Russell Causley, who killed his wife Carol Packman in 1985, will become the first prisoner to face a public parole boarding hearing.
An application for the next hearing to consider his release to take place in public has been granted by the Parole Board. Causley. now 79, was handed a life sentence for killing Carole Packman a year after he moved his lover into their home in Bournemouth, Dorset.
He was freed in 2020, after serving more than 23 years of his sentence, but was returned to prison in November 2021 after breaching his licence conditions. Causley, who never revealed where he hid Ms Packman’s body, is next due to face the Parole Board for review in October.
READ MORE: Family pay heartbreaking tribute to boy whose horrific death has sparked major murder investigation
Causley's grandon, Neil Gillingham, applied for the hearing to take place in public in a bid to shine a light on what he sees as the failure of legal changes designed to make it harder to release killers who refuse to reveal the whereabouts of their victims' bodies. Neil and his mother Samantha have been searching for answers about what happened to Ms Packman.
Mr Gillingham previously told the PA news agency: “My grandfather has no shame. I question whether or not he has a heart, and if he does, whether it’s made out of stone or flesh. My whole life has been tainted by my grandfather and I want a public hearing to scrutinise the man who has impacted on me for so long.”
Causley initially evaded justice for the best part of a decade after his wife’s murder by faking his own death as part of an insurance scam. He was first convicted of murder in 1996 but this was quashed by the Court of Appeal in June 2003, and he then faced a second trial for murder and was again found guilty.
According to a document setting out the decision made by Parole Board chairman Caroline Corby, Causley does not want the hearing to take place in public and indicated he may not give evidence if the application was granted. But Ms Corby said: “In the application for a public hearing in the case of Mr Causley, I have decided that there are special features, which set it apart from other cases, which may add to the proper public understanding of the parole system.”
The murder of Carole Packman became the subject of a true crime investigation programme on ITV back in 2016. The Investigator: A British Crime Story was a four-part series led by former police detective Mark Williams-Thomas.
Daughter Samantha Gillingham, who was just 16 when her mum went missing, was hoping to get answers. Samantha and her father Russell returned from a day out to their Bournemouth home to find a short note left on the kitchen table alongside her mother's wedding ring, which read: "I’ve had enough and I’m leaving. And I’m not coming back."
The middle-class couple lived on the outskirts of Bournemouth with their daughter and while they appeared a normal family, behind closed doors their marriage was unconventional. Publicly Russell later claimed that his wife ran off "with a man in a red Porsche", but it was actually Causley, a serial philanderer, who had multiple extra-marital affairs and had moved his latest mistress, a work colleague called Patricia, into the family home a year before Carole's disappearance after claiming she had nowhere to live.
After Carole went missing, Russell changed his name by deed poll from Packman to his lover's last name - Causley. First treated as a disappearance, with the understanding she had left to start a new life it wasn't until a decade later that police returned to the case after Russell was arrested and convicted of insurance fraud after attempting to fake his own death.
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