Jailhouselawyer's Blog

'It's not like I'm killing someone now because there's no lids for my jam jars'

In 1979, John Hirst was jailed for brutally killing his landlady. He believes remorse is a 'middle class thing' and he's done his time. The victim's daughter says she can never forgive him. Andrew O'Hagan reports
Andrew O'Hagan
Saturday November 18, 2006

Guardian
John Hirst was 28 and recently paroled from prison when Mrs Bronia Burton took him in as a lodger at Normoor Road near Burghfield Common, Berkshire. It was the spring of 1979, and she gave up the main bedroom in her house to the itinerant labourer partly for a bit of extra cash, but mainly for company. She was lonely in the house. Though the incident that happened next would create the gravest upset in dozens of different lives - end relationships, darken psychologies, consume lawyers, haunt dreams - there seems to be no doubt about what actually happened. Let us use the words of Barbara Calvert QC, who prosecuted Hirst in the trial that followed. "On the evening of June 23 they were watching television when Mrs Burton asked the defendant to collect some coal from the shed. He went to the shed, got the coal and at the same time picked up a heavy hand axe. He returned to the living room, put the coal on the fire, and then approached Mrs Burton and hit her, perhaps seven times, on the head with the axe. He then went to the kitchen to make coffee and drank it, waiting for Mrs Burton to die."

There was some dispute at the time whether Hirst had struck the victim six or seven times. It seemed important, signifying a higher or lower level of frenzy. After finishing his coffee, it was stated, Hirst walked six miles to Reading police station, where he gave himself up. The man at the desk thought he was drunk and told him to go home. "No," Hirst said. "I killed her and she's dead."

Twenty-seven years later, Nina Burton-Harris is crying into a handkerchief in a Somerset pub. "My mother and I had had a little disagreement," she says, "so I hadn't seen her for a while. You know how these things are. I didn't know he was living there: Hirst hadn't been there long." The morning after Mrs Burton's death, Nina received a phone call from a police officer who said there had been an accident and could she come to the police station. "I went there and things just got worse," she says. "I wasn't allowed to identify her because of the nature of the crime."

Mrs Burton was 63 when she died. She was born in Russia, but Nina doesn't know exactly where. "My mother never admitted to people that she was Russian," she says. "She'd pretend to be French. She didn't have a great knowledge of the English language and that frightened her. I think she was afraid they would deport her or something." Mrs Burton met Nina's father in Haifa during the war, where she was working as a nurse and he was enlisted in the Palestine police. The family moved to England when Nina was four, and they had long been settled in the Reading area.

Nina says the nightmare really began when she and her then-fiancé Bob had to clear out her mother's house. "I stood outside for nearly an hour and Bob went in. I knew there was still blood there. I knew where it happened and my limbs wouldn't stop shaking. I was sick several times and the shock of being there brought my period on." She dabs her eyes as she thinks back on it. "You see," she says, "I had no experience of violence."

I ask her what Hirst's room was like. "All I remember is the books," she says. "There was Tolkien, Lord Of The Rings - that's all I remember. It must have been a double bed. I remember saying at the time he was a very intelligent man, just because of the books. But I couldn't stand for anything to be left at the house. I cut up all the furniture because I didn't want anybody else to have it, and I destroyed all the roses in the garden because my mother loved her roses."

According to evidence presented at the trial in February 1980, Hirst appeared almost impervious to the shock of what he had done. He said that Mrs Burton hadn't liked him going out and that she nagged him constantly. "She just kept on at me," he said. On the night he was arrested, a police officer remembered asking Hirst in his cell if he felt any remorse. "No, it is part of life," he said. "It is all in the past and I can forget it now. I bet she had got a bit of a headache."

At the trial, he pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. "In court I was just crying," says Nina. "Screaming. At one point in the trial, I looked over and he was to my left. I stared at him and I had these really bad thoughts. I couldn't believe he was alive and my mother not. He looked back at me and I know he could feel it. I just kept staring at him."

In the end, the prosecution at Reading Crown Court accepted Hirst's plea of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility and he got 15 years. "I have no doubt you are an arrogant and dangerous person with a severe personality defect," said Mr Justice Purchis. "Unfortunately, this is not suitable for treatment in a mental hospital."

I ask Nina Burton-Harris whether she thinks the trial was weighted in Hirst's favour.

