Hitmen: True Stories of Street Executions

by Wensley Clarkson

  By early next day, Frank and Olga’s friends were so worried by her disappearance that they called the police. And back on the sleazy side of Santa Barbara, Moya and Baldonado were expecting their payment. Moya called Elizabeth at her home and announced, ‘We’ve done the job. When do we meet to collect the dough?’

  Elizabeth played for time. ‘I can’t get all the money right now because the police have already been round to see me about Olga.’ It was a classic Elizabeth lie. ‘If I start taking that kind of money out of the bank they’d get real suspicious.’

  ‘You gotta have some dough for us?’ asked Moya.

  ‘Sure,’ agreed Elizabeth.

  So a meeting was set up for the following day at the Blue Onion restaurant. Mrs Esquivel acted as the go-between because Moya and Elizabeth did not want to be seen meeting together in public. Moya had earlier warned Mrs Esquivel. ‘I’ll get real angry if she doesn’t come up with the dough.’

  Elizabeth offered the two drifters a cheque worth $200 and promised the rest of the money would follow ‘very soon’. The cheque had actually been given to Elizabeth by her beloved son Frank to buy a typewriter. Little did he know his own money was being used to pay off the killers of his young, pregnant wife.

  Naturally, Moya turned nasty and demanded cash. Another rendezvous was fixed up for a couple of hours later that day. This time Elizabeth handed Moya an envelope. When he opened it in his car a couple of minutes later it turned out to contain just $150. Over the next few days, Moya hounded Elizabeth for money but none appeared, except for a miserly $10 which she left for him in an envelope marked ‘Dorothy’ at the Blue Onion restaurant.

  Meanwhile police enquiries prompted by Olga’s disappearance had uncovered the full depth of anger that Elizabeth felt towards her daughter-in-law. When she was hauled in for questioning, she deflected attention by claiming she was being blackmailed by two Mexicans who’d threatened to kill her beloved son Frank. She even gave detectives descriptions of Moya and Baldonado – a curious move considering they both held the key to the actual crime that had been committed. The police then set up a phone-monitoring system to record any future calls from the supposed blackmailers. Elizabeth pulled the plug out of the recorder in her home to ensure she was not caught making her own incriminating statements.

  On 4 December 1958, police picked up Moya and charged him with suspected blackmail. He was placed in an identity parade but Elizabeth failed to pick him out. Then the tormented Frank finally cracked and confronted his evil mother for the first time in his life. He accused her of covering up the truth. But she still refused to admit her role in Olga’s disappearance. Meanwhile Moya was released and on his way out of the police station, he encountered Elizabeth and whispered to her, ‘I think everythin’ is goin’ to be OK.’

  Investigators then uncovered the truth about Elizabeth’s involvement in the bogus attempt to annul Frank’s marriage. Detectives also located Elizabeth’s dotty old friend Mrs Emma Short, who suffered from the early signs of senile dementia. However, when the police called round at her home she poured out the entire story about the murder plot and how Olga was to be killed in Mexico. Mrs Short said she was terrified of Elizabeth Duncan and felt an undercurrent of violence every time the two women met. She told police she’d been too scared to report anything earlier, but now she knew it was time to speak up or be accused of conspiring with her friend in the murder of Olga.

  Police obtained confirmation of Mrs Short’s bizarre claims from the equally scared Mrs Esquivel. Baldonado was immediately hauled in for questioning, but refused to talk so he was jailed on a holding charge of failing to support his children. Moya was then re-arrested for violating his parole on an earlier conviction.

  But there was still no sign of Olga’s body and Elizabeth Duncan’s lips remained sealed even though she was arrested and thrown in prison on a holding charge. In jail, she immediately began planning her escape and even offered bribes to other inmates to help her. Detectives knew they stood little chance of convicting anyone on the word of Mrs Short and Mrs Esquivel. They needed a confession from one of the main players or else they’d all walk free.

