For ambulanceman Adrian Coggins, the nightmare of Hunger-ford appears unlikely ever to end: 'One sight will haunt me for ever. That poor policeman with a bullet in his back. He was just an ordinary copper doing his job. A man like me, with a wife and kids back home.'
Liz Brereton was still oblivious to the carnage being inflicted in Hungerford. Having tended to the needs of others, she was now free to set about her own domestic routine, as she recalls: 'I was just going to put the radio on, as I usually do, but I suddenly stopped myself. It was as if I wasn't meant to hear. I thought that as it was such a lovely day I might as well clean the bedroom windows.'
The windows of her police house soon looked spick and span, and Liz moved on to the next item on the agenda: the washing. With two teenage sons living at home, there was seldom any shortage of work waiting to be done.
Meanwhile, Ryan continued to make his way along South View, away from the Common. As he did so, Mrs Linda Chapman and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Alison, came under fire. Alison had heard shots coming from South View and had told her mother that she was concerned for the horses she kept there. Together they had decided to investigate. Driving towards South View, they too soon came face to face with Ryan. As the windscreen shattered, Linda Chapman felt a shot hit her neck. She nonetheless managed to drive down Park Street to the doctor's surgery in The Croft, where mother and daughter both received emergency treatment, Alison having also been shot in the leg.
Audrey Vaquez witnessed Ryan's technique. It was hardly sophisticated, as she would later reveal to the inquest. She had watched, terrified, from behind her net curtains as the gunman, bearing two rifles and one handgun, waited for a victim, any victim, to approach.
'He took one step into the road as the car came around the corner, lifted the gun and then fired it at the driver's window. I heard smashing glass and then the sound of a car crashing.'
Satisfied that his victim was dead, Ryan would then stroll casually away to seek more human targets.
'He appeared so calm and walked on as if nothing had happened,' Mrs Vaquez continued, almost as if it was like a fairground game. There was no emotion whatsoever.'
Ryan was firing left and right, reloading from a bag of cartridges on the chest of his sleeveless flak jacket. As the medical authorities realized the scale of the shootings, urgent appeals were made for voluntary nurses to report for duty. More and more police descended on Hungerford, summarily ordering people off the streets. Crowds piled into the Three Swans Hotel, where there was an unseemly dash for the bar. Before long, the busy market-day town had become a ghost town.
Jennifer Hibberd came within twelve feet of Ryan as he stood with a rifle in one hand, so she was able to observe him at close quarters: 'His face was sweaty, with red blotches. I could see he had a strange smirk on his face, half grinning.'
The gunman's strategy was to cripple first, then to shoot again to kill. The shots were multiple and came from two weapons. His victims were incapacitated by shots from the Beretta, after which the coup de grâce would be delivered by the Kalashnikov.
Near the other end of South View, as his own home burned, Ryan was killing again. His sixth victim was Abdul Rahman Khan, an eighty-four-year-old retired restaurateur, whom he shot twice with the Kalashnikov. Mr Khan had been in the back garden of his home at 24 Fairview Road, peacefully mowing the lawn. His wife, Bessy, would later describe how she had heard a terrible noise after her husband had gone into the garden. She heard him calling to her and saw that he had been shot. But Abdul Rahman was never to recover from his wounds.
Immediately after shooting Mr Khan, Ryan turned his gun on Alan Lepetit, who was walking along Fairview Road towards South View. The coalman had become extremely concerned about the safety of his children and, like the Chapmans, had set off to investigate. Ryan shot him twice in the arm, and then again in the back as he fled from the scene. Alan Lepetit could hardly have been better known to Michael Ryan because he was his immediate neighbour. It was he who had once helped Ryan put up his gun cabinet, as his wife Linda would later recall: 'He had wanted a hand carrying the Chubb steel case upstairs to his bedroom. Ryan always liked to be surrounded by an armoury of guns, even when he was asleep.'
Unlike Mr Khan, Alan Lepetit survived.
Ambulancewoman Mrs Linda Bright had been based in Hun-gerford for just three weeks when she found herself, with Mrs Hazel Haslett, the first ambulance crew to arrive on the scene. As they tried to enter South View to tend to the injured, they too came under fire. Although Ryan's bullet shattered the windscreen of their ambulance, it ricocheted off and they were able to make a quick getaway because they had reversed into South View, instead of driving forwards. But even after coming under fire, with Hazel Haslett having received arm and leg injuries from flying glass, they both continued to give Ryan's victims first aid, before going on to answer a second call for help and managing to rescue four people who had been shot.
'As we turned into South View,' Mrs Haslett would later recount, 'I screamed to Linda: "Get out of here", and we backed away. When I heard him fire I was petrified. We could see a man running away from him bleeding. We were trying to get to him when the gunman fired.'
As they set about their hasty retreat, they managed to send a quick radio message: 'Under fire, under fire', while they drove away from the killing zone. The ambulance crew sought safety just round the corner, where their priority was to warn other crews who, because of the volume of calls, were bound to be approaching. But because part of Hungerford is a communication black spot for the ambulance service, a problem already hampering the police operation, they were not sure whether or not their message had been received. So they headed off towards a nearby old people's home to make sure that their urgent message came across loud and clear. They had acted decisively and with courage and were later honoured for so doing. In many respects, though, Linda Bright and Hazel Haslett had been lucky that Wednesday, as they would be the first to admit.