"Yes," she says. "He'd had a bad upbringing. He was sexually abused. And I do feel very sorry for him for that. But there was no reason to be a criminal. The judge said he should serve a minimum of 15 years, but I just couldn't believe it. I wanted him in prison for the rest of his life. I did have times when I thought, yes, capital punishment is a good thing. People who do that shouldn't be allowed to come out of prison and lead relatively normal lives.

At least, they should not be allowed out of prison at all."

In the end, Hirst spent 25 years in prison because, the authorities say, of violent offences he committed while he was a prisoner, but he was finally released a few years ago. "Yes," says Nina, "he spent a long time in prison - a lot longer than most murderers do, and I'm very grateful for that - but even so. He was reported as saying, 'What else does she want from me?' but I want the rest of his life."

I ask what is sufficient. Is there not a question of forgiveness, or the possibility of redemption?

"I'll never forgive him," she says. "I'll never, ever, ever forgive him. He took my mother away. And he broke up my relationship with my fiancé. I was prescribed tranquillisers, but I only took them once and then learned to cope without them. And it affected my father's life - I lost my mother and my father in the end. My father was never the same again and then he died. I'm not a tolerant person any more. I feel angry a) that he was in a position to do that to her and b) that he's still walking the streets."

According to the Home Office's own figures, people in Britain serving life sentences have doubled in the past 10 years. Newspaper reports of judges' leniency are strictly opposed by the facts: not only are lifers doing something closer to life, but prisoners in general are spending longer in prison. Yet earlier this year Tony Blair set out an agenda for overhauling the criminal justice system in such a way as to "greater safeguard the civil liberties of victims at the expense of offenders". But while prisons are full to bursting - inching up to the highest-ever figure - a new sentencing row seems to be instigated every other week by "public outrage" at single cases of recidivism or early release. We are, in point of fact, the biggest jailer in western Europe.

Sitting with Nina Burton-Harris, I can see how all these arguments and all these statistics come down to a very human hurt: a woman crying in the afternoon about a terrible event that still controls her life, 27 years after the event. "I do feel the families should have some say and should be taken account of," she says. "It seems the prisoners have all the rights. They can do and go wherever they want. The idea that it wasn't his fault the way he turned out, because of his upbringing, I just don't believe that."

A while later, I wrote to Nina to ask if she truly hated the person who had killed her mother. "I hate the word 'hate'," she replied. "Such an intense word. But I think it is justified. I fucking hate him, honestly."

John Hirst lives in a part of Hull where the terraced houses are decayed and where broken cars stand rusty and flat-tyred against the pavement. Set back from the road, his house wears a feeling of nervous exhaustion, and as soon as I touched the bell I knew that a dog would immediately start barking. Hirst came to the door through a hail of barks and with eyes that seemed accustomed to a hostile world. "Never mind him - that's Rocky," he says.

If one is thinking straight, it's impossible not to be in two minds about people with a violent past. Meeting a person who once hit another person six or seven times on the head with an axe does, despite all one's views about the aims of society, present an immediate challenge to one's liberal contentment. It is obvious within seconds of meeting Hirst that he is probably neither a monster nor a model citizen, but he presses his Open University learning on you without ever knowing that the overwhelming sense he gives is not of educated reasonableness but of chaos and vast insensitivity. This is just an observation: he makes a case for himself very persuasively, but everything he says makes you wonder whether this man is totally in control of himself. He talks endlessly about society's powers of control, as if he were endlessly defined by others' need and hunger to restrain him.

I arrive in his living room to see that he is able to watch me coming on his own DIY closed-circuit television unit. His TV set shows pictures of the yard outside his front door and then it flicks, for seconds at a time, to show other vistas: the backyard and other views about the house. Stacks of video tapes stand here and there in the room, and I notice the clock on the screen that shows the path I had just walked up: 14:34:07, it reads. By the time that 35th minute elapses, Hirst is sitting across from me, swearing about a woman who has thrown out the lids of his jam jars.

"Oh for crying out fucking loud," he says. "Stupid cow. I don't fucking believe this." Then he stands up and goes back into the kitchen, from where I can still hear him cursing and tantrumming. "She's fucking thrown the fucking lids out, the stupid cunt. Fucking stupid fucking cow. Stupid bitch."

