The thin-faced Cregan, whose wiry body concealed the viciousness in his heart, also cut a threatening figure as his left eye had been so badly injured that he had replaced it with a black glass one, giving him a look of particular malevolence. He would tell his friends that he had lost the eye during a fight with a man with a knuckle duster on one of his regular trips to Thailand, but the police believe it was forcibly removed by a member of a rival gang in Manchester as a punishment for Cregan disrespecting them. That was the company he kept and flourished in.
Indeed, it was a fight between two rival gangs in east Manchester that launched Cregan on the killing spree that would see him kill not one, but two, unarmed uniformed women police constables on a bright September day in 2012.
Cregan’s journey to those killings began in his native Droylsden, in a pub called the Cotton Tree just five months earlier. It was there in early May 2012 that a fight broke out between two of Manchester’s crime families, the Shorts and the Atkinsons – a fight over the Premier League success of the east Manchester team of Manchester City at the expense of their south-west Manchester counterparts, Manchester United.
There had been a feud between the two families since 2001. It started when one of the younger members of the Atkinson family, Leon Atkinson, hit David Short in the face for ‘looking at him’. That ignited a sustained, violent tension between the two families.
‘We had another fight after that,’ Leon Atkinson admitted later. ‘I had a fight with one of their nephews … two of their nephews. My brothers had fights with his cousins or nephews.’ But the feud escalated significantly in September 2003 when Leon Atkinson’s father Francis reportedly had his left knee cap ‘blown across’ a pub.
Not long afterwards David Short was run off his bike and his throat was cut, though he survived. The Short family become convinced that the man they called Leon Atkinson’s ‘right-hand man’, Dale Cregan, was responsible for the attack. Even so, an uneasy truce had been called when Leon Atkinson and David Short shook hands in Manchester’s Arndale Centre in 2008. ‘We just said there was no use in fighting,’ Atkinson was to say later.
But the war between the two families broke out again with a vengeance four years later with the row about football on that Sunday evening of 13 May 2012. It began when Theresa Atkinson – the ‘matriarch’ of the crime family – threw a bottle at a member of the Short family, Raymond Young, who promptly slapped her in response.
Mrs Atkinson warned him fiercely, ‘I’m going to get my boys – you’re all dead.’
The telephone records show that she did indeed call her son Leon and another son a few hours later, and they also showed that the following morning Leon Atkinson spoke to his mother again before contacting Dale Cregan.
Twelve days later, on Friday 25 May, the Short family and their friends once again gathered at the Cotton Tree pub in Droylsden. The Atkinson family had been planning their revenge for just such a moment. With the Shorts all inside the pub, and due to remain there until midnight, Cregan and two other men, Luke Livesey and Damian Gorman (known as Scarface), pulled up outside in a stolen car.
Moments later a man wearing a black woollen balaclava as a disguise entered the pub and let off a volley of seven shots using a self-loading revolver. He killed twenty-three-year-old Mark Short outright and wounded three other men, narrowly missing a fourth. By sheer chance the head of the family, David Short, was in the toilet during the shooting, and emerged unscathed, only to have his son die in his arms.
The gunman was Dale Cregan, who promptly disappeared from view while the police tried to piece together what had happened. Eventually, Cregan was one of several Manchester criminals arrested and questioned about the murder of Mark Short, but without clear proof he was released on police bail in early June.
By that time Cregan was living in fear of what the Short family might do to him, his partner Georgia Merriman and their four-year-old son in response. But as May turned into June, and then July and August, Cregan decided to prevent the opposing crime family taking any revenge whatever – he resolved to kill David Short.
‘I couldn’t get him out of my head,’ Cregan said later. ‘I thought if I kill him, maybe I will get a rest. He threatened my whole family. He told me, “The gloves are off.” So I was always going to kill him.’
Even though the police issued forty-six-year-old David Short with three official ‘danger to life’ warnings during those months, the crime family boss did nothing particular to protect himself. Indeed, he remained at his home address and went about his daily business as usual. That proved to be a fatal mistake – a mistake brought on both by his overconfidence that his own family would always protect him and his certainty that no one would dare to attack him.
On Friday 10 August 2012, Dale Cregan proved him wrong. He and his friend Anthony Wilkinson emerged from a van parked outside Short’s house in Clayton, Manchester, and burst in, chasing him through the house and out into the back garden while firing at least nine shots in the process. Cregan killed the crime family patriarch during the chase, but to make sure he was dead he then shot him in the head three times and threw a hand grenade under his body which duly exploded – effectively dismembering his fatally injured body.
Ten minutes later a second grenade was thrown at a house in nearby Luke Road, Droylsden, the home of a woman named Sharon Hark, although this time no one was hurt. The hand grenade was to become Cregan’s grim calling card, as WPCs Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes were to discover a month later.
But the murder of David Short did not prick Dale Cregan’s conscience. As he told Dr James Collins, a consultant forensic psychiatrist, ‘The night I shot David Short I had the best sleep of my life.’