  Eventually it was Baldonado who cracked. He knew that Elizabeth had conned both him and Moya and refused to let her get away with it. So he led them to Olga’s battered remains – on condition that he didn’t have to watch them dig her up. Shortly afterwards, Moya also confessed. With Mrs Short and Mrs Esquivel both granted immunity from prosecution, would Elizabeth finally confess? Not on your life: she carried on spinning her web of lies.

  At her trial in March 1959, any suggestion that Elizabeth Duncan might be insane was thrown out by the court. A psychiatirst proclaimed that Elizabeth suffered from ‘what is known in medicine as a personality trait disorder, more commonly called psychopathic personality … But my findings are that she is not insane.’ All three defendants were eventually found guilty of murder in the first degree. Each was sentenced to death.

  Over the next three and a half years, a succession of appeals were made in a bid to stave off the executions. And the man leading the fight was none other than Elizabeth’s beloved son Frank. Eventually he made a personal plea to a federal judge in San Francisco for yet another last-minute stay of execution, but this time his appeal fell on deaf ears. Finally Elizabeth Duncan, Luis Moya Jnr and Gus Baldonado headed for the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison on 8 August 1962. Elizabeth Duncan, still an outwardly respectable-looking woman in late middle age, settled into the cold steel chair as if she was about to start a lengthy knitting session. She made herself comfortable before fixing her gaze on the two guards strapping down her arms.

  ‘Where’s Frank?’ she asked sternly. No one reacted so she closed her eyes slowly and took her final four deep breaths. At 10.12am, Elizabeth Duncan was pronounced dead.

  Three hours later Moya and Baldonado smiled pleasantly as they entered the same room. They sat in chairs marked A and B and continued their friendly banter even after a lever had been pulled to release the cyanide pellets into the vat of acid beneath their chairs.

  As the poisonous fumes wafted upwards their moods finally changed. ‘I can smell it,’ said Moya. ‘And it doesn’t smell good.’

  Ten minutes later both men were dead.

  Chapter Five:

  JIMMY MOODY O.B.E

  Combine the Kray Twins and the Richardsons with a sprinkling of guv’nor Lenny McLean, plus an IRA hitman thrown in for good measure and you start to get an idea of Jimmy Moody’s underworld credentials.

  And as they say in gangland Britain: ‘He may be dead but his spirit lives on.’ For Moody’s career spanned more than four decades and included run-ins with Jack Spot, Billy Hill, ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, the Krays, the Richardsons and the Provos.

  James Alfred Moody was number one enforcer for the Richardsons, did freelance ‘work’ for the Krays and became one of the most feared gangsters ever to emerge from the London underworld – all before he reached 30. And, just like the Krays, he worshipped his dear old mum.

  Moody’s first starring role came when he survived one of South London’s most legendary club battles at a venue called Mr Smith’s and the Witchdoctor’s, a cabaret and gambling house in Catford in the early 1960s. A fight kicked off in the early hours when small-time hood Dickie Hart started waving a pieces around and shot another villain called Harry Rawlings. Hart was then plugged on the spot. All hell then broke lose and Jimmy Moody ended up carrying the wounded, including Eddie Richardson and Frankie Fraser, out of the club before disappearing in a cloud of smoke. Moody was later aquitted of any involvement in the shootings.

  Some reckon the battle inside Mr Smith’s was deliberately engineered by the Krays, who wanted to dismantle the Richardsons’ powerbase. As James Morton says in his book Gangland Britain: ‘This was an attempt by the Krays – with whom the Richardsons were, at the time, in serious disagreement over the rights to provide security for a blue-film racket in the West End – to dispose of their rivals once and for
all.’

  Jimmy Moody’s reputation got another boost in 1967 when he was convicted of manslaughter over the death of a young merchant navy steward called William Day. Moody copped a six-stretch for that little number. In the clink, Moody became a committed body builder and on his release joined a notorious band of armed robbers known as the Chainsaw Gang which specialised in highjacking security vans in south London and the home counties.

  Moody was a quiet, reserved sort of fellow who tended to stand back on the edge of a crowd and remain in the showdows keeping an eye on things. As such he was an important member of the Richardsons’ inner circle. Moody was their official ‘enforcer’ – a godfather, feared and respected by the London underworld.

