Lifers

by Geoffrey Wansell

  9

  ‘He kills coppers’

  David Bieber

  It was a grey, dull Boxing Day in 2003 and two traffic officers from West Yorkshire Police – PC Ian Broadhurst, aged thirty-four, who had been married for just two years, and PC Neil Roper, aged forty-three – were out on a perfectly routine patrol in Leeds, when they encountered a monster intent on killing them both.

  The two men had been put together as partners just a few months earlier and had become close friends. They had even had breakfast together that morning with Broadhurst’s mother Cindy, and were in good spirits. ‘He was my mate, not just a policeman,’ Roper was to say later of Broadhurst. ‘He was just a genuine fella that got on with everybody.’

  ‘Boxing Day is generally a quiet day,’ Roper remembered, and as a result the officers were spending their time on patrol looking for stolen cars, or ‘anybody that is doing something that draws our attention’. In the short time since they had joined forces the two constables had developed an almost uncanny ability to spot stolen vehicles – and this day immediately after Christmas would be no different. Yet it would cost Broadhurst his life.

  In their easily identifiable police car, they were touring the border between the Gipton and Oakwood areas of Leeds in south Yorkshire when they spotted a car parked down an alley at an unusual angle – and outside a post office. A large man, with a dark moustache and dark hair, was sitting in the driving seat reading a newspaper.

  ‘I just basically saw this black 3-series BMW parked up on the causeway in a – how can I put it – a peculiar position,’ Roper recalled. ‘We went slowly past the passenger side of the vehicle. I looked in and saw this white man reading a Racing Post.’

  Broadhurst and Roper instinctively thought the car might have been stolen and radioed in to the control room to check. Their instinct had been right. The BMW had been stolen. The two officers climbed out of their police car and walked towards the car and its driver, but as they did so Roper became increasingly nervous. The man was huge and well-muscled. The two officers politely asked him to get out of his car and join them in their police car. He was then asked to sit in the back, while they sat in the front.

  ‘In the police car there is a button that you press which gives you the facility to record anything that’s being said in the car,’ Roper explained later, and a record of what happened next was caught on the tape. The man from the BMW confidently told the two officers that he was from Leeds, but that he had been born in Canada, and added, ‘Just to let you know – I did not steal the car.’

  His dismissive, almost arrogant, attitude did nothing to calm Roper’s nerves, and he decided that the safest thing was to handcuff the man, who was now clearly a suspect in a case of car theft. So Roper, the older of the two officers, got out of the police car and called another officer on his personal radio before he climbed into the back to handcuff him.

  This left PC Ian Broadhurst alone with the suspect in their police car. Moments later, another uniformed officer, PC James Banks, arrived and PC Broadhurst also got out of the police car to join his two colleagues. None of the three officers was armed in any way – apart from their truncheons.

  ‘I said to James,’ Roper recalled, ‘“When I’m cuffing him, can you just watch my back?” But then, as I’ve looked forward, I’ve just seen this gun coming up to my face.’

  ‘He’s got a gun!’ Roper shouted at the top of his voice, but at that very moment the man in the back of the police car fired four shots in the space of three seconds. The shots were all recorded on the tape inside Broadhurst and Roper’s police car.

  Roper was hit in the shoulder and stomach, but somehow made it to a nearby building and radioed for help.

  ‘I’ve been shot twice,’ he told the control room. ‘I don’t know about Ian, he’s down on the floor.’

  Broadhurst had been shot in the chest and had slumped to the pavement.

  The fourth bullet hit PC Banks, but he was saved from injury by the simple fact that the bullet had ricocheted off his police radio.

  Five seconds later, and with Roper and Banks now taking cover, the man in the back of the police car got out and calmly walked across to Broadhurst’s prone body. He shot him one final time, in the head, executing a defenceless serving policeman on duty without the slightest sign of panic or remorse.

  Even more terrifying, the tape-recording from the police car revealed PC Broadhurst pleading for his life. As the man pointed his revolver at his head, he is heard saying, ‘No don’t, don’t. Please, please no.’

  It made no difference whatever. The young officer was dead, and his killer simply ran off down the alley, abandoning his stolen car. Minutes later he hijacked a car at gunpoint outside a nearby betting shop and disappeared.

  What had started as a perfectly ordinary traffic incident over Christmas suddenly became a national tragedy. PC Broadhurst was the first British police officer to be killed while on duty for seven years, and his murder sparked a frantic, nationwide manhunt for his executioner. Yet all the police truly knew about the killer was that he was armed and ruthless.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Gregg, the senior detective on call that day, remembered exactly what happened. ‘It was as cold-blooded an execution as you can imagine,’ he said later. ‘This was a dangerous criminal who was on the run.’

  The only evidence DCS Gregg had that might help to establish his identity were two newspapers and a half-eaten chocolate bar, all of which had fingerprints on them and which he had left behind in the stolen BMW.

  Those fingerprints yielded no match to anyone in the police database, but a videotape from the inside the post office showed the driver inside the shop just minutes before the shooting. That, at least, gave the police an image of the man they were looking for. And there was also the recording of the man’s voice in Broadhurst and Roper’s police car.

