Hungerford: One Man's Massacre

by Jeremy Josephs

  The police view has long been that Ryan had planned to sexually assault Sue Godfrey, his first victim. When the young mother and nurse had realized his intentions, they think, she had tried to run away. But no one has ever succeeded in explaining why this first murder in the forest should have been a prelude to the massacre in Hungerford.

  It was precisely because the truth was no longer available that the door was left open for cranks of all kinds. The Sun paid several thousand pounds to one Andrew Preston for what the newspaper considered to be a first-class story. Under the headline 'Maniac Rambo was my Gay Lover - Ryan's kinky secret revealed', there appeared a graphic account of homosexual activity in the Saver-nake Forest. This 'exclusive' was later revealed as an elaborate hoax, the result of a dare Preston had risen to while in a state of inebriation.

  Despite the apparent credulity of all those to whom he told his stories, Ryan craved yet more fantasy. Imagine his delight, then, when he discovered that this was available via mail order. As if designed to cater specifically for his needs, Ryan is said to have paid £5 to become a subscriber to a bizarre postal game called 'Further into Fantasy'. It was a cruder version of the better-known 'Dungeons and Dragons', the most popular of such fantasy war games. Power is earned through the murder of enemies and monsters, with players growing in power and status as they execute various grisly assignments allocated to them.

  Opting to be a high priest of an evil serpent god, and paying £1.50 for each turn, Ryan adopted the code-name Phodius Tei. In July 1987 he received a final challenge from Set, the game's serpent god, who lived on the planet Dorm: 'You have been one of my greatest Terran priests and as such are worthy of the power I offer. But Phodius, you have one last point to prove . . can you kill your fellow Terrans? I offer you one last challenge. Will you accept, Phodius, to go back to Terra and slay them, to devour their souls in the name of Set the immortal god?'

  Two weeks later Ryan received what was to be his final message: 'When at last you awake you are standing in a forest, there is a throbbing in your head, a madness that is the exhilaration of the serpent god, you know what you must do, know what power is to be gained from this.'

  Ryan had indeed stood in a forest. Sue Godfrey had discovered that. It is reasonable to assume too that there had also been a throbbing in Ryan's head, for he had taken two paracetamols on the morning of the massacre. In fact many of those who encountered Ryan that day would later refer to the blank expression on his face. 'Brain-dead' had been the most popular phrase of the day. And Ryan would himself tell Sergeant Brightwell that the entire day had been 'like a bad dream'. Had he not therefore been acting out, in his own way, these coded commands received through the post, unable or unwilling to distinguish between fantasy and reality?

  Of course it is one possibility, but by no means the only one. And in any case no evidence was ever produced to prove conclusively that Ryan had participated in these bizarre fantasy games, despite an investigation carried out by the Thames Valley Police. It is, therefore, simply impossible to say with any certainty precisely why Ryan carried out the Hungerford massacre. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that much more will ever be learned that will reveal his true state of mind. Because, as the Sunday Times so aptly put it: 'his last shot blew the truth away'.

  As the Reverend Salt went through the hundreds of letters which were arriving each day at St Lawrence's, he found among the cash and cheques destined for the fund another poem, sent in anonymously by a member of the public. It bore no title, and was instead simply prefaced: 'Written following the sad events which occurred at Hungerford, Berkshire on August 19th 1987.' The poem reads as follows:

  That peaceful summer afternoon

  Old England faced a cruel reality —

  When in a forest's leafy glade

  One instant doubly robbed two babes

  Of innocence and a mother's love.

  But that was just the start. . .

  Before the sun set that day

  Many a Hungerford home

  Suffered a dreadful loss, -

  And none knew why.

  The Nation's heart missed a beat

  In disbelief. . .

  In flooded indignation, anger;

  Followed by bewilderment and shock

  Soon replaced by compassion, — love

  For those so cruelly bereaved, -

  Robbed of a loved one —

  None knew why.

  SIXTEEN

  'A basic failure of the police'?

  'Some people have said the police didn't do a good job,' Ron Tarry recalls indignantly. 'I don't agree with that at all. I thought that they did and I said so at the time to the Home Secretary. It's just all too easy to blame the police. It's true that there was quite a long delay in getting armed police into Hungerford. But people have to remember that the arms they were able to call upon locally were no match for a Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifle. And on top of that the Thames Valley hit squad happened to be situated quite some distance away.'

  But this is not to imply, Ron Tarry is equally quick to point out, that nothing could have been improved in terms of policing and that mistakes were not made. Such an approach was itself mistaken and far too complacent. Of course there were lessons to be learned. 'But in the end you can only blame Michael Ryan,' the former Mayor concludes. 'Because he had the weapons, the ammunition and the will to use them.'

  It was a typically balanced appraisal from Ron Tarry. Nonetheless, there were a number of people who indeed sought to blame not Michael Ryan but the officers of the Thames Valley Police. If they could not have prevented the incident happening, it was argued, then they should at the very least have brought the shootings to a much more speedy conclusion.

