When Karen Beadle got home from work on 7 February 2019, her phone was beeping furiously. She played the first message, which said her son Garry had had an accident and she should call the hospital urgently. “I thought: what’s he done now? The doctor said, ‘You have to prepare yourself,’ and I said, ‘Prepare myself for what? What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘He’s gravely ill on life support.’” Karen comes to a choked stop. “It’s like somebody punches you in the face. I said, ‘What’s happened then? What’s he done at work?’ He said, ‘He wasn’t at work, he was in prison.’ I thought ‘What are you on about?’ He said, ‘This is very serious. He has suffered catastrophic brain injury. There’s no coming back from that, I have to warn you.’”
Garry Beadle had never been in prison before. He spent less than a week on remand awaiting trial before attempting to kill himself. Four days later, the life-support machine was turned off. Karen has spent the past three years tracing what happened. The two were exceptionally close, but in his final days they hadn’t spoken. His relationship with the mother of his two youngest children had recently broken down, and he had apparently suffered a mental health crisis. After his partner asked him to leave their home, she changed the locks and moved in with her mother. When Garry discovered this, he broke in and wreaked havoc on pretty much everything that didn’t belong to the children. It wasn’t in character.
Little he did in those final weeks was. Garry was briefly street homeless, taking drugs, and just before he was arrested he tried to kill himself. He was alleged to have thrown something at his partner during an argument, bought something on her credit card without her consent, and stolen scrap metal from an empty house to sell. Garry was charged in relation to these incidents with fraud, burglary, theft, common assault and possession of a dangerous weapon (a penknife).
On 1 February 2019, Garry arrived at Durham prison with a suicide and self-harm warning form. It recorded that he had made two attempts in the past two weeks. He had told the magistrate and his solicitor he would not last two days in prison; in the event he lasted six. Garry Beadle took his own life in Durham prison, aged 36.
If Garry’s story was a one-off, it would still be cause for alarm. But there are many Garry Beadles – prisoners with severe mental health problems who took their lives while on remand awaiting trial (or, in some cases, while waiting to be sentenced).
The rate of self-inflicted deaths of remand prisoners has consistently been around three times higher than that of convicted prisoners. From September 2020 to September 2021, 42% of the 81 prisoners who died by suicide were on remand, despite this group making up only 16% of the overall prison population. For various reasons, including a Covid backlog, a shortage of court staff and court closures, more prisoners are being held on remand than in recent years, and more are spending longer on remand than the legal time limit for people awaiting trials. Between December 2019 and December 2020, the remand population grew by a shocking 24%. This is partly because, in September 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the prison custody time limits (the amount of time prisoners can be held before trial) were extended from six to eight months. In June 2021 this reverted to six months.
Remand prisoners have always been more vulnerable than the general prison population – they have no idea what the future holds, and many are innocent. But when so many prisoners on remand are taking their own lives, something is going terribly wrong.
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Karen Beadle’s home near Watford has become a shrine to Garry. By the door is a huge, handsome portrait of him. In the lounge are more pictures of Garry with Karen and playing football. Even from a photo, you can tell he had the balance of a born athlete.
Three and a half years have passed since he died, and Karen says it feels like yesterday. “I still send him texts. His voicemail is still on his phone. On anniversaries, on Mother’s Day, I’ll send a text.” What does she say? “Missing you every second of every day. Wish you were here, wish I could talk to you, wish I could hug you. Wish I could even shout at you.” Did she shout at him a lot? “Yeah! I want to make it abundantly clear my Garry was no angel. Not at all. But my goodness he didn’t deserve this.”
Garry was an only child. Karen says he was a nightmare at school. “He wasn’t rude or horrible, but he used to wind the teachers up.” He was popular, had friends galore and was the best footballer in his primary school. He won a place at the specialist sports and science college, Queens’, in Bushey, Hertfordshire. At 13, he was signed by Watford. Before long, Wimbledon, West Ham and Aston Villa were also interested in offering him professional terms.
But his career foundered and, at 16, Watford released him. “He discovered girls and lager,” Karen says. She believes some of his friends were jealous and led him down the wrong path, but admits he lacked discipline. The club probably gave him more chances than he deserved, she says. “In the end they had to let him go. If they had a game on a Saturday he’d be out till the early hours on a Friday and he couldn’t get up.”
Garry knew he’d blown it. “One Friday evening, he was in town with his friends in a club in Watford and he rang me. By this time he was quite well known on the circuit, and he hung around with professional footballers. He said, ‘I’ve just been talking to Joe Cole, Mum, and I realise I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life.”
