Brighton killer Russell Bishop's funeral funded by taxpayers

Nearly £3,000 of public money was spent on arrangements after Bishop died in hospital on Thursday, January 20, aged 55.

Bishop was convicted of the killings of schoolfriends Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, both nine, in 2018, over 30 years after the murders took place.

He died in hospital with only a pair of prison guards for company and was cremated with no family present.

A Freedom of Information request submitted by The Sun revealed that around £2,800 was spent in total on his funeral. It included costs for “the collection of his body, his coffin, the transportation of the body to the crematorium and a short blessing”.

Bishop is believed to have died from bowel cancer after being diagnosed with the disease in 2021.

The murderer was rushed to hospital having been serving time in high security HMP Frankland in County Durham. He was given a life sentence for his crimes.

Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway

Bishop, who lived in Hollingdean, was 20 when he was first arrested shortly after the girls' bodies were found in Wild Park in Brighton. Post-mortems suggested that the children, who  lived in nearby Moulsecoomb, had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

Bishop was initially acquitted of the murders due to a series of errors in his trial but was eventually re-tried under the double jeopardy law and convicted three decades later due to advances in DNA evidence.

He was already in prison serving a life sentence for the attempted murder of a seven-year-old girl in 1990.

A spokesman for The Ministry of Justice said: "Prisons must offer to pay a contribution towards reasonable funeral expenses of up to £3,000."