Hungerford
One man's massacre
By Jeremy Josephs
4 A Peaceloving Man
PC Roger Brereton did not share Michael Ryan’s
enthusiasm for the world of weaponry. Quite the opposite. For during
the early part of August 1987, he and a colleague from Newbury police
station had been discussing the issue of arming the police. Both had
agreed that the British ‘bobby’ was able to police more effectively
precisely because he was known to be unarmed. The point was for
policing to be, and to be seen to be, by consent, not compulsion. So
strongly did the pair believe in an unarmed police force that they
both resolved to tender their resignations rather than be obliged by
law to carry guns.
‘I met Roger at a coffee bar in Reading back in
1964,’ Liz Brereton recalls. ‘It was at a place called "The Thing".
Actually the bar was more of a night club really. I can remember our
meeting very clearly, because Roger tripped over me. It was during the
evening and quite dark. I had been sitting on the floor - there were
no seats, this was the Swinging Sixties, remember - when this person
stumbled over me. I looked up and thought, he’s cute - and that was it.
I just knew as soon as I looked up that he was the one for me. On my
part it was very much love at first sight. I knew the friend who he
was with, and he introduced us. Roger then went up to the jukebox, put
a record on and asked me for a dance. And that was it. I was a mod
then, and so was Roger. He was looking great in his parka, with fur
all around the hood, while I was dressed as a mod too, decked out with
my suede coat. That coat went everywhere with me, even in a heatwave.
I was probably in ray bellbottoms too. We were both just eighteen
years old.’
That night Roger Brereton asked if he could escort
his new mod girlfriend home. Almost immediately, Liz could see that
there were a number of formidable obstacles to be overcome if their
romance, scarcely off the ground, was ever going to succeed. She
explains: ‘As soon as Roger told me that he was in the Navy, I knew
that things were not going to be easy. He just happened to be home on
weekend leave when we met. His rank was LREM - leading radio electric
mechanic. I have always had a bit of a thing about men in uniforms.
But to be honest it wouldn’t have mattered what he was wearing,
because I just knew that he was for me. Anyway, that night he told me
that in about twelve weeks’ time he was off to Mauritius for eighteen
months. I thought, right, that’s it, this relationship doesn’t stand a
chance. I said to myself that I wouldn’t be seeing him again - because
you know what they say about sailors.’
Whatever it is they say about sailors clearly did
not apply to Roger Brereton. Because within a few days Liz had
received a postcard from Nairobi, where he had changed planes. The
following week a letter arrived, and they continued to arrive
throughout the eighteen months of their separation. His commitment was
as strong as hers. Nonetheless, it was a courtship of correspondence
and all the more difficult because of that.
‘Well, those eighteen months did go by. Eventually
he surprised me by just turning up at the office where I was working.
Downstairs reception called me. My legs were like jelly when I saw him
again for the first time. His back was towards me, and as I walked
from the stairs to where he was standing, it was the longest walk in
my life. I greeted him with the words: "God, you’ve put on weight!’
But after an hour chatting together it was as if he had not been away.’
Within a week they were engaged to be married.
There were to be more separations, though none as long as the
Mauritius trip. In 1968, after a four-year courtship, they were wed -
only for Roger to be sent off to sea again shortly before their first
wedding anniversary, by which time Liz was seven months pregnant. When
Roger returned after a year, he set his eyes for the first time on
Shaun, his bouncing, ten-month-old son.
‘That was terrible for me, I must say; recalls Liz.
‘I had a telegram at the hospital and that was it. I used to have a
particularly hard time in the evenings, when all the husbands would
come to visit - except mine. But everyone used to make a fuss of me
and that did help a bit’ ‘
A year and a half later Paul Brereton was born.
After eleven years in the Navy, Roger was reluctant to leave his young
family any more. Instead of becoming easier, the separations had
become more difficult to endure for Liz and Roger alike. Committing
himself to a second eleven-year term was simply unthinkable.
Roger had made up his mind to join the police. In
many respects, it was a logical move. He had thought of such a career
as a schoolboy, and what he really wanted was to be a traffic cop.
‘Of course, I knew that there was a certain amount
of danger in Roger joining the police force, ‘Liz reveals. ‘But he
would have gone mad just doing an ordinary nine to fiver. There is
always this underlying tension in the police force, this fear that
something might happen. One way of coping was for we police wives to
be very supportive of one another, which we were. Because it was the
same for all of us. HQ were always very good too, often ringing up, at
Roger’s request, if he was going to be late. But it was still always
very nice to hear the key in the door.’
A sensitive man, PC Brereton would often try to
allay his wife’s fears. His standard light-hearted line was to the
effect that should any maniac happen to strike in the vicinity, he
would be the first person, and the fastest, running in the opposite
direction. It didn’t help a great deal, but just to address the
family’s worst fears could itself be therapeutic.
Roger Brereton began his police career as a bobby
on the beat in Wantage, in Berkshire. The Breretons first lived with
his parents, then hers. The new police constable would walk or cycle
around his beat and soon developed a local reputation as a popular and
friendly policeman.
