Bonded by Blood

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  Thompson then began visiting Nicholls in police custody so that they could work on the manuscript together. This was achieved without the police having any knowledge that Thompson was a journalist.

  In Bloggs 19, the book they eventually wrote together, Thompson claims that his initial meeting with Nicholls took place at a McDonald’s in Romford and that Nicholls was accompanied by his minders, who had tailed Thompson’s car. Both Thompson and Nicholls have since agreed that this was made up and the idea for this version of the meeting came from a gangster book called Wise Guy.

  When defence barristers had trawled through Nicholls’s statements, it became evident that he had encountered similar difficulty in getting right the story that had led to Whomes and Steele being charged. During his police interviews, Nicholls had changed the account he was giving after visits to his cell during ‘rest breaks’ from DC Winstone and DC Brown, the same two detectives he was being interviewed by: a practice totally against police procedure. On Nicholls’s custody record, these encounters were recorded as ‘welfare visits’, even though Nicholls already had an appointed welfare officer, Detective Sergeant Crayling.

  The custody record shows that on one occasion Nicholls spent 25 minutes with DS Crayling, then shortly afterwards he had spent an hour and a half with DC Brown. It reveals that there were numerous other occasions when Nicholls had received excessive visits concerning his welfare. For instance, DS Crayling is recorded as visiting Nicholls for 55 minutes and then DC Winstone spent 1 hour and 55 minutes with him. On another occasion, DS Crayling visited Nicholls for 35 minutes. This was followed by a visit from DC Winstone for 2 hours and 20 minutes.

  When cross-examined at trial, Winstone and Brown said they could not recall what was discussed. Nicholls denied the case was discussed and told the jury the officers had only visited him to ‘cheer him up’. Indeed there is no evidence of any impropriety in these visits. Winstone and Brown did admit that they provided Nicholls with a writing desk, pens and paper so that he could ‘make notes’ about anything he may have remembered about his evidence.

  The defence suggested that these visits had a far more sinister purpose. It was suggested that they were to remind Nicholls of a ‘version of events’ that would fit in with the mobile phone and other circumstantial evidence. Only Nicholls, Winstone and Brown know what was discussed, but it cannot be argued that Nicholls kept getting the story wrong and after each break would miraculously remember details and correct his mistakes.

  During one interview, Nicholls had told police that on the day of the murders he had received a message on his answering machine to telephone Steele. When he returned Steele’s call, Nicholls said he was asked by Steele to meet him at a motorbike shop called Ron Parkinson’s at Marks Tey near Colchester. Nicholls said he remembered the meeting because while he was waiting for Steele he had purchased a new battery for his van. DC Winstone and DC Brown quite rightly thought this was an important piece of evidence because they could now visit the shop and check the sales for that day – if there was a record of a battery being sold, then it would support Nicholls’s story. A few days later, Winstone and Brown had to explain to Nicholls that they had visited the motorbike shop and there was no record of him or anybody else purchasing a battery that day. In the next interview, Nicholls said that he had thought about the battery and he now remembered that he had in fact purchased a bulb for his motorcycle but had fitted it to the Land Rover that he was driving because the interior light had gone and it used the same type of bulb as his motorcycle. Unwittingly, Nicholls had not only changed his story about the battery which had been proven to be untrue, he had changed his story from travelling to meet Steele in his van to now travelling to meet Steele in his Land Rover.

  After further welfare visits, Nicholls told DC Brown, ‘I have had a thought about what car I was driving that night. Do you want me to tell you what I thought I was driving?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ DC Brown replied.

  Nicholls then blurted out: ‘I was driving a Golf convertible.’

  You would think that if you had been duped into taking a hit man to murder three people, as Nicholls claims he was, the events of that evening would be etched into your mind for all time. Unless you happen to be Darren Nicholls, that is, because he had difficulty remembering the simplest of details.

  Nicholls told police that after the battery/bulb incident, he sat outside the motorbike shop in Steele’s vehicle, waiting for Whomes. ‘Well, anyway, when I’m talking to Mick in his Hi Lux, Jack has come along,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t stopped or got out or nothing.’ He told police, Mick then said for them to leave.

