This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Two men, who met in prison while serving time for previous murders, have been sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in jail for the torture and murder of a 28-year-old woman.

Stephen Unwin, 40, and William McFall, 51, attacked Quyen Ngoc Nguyen, a Vietnamese nail technician, at Unwin’s home in Shiney Row near Sunderland last August.

The pair tortured her to get her bank pin numbers, before Unwin raped her. They then dumped her body in a car and set it alight while she was still alive.

Sentencing the pair on Wednesday afternoon, Mr Justice Morris said: “Stephen Unwin, you are a calculating, manipulating and ruthless killer. William John McFall, you are an extremely violent man capable of monstrous behaviour.”

McFall shouted angrily from the dock: “That’s your personal opinion.”

Morris added: “Quyen Ngoc Nguyen was a young, healthy and lively woman, a mother of two young children and much loved by her family here and in Vietnam. It is not possible for any of us to imagine the horrific ordeal which she was subjected to over a number of hours that night, but terrifying it most certainly was.”

Reading a victim impact statement to Newcastle crown court, the victim’s sister, Quynh Ngoc Nguyen, 35, questioned how the men could have been freed from prison after their previous crimes.

“We cannot comprehend how men like this can live freely in this country,” she said. “My sister believed, as I did, that you came to this country for a safer life, with better opportunities for herself and her children. Our lives have been blighted by these two terrible men for ever.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Quyen Ngoc Nguyen. Photograph: Northumbria police/PA

She said her family had been left heartbroken by the crime. “They did not act like human beings. They are evil,” she said of her sister’s killers.

Nguyen came to the UK in 2010 to study business at university in London. She met Unwin, who worked for landlords maintaining properties, while she was working renting out accommodation to other Vietnamese people.

After torturing Nguyen, the men took £1,000 from her bank accounts. Firefighters found her badly burned body in the back of her Audi, which had been torched.

Unwin and William first met at HMP Swaleside, a Category B institution in Kent, where they were both serving sentences for murder.

Unwin killed retired pharmacist John Greenwell, 73, in Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear, while breaking into his home on Christmas Day 1998. He then set fire to the house to conceal the evidence. Unwin later admitted murder, was sentenced to life and was released on licence in December 2012.

McFall attacked Martha Gilmore, 86, with a hammer after she disturbed him breaking into her home in Carrickfergus in May 1996. He was jailed for life and released on licence in October 2010.

David Hines, of the National Victims’ Association, said the Parole Board and probation service should be held accountable for McFall and Unwin being freed to kill.

“The Parole Board makes these decisions about who is and who is not fit to be freed from prison and when it goes wrong, as it has so catastrophically in this case, they are never held accountable and that is wrong,” he said.

“It’s another appalling example of how the justice system is failing the people it is set up to protect.”