  In fact it was not just those people who might have had a vested interest in attacking the police who became most vociferous in their criticism of the armed response to Hungerford. Colin Greenwood, a former Superintendent and firearms instructor in the West Yorkshire Police, repeatedly made a number of scathing remarks. Nor was he prepared to quietly document his criticisms in the form of a confidential memorandum to Charles Pollard, the Assistant Chief Constable of the Thames Valley Police. For the retired policeman, who had gone on to become the editor of the magazine Guns Review, decided instead to go public, voicing his opinions to millions of television viewers. Appearing on a special Thames Television programme, broadcast some six months after the massacre and entitled Hungerford - the lessons, he was presented as the key and most authoritative witness prepared to articulate the case against the inadequacy of the police response.

  Greenwood did not mince his words: The basic fact is that Ryan went on killing people as long as he wanted, and the police didn't stop him. At no time did the police do anything to stop Ryan shooting people. That's a basic failure of the police. At no stage did the armed police confront Ryan. We know that the Tactical Unit [Firearms Team] was kept as a unit because it is said they operate as a team, which is really quite nonsensical. We know that the local police were assembled on the Common and at no time did any of them confront Ryan. He stopped because he got fed up with it. What you have to ask is whether this situation was dealt with properly. And if sixteen people were killed it wasn't.'

  At the heart of such criticisms lies the precise timetable of events on Wednesday 19 August 1987. What is accepted by all parties is that the first 999 call was made at 12.40pm after a motorcyclist had witnessed the attempted murder of Kakoub Dean at the Golden Arrow Service Station at Froxfield on the A4. Nonetheless, Ryan had managed to remain on the loose for more than an hour, killing his last victim at 1.50pm. But it was not until half an hour after that, at 2.20pm, that the Tactical Firearms Team was assembled and ready to go into action. The main reason for this delay was that the only available officers from the Team that day were some forty miles away, engaged in training exercises at the Otmoor army firing range. The consequence of this was that there was in effect no tactical firearms cover in the south of the Thames Valley police area
, where Hungerford is situated. In other words, by the time the Tactical Firearms Team had arrived in the market town, Ryan's last shot, apart from the bullet destined to penetrate his own skull, had been fired. The armed response, according to the critics, had quite simply been too late.

  That is not to suggest, however, that there was no armed presence before the arrival of the Tactical Firearms Team. Because for almost one hour before the appearance in Hungerford of the specialist squad, officers from the Diplomatic Protection group, who happened to be training nearby, had already made their way to the market town. Though no match for Ryan's armoury, they too were in possession of weapons. But lacking reliable information as to the gunman's precise whereabouts, they managed only to contain the area where he had last been seen. In fact Ryan had long since moved on, and was instead stalking the streets of Hungerford, picking off passers-by as he went.

  There were others who also perceived the role of these particular officers to be both weak and ineffectual. Even Major John Hathway, himself a former Mayor of Hungerford, felt compelled to speak out in the television programme in which Colin Greenwood appeared:

  'It was very unlike a military operation. The police seemed to me to be too keen on finding out where Ryan was before they deployed their troop. Under military conditions I suspect that we would have gone forward to try and come in contact with the enemy. After all, it was known that it was only one man. There was a small party, admittedly, who moved forward across the Common and deployed. But they only went about 150 yards before taking up a position of cover. From there they just looked on in the general direction of where they thought he was.'

  Chief Inspector Glyn Lambert, who headed the Tactical Firearms Team that day, is quick to repudiate the notion that members of his unit should have been despatched to Hungerford any earlier. For although some fifteen of his men had been ready to go into action, he had decided to wait a few minutes longer until the whole team had assembled.

  'They arrived as an organized package and were armed and deployed, rather than arriving piecemeal, ill-equipped and disorganized,' Chief Inspector Lambert explained to lawyers representing a number of victims' families at the inquest. 'That is the system that Thames Valley Police operates. And the system on this occasion worked properly. As for those officers from the [Diplomatic] Protection group, they didn't move from their position at Hungerford Common because they quite simply had nowhere to go. People have asked why they didn't move across the Common - to which I say, move where?'

  Charles Pollard, the Assistant Chief Constable of the Thames Valley Police, was not at all happy when he viewed the hour-long This Week Special. His force had cooperated with the television programme's makers, even allowing them to have exclusive access to police tapes recorded as the incident was unfolding, on the grounds that the public had a right to know.

  'It's not that we in the police force can't take criticism. We can,' he explains. 'And it is of course right that the role of the police should be closely scrutinized - not just in relation to Hungerford, but in all areas of our work. But that programme was a piece of biased reporting. In fact many people phoned in afterwards to say that they thought it was absolutely disgraceful. I happened to know, for example, that the programme makers were speaking to people from overseas who had experience in this type of incident, and when they refused to be critical of Thames Valley Police, they were edited out of the programme. Because that would have spoiled their line.'

  Certainly the coroner at the inquest largely exonerated the Thames Valley Police. Summing up before the jury retired to consider their verdict, Charles Hoile reminded the six women and five men considering the case of the extremely delicate balance which had to be struck. There was an inherent conflict, he explained, between the desire to retain an unarmed poüce force on the one hand and the easy and early availability of arms on the other.