  An audio expert, Dr Peter French, was called in to analyse it. ‘He’d made a claim during the course of the arrest that he was, in fact, Canadian,’ French explained. But to his trained ear it was clear that the man was American, not Canadian, and came from the southern states of America, although Dr French could not be sure exactly which of the southern states. He suggested to the police that the accent might be found in ‘Georgia, Alabama and, of course, Florida’.

  Then, in an effort to pin down the identity of PC Broadhurst’s killer, the police made a series of appeals to the public for their help to identify him. They got it.

  ‘We received an anonymous phone call, from a man who said, ‘I know an American guy. He has a gun and he has a black BMW.’ DCS Gregg recalled, ‘He just gave us the name Nathan. And a mobile phone number. Through that mobile phone number we tracked down a man using the name Nathan Wayne Coleman.’

  The police now had a name, and some idea of where he had been living, but they knew little else about him. They were soon to discover that he was a very dangerous man indeed, but that his name was not Nathan Wayne Coleman. It was David Francis Bieber, then aged thirty-seven, a 220-pound professional bodybuilder who had been on the run from a charge of conspiracy to murder in Florida for the past eight years.

  ‘He could’ve been a model. He was a good-looking guy,’ recalled Bobby Ammons, who grew up with Bieber in Fort Myers, Florida. ‘The kinda shape he was in is phenomenal. Of course, he drove around in, you know, a nice car. And he always had money.’ Bieber had also become addicted to steroids as a teenager, desperate to become an American Marine.

  By the age of eighteen, in 1984, Bieber had transformed himself into
a muscle-bound hunk, but one with no appetite for authority. After joining the Marines he rapidly realised that taking orders was not for him, and after just two years he was discharged from the service. Bieber turned to bodybuilding full time, entering professional contests and winning them. But he also developed a sideline in selling the steroids he had become addicted to illegally.

  Spending more and more time at the gym, Bieber had encountered fellow bodybuilder Markus Mueller, a German immigrant to the United States and as large and muscled as he was. The two men had become friends. Mueller had a small career as an actor, playing heavies in low-budget movies, but he also had a sideline in importing steroids from Europe – illegally.

  In October 1994, Mueller and his girlfriend, Danielle Labelle, were arrested on drugs charges, and both pleaded guilty. What did not emerge in Court, however, was that Bieber was also part of their operation. Indeed he had ambitions to take over from Mueller and run the entire business himself. As it turned out he also wanted Mueller’s girlfriend Danielle. They started an affair, and after just a few weeks got married.

  When she spoke on Fox Television’s show, America’s Most Wanted, Danielle explained, ‘I was seeing both Markus and David. I loved Markus but David was just fun to hang out with.’

  Just after noon on 10 February 1995 this love triangle came to the attention of the Florida police, when Markus Mueller’s dead body was discovered. He had been shot in the head and in the stomach. The body was found by Bieber’s wife – Mueller’s former girlfriend – Danielle Labelle, and it was she who called 911.

  In fact it was Bieber who had driven her to Mueller’s house – ostensibly to collect something she had left there when they were still together – and he was still there with her when the Florida detectives arrived, looking relaxed and as if nothing unusual had happened. The reason was that he had arranged for a hitman to kill Mueller, and thereby provided himself with a perfect alibi for the time of the murder.

  The detective in charge of the case, Barry Futch, quickly concluded that Bieber was behind the murder. ‘He had two reasons for knocking Markus off,’ he said afterwards. ‘One was the steroid business. And two was Danielle. So he just decided to get rid of him. And then he would have the girl and he would have the drugs … I told him that day, “You know you’re involved in this. And we’re gonna prove it.”’

  Bieber was to go to great lengths to make sure he was never caught, just as he was later to make sure that Danielle did not tell the world that he had arranged for the killing of her former partner, and had stolen thousands of pounds worth of illegal steroids from Mueller after the killing. It was to take the Fort Myers’ police several months to unravel the grim reality behind Mueller’s murder – but when they finally contacted him, David Bieber realised that the game was up and promptly disappeared.

  While the Florida police had been examining his alibi, Bieber had been setting about giving himself a completely fresh identity. He did so by visiting a cemetery in Georgia and finding the grave of a six-year-old boy named Nathan Wayne Coleman who had died in 1975. Using a technique outlined in Frederick Forsyth’s best-selling thriller The Day of the Jackal, Bieber bought a copy of the child’s birth certificate and got himself a passport using the dead child’s name.

  In the autumn of 1996, Bieber, now known as Nathan Wayne Coleman, left the United States and came to England, arriving through the Kent coastal town of Ramsgate on a channel ferry on 26 September, where he used his fake passport to obtain a six-month visa to remain in the United Kingdom.

  The drug dealer and bodybuilder was not worried about the time limit. He had already planned to marry a British woman, which would allow him to stay in the country indefinitely, and in March 1997 – shortly before his visa expired – he did indeed marry British girl Denise Horley in Cumbria.

  This then was the man that West Yorkshire Police were searching for in the wake of the killing of PC Broadhurst, and it did not take them long to find out more.

