Three inmates have been found guilty of murdering a child killer who was stabbed 25 times in his cell at HMP Wakefield and then “tucked up in bed” by his attackers as if he were asleep.
Mark Fellows, 45, Lee Newell, 57, and David Taylor, 64, were convicted on Thursday after a jury at Leeds Crown Court deliberated for less than three hours. They will be sentenced on Friday.
The victim, Kyle Bevan, 33, was serving a life sentence with a minimum term of 28 years for the murder of his partner’s two-year-old daughter, Lola James, in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, in 2020. Lola suffered 101 external injuries, catastrophic head trauma and extensive damage to her eyes during a “sustained, deliberate and very violent” assault. Bevan had initially claimed the family dog had pushed her down the stairs and was later found to have searched online for advice on how to rouse an unconscious child.
CCTV footage released by the Crown Prosecution Service showed Bevan walking to his cell shortly after 5.30pm on 4 November, followed seconds later by the three defendants. Taylor was seen taking something from his waistband as he entered. They emerged less than five minutes later in what prosecutors described as a “satisfied, job-done mood”, shaking hands and apparently congratulating one another.
Inside the cell, Bevan had been stabbed to either side of his neck and repeatedly to the front of his body with at least two different weapons. One weapon, made from a folded piece of metal taken from the back of a television, was later found outside the cell with Bevan’s blood on it. The weapon that caused the fatal injuries has never been recovered. The defendants then arranged Bevan in his bed to make it appear he was asleep. He was not discovered until the following morning, when another inmate alerted prison staff that “something was wrong”.
Summing up the case, Mrs Justice McGowan told the jury: “We do not know who did what in the cell. At least one person must have inflicted the fatal injuries. At least two weapons were used… it seems likely he was held by his arms.” She added that the jury had to be sure each defendant was at least part of the group, “even if it was only helping or encouraging in some way, even if it is only by blocking the door or acting as a lookout”.
Newell was seen with an injury to his hand after the attack, while Fellows was observed rolling up his bloodstained tracksuit bottoms before disposing of them. As Taylor was later transferred out of Wakefield, he was heard to shout in Newell’s direction: “Nice working with you and the Iceman” – a reference to Fellows’ nickname. Taylor had earlier boasted about his ability to make makeshift weapons “out of all sorts”; after Bevan’s death, several were found hidden in a bottle of chilli sauce in his cell, although they could not be linked to the fatal attack.
None of the defendants answered questions in police interviews or gave evidence during the trial.
Prison regime under scrutiny
The trial heard that at the time of the killing, HMP Wakefield – a high-security Category A prison nicknamed “Monster Mansion” because of the number of high-profile offenders housed there – operated a policy that did not separate vulnerable prisoners from the general inmate population. Unlike other jails, “main prisoners” such as Fellows, Newell and Taylor were required to mix with those prosecutors said were considered, in a “distorted moral hierarchy”, to be “beneath them”, including child killers.
Prosecutor Jason Pitter KC told the court the regime created a “lot of tension in the prison at the time”. In the weeks leading up to Bevan’s death, two other serious attacks had taken place: paedophile Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins was stabbed to death at the prison in October 2025 – he had survived a previous stabbing in the same jail in 2023 – and David Minto, who murdered 16-year-old Sasha Marsden in Blackpool in 2013, was seriously injured. Minto had lured Marsden to a hotel where he raped and stabbed her 58 times before trying to burn her body.
Violence at Wakefield had surged in the period leading to a review in June 2026, with a 62% increase in violent incidents and a 72% rise in serious assaults recorded, according to reports from HM Inspectorate of Prisons. The same review noted that the prison’s population had since been reconfigured so that nearly all inmates are now deemed vulnerable, but that problems remain, including long periods locked in cells and deteriorating health services.
Jurors were told that both Fellows and Newell had expressed a desire to be transferred away from Wakefield because of their dissatisfaction with the regime. Newell, who is serving a whole-life order, had previously strangled a child killer at HMP Long Lartin and left his body in bed. Pitter KC described “a chilling similarity” between that attack and the circumstances of Bevan’s death. Newell had also been convicted of strangling a neighbour in 1988.
Fellows, known as “the Wakefield Dexter” and “the Iceman”, is a double murderer serving a whole-life order for shooting dead “gangland kingpins” Paul Massey and John Kinsella. He had made a formal application to move from Wakefield not long before Bevan’s killing. Taylor, 64, had recently been transferred to Wakefield after pleading guilty to the murder of an associate and the attempted murder of a police officer while in custody.
Mrs Justice McGowan reminded the jury that the case was not about whether mixing vulnerable and main prisoners was a good way to run a prison, nor about anyone’s views on how child offenders should be punished. “Nobody has a right to kill anyone else because they disapprove of what they have done, or because they hate them,” she said. “It’s a fairly basic premise in a civilised society.”
