The Wrong Man: The Shooting of Steven Waldorf and The Hunt for David Martin

by Dick Kirby

  Neil Dickens agreed. ‘These speculations are totally wrong,’ he said. ‘The tragedy of this whole sad affair was the genuine mistaken identity of Waldorf.’ Steve Holloway concurred. ‘Personally, I think they were just going about their daily business,’ he told me. ‘Like you, I can’t see any credence in a decoy theory. I’d be surprised if they were actually capable of thinking that way and I can’t see a reason to do so.’

  So that’s the theory of them being a decoy dispensed with, but nonetheless their behaviour in the car was certain to draw attention to them. At the car hire company, DC Robert Bruce saw Waldorf, who at that time was standing on the pavement outside the company, ‘go to the Capri and leaned in to the rear of the vehicle and took what appeared to be a briefcase and brolly from the rear’. During his interview (and referring to the yellow Mini), DC Deane said, ‘I saw that Purdy was driving, the unknown man [Waldorf] … was sitting in the front passenger seat and he was motioning towards Susan Stephens who was in the rear seat, to keep lying down’. DC Cyril Jenner said, ‘… it had been observed that the front seat passenger kept going down as if delving into a case or bag, but this was some time prior to the shooting’.

  And during his interview with Commander Taylor, Jardine said, ‘I think it’s probably relevant to say at this point that on the approach to the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, DC Deane and I noticed that Susie kept ducking or lying down on the back seat. We also saw the front passenger from time to time was leaning over to the back seat and opening or tampering with a briefcase and some packages. DC Deane and I discussed between ourselves the possibility that Susie was either trying to avoid surveillance or had been told to keep her head down in case some trouble started.’

  Even David Still, the passenger in the Volkswagen van behind the yellow Mini in Pembroke Road, stated, ‘I also noticed a girl in the back of the Mini who had been sitting up and looking out of the back window and then lying down out of sight. She appeared to do this, several times.’

  This odd behaviour was unravelled by Lester Purdy. He explained to me that he had been part of a group of Second World War fanatics who bought up a number of ex-wartime vehicles and carried out manoeuvres, mainly in Wales, using large fireworks which they set off at ground level. ‘We were on pot and LSD,’ he told me, ‘so it was real to us.’ One morning after a party, Purdy’s address was visited by two men, whom he described as being ‘Special Branch, and armed’. A lot of the guests were still there. The officers questioned him about the manoeuvres and the explosions and asked if he had any political affiliations but Purdy gave them a truthful explanation as to the activities, which they accepted. ‘They could of easily busted us all for pot, etc., they saw it and joked about it, then left,’ said Purdy.

  However, Purdy thought that the Special Branch officers might tip off the Drugs Squad and this appeared to be confirmed a few days before the shooting when he, Stephens and a friend were driving in the King’s Road, Chelsea. He felt they were being followed, but as he told me, ‘I didn’t try to lose them, just made them aware we knew; I had nothing to hide, anyway.’

  But on 14 January there was something to hide. When Purdy and co. left West End Lane in his Capri, he did not believe he was being followed and after transferring to the Mini, his mood of optimism continued because as Purdy told me, ‘I must have been at ease because pretty much every red light we stopped at we all had a snort, Steve was chopping up lines on my briefcase and we were passing it back and forth, which is what we were doing in Pembroke Road.’

  The behaviour in the Mini does tend to confirm that witnessed by the police and civilian witnesses but what did the occupants of the Mini have to say about it? The answer is, differing versions.

  Purdy was being fairly ambiguous when he told Neil Dickens, and also his solicitor Arwyn Hopkins, ‘Prior to leaving the flat at West End Lane on the Friday, I didn’t take any drugs and I didn’t see anyone else take any. But when I got home, I took some drugs because I was shocked.’

