage to his heart and blood vessels causing him to bleed to death.
“Three inmates given whole life orders for stabbing child killer Kyle Bevan to death in his cell at HMP Wakefield.”
Bevan was serving a life sentence with a minimum term of 28 years for murdering his partner’s two-year-old daughter, Lola James, in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, in 2020. He “kept himself to himself” and would often ask to be locked in his cell, jurors were told.
On the day of his death last November, he was seen on CCTV walking to his cell with the three defendants just seconds behind. Taylor could be seen removing something from his waistband as he entered. The attack was not discovered until the following morning, when a fellow inmate tipped off prison staff.
At Leeds Crown Court, all three men were given whole life orders. For Taylor it was his first, while Fellows and Newell were handed new orders separate from those they were already serving. The court heard that unlike other prisons, vulnerable inmates at Wakefield were not segregated from the general population. Prosecutors said the regime meant “main prisoners” such as Fellows, Newell and Taylor “had to mix with, in a distorted moral hierarchy, other criminals that were beneath them”, including child killers. Both Fellows and Newell had expressed a wish to be moved away from Wakefield.
Taylor boasted about his ability to craft weapons “out of all sorts”, and after Bevan’s death, further makeshift weapons were found in a bottle of chilli sauce in his cell, though they could not be linked to the fatal attack.
Senior investigating officer Chief Inspector James Entwistle said: “This was a premeditated brutal attack carried out inside a prison by three long-term inmates. Fellows, Taylor and Newell’s actions showed a complete disregard for life and for the rules designed to keep people safe in custody. By their very nature, prisons are designed to deny offenders of their liberty, but they also need to be environments that are kept safe from unlawful violence.”
The three men will now die in prison.