Despite not working hard, Garry passed half a dozen GCSEs and got a job in IT at Watford General, the hospital where Karen worked as an admissions officer. “He didn’t like the fact he had to be suited and booted, but he was good at it. They all loved him.” Not least because of his naivety. “One day they told him one of the main servers had gone down and told him to go over to a building and ask for the tubing they needed. He went in and they said, ‘Can I help you?’ and he said, ‘I’ve been asked to pick up a fallopian tube.’ He was in the sexual health clinic.” She laughs. “So gullible!”
Karen digs under her bed to take out boxes of memories. There are newspaper clippings of Garry’s performances on the pitch, a tribute in the Watford programme after he died, loving cards he sent to Karen. “Thank you for all your love and support Mum,” he wrote in one Mother’s Day card. “I wouldn’t be in this world without you.” There are photos of him messing around, grinning or gurning at the camera. Another box contains his first baby shoes and his christening gown.
There are more pictures. “Are you squeamish?” Karen asks. There is a photograph of Garry on life support, and one of Karen holding his hand as he lies in his coffin. A cupboard reaching the ceiling is crammed with documents relating to his case. And then there’s Garry’s personal stuff – clothes, trainers, trophies. “He was always mega-fussy about his trainers, his clothes and his hair. Almost girly.” She looks at it all and turns away. “It’s not much for 36 years, is it?”
***
After being released by Watford, Garry kept up his football. He played for Oxhey Jets – an amateur team that plays in a semi-professional league. Garry became the Jets’ star midfielder, scoring the most important goal in their history – a spectacular free-kick against Aveley in 2006 that took them to the second qualifying round of the FA Cup (where they lost to Wimbledon). Garry had become estranged from his own dad, and found a father figure in the Jets’ founder and owner, John Elliott.
Elliott is watching a football match when we speak. “Garry was a hell of a good player,” he says. “He was a goal-scoring midfielder. His nickname was the Wasp because he was just a bloody nuisance. Every time you swipe a wasp, it comes back and has another go at you. It’s just a pest. And that’s what Garry was like, on and off the football field.” Even so, Elliott says it was impossible not to like him. “Garry could make you laugh when you didn’t want to. When you really wanted to give him a bollocking, you’d look at him and he’d be pulling a face. He’d just destroy you when you’re trying to be the big Mr Angry.”
Garry stayed with the Jets for seven or eight years. The club was run like a family by Elliott. Everybody pitched in with bar and cleaning duties. When Elliott was let down by a builder who had agreed to erect a new stand, Garry stepped in and built it himself. It has now been renamed the Garry Beadle Memorial Stand. Over the years, he and Elliott became closer. Elliott helped Garry get a new job at Kodak, where he was a senior manager. Garry gave Elliott Father’s Day cards, and many people assumed he was his actual dad. “He had a very caring side, too,” Elliott remembers. “If one of you wasn’t well, Garry was always the one who’d pick the phone up or pop round. He had a big heart on him.”
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Garry’s failure to make it as a professional footballer wasn’t his only major setback. He and his first partner lost their first baby after she had a heart attack when she was just four weeks old. They went on to have two more children, but split up soon after the youngest was born. When Kodak closed down its training centre in 2004, he was made redundant and started doing shifts on building sites.
At the age of 24, he met his second longterm partner, Katie (not her real name), on holiday, and moved to Newcastle to be with her. “He couldn’t stop talking about Katie,” Elliott says. “I thought it was going to make his life, and in fairness it did for a long time.” They were together for 12 years and had two children. For most of his time in Newcastle, he worked with a friend installing cable trunking. It was a skilled and dangerous job. He still played football, but by now only for pub teams.
Elliott visited Garry regularly and began to sense things weren’t right in December 2018, a couple of months before he died. There was tension between Garry and Katie. Things came to a head over his beloved labrador, Blue, named in tribute to Chelsea, the football club he supported. Blue was untrainable. Katie was terrified the dog would attack the children and told Elliott she planned to give him to an owner who had no children. “The dog was a pain in the arse, if I’m honest. He was out of control, but Garry loved him so much. Katie, rightly, was worried about the kids. I paid for a dog obedience trainer to come in because they had no furniture left in the house. He’d ripped everything to shreds.”
