The details of the terrible murder of Sarah Mayhew are almost too appalling to bear, but one question stands out most of all: why was the convicted murderer who killed her free to take Sarah’s life?
Sansom had murdered before, when he was just 19
Sarah, a 38-year-old mother of two, was lured to a flat in south London last March and never seen again. Steve Sansom and his partner, Gemma Watts, killed Sarah in a manner which involved sexual and sadistic conduct. The killers had previously exchanged messages detailing a desire to kill people with a knife or knives while engaged in sexual activity. After’s Sarah’s murder, the couple dismembered her and dumped her remains in different locations around London.
A horrific, brutal crime made even worse by the killers’ efforts to evade justice. But not one which came from nowhere. Sansom had murdered before, when he was just 19. On Christmas Eve 1998, he attacked, robbed and killed a taxi driver. Sansom was caught, and jailed. He served twenty years, before convincing a parole board he had changed. He was released in 2019. As a murderer on a life sentence, he would have expected to be supervised by probation officers for the rest of his life. Their job is to protect the public and ensure that the person doesn’t reoffend, recalling them to prison if necessary. We must ask whether they did their job properly in this case.
When a person on probation is accused of committing a particularly serious crime, the Serious Further Offences (SFO) process begins. Sansom’s SFO is still underway; like most of them, this may well not be published, although the Ministry of Justice told me ‘we will share the findings of the review with Ms Mayhew’s family’.
Sansom received a whole-life order this time after being convicted of murder at the Old Bailey. He will never again be free. Watts was given a 30-year tariff. She will be almost 80 when she’s first eligible for release. But while this evil pair are now locked away, we need to know how this crime happened. How regularly was Sansom meeting his probation officer? Had any warning signs been noticed or reported? Had his probation officer recently changed? Was he, like Joshua Jacques, another SFO case who killed four people, subject to Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA), and if so, were they working?
Frankly, we need a great deal more individual accountability as to who was responsible for failing to prevent Sansom from killing again. There should be a presumption that all SFO reviews are published and people who have failed in their jobs should face professional consequences. Much of the justice system hides behind secrecy, allowing its alarming and dangerous failures to continue. This is not good enough.
Something is going badly wrong in our justice system – and an innocent woman has paid for this failure with her life. Almost 10,000 people were recalled to prison between July and September 2024, according to the most recent figures. But often these recalls are for spurious reasons. Gaie Delap, a 77-year old retired teacher and Just Stop Oil activist, ended up back behind bars because there were no available curfew tags that were small enough to fit her ankle. Just this week, I heard of a woman recalled to prison for breaching her curfew. In fact, she’d been gravely ill in the intensive care unit of a hospital. Something is going wrong when people like this are recalled and Steve Sansom was out, and able to kill Sarah.
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