I'd say, even if you didn't know, that you'd think you were in the living room of an ex-convict. Hirst has been out of prison a few years, but the living room is in every way like a cell. The CCTV is one thing, but every surface is covered in fag ash; the smell of socks and male sweat is overwhelming. His dog seems a loyal beast, and its presence is everywhere: the sofa is matted with its hair and a couple of chewed footballs lie on the floor next to the grimy window. A bottle of Tesco's Whole Orange Squash stands on a table crammed with papers. Among his video tapes is a copy of The Shawshank Redemption, and dozens of books on English law crowd the shelves next to the fireplace. In the middle of them I see a paperback copy of Crime And Punishment, and, as Hirst comes back in, I think of Raskolnikov and his brutal time with the old lady. He is squat and his hair is shorn, and where his skin seemed tough, his eyes are soft and show a certain bewilderment every time he smiles. He sits on the edge of the sofa wearing a loose T-shirt and a pair of paint-splattered trousers.

"I found security in prison for the first time in my life," he says. "I stopped wetting the bed when I went to prison. And here ..." - he points to the front window and then to the back of the house - "nobody can come that way and nobody can come that way." He talks in a strong Yorkshire accent about violent difficulties with his neighbours. "Their claim to fame," he says, "was they got rid of all the asylum seekers off this street and I said, 'Well, you're not getting rid of me.' I tell you what it reminds me of: First Blood, Rambo, you know, I mean 'don't push me'. I've backed myself into a corner.

I did the same in jail whenever I got into situations, backed myself into a corner."

Hirst was born on November 18 1950 in Bradford. His mother was Latvian and she came to Britain at the end of the second world war. She had four children, but she and the father divorced before Hirst was two. He says his mother couldn't cope with her children and the younger pair, including him, was placed with Barnardo's. His only memory of the home is of cutting his foot on glass from a broken milk bottle. The records show that each time he was returned from a foster home, he was described as "uncontrollable". He says he wasn't uncontrollable; he was suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, though that was only diagnosed much later. "Children were meant to be seen and not heard," he says, "and I was bright and I'd ask a question. I'm still like that."

He went from being with one foster family called the Butterfields to doing labouring work, then he did some time in a factory. Listening to Hirst, you soon notice a pattern: each stage of his story leads into a pocket of difficulty, and in each case he likes to speak of being let down by authority. Foster parents were wrong when they said he was difficult. The union was wrong when they said he was working too many hours at a bakery. "Once someone's shit on me that bad, I don't give them a second chance," he says. He tells me about prices in the early 1960s, and how you couldn't live off the money you got on the dole, so that the only option was to start stealing. "I started supplementing my income. I was quite a good burglar - prolific." He is clearly proud of it. "I could actually get through a six-inch gap," he says, "which is what you'd have for a cat flap."

"But you got caught?" I say.

"But I didn't really care. I was a drifter and I'd always seen myself as being like a dinghy without a paddle. I didn't believe I had any control over my life: everything was preordained."

Hirst suggests he had some involvement with organised criminals in Leeds and Manchester. He mentions some violent activity at that time, but maintains he never used violence when it came to any of the robberies. There was arson, which led to a five-year prison sentence at Albany Prison on the outskirts of Newport. He puts the time he spent at Albany down as the beginning of a deep psychological disturbance. He speaks of being brutalised by prison officers and of a jungle mentality in prison, which shook him up like a bottle, he says, and it was just a matter of when the top would blow off. "If you put enough pressure on anybody, then eventually they will crack." He lights another cigarette and looks into the wall; the dog is by now sleeping soundly across his lap. "Good boy," he says.

Mrs Burton was called Bronia, but she liked it better when people called her Betty. By 1979, she was divorced from her husband and arthritic, and life in Normoor Road could be very lonely. Her daughter said she did not have a particularly untroubled life. "She wasn't easy to get on with, my mother," Nina Burton-Harris says. Partly to stem the boredom, Mrs Burton started taking in lodgers. She wasn't a natural landlady, but she couldn't make the stairs in her house any more and so it wasn't any burden to surrender her bedroom to the occasional paying individual.

John Hirst was on parole in May 1979, having served half of a two-year sentence for burglary. He had no address and stayed for a while with the Langley House Trust, but he wanted out of there and the probation service gave him Mrs Burton's name as someone who was known to take in lodgers. He moved into her house on June 12. Eleven days later, in the evening, Mrs Burton was watching a Judy Garland film on television when Hirst appeared in the sitting room to say he was going out. He says she then nagged him: he claims she didn't want him to go out.

