“It’s ridiculous he’s still inside,” says Irene. “A man near here massacred a woman and cut her into pieces. He got 20 years, now he’s on parole. Even terrorists have done less time”
The local bus is not a typical setting for a grand romantic gesture. But then, there is nothing typical about the man serenading Irene Dunroe. Her would-be suitor and “best friend” is belting out Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called To Say I Love You”.
And because, at 73, Irene can only hear the phone while in speaker mode, her fellow passengers are enjoying the rendition too. One even gives a thumbs up. “It was so embarrassing,” she giggles. “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He sang the whole song!”
It’d be unusual enough if these passengers knew the man wooing the grandma was in fact her ex-husband – who she divorced 49 years ago.
More so, that it is her ex-husband who’s just asked her to remarry him. And it’s almost inconceivable that the crooner on the other end of the line is in fact one of Britain’s most notorious prisoners…..Charles Salvador. Or, as most know him, Charles Bronson.
For Irene, however, it’s just another Tuesday. Because in her eighth decade, the mum-of-three is – for want of a better word – ‘dating’ her ex-husband again.
They speak every day – sometimes twice. He sends her artwork (he’s done a series around their love story) and he even enjoys weekly chats with her grandchildren, to whom he sends birthday cards, as if they were his own.
The two have discussed living together when – and if – he’s finally freed from prison after his next parole hearing later this year. “We’ve both got used to our own space,” laughs Irene, who works in her local Ann Summers. “But I’ve said he can live in my shed!”.
Fears for ‘UK’s most dangerous prisoner’ after girlfriend receives ominous letter
They have a freedom bucket list to fulfil – juicy steaks, walks on the beach, buying a tailor-made suit and running the London Marathon for charity. (“He’s going to dress as a prisoner with me as his warden”, she laughs. “I’ll bring home a whip to make him go a bit faster.”)
And while she’s on the fence about his recent re-proposal – “I’m not really 100% sure on that yet, but just going to see what happens” – at the very least they will be going on holiday together. Not that his idea of a dream vacation is exactly impressing Irene. “He wants to go to Blackpool,” she says, non-plussed. “I mean, it used to be quite a nice place before he went inside. You know, 50 years ago. But he has no idea how things have changed.”
Apologies to Blackpool aside, Irene’s words are not strictly true. For all the frivolity and the tongue-in-cheek banter, Irene and Charles – or Mick Peterson as is his real name – are both acutely aware things have changed considerably since they first tied the knot.
Irene was 22 and three years into married life with a two-year-old baby when the man she calls Mick was imprisoned for seven years for armed robbery of a post office in 1974.
What happened next has been well-documented – but only from his side.
Mick – who now channels his feelings into his artwork – became infamous for his violent behaviour, attacking other prisoners and punching guards and destroying a workshop.
By the 80s was considered so violent he was transferred between prisons chained to the floor of the prison van. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals like Broadmoor and Ashworth, remarried twice, befriended the Kray twins, spent four months trying to dig out of his cell, tried to strangle child rapist John White and caused hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage during rooftop protests. He’s been in solitary confinement for more than three decades and repeatedly took staff and prisoners – plus one foolhardy art teacher who criticised his drawings – hostage.
In 2018, Bronson however showed he was changing. He was acquitted of the GBH with intent of his then HMP Wakefield governor after claiming it was an accident. “For the first time in 44 years in prison I never intended to be violent”, he said.
Now 73, Mick insists he’s a changed man after 51 years in custody. The morning we speak to Irene, he has called to give her what many might call an inspirational thought of the day. “He told me the sun was shining and to go outside because I deserve ‘a golden rainbow’,” she says. “How lovely is that?”. The pair often enjoy a cup of tea together over the phone. Mick was moved when he heard the clink of her teaspoon on her china mug. “He’d not heard that sound for nearly 50 years,” she adds. “It’s all cardboard in there. It’s those little things we take for granted.”
In 2023 Mick, who still spends 23 hours a day in his cell, was confident he might finally get parole, only to find himself stuck in a Catch-22 position: They can’t certify he’s no threat to others until he’s been around other prisoners. But they can’t let him around other prisoners until they certify he’s no threat to others. His next hearing was meant to be early this year but staff shortages have pushed it back to Autumn.
Irene has one wish – to see him sat round the table, with their son Mike, for the family Christmas they never had. Mick meanwhile wants to take Mike for their first pint together. The fact that Mike is now 53 is almost a moot point to them both.
“It’s ridiculous he’s still inside,” says Irene. “People seem to think he’s like Charles Manson. But he’s never killed anyone. A man near here massacred a woman and cut her into pieces. He got 20 years, reduced to 10 and now he’s on parole. Even terrorists have done less time. Mick’s elderly. He just wants to get out and find himself a little cottage in the country and make it his art studio. If he has to wait another three years….well, he might actually break this time.”