  Susan Stephens was slightly less disingenuous. Telling the investigating officers that she laid down in the Mini, she suggested a contributory factor to her weariness may have been, as she later told a newspaper, ‘The night before, I had been to an all-night video party: E.T., The Poltergeist and lots of pot.’ Referring to the day of the shooting, she said, ‘Yesterday, I took a small amount of drugs. I had a line of heroin and cocaine, mixed,’ although she stated that this was prior to getting into the Mini. In a further statement made to Detective Chief Inspector Siddle in the presence of her solicitor, Michael Caplan, and referring to Waldorf, she added, ‘Steven is not an addict but he does take heroin, occasionally. I have no knowledge if he took heroin that day. Lester Purdy also takes heroin but I have no knowledge whether he took any that day or had any in his possession.’ Upon their arrival at the hospital and referring to Waldorf, Jane Lamprill heard her say, ‘Be careful what drugs you give him, he’s on heroin,’ and Stephens agreed in essence with that statement. This was taken on board by Dr Peter Opie at St Stephen’s who in treating Waldorf carried out ‘… tests for the presence of the Hepatitis B Surface and Antigen, as we heard that the accompanying female was a known hepatitis risk’.

  What did Steven Waldorf say? Probably the frankest of them all, he told Neil Dickens, ‘I have been asked if I heard Susie say anything about my having taken heroin. I have in the past experimented by smoking heroin but when I have taken drugs more recently, it has been cocaine. I would like to add here that having experimented, I am now against them. I do not consider myself to be an addict in any way.’ However, he added, ‘When we were in the Mini that evening, some time before we arrived in the traffic jam where I was shot, I had taken a line of cocaine. That means sniffing a small amount up my nose.’

  The last of Purdy’s theories is that when he ran from the car, it was said that he was in possession of a gun. Telling me, ‘The gun theory also doesn’t make sense; I ran for my life’, and I could find no one who disagreed with him. ‘I would have thought that most people would try to save themselves when being involved in such a firearms incident,’ said Neil Dickens and as Steve Holloway with characteristic bluntness told me, ‘he was saving his own arse.’

  But Purdy persisted that the police had put this rumour about. ‘The police knew I didn’t have a gun and it was very convenient that I got away; it meant anything could be said,’ he told me. ‘I was in the wrong place at the wrong time – surely you realise that?’

  As a matter of fact, I do.

  Blame was freely apportioned and responsibility abdicated. Martin agreed that he had shot PC Carr but added as a corollary, ‘it is his fault for actually grabbing my hand and wrenching my arm about.’ Martin’s father, blithely disregarding his son’s chequered criminal history, claimed that his conviction and sentence had come about because ‘he had taken the can back for the Waldorf shooting’. Following her daughter’s conviction, Mrs Patricia Stephens said, ‘My daughter is being victimised for being a friend of David Martin.’ Sir Ivan Lawrence appeared to blame the prison officers for not earlier finding the flex with which Martin hanged himself. Only in the case of Jardine and Finch did they say, in effect, ‘Yes, we did it, we made a terrible mistake and we’re sorry.’

  But when all was said and done, as one officer who was marginally involved in the case told me with masterly understatement, ‘It was not the Met’s finest hour.’

  He was right; it wasn’t.

  * * *

  1. This condition can materialise in as little as one month after being involved in a traumatic incident.

  2. For a fuller version of this heroic event, see the author’s book The Brave Blue Line (Wharncliffe Books, 2011).

  Epilogue

  Over forty years ago, I knew a detective who had a preoccupation with his looks, an overpowering arrogance and an unshakeable belief in his sexual attractiveness. He was a prolific womaniser although an indiscriminate one; on three occasions his dalliances resulted in him being infected with a dose
of the clap. As well as nervously avoiding the lavatory seat in the cubicle which he had recently vacated in the washroom, the rest of us grew mightily fed up with the way in which he admired his reflection. We mere mortals would simply glance in the washroom’s mirror to check that our hair was neatly combed; he preened himself for what seemed like hours in front of it. At last, I could tolerate this state of affairs no longer. ‘Tell me, John,’ I said (while ensuring that a crowd as large as possible was present). ‘If you could live your life all over again, would you still fall in love with yourself?’

