Nearly nine years after he was convicted of sex attacks on 12 women, the so-called black cab rapist could be freed from prison this week. For victims, some of whom still live in fear of a man who has been linked to hundreds more assaults, the question remains – why?

‘We believed he would be in jail for life’: the story behind John Worboys’ imminent – and baffling – release

‘We believed he would be in jail for life’: the story behind John Worboys’ imminent – and baffling – release

The plan includes decoy cars, false leads, lookalikes and aliases. Drawn up in secret, it outlines the release from a high-security prison of a man whose new legal name is John Radford, an inmate adept in the art of manipulation and deceit.

The prisoner, whose crimes led him to be jailed alongside the country’s most serious sex offenders, has been known as Tony, Paul, Terry the Minder – his porn actor pseudonym – and by his real name, John Worboys.

As with other notorious prisoners before him, the release of the black cab rapist has to be handled carefully, according to prison insiders. “What they are likely to do is have several cars driving out, with the prisoner in the third or fourth to confuse anyone waiting,” says a source close to the process.

The journey will take 60-year-old Worboys from the prison gates to a location officials are trying to keep secret to prevent vigilante attacks. His first nights of freedom will be spent in approved accommodation, supervised by two members of staff. He will be under a strict licence – the details of which have not been released – in an effort to reduce any risk to the public.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Evidence found in Worboys’ Fiat Punto. Photograph: Metropolitan Police/PA

Nearly nine years after he was convicted of serial sex attacks on 12 women, Worboys, who is linked to more than 100 serious assaults and rapes, will be back on the streets.

It is a day his victims thought they would not see for a considerable time, if ever.

“We all believed he would be in jail for life,” says one victim, whose case was not part of the criminal trial. “The police assured us they had cherry-picked the strongest cases and that he would get the maximum sentence.

“Now there is nothing to stop him coming and finding me, because he knows where everyone lived, he kept it in a notebook; all our addresses were there.”

The dismay and anger of victims at his release, after serving just over the minimum eight-year tariff imposed by the trial judge, should be seen in the context of the singular nature of Worboys’ offending and the police failures that allowed him to prey on women unchecked for many years.

One high court judge summed up the errors made by the Metropolitan police as “multiple, systemic and serious”. They contaminated almost every aspect of the investigative process, blinding officers to the evidential trail over more than six years. They included a mindset that the cabbie was a decent bloke (tapes of police interviews reveal officers using his first name as they banter together) and the repeated dismissal of the victims as drunks or drug addicts.

In a 2014 high court judgment, which found police failings had breached the human rights of two victims, Mr Justice Green said that the police computer database should have been “brimming with details of vulnerable women being subjected to drug rapes and assaults by a taxi driver”. But failures of intelligence meant no one was tying the threads together.

When Worboys was finally stopped in 2008, he had, according to the 2014 court ruling, committed in excess of 105 rapes and sexual assaults upon women in the back of his cab, using drugs and drink to incapacitate them. Worse, the failure to apprehend Worboys allowed him to perfect his methods and more efficiently target and assault women.

Worboys’s convictions in 2009 represented just a fraction of the victims – lawyers, journalists, city workers, students, young mothers – who came forward. Those who were not part of the police and prosecution case accepted being on the sidelines because they were promised it was strong enough to keep him in prison for a very long time. The women feel let down by a criminal justice system that is trying to persuade them the man who drugged and assaulted them as they lay senseless in the back of his cab is no longer a risk.

Q&A Why is John Worboys being released and can the decision be reversed? Show Hide The Parole Board is able to assess the continued risk posed by prisoners based on psychiatrist and prison guard reports at Parole Board hearings that take place around once a year for each offender. Some of the hearings are oral, some of them written.

In November, a three-person panel of the Parole Board directed the release of Worboys, following an oral hearing. He will be released back into society under strict monitoring on a licence period of at least 10 years. Parole Board hearings are held in private and reasons for release are not made public, although a consultation is to be launched on how the body shares its decision-making with the public. The Parole Board is an independent body and its recommendation for Worboys’ release cannot be overturned by the Ministry of Justice. There are examples of Parole Board decisions being challenged by judicial review in the courts, but only when the prisoner has been denied release. Read a fuller explainer on John Worboys

Worboys was held on an indeterminate prison sentence, with a minimum eight-year tariff. After this period, an automatic referral to the Parole Board was triggered; it held an oral hearing last year and announced this month that he is to be released. It is the board that has to weigh up whether the prisoner is still a risk, but the reasons for their conclusions are kept from public scrutiny.