‘I was proud of him being a policeman. At. least I
could see him every day or night, according to which shift he was
working. And I knew that once the initial training period at Hendon
was out of the way, then there would be no more separations. He went
on the driving course, passed it - and then waited for a posting. It
was Newbury. When he passed the driving course, he was over the moon -
you couldn’t get his head through the door. And I do remember thinking
when he became a traffic cop, thank God for that - now he’ll only be
dealing with TAs - traffic accidents, that is. That now he would be
safe.’
Brereton loved his work. His childhood dream had
come true. There were indeed lots of chases, accidents and ‘domestics’.
The work was always interesting and varied. Seldom was there a
shortage of compelling anecdotal material to retail to Liz. For
policing purposes Brereton’s Newbury traffic base had within its
jurisdiction the town of Hungerford. The two towns also had other
links, for radio communication at Hungerford was by way of personal
UHF radios operated from Newbury, and Hungerford was in any case part
of the Newbury Sub-Division, and its personal radios were controlled
by the Newbury Control Room.
Professionally, Brereton had little to do with
Hungerford, however. When the Breretons set foot in the town it was
more likely to be for pleasure than police duties, for both were very
fond of the place. A favourite treat was to picnic on the Common, or
to browse around the parade of antique shops, second to none in the
area. Only ten miles from their police house just outside Newbury, for
them Hungerford was the ideal outing.
Roger Brereton was certainly a friendly man, but he
could also be tough. How else could he have broken up a pub brawl in
which knives were used, as he had once had to do? But he was aware
that as far as the implementation of the Road 1Yafftc Act was
concerned, sometimes a severe dressing-down could be just as effective
as an endorsement or a fine. He once decided to adopt such an approach
with a motorist who was driving at well over the speed limit on the
M4. As he launched into his reprimand Brereton could not understand
why the motorist was not suitably humbled, or what might account for a
smirk on his face. Being caught by the police driving at over eighty
miles per hour on one of Britain’s main motorways was surely no
laughing matter. Brereton had failed to remove some Christmas
decorations from his policeman’s hat after the annual office party,
and it was the juxtaposition of tinsel and a ticking off which had
proved so comic. Always keeping a keen eye on those with designs on
the speed limit, Brereton had also once stopped a member of the Royal
family for this same offence.
On the morning of 19 August 1987 the sun was
shining and there was a gentle breeze in the air. At eight o’clock
Roger Brereton set off for work. Liz was showering when he rushed in
to kiss her goodbye. Both had overslept and there had been a rather
unseemly rush for the bathroom.
‘It wasn’t much of a kiss really,’ Liz explains.
‘His glasses steamed up as he popped his head round the curtain. I
reminded him that he had forgotten to wash his hair, because he always
liked to look his best for work. As he rushed down the stairs he
shouted out: "Not to worry, I’ll do it tonight. See you later.---
Liz topped up the family income by working as a
home help. She would tidy the homes of the elderly and infirm,
cheering them up in the process. Because a police career is so finely
structured, both in terms of age limits and pension rights, many
personnel and their families begin to address the issue of retirement
relatively early. Roger Brereton was no exception. He always liked to
think ahead. In his own mind, at least, his agenda was very nearly
fixed. He would in time buy a pub and retire to the West Country.
Roger and Liz would run it jointly, and for both it was a very
appealing prospect. Occasionally, as Liz went about her work, she
would permit her mind to embroider this scenario. Every time, she
liked very much what she saw.
But that Wednesday has stayed in her mind for a
very different reason, as she explains: ‘Normally, when I used to go
on my rounds as a home help, most of the houses I went to would have
their radios or televisions on. But on that Wednesday none of them did.
When I got to my last lady, it was ten to one in the afternoon, and I
could hear the sound of police sirens. I knew I would hear all about
it later that evening when Roger would get in from work. I thought it
was probably a bad TA. In fact I can remember my exact words to that
lady: "Some poor bugger’s in trouble," I said.
5
‘Something about that Michael Ryan’
If, on that sunny August morning in 1987 when Sue
Godfrey and her children were picnicking in the Savernake Forest,
Michael Ryan was behaving strangely near by, so too had he been doing
at home. Towards the end of July he had become involved in a row with
Mrs Christine Reagan, a neighbour whose children had been irritating
him by playing on his drive. Ryan’s remedy for any such minor
trespasses was to fire airgun pellets at his neighbour while she was
hanging out her washing. A little earlier in the year he had also
crossed swords, almost literally, with another neighbour, Ivor Pask,
on whom he had threatened to draw a knife after an argument prompted
by the constant fouling of the footpath by Ryan’s dog. Others within
the vicinity had come to fear Ryan too, most notably the children of
South View, who had long been terrified by his style of driving as he
roared off on his solitary evening excursions in his sporty Vauxhall.
