Hungerford: One Man's Massacre

by Jeremy Josephs

  Kakoub Dean had been spared. Little Sue had not. And not long after Ryan sped off from the petrol station, Detective Constable John Tuf ten, a scene-of-crime officer, arrived at the Saver-nake 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 9mm 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 1pm, 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 wasn't 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.

  EIGHT

  'A funny sort of grin on his face'

  'That Wednesday afternoon I was driving around and about the Lambourn Downs, calling on customers on behalf of my employers,' recalls Ron Tarry, the then Mayor of Hungerford. 'Then the BBC announced on one of its early-afternoon news bulletins that reports were coming in of a series of shootings in Hungerford. It said that someone had gone berserk in the High Street. I thought that this couldn't be our place. Not that I knew of another Hungerford, mind you. And then it said that it was Hungerford in Berkshire. So it had to be our town. My daughter was at our house with her friend and their children. I thought that they might well have gone down to the High Street. I immediately decided to go back home to make sure that they were all right.'

  As Ron Tarry drove home, the town was bustling with shoppers. For generations Wednesday had been market day and therefore the busiest day of the week. It is the one day of the week, Tutti Day apart, when the town really comes to life, with market stalls and shoppers all around.

  Michael Ryan was also in town that day. He arrived there just before a quarter to one, fresh from his encounters with Sue Godfrey in the Savernake Forest and Kakoub Dean at Froxfield. He was poised to embark on an orgy of violence and slaughter that would in just over one hour leave sixteen people dead and as many injured. During the six years of the Second World War, twenty-eight men from Hungerford gave their lives for their country, heroes in the fight against fascism. But it was to take Michael Ryan a little over sixty minutes to reach almost two thirds of that toll. He was about to turn a quiet Berkshire town into the most gruesome of killing fields. And in so doing he was about to perpetrate the worst series of shootings in the history of British crime.

  But the first thing Ryan did when he arrived back in Hungerford was to return home. He was seen going into 4 South View, and slamming the door behind him. According to a neighbour, Mrs Margery Jackson, he looked extremely uneasy: 'He looked at me in a very vague frame of mind as if he had been upset or angry and he went inside the house.'

  Having committed one murder and bungled a second attempt, Ryan was well aware that it would not be long before the police would catch up with him. In this at least, he was right. For two 999 calls had already been made, one at 12.40pm to the Thames Valley Police and the other at 12.42pm to the Wiltshire Police. This second call was from Kakoub Dean, urgently reporting that she had been shot at. Ryan's strategy now was to try to escape, to cover up as much of the evidence of his crimes as possible and somehow survive. After thoroughly dousing with petrol the home to which, twenty-seven years earlier, he had been brought back as a baby, he set it alight.

  Ryan's survival kit and three firearms were in his car, and it was his intention to set off again from Hungerford. But as he was about to discover, things were not to go quite as planned. Not that there were any problems with his survival kit, for this he had thoroughly prepared. Safely tucked away in the boot of his car, it included a respirator mask, a flak jacket, battledress trousers and a balaclava helmet with eyeholes. The rucksack contained a first-aid kit in a pouch, and there were also ear mufflers, a NATO poncho, a shoulder holster and a kitbag. In fact Ryan had been so meticulous in his preparations that among all the army surplus gear was a spare pair of clean blue and white underpants.

  Nor was there anything wrong with his beloved firearms. As neighbours, strangers and passers-by alike were about to discover, these were all in good working order. The semi-automatic Kalashnikov - his latest acquisition and indisputably the pride and joy of his collection - in conjunction with the Ml carbine and the Beretta pistol, could not fail, he believed, to ensure his survival. These two rifles and one handgun were also in the car, having accompanied him to Savernake earlier that morning. But in reality Ryan's flight from Hungerford was never to get under way. It would have done 'if only my car had started', the gunman would later lament. The engine flatly refused to turn over.

  It was perhaps no surprise that Ryan's car would not start. For almost a year he had driven it recklessly, travelling just under 18,000 miles and managing to wear all the tyres almost bald, when they should have lasted at least twice as long. That vehicle had been singularly abused from the start. Nonetheless, after his armoury, it had been the second and only other love of Ryan's life, and the source of innumerable squabbles with neighbours' children who threatened even to approach it or indeed its hallowed driveway. But now, spraying it with five bullets, he narrowly missed the petrol tank, although he succeeded in causing an explosion outside his home, already set ablaze by his own hand. However, turning his machine-gun on the car was one thing; turning it on his neighbours, quite another.

  Almost immediately, round at the back of his house, Ryan took aim at his neighbours. Roland Mason, a keen and able gardener, had been in his garden creosoting the fence of his home at 6 South View. He had planned to finish the fence while the children from number five were away on holiday. But he was never to complete the task, for he died instantly, after being shot six times. His wife, Sheila, then met the same fate, fatally wounded by a single shot which hit her in the head as she stood at the back of the house. The Hungerford massacre had begun.

