Convicted Paedophile Russell Bishop has been jailed for life for the murders of two school girls in 1986.
Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows
The murder known as “The Babes in the Wood” has been solved after 32 years.
Bishop will serve a minimum of 36 years after he is found guilty at a second trial on the 10th December.
At aged 20, Bishop had killed nine-year-olds Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway in Wild park, Brighton in 1986.
In 1987 he was cleared for their murders but within three years he abducted, sexually assaulted and tried to kill a seven-year-old girl, the Old Bailey Court heard how he left her for dead.
Karen Hadaway’s mother, Michelle Hadaway, said: “Finally, justice has been done and Bishop has been seen as the evil monster he really is.”
Bishop, now 52, who was already serving a life term for attempted murder had refused to attend court for his sentencing. The judge Mr Justice Sweeney described him as a “predatory paedophile” who had shown no remorse in the case.
The two girls had gone missing from their homes after they went out to play on October 9th, 1986. They were found in Wild Park the next day, laying together as if they were sleeping. Bishop was helping in their search and was one of the people that found them, but he protested his innocence throughout police investigation and his first trial.
Three years later when he kidnapped a 7-year-old girl who was roller skating in Brighton, the police found “striking similarities” in both cases. He had drove the girl to Devil’s Dyke on the South Downs where he strangled and molested her, leaving her for dead.
DNS made a breakthrough in the Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway case when a sweatshirt was discarded on his route home which had DNA samples from Karen’s left forearm.
Nicola’s mother, Sue Eismann, said: “I have lived with the pain, the loss and sheer hate towards him for what he had done for the last 32 years,” she said.
“Russell Bishop is a horrible, wicked man. No child is safe if he is allowed to be free.”
Det Sup Jeff Riley, of Sussex Police, described Bishop as a “truly wicked man”.
Followig the sentencing he said: “Bishop will hopefully spend the remainder of his life behind bars where he truly belongs and never darken the streets of Brighton again,”
“This significant term of imprisonment will of course never make up for the loss of Karen and Nicola but I hope their families will take some comfort from it.”
Russell Bishop was named a ‘Cowardly’ man that has decades of lies. His lies had started before the girls’ bodies were even found, when he turned up to search for the bodies of the two girls he killed.
Former detective inspector Malcolm Bacon, said: “He was walking round, fronting marches, trying to find out who the ‘real person’ was who had killed the girls.”