Justin Mildenhall recalls: ‘He was mad in his car. Our alley’s so
narrow, there’s no footpath. So if a person in a car comes up and
there’s someone in the lane, they normally slow past on the bank. But
Michael, he’d just go up there really fast, and you would have to
press yourself against the hedge or be run down.’
While Ryan was sporadically terrorizing his
neighbours, a tragedy was unfolding on the other side of the globe.
For on 9 August 1987 the quiet of a Melbourne suburb was shattered by
a young man named Julian Knight, a nineteen-year-old failed army
officer cadet. He had kitted himself out in paramilitary gear and
armed himself with two semi-automatic rifles and a shotgun. He then
stalked passers-by from behind bushes, picking them off one by one. In
this way he casually murdered six people and wounded a further
eighteen. The drunken gunman was ‘finally caught by a wounded traffic
policeman, but only after he had run out of ammunition.
But why should a person explode in such a
destructive and murderous fashion? For decades psychiatrists have
struggled to provide compelling explanations. And yet the
personalities of inexplicably violent offenders have been documented
nonetheless. For, as long ago as 1963, a group of doctors published a
paper entitled The Sudden Murderer, which can be found in
Britain’s Archives of General Psychiatry.
‘Such a murderer,’ they argued, ‘was likely to be a
young adult male, with no history of previous serious aggressive anti-social
acts, who had been reared by a dominant natural mother in a family of
origin that had been overtly cohesive during the patient’s childhood.
The father had either been hostile, rejecting, overstrict or
indifferent.’
Building on this research, Jack Levin, Professor of
Sociology at North-eastern University, Boston, has been able to
construct a model for the type of person who, like the gunman Julian
Knight, kills indiscriminately. There is a combination, according to
Levin, of frustration, a precipitating event such as unemployment or
divorce and, most important of all, access to and training in firearms.
The problem with such a model, however, is that
large numbers of people can fall within its scope. Certainly many
millions of people are frustrated with various aspects of their lives.
Millions divorce. Millions are unemployed. And certainly large numbers
of people have both access to and training in firearms.
There was indeed something distinctly odd about the
behaviour of Michael Ryan; a good many of the people of Hungerford
could have testified to that. Furthermore, he fitted Levin’s model.
But then so did many other members of the Turtnel Rifle and Pistol
Club. And when Peter Browning, then a thirty-five-year-old Royal
Marine, met Ryan at the Devizes club on the afternoon of Tuesday 18
August, nine days after the carnage inflicted in Australia, he was
quite unaware of the slightest trace of abnormal behaviour: ‘I
remember that he was wearing brown paramilitary boots, a pair of plain
green denim fatigue trousers, a green woolly jumper and a shooting
duvet jacket. To me he looked like a regular gun-club member. He was
really very polite. Just a nice pleasant. lad who liked to talk to
people about guns.
A number of Ryan’s neighbours from South View knew
otherwise; so did various colleagues from his last foray into the
world of work. But ask them to be more specific and they would be at a
loss to identify with any precision what it was about Michael Ryan
that set him apart from the rest. Even Ethel Stockwell, a retired
nurse and a close friend of Dorothy Ryan, never fathomed Ryan’s
personality: ‘I don’t know what it was about that young man. He was
impenetrable. But there was definitely something about him. Yes, there
was definitely something about that Michael Ryan. And yet I could
never quite manage to put my finger on what it was.’
6
Tactical Decisions
There was nothing strange about Paul Brightwell.
His career had followed a conventional enough path. He had joined the
Thames Valley Police in 1970, and served at a number of its centres,
including Aylesbury, Slough and High Wycombe. For many years he had
worked in the Traffic Department. But with a view to advancing his
career and adding spice to his daily routine, he eventually applied to
join the Support Group, whose officers constitute the Tactical
Firearms Team.
‘I was in the Support Group between 1979 and 1985,’
Brightwell explains, ‘when I was promoted to the rank of Sergeant. I
then left for a couple of years - only to return to the group as a
Sergeant at the beginning of 1987. I was then thirty-five years old.
When I married Sandy I was already in the job, so she had a fair idea
of the sort of work I would be involved in and she has always backed
me all the way. I do enjoy our rather specialized field of work. Mind
you, I also find the whole area of firearms rather difficult. Because,
unlike many people in the group, I’m not a natural shot -just a good
average - so I really do have to work at it.’
The first Thames Valley Police Support Group began
operations in 1969 on an experimental basis under the command of the
Assistant Chief Constable. It consisted of twenty-seven selected
officers and dog handlers. The object of the Group was to provide a
highly mobile unit of officers, able to perform a preventative role,
to support divisions in most aspects of police work and, perhaps most
important of all, to give immediate assistance after a report of a
serious crime.
In its early days the Group was most active in and
around Aylesbury, Amersham, Slough, Bracknell and Reading - familiar
terrain to Sergeant Brightwell - where crime was rife. But it also
assisted both mi large-scale enquiries and local events such as the
Henley Regatta and Royal Ascot.