It has to be said that Hirst has a slight tendency to pathologise his victim. "She'd had six or seven ex-offenders living there," he says, "and they couldn't bear her. She was unbearable. She stole our food. It was as though I was her carer, and I was so fragile it was unbelievable. I was like a walking time bomb. She claimed she had been in a concentration camp. She was trying to control my life and ... wanted to be waited on hand and foot. I had my own life to lead."

She asked him to put some coal on the fire. He went out, muttering under his breath, wishing she would leave him alone, and walked to the shed where the coal was kept. As he filled the bucket, he looked up and saw an axe hanging on the wall. He walked back to the house, and when he reached the kitchen he told himself not to be stupid, so he put down the axe.

"Then she started on me again," he says. When he came in from collecting the second load of coal, he picked it up again, switched on the kettle and went through to the sofa where Mrs Burton was lying. He hit her seven times. "I used the blunt end," he says matter-of-factly. As he speaks about it, Hirst lifts his cigarette tin to simulate the top of the axe and uses the ashtray in front of him to indicate Mrs Burton's head. "It could have been anyone," he says. "In the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Were you relieved?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says. "I put the kettle on. I've killed her. I've heard the kettle go click. I've gone back and carried on making the brew. Then I sat down to drink it and that's when I'm having a fag ... and that's the relief, the pressure's gone. I've looked down at my feet and thought of that line from Laurel and Hardy: that's another fine mess you've got yourself into. As I'm sat there, I'm thinking, well, I'll get a life sentence and maybe I can study for a degree or something."

I wonder if Hirst knows how callous he sounds. It is difficult to avoid seeking a connection between the coldness of his descriptions of what he did - "It was like swatting a fly that's buzzing around you" - and the question of whether he is truly reformed. Sitting in his living room, I begin to feel afraid of John Hirst. He would say such fears were stupid, because the stupidity of other people's doubts about him are self-evident to John Hirst, but something in him seems amoral and the self-control he often speaks of seems teetering in his case. When he stops talking about how he killed Mrs Burton, he stands up and returns to the kitchen. I look again at the CCTV showing the space outside and wonder if I could handle him.

"Fucking 'ell. Look at this," he shouts. I take a deep breath and pick up my notepad. As I enter the kitchen, I see that he is standing over by the sink, his hands and arms covered in red liquid. The red stuff stands in pools on the worktop and is running down the cupboards underneath. "No lids for these fucking jam jars," he says, and the pool of jam seems to glow redder. He looks up at me. "You'd think I'd killed the landlady in here," he says. I step backwards into the sitting room and, as I go, see a calendar on the wall, which has "Sign on" scribbled in pencil, and nothing else, two Mondays a fortnight apart.

Does prison really change people and serve the good of society? We have to believe that it does, and that in order to be civilised we have to invest as much in the idea of reform as in retribution. But on a gut level, people are frightened of those who have proved themselves capable of violence.

John Hirst did his time. In the end he did 25 years. But he is free now. He got educated, he appears to have put crime behind him, and he is making jam. He has also committed himself to an impressive workload of prison reform, taking the government to the European Court of Human Rights over issues such as voting rights for prisoners (they found in his favour) and the right of prisoners to have telephone conversations.

We look for remorse to be the guarantor of moral change and the stamp of decency. If an ex-offender is sorry enough, we may begin to think them normal. This may be a game, but it is nevertheless one that everyone expects violent criminals to play. Hirst was helpful all the way through the process of my writing this article, but it is quite striking to observe that my taped interview with Nina Burton-Harris reveals many pauses for tears, whereas Hirst's is filled with his own laughter.

When I ask Hirst about remorse, he looks at me as if I'd missed the point of him. "Remorse is a middle-class thing," he says. That's a good line, but it's not true: the people who call for criminals to rot in jail are readers of the Sun and people who might, on the basis of Hirst's behaviour that day in Hull, ask for him to be returned to jail until he learns how to speak with respect about his victim and her family. At one point I tell him it is very difficult for Mrs Burton's daughter to move on from such a thing. He lifts a Rizla packet from the table and rips it in two. "That's her mother," he says. "You can't put that back together."

