John Worboys will stay in prison after the Parole Board ruled against releasing him or moving him to open conditions, telling his victims on Thursday that he would remain behind bars. It was the second time the panel had blocked parole for the former London cab driver, whose case has haunted victims for more than a decade.
The decision means Worboys, 68, will not move to the less restrictive part of the prison system, where offenders are held under minimal security and can work in the community. For Carrie Johnson, who testified against him after taking a drink she believed had been spiked, the ruling brought a measure of relief after years of campaigning to keep him locked up. She said the wait for the hearing had been hugely anxious and that the relief of knowing he would remain behind bars was hard to put into words. Johnson added that women and girls across Britain are safer because of the decision.
Worboys was convicted in 2009 of sex offences against 16 women after being found guilty of assaulting victims he drugged with spiked drinks. Police believe he may have had more than 100 victims. He was handed two life sentences with a minimum term of six years.
The case has already produced one major reversal. In 2018, the Parole Board decided he could be freed after serving nearly 10 years, but victims challenged that decision and won. After that legal fight, the board said he should remain in jail because of his sense of sexual entitlement. A probation report in August 2019 found he was potentially just as dangerous as he had been at the time of his first sentence, and four more victims came forward that same year.
The wider fallout also reached the police. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that officers owed human rights damages to two of Worboys’s victims after they reported assaults in 2003 and 2007, saying police had failed to charge him because of significant errors. Those failures allowed a man already known to authorities to continue offending. He went on to assault as many as 100 more women.
There is no fixed date for his next parole hearing, although the board thinks it could come in about one to two years. For now, the ruling closes the door on another early release for a man whose crimes exposed both the scale of his offending and the cost of failing to stop him sooner.