By 1970 an independent streamlined unit was in
place, with a remit covering the whole of the Thames Valley police
area. As the years went by, so the Support Group grew in both stature
and reputation. Nonetheless it still retains its initial role,
continuing to deal with a variety of incidents, such as the policing
of major events, crime investigations, house-to-house enquiries,
searches and preventative patrols in response to terrorist threats.
The major function of the Support Group, however,
is that its officers form the Thames Valley Police’s Tactical Firearms
Team, and this has always been the cornerstone of its role. The Team
is specifically trained to conclude armed incidents, whether
confronting a gunman on the loose or attempting to conclude a siege.
It is a highly trained and heavily armed specialist squad whose
overriding duty is to provide an efficient, disciplined, twenty-four-hour
response to any shooting incident within its police area. Considerable
skill and experience are required of candidates for the Group, and
every officer selected is trained to a high degree in both tactical
and shooting skills.
The Support Group now consists of forty-eight
officers headed by a Chief Inspector. There are two Inspectors, one
with responsibility for the north of the police area, the other
mandated to cover the south. Under each Inspector there are two
parties of ten constables and a sergeant working alternate day and
night shifts, with one constable acting as coordinator. The precise
nature of the work of the Support Group remains shrouded in secrecy,
and it uses unmarked vehicles, although these are equipped with
portable blue lights and two-tone horns or sirens.
During the summer of 1987 the head of the Support
Group was Chief Inspector Glyn Lambert. Having had an operational
career within the Thames Valley Police, he had been selected first as
an Inspector in the Support Group, before going on to head it. Chief
,Inspector Lambert describes his role and the work of the Group thus:
‘Of course I have passed all the necessary firearms courses myself.
But you need to be more than just a proficient shot: you must be able
to think and to train tactically. You have to learn how to move around
and to be sensible in your approach. Whenever a major firearms
incident accurs within our jurisdiction, overall control actually
falls to the Assistant Chief Constable. But because of my advisory
role as the tactical firearms officer my role is also quite crucial,
with my advice being sought on the firearms issue. Once notified of an
incident I will ensure that our firearms package gets rolling - that
is to say, the communications package, tactical dogs, weapons,
officers, helicopters and whatever else I think might be helpful and
relevant for the operation. Of course we do have powerful rifles in
our pack, although I have to, say that the Kalashnikov is a hell of a
weapon. That’s because it’s self-loading. Once launched, its bullets
travel at 2900 feet per second - and they can cover a distance of up
to four miles. And because of its high penetration, it really is a
most fearsome weapon.’
Chief Inspector Lambert indeed had a highly trained
group of men, but he did not have the most modern equipment. For
example, the control room at the force’s headquarters at Kidlington
had out-of-date communications equipment. Nor at that time did the
Thames Valley Police then have their own armoured Land Rovers. At the
time of the Hungerford massacre, these were a new thing for the police.
While the Metropolitan Police had some, few other forces did, and in
any case they were not often needed. Compared with some forces in the
country, however, the Thames Valley Police were privileged, as Chief
Inspector Lambert explains:
‘In 1987 there were only four police helicopters in
the country. And we were fortunate enough to have one at our disposal.
I always have great faith in the helicopter and I like to work closely
with it because it really is an excellent spotting tool. On Wednesday
19 August, however, it is true to say that our helicopter had been
temporarily grounded for repairs.’
While repairs were being carried out on the
helicopter, the officers of the Support Group were at Otmoor, an army
training range, where they had gone to meet the Firearms Training Unit.
Sergeant Paul Brightwell was there on that day, and recalls: ‘That
Wednesday had been allocated as a firearms training day at Otmoor,
which is about eight miles north of 1Gdlington HQ and therefore not so
far from Oxford. Every month we would have at least one or two
training days. I used to enjoy them very much. On other occasions
there would also be tactical training - how to deploy at different
incidents and so on. Being an outdoor range, Otmoor was glorious on
that sunny Wednesday morning. We spent the first few hours in
straightforward firearms training.’
Sergeant Brightwell and his colleagues at the
training range were the only officers from the Support Group on duty
that day. The rest of the team were off duty, or just about to come on.
Thus there was no tactical firearms cover in the south of the Thames
Valley police area at all. In policing terms, however, there is
nothing remarkable about such a lack of cover, as the former policeman
and firearms expert Colin Greenwood explains. ‘Some people believe
that you’ll never be able to get a tactical unit into action quickly
enough; that effective response times can only be achieved when
weapons become available to many’ more local officers. When I was with
the police we used to do tests. I would go back and pick a day - three
o’clock in the morning on 4 August, say - and then demand of the Force
how many armed men would have been available. And each time that was
done, we were frightened by the result.’