  In a later interview, Nicholls changed his story and told police, ‘Jack arrived, he pulled up beside us and he did come to the window of Steele’s Hi Lux and had some conversation.’

  Nicholls’s errors were quite descriptive and therefore unlikely to be momentary losses of concentration, or created by confusion. He told police that Whomes had tried to fix false number plates while waiting in Brentwood Country Park prior to driving to the Halfway House pub where Tucker, Tate and Rolfe were allegedly going to meet Steele. Nicholls altered this account later to say that after Tucker, Tate and Rolfe had arrived at the Halfway House to meet Steele, Jack, who was allegedly watching from the other side of the car park, had said, ‘Right, off you go!’

  ‘I pulled out of the Halfway House,’ Nicholls said, ‘and then Jack said, “Pull over here.” I asked why and he said, “I want to change the number plates on the car.” And I said, “Why, what’s the matter?” He had some sticky tape on the number plates, but they wouldn’t stick. It was wet.’ Nicholls claimed that they drove to Rettendon, through the village along the A130, dropped down the hill and after about 100 yards he had dropped Whomes off on the left-hand side of the road. Whomes is then alleged to have got out of the car and walked away carrying a bag. In a later interview, Nicholls described driving through Rettendon village, down the hill and Whomes telling him to pull into a lane on the right-hand side of the road.

  ‘I remember him saying, “When you come back, you reverse down here, so you’re facing the right way to drive straight out,”’ Nicholls said. He also said that after Whomes got back into the car after allegedly committing the murders, he noticed Whomes was wearing surgical gloves that had ‘specks of blood all over them’. Nicholls later stated that he first noticed Whomes had surgical gloves on when he dropped him off at Steele’s car after they had driven away from the murder scene. ‘He took his overalls off and his wellington boots. I don’t know if they had gloves on. I think I noticed Jack had on surgicals, I think he had surgicals on because I didn’t get to look in the car because I was driving it. But I think Jack had blood over him like a fairish amount, you know what I mean.’

  When asked which version of events was correct, Nicholls told police, ‘Jack was sitting in the middle between the seats behind us and he had rubber gloves on. I do remember the rubber gloves. They had like specks of blood on. I’m sure it was specks of blood. Mick then started handing him bits of the gun covered in blood.’ Every time Nicholls suffered a loss of memory and then managed to remember events, the case against Whomes and Steele just happened to get stronger and stronger for the police.

  While Nicholls was busy sorting out his version of events, Tony Thompson was busy trying to sort out lucrative deals for himself and Nicholls by selling his story. Thompson approached Jeff Pope, who was the head of factual drama at London Weekend Television (LWT) with a suggestion for a film about Nicholls’s life and his experiences on the witness protection programme. As a result, LWT commissioned a ‘video diary’ type of film featuring Nicholls to be screened on Channel 4.

  On 22 May 1997, Nicholls, Thompson and LWT entered into an agreement in relation to the project. This ‘option’ agreement was basically a method of ensuring that Thompson and Nicholls did not go elsewhere with the programme idea. It bound them to LWT for a period of six months in return for a fee of £2,500. A further contract between
the same parties was signed at the same time. In this it was agreed that Thompson would act as an associate producer. His services would include, inter alia, the recording of 30 hours of (video diary) footage of Nicholls before, during and after the murder trial.

  Thompson and Nicholls were also contracted to provide details, access and introductions to third parties who had information relating to the trial. The contract stated that Thompson and Nicholls would receive contributors’ fees – £5,000 and £15,000 respectively.

  In order to film the video diary, Thompson smuggled a video recorder into Harlow police station. Wigs, false beards and a ski mask were also given to Nicholls so that he could prevent his true image being broadcast later on TV. Extensive video-diary filming was carried out by Nicholls and all the paraphernalia was kept in his cell. The police deny knowing it was there. The video tapes have since been ‘lost’, so nobody will ever know what Nicholls actually said during these recordings.