  'So far as the police response is concerned,' the coroner told the jury, 'leaving aside the armed branch of the Force or that part of the Force which can become armed, the response of the Police obviously was pretty prompt because quite clearly one of the first people to be killed was PC Brereton answering the call. And he was not alone - he was with another officer in another vehicle and two other officers who were local policemen called to the emergency. Looking at it from that view their response would be difficult to fault. There is then a gap - because the whole character of the occurrence changes from being that of a domestic quarrel to something which is absolutely unprecedented, a man going berserk and killing.'

  The jury did not take long to return verdicts of unlawful killing. Nor did they seek to criticize the police. On the contrary, they went out of their way to commend a number of officers, including Constables Brereton, Wood and Maggs and Sergeant Jeremy Ryan. They made only one recommendation to the coroner, which he accepted unconditionally. Speaking at the end of the four-day inquest, Anthony Bridge, the jury foreman, issued a short statement: 'The Jury do feel that semi-automatic weapons should not generally be available and that an individual should not be allowed to own an unlimited quantity of arms and ammunition. However, knowing that this subject is under review by the Government, the Jury makes no detailed recommendations.'

  The jury foreman was right. The subject of the country's gun laws had indeed moved high on to the political agenda within a few hours of the massacre. Before long Douglas Hurd's Firearms (Amendment) Bill was making rapid progress through its various parliamentary stages, its proposals largely welcomed across the political divide. It came as no surprise that possession of the Kalashnikov assault rifle was to be outlawed forthwith. But the fact was that Ryan killed as many people with his Beretta semi-automatic pistol, and there were no plans to ban that. For, as the Home Secretary explained to the House of Commons at the time, there was only so much the law could do: 'It cannot guarantee against criminal behaviour. Nor can it protect us against the individual who, having complied with all the requirements, loses control in a fit of madness. All we can seek to do is to reduce the risk.'

  Would arming the police, or making firearms more easily available to them, further reduce the risk? Despite the experience of Hungerford, the police view remains firmly in favour of retaining an unarmed police force. Even PC Trevor Wainright, the local policeman whose father was murdered by Ryan, remains convinced that the British bobby should not be seen to be brandishing weapons: 'God forbid that anything like this should ever happen again in any town in England. But if it did, I don't think things would change at all. It would still take some time to get armed units to the scene of any shooting. It's perhaps the price that we have to pay for the policing we expect. Nobody wants to see armed policemen walking down the streets of our towns.'

  When it comes to the use of firearms, then, it is almost impossible for the police to please all parties. When a gunman had been on the loose in a quiet country town, they were criticized in some quarters for not having cornered and killed him quickly enough. And yet the previous year, each time the police had responded more speedily, shooting and killing a number of gunmen, there had been an immediate furore. Surely, a number of people had pointed out, such an approach was wholly alien to the long traditions of policing the British Isles. In any case, Mr Charles McLachlan, Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary, was soon able to confirm in his official report that arming the police could not be relied on to prevent any such similar shootings in the future.

  It is a view with which Chief Constable Charles Pollard, as he now is, heartily concurs. In fact, he goes on to argue that making weaponry more easily available to more local officers - in effect a policy of guns in cars - would be entirely counterproductive: 'The more you have policemen being armed, the more you'll get mistakes. This is precisely what happened in Italy about fifteen years ago. They changed the law to make it easier for the police to have access to arms, and since then they have had about 150 innocent deaths, and 235 people injured. I think that shows very clearly the side of the equation which we need to take into accoun
t. It's not that it's just a quaint tradition of ours to be unarmed - it actually means much more effective policing as a whole.'

  In his report on the massacre, the Chief Constable was at pains to highlight a number of factors which hampered the police operation. A combination of obsolete and inadequate communications equipment and limited manpower had severely hindered pohce efforts to contain Ryan. 'However,' he insisted, 'no force, even with the most up-to-date equipment, would have been able to handle the vast flood of varied information coming in during the early stages, particularly up to the last murder being committed.'

  Marlyne Vardy and Elizabeth Playle, both of whom lost their husbands in the shootings, were not at all satisfied with the outcome of the various investigations into the police's handling of the massacre. Why, for example, had there not been a public enquiry? Their nub of their contention was hardly complex: instead of being diverted away from the massacre, as manifestly ought to have been the case, the police had inadvertently sent the women's husbands directly towards the killing zone and thus to their deaths. Did this not constitute an appalling example of gross incompetence on the part of the police? Their formal complaints were duly investigated by an outside force, but a police force nonetheless -the Hampshire Constabulary - under the supervision of the Police Complaints Authority. But no action was taken against those officers who had allowed Eric Vardy and Ian Playle to proceed into Hungerford. For the two widows, it served only to add a legacy of anger and bitterness to their feelings of total loss and grief. 'All I ever wanted,' Elizabeth Playle would later lament, 'was an apology. Just for someone from the police to say sorry. But I didn't even get that.'