Hungerford: One Man's Massacre

by Jeremy Josephs

  Assistant Chief Constable Pollard was not the only person hungry for information that afternoon. Ryan's own relatives were themselves extremely concerned to find out precisely what was happening in Hungerford. They too had been listening to the news. The gunman's cousin, David Fairbrass, explains: 'We had heard all about this mad gunman on the loose in Hungerford, and my mother was desperately trying to reach her sister Dorothy on the phone to find out if she and Michael were safe. Then we saw pictures of their burning house on the television and my mother was beside herself with worry.'

  Eric Vardy was to be Ryan's twelfth victim. A carpenter and driver for Norland Nursery College, he had given up his job as a manager of a coach-building company to be closer to his wife Marlyne, who was stricken with cancer. The couple had recently celebrated their silver wedding anniversary, when Eric had presented his wife with a beautiful ring. Mr Vardy was travelling in a white Sherpa minibus with his passenger Steven Ball when they came under fire from Ryan. Immediately before driving up Tarrants Hill, the two men had seen a police car and a crowd near a public house and assumed that there had been a fight there. Oblivious to the danger, they carried on up the High Street in search of an alternative route to their destination, a builders' supplier.

  Steven Ball would later describe how the van's windscreen was suddenly shattered and Eric Vardy's body 'jumped up and slumped', the vehicle then speeding off out of control before crashing next to a telegraph pole. Eric Vardy had been hit twice, just under the chin and in the side. He was to die later as a result of shock and a haemorrhage caused by the bullet wound to his neck. 'In my own heart,' his widow Marlyne would later reveal, 'I blame the police for having let his vehicle go through and not attempting to stop the traffic, or to warn them that there was a gunman on the loose.'

  Nor would Marlyne Vardy be the only person to have cause to complain about the tactics of the Thames Valley Police that afternoon.

  Leaving Tarrants Hill, Ryan then walked into Priory Road. It was there that he took aim at Sandra Hill, driving along that road in her red Renault 5. Taking advantage of the sunshine and clearly in good spirits, she had the window down and the car radio on loud. She had decided to take a day off from work in order to visit old friends. In an instant Ryan ensured that that day would be her last, hitting her with a single bullet fired through the open window. Graham Brunsden was one of the first helpers to reach Sandra Hill. He found the twenty-two-year-old with her mouth full of blood and a bullet wound in her chest. After he helped to remove her from the car, she was taken to a nearby doctor's surgery. She was dead on arrival - Ryan's thirteenth victim, but by no means his last.

  The gunman continued down Priory Road, where he broke into number sixty, a detached house belonging to Myrtle and Victor Gibbs. Mr Gibbs, aged sixty-six and known to everyone as Jack, had a reputation as a cautious man, always going out of his way to ensure that his doors were securely locked. One blast from Ryan's Kalashnikov removed all pretence of security, and Jack soon found himself face to face in the kitchen with the gunman. Immediately, the pensioner threw himself across his wife's wheelchair to protect her from a further burst of firing, this time from the Beretta. Jack Gibbs died of multiple gunshot wounds to the chest, while his wife, already crippled with arthritis, lay critically wounded. The shots were heard by the Gibbs's next-door neighbour, Mrs Sylvia Dodds, who would later describe her neighbours as a devoted couple wonderfully happy with one another'. In fact they had been sweethearts from their early teens. Their happiness together, which had spanned more than half a century, ended abruptly shortly after one o'clock that Wednesday afternoon when Ryan had burst in through their front door.