He also told Dr Collins that Short had threatened to rape his sister and his son, and then to set the four-year-old boy on fire. It was his dread of reprisals, rather than the thought of killing David Short, that had preyed on Cregan’s mind. He was later to confess that he had been having fantasies about killing Short for years.
‘I could not get him out of my head,’ Cregan told the psychiatrist. ‘It was on my mind constantly, I could not put the thoughts away. When I was having my fantasies I used to think of stabbing him repeatedly, smashing his head with a hammer and cutting his head off. If I’d had time I would have cut his head off and his arms and legs. I thought if I killed David Short all these thoughts would go away. I did feel better after killing him. I felt better for a couple of days, but all the thoughts came back. The paranoia was so bad that I used to sit in the house on my own.’
To try to escape his paranoid fears, Cregan had gone on holiday to Thailand before he killed David Short, only to be arrested as he got off the plane at Manchester airport when he returned on 12 June 2012 on suspicion of the killing of Short’s son Mark. Tragically, three days later the police had to release him on bail while they continued gathering evidence against him. It was while Cregan was on police bail that he shot the head of the crime family.
At the beginning of August, the police had decided to re-arrest Cregan, but when they went to his house he was not at home, having taken his family on holiday to a hotel in Bowness in the Lake District. With the police still searching for him, Cregan killed David Short and was then moved around North Wales and the North of England by a series of accomplices, many of whom were being sought by the police.
At one point he stayed at a hotel and spa in Anglesey, but as the days passed he clearly developed an overwhelming grudge against Greater Manchester Police for not offering protection to him, his wife and son in the wak
e of the murder of Mark Short. It was a grudge that would lead to more murder.
In sharp contrast, Anthony Wilkinson surrendered himself to the police not long after the David Short killing. But surrender did not suit Cregan’s view of himself or his importance in Manchester. Instead he decided to cement his celebrity in the local neighbourhood, which had protected him for more than four weeks, allowing him to visit local pubs and shops with impunity. He resolved to do so by committing a crime so vicious and brutal that it would ensure him fame in the Manchester underworld.
At 10.14 on the clear, fresh Tuesday morning of 18 September, 2012, Cregan, using a false name, called the police and said that someone had thrown a concrete slab through the window of his house in the midst of a burglary and had run off across the nearby fields in Mottram, Manchester. When the police told him that they would be sending officers to investigate, he said calmly, ‘I’ll be waiting.’
The by-now bearded Cregan had planned for the arrival of two uniformed officers whom he intended to kill. He had armed himself with at least one hand grenade and the same Glock pistol that he had used to kill David Short, although this time loaded with an extended magazine to accommodate more bullets.
Two female police constables, WPC Fiona Bone, aged thirty-two and WPC Nicola Hughes, aged twenty-three, were dispatched to the address Cregan had given to the police, a vacant council house with its windows painted with whitewash so that no one could see inside.
Irrespective of the fact that the officers were women, and clearly unarmed, Cregan carried on with his plan. As the two climbed out of their police van and approached the front door of the house, he opened it and emerged brandishing the self-loading pistol. He then fired all thirty-two bullets in the magazine at them within a period of just thirty-one seconds, in a cold-blooded and utterly ruthless attempt to end their lives.
One of Cregan’s first shots hit WPC Hughes in the back, as she turned away from danger, only to leave her paralysed on the ground near the front door. He then pursued her younger companion WPC Bone, firing some twenty shots at her and killing her. At one point she had bravely tried to use her Taser gun to subdue Cregan, only to be killed before she could do so as a bullet penetrated her body armour and hit her in the heart.
Cregan then returned to WPC Hughes, who was lying defenceless, unable to move, outside the house. He shot her in the head no fewer than three times, but he did not even leave matters there. Cregan then took one of his signature hand grenades and exploded it near her body, causing her yet further dramatic injuries. Both officers had been shot at least eight times.
Having achieved his dream and guaranteed his notoriety in Droylsden, Cregan obviously realised that he would be unlikely to escape detection – even though he had considered taking a car ferry to Ireland. Desperate to avoid being caught up in a shoot-out with armed police, he drove himself to Hyde police station in Manchester in a stolen BMW, casually phoning his girlfriend on his mobile phone as he walked into the station and waited at the front desk to be arrested. Wearing a pair of blue shorts and a grey hoodie, he looked for all the world like a man without a care in the world.
When a constable leapt over the front counter, recognising him instantly as the man wanted for the Short murders, Cregan said calmly, ‘I’m wanted by the police and I’ve just done two coppers.’
When asked if he was armed, he simply replied, ‘I dropped the gun at the scene and I’ve murdered two police officers. You were hounding my family so I took it out on yous.’ He still had his mobile to his ear as the officer began to handcuff him, carrying on his mobile phone conversation with his girlfriend, seemingly oblivious to the two murders he had just committed in cold blood.