The Government’s reluctance to allow the police
ready access to firearms can be traced back to the first half of the
1980s. For it was then that the police had made a series of disastrous
mistakes with their weaponry. An innocent man, Stephen Waldorf, had
been gunned down in his car in 1983, and then, two years later, Mrs
Cherry Groce was crippled by police fire in Brixton. Only a few months
later a five-year-old boy, John Shorthouse, was shot by a policeman in
Birmingham. There was a huge public outcry and the seeds of a new
approach were sewn. Political pressures resulted in the Home Office
issuing a directive that considerably more caution should be shown in
the handling of firearms. As a result, the rank necessary to sanction
an armed operation was increased from inspector to the Assistant Chief
Constable himself. The key to increased public safety, a Government
working party later argued, was to have fewer firearms officers, more
professionally trained.
Despite this new caution by the Home Office, by
1987 more than 14,000 British police officers were authorized to use
guns. The prevailing legislation was then the Criminal Law Act of
1967. Sergeant Brightwell explains: ‘We all used to have to carry a "white
card" which showed our authority to use a firearm and which laid out
the guidelines under which we could operate. The card quoted from the
‘67 Act, saying that guns can be issued when there is reason to
believe that a police officer may have to face a person who is armed
or otherwise so dangerous that he could not safely be restrained
without the use of firearms".’
The card also specified that guns should be fired
by police, only as a last resort when conventional methods have been
tried and failed or must from the nature of the circumstances
obtaining be unlikely to succeed if tried’. A gun could then be used,
the legislation stated, when it ‘is apparent that the police cannot
achieve their lawful purpose of preventing loss or
further loss of life by other means’. Sergeant Brightwell and his
colleagues in the Support Group were very familiar with the statute,
for the extremely cautious wording of the 1967 Act had been drummed
into them time and again.
But for all the Group’s members, there was one
crucial consideration which always put the entire issue into
perspective: that while the decision to open fire is an individual one,
that individual’s decision might one day have to be justified before a
properly constituted court of law. Sergeant David Warwick, a colleague
of Brightwell’s, was not actually in the Support Group. But as a
firearms instructor who sometimes supplemented the Tactical Firearms
Team’s response, he was well acquainted with the regulations
concerning firearms.
On the implications of this rule, Sergeant
Brightwell says: ‘Just to fire for the sake of it quite simply makes
you a murderer. If I have a person within my sights - even if he has
shot another person - I quickly run through three simple tests. Is the
person likely to shoot anybody else? Is there any threat to. the
public, the police or anybody else? And is the person likely to
abscond or commit other offences? If the answers to these questions
are coming up no, then you simply do not shoot. In fact if you have to
shoot we in the Support Group consider it basically a failure of
policy. We are the police. We are not judge, jury and executioner all
in one.’
Britain’s police, both armed and unarmed, are.
therefore quite properly prohibited by Act of Parliament from using
unreasonable force. But at the same time it is accepted that the
police should not be obliged to expose themselves to unnecessary risks
while carrying out their duty to protect the public. While tl-ds is an
extremely delicate balance to achieve, Chief Inspector Glyn Lambert is
sure of one thing: ‘When an armed incident occurs it is an
impossibility to just go charging in like the Cavalry. Of course we
have a duty to save lives if one can. But it is just not on to expose
yourself to a ridiculous amount of jeopardy in order to do this. So if
necessary we will go cautiously. And if necessary we might even have
to go tortuously. I have to protect the public, of course. That is
what policing is all about. But I am never going to be prepared to
sacrifice my men like lambs to the slaughter needlessly and without a
sense of direction or knowledge of what they are trying to achieve.’
There are many other facets to policing besides the
firearms issue, which is why, when a major incident occurs, overall
operational control immediately passes to the Assistant Chief
Constable. And on Wednesday 19 August 1987 this senior position was
occupied by Charles Pollard, perhaps the most popular and highly
respected person in the entire Thames Valley force. On that Wednesday
morning Assistant Chief Constable Pollard was preoccupied with one
thing: that his desk should be cleared by the end of the afternoon,
for his long-awaited summer leave was due to begin.
A veteran of the siege at the Iranian Embassy in
London in 1980 and of the bombing of the Conservative Party conference
in Brighton in 1985, Pollard has been a lifelong defender of the
principle of Britain’s police remaining unarmed: ‘The Thames Valley
Police is, in common with the rest of the police service in this
country, a civil, unarmed police force whose members carry out their
duties through the consent of the community rather than by force. On
those occasions when force is required, tradition provides, and the
law dictates, that only the very minimum of force is permissible. This
principle is practised not only in everyday policing situations but it
is also enshrined in all our policies involving the exercise of force
through the use of special equipment such as firearms. What a lot of
people don’t realize is that when an incident occurs it’s not just a
question of going into a local police station, getting a gun, going
out and shooting a suspect. IVs just not as simple as that. It does
take time to get weapons out, to get them to the scene, to identify
where your suspect is and then to contain him. And that is one of
those things which, in a country like ours, we perhaps have to accept.’
As the Assistant Chief Constable set about his
paperwork, hoping to be able shortly to go on holiday with a clear
conscience, Sergeant Brightwell was engaged in his training session at
the army range at Otmoor. Then, suddenly, Brightwell’s pager sounded.