Elliott last saw Garry about three weeks before he died, when he went up to celebrate Garry and Katie’s daughter’s birthday in mid-January 2019. By now his behaviour was disturbing. “I didn’t like what I saw of Garry. He was arguing, and a couple of times he flared up in front of the kids. I think he was close to a breakdown.” Had he seen him like this before? “No, I hadn’t. I knew trouble was coming because Katie told me she was making plans for the dog. When I left I said to Garry, ‘If you want to have a couple of weeks at my house, come down.’”
A few days later, Garry returned from work to find Katie had got rid of the dog. Elliott tells me Garry reacted badly, Katie called the police, and he left the house. When Garry returned home for fresh clothes, he discovered the locks had been changed and nobody was home. Katie and the children had gone to stay with her mother. “Let’s be fair about this,” Elliott says. “He broke into the house, he damaged things. He was pretty much smashing the place up. What he said to me once was, ‘I will break something of hers every few hours until I get my dog back.’ The dog became a fixation. Katie would have been very scared because she is not a confrontational person.” A warrant was put out for his arrest.
At this stage Garry was ringing Elliott multiple times a day. He was desperate, Elliott says, convinced he’d destroyed his family and that there was no way back. He was still grieving for his first daughter, had little contact with his two oldest surviving children and now believed he had lost his two youngest. “He was saying, ‘I’ve ruined everything,’ and he went into this downward spiral.”
When Elliott realised Garry was living on the streets, he paid for a room in a hotel for him. He also sent Toby Carvery vouchers so he could get regular hot meals; he wouldn’t send him money because he thought that it would go on drugs. Nobody knows exactly how Garry’s life unravelled in his final weeks. But Elliott believes it was only towards the end, after the breakdown of his relationship, that he got into drugs. Elliott told the police he was in touch with Garry and was encouraging him to hand himself in. It was at the hotel he paid for where Garry was arrested and charged on 31 January. The following morning there was a preliminary hearing at Newcastle upon Tyne magistrates court. The trial was adjourned until late February.
“I was talking to his solicitor about getting him to stay at my house in Watford. The court didn’t think he’d leave Katie alone, so they put him on remand.” It was at this hearing that it emerged Garry had tried various ways to take his own life in the past couple of weeks. This is when he told the magistrate that he would not survive prison.
On Sunday 3 February, Garry called Elliott from prison. “He thanked me for everything I’d done for him and said he knew what to do and he was going to do it. He said he loved me and asked me to look after his mum and his kids. I immediately phoned 999. I spoke to the police and told them I thought Garry was going to kill himself. They were brilliant. They kept ringing me back and they tracked him down.”
Northumbria police passed Elliott’s message on to the prison where Garry was being held on remand. HMP Durham recorded the police contact in security prison officers do not have access to. The information was not passed on to mental health staff or any officer working with Garry.
Elliott believes he didn’t tell his mother he was in prison because he didn’t want to upset her. Four days after Garry had told him his plans, Elliott got a phone call from the prison chaplain. “‘Mr Elliott are you something to do with Garry? You’re down as the next of kin.’ As soon as you get the chaplain you know you’re in trouble. I just said, ‘He’s done it, hasn’t he?’”
***
The inquest concluded that failings in record keeping and information sharing at HMP Durham possibly contributed to Garry Beadle’s death. What was certain was that the failings were numerous and inexcusable. On arrival at prison, Garry told an officer he missed his children “like crazy”, and felt so down he would attempt to take his life again, but the officer did not fully record this. Despite arriving at the prison from the magistrates court with a Sash (suicide and self-harm) warning form stating that Garry had overdosed in the previous two weeks, the nurse who saw him on admission recorded that he had not overdosed in the previous 12 months. The nurse had received no training in prison suicide and self-harm management for at least five years. Garry did not receive his antidepressant medication until his fourth day in prison. An ACCT (Assessment, Care in Custody and Teamwork), the care-planning process for prisoners identified as being at risk of suicide or self-harm, was opened. His risk of self-harm and suicide was initially assessed by the ACCT to be low, was then raised and was finally reduced to low again on his final day in the cell. This was despite an incident the evening before, where Garry had been distressed about his cellmate moving, leaving him alone in his cell. Perhaps the biggest failing was not passing on the message from Elliott. At 2pm on 7 February 2019 Garry was found in his cell after attempting suicide. He died four days later in hospital.
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In August 2019, the chief inspector of prisons raised “significant concern” over the number of deaths at HMP Durham, and called for urgent action in managing inmates at risk of suicide and self-harm. In May 2020, 48-year-old Jason Parker became the sixth prisoner to take his own life since Garry Beadle. The similarities were stark. As with Garry, the prison had failed to take account of his suicide and self-harm warning form. He took his own life after being remanded for threats to kill four days earlier. As with Garry, it was his first time in prison. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman said: “It is critical that the governor addresses these repeated failings and ensures that improvements are made as a matter of urgency.”
Why are the number of self-inflicted deaths so much higher for those on remand, awaiting trial or sentencing? For some it may be simply because they are innocent or have not committed a crime that merits a custodial sentence. In 2020, one in 10 of those remanded before trial were subsequently acquitted, and one in four of those remanded in custody and found guilty were not sent to prison following their trial (though this may be because they had already served enough time while on remand).
In 2018 the Howard League for Penal Reform published its Preventing Prison Suicide report, full of commonsense recommendations. Prison numbers should be reduced (they had virtually doubled from 44,975 in 1990 to 85,321 by 2016); prisoners should spend less time locked in cells; suicide prevention measures had to be improved; the use of solitary confinement should be reduced. The report pointed out that the most vulnerable prisoners – those with mental health problems and learning disabilities – were most likely to be punished. Many of them were also denied the very things that were likely to stop them taking their own life – televisions, social interaction, activities, education.
The pattern is horribly familiar. Sarah Reed, 32, was found dead on 11 January 2016 at HMP Holloway. Reed had been on remand for more than three months, solely for the purpose of obtaining two psychiatric reports to see if she was fit to plead. Her alleged crime? Assaulting a nurse in a secure psychiatric unit. The reports, finally completed three days after she killed herself, concluded she was unfit to plead. The inquest concluded that failures in the management of her medication and in concluding the psychiatric assessment in a timely manner contributed to her death. The jury also had concerns about suicide and self-harm report monitoring, and believed that Reed did not receive adequate treatment in prison for her high levels of distress.
Again at HMP Durham, Charlie Todd, 18, was remanded in April 2019 awaiting sentence for burglary and motoring offences. He was also awaiting trial on wounding charges. After his death, the wounding charges against others who had been accused alongside him were dropped. Todd had a history of self-harm and depression. On 2 September 2019, he was given five days in the segregation unit after being caught with the drug spice. Later that afternoon, he was found to have taken his own life. HMP Durham was asked to respond to the coroner’s concerns after it emerged at the inquest that some of the hourly checks on his condition that should have been made were missed. HMP Durham said it had taken on two extra staff members since Todd’s death.
Michael Forster was remanded to Leicester prison in October 2016, charged with a violent offence against his ex-wife. He had a history of psychosis and mental ill health. It was his first time in prison; he had recently self-harmed and, when remanded, said he would take his life that night. In his six weeks in prison, he never received his antipsychotic medication. The jury at his inquest concluded that concerns raised by his family and lawyer were inadequately acted upon by staff, and that there was ineffective recognition of the deterioration in his mental health. Prison staff were required to check Forster twice an hour, but on the morning of 19 November 2016, the night patrol officer went for more than an hour without observing him. At 4.37am, he found that Forster had tried to take his own life in his cell. He died in hospital on 21 November.
Ben Ireson, 31, was a remand prisoner who arrived at HMP Nottingham on 16 October 2018, charged with violent offences against his partner. He told staff he had a history of anxiety, had previously attempted suicide and wanted a cellmate as he felt isolated. Ireson was referred to the prison mental health team and should have been seen within five days. In fact he was not assessed for a further four weeks, and then by a trainee member of staff who did not know Ireson and had not been provided with any information about him.
A week later, on 22 October, Ireson reported to prison staff that he felt under threat and felt like harming himself before someone else did. Suicide and self-harm prevention procedures were started, but stopped only two days later. On 15 November, two days after Ireson pleaded not guilty, the first review of his phone calls (which should have been checked every three days) noted that he had repeatedly been expressing suicidal thoughts and had tried to kill himself in prison. This information was not acted upon. On 9 December, Ireson was moved to another cell on the same wing, with no cellmate. On the evening of 12 December, CCTV showed that prison staff walked past his door without checking on him. At 5.45am the next day, a member of the support staff noticed that Ireson had covered the observation panel in his cell with toilet paper, and saw that he had attempted suicide. CPR was started, but he was pronounced dead at 6am.
At Ireson’s inquest, the coroner concluded that “woeful” and “shocking” failures contributed to his death. It was the 12th self-inflicted death at HMP Nottingham between June 2016 and December 2018.
Garry Beadle, Sarah Reed, Charlie Todd, Michael Forster and Ben Ireson were all found hanging in their cells. And on it goes, a litany of incompetence and neglect: warnings unheeded, records unread, signs unseen, medication not given, suicide prevention plans not implemented, desperately vulnerable people left alone in cells.
In June, the campaigning journalist Jon Robins reported on his website The Justice Gap that a recent small-scale survey showed how little attention was being given to the decision on whether to detain defendants pre-trial. Tom Smith, associate law professor at the University of the West of England, observed 26 hearings at which pre-trial detention was discussed, and reported that the decision, usually taken by a magistrate, was made at speed. In 17 of the hearings, between one and five minutes was spent on pre-trial detention matters. At a further five hearings, between five and 10 minutes were spent on the issue.
Deborah Coles, director of the charity Inquest, says: “We have worked with hundreds of bereaved families whose loved ones have died in prison without ever having been convicted or sentenced for any crime. There is an epidemic of self-inflicted deaths within our prison system, and inequality and mental illness are at its roots. Imprisoning people without a conviction should be a last resort, reflecting the principle that we are innocent until proved guilty. Instead, evidence shows it is an everyday occurrence.”
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I ask John Elliott whether Garry’s death has changed him. Hugely, he says. He admits that when Garry was detained in custody he was slightly relieved. “I thought they would get a doctor to him, look after him, see whether there was any drug dependency and give him the help he needed. I thought, wrongly, that he was being put into a care situation. It turned out they were anything but caring. They were a disgrace. I’ll never forgive them. I believe Garry’s life was taken away by lack of care by the Prison Service.” Elliott pauses. “I looked on him as my adopted kid, and I still feel that way about Garry.”
A Prison Service spokesperson says: “Our sympathies remain with Mr Beadle’s family and loved ones. Since this tragic event, a 24-hour hotline for relatives has been launched at HMP Durham, and staff have been given extra training on supporting vulnerable prisoners. Self-harm has since fallen and there were no self-inflicted deaths in 2021.
“More widely, we are doing more to prevent suicide and self-harm, and investing £34m over the next three years to make prisons safer, with improved awareness training, prison helplines and ligature-resistant cells.”
After submitting a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Justice, we have discovered that a shocking 65.7% of prisoners in England and Wales who died on remand over the past 10 years had at some point (though not necessarily the time of their death) been on an ACCT – in other words, at risk of suicide or self-harm. During this period, 265 remand prisoners died by self-inflicted means, of whom 174 had been on an ACCT. While it could be argued that this shows the justice system is successfully identifying the most vulnerable prisoners, the more obvious conclusion is that it is failing them by allowing such a high number to take their own lives.
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Karen Beadle is still trying to piece together Garry’s last days. Last year, she and a friend went to HMP Durham where the prison chaplain took her to Garry’s cell. “I said to the chaplain, my friend and the prison officer, ‘All I want you to do is walk away and leave me. I need to be on my own now.’ I asked the chaplain to show me where Garry was found, and I fell to my knees, sobbing. You can’t put it into words.”
There are many things that disturb Karen about what happened to Garry. One is that he killed himself the day after her birthday. “I asked my psychiatrist, ‘Why would somebody do that?’ and he said, ‘In my opinion it was because he was so low, he was just waiting for your birthday to pass.’” At the inquest she discovered something that has gone on to haunt her. “I found out that he’d rung me on my birthday. I didn’t take the call because I didn’t recognise the number. And I have to live with the guilt because I could have talked him out of it.” She pauses. “Then I think: would he have told me he was in prison or that he was working away? I’ll never know now.”
Karen is determined that Garry’s death won’t have been in vain. She wants the world to know that Garry is just one of hundreds of defendants who have taken their own lives on remand when they were in no state to be jailed in the first place. Like many others, he managed to do so because of transparent failings by the prisons tasked with ensuring his safety. One death like Garry’s, she says, is too many.
She talks about meeting the governor at Durham prison after Garry’s death. “I thought: do I want to throw a chair at you, or do I want to keep my decorum? He came into the room and went to shake my hand, and I said, ‘No thank you.’ I sat down and thought I was going to faint. They got me some iced water, and all the governor said was: ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ Repeatedly. And every time he said it, I replied, ‘But you can’t bring him back can you?’” She pauses. “You can’t bring my boy back. You’ve taken him away from me.”
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
