I was a remand prisoner in Malaga prison (Alhaurin de la Torre) in 2001. I spent twenty months in that hole and I was released on Christmas Eve 2002.
During my incarceration I had the misfortune to share a cell with a killer; a nutter with no conscience whatsoever, a real psychopath. This creature should never be allowed out of prison because he will kill and kill again. His name is David Baxendale, a name I’ll never forget because he bragged about the innocent lives he took. His glib tongue soon wore thin the superficial charm he tried on me before he started bragging about his crazy parasitic life.
Whilst high on heroin and all manner of pills he could find, he would relax on his bed in my cell and talk about how he stabbed this bloke and that bloke and how he liked the popping sound of lungs being punctured and especially the heart of the young man he killed in Fuengirola.
He is something of a Mummy’s boy. The only female he ever spoke about was her. One day he pleaded with me to call his mother because the duty prison officer wouldn’t allow him to use the phone. He knew I had privileges so he asked would I call his mother and pass him the phone. The duty prison officer was ‘Mad Jack’, a particularly nasty man who hated Baxendale. I called his mother and handed him the phone. That favour cost me dearly with Mad Jack.
Because I was the only Englishman on my wing, they put him in my cell with me, but I could only tolerate his company for a short time; I had to get rid of him. Luckily for me, he made many enemies in a very short time and was soon spending time in the infirmary nursing his wounds.
One of the quirky things about him was that he wrote poetry. Not that I could make neither head nor tail of it because it was quite strange and mainly about states of mind in a psychedelic way; he was often hallucinating because of the drugs he took.
At first he seemed to thrive in prison and was ducking and diving as though he knew his way around. He lived for the present and couldn’t hold a conversation about the past for very long, unless it was about stabbing somebody. He had no friends that he could speak of, not even past inmates from other prisons: a sure sign of the sociopath.
He started trading heroin, which meant treading on the toes of established gangsters who run the busy drugs trade in prison. But, more importantly for me, it meant storing the drugs in my cell. I could not allow this to happen. I wasn’t without influence in there so I had him removed to another cell; better for me, better for him.
After several fights with other drug dealers and the self inflicted abuse with all manner of drugs, it soon became apparent he was physically and mentally on a steep downhill slope. Following a particularly vicious beating from the chief gypsy on the wing, he was removed from my wing and fortunately from then on, I only saw him in passing in various places in the prison.
I read in the news he stabbed and killed a mother of three in Surrey on 10th May 2010 after being released from Rye Hill prison in Warwickshire 11 months earlier. He had been transferred from Malaga prison the year before to continue his sentence in the UK, but was released early to finish his sentence in the community.
Who is the incompetent prick who sanctioned the release of this sociopath back on the streets of Britain? I am in no way qualified as a shrink, but five minutes in the company of Baxendale is enough to realise I am sharing space with a nutter.
He is now serving a Whole Life Term sentence... too late for mother of three, Sarah Thomas, she's dead.