  In October 1998, LWT entered into a new agreement with Thompson relating to the making of the film. However, later that month a new commissioning editor at Channel 4 decided that he did not wish to proceed with the film as then planned, so LWT approached the editor of the BBC Inside Story series, who commissioned a film about Nicholls in the form of a full-scale documentary rather than a video diary. It was against this programme that Nicholls later sought an injunction to prevent it from being broadcast.

  In total, Thompson was paid in excess of £40,000 for the various deals he secured using Nicholls’s story. It’s unclear what Nicholls earned because he and Thompson cannot agree on what he received. Thompson thinks it was £14,500, but Nicholls claims it was two cash payments of around £4,000. Both agree that Nicholls received no money in respect of revenue from the sales of the book Bloggs 19.

  In order to check the validity of Nicholls and Thompson’s story, Hertfordshire Police on behalf of the CCRC interviewed everybody they could locate who had been in contact with Nicholls during his time as a protected witness. This included prison officers, fellow inmates in the protected witness unit, his police handlers and those in the media with whom he and Thompson had dealt.

  Few had anything good to say about Nicholls, and some questioned his credibility as a witness. A prison officer from HMP Woodhill, known only as officer ‘A’, told police, ‘I would describe [Darren] as a big, fat cry baby, who was always asking to see me about different things.’ An officer known only as ‘M’ said, ‘Nicholls was a reasonable man but moaned a lot.’ This officer also stated that Nicholls was not particularly well liked by other prisoners in the unit and tended to keep himself to himself.

  Officer ‘V’ told police, ‘Nicholls was a whinger, and we were always phoning his police handlers on his behalf because of his demands to see them.’

  Nicholls clearly lied to a prison officer identified only as ‘X’, who said that Darren had told him that he had only been questioned by the police about routine matters and he had not told them anything whatsoever about the Range Rover killings. ‘Nicholls said that despite the fact he hadn’t told the police anything, the killers believed he had spoken to the police and that they would get their revenge somehow. Darren said he didn’t know what to do now.’

  Inmates who had been in custody with Nicholls at HMP Woodhill who were interviewed by Hertfordshire Police portrayed him in an equally unflattering light. Supergrass Mike Hodgson said, ‘I remember Darren telling me that the police had told the “baddies” that he was an informant. Darren said that he had no choice but to go along with the police. I remember Darren telling me that it was the police who had concocted the story about his involvement in the Range Rover killings.’

  Supergrass Ian Wimsey, also known as Damien or Damon, said, ‘I would describe Darren as a bit of a bragger. When I explained that I was going through some difficulties with my police handlers, Darren suggested that I could make some money out of my story. I remember Darren at some stage talking about figures of £25,000 for a newspaper story and more for a television documentary. He told me that a reporter he knew was working for Time Out magazine.

  ‘A couple of weeks later, I had a visit from my girlfriend and son. Darren had a simultaneous visit from a black man. During the visit, he kept looking towards me. At some point during the visit, I met Darren in the toilet, where he explained that the man was the journalist he knew. I was introduced to the man by Darren and he gave his name as Tony Thompson. I believe I saw Thompson between three and six more times at the prison after that.’

  At the conclusion of their investigation, Hertfordshire Police submitted their findings to the CCRC, who immediately referred the case back to the Court of Appeal. Everyone connected with the campaign to free Whomes and Steele was ecstatic. They felt that if the jury at the original trial had known Darren Nicholls had been making money writing books and agreeing to lucrative TV deals prior to giving evidence, they might well have taken a very different view of his testimony. All they had to do now was convince the appeal judges of that fact and Whomes and Steele would be going home.

  Chapter 18

  It’s 7.20 a.m. on 18 January 2006. The taxi horn has just sounded outside my home. Bleary eyed, I open my door to a cold, dark, miserable morning. The bleak conditions reflect how I am feeling. It’s my wife Emma’s 28th birthday today. I should be happy. We were married just eighteen months and three days ago at Peterborough Cathedral. Emma and I had agreed that we would start a family this month; she was convinced that we would only ever produce daughters. ‘Having you to look after is enough,’ she would joke. ‘I don’t want another disruptive male child to care for.’

