A few weeks later, the family of Joan Stirland attended her funeral at Wilford Hill Crematorium. It was a much quieter affair. The imprisoned Michael O’Brien did not attend either his mother’s funeral or John Stirland’s the previous week. The family could not even bury their dead in peace. Helicopters swarmed overhead and men in dark uniforms patrolled the perimeter of the graveyard with semi-automatic guns. It took police more than twenty-four hours to go and see Joan’s daughter Rosie, to inform her of her mother’s and stepfather’s murder. They didn’t even realise she was at risk. A dedicated witness protection team didn’t exist until 2005 in Nottinghamshire and several officers who worked witness protection had breakdowns – they had never been properly trained for the task. Rosie Stirland was scathing about the way the matter was handled.
‘They turned up at 4.30 in the morning, two police officers,’ she said. ‘They said, “We’ve got some news for you, you might want to sit down. There’s been an incident in Lincolnshire, two people are deceased.” I said, “Who?” They said, “We believe it’s John and Joan Stirland and they’ve been shot and they are dead,” basically. I said, “You know who’s done it, you’d better go and arrest the Gunnies, hadn’t you?” They said, “Well, can you notify the rest of the family now and we’ll leave you to it,” and they walked out. They weren’t even there five minutes. I didn’t know what to do next. I said to my partner, “I can’t believe they’ve left us.”
‘Lincolnshire Police rang me the next afternoon and asked if the Notts Police had been to see me yet. They said, “We’ve got your sister Tonette but who’s looking after you?” They said I should complain about Notts Police. They sent someone down from Lincolnshire Police who spoke to me and then asked me if I would identify my mum. From that minute, we were put in a hotel with my sister and our mobile phones taken off us and we were told we couldn’t go back to Nottingham. We were kept under armed guard and couldn’t even be allowed out of the hotel room and if anyone saw us we had to be moved. I spoke to Lincs Police and said, “You knew she was in danger and so why didn’t you go straight round to my mum’s house?” They said, “Oh, she didn’t want flashing lights.” I said, “She meant she didn’t want people drawing attention to her, not that she didn’t want them to hurry up. She didn’t want panda cars, not that she didn’t want them to come round.” She was frightened to death.
‘For my mum’s funeral, we couldn’t even grieve properly. I gave instructions for her to be buried in her own clothes. I found out afterwards from the funeral parlour that she was buried in a hospital gown. The funeral itself was appalling. I had to sign a document that if I went it could result in my injury or death. I went, obviously. The whole road was closed off specially for it. I sat and told the officer in charge we had wanted the horse and carriage and he said, “We would have accommodated that, we told Lincs we would do whatever you wanted.” He said, “I’m not very happy about that.” It really upset us at the time. I don’t understand what was going on with these two forces. To be honest, I’ve not been back to the cemetery since that day. I’ve asked them if they could arrange it and they said no. It’s like they’ve got rid of us now, after everything that happened with my mum, we’ve now been told we don’t fall under the criteria for witness protection because we weren’t actually witnesses. I said, “Well what do we fall under?” And they said, “We don’t know.” I changed my surname and I did that myself, they wouldn’t do it for me.
‘The police kept us in Lincolnshire for at least two weeks. We were in a hotel overlooking a lake for about the first four days, then we were moved to a disused agricultural college in Lincs. It was in a right state, all the firearms police were downstairs and we were upstairs, me and my partner and my kids, my sister and her partner and her kids. We had a room each. It was appalling, there were no carpets on the floor, the kitchenette was dirty and if we wanted any shopping they had to bring it to us. The kids weren’t allowed to play in the field at the back. The firearms guys didn’t want to sit outside with them.
‘My partner at the time needed to go home to sort a few things out. They said they would take him home and bring him back the same day. I got a phone call at night time saying, “He doesn’t want to be a part of this, he wants to finish with you and he isn’t coming back.” I was like, what? I had a mobile phone I hadn’t given to the police and spoke to my partner and he said, “Are you all right? What’s going on? They said they would come back and get me tomorrow. But they’ve rung me up and said you don’t want me to come back.” I said, “No, they’ve told me you don’t want to come back.” He said, “No, no,” and he was going mad. I went mental and walked out. I told them they were just trying to save money, the way I saw it. I walked six miles to the nearest village being followed by them. I phoned my partner and asked him to come and pick me up. The witness protection people said they would drive me to my partner and come and collect us in a few days.
‘I just want a normal life now. Everything was cleared out of our homes and put into storage. We were in a privately rented house for eighteen months and that was furnished. When I actually got my own home they said they will bring the stuff down. But everything was green with mould. All the clothