Double jeopardy killer Dennis McGrory has been sentenced to life with a minimum term of 25 years for murdering and raping teenager Jacqueline Montgomery in 1975.
He was cleared of the crime nearly half a century ago but was found guilty following a second trial after new DNA evidence was found.
Now in his mid-seventies – and sentenced today to at least 25 years and 126 days – he is likely to die in jail.
McGrory, a violent drinker, was 28 when he raped and murdered the 15-year-old in her home in Islington, north London.
He was angry and looking for his estranged partner Josie, Jaqueline’s aunt. It was thought he attacked her to force her to reveal Josie’s new address.
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1:23
‘You have shown not one iota of remorse’
Jacqueline’s father found his daughter’s body when he got home.
She had been raped, stabbed through the back, heart and diaphragm, and strangled – with the cord of an iron found around her neck.
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McGrory carried out the attack “fuelled by alcohol and driven by rage and lust for Jackie”, said judge Mr Justice Bryan during sentencing today.
He said the killer had an “unreciprocated sexual interest” in Jaqueline and had “tried it on” with her before.
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There was “very significant suffering before death” – with the judge calling it a “horrific, violent and sustained ordeal”.
Jacqueline would have been “terrified”, he added, with experts believing she could have survived with the horrific injuries for up to 10 minutes before she died.
“How any man could inflict such sexual and physical harm upon a 15-year-old child who had done them no harm beggars belief?” the judge said.
He said there was also the possibility she was tortured because of the iron cord around her neck and a burn mark on her leg.
‘A billion-to-one match’
McGrory was described in court as showing “not one iota of remorse or compassion” for his victim and her family.
He continued to deny the murder despite the damning new DNA evidence against him.
The killer originally claimed he had been attacked and beaten up by four strangers on the night of the murder and had not been to Jacqueline’s home.
But the prosecution said they were injuries caused when his victim tried to fight him off.
Eventually, a judge at the Old Bailey threw out the case in 1976 after deciding the prosecution evidence, which was purely circumstantial, was too weak.
But vaginal swabs from Jacqueline’s body had been kept and were retested using new scientific techniques.
They showed a billion-to-one match with McGrory’s DNA, his unique genetic fingerprint. He was re-arrested and charged with rape and murder for a second time.
It took jurors at Huntingdon Crown Court just three hours to find him guilty of rape and murder.
This was a rare retrial – and the oldest – after the scrapping of the ancient double jeopardy legal principle which prevented a defendant being charged with the same crime twice.
The law was changed in 2003 to allow retrials of acquitted defendants if new and compelling evidence emerged and the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) was convinced that each case was fair and in the public interest.
Since the change in the double jeopardy law there have been only a few retrials of previously acquitted defendants.
The most famous is the successful prosecution of Gary Dobson who had been found not guilty over the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in South London in 1993.
He and another original suspect David Norris, who hadn’t previously stood trial, were convicted in 2012 and jailed for life.
He called emergency services but soon “water started seeping in”.
“I thought I’m going to have to get out, I’m going to have to smash a window,” Mr Randles said.
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He wound down his and his son’s windows, and climbed out before rescuing his son.
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‘Devastating’ flooding in Wales
“The water was chest high, I held him up as high as I could to keep him out of the water.”
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“It wasn’t raining so heavily, I’ve driven in much worse rain,” he added.
Mr Randles, a self-employed roofer who relies on the car for work, said he remained calm during the ordeal and was helped by the fact that Luca was asleep during the rescue.
Mr Randles’ partner Paige Newsome – who was not in the car at the time – said the incident was “really scary”.
“To think I could have actually lost them both – I don’t know how I would’ve lived,” she said.
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The road has been flooding for at least two decades, the couple said.
“What is it going to take for the council to sort it out? Does a fatal incident have to happen? It’s been going on for years,” Ms Newsome said.
The couple are worried about affording another car as well as Christmas celebrations.
But Mr Randles said: “I’m grateful that we got out safely and that we can spend his first birthday and Christmas as a family.”
Storm Bert has brought more than 80% of November’s average monthly rainfall in less than 48 hours to some parts, the Met Office said.
Around 300 flood warnings and alerts are in place in England, with another 100 in Wales and nine in Scotland, as heavy rain and thawing snow bring more disruption across the UK.
A major incident was declared by Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council in South Wales after homes and cars were submerged in water.
‘It is devastating’
Gareth Davies, who owns a garage in Pontypridd, a town in Rhondda Cynon Taf, told Sky’s Dan Whitehead that flooding has put his small business “back to square one”.
As the River Taff burst its banks, the majority of the vehicles in Mr Davis’s garage were so damaged he says they will have to be written off.
“I am gutted,” he said, standing in his flooded garage, most of which is also covered in oil after a drum tipped over.
“How long is it going to take to sort out? I am going to lose money either way. I can’t work on people’s cars when I am trying to sort all of this out.
“It is devastating.”
Mr Davies said he has never had an issue with water coming into his garage until now.
Pointing to one car that had been hoisted into the air before water reached it, he said: “Lucky enough, I did come in this morning just to get that car up in the air.
“I don’t know what to say, I have been working flat out for two years to build this up and something like this happens, and it just squashes it all.
“This has put me back to square one.”
At least two to three hundred properties in South Wales have been affected by flooding, Councillor Andrew Morgan, leader of Rhondda Cynon Taf Borough Council, said on Sunday.
He said the affected buildings are a mixture of residential and commercial properties, after the weather turned out to be worse than what was forecast.
The Labour MP behind the assisted dying bill said she has “no doubts” about its safeguards after a minister warned it would lead to a “slippery slope” of “death on demand”.
In a strongly worded intervention ahead of Friday’s House of Commons vote, Ms Mahmood said the state should “never offer death as a service”.
She said she was “profoundly concerned” by the legislation, not just for religious reasons, which she has previously expressed, but because it could create a “slippery slope towards death on demand”.
Asked about the criticism, Ms Leadbeater said: “I have got a huge amount of respect for Shabana. She’s a very good colleague and a good friend.
“In terms of the concept of a slippery slope, the title of the bill is very, very clear.
“It is called the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. It cannot include anybody other than people who are terminally ill, with a number of months of their life left to live. It very clearly states that the bill will not cover anybody else other than people in that category.”
She wants people who are in immense pain to be given a choice to end their lives, and has included a provision in the legislation to make coercion a criminal offence.
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The matter will be debated for the first time in almost 10 years on Friday, with MPs given a free vote, meaning they can side with their conscience and not party lines.
As a result, the government is meant to remain neutral, so the intervention of cabinet ministers has provoked some criticismfrom within party ranks.
Labour peer Charlie Falconer told Sky News Ms Mahmood’s remarks were “completely wrong” and suggested she was seeking to impose her religious beliefs on other people.
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Kevin Hollinrake says he will be in favour of the assisted dying bill
Asked about his comments, Ms Leadbeater said it was important to remain “respectful and compassionate throughout the debate” and “for the main part, that has been the case”.
She added: “The point about religion does come into this debate, we have to be honest about that. There are people who would never support a change in the law because of their religious beliefs.”
Ms Leadbeater went on to say she had “no doubts whatsoever” about the bill, which has also been objected by the likes of Health Secretary Wes Streeting and former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown.
Asked if she has ever worried about people who don’t want to die taking their own lives because of the legislation, Ms Leadbeater said: “No, I don’t have any doubts whatsoever. I wouldn’t have put the bill forward if I did.
“The safeguards in this bill will be the most robust in the world, and the layers and layers of safeguarding within the bill will make coercion a criminal offence.”
There is a lot at stake this week for Sophie Blake, a 52-year-old mother to a young adult, who was diagnosed with stage four cancer in May 2023.
As MPs vote on whether to change the law to allow assisted dying, Sophie tells Sky News of the day her life changed.
“One night I woke up and as I turned I felt a sensation of something in my breast actually move, and it was deep,” she says, speaking from her home in Brighton.
“Something fluidy, a very odd sensation. I woke up and made a doctor’s appointment.”
Sophie underwent an ultrasound followed by a biopsy before she was taken to a room in the clinic and offered water.
“They said, ‘a hundred percent, we believe you have breast cancer’.”
But it was the phone call with her mother that made it feel real.
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“My mum had been waiting at home. She phoned me and said ‘How is it darling?’ and I said ‘I’ve got breast cancer,’ and it was just that moment of having to say it out loud for the first time and that’s when that part of my life suddenly changed.”
Sophie says terminal cancers can leave patients dreading the thought of suffering at the end of their lives.
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“What I don’t want to be is in pain,” she says. “If I am facing an earlier death than I wanted then I want to be able to take control at the end.”
Assisted dying, she believes, gives her control: “It’s an insurance policy to have that there.”
Disability rights advocate Lucy Webster warns that for people like Sophie to have that choice, others could face pressure to die.
“All around the world, if you look at places where the bill has been introduced, they’ve been broadened and broadened and broadened,” she tells Sky News.
Lucy is referring to countries like Canada and Netherlands, where eligibility for assisted deaths have widened since laws allowing it were first passed.
Lucy, who is a wheelchair user and requires a lot of care, says society still sees disabled people as burdens which places them at particular risk.
“I don’t know a single disabled person who has not at some point had a stranger come up to us and say, ‘if I were you, I’d kill myself’,” she says.
The assisted dying bill, she says, reinforces the view that disabled lives aren’t worth living.
“I’ve definitely had doctors and healthcare professionals assume that my quality of life is inherently worse than other people’s. That’s a horrible assumption to be faced with when [for example] you’ve just gone to get antibiotics for a chest infection. There are some really deep-seated medical views on disability that are wrong.”
Under the plans, a person would need to be terminally ill and in the final six months of their life, and would have to take the fatal drugs themselves.
Among the safeguards are that two independent doctors must confirm a patient is eligible for assisted dying and that a High Court judge must give their approval. But the bill does not make clear if that is a rubber-stamping exercise or if judges will have to investigate cases including risks of coercion.
Julian Hughes, honorary professor at Bristol Medical School, says there’s a very big question about whether courts have the room to take on such a task.
“At the moment in the family division I understand there are 19 judges and they supply 19,000 hours of court hearing in a year, but you’d have to have an extra 34,000,” he explains.
“We shouldn’t fool ourselves and think that there wouldn’t be some families who would be interested in getting the inheritance rather than spending the inheritance on care for their elderly family members. We could quickly become a society in which suicide becomes normalised.”