  From the Gibbs's home, Ryan then fired at nearby houses, injuring a man at number sixty-two and a woman at number seventy-one. Both were to survive. Ian Playle, however, would not. The thirty-four-year-old was clerk to the Justices at Newbury Magistrates Courts and one of the youngest solicitors in the country to hold such a post. He had come to Hungerford with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two young children, Richard and Sarah, on a shopping trip. They had set off from their home in Newbury in their Ford Sierra before running into a police roadblock at Inkpen Gate. At that Hungerford landmark, Elizabeth Playle had at first not believed that the men standing there were detectives, but her husband soon recognized them as regular visitors to the courtrooms at Newbury. Without seeking or being given a reason for the roadblock, they sought an alternative route into the centre of Hungerford, and drove down Priory Road, rounding a sharp right-hand bend.

  'The car started making a whirring sound,' Elizabeth Playle would later explain, and I turned round to ask Ian what the matter was - and there was blood pouring from his neck - and we crashed into another car.'

  One witness, one of the heroes of Hungerford that afternoon, heard from a truck driver that a little further along the road there was a family in trouble.

  'There was a woman in the passenger seat holding some kind of rag into the guy's neck,' he remembers. 'She was screaming, "He's gone, he's gone." I asked to see the wound. There was no blood coming out and there was no pulse. She was screaming hysterically, "I'm a nurse. He's gone, he's gone. Help me. Help me. Ian, please don't die." '

  Elizabeth Playle sat alongside her critically injured husband as she waited for assistance. But he was to die later from a single bullet wound to the neck from the Beretta. Ian Playle was to be the last person to receive fatal injuries at the hands of the crazed gunman of Hungerford.

  Quite apart from the burden of coping with her grief, Mrs Playle, like Mrs Vardy, was not at all satisfied with the conduct of the police. She later complained that inadequate information by the police officers who stopped them on Hungerford Common had resulted in her husband entering Hungerford from another direction when, quite clearly, the Playle family should not have been entering the town at all. She would further complain of inadequate assistance from the police in tracing her children, who had become separated from her in the aftermath of the tragedy. These complaints would later be adjudicated upon by the Police Complaints Authority.

  However, Mrs Playle's criticisms of the police were to cut little ice with the West Berkshire coroner, Mr Charles Hoile, who would in due course advise the inquest jury. 'We, as a nation,' the coroner declared, 'cannot have it both ways. We cannot insist on having an unarmed police force and at the same time expect the police force in an emergency of this sort to become armed and be available at the drop of a hat. We have got to pay for the privilege of having the police force which is on our side, not threatening us. It is an important part of our liberty, which most people would be very reluctant to do away with. Aside from the question of the armed officers, the police response was obviously pretty prompt.'

  Not prompt enough for George Noon though. Because, as Ryan made his way towards the John O'Gaunt School, he shot and injured Mr Noon as he stood in the garden of his son's house at 109 Priory Road, wounding the sixty-seven-year-old in the shoulder and eye. As George Noon lay critically injured, however, his son Tim was being spread-eagled and frisked by police. The armoured Land Rover, summoned earlier by Chief Inspector Lambert, had driven through the hedge and pulled up at the door of the Noon household. Tim explains: 'There must have been twenty police with pistols or machine-guns pointing straight at me. My sister Sue came downstairs as they came in and we were both given the once-over and searched. I heard one policeman say, "Shall I put him in handcuffs?" I kept trying to explain that I was not the gunman and that my father had been shot.'

  By a little after 1.45pm, the police helicopter had arrived and was circling above the town. It had been delayed fifteen minutes for repairs. On board was a police marksman, although his weapon was just a shotgun - clearly no match for Ryan's Kalashnikov. The helicopter was therefore obliged to land again, ten minutes later, to pick up a rifle for the marksman as soon as it had been delivered. As the helicopter swooped and searched, Ryan was still heading towards the school.

  Three doors away from the Noons, Ber
t Whatley saw Ryan approach the rear of the school. It was shortly before 2pm. 'He was walking up the road and turned into the school premises,' Mr Whatley would later explain. 'He had his head held down very, very low - you could just see the back of his neck - he didn't turn round and he was walking very slowly, and he had a handgun in his left hand, heading to the ground, and a rifle over his right shoulder.'

