FROM busting drug rings to guarding notorious serial killers, Dame Vanessa Frake-Harris has lived a life few could imagine.
Over a 27-year career, the former prison governor spent time between infamous lock-ups HMP Holloway and HMP Wormwood Scrubs – often coming face-to-face not just with hardened criminal monsters, but celebrities who found themselves behind bars.
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Now Vanessa, who received an MBE for her work in 2012, has lifted the lid on her most memorable encounters, including one rock star who proved a particular “pain in the a***”.
Speaking to The Sun, she reveals how despite having guarded a wealth of notorious names, it was the the disrespectful behaviour of Pete Doherty that sticks most in her mind.
The Libertines frontman, who spent time in Wormwood Scrubs for just under a month in 2008, proved particularly stubborn despite staff efforts to help the troubled heroin addict get clean.
“He was of the frame of mind where he didn’t give a flying f***, he wanted to be against the establishment,” Vanessa explains.
“He thought it was all hilarious and great fun, I’d expect nothing less. He thought he was special but he was not, he was a prisoner.”
Doherty was locked up after a court-mandated drug test found he had used Class As, which breached a probation order designed to help cure his addiction.
In prison, he did no better to curb his drug problem. Vanessa recalled confronting the Can’t Stand Me Now singer after The Sun’s exclusive front-page story showing the spaced-out star after using heroin in his prison cell.
She described it as “very frustrating” because officers had tried to help him detox when he arrived and keep a low profile for his safety.
Their care was repaid with “diva behaviour” from Doherty on the wings including “larking around”, winking after receiving instructions and being the last locked-up – ultimately, they feared his dismissal of the rules could “inspire or incite” misconduct from other lags.
Vanessa, 62, of Cambridgeshire, says he “expected special treatment… demanding this, that and the other” and she was “furious” after discovering he had bought drugs from other inmates with ‘IOU notes’.
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After The Sun’s story broke, she moved Doherty to the prison’s Segregation Unit, known as ‘Seg’, and confronted him, joking that he “looked like he needed a good scrub in Dettol”.
In Vanessa’s memoir The Governor: My Life Inside Britain’s Most Notorious Prisons, she recalls him acting “like a sulky, petulant teenager” and says: “His persona screamed, ‘Do you know who I am and who the f*** are you?’”
She also told us how at least five of Doherty’s cell cards – which had his name and prisoner number on them – “went missing”.
“Prisoners were taking it and getting him to sign them,” Vanessa added.
‘Shadow of himself’
Another famous lag that crossed her path was Jefferson King, better known as Shadow from the original Gladiators TV show, who she described was “literally wasting away”.
He was imprisoned in Scrubs for a month and a half in 2001 for drug dealing – previously, it was reported he was using heroin and crack cocaine.
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Vanessa, who pitied the star’s transformation, says: “He was literally a shadow of his former self and looked nothing like a Gladiator.
“Drugs are an evil thing and it’s sad to see what they do to people. He was very calm, quiet and literally wasting away.
“When you think of Shadow, you remember him in the red, blue and white shorts on the show, someone full of muscles, pumped up and with lots of get-up and go… he was nothing like that.”
The former TV star, who was fired from Gladiators in 1995 for steroid abuse and using cocaine, was jailed for six years and three months for two counts of blackmail while working as part of a criminal gang in 2021.
‘Calculated like chess player’
Of course, Vanessa’s line of work also meant she brushed up against some far more fearsome characters.
She took care of Rose West at HMP Holloway in 1994 while the serial killer awaited trial for her and husband Fred’s vile attacks at their ‘House of Horrors’ home in Gloucester.
The monster, now 70 and serving a full life sentence, helped him torture and murder at least 10 women including her eight-year-old stepdaughter.
Far from the intimidating character many might imagine, Vanessa says she was “more like the auntie you don’t want to see on the weekend” – but at one point proved how cold and calculated she was.
She recalls: “When Rose West was arrested, there was this violent tirade of swearing and shouting at the police, spitting out how innocent she was and didn’t know anything.
There wasn’t a flicker, not a flick of emotion at all. She didn’t bat an eyelid. It just goes to show how cold she was
Dame Vanessa Frake-Harris
“But at Holloway, she didn’t actually cause us any problem at all… it was hard to imagine how she could be so violent and evil.
“We all know what an evil woman she could be but to us, she was inoffensive and looked like someone’s auntie.”
West was kept in the Segregation unit for her own protection, where she was given plastic knitting needles to occupy her time and tasks to do.
Vanessa recalls: “We kept her in the cell opposite the office and got her out to do a bit of cleaning, let her watch a TV.
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“She was quiet, very calm and never put a foot out of place but she was clearly very manipulative.”
In The Governor, Vanessa described feeling there was always “something much more calculating going on in her head” and behind her smiles and sing-song voice, she was “working out her every move like a chess player”.
This became evident watching how she reacted after being told Fred West, her husband of 23 years, had taken his own life in 1995, shortly before their trial began.
“She was always constantly knitting and when we told her Fred had died, she just carried on knitting,” Vanessa recalls.