He has a great deal to say about freedom and rights, and wishes Nina Burton-Harris would move on. "She thinks I'm free," he says. "My life sentence goes on until the day I die. But she is filled with assumptions about my life being all freedom and jollies. In a sense, your life sentence only begins the day you get out."

"But do you want to be forgiven by her?"

"Honestly, I don't give two fucks," he says. "That might sound callous, but it isn't. Her being in the court brought home to me what I'd done. Here's someone now before me who hasn't done anything, and I was feeling for the daughter, but all I could see was her anger and bitterness coming back. She probably wanted me to be hung, but it still wouldn't have brought her mother back ... I've satisfied retribution. I've satisfied deterrence. I owe society nothing now." He strokes the sleeping dog and looks at the pictures of his own front yard on the TV set. "Society owes me," he says.

"I did my sentence. It's not like I'm killing somebody now because there's no lids for the jam jars."

After weeks of wondering about John Hirst and Nina Burton-Harris, I called a lawyer named Humphrey Forrest. Forrest had worked with Hirst over many years, and his educated voice seemed to elucidate some of Hirst's views about himself and his predicament. "We met," he says, "when John was a prisoner in Hull. It came to my attention that he was being treated appallingly. One time he was disciplined for having cigarettes and placed in solitary confinement for 21 days. The warder had implied it was fine to give him the cigarettes, and as soon as we left John was punished. It was entrapment. An action for misfeasance in public office was later taken and the disciplinary was quashed. But he was treated appallingly because he challenged authority."

Forrest goes on to say that, in Hirst's case, the fact that he spent 25 years in prison rather than the 15 recommended by Justice Purchis at his trial was not because he continued to pose a threat to the public, but because he continued to buck the system. "He challenged authority by suing them, not by punching them in the face," he says, "and he was gravely punished for that. If he had knuckled under - as many of us advised him to do - he would have been out much earlier."

"But wait," I say. "He was violent in prison. He committed further offences."

But Forrest insists that Hirst did not commit 10 extra years' worth of offences. He was simply judged to be unfit to re-enter society because he "disrespected authority" by challenging the decisions they were making. "There came a point in prison [about the time he'd done 15 years], where he had a road-to-Damascus moment. He discovered the law, and he channelled his sense of frustration and his sense of justice into knowing the law."

"But does that mean he was no longer a threat to public safety?"

"He was no longer a physical risk to anyone - he hadn't attacked anyone for a long time. The circumstances that had led him to do what he did had totally changed. There was no evidence that would lead one to suspect he would ever commit such an offence again. Prison psychiatrists weren't saying he was dangerous: they were deducing dangerousness from the fact that he would not respect their authority."

I make the point to Forrest that Hirst seemed at times to show contempt for his victim and for her family. "He hasn't expressed this view to me, and I'd pull him up if he did," Forrest replies. "The fact about John is that he has a very literal view of justice: he did the crime and he served the time. He got 15 years and he did 25. He accepted what society said of him at the time and his position now is to say, 'Enough is enough'. He is probably wrong not to betray more sensitivity, but that does not in any sense mean that he is a risk to the community."

Bronia Burton, or Betty, is long gone from the house near Burleigh Common, and she will never know how her ending was both a gross culmination of anger in one person and the terrible beginning of pain in the lives of others. Her daughter and her killer will never meet, yet they are condemned to meet in their respective imaginations: the whole of England separates them, but they must always live with the thought of what happened in the house in Normoor Road. In the end, it was the house I kept coming back to. I thought of its quiet modern facade - the house at the centre of the evening. "Home is so sad," wrote that other one-time denizen of Hull, Philip Larkin.

It stays as it was left

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so,

Having no heart to put aside the theft.

A factory near Burghfield Common used to produce nuclear warheads, and now it is the great place for decommissioning them. The housing estate where Mrs Burton lived is not far from there, and is these days very quiet in the afternoon, the dogs walking without a sound on the pavement and the children at the end of the summer running out towards a stretch of grass as if the future means nothing to them. But there are new shoots in Mrs Burton's garden, and change is evident. "I dream of him sometimes and just wish he would disappear," Nina Burton-Harris had said. "At the end of the day, you just want to move on and live a decent life."

· Andrew O'Hagan's latest novel, Be Near Me, is published by Faber & Faber
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