It was the final public act of a vainglorious, ruthless killer, though Cregan did admit to the officers who formally arrested him later that afternoon, ‘Sorry about those two that have been killed, I wish it was men.’
He may have meant it, though I fundamentally doubt it, as Cregan had more than enough time to abort his attack when officers Hughes and Bone arrived at his door. It is far more likely that the ever-vain Cregan was being facetious. That certainly fits in with the description of him by a leading psychologist.
Elie Godsi, a consultant criminal psychologist, said after his arrest that Cregan displayed all the characteristics of a psychopath and may have killed the PCs because ‘he wanted to go out in some sort of distorted blaze of glory’. He added, ‘In the criminal underworld there are not only people taken out because of turf wars and disputes … there is also a very strange moral code where people mustn’t be offended, you must save face … Perhaps in some circles the murder of police has some sort of kudos attached to it.’
‘Grandiosity is central to the behaviour of psychopaths,’ Godsi went on, ‘because usually their lives are quite pathetic, empty and meaningless … so they have to create a very distorted sense of their own self-worth. The other side of that is that other people are not important to them.’
Sir Peter Fahy, the then Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, also believes that Cregan wanted to be seen as a ‘folk hero’ by the criminal underworld by killing police officers before his inevitable capture for the Short murders.
‘I do think that was part of his plan, trying to get the hero status,’ Sir Peter said after Cregan’s arrest. ‘He handed himself in because he feared that if he engaged with police officers, he would have been shot. That’s why he desperately got into the car and raced to the station.’
But there were elements of envy as well as fear among the people around Cregan in his neighbourhood in Manchester. As one local resident put it later, ‘People like Cregan were living a lifestyle that was far beyond most people’s means. Trips away, decent cars, I mean it was pretty obvious what people are up to when you go to school or the nursery in the morning and someone turns up in a four-by-four with a blazing suntan.’
Violence, drugs and an insatiable appetite for local celebrity were among the ingredients that helped to turn Cregan into the killer of two innocent policewomen and two local gangsters. He may have had psychopathic elements to his personality, but he was also self-obsessed and manipulative, a bully who liked nothing more than to have people live in fear of him. He could not bear to go unnoticed.
That helps to explain why Cregan pleaded not guilty to four murder charges and three attempted murder charges when his trial opened at Preston Crown Court on 4 February 2013. Relishing in the extraordinary security at the Court, which included around 150 armed officers at a cost of some £5m, and the fact that the prosecution would have to lay out in detail the brutal reality of his crimes before the families of the victims, Cregan preened in the dock. He wanted the world to know who he was and what he was capable of.
Wearing a yellow sweatshirt, Cregan sat impervious to anything around him as the prosecution opened their case against him before the Honorable Mr Justice Holroyde. It was not until four days into the trial – significantly, after the prosecution had detailed his ruthless killings of the two policewomen – that Cregan changed his plea from not guilty to guilty in respect of their murders. But, equally significantly, he did not change his plea in respect of the killings of Mark and David Short; there was still his reputation as the leading hard man among the Manchester underworld to be embellished.
It was to be more than two months, after the full extent of his involvement in the killings of the Shorts had been revealed in Court, before Cregan changed his plea a second time and admitted those murders as well. The extraordinary publicity the trial received and the attention that was paid to his part in it h
elped to feed Cregan’s vanity and his image as a hero in the underworld community.
Finally, on 5 June 2013, the jury retired to consider their verdict after a seventeen-week trial. The only issue for them in Cregan’s case was whether he was to be convicted of the attempted murder of Sharon Hark in the wake of his killing of David Short on 10 August 2012 – as he had by now pleaded guilty to the four murders he was charged with initially.
But there were his accomplices and co-defendants to consider, none of whom had pleaded guilty at the outset, including Leon Atkinson, who had been with him when Cregan killed David Short, and Luke Livesey and Damian Gorman, who had gone with him to kill Mark Short in the Cotton Tree pub.
Seven days later, on 12 June, the jury returned the first of the verdicts – ironically clearing Cregan of the attempted murder of Sharon Hark. The following day Mr Justice Holroyde delivered his sentencing remarks. They provide an eloquent explication of Cregan’s crimes, but the judge was also intent on explaining to the Court the detailed reasoning that lay behind the sentences he was about to pass on the gangsters in the dock in front of him.
Dealing with the assassination of Mark Short first, Mr Justice Holroyde told Cregan, ‘I have no doubt that you intended to kill him, not merely to cause him serious injury … you were trying to kill as many persons as you could.’
Turning to the killing of Mark’s father, David, the judge went on, ‘I have no doubt that you had been planning to kill David Short ever since he had escaped death at the Cotton Tree. I have no doubt that you were determined to carry out that plan and murder the man you hated whilst you were still able to do so.’ The judge added that the fact Cregan was on police bail at the time was ‘an aggravating feature’.
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