Irene adds: “I just want Mick to be happy. I don’t want him in prison. I want him out. I can’t rest until he is. It breaks my heart. I feel like time has been suspended, but when he’s out I can finally relax.”
Mick’s victims may have different feelings. But few could blame a woman for wanting to see the best in her child’s father. Life’s been hard on their son Mike. He’s the pair’s only child and has never been able to escape his dad’s shadow – mainly because he looks the spitting image of him.
Irene says: “My Mike’s been so affected by it all. He does need his dad. I think there’s been a big piece missing in Mike’s life, there really, really, has.”
But the decades haven’t been easy for Irene either. For while Bronson’s story is well known, what happened to the woman he quite literally left holding the baby is not – which is why she’s chosen to share it for the first time in a joint book she has written with Mick, released tomorrow.
In short, the pair met in a pub in Cheshire’s Great Sutton (Irene was taken with his “Mexican moustache”), they married aged 19 in 1971, moved to Ellesmere Port, had Mike in 1972, divorced in 1976, began talking again in 2012 and met again for the first time in the flesh in 2023. And while they might be “best friends” now, Irene is by no means excusing his past actions.
For starters it wasn’t an easy marriage even before he was jailed. Mick was somewhat “overprotective” and his constant court visits helped trigger Irene’s lifetime battle with debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder.
“We were a bit like Romeo and Juliet because my parents never liked him from the start,” she says. “Mick was very, very protective. He never used to like me to wear make-up. I used to get lots of attention from the other men. I’d be walking along the road with him and if men stared, Mick would go mad.”
Sometimes he wouldn’t come home and she’d panic he was in trouble with the law. “I’d have to phone the courts up to see where he was, if he had got put in prison,” she recalls. “It was awful. And then the OCD started. I started having to touch things and repeat things, or I would fear something bad would happen.”
After he was sent down, Irene intended to wait. But Mick’s sentence kept getting extended. “I used to wonder if it was going to be a good letter day or a bad letter day,” she explains. “It would be ‘this man came at me with a piece of glass’, or someone had stabbed him. Soon he had scars all over his back. In the end, I thought he’s never, ever going to get out.
“He was just standing up for himself but he was young and he didn’t realise how hard things were for me and Mike on the outside. In a way I had it harder. He didn’t have to worry about paying bills. It was hell. I wouldn’t like to relive my life. I don’t think I could.”
In the end, the pair divorced to allow Irene to move on. She cut all contact between Mick and Mike (one of her biggest regrets) and went on to marry twice more, having two more children.
But Mick never really went away. He was on the TV, in the papers and Mike was growing up to be his carbon copy. It was 28 years after their divorce that Mick reached out through a friend and asked to see Mike. A decade later in 2012 – sick of passing messages between his parents – Mike pushed Irene to speak to Mick on the phone. Mick’s Cockney twang had not changed. “How are you doing, Princess?”, Irene remembers him saying.
They began to speak regularly as friends – and Irene even befriended Paula Williamson, Mick’s pen pal turned third wife whom he married in 2017 before she later died after they separated in 2019. (The inquest ruled she’d died after taking drugs and alcohol).
It was only in 2023 – just before his last parole hearing – that Irene went to see her ex-husband for the first time in the flesh however. He was in “prison within a prison”, where they kept the most notorious prisoners.
“He was the same broad, muscular man but he was so pale because he hardly sees the sunlight,” she says. “His eyes used to be brown but they were so pale. But it felt so comfortable.”
As their friendship continued, she’s become convinced he’s now a different man.
She says: “He feels horrible for what he put us through by being locked up. He doesn’t get jealous anymore. He’ll be pleased if I got attention from a man now – he’d be proud!
“He’s very artistic, very clever, very intelligent, generous. He’s just a completely different person than this mad monster that people used to make out he was.”
For Gen Z types there may be some red flags, but even Irene’s two grandchildren – by her other son and daughter – have given Mick the thumbs up. Phoebe, 18, says: “It’s ridiculous he’s still not out. I speak to him about once a week. He’s very interesting with the stories he tells. And he’s always singing to my nan.”
Irene last visited Mick a few weeks ago at his current ‘home’ in HMP Long Lartin, Worcestershire, when half serious, half not Mick re-proposed again. She’s seen him marry twice and have girlfriends while in prison but she’s adamant she’s different. In her mind, she’s the only proper wife – as she was with him on the outside
.
“I would never go to the prison to get married,” she says. “I just wouldn’t. They might marry him in prison, but would they have been married to him on the outside? Or is it for the fame? I lived with him. Nobody knows him like I do.”
Whether she’ll say yes again to Mick’s proposals is a long, long way off decided. But one thing is certain – despite having just released their first book together, their story is far from over.
Bronson: Inside and Out By Julie Shaw, Irene Dunroe and Charles Bronson (Mirror Books, £9.99) is on sale on Thursday in paperback and ebook.