Liz Brereton was not to have such good fortune: 'I was shaking a mat out in the back garden. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an unmarked car pull up outside our house, with a policeman and woman. And I remember thinking, ooh, hello, who's he dragged home for tea now. But then I saw my best friend also getting out of the car. I took one look at their faces and I knew it was bad news. I thought it was my eldest son, who had gone up to Wembley to see a Madonna concert. I thought that he had perhaps been killed during a traffic accident. All this was flashing through my mind. I thought, well, where is Roger if something has happened to our son? Then I thought that he was perhaps too upset to face me. When they told me that it was Roger, I said: "Don't you mean Shaun" - my son -because I was so convinced it was him. I had no idea what had been going on that day. As they talked about a terrible accident, I asked them outright: "Are you telling me that my husband has been shot?'"
Indeed they were.
T knew that Roger had been killed,' Liz would later explain. 'And people were coming round all the time to comfort me. But I would end up by comforting them. They would come into the house and just burst into tears. They were crying but I couldn't. So I would just say, "It's all right", and comfort them. All I experienced was a lump in my stomach. When I did cry, there was nothing much. It was as if it just didn't seem to want to come. Then I had a couple of good ones, but I knew it wasn't all. At the beginning I almost felt sorry for that guy, almost. Because I thought for anyone to do that, they have to be completely sick in the head. But that didn't last long. I have been able to harness feelings of hate towards him, even though in so doing I know that I only hurt myself. But he robbed me of a future, and I'm angry about that. I know it sounds horrible to say so, but the truth is that I curse the day his mother gave birth to him. Because if it wasn't for him I would be a happy, contented woman. We had all sorts of exciting plans together for the future. It's often said that life begins at forty - so bang goes that bloody theory.'
When, seven weeks later, the Archbishop of Canter
bury addressed a memorial service in Hungerford, not surprisingly his words were a good deal more measured:
'What happened here in Hungerford on 19 August shocked this whole land. A small country town, long in history, rich in memories, beautiful in its surroundings. Surely this is the very epitome of the England of which poets have written and expatriates have dreamed. That such a place should, on a summer afternoon, erupt in gunfire and terror, blood and death, was, quite literally, shocking to us all'
Just as the ambulance crews were prohibited from tending to Ryan's victims, so the fire crews were obliged to stand idly by for almost four hours as the terraced houses in South View burnt almost to the ground. It was, quite understandably, the constant risk of being shot at which prevented them from going in, as Divisional Officer John Cart explains: 'We tried to get crews in at about half past one, but because of the amount of shots being fired we had to withdraw. The fire is believed to have started about 1pm. But it wasn't until 5pm that crews were permitted to enter. When we did go in, all four properties were quite badly damaged and involved in fire. What we did was to put a spray jet at the end of the terrace to stop any fire spreading to the bungalow at the end. No personal effects were rescued from any of the houses. All that was left was four walls.'
After venturing briefly into Fairview Road, Ryan, who had now fatally wounded six people, returned to South View. By this time Mr Ivor Jackson, who had earlier received a telephone call from his wife warning him of the catastrophe which was unfolding, was also making his way back into South View, along with his colleague George White, a quantity surveyor. Mr White was at the wheel of the car, having volunteered to drive Ivor home after Margery Jackson's call. Immediately, his Toyota came under fire, an arc of eleven bullets hitting the car. As George White died at the wheel, the car crashed into PC Roger Brereton's white patrol car. Ivor Jackson, also shot and injured, immediately realized that one wrong move and Ryan would move in to finish him off, as he would later explain: 'I saw that this police car ahead of us had hit a telegraph pole. The policeman was slumped inside. Suddenly our car was raked with machine-gun fire, with these bullets starting to come at us. I got three in the chest and I've still got one left in my head, which apparently went in through my ear. I realized that I had been shot and so I decided to play dead. But I still thought that I was going to die. Then, with Mr White no longer in control of his Toyota, we crashed into the police car ourselves.'
As Ivor Jackson feigned death, he hoped and prayed that Ryan would not come any closer in order to inspect his victims. His good fortune, however, was to be Dorothy Ryan's misfortune, for as he lay motionless in the passenger seat of the car, the gunman's mother was returning in her car from the local shops. Dorothy Ryan had been in excellent spirits of late, for she was looking forward to starting, in a few weeks' time, a new job at a stylish health farm just outside Hungerford. She parked her car behind George White's and emerged into a scene straight from a horror film. What she was about to confront was all the more horrific in that it was her only child, Michael, on whom she had doted for over a quarter of a century, who was the marauding murderer of South View.
Ivor Jackson recalls: 'I then heard somebody open the door of the Toyota and Ryan's mum looked in and said, "Oh Ivor ..." and she then went hurrying along up the road.' Another witness, Chris Bowsher, recalls seeing Dorothy Ryan at the bottom end of South View, talking to a man who insisted that she should not go home. But she was adamant that she should, and pushed her way past him, aware that it was her responsibility to reason with her son. As she ran towards the home that they shared, which was even now being consumed by flames, she threw up her hands in horror. 'Stop Michael. Why are you doing this?' she shouted.
