Hitmen: True Stories of Street Executions

by Wensley Clarkson

  But the last straw in their so-called relationship came when Holmes asked Audrey to a charity function. She turned up to find him sitting at a table with his wife. Holmes saw her and persuaded her to stay. A few days later, Holmes arranged to meet Audrey in a local pub. He said he was also meeting a man known as Banjo. Holmes was late, as usual, so Audrey introduced herself to Banjo who immediately hinted at a mysterious background in the Armed Forces. ‘I met him several times over the next couple of months. I knew he was involved in some big business deal with John, but I never dreamed they could be plotting a double murder,’ Audrey later recalled.

  In fact, John Holmes had recruited his ex-cellmate Paul Thorlsog – a former travelling circus clown known as Banjo – as the hitman who would wipe Sylvia Paterson’s stepson Paul and his wife Sarah off the face of the earth. Banjo later recalled, ‘I was asked if I was going to be discreet and I said, “Yes – I am a professional.” But I had no intention of carrying out any killing. My intention was, once I got some money in my pocket, I’d disappear. Sylvia offered me £20,000 per person. But she couldn’t make up her mind how she wanted it to happen.’

  It was eventually agreed that Banjo would murder Paul and Sarah as they celebrated their 14th wedding anniversary on 27 April 1999. As Banjo later explained: ‘For Sylvia it was all a matter of diabolical greed. She wanted to get her hands on the money. For John it was all a game. He liked to act like God and didn’t want to look stupid in front of his criminal friends. He always had to be the big man.’ However, 12 days before the designated day of the hit, Banjo the clown panicked and went to the police.

  Detectives immediately launched Operation Gatehouse and sent in an undercover cop, whom Banjo introduced to Holmes and Peterson as a soldier more willing and able to carry out the contract. Paterson and Holmes were secretly tape-recorded as they talked about the intended murder and their scheme was uncovered before the killings could take place. At one stage, Holmes even told the undercover cop he could easily get ‘Ruud Gullits’ – rhyming slang for bullets. And he referred to someone being sent to a ‘warm place’ – a grave.

  The next day both Holmes and Paterson were arrested.

  At their trial at Manchester Crown Court, circus clown Banjo donned his civvies – a dapper grey pinstripe suit, a flat-top haircut and handlebar moustache – to tell the jury how Holmes and Paterson tried to recruit him as a hitman. Banjo/Thorlsog told the court: ‘I was just interested in making some money. Who wouldn’t?’ He said he discussed the double hit during a series of meetings with Holmes and Paterson. He even said she admitted she wanted her stepson and his wife dead so she could reclaim her stake in the family business.

  In court, Sylvia Paterson claimed she hired Banjo the clown purely to spy on her husband, whom she suspected was having an affair with a married woman. She also revealed to the court the full extent of her appalling relationship with her stepson Paul and his wife Sarah. How they’d first met at the couple’s house when Sylvia was going with Ken Paterson to a cocktail party in December 1993. Dressed in a camel-coloured frockcoat, Paterson turned towards the jury and said, ‘I was probably there for 15 minutes. Paul had a discussion with his father and Sarah didn’t say anything. I was trying to talk to their little boy but it was difficult because he was having his dinner. We then went straight out of the front door and I have never been back since.’ Sylvia and her elderly husband, Ken, had started divorce proceedings just before the trial started but Ken loyally stood by his wife and was even called as a defence witness during the proceedings.

  Manchester Crown Court then heard how John Holmes had stayed in close contact with escort agency boss Audrey and she’d even visited him in prison while he awaited trial. However, after giving evidence against him, Audrey received two death threats, which were taken so seriously that she was given round-the-clock police protection. ‘All my feelings for him have now disappeared. But I really did love him despite everything,’ Audrey later explained.

  Sylvia Paterson’s QC maintained throughout the trial that she was innocent. But Judge Sir Rhys Davies called Paterson the ‘driving force’ behind the plot. And he told John Holmes: ‘You enjoyed a very comfortable lifestyle. There is no one but yourself to blame for its destruction.’ Neither of the defendants showed any emotion when the jury came back with a guilty verdict for both of them. Holmes and Paterson were each jailed for nine years for plotting the hitman murder of her stepson and his wife.