Almost simultaneously, Sergeant Winnick’s did likewise. So did those
belonging to the firearms instructors. For the last few minutes or so,
Kidlington HQ had become frantic with activity. Chief Inspector
Lambert, head of the Support Group, was swinging into action, his many
years of experience in the police standing him in good stead in a
crisis. The Assistant Chief Constable phoned home to break the news to
his wife that their holiday was off. Although they did know it at that
time, the members of the Tactical Firearms Team of the Thames Valley
Police were poised to confront the biggest-ever test for armed police
anywhere in the United Kingdom.
7 ‘A
man in black has shot my mummy’
At home in North Newnton, Nellie Fisher waited and
waited. It was a frustrating time for the great-grandmother on her
ninety-fifth birthday; she was growing impatient for the festivities
to begin. So too were the other members of the family who had gathered
for the occasion. But they all knew very well that the celebrations
could not get under way until her favourite granddaughter, Little Sue,
had arrived with young Hannah and James.
When Michael Ryan woke up that same morning he was
feeling a little off colour. He decided that the best remedy would be
to take a couple of paracetamols. Nor was he sure precisely how the
day was likely to turn out. But one thing was certain: unlike the
previous day, he would not be visiting the ‘Funnel Rifle and Pistol
Club in Devizes, the shooting centre where he had been spending so
much of his time and energy during recent weeks. Instead, having put
on an open-necked white shirt and a pair of blue jeans, he jumped into
his D-registration Vauxhall Astra and pulled out of his driveway in
South View.
After turning right on to Fairview Road, Ryan then
drove down Hungerford’s ancient High Street and headed off towards the
A4. He was travelling in a westerly direction, towards the Savernake
Forest. It was that well-known Wiltshire beauty spot that ‘Little Sue
had chosen for her picnic, with Hannah and James. She had prepared the
children’s treat some time before. Indeed she had meticulously planned
out their activities for almost every day of those long summer
holidays, which, for Hannah at least, still had another three weeks to
run. And the weather, that Wednesday morning, had not let them down.
Myra Rose, a spirited pensioner of seventy-five,
had also been in the forest that morning. Her home was in Bournemouth,
but she was staying with friends in nearby Marlborough. The woodland
setting was so soothing that she decided to sit down and read for a
while, and before she knew it, almost an hour had slipped by. Her
imagination and intellect exercized, she knew that it was time now for
her body to benefit likewise. Walking along at a brisk pace, she
basked in the glorious sunshine. Suddenly her serenity was shattered
by a calm announcement from a little girl. It was four-year-old Hannah,
Little Sue’s eldest child.
‘I was walking through the forest,’ Myra Rose would
later recall, ‘when these two small children strolled up
towards me. "Oh, we’ve been looking for you," the little girl said to
me. We were coming to find you!’ They both held my hands and the
little girl looked up at me and said: "A man in black has shot my
mummy!’ They were both very calm and didn’t really seem at all dazed.
"He’s taken the car keys," said the little girl, "and James and me
can’t drive the car without the keys!’ Then she said: "We’ve had our
picnic - I’m going home to find my daddy. We’re going home!’ They then
began to walk off. Well, this was a story you just could not believe.
In any case, I hadn’t heard any shots or anything. I was quite simply
dumbfounded.’
Dumbfounded though she was, as a grandmother of two
children Myra Rose knew full well that she could not allow these two
youngsters to wander off all alone into the thick of the forest.
Instinctively, without hesitation, she took them under her wing. For
the first few moments, however, she was not sure what to believe, in
which direction to head or indeed what to do at all. The little girl’s
story simply sounded too far-fetched to be true. The kindly old lady,
instantly adopted by Hannah and James, decided that she should perhaps
go back in the direction the two children had come from and try to
find their mother’s car. She was convinced that somewhere in the
forest was a young mother frantically searching for her two children.
Whether the little girls story was true or not,
Myra Rose knew that her role was to care for these two tiny waifs; to
comfort and to calm them. As she embarked on her search, she knew that
when it came to distracting or entertaining young children, one of her
stories could almost always be relied upon. They had served her well
with her own grandchildren in Australia, and, she hoped, they would
have the same effect now.
‘The children told me that they had been tired and
had had a little sleep in the car; Myra Rose would later explain.
‘They then said that they didn’t know the way back. So we walked back
the way I had come from and we met some other people who I had earlier
seen having a picnic. Then James began to cling to me. He just would
not leave me. It was just such an incredible story, though, I was
still not at all sure what to believe.’
Unfortunately, as the adoptive grandmother was
shortly to discover, little Hannah could hardly have been a more
reliable witness. Her every single word had been true. A man in black
had indeed shot her mummy. And that man was Michael Ryan.
During their picnic, Hannah would later disclose to
the police, another car was parked nearby, with a man sitting at the
steering wheel. Just as her mother was finishing the picnic and foldin
g away the groundsheet, the man had got out of his car and walked
towards Little Sue and her children.