In reply, Ryan raised his gun. Understanding at once the danger she was herself now facing, Dorothy Ryan hastily changed her tone. No more remonstrations now; just an urgent plea for her own life to be spared. Amanda Grace overheard it: 'I heard a woman scream, "Don't shoot me", and then I heard two rapid bangs.'
As his mother slumped to the ground, Ryan shot her twice more in the back, from a distance of less than four inches. She had been shot with the Kalashnikov. Joining Ryan's toll of victims, now she too lay sprawled downwards in the road, just in front of George White's car. Ivor Jackson, still pretending to be dead, heard it all.
Dorothy Ryan was the eighth person to die since the first murder back in the Savernake Forest. In all, six had been killed with the Kalashnikov, two with the Beretta. In fact, seven of Ryan's victims, his own mother included, had died in the small area of South View itself. As the terrified people of Hungerford locked themselves in their houses and cowered for cover, and as a police helicopter circling overhead warned by loudspeaker those living in the cordoned off area: 'If you value your lives, stay indoors', there were now just two questions on everybody's mind. How long would Ryan be allowed to continue his slaughter without being challenged? And, more pertinently perhaps, where on earth were the armed police?
It was a question to which Ron Tarry, for one, certainly wanted an answer: 'I still didn't know what to believe. I kept saying to myself that this can't be true. Chicago, yes. Liverpool or the East End of London, perhaps. But Hungerford? Surely not. Many people felt awful for a very long time that afternoon because they just were not able to find out what was going on. All the time we were trying to get information. My daughter knew very well that she had to keep the children indoors and the windows closed. But it was a very hot day, so she spent the afternoon bathing the children -twice. Round at my friends' house, we had tea, watched the television and talked. It wasn't until 7pm, when I managed to find a way back into Hungerford, through a back way, that I began to find out what had been going on. The name of Michael Ryan meant nothing to me, although subsequently I remembered seeing him. But no one, it seems, really knew him. My wife knew Dorothy quite well, though - a very pleasant woman. Many people saw bloodshed. I didn't, because the bodies had been removed by the time I reached the scene. But I did see some of the cars, bloodstained and with bullet holes, smashed windscreens, and so on. We are a very small community and it of course affects us all. We were all in state of shock. I thought, what on earth can people do? What can I do? What can be done? I didn't know what to do -just that something should be done. That we couldn't simply sit around.'
A little later that evening ITN made contact with Ron Tarry, as did the BBC. He immediately agreed to their requests. Unbeknown to him, however, the Mayor was about to have a role thrust on him. For he was to become, both nationally and internationally, the 'voice of Hungerford', instantly recognizable by his gentle Berkshire burr.
At the Tunnel Club in Devizes, where Ryan had spent so much of his time during the previous few weeks, signing in virtually every other day in order to sharpen his shot, there was similar shock and outrage. 'Michael Ryan didn't give the slightest indication that he was a head case,' one of its directors would later insist. 'With hindsight, though, you can see that he was like a silent tiger.'
But the tiger had still only exacted half of his toll. Indeed for several hours on that black afternoon that same silent tiger had still to be located, let alone silenced. He was free to roam the lanes and alleyways of Hungerford, and thus to resume the killings anywhere, anytime and entirely at his whim.
Ryan now slipped out of South View, heading across the adjoining playing field. No one saw him go.
NINE
'Be still, and know that I am God'
During the early part of the evening of Tuesday 18 August, some sixteen hours before Michael Ryan embarked on |his bloody rampage, the Reverend David Salt, Hunger-ford's vicar, was wrestling with an age-old dilemma. So too were other members of the Stewardship Committee of St Lawrence's church. While representatives were keen to promote the concept of Christian stewardship, they were equally adamant that any events they might organize should not be, or be seen to be, merely another round of fund-raising activities. The Committee members concluded that the only satisfactory answer w
as to actually demonstrate their love and care for the community of Hungerford. But how, in practical terms, was this to be done?
'The next day, Wednesday 19 August, we had a kind of answer,' the Reverend Salt would later reflect. 'It was not the one we were looking for, of course. But soon there was to be no room for Christian theories of compassion and what we might do, for the task was all too plain.'
Shortly after lunch on that Wednesday afternoon the vicar was preparing for his weekly hospital visit. But before setting off, he had to make a number of important phone calls. However, each time he dialled a number the Une was engaged. He thought that for so many numbers to be so consistently busy was a little strange, and concluded that there was probably a fault on the line. Leaving the vicarage in his gold-coloured Mitsubishi Colt, he set off towards Hungerford High Street. This time it was ambulances, not antiques, which caught his eye. For he soon found himself staring at an entire fleet of hospital vehicles, all from adjoining Wiltshire.
'They all looked clean and shiny. So I thought that maybe Wiltshire County Council had taken on a number of new ambulances and they were having a joy ride, or something like that.'
Hungerford: One Man's Massacre Page 8