  After the trial, intended targets Paul and Sarah Paterson said, ‘We are very relieved. We knew nothing of the plot to kill us until the police came to inform us. We would like to thank the police for their unstinting support and can now look forward to returning to a normal family life.’

  Meanwhile Banjo the clown remains in protective custody amid claims that Holmes has put a £250,000 contract out on his life.

  Chapter Nine:

  SPANISH BEDLAM

  Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, was a picturesque place full of sunshine and good humour – until British holidaymakers started turning up in droves more than 20 years ago. They bring much of the money to the island but they also bring much of the trouble.

  Many reckon that the area round Playa de las Americas is fast on its way to displacing the Costa del Sol as Spain’s preeminent ‘Costa del Crime’. Almost 20,000 Brits live permanently in the south of Tenerife and a large number of them are criminals who have a strong grip on the island’s underworld, controlling the flow of drugs into Tenerife and dominating the shady world of timeshare. It’s said that if you cross any of the criminal element you’re likely to get a visit from men with baseball bats. Or you just disappear.

  So Mick O’Hara, Gary Holmes, Stanley Stewart and Jacqueline Ambler were not exactly fish out of water. Holmes and Stewart both had records back in Britain for violent offences. O’Hara had seven convictions for offences including robbery and assault. Thirty-three-year-old Jacqui Ambler, from Rossington, near Doncaster, also had a couple of convictions, although her father later disputed this claim.

  She’d divorced the father of her son and arrived on Tenerife with her new partner, Mick O’Hara, from Wakefield, Yorks, in March 1995. Back in Britain, he’d run a coal delivery firm and she’d helped out with the paperwork. They bought a British-style pub called Stevie’s Bar on an avenue planted with palm trees that ran between a shopping precinct and an apartment hotel at the resort of Los Cristianos. It was a bizarre, overdeveloped district filled with rapidly constructed buildings completely out of sync with many of the older style properties.

  Jacqui Ambler’s bar wasn’t exactly an investment in the future. She and Mick had fallen into the classic trap of believing that the rest of their lives could be turned into a holiday on the sunshine island. She’d even hoped that her 6-foot, 15-stone lover’s violent temper might change in a warmer climate.

  But that dream soon turned into a nightmare when Jacqui discovered that 39-year-old Mick’s temper had got worse. Soon, neighbours in Playa de las Americas noticed the bruises and scars on her face and upper body.

  The beatings rapidly got so bad that Jacqui decided on some drastic action. She got talking to bar regular Gary Holmes, from Littlehampton, Sussex, and asked to meet him later in a neighbouring bar. That was when she told him she wanted Mick to be killed. Jacqui informed him that her young son, who was on holiday, would be returning to England the following Tuesday and that she believed Mick O’Hara would kill her the moment the boy left the island. She said that Mick, in front of the boy, had ‘previously’ told her she had two years left ‘to live’; that she was ‘of no more use to him’.

  Holmes and Jacqui agreed a plan to carry out the killing later that same day when all the customers had left Stevie’s Bar.

  Holmes, 31, later claimed that Jacqui offered him £4,000 as a down payment and a further £50,000 to be handed over later in Britain.

  On 5 September 1995, Jacqui Ambler went out the back of Stevie’s Bar saying she had to put the rubbish out. Holmes’ 31-year-old
friend Stanley Stewart, from Stirlingshire, then lured Mick O’Hara into the lavatory of O’Hara’s bar by pretending the sink was blocked. The idea was to beat him unconscious and then stab him to death, but then Stewart slipped as he set about his intended victim and managed to do no more than grab him by the neck.

  Then Holmes botched the stabbing when the blade bent before he could plunge it into O’Hara’s heart. So Holmes broke a bottle over his head. But not even that was enough to knock out O’Hara, who then broke free and locked himself in the lavatory.