  One time, Moody, dressed as a copper, jumped out of a motor in the Blackwall Tunnel and forced a security van to stop. To prevent anyone raising the alarm, he leaned into nearby cars and lobbed their keys into the gutter. In 1980, Moody was on the run from the law after yet another ‘chainsaw gang’ hijack when he visited a relative’s flat in Brixton and was nicked for a series of blaggings involving a massive total of £930,000. He was then locked up in Brixton on remand.

  In those days it was still possible for inmates awaiting trial to have food, wine and beer brought in by friends and relatives. One Sunday lunchtime Moody’s brother Richard brought in hacksaw blades, drill bits and other tools. Within days Moody, his cellmate, IRA bomber Gerard Tuite, and Stan Thompson, a vet from the Parkhurst Prison riots of 1969 now banged up on an armed robbery charge, had begun cutting their way through the brickwork. On 16 December, 1980, they pushed out the loosened masonary of their cell, stepped onto a roof where a ladder had been left by workmen and were on their toes. Tuite and Moody vanished while Thompson was soon tracked down.

  But Moody’s story only took on legendary proportions after he went on the lam from Brixton Prison. Moody’s cellmate Tuite told him countless tales of brutality and torture inflicted by the British across the water. Moody even looked a touch Irish with his heavy build, thick black eyebrows and bulldog neck. Once across the water in Ireland, Moody’s murderous skills were soon put to good use by the Provos. He became their secret deadly assassin – a man who struck so much fear into Northern Ireland’s security services that at one stage in the mid-1980s the Thatcher Government assigned a three-man hit-team of crack SAS men to finish him off.

  It was then Moody coined the most chilling gangster-fuelled phrase of all time when he began referring to his victims as having been awarded an O.B.E. (One Behind the Ear). It went on to become the calling card used by many Belfast killers over the following 15 years. Moody himself fine-tuned his skills as a hitman to become the number one hired killer on both sides of the water. He was even renowned for professionally disposing of his victims’ bodies if that was part of the contract or making sure that death occured in a public place as a ‘message’ to others.

  But there was undoubtedly a human, caring side to this cold-blooded killer. While on the run in Ireland, Moody desperately missed his wife Val and their two kids back in Dulwich, South London. The cozzers almost nicked him in London when he flew in for a reunion with his son. He only got away when he was tipped off about a police and scarpered minutes before a posse of the local Old Bill swooped.

  And in the middle of all this, Moody even deliberately fed informers, including the British security services, with inaccurate information which enabled him to survive on the run for more years than anyone else – with the exception of Ronnie Biggs.

  By the late 1980s, Moody knew full well that he was in danger of over-staying his welcome on the Emerald Isle. The lure of London and all his old mates persuaded Moody to return to the smoke. He was convinced his reputation as a hired killer would keep him one step ahead of trouble – and the law.

  But the ‘smoke’ he returned to was a very different place from the one he’d left ten years earlier. Huge drug deals – usually involving Ecstasy and cocaine – had taken over from armed robbery as a way of financing the lavish lifestyles of many criminals. The stakes were higher and so were the profits. Even a hardened soul like Jimmy Moody was disturbed by what he saw. He warned his own children to steer clear of drugs. But then he was renowned as a man who would not even tolerate other people smoking in his company.

  However, Moody still had to earn a crust and, in the middle of all this, it’s rumoured he knocked off one or two of the most notorious faces in London. They’d got up the noses of their drug baron mates big time. Moody knew that his reputation as a real hardman had to be maintained in the face of all these multi-millionaire drug barons. In 1990, the cozzers named him as the chief suspect in the ‘plugging’ of a member of one notorious south London criminal family. Moody never denied his involvement. However, he told one oldtime gangster that he knew he never should have taken the job because that family had never done him harm in the past and now they were after his blood.

  ‘Jimmy knew he’d made a mistake and that he might end up paying the ultimate price for topping that geezer,’ explained the south east London villain.

  Moody even told his wife Val he wanted to turn over a new leaf and retire from gangsterdom before it was too late. He always defended himself in public by insisting he never once killed an innocent person. ‘Each and every one of them deserved what they got; they were toerags,’ he told one old mate.

