That's exactly how I felt when I read the following headline on 4 January 2018: '"Black-cab rapist' John Worboys to be freed from jail."
Words escaped me. It seemed so nonsensical, as preposterous as it was cruel, that my eyes must have been deceiving me. For who would allow such a thing?
Surely not?
After serving 10 years, including a period on remand – he had been given an indefinite sentence with a minimum term of eight years in 2009 – a Parole Board panel decided to green-light his release. The reasons were not made public but there could only be one logical conclusion to such a decision: he was no longer considered a danger to the women he would once again be living among.
But the fact remained: Worboys would walk among us.
Just a few weeks later, however, there was a landmark development that ensured Worboys has remained in prison to this very day.
Carrie Symonds, now Johnson, played by Miriam Petche, who was drugged by Worboys, also waived her anonymity after his trial to encourage other women to come forward, as well as using her press contacts to push for a review of the Parole Board's decision to release him and helping to raise legal funds.
But after watching Jeff Pope's true crime drama, how can anyone be in any doubt about the risk releasing a man like Worboys poses – back in 2019, in another 10 years' time, or ever, for that matter?
Significant time is also spent outlining the negligence and incompetence of the Met Police, who failed to catch Worboys long before they eventually did and, in doing so, left him free to continue sexually assaulting women on a horrifying scale.
But when you see his sickening crimes laid out in front of you – and in just the right amount of detail, so as not to be voyeuristic, but to leave you in no doubt about the horrors of his deviant abuse of so many women, some of whom still may not have come forward – Believe Me's stance is clear: to allow Worboys, one of Britain's most prolific sex attackers, to be released would be an astronomical risk.
The premeditation – the rape kit he carried in the passenger footwell containing alcohol laced with Temazepam or sleeping tablets, more prescription drugs, plastic gloves, condoms and a vibrator; the lies he scribbled on sheets of paper – he claimed that some of the women he had attacked had actually sexually assaulted him; the initial refusal to admit his guilt... it all leads you to wonder: will releasing Worboys ever be a risk worth taking?
Are women's lives really worth that little?’
Worboys violently upended their lives – and to such an extent that, in the cases of 'Sarah' and 'Laila' in particular, they struggled to imagine a future beyond the trauma he inflicted.
Anyone who watches the series – including Parole Board members and judges – will surely have their answer, such is the power and impact of drama when a writer like Pope is holding the pen.
But just as crucially, it also ensures that public opinion and pressure in the fight for what is right never wanes.
But that was probably also a widely held belief eight years ago when the Parole Board decided he was fit to leave prison. Who is to say that this June, when he undergoes a public parole hearing and a panel once again considers whether he is suitable for release, or to be transferred to an open prison, that history will not threaten to repeat itself?
Read more:
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