  This brings us to David Martin, who you may agree was not dissimilar in several respects to ‘John’. No doubt, I shall be asked by the media in the years to come ‘Didn’t you have a sneaking regard for Martin?’ The answer is not something I shall have to ruminate about for too long; the answer will be a flat, unequivocal ‘No’. I did not hold him in any kind of regard at all, sneaking or otherwise. I described Martin at Knightsbridge Crown Court as being ‘the most dangerous man in London’ and although over thirty years have passed since then, I still adhere to my description of David Ralph Martin. Before and after that investigation, I met criminals who were tougher and more violent plus some who, like Martin, had no redeeming features whatsoever, but for sheer professionalism, coolness, resolution and ruthlessness, Martin reigned supreme. As far as I was concerned, Martin was a near-psychotic, out-of-control, manipulative, murderous piece of garbage. Harsh words? Yes, I agree but I happen to think they’re the most appropriate ones.

  Even if one were to accept – which I most conspicuously do not – his denial in court that it was not he who pulled the trigger when security guard Edward Burns was shot, he was part of that cold-blooded robbery and in possession of one of the stolen guns. There was no denying that he certainly pulled the trigger – three times – when confronted by Police Constable Carr whom he shot one week later; and it was not his fault that PC Carr did not die from his injuries. And six weeks after that, I am under no illusions whatsoever that if he had been given the opportunity to use either of the fully loaded handguns in his possession when he was arrested by DC Peter Finch and PC Steve Lucas, he would have done so, with murderous intent.

  Was there any truth in Martin’s assertions in court that he wished to acquire firearms in order to kill himself, in the event that he was threatened with capture? No, in my opinion, none at all. I believe that at the moment of his arrest, he wanted the police to shoot him, hence walking towards them refusing to raise his hands. Had that occurred, in his twisted psyche, he would have achieved iconic status, since he would have engineered his own death. And looking at matters from a common-sense point of view, why would anyone go to all the trouble – while being London’s No. 1 wanted man – to break into an office, to get details of people who wanted to sell guns and go and photograph the exterior of their home addresses, presumably prior to breaking in and stealing the firearms, simply to commit suicide? The whole concept is ludicrous; especially when you consider there are far easier ways of committing suicide, as Martin found out.

  I accept that at the time of Martin’s arrest in the Underground tunnel, he was not in possession of a firearm, nor did he have access to one. If he had, I have no doubt that he would have opened fire at his pursuers and would have killed or incapacitated as many of them as possible before, once more, attempting to escape.

  Martin was brilliant, certainly, in his knowledge and expertise when dealing with locks and security devices, but since he utilised that knowledge to commit offences, instead of strengthening the weaknesses he found in those security systems – which as I have already suggested would have made him his fortune by the security companies – is that something to be admired? Not by me, although with the values which are held nowadays by many members of the public as to where wrong is right and vice versa, I should think that my opinion is only held by a minority. And yet, ironically, Martin described himself as a security expert, a security advisor. At his trial, Martin told the jury that in late 1982, he had been involved in security work, adding that he had ‘reasonable ability’ in his field, including the ability to enter buildings. And while the Flying Squad was still hunting him, Martin’s friend Philip Lee told the press that he had seen him several times during the summer of 1982. ‘He told me his job was selling bugging equipment and he used to go out of town now and then, supposedly to see business clients,’ said Lee. ‘His flat was filled with gadgetry and he never stopped talking about it. He even asked me to make him some sort of bugging device once but he was a bit of a rambler. He used to go on and on and on.’

  ‘He was,’ added Lee, ‘a bit of a dreamer.’ Not, however, according to former Detective Sergeant Roger Clements. ‘Out of all the criminals I ever dealt with, there were only two that I regarded as being pure evil,’ he told me. ‘One was an IRA quartermaster and the other was David Martin.’ Martin was rotten through and through. He chose his lifestyle, nobody else. He did not have to become a criminal and the fact that he did, was his choice. I heard that when Martin was told that Steven Waldorf had been shot by police, he wept; call me Old Mr Cynical if you like but if he did, I should think they were tears of laughter. Controlling and cunning, it seemed as though his criminal acts were just one long dare, to ‘catch me if you can’. And when he was caught, whatever he had done was always somebody else’s fault.