  Sergeant Paul Brightwell was now also in action. Chief Inspector Lambert had tasked him, together with his party of police constables, to investigate the school. Neither Lambert nor Bright-well knew at that time that this was indeed the correct location. What Sergeant Brightwell did know, however, was that his handgun, a standard police-issue .38 Smith and Wesson, a six-shot revolver, was not in the same league as Ryan's semi-automatic rifle.

  'I wasn't thinking of my family then. I was just thinking one thing: where is he? By now we were very much on our toes. We got called in for a quick briefing by Mr Lambert at Hungerford police station and the name Michael Ryan was given to us. There were lots of people, lots of information. I was given a map - because obviously I didn't know Hungerford - and headed off towards the school.

  Other parties went elsewhere. Heading up his party, Sergeant Brightwell had a handgun, as did all his constables apart from two who had pump-action shotguns.

  'It was simple, in one sense. "Here's a map. You're here. The school's there. Now off you go." We deployed on foot, very slowly, stalking either side of the road. You are looking around you all the time. We just didn't know where this bloke was. I was in the middle of the party, trying to listen to the radio, and relying upon my blokes to keep their eyes open. He could have been anywhere. I had to concentrate on the map and the radio. We walked slowly. It must have taken us an hour. At one point we got held up at Bulpit Lane. One of my PCs sighted someone in a house in a camouflage jacket. Since this partly fitted the description of the suspect it obviously couldn't be ignored. But that person was eliminated and on we went. I just kept on thinking that I had to get to that school.'

  During that bloody afternoon, shots were heard coming from South View. It would later emerge that this was part of Ryan's arsenal exploding, ignited by the flames. But since it could have been the gunman it had to be investigated. And then other sightings would be reported. As Sergeant Brightwell's party advanced, people would pop up from their gardens and out of windows, giving their views on where the gunman had headed. But much of the information continued to be either inaccurate or out of date, or in some cases, both.

  'We then found poor old George Noon,' Sergeant Brightwell would later report. 'He had been shot in the head. People were comforting him. We tried to get him out because he was in a bad way. I spoke to Mr Lambert about getting him out, but he decided that it was too risky to send any ambulances in until we knew where Ryan was. As we continued to advance, though, I had a hunch that we might well be on the right track.'

  Shadowing the Tactical Firearms Team as they went about their task were certain members of the press corps, jeopardizing their own lives and indeed the entire police operation. On more than one occasion Sergeant Brightwell had to forcibly evict them from the area.

  'We finally arrived at the school. But we still didn't know that he was there. My job was to contain the front and sides of the school as best I could, knowing that there was another party covering the back of the school. But there was a vast open expanse around the school, so that containment was not easy. I was reporting to Mr Lambert, but I knew he was getting so much information, I just told him that we had arrived and were OK. He sent down one of his inspectors to see how our containment was. All the time, the helicopter was around and about.'

  Chief Inspector Lambert had based himself in a Portakabin outside Hungerford police station, and from there established his firearms control, maintaining radio contact with each team as they went about their allotted tasks. But as the minutes became hours, he grew extremely concerned that there was still no definitive sighting of Ryan.

  T kept thinking,' the Chief Inspector would later recall, 'why the hell haven't we found him yet? Why the hell hasn't the heli spotted him? If he was moving about, as many of the reports would have had us believe, then it was almost certain that he would have been seen by the helicopter. Once the two other teams had dealt with their enquiries, I sent them off to join Sergeant Brightwell's party at the school. Altogether they had had to check out eight erroneous reports. Many had been panic-stricken; one even turned out to be a car backfiring.'

  At 5.26pm Ryan was spotted at a window of the school. Immediately Hungerford was declared safe for the waiting ambulances, although some earlier rescue work had been carried out by the armoured Land Rovers. It had taken the police four and three- quarter hours to pinpoint Ryan after they had first received notice of him.