  Emma had even chosen a name for our firstborn: Emily, a nickname I often called my beautiful wife. Sadly, our dreams of family bliss are no more. Emma died just four months after our wedding. In December 2004, we had both fallen ill with flu. We were not bedridden or unable to leave our home; we had contracted the same strain of flu many people suffer from each winter. While watching TV one evening, Emma started telling me over and over again that she loved me. Not being the romantic type, my initial thought was that she wanted to start our family earlier than planned, but there was a sense of fear in her voice, panic almost. I telephoned a doctor but realising my wife’s condition was rapidly deteriorating, I dialled 999 and summoned an ambulance. Moments later, Emma clutched her chest, gasped what was to be her final breath and lay motionless in my arms. I gave Emma the kiss of life, but my efforts were in vain. By the time the ambulance arrived, the girl I loved was gone. A pathologist told me later that the flu virus had attacked Emma’s heart. This had caused it to slow down and eventually stop.

  The weeks that followed are a painful blur. So many good people tried to console and assist me. I’m not sure if I could have made it through my darkest hours without them. Pam and John Whomes had over the years become good friends with Emma and me. They did all they possibly could to help me following Emma’s death and they were there to help me through the dreadful day of her funeral.

  Jack Whomes, enduring his own personal nightmare in Whitemoor prison, wrote to me as soon as he heard of Emma’s death. Enclosed within Jack’s letter to me was a second letter addressed to Emma. At first I thought it rather odd that somebody would write to a deceased person, but when I read it I wept. Jack was thanking my wife for all the support she had given to him and his family and regretting the fact he had never been able to thank her in person as a free man. He asked me to let her family and friends read the letter, so they could understand just how much she meant to those she had tried to help.

  That’s why I am heading to London this dark miserable morning. Jack and Mick Steele’s appeal is being heard in the High Court. I should visit Emma’s grave because it’s her birthday, but I know in my heart where she would want me to be today. Emma had accompanied me to my first meeting with John Whomes at a pub in Marks Tey nearly a decade ago. Now that the campaign that was launched that night was reaching a conclusion, Emma would want me to be in court to show ou
r support for Pam, John and Jack. ‘They were there when you needed them,’ Emma would say, ‘you have to be there for them now that they need your support.’

  Helping and supporting other people is important in life, but in the past I have put so much time and effort into doing so, I have ended up making those I love suffer. As the train I am now sitting on hurtles towards London, I am thinking how in the late 1980s, I campaigned to raise money for a young boy named James Fallon who needed specialist medical equipment. I became so involved with his plight, I quit my job and rarely saw my own children. Sadly, James died before he could be given the equipment he needed. I think about how I was foolish enough to campaign to free Lisa and Michelle Taylor, two sisters who had been convicted of murder but whom I believed were innocent. This blind loyalty to two complete strangers eventually caused my then partner Debra and me to separate, albeit temporarily. When the Taylor sisters were released following an appeal, I discovered that they were in fact guilty of the murder and so spent a further three years in and out of court fighting for the right to publish the fact. Again, my family suffered because of the amount of time and money I wasted trying to prove that Bernard O’Mahoney was right.

  Hopefully today, Mick and Jack will be free to restart their lives because in many ways their release will be freeing me too. I have had enough of campaigning and talking about dead Essex villains. Once this case is over I want to visit the lane where Tucker, Tate and Rolfe met their deaths. I need to recall all that has been rotten in my life, remember those that suffered at the hands of the Essex Boys firm, try to make sense of it all and then walk away for good. Easier said than done, I guess.

  After leaving the train, I am still thinking about my bloody past when I approach the Appeal Court. I don’t notice the groups of TV, radio and newspaper journalists gathered near the entrance, but as soon as they see me I am surrounded. Microphones and cameras are shoved in my face and a stream of questions is directed at me. ‘Do you believe Mick Steele and Jack Whomes are innocent?’ ‘If they didn’t commit the murders, who do you think did?’ I answer as best as I can while still walking.