  Moody got himself work in a pub in the East End. He had a new name, a new job and life seemed reasonably sweet. Even though he prided himself on keeping a low profile, Moody believed he was better off on familiar territory. As another old timer later explained: ‘You got more chance of surviving on home territory. There’s always someone to let you know the cozzers are sniffing around or a face from another manor is on your tale. It makes total sense.’

  But by the early 1990s Jimmy Moody’s list of enemies read like a Who’s Who of criminal faces from across both sides of the water. There was also the police, the RUC and the British security services. It was only a matter of time before someone’s barrel pointed in his direction.

  Moody was now known as ‘Mick the Irishman’ and he was finally awarded his own O.B.E. on the night of 1 June 1993, while drinking at the bar of the Royal Hotel, in Hackney. Three bullets to the head and one to the back from a hitman special – ironically, a .38 revolver just like Moody’s favourite weapon of choice.

  The fellow who shot Moody was in his early 40s, wearing a leather bomber jacket. The shooter had even first ordered his own pint of Foster’s lager and put two coins down on the bar to pay for it. Then he turned towards Moody and carried on blasting away as he slumped to the floor. The killer fled in a stolen Ford Fiesta that was parked up just outside the pub.

  At the time of his demise, Jimmy Moody had been living in Wadeson Street, a back alley off Mare Street, in Hackney. Some reckoned that Moody was topped because he was banging someone’s missus. Others pointed the finger at a power-struggle between two south London gangs. Then there was the IRA and the British security services.

  Frankie Fraser in his book Mad Frank has another take on Jimmy Moody’s demise: ‘It now turns out that Jimmy Moody was working in a pub at the back of Walworth. He’d been in the area for ten years. He wasn’t an out-and-out nightclubber so he could have been there and very, very few people would know who he was. He’s done quite a bit of bird and now he took it as a personal thing to keep out. It was a personal challenge for him. He could be stubborn and obstinate, a good man but a loner. He’d be content to do his work and watch the telly knowing that every day was a winner. That’s how he would look at it.’

  The mother of the one of Moody’s most recent victims said: ‘I’m glad Moody’s dead. My family is overjoyed. He got it the way he gave it out. I’m glad he didn’t die straight away. That man was evil and I hope he rots in hell.’

  Jimmy Moody was a unique modern day figure whose activities have had an ominous knock-on effect on Britain’s criminal underworld to this day. He perfectly encapsulated the archtypical London cri
minal. But he’d incurred the wrath of numerous gangsters and, as we now know, even members of the Provisional IRA. So it was no surprise that a price was put on his head.

  Jimmy Moody pulled no punches. His life revolved around violence, black humour, the bizarre and the unemotional. But he was prepared to go beyond those traditional boundaries in order to make his name in the underworld. If you live by the sword you will eventually die by it…

  Chapter Six:

  BARRY THE BASTARD

  Every morning, private eye Barry Trigwell’s colleague John Waight picked him up from his home in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, because Trigwell was banned from driving. When Waight arrived on Wednesday, 8 February 1995 and spotted the kitten mewing on the doorstep, he knew something was wrong. He rang the doorbell. No answer. He dialled Trigwell on his mobile phone. Still no answer.

  Waight looked up and down the quiet cul-de-sac of Fowey Close. It was deserted. Then he peered through the lounge window of the modest, three-bedroomed red-brick house and saw bloodstains on the carpet. He called the police.

  Inside the house, officers found a trail of blood stretching from the lounge to the bathroom. Trigwell’s battered body, clad only in a pair of trousers, was floating in the half-filled bath. He’d been repeatedly beaten with a blunt object and had suffered severe fractures to his skull, face and body. His blood-soaked shirt was found discarded in the bathroom. It later emerged that the gun used by his attackers had failed to go off so they’d used a poker to batter Trigwell to death.

  Police quickly established from neighbours that, at 7pm the previous evening, Barry Trigwell had arrived home after a meal alone at his local Indian restaurant. It looked as if he’d only been back in the house for a few minutes when there was a knock at the door.