An indeterminate prison sentence means an inmate can be held in prison for life if they are considered to pose a threat to the public. It is highly unusual for a prisoner to be released from a high-security prison without spending time in an open prison, as in the case of Worboys.

Don Grubin, emeritus professor of forensic psychiatry at Newcastle University, knows the process and says one handicap for the prison service is that they often use trainee psychologists at the hearings. “There is a problem when you have a psychologist with 30 years’ experience giving evidence for the prisoner and you have a trainee for the prison service,” he says.

Grubin says the hearing was neither a trial, nor a procedure for imposing more punishment. It will have concentrated only on assessing what risk, if any, the inmate poses. “In my experience, the Parole Board is not cavalier in making its decisions; they are very careful and thorough,” he says.

The difficulty in part was the lack of transparency around the parole process. “We don’t know what information they had before them, we don’t know if they considered just the convictions or included all the offences linked to him,” he says.

Worboys’s background, his criminal modus operandi, his behaviour in prison and, crucially, his willingness to admit his guilt will all have been considered by the board.

Born in June 1957 and raised in Enfield, Worboys refined his sexual attacks over many years. While living in Poole, Dorset, in the 1980s, he starred in amateur porn films shot in his flat and tried to select young women he met to appear with him. By 1996, he had passed the knowledge – the intensive training course taken by London’s black cab drivers – and moved back to the capital, where he toured the West End late at night in his cab.

Five years into his life as a cabbie, Worboys was prescribed sedatives by a GP, which he stockpiled and used as part of a rape kit discovered in the boot of his Fiat Punto when he was finally arrested in February 2008. It comprised miniature bottles of champagne, clear plastic gloves, a torch, vibrators, condoms and a heavy ashtray in which he crushed his sleeping pills.

The accounts of his victims are strikingly similar. Often, they would wake up lying on the floor at home, clothes dishevelled, dried vomit on their hair, legs heavy, heads thick with confusion as snapshots of the night flickered into their consciousness.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Worboys’ black cab. Photograph: Metropolitan Police/PA

They remembered hailing a cab, a glass of champagne proffered by “Tony” or “Paul” the cabbie to celebrate a lottery win, turning down streets far from home, waking in the back seat with his hand up their skirt or trousers pulled around their ankles, shouting no.

As the Parole Board remains silent on the reasons for its decision, women are left examining what is known about Worboys’s behaviour in prison to seek answers. They are not reassured.

Jailed in 2009, Worboys has spent most of his time inside vigorously protesting his innocence. Almost as soon as he arrived at Wakefield prison he was preparing his appeal against conviction, cobbling together an argument that the forensic testing of evidence was inaccurate. When the appeal was rejected a year later, Worboys faced civil claims from 11 women he had attacked.

Again, he denied he had sexually assaulted them. One lawyer who spoke to him in Wakefield prison in 2013 said: “He was playing games with us. He said he didn’t do any of it. He was someone who came across as very persuasive.”

In March 2013, Worboys applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission for a second appeal, insisting he was innocent and suggesting toxicology and fibre tests should be repeated. He withdrew his application in May 2015 – three months before an automatic review of his case was scheduled to take place by the Parole Board. “Insisting you are innocent at the same time as the Parole Board is considering your case is not conducive to persuading them you have accepted your guilt,” says one source close to the case.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Worboys. Photograph: Metropolitan police/AP

In September 2015, the Parole Board rejected a move to open prison – almost always a precursor to release for prisoners in high security jails. It will not reveal why. In April 2017, his case was referred to the Parole Board again. In November 2017, the three-strong board heard evidence from four psychologists, the prison and probation service, one victim and Worboys himself. The panel decided he posed low or no risk to the public and approved his release.

“It is difficult on the basis of what we know about the sequence of events, and what he was accepting and not accepting in prison, to credit the idea that this man has undergone such a radical transformation to make him low risk or no risk,” says Richard Scorer, who represents several of Worboys’s victims. “It does not seem plausible from someone who has proved himself to be so manipulative.”

Prof Grubin says prisoners are sometimes able to deceive the Parole Board. “That is something they are alive to and have to consider; ‘Is this man deceiving us? Is he pulling the wool over our eyes?’”

A last-minute judicial review bid is underway by two victims to keep Worboys in prison, but preparations for his release are in their final stages.

“I am taking each day as it comes,” says one of his victims. “I am afraid I don’t have confidence in the Parole Board or the probation service that they can stop him. There is the inescapable feeling that Worboys is still able to manipulate ... and if he is released he will not be thwarted by the restrictions they place on him.”