Killer who despaired of release frolm hospital

By Lucy Hodges

Alan Reeve, who escaped from Broadmoor yesterday, was not considered dangerous by his doctors. Thev had been trying for several years to obtain his release.

I met him more than a year ago and have been corresponding with him since. lis letters have become increasingly desperate about wvhether he -wvould obtain his freedom. He has been in Broadmoor nearly 17 years, all of his adult life, having been sent there in 1964 without limit of time and with his release at the discretion of the Home Secretary.

In June this year he sent telegrams to the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary to say that he had been waiting seven months to hear whether he would be released and that this treatment was inhuman. Dr Edgar Udwin, the acting medical superintendent at Broadmoor, said yesterday that the Home Office had rejected his application but that an alternative course wvas being considered for him which he knew about.

Dr Udwin, wvho is also Alan Reeve's responsible medical officer, said he did not believe that the pressures on a man who had been waiting so long for his freedom were enough to explain his escape.

This was the third time he had applied to the Home Secretary for his release. In recent years Alan Reeve had become a studious and well-behaved patient; last year he gained an upper second class honours degree from the Open University and he was interested in undertaking a PhD course.

He wvas gentle and good humoured in conversation, highly articulate and political. He was convinced his left-wing viewvs were the reason he was being kept in Broadmoor so long. When he wrote to me in February this year he said: "Existence continues to be interesting, but I look forward

Alan Reeve: Gained an

honours degree

to living. Lots of excited conjecture about that strange land known as freedoTm"

His childhood had not been happy and his father was a serving soldier, a militarv prison officer, wvho was stationed for a time in Cyprus. Reeve was not close to his parents but he is now reconciled wvith them and they are as keen for his release as his doctors.

He spent time in a children's home, an approved school and a Borstal, convicted of minor offences. Then in August 1964 he murdered a schoolboy after he absconded from the BorstaL He told me he bitterly regretted this action and that he had attacked the boy because he had made derogatory remarks about borstal boys.

He denies the second murder which he was convicted of -in 1967, though he admitted it at the time and is not appealing against conviction. When I visited him, he told me he had falsely confessed to the murder of a fellow patient to* gain Dr Udwin's attention.