  As for the escape from the cells at Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court, it was a widely held belief that he had used a metal spoon or perhaps a plastic knife to pick the lock of the cell door, except that on the inside of a cell door there is no lock to pick, just a flat steel plate. Nor did he use a duplicate key, for precisely the same reason. The answer is far more simple. As I mentioned previously, during the large number of journeys he made to the cells at court, his meek and mild manner lulled his captors into a false sense of security. It was Mick Geraghty who unravelled this conundrum as he chatted to Martin when he took his fingerprints; let him tell the story:

  He noticed that the jailer only pushed the cell door closed and did not secure it further. Martin obtained a sheet of Perspex in prison and when he attended the court and the cell door was closed, he slipped the sheet between the door and the door jamb to prevent the lock sliding home. At an appropriate time, he had only to push the cell door open and having worked out the route, walked out of the cells and out of the building. He said that he did not say how in his interviews, as he did not want to get the jailer into trouble.

  And there is one matter that all of us should remember: directly or indirectly, David Martin was responsible for injuries and/or trauma to quite a number of people and their families who feature in this book. This caveat also applies to any liberal-minded council who might, one day, be induced to put up a blue plaque to him, perhaps at the slum in Finsbury Park where he grew up, maybe at the stinking dump at Notting Hill where he spent his last few hours of freedom or else Hampstead Underground station. Mind you, I think Martin would have loved that.

  As he once said to a friend, ‘If you’ve got the bottle, you can make the world dance for you.’ And perhaps for a short time in London during the early 1980s, it did.

  Bibliography

  Ball, John, Chester, Lewis & Perrott, Roy, Cops and Robbers, Andre Deutsch, London, 1978.

  Cater, Frank with Tullett, Tom, The Sharp End, The Bodley Head, London, 1988.

  Fido, Martin and Skinner, Keith, The Official Encyclopedia of Scotland Yard, Virgin Books, London, 1999.

  Gosling, John with Tullett, Tom, The Ghost Squad, W.H. Allen, London, 1959.

  Graham, Winston, Great Cases of Scotland Yard, Volume Two: ‘The Wembley Job’, The Reader’s Digest Association Ltd, London, 1978.

  Kelland, Gilbert, Crime in London, HarperCollins, London, 1993.

  Kirby, Dick, Rough Justice, Merlin Unwin Books, Ludlow, 2001.

  Kirby, Dick, The Sweeney, Wharncliffe Books, Barnsley, 2011.

  Kirby, Dick, The Brave Blue Line, Wharncliffe Books, Barnsley, 2011.

&n
bsp; Kirby, Dick, Death on the Beat, Wharncliffe Books, Barnsley, 2012.

  Lawrence, Sir Ivan, My Life of Crime – Cases & Causes, Book Guild Publishing, Kibworth, 2010.

  Mark, Sir Robert, In the Office of Constable, Collins, London, 1978.

  Parker, Norman, Dangerous People, Dangerous Places, John Blake Publishing, London, 2007.

  Read, Leonard with Morton, James, Nipper, Macdonald & Co., London, 1991.

  Real Life Crimes … And How They Were Solved, Issue 38, Eaglemoss Productions, 1993.

  Roach, Eddie, ‘A Crime Revisited’, unpublished document.

  Rubin, Gareth, The Great Cat Massacre – A History of Britain in 100 Mistakes, John Blake Publishing, London, 2014.

  Waldren, Michael J., Armed Police, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2007.

  About the Author

  Dick Kirby was born in the East End of London and joined the Metropolitan Police in 1967. Half of his twenty-six years’ service was spent with Scotland Yard’s Serious Crime Squad and the Flying Squad.

  Kirby contributes to newspapers and magazines, as well as appearing on television and the radio. This is his twelfth true crime book and in his retirement he lives with his family near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. He can be visited at his website: www.dickkirby.com