Ryan was brandishing a Beretta self-loading pistol,
capable of firing sixteen shots. Pointing it at Little Sue, he told
her to put her children into her own car. As she strapped them in, she
succeeded in keeping her composure, speaking confidently and
reassuringly to them. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes,’ she said.
Sue Godfrey’s overriding priority was to give the
impression that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, that she
remained fully in control of everything that was taking place, just as
she always did. In reality, as she knew only too well, something quite
extraordinary had happened, and Ryan’s Beretta amply demonstrated that
she was not at all in control.
The gunman frogmarched Little Sue into a woodland
glade some seventy-five yards from her car, clutching the blue
tarpaulin groundsheet under his arm. There is little doubt that Ryan
had sex uppermost in his mind when he approached Sue Godfrey, a
strikingly attractive woman in her mid-thirties. Certainly the police
have long taken this view. ‘Of course, our theory is difficult to
substantiate,’ a police spokesman explains, ‘because facts are scarce,
and we only have the testimony of the little girl. But Mrs Godfrey was
a very good-looking woman being led deep into the woods, with Ryan
holding the groundsheet, to boot, so we don’t think that he was taking
her on a nature trail. We think that she must have tried to make a run
for it. And that in so doing got shot.’
Hannah Godfrey heard those shots. She then saw the
man in black run back to his car and speed off. Not surprisingly,
there was no sign of her mother. Indeed, mother and children were
never to set eyes on one another again. Hannah and James remained in
the car for a short while before Hannah decided to unstrap herself and
James.
What Hannah did not know was that her mother had
been shot ten times in the back. After she had fallen through a wire
fence, Ryan had then fired three more shots into her body. The
pathologist Dr Roger Ainsworth later confirmed that he had found
thirteen bullet holes in her upper back. But it was a policeman,
Sergeant Coppen, who had been first to arrive at the scene of the
crirne. He found Sue’s car parked on Grand Avenue in the forest,
unlocked and with two handbags, several toys and her driving licence
inside. He had found her body lying on its side at around 2pm on that
warm Wednesday afternoon. Several bullet holes had punctured the blue,
flowery dress which she had chosen to wear for Grandma Nellie’s
birthday. Ten yards away lay the blue groundsheet. It had been
stretched out on the ground, but her clothing remained entirely
undisturbed.
Driving home from work that evening, Brian Godfrey
heard on the radio that a young mother of two had been shot dead in
the Savernake Forest. ‘I thought, how terrible. Obviously I identified
with a mother and two kids. But I never dreamed that it was my wife
and kids,’Brian recalls.
When he returned to Burghfield Common, the family
home in Clay Hill Road was empty. By the time another hour had elapsed
the computer technician was distinctly on edge. Then he noticed two
tall men walking down the path and making their way towards his front
door.
‘They were in plain clothes, but I knew that they
were policemen. By the time they were inside I knew that Sue was
either hurt or dead.’ One of them said, "You look upset" and I said
that I had been listening to the car radio. Then they said: "We’ve got
bad news for you - your wife is dead." I asked what had happened to
the children and they told me that they were at Swindon police station.
What I’ve managed to get from the children is that a man with a gun
appeared just as they had finished the picnic. He apparently said to
Sue: "I’m going to shoot you if you don’t come with me." She fastened
the children into their seats and told them that she would return in a
short while.’
Sue Godfrey did not return - Ryan had seen to that
- and her children were left to wander about the forest before being
found by Myra Rose, who would later explain: ‘I eventually went with
the children to Swindon police station. Of course there were lots more
stories throughout the day. James was with me all day until his daddy
turned up. But when that poor man walked in, I thought that it was a
good time for me to creep silently away so that James, in particular,
would not notice that I’d gone.’
ITN’s News at Ten broadcast to the nation
later that evening the story of what had happened to Sue Godfrey and
her two children, a story that was almost ‘unbearably painful’, even
to report. As far as Ryan was concerned, however, the day had hardly
begun. For as he sped away from the scene of this brutal murder, Mrs
Kakoub Dean of the Golden Arrow Service Station on the A4 at Froxfield,
was herself about to come within a hair’s breadth of losing her life.
The isolated petrol station was the one where Sue
Godfrey had filled up earlier that morning. She and Mrs Dean had
exchanged a few brief but friendly words. A couple of hours had passed
since then and Mrs Dean had served a good many more customers. For her,
it was a typical August day at the Elf service station owned by her
husband, Zubair, who also ran a petrol station at Marlborough. Then
Ryan’s silver-grey Vauxhall Astra GTE pulled in. For several years now,
he had been a regular customer and a familiar, if not always very
friendly, face. Mrs Dean, a twenty-nine-year-old Asian mother of three,
immediately thought it unusual that he had approached from the
Marlborough side, rather than from Hungerford, his customary route.
Almost every other day Ryan would buy £4 or £5
worth of petrol with his Barclaycard. He preferred pump number two,
but this time, as well as putting £15.42 worth of petrol in his car,
he filled a five-litre can with £2.01 worth.
