This is the moment three of Britain’s most dangerous inmates stormed child killer Kyle Bevan’s cell at HMP Wakefield, stabbed him more than 25 times, then ‘tucked him up in bed’ to leave him bleeding out. On Thursday, Mark Fellows, 45, Lee Newell, 57, and David Taylor, 64, were each given whole-life orders – never to be released – after a jury at Leeds Crown Court took less than three hours to convict them of murder.
CCTV from 5.30pm on 4 November last year showed Bevan walking to his cell, followed seconds later by the three defendants. Taylor was seen taking something from his waistband as he entered. Over four minutes and 39 seconds, Bevan was stabbed repeatedly to the neck and body with makeshift weapons, including a piece of metal from the back of a television. After the attack, the men positioned his body to make it look like he was asleep. He was not discovered until the following morning, when an inmate tipped off prison staff that ‘something was wrong with Bevan’. He had bled to death from 25 stab wounds caused by at least two weapons, with damage to his heart and blood vessels.
“Three inmates received whole-life orders for murdering child killer Kyle Bevan in a premeditated cell attack at HMP Wakefield.”
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. At Wakefield, vulnerable prisoners were not separated from other inmates, the court heard. Prosecutors said 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. All three defendants had a hostility to those who committed offences against children, and Fellows and Newell had expressed a desire to be transferred away from Wakefield.
Fellows, known as ‘the Wakefield Dexter’, had previously committed two murders to take out people he opposed. Newell, already serving a whole-life order, had previously strangled a prisoner who murdered a child and left him in his bed – a ‘chilling similarity’ to Bevan’s death, prosecutor Jason Pitter KC told the jury. Taylor boasted of his ability to make weapons ‘out of all sorts’, and after Bevan’s death, some makeshift weapons were found in a bottle of chilli sauce in his cell, though they could not be matched 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.’ The men were seen on CCTV emerging from Bevan’s cell less than five minutes after entering in ‘a satisfied, job-done mood’, prosecutors said.
The murders came amid wider unrest at HMP Wakefield, where two other serious attacks had occurred in the weeks before Bevan’s death – including the fatal stabbing of paedophile Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins and a serious assault on David Minto, who murdered 16-year-old Sasha Marsden in 2013. Taylor’s whole-life order was his first; Fellows and Newell received new orders on top of the ones they were already serving.