A prisoner is accused of raping and murdering a paedophile inside of a Yorkshire prison. 30-year-old Paul Fitzgerald, the prisoner who allegedly killed the paedophile, said that the killing was “poetic justice.”
Fitzgerald reportedly attacked 33-year-old Richard Huckle, a convicted paedophile, at Full Sutton prison in October of 2019. Fitzgerald’s trial began this week.
Huckle was a notorious prisoner who was often called “Britain’s worst paedophile.” He was serving 22 life sentences for sexually abusing nearly 200 Malaysian children between the age of six months and 12 years.
In court testimony, jurors heard that the killing was very carefully planned and that the attack was “designed to humiliate and degrade him.”
Shortly after the attack, another inmate found Fitzgerald straddling Huckle on the floor of his cell.
Prosecutor Alistair MacDonald told the court that Fitzgerald strangled Huckle with an electrical cable sheath. Fitzgerald then stabbed him in the neck with a shiv made with a screw and a melted toothbrush.
Fitzgerald then tortured Huckle until he died and desecrated his corpse by inserting a pen into his brain and penetrating his lower orifices with a blunt object. The torture was intended to be “a form of punishment,” according to prosecutors.
Fitzgerald said he wanted Huckle to feel what his victims felt.
“He said that Richard Huckle was a man who raped and abused children for fun and that he suspected that Richard Huckle had done more than merely rape his victims,” MacDonald told the court.
Oddly enough, Fitzgerald is himself a sex offender, and he later told the prison psychiatrist that he enjoyed the torture and murder.
“This is a man who rapes and abuses children for fun. He could have killed them as well. I’m inclined to think he did worse than just raping them,” Fitzgerald said.
He also told the psychiatrist he “felt high as a kite” after the attack and would “recommend it to anyone.”
Fitzgerald suffers from mixed personality disorder, psychopathy, and gender identity disorder, according to the prison psychiatrist. Whilst being interviewed after the murder, Fitzgerald said that he would have liked to “cooked bits of his body.”
Huckle traveled around Malaysia working as a photographer in the 2000s, where he posed as an English teacher and Christian volunteer and sexually assaulted young victims in poor neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur.
He was notorious for bragging about his acts on the dark web and awarded himself “paedopoints” for different acts of abuse, according to the International Business Times.
In addition to his direct crimes against children, he was also a dark web child pornography tycoon, who sold countless child abuse images and videos to other criminals. After his arrest in 2009, officers seized his encrypted laptop and managed to uncover more than 20,000 indecent pictures and videos of child abuse.
In a 2007 report, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated that 20% of women and 4% of men in the UK have experienced some type of sexual assault since the age of 16, which is equivalent to 3.4 million female and 631,000 male victims. Meanwhile, 3.1% of women (510,000) and 0.8% of men (138,000) between the ages of 16 and 59 had experienced a sexual assault in the year the survey was taken.
