I first heard Harry Roberts’ name chanted by anarchists at political demos in the 1980s. A cruel and infantile taunt against the police. The would-be revolutionaries appropriated him as a hero, imagining that his crime represented the supreme act of defiance against the state. In fact he was a petty thief who committed cold-blooded and senseless murder. And it was the state that taught him to kill.
Conscripted into national service barely a week out of borstal, Roberts served and saw action in the Malaya campaign against communist insurgents, a particularly brutal war on terror, often described as Britain’s Vietnam. Demobbed with little preparation for civilian life, he drifted back into crime. Far from a major league villain (he was in a dodgy van with an out-of-date tax disc when he was stopped with two accomplices on the day of the killing) he did possess one lethal expertise. The ability to shoot fast and think of the consequences later, a skill that had earned him praise and commendations as a soldier, led to the merciless slaughter of three unarmed police officers in the line of duty.
He used his jungle training once more when he went on the run, hiding out in Thorley Woods near Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, where he had played as a child. He survived for three months in an ingeniously camouflaged hideout. And it was probably this period and his ability to frustrate the desperate attempts of the authorities to catch him that transformed him into an almost mythological figure. His fugitive status made him a wanted man. He was a pariah, of course, a folk-devil that had gone to ground but he also became a sort of twisted folk-hero as well. A hooligan saint and subject of a gruesome ballad of nihilistic rage.
This did nothing to help his rehabilitation in the public mind nor in the eyes of the state. He was recommended for release on parole 10 years ago, a move blocked by the then home secretary, ironically using legislation passed to prosecute our current war on terror. He remained a threat to the security of our national psyche, condemned to be judged by what he was thought to represent rather than what he actually is.
I suspect he is not much of a folk-devil and certainly no folk-hero but a product of the system, a very flawed human being who committed a terrible crime half a century ago. And if 48 years of prison have not achieved any rehabilitation for Roberts, then the system is at fault as well as him.
• Jake Arnott’s novels include He Kills Coppers, which is based on the life of Harry Roberts