  'I think that that must have been the biggest feeling of relief that I have ever experienced,' Chief Inspector Lambert explains. 'Because once I had made sure that the containment of the school was absolutely tight, I then knew full well that he wasn't going to be going anywhere.'

  For the next ninety minutes or so, Ryan and Sergeant Bright-well were to have a long and detailed conversation. From the point of view of the police, these protracted negotiations had just one objective: Ryan's surrender.

  'Hungerford must be a bit of a mess,' the gunman shouted.

  ELEVEN

  Emergency

  Shortly before two o'clock that afternoon nursing sister June Fawcett walked into the waiting room of the Accident and Emergency department of Swindon's Princess Margaret Hospital. Less than ten minutes later the waiting room had been cleared. The reason for the hasty evacuation was quite simple: having been alerted to Ryan's rampage through Hungerford, the department was to receive four casualties within the next few minutes. And with Berkshire's ambulance service warning that there were many more to follow, the nurse was well aware that there would be no time to deal with the more familiar workload of cuts, bruises, fractures and sprains.

  Situated some fifteen miles from Hungerford, the Princess Margaret was the nearest hospital with an Accident and Emergency department equipped to cope with the situation. Although the Princess Margaret, Swindon's district hospital, had 400 beds, the department was then able to take only fourteen stretcher patients. It consisted of a resuscitation room, two minor operating theatres and a number of cubicles. Attached to it was an eleven-bed observation ward, manned by Accident and Emergency department personnel.

  Although some nurses had experience of shotgun wounds, none had experience of those caused by the high-velocity bullets of a semi-automatic rifle. Staff were shortly to discover that whereas a shotgun causes a peppering effect, the damage caused by the bullet of a Kalashnikov is more likely to lead to extensive internal damage and in many cases to large exit wounds.

  The massacre had begun during the hospital's afternoon shift overlap, which meant that a few more staff were on hand than might otherwise have been the case. Soon the two nursing sisters, three staff nurses, four enrolled nurses and seven third-year student nurses were to face what must surely be the ultimate test for any Accident and Emergency unit anywhere: to provide a medical response to widespread and gratuitous slaughter. Medical personnel already present at the department that afternoon consisted of a senior house officer, a local GP working as a clinical assistant and a student of medicine. They too were to be put through their paces.

  In fact the hospital's service manager was already in action, informing the X-ray department, alerting the blood bank and, anticipating the grim outcome of Ryan's rampage, contacting the hospital's chaplain. As appeals went out for extra doctors and support staff to report for duty, routine admissions were cancelled. It was imperative that there should be sufficient beds to accommodate the injured. Before long, the hospital was buzzing with an atmosphere of busy efficiency. June Fawcett's diary notes:

  '14.15. An unconscious fifty-two-year-old male with a gunshot wound to the neck arrives and is taken straight into the resusc
itation room.

  '14.19. Another call from ambulance control; two more casualties with serious gunshot wounds are on the way.

  '14.20. The casualties with gunshot wounds arrive; a thirty-seven-year-old male with an injury to his left upper arm, a sixty-two-year-old female with injuries to her left hand and right side of chest, and a forty-nine-year-old male wounded in the throat and lower mandible. All are able to walk into the department. Quickly assessing them, I allocate nurses to initiate their care and treatment. The man with facial injuries requires the attention of the facio-maxiliary team, who are immediately summoned.'

  And so it was to continue throughout that afternoon and early evening, as Ryan's victims eventually arrived at the Princess Margaret, some having waited a considerable time.

  One young man in Hungerford that afternoon was not prepared to stand idly by waiting for the arrival of the emergency services. For Lance-Corporal Carl Harries, a veteran of the Falk-lands War despite his twenty-one years of age, was a man of action. For almost an hour and a half the off-duty soldier, at that time serving with the Royal Engineers at Maidstone in Kent, was to repeatedly risk his life feverishly running around the town tending to one victim after another.