  The two burly doormen fled but were stopped outside by Jacqui Ambler, who allegedly persuaded them to go back inside and finish him off. Seconds later, Jacqui lured O’Hara out by pretending his attackers had fled. As he emerged he was hit several times over the head with a metal container – a beer barrel or gas bottle – before Holmes set about trying to strangle him with his own medallion chain.

  But still O’Hara refused to go quietly, so Holmes stuffed a bar towel into his mouth and even up his nostrils to try suffocating him instead. That eventually did the trick. But by the time Holmes and Stewart were finished, their victim and his bar were smothered with blood.

  Just a few hours later, Holmes and Stewart were both arrested and confessed to the murder. But what Holmes didn’t realise was that there would be no going back on that first statement. Spain’s legal system reserves its stiffest penalties for those about whose guilt there is no dispute and it is as harsh on premeditation as it is lenient on those driven by some spontaneous, momentary, uncontrollable passion.

  Jacqui Ambler frequently broke down in floods of tears during her trial at the Palace of Justice in Tenerife’s capital, Santa Cruz. She always maintained her innocence, constantly denying that she had plotted the killing and promised to pay the two men to kill O’Hara. However, Holmes and Stewart both made detailed statements shortly after they were arrested in which they described the events that led up to the killing.

  But when the trial started, 30 months after their arrest, they changed their stories and Holmes claimed that he alone was responsible for O’Hara’s murder. He insisted he’d killed the bar owner in a vicious fight over a drugs debt. Holmes said he’d made up the story about Jacqui Ambler hiring him and Stewart because he thought she had told police about his drugs trafficking.

  Neither the court or the police made any attempt to check this new version and the question of drugs was not even mentioned throughout the trial. ‘It has been shown that there was something more than a mere relation of acquaintanceship between Gary and Jacqueline,’ remarked Judge Juan Manuel Fernandez del Toro Alonso.

  But the big question was, when did their affair begin? If it was after the murder then it is not relevant, but if they were lovers before the killing, it would put a whole new light on the case. And the defendants’ legal counsels were not permitted to challenge the prosecution’s evidence in cross-examination.

  One witness who didn’t show up at the trial, a waiter called Clemente Alvarez Lopez, originally told police he’d seen Holmes in the bar with a Scotsman and a woman he did not recognise. Shown photos of Ambler by the police, he was unable to identify her as the woman, yet subsequently he picked her out twice in identity parades.

  Another key witness was the owner of the bar next door to Stevie’s Bar. Francisco Pacheco told police he’d seen two men talking to Ambler outside the bar at 4am, after the murder. He claimed to have seen the men earlier that evening. Yet he failed to identify either Holmes or Stewart in identity parades.

  At one stage during the trial, Holmes even leapt to his feet and shouted at the Spanish judges: ‘These people are innocent. I have put my friend and this woman behind bars for nearly three years already. You can do what you like to me but please let them go.’ Stewart told the court he’d gone along with Holmes’ claims because he was scared of him and ‘of the men he worked for’.

  Holmes told the court that Stewart’s only involvement had been to try and break up the fight between himself and O’Hara. But the judges rejected the new versions and decided the original statements made to police and, under oath, to an investigating judge told what really happened.

  In May 1998, Holmes and Stewart – both bouncers at another bar in Playa de las Americas – began what are thought to be the biggest sentences handed out to British subjects in Spain since the end of Franco’s dictatorship: 29 years, just one year short of the maximum allowable under Spanish law. Jacqui Ambler’s was given 27 years, 8 months and a day.

  Back home in Rossington, Jacqui’s father John, 61, said, ‘There was no evidence against my daughter. Those first statements were made under duress. Twenty-seven years – I can’t believe it. I never thought of anything but a “not guilty” verdict. We expected her to be freed and hadn’t made plans for this. We can’t understand how she could have been convicted. None of the prosecution’s seven witnesses turned up and it just doesn’t seem real.’

