I won longer sentences for killers. This is what I want next

Times

01-06-2025

Carole Gould has recurring nightmares about walking past her daughter's killer on the street.
The family live in the home in Calne, Wiltshire, where in May 2019 Gould's husband, Matt, returned from work to discover Ellie, 17, lying on the kitchen floor with 13 stab wounds to her neck and face.
She had been killed by her first boyfriend, Thomas Griffiths, who was 17 and seven months old when he bunked off school, travelled to her house and attacked her with one of the family's steak knives the day after she ended their relationship.
Griffiths has served about six years of his 12½-year sentence, but Gould understands he could be eligible for transfer to an open prison and weekend visits to the family home in about three years' time. Their home is two miles from where Griffiths' parents live.
'Can you imagine how traumatic it would be for us and Ellie's friends to see him walking around here?' Gould said. 'This is one of many things we want to fight — the idea he could be having weekends at home at taxpayers' expense.'
In the space of six years Gould, 55, a part-time estate agent, has campaigned tirelessly and won several victories to secure greater justice for the families of girls and women killed by ex-boyfriends after a break-up. Despite a number of successes, for which she was made an OBE this year, there is still much to do.
'I've felt like I have to be Ellie's voice because she did believe in justice and what was right and wrong,' Gould said. 'I wonder what she'd be saying if she could shout down to us. I'm sure she'd be so angry he took her life away when she had so much to live for. I'm sure she would be proud, but I'd give it all up in a heartbeat to have her back.'
Because of Gould's campaign, sentencing guidelines changed in 2021 so teenage killers are treated almost as adults. 'Ellie's Law' meant Axel Rudakubana, 17, who killed three girls in Southport last year, started at a minimum of 27 years as opposed to 12. He was jailed for a total of 52 years.
Working with other bereaved mothers such as Julie Devey — whose daughter Poppy, 24, was stabbed in her student flat by an ex-boyfriend in 2018 — Gould successfully campaigned for judges to consider aggravating factors such as where disproportionate force was used to murder, and recognise the impact of coercive behaviour.
Now, a week after the government published its sentencing review by the Tory former justice secretary David Gauke, Gould has thoughts on how the justice system needs to change to give a sense of real justice to families who have lost young women to violence by men.
She is calling for:
• The minimum tariff for murder on the street and the home to be equalised at 25 years.
• The introduction of restricted zones that contain offenders' movements to a small area, including preventing them from entering an area where their victim's family lives once they are released from prison. She wants to see restricted zones in place for life.
• Greater availability and use of blunt knives in homes and across the country.
Goal No 1 is to reform domestic homicide sentencing, increasing the minimum sentence for murder in the home from 15 to 25 years, in line with the minimum tariff for murder on the street where a weapon is taken to the scene. 'What grieved me so much with Ellie's case is the idea that if a youth over 18 goes out with a knife in a town and stabs someone, he would straight away get 25 years as a starting point,' Gould said. 'But when it comes to violence in the home, which is more often against women, it's just not taken as seriously.'
She is also supporting the Let's Be Blunt campaign encouraging people to choose round-tipped kitchen knives. It was started by Leanne Lucas, the dance teacher who was critically injured as she protected children targeted by Rudakubana in Southport. Three quarters of all domestic homicides involve a kitchen knife, according to the Office for National Statistics.
'He'll be petrified in prison'
In the independent sentencing review, Gauke said the prison capacity crisis 'requires us to set out proposals in which some people who currently receive custodial sentences are, instead, punished in the community and that some of those who still receive custodial sentences spend less time in prison than was previously the case'.
Gould warned that current methods for assessing parole could be inadequate if specialist advisers on domestic abuse and gender-based violence are not used.
'My grievance with Gauke's review is that they're basing parole on good behaviour in prison,' she said. 'Somebody like Griffiths will be petrified in prison because he's a middle-class boy among gang members — obviously he's going to be behaving. How can you say whether he's going to be a danger to women when he gets out? There ought to be a domestic abuse adviser on the parole board for a case like his.'
Through her Killed Women network, Gould repeatedly hears about women whose attackers have been released from prison and committed further violence.
She referred to the case of Mark Keel, 33, who was jailed for 22 years last week for killing his partner, Maxine Clark, at her Glasgow home. Clark, 36, a mother of four, had previously been attacked by Keel, who had been jailed for domestic violence in 2022 and has abuse convictions from three previous relationships.
Years of campaigning
Gould has been fighting the justice system almost since the day six years ago when she left Ellie at home to be picked up by a friend for school.
The hard-working, vivacious and popular girl had ended her relationship with Griffiths, a quiet prefect at her school, the night before. She was weeks away from the results for her first year of A-levels and an extended project entitled: 'Should child murderers be punished?'
CCTV showed Griffiths was dropped at school by his mother that morning. He waited until she drove away before getting a bus home and changing into black shoes and clothing.
After the murder he began a cover-up. He gave the bloodied clothes he was wearing to his mother to wash and dumped kitchen towels used to mop Ellie's blood in a nearby wood. He texted friends that scratches on his neck, the product of Ellie trying to defend herself, were self-harm because he was depressed about family illnesses.
• Why abusive partners who kill at home get off lightly
The judge considered Griffiths's violation of the home as a place of safety and his attempted cover-up as aggravating factors which would increase his sentence from a minimum of 12 years. However, mitigating factors lowered the sentence to 12½ years. These included his age, the fact that he had pleaded guilty three months after his arrest, a letter demonstrating remorse he sent to the judge, and that he did not bring a weapon to the scene.
Encounters with killer's parents
In the wake of the Netflix series Adolescence, which the Goulds watched together, parents and teachers across the country have been having conversations about toxic masculinity, incel (involuntary celibate) culture and the rise of misogynistic influencers such as Andrew Tate.
'I often wonder with Griffiths whether he did this because he was always on the internet,' Gould said. She was told by a friend of Ellie that he was insecure about his masculinity, once storming out of a gym after she asked a different boy to get a weight down from a high shelf for her.
Schools ought to be having more conversations with teenagers about healthy relationships, she said, spotting controlling behaviour and reassuring young boys so they did not believe the world was against them.
Gould also wants restricted zones — ensuring that high-risk former prisoners are only able to live, work and travel in specific ares of the UK — in place for the rest of ex-prisoners' lives. Otherwise, she says, his presence in their home town would turn it into a 'prison'. She gave an example of Julie Butcher's family, who live in nearby Swindon. Butcher's killer husband said that after his 13-year sentence he wanted to return home there — to the same area where her sister Emma lived.
Staying in the area has meant that the Goulds have seen the Griffiths family a couple of times. On the first anniversary of Ellie's death, Carole Gould confronted his parents, she said.
'They said that their lives had been destroyed, which I get. But I said to her, mother to mother, all I've got left of my precious daughter is a box of ashes and a lock of hair because of the monstrous act of your son.'
'[Ellie] should have gone to university, probably to study psychology. She should have passed her driving test. She could have gone travelling. She could now be starting out in her career as a police woman, which she was considering. You mourn your loss going forward: we'll never see her get married, we'll never see her have children. This is why 12½ years is just not long enough to reflect the damage it's done to us.'
The Ministry of Justice said a review of homicide law would be conducted by the independent Law Commission. 'We are already working at pace to introduce statutory aggravating factors for murders involving strangulation and relationship breakdowns,' a spokesman said. 'We are also looking at options on knives and will be meeting manufacturers and retailers to discuss increasing sales of rounded-tipped knives shortly.'