  Kitted out in an olive-green armoured waistcoat, and armed to the hilt w
ith both weaponry and ammunition, Ryan would now dispense death and injury at whim. For those unfortunate enough to cross his path, destruction and death loomed. And in his choice of victims he would show no discrimination. A young punk rocker or a pensioner confined to a wheelchair: to Ryan neither age nor infirmity made the slightest difference - they were all legitimate targets.

  Ryan next turned his guns on Margery Jackson, the neighbour who had noticed him arrive home a few minutes earlier. She had soon after seen Ryan emerging from his home and start firing at anything that moved, even a neighbour's dog. Diving for cover behind tables and armchairs, she had managed to telephone her husband, Ivor, to warn of the impending danger. Ivor insisted on coming straight back home, and his employer, George White, immediately offered him a lift. Then Ryan spotted her.

  'I realized I'd been shot,' Mrs Jackson would later testify. There was a sort of burning pain in the back. In fact quite a few bullets came into my home. He was jogging up and down, running up and down the lane outside. He must have run up and down the lane about ten times. I think he was determined to slaughter us up there. It was all very quick fire.'

  As Mrs Jackson lay injured in her home, she could hear gunfire continuing outside. But at least she had succeeded in her desperate struggle to pull a neighbour, seventy-seven-year-old Mrs Dorothy Smith, inside. Mrs Smith was one of the lucky ones that Wednesday, particularly since, although deaf in one ear, she had upbraided the gunman for disturbing neighbours with his gunshots, unaware that the shootings had signalled the start of the Hungerford killings.

  Mrs Smith would later recall: 'I said: "Is that you making that noise? You are frightening everybody to death. Stop it." He just turned his head to the right and looked at me. He had a terrible vacant look in his eyes and a funny sort of grin on his face. He looked to me as if he was brain-dead. I realized I was talking to Michael Ryan. I had, after all, known him for twenty years. But he looked so strange that day, I hardly recognized him. So I just yelled out to him that he was a stupid bugger.'

  And she lived to tell the tale. Ryan then ran eastwards up South View and towards a footpath leading to Hungerford Common, shooting and injuring two people as he went. One of them was fourteen-year-old Lisa Mildenhall. Lisa was playing in the back of her home when she first heard the commotion outside. As Ryan stood near to her, she looked him straight in the face.

  'I saw this man jogging along the road. He was carrying a great big rifle under his arm as if he was going to fire it. I stopped at the front door and the man stopped jogging as well. I immediately recognized him as Michael Ryan. I fixed my eyes at his eyes and he smiled at me. He then crouched down and aimed the rifle at me. I just froze by the front door. He fired the gun and I can't actually recall being hit. I thought he was playing about and that it wasn't a real gun, and that the blood was a blood capsule. I remember thinking, what a mess, and turned and ran inside. As I was running I could still hear shots being fired. I said: "Mummy, mummy, have I been shot?" She looked really shocked and then I realized I had been. There was a lot of blood. I felt weak and fell to the floor.'

  Lisa had been shot because, like many others in Hungerford that day, curiosity had got the better of her. Whereas her younger sister was able to take cover as Ryan approached, Lisa had stood there transfixed and was shot four times in the legs and stomach, the bullets splattering her pink leggings with blood. She might well have died had it not been for the timely actions of Mrs Sylvia Pascoe, a St John Ambulance Brigade worker, and another neighbour, Mrs Fiona Pask, both of whom staunched her heavy bleeding while waiting for an ambulance. Unfortunately, as many of the dying and injured were to discover, ambulances were some time in coming, for the police had decided that it was too dangerous for the crews to make contact with the injured.

  The road where Ryan had played as a small boy was now heavy with the smell of cordite. Its paths were bloodstained, and there was shattered glass and live ammunition scattered all around. As Ryan took the path towards Hungerford Common, local man Ken Clements was returning from a stroll with other members of his family. Unlike Ryan's first three victims, Ken Clements had received a warning that someone had 'gone berserk with a gun'. He had not believed a word of it, and had even gone out of his way to reassure another neighbour, Mrs Josephine Morley, that it was nothing more than children larking about. But Ken's son, Robert, was not quite so sure: 'I felt I couldn't let him go up there on his own, so I followed a few yards behind. Then this military-type person jumped out on to the track and lifted the gun and fired. My father seemed to fold up on to his back. I stared at the person holding the gun and I looked at the fence and I thought, right, I'm going to have to make a jump for it - and over I went. There didn't seem to be any way of helping.'