  DCS Gregg discovered that Coleman/Bieber had been living in England for the past seven years, working as a nightclub bouncer, while sustaining his addiction to steroids and bodybuilding. But he had also become a heavy gambler, spending about £300,000 in the three years leading up to the Boxing Day shooting in 2003. Gregg also learnt that Bieber had divorced Denise Horley in May 2002 and that this vain, over-muscled man, who wanted to become known as a gangster, had been living on the edge of the law for years, longing for what he called ‘respect’.

  On 28 December 2003, two days after the killing of PC Broadhurst, Gregg’s team of officers raided Bieber’s apartment. He was not there, but he had left substantial amount of evidence behind. ‘We found items in there which we knew were connected to the shooting,’ Gregg said. ‘Whoever had this flat had got an interest in gambling. A gun-cleaning kit was under his bed. There was a bulletproof vest.’

  Meanwhile, Coleman/Bieber was popping up on security cameras around Leeds; in particular he had been to several banks, withdrawing £2,900 in cash over a series of visits.

  Then the police got another tip from a member of the public. The manager of a storage warehouse in Leeds recognised the name of Nathan Wayne Coleman, and told them that he had a unit there. When the police arrived to examine it, they made a second discovery. It contained hundreds upon hundreds of 9mm bullets, as well the means for creating home-made bullets, including gunpowder and cartridge cases.

  The warehouse’s video-surveillance footage revealed that Bieber had been there recently, apparently arming himself. ‘It showed this character going in with one bag and coming out with another,’ DCS Gregg explained. ‘And we thought that rucksack was probably packed with ammunition. We were very, very concerned that now there is a man on the run, he is dangerous, and he has killed one cop and shot another. He is probably realizing that he’s going to be facing the rest of his life in jail. What has he got to lose?’

  At the same time as they were searching the warehouse, the police had submitted the fingerprints they had found in the BMW on Boxing Day to the FBI in the United States, having found no match on any British database. On 30 December 2003 they discovered that they belonged to the man originally known as David Bieber.

  The American authorities told the Yorkshire police a great deal about David Bieber, not just that he was wanted for conspiracy to murder, but also that he had disappeared completely in 1996. This knowledge made the British police even more anxious to locate their suspect – in case he tried to leave the country again to escape another crime.

  Ironically, on the very day that the Yorkshire police heard from the FBI about the true identity of their suspect, a member of the British public finally found him.

  Vicky Brown, a night receptionist at the mock-Tudor Royal Hotel in Gateshead, in the north east of England, recognised a man who had checked in at 3.00 that afternoon, calling himself ‘Mr Harris, from 2 Law Street, Notts’, as the man she had seen in newspaper stories about the manhunt for the killer of PC Broadhurst.

  Indeed Vicky Brown remembered exactly what Bieber looked like. ‘Very big, very tall,’ she said, ‘and he looked quite broad. He was wearing this black, woolly hat pulled right down over his ears, and a big pair of old-fashioned glasses’. She called the hotel owner at home and he telephoned the police.

  A team of officers arrived at the Royal Hotel shortly before 2.00 in the early hours of 31 December, 2003, New Year’s Eve. Bieber was in a front bedroom upstairs, alone and – the police assumed – prepared to shoot his way out. After all, he had nothing to lose. But this time Bieber was not facing three unarme
d officers, he was confronting a fully armed police team, including marksmen with high-powered rifles.

  ‘When he first came to the door, we didn’t actually see him,’ one of the arresting officers said later. ‘The door opened by about an inch, an inch and a half, and then slammed shut quickly after that.’ For several minutes there was tense silence, but the police knew that Bieber could not climb out of the window, and that his only way of escape was through the room’s front door.

  In the end Bieber decided against committing what would have been certain suicide in a shoot-out with the police, and opened the door, dressed in his underpants, with his hair dyed an extraordinary shade of ginger. His first words were, ‘You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man, would you?’

  Under the bed in Bieber’s hotel room the police found the 9mm pistol that had killed PC Broadhurst – fully loaded with fourteen rounds of ammunition – along with another 205 home-made bullets. Bieber refused to utter a single word to the officers in his hotel room after his first question at the entrance. Indeed, from the moment of his arrest and removal to a local police station under armed guard he said nothing.

  But when Bieber was brought for trial on one count of murder and two of attempted murder at Newcastle Crown Court in late November 2004, almost a year after his arrest, he comprehensively broke his silence about the killing of PC Broadhurst, testifying in his own defence before the jury, and denying that he killed him.

  Towards the end of his eleven-day trial, Bieber admitted being on the scene when PC Broadhurst was murdered – but insisted that the actual shooter was a friend of his from Florida, whom he refused to name. Bieber also denied being in the police patrol car with Broadhurst and Roper.

  To refute Bieber’s extraordinary denial, the prosecution, with the help of West Yorkshire Police, tracked down one of the telephone gambling companies that Bieber used frequently and asked their voice expert to compare the two recordings. He found the two voices ‘very similar’ in pronunciation. That evidence, together with the fingerprints found in the BMW that matched Bieber’s from the United States, clearly convinced the jury of six men and six women. It took them less than three hours to reach a verdict of guilty.