Two gay-hating killers were jailed for a record 28 years each yesterday for brutally murdering a homosexual on Clapham Common, as a new law against hate crimes came into effect.
The mother of Jody Dobrowski, a barman killed “like an animal” in woods popular for nighttime cruising by gays, said outside the Old Bailey that his slaughter was “an act of terrorism”.
A judge said Scott Walker and Thomas Pickford, both known criminals, went to the Common to engage in “homophobic thuggery” against “those who were gay and were particularly vulnerable”.
The sentencing heralds a new era when murderers motivated by their victims’ sexuality will be jailed for twice as long as those convicted of other murders. Similar heavier penalties apply when murders are committed on grounds of race, religion or disability.
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As the Common Serjeant of London, Judge Brian Barker, QC, finished a sentencing speech tempering severity for the killers with compassion for their victim’s plight, applause broke out.
Stonewall, the gay rights group which campaigned for extra penalties against homophobic hate crime, will now press ministers to outlaw incitement to hatred of gays.
Mr Dobrowski, 24, had come to London to pursue a career in bar management. On an evening last October, the 6ft 4in young man left a friend’s house and walked towards the Common in south London.
Headed there too were Walker, 33, and Thomas, 26. The pair lived in a religious-run hostel for ex-offenders at the edge of the Common. They had drunk at least eight beers.
Walker, just 5ft 5in and stocky, had been given early release from a 15-month prison sentence for assault and making threats to kill, arising from a vicious attack on his mother. She had been left with a swollen neck, unable to swallow, after he attempted to strangle her, punched her face and bit her nose in an argument. His licence had ended the previous day.
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Thomas was a heroin addict with a history of petty burglaries.
The pair had beaten up a gay man in the Common’s woods two weeks earlier, punching him in the face and hitting him 30 times. He was left alive but suffering concussion.
Again, they took the same detour into the darkness. A man on the Common heard Mr Dobrowski’s screams. He approached the attackers to ask: “Are you trying to kill him?” One replied: “We don’t like poofters here and that’s why we can kill him if we want to.” Pickford asked the man if he too was a poofter and wanted to be killed.
The man retreated and saw the pair stamping on Mr Dobrowski’s head. “They were kicking and jumping on the man as if trying to kill an animal,” Nicholas Hilliard, for the prosecution, said.
Another witness heard them shout “f---ing queer, bastard, faggot, poof”. Pickford described the prolonged cruelty of the attack to police. He said Walker had stuffed Mr Dobrowski’s sock into his mouth to choke him while hitting him with a shoe. He broke a beer bottle on the gay man’s head and kicked him like a football.
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A witness telephoned police and the killers scattered. Mr Dobrowski died in hospital. A post-mortem examination discovered 33 separate sites of injury.
Meanwhile, the pair returned to the hostel, Thomas with his trousers knee-deep in blood. They boasted to residents they had kicked the shit out of someone: “Boy, we done him good.”
In a court statement, Mr Dobrowski’s mother Sheri described a confident man with a strong sense of integrity: “The only question we would like to put to the defendants is why they have taken his life and ruined ours?”
Lord Thomas, QC, for Walker, responded: “We are moving towards a saner society in which everyone’s human dignity and personality, whetever his lifestyle, is fully recognised. There is still an atavistic strain in our society, hopefully declining.”
The judge, who studied photographs of the dead man, said his face had been left ” a bloody and swollen pulp. You showed him no mercy.”
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When he passed sentence, Mr Dobrowski’s mother shouted “Woo-hah” and hugged a policeman. Outside court, she said: “Jody’s murder was an outrage. It was a political act.
“Jody was not the first man to be killed or terrorised or beaten or humiliated for being homosexual or for being perceived to be homosexual. Tragically, he will not be the last man to suffer the consequences of homophobia which is endemic in this society.”
Ben Summerskill, Stonewall’s chief executive, said: “This tragic killing was a sober reminder of how much prejudice still exists in some people, even in one of the most tolerant cities in Britain.”