  As Robert Clements clambered over the fence and into the adjoining school, he shouted out: 'He's shot the old man.' Ken Clements's sister and his two daughters did likewise, and ran, quite literally, for their lives. In fact Ken Clements died while trying to comfort his dog, which had been startled by all the shooting. When the pathologist examined the former soldier's body he was to find the dog's lead still clasped firmly in his hand.

  A little later that afternoon Ron Tarry arrived back in Hungerford. He recalls: 'When I came into the town, I ran into a road block by the Bear Hotel at the corner, to come up the High Street. I saw someone I knew and asked what on earth was going on. This chap replied to me that a bloke had indeed gone berserk and that he had gone and shot someone at the end of my road. As you can imagine, this didn't really help a great deal because I still didn't know about my own family. As the Mayor of Hungerford, I was well aware of my responsibilities in relation to the community. But I must be honest and say that my first reaction was entirely personal. Were my family all right? What about my wife? What about my daughter Judith and her two small children, Stuart and David, who were there that day? I thought that since I knew all the back doubles I would get back to my home over the Common. But that was also blocked off. So instead I went to some friends of ours. No one knew what was going on, although by this stage there was a helicopter circling up above. The telephone system was completely overwhelmed. But I was lucky and managed to get through after just a few attempts. I spoke to my wife and daughter. Both told me that they were all right. Very selfishly, I was enormously relieved. Because I knew that all my other children were out of town. I then watched the television to try to find out what was going on.'

  Liz Brereton, the wife of the Newbury-based traffic policeman PC Roger Brereton, did not have the television or radio on that Wednesday afternoon. She had returned to her home just outside Newbury, having completed her work as a home help. True, she had heard the sound of police sirens as she had gone on her rounds, but she had assumed that there had been a bad road accident and that she would hear about it from Roger later that evening. What she could not have known was that one of those sirens was her husband's. His patrol car was one of three ordered to keep a lookout on the A4 in response to what the police referred to on their radios as 'the Froxfield job', still unaware of the murder of Sue Godfrey in the Savernake Forest. None of these officers was armed. The first information reaching the officers in these early and preliminary reports was that no gun had been used. Within minutes, however, the message had been updated: 'Newbury have just had a call from a female in South View, Hungerford. We believe the bloke in connection with the Froxfield job is there with a weapon. Person in this area discharging a shotgun. One person injured at this stage. No further details. Over.'

  As Liz Brereton later put it: 'If you're a policeman and you hear about some maniac, you don't stop to think, I'm a traffic cop, its nothing to do with me - you just go.' She was right. Her husband had done precisely that and sped off towards South View, as had his colleagues driving the two other marked police cars. Between them they hurriedly devised a strategy. The incident could best be contained, they thought, by blocking off both ends of South View. PC Brereton's car would go to the west entrance, nearest the town, whi
le the other two would approach from the east, across the Common.

  As he made his way to South View from the end allocated to him, PC Brereton realized the growing seriousness of the incident to which he had been called. The police radio network was now buzzing with reports of further 999 calls. Urgently, he radioed for an update: 'One-eight, copy. Is he still armed, over?'

  'Bravo sierra five, we have no knowledge at present, over. We assume so,' came back the reply.

  That assumption was right. By now the gunfire in South View was almost continuous, as Ryan set about shooting at anything and everything within sight, including his beloved labrador, Blackie. As PC Brereton pulled into South View, police headquarters at Kid-lington was urging the very greatest of care: 'HQ to all mobiles. Please treat with caution. The last report is that this person is armed and has used a shotgun and a person is injured.'

  For PC Brereton, that warning came too late. In what was undoubtedly the most savage of all the Hungerford killings, Ryan raked the police car with two dozen bullets, from both the Kalashnikov rifle and the Beretta pistol. As they peppered the car, one hit the policeman's neck, fatally wounding him. In total he had been shot four times. Slumped over the passenger seat of the car, but still clutching his two-way radio, he managed to pass on one last message: 'Ten-nine, ten-nine, ten-nine. I've been shot.'

  It was police code meaning that an officer was urgently needing assistance. What PC Brereton did not know was that he had been fatally injured.

  Forensic experts would later reveal that the pistol bullets were mainly confined to the front section of the vehicle and the windscreen. But the firing had continued down the nearside of the vehicle to the rear of it, and shots had also gone through the back window. In normal circumstances the bodywork of a car can usually be relied on to afford good protection against a pistol. But certainly not from a weapon as formidable as the Kalashnikov. Furthermore, the ammunition Ryan used throughout the massacre had been carefully chosen. It was imported and of Hungarian military manufacture. This differs from ammunition used by Western armed forces in that the bullet core is a hard steel slug in a copper-coated jacket. Classified as armour-piercing, these bullets were far better able to penetrate through the body of the vehicle and its fittings. The unarmed police officer had simply not stood a chance. Afterwards, not even sparing a look for his victim, Ryan had just run off.