  It is not clear how long the three defendants expect to remain behind bars. They had been held in the island’s prison since their arrests almost immediately after the killing. In another case in the early Nineties, a Briton living on the Costa del Sol was jailed for 25 years for the murder of his wife but released after five. Meanwhile others have had to serve at least two-thirds of their sentence, meaning Ambler, Holmes and Stewart could end up serving at least 20 years each.

  Shortly after the case, O’Hara’s mother Doreen Emerson was astonished to receive a £2,500 bill by the court which had jailed her son’s killers. Spanish law officers said the bill was for ‘court work’ connected to the case.

  Doreen said, ‘I have lost a son who meant the world to me and have had nothing but expense. The court demand is outrageous.’

  The court bill came following disclosures about how Holmes and Ambler had been allowed sex sessions in their Tenerife jail for good behaviour.

  Chapter Ten:

  TWISTED FURY

  Richardson, Texas. A quiet, middle-class suburb of Dallas. It is the early hours of the morning of 4 October 1983. Inside the bedroom of a house on Loganwood Drive lies a critically wounded young woman. She is naked, her wrists are tied to the bed and she is face down with two bullet wounds in the back of her head. Yet somehow she’s still alive.

  Just then, her four-year-old son walks into the bedroom. He looks down at his mother and tries to ‘wake her up’. The child then rushes to the phone and calls his father: ‘Momma is sick. I can’t wake her up.’ The father immediately calls the emergency services before rushing over to the house. Within minutes, the wailing sirens and blue-and-red lights of the emergency services flash in the distance as police units and paramedics swamp the area.

  The size of the entry wounds to her head show that she’s been shot with a small-calibre gun. Bloodstains cover the sheets, and a pillow punctured by two bullet-holes lies on the bedroom floor. Tissue paper is also spread across the floor. Rope is tied from her wrists to three of the bedposts. Another piece of rope lies on the carpet at the foot of the bed, next to a puddle of vomit. The brunette victim is unshackled by paramedics and rushed to a nearby hospital.

  Outside, the victim’s four-year-old son is crying hysterically in the garden as he’s comforted by his father, who tells the police that the gunned-down woman is his 33-year-old wife, Rozanne Gailiunas, a registered nurse.

  The boy’s father told officers from nearby Richardson that he’d been estranged from the child’s mother for the past few weeks. Investigators then immediately began knocking on houses in Loganwood Drive for possible witnesses. Not long afterwards, another man walked into the victim’s front yard asking what had happened. Richard Finley explained he was a friend of Rozanne Gailiunas and said he’d last spoken to her by phone earlier the previous morning.

  There were no signs of a forced entry to the house nor anything to indicate there’d been a burglary. Apart from on the bed, there were not even any signs of a struggle. Had the victim known her attacker and let him in the house? Or was she the victi
m of a random assailant who persuaded her to let him or her in?

  Rozanne’s young son told police that he and his mother had eaten at a fast food restaurant the previous lunchtime before she took him to a local ice rink. When they returned home later that day, Rozanne told her son to take a nap. When he woke up – probably because of the sound of the shots – he went to the living room to watch a film on the VHS machine but was unable to start it. The toddler then went to his mother’s bedroom for help, found her tied to the bed and phoned his father.

  Over at the Dallas hospital, Rozanne Gailiunas underwent life-saving surgery. Doctors warned detectives she might not live through the night and she died a few hours later without ever recovering consciousness. Police then began the painstaking process of piecing together Rozanne’s life story.

  Rozanne had met and married her doctor husband in their native state of Massachusetts before moving to Texas in 1972, when he took a job on the faculty of a Dallas medical school. She worked as a nurse in a local hospital and their son was born in 1979. Rozanne quit her nursing job to take better care of the boy. Plans were discussed to construct a brand new $500,000 home in an exclusive Dallas suburb. And by the beginning of 1983 the building was starting to take shape.

  The couple’s marriage started crumbling when Rozanne announced she ‘wanted some space’ to sort her life out and even proposed a return to nursing. In fact, she’d begun a passionate romance with a handsome building contractor who was working on their new home. Richard Finley was separated from his wife at the time and was the man who mysteriously arrived at the crime scene on the night of Rozanne’s murder.