“There wasn’t a flicker, not a flick of emotion at all. She didn’t bat an eyelid. It just goes to show how cold she was.
“I always thought she believed she would get off because Fred was dead and that the prosecution wouldn’t carry on the case with her. How wrong she was.”
Shock reception job
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Similarly, Vanessa was surprised when meeting Moors Murderer Myra Hindley, who alongside boyfriend Ian Brady kidnapped, sexually assaulted and killed three children in the Sixties.
“She was nothing special,” she defiantly states. “Not to take away from the dreadful crimes people like her committed.”
Hindley, who served a full life sentence until her death in 2002, was working as a tea lady in a reception area, at HMP Cookham Wood, and served the prison officer a hot drink.
Vanessa didn’t recognise the mass murderer as she shuffled out in a denim skirt and a brown jumper with holes in the elbows, with mousy-brown locks.
She recalls: “When you say the name Myra Hindley, your brain switched to bleached blonde hair, piercing eyes and evil stamped across the forehead.
“She didn’t look anything like that. She was quite confident in what she was doing, not meek at all, and pleasantly said, ‘Morning miss, how are you?’
HMP Wormwood Scrubs’s notorious inmates
CELEBRITIES, musicians and notorious crooks have passed through the gates of HMP Wormwood Scrubs.
The London lock-up, based in White City, is a Category B men’s prison that first opened nearly 150 years ago back in 1975.
Here we recap some of the famous and notorious names that have been held at the jail, often referred to as Scrubs, over the decades:
Charles Bronson – Britain’s most famous criminal, who has been detained for violent offences since 1974, had a brief stint in Scrubs.
Keith Richards – the Rolling Stones guitarist was sentenced to one year in prison in 1967 for allowing cannabis to be smoked at his property. His conviction was overturned in the appeals court one month later.
Ian Brady – the Moors murderer was transferred to Scrubs in 1974 eight years after being jailed for life for killing five young people aged between 10 and 17 years old. Some were killed alongside his partner Myra Hindley.
Dennis Nilsen – the serial killer and necrophile murdered at least 12 men and boys during a 10-year period until 1983. He spent a brief stint in Scrubs.
Leslie Grantham – the late EastEnders actor was held at the prison before being moved to HMP Portsmouth and later Leyhill. It followed him being found guilty of murder at a court martial in Germany in 1967. Grantham was trying to rob taxi driver Felix Reese at gunpoint. The pair wrestled over the weapon and it suddenly went off, killing Reese.
Peter Samuel Cook – the serial sex attacker, known as ‘the Cambridge rapist’, was found guilty of six counts of rape and two counts of assault. He received two life sentences and spent time in Scrubs before moving to HM Prison Winchester, where he died in 2004.
Pete Doherty – locked up for just short of a month after breaching a probation order to keep him off drugs in 2008.
Nines – the rapper, whose real name is Courtney Leon Freckleton, was sentenced to 28 months over a plot to import 28 kilograms of cannabis and money laundering.
George Blake – the KGB double agent managed to escape from the prison in 1966 and fled to the Soviet Union, where he stayed until his death in 2020.
“People like that put on a nice person persona and it’s important that you treat them no differently and don’t make them feel special, you can’t say, ‘Oh gosh, that’s Myra Hindley.’”
She noted that Hindley was “frumpy” and “looked like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth” but still believes she was “manipulative”.
While Vanessa was initially surprised Hindley worked somewhere “with lots of comings and goings”, she says it would have followed risk assessments and was better to have someone like her supervised for her own safety.
She suspects something similar may be arranged for Lucy Letby, who is the worst child killer in British history, after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to take the life of another seven.
Vanessa adds: “I doubt she’s in the general population, she will be in a vulnerable prisoner unit and it will be a long time before risk assessments show she could be safe there.”
‘Dreadful place’
Vanessa says the prison service “doesn’t get the credit it deserves” despite the difficulty of the job and a concerning lack of investment over the years.
She notes that a prison wing of 90 inmates is now guarded by just two prison officers in some instances, compared with six and a senior officer in previous years.
Vanessa also points out that “retention is dreadful” in the service, which she believes is due to low wages, lack of support for staff and cutbacks meaning prisoners misbehave more.
“Many don’t have time to work with prisoners to help with their offending behaviour, which leaves you with bored prisoners, locked up for long amounts of time,” she tells us.
“That means all they do is take drugs and become very angry and agitated, when you open the cell door you’re hit with violence.
“The prison service is a dreadful place to work and I sympathise with staff and the difficult circumstances that they see on a daily basis that most don’t in a lifetime.”
The former governor believes the service has fallen upon such hard times due to prison spending “not being a vote winner” for politicians and neglect from successive governments – despite prisons being of vital importance for public safety.
She adds: “Nothing prepares you for the prison service, the suicide, the self-harm, the violence. You can do as much training as you want but when s*** hits the fan you realise what sort of career it is.”
Vanessa Frake spoke at true crime event CrimeCon London. She wrote the memoir The Governor: My Life Inside Britain’s Most Notorious Prisons, which is available now (HarperNonFiction, £9.99).
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