‘I also thought it a little odd that he had bought
more petrol than usual; Mrs Dean would later recall. ‘I always used to
say good morning to him, but he would never say a word. He would
always just put his credit card down on the counter and never said
anything. Not even a thank you. I must say that I always found him a
very strange customer.’
Whatever lack of courtesy Ryan might have displayed
in the past, Mrs Dean was certainly right about his behaviour being
odd that day. For as she turned to the till to register the sale, he
seemed to be bending down to remove something from the boot of his
car. When she looked up again, Kakoub Dean was staring into the muzzle
of a semi-automatic rifle: ‘He seemed to be fiddling with the boot of
his car for ages, waiting for another customer to leave. I can’t
remember whether I dived below the counter before the gun went off or
after.’
Whatever the sequence of Kakoub Dean’s movements, a
one inch hole had been blasted through the petrol station’s window,
the bullet ricocheting off the wall into the ceiling and out again
into the back of the shop: ‘The next thing I knew was a bullet had
smashed through the glass kiosk screen and hit the clock. I don’t know
how it missed me, because I’m sure I felt it pass through my hair. It
was just as I was telling him the amount on the till that I lifted my
eyes and saw him pointing this gun straight at me.’
Ryan had missed. But he now stepped inside to do
the job properly. Perhaps at closer range he would achieve a little
more accuracy. Stunned, Kakoub Dean hid under the counter. ‘Please
don’t, please don’t,’ she begged, as the gunman confronted her.
‘I really don’t know if he heard me or not. Because
he said nothing. I could see him but he couldn’t see me. He stayed
there for a few seconds and was standing holding the gun - but there
was nothing I could do.’
As she lay helpless under the counter, Kakoub Dean
crawled close to a rack of sweets which formed part of its display.
She held her breath and simply waited to die. There was nothing else
she could do. She had appealed to Ryan, and it had had the air of a
last request. As she did so, the gaunt face of Rambo looked out from
the shelves, among an array of other violent and soft-porn videos,
including The Terminator.
But all Kakoub Dean heard was the clicking of an
empty gun: Ryan, the self-styled marksman extraordinaire, had ran out
of ammunition. ‘I heard four or five clicks - and nothing happened,’
she recounts. ‘I know I am lucky to be alive. He would have killed me.
I don’t know how I survived. Because there was murder in his eyes. He
didn’t smile. He didn’t blink. He didn’t do anything. He just stared
straight through me as if I wasn’t there.’
Kakoub Dean had been spared. Little Sue had not.
And not long after Ryan sped off from the petrol station, Detective
Constable John Tuften, a scene-of-crime officer, arrived at the
Savernake Forest to gather evidence with which he would later be able
to compile a report or use in evidence. He took away a number of items,
including bloodstained leaves, a fragment of wood, three cartridge
cases and the blue groundsheet. The following day he returned and
removed an additional ten cartridge cases and three bullets. The
latter were embedded six inches in the ground.
The investigation into the murder of Sue Godfrey
continued apace, and although it was not at all complicated, there
were the customary procedures to be followed. Thomas Warlow, a
forensic scientist based at the Home Office National Firearms
Laboratory in Huntingdon, was soon able to confirm Detective Constable
Tuften’s earlier findings. He would later report to the inquest that
he had observed two separate groups of spent 9nun cartridges on the
ground. Thirteen pistol cartridges, of German manufacture, had indeed
been fired. And there was not the slightest doubt in his mind that
Ryan’s Beretta had been responsible. For this pistol, which was in
good working order, was later found attached to Ryan’s right wrist
with a bootlace, and covered with blood.
Nellie Fisher and her family continued to wait for
Sue and the children. But by lpm, as Ethel Fisher explains: ‘We
thought perhaps there had been an accident. We knew Sue would never
just change her mind and return home without letting us know somehow.
In the meantime, Joan’s husband rang to tell Joan she wasn1 to travel
back home [to Reading] on her own, owing to a shooting at Hungerford.
We then telephoned the police to hear what was going on, as Sue hadn’t
arrived. They informed us that she had probably been turned back,
owing to the trouble. We then sat in Joan’s car to listen to the radio
and heard that a young woman had been shot dead at Savernake Forest,
and that there were two children walking about - ages two and a half
and four and a half. Knowing that she was stopping there to picnic
with the children, we knew it was our Sue.
‘The police were contacted again and certain
questions were asked by them, and they said they would be coming round
to see us. Which of course they did, and told us as gently as they
could what had happened. Later we were taken to Swindon police station
to collect the children. Brian, Sue’s husband, was already there.’
By 12.40 that morning Michael Ryan had savagely
murdered Susan Godfrey and bungled his attempt to kill Kakoub Dean.
Immediately after his hasty exit from the service station, the shocked
cashier telephoned the police - the first of what would soon become an
avalanche of callers. But by this time Ryan was speeding back towards
Hungerford.
Just as the serenity of Myra Rose had been
destroyed earlier that day, so now was the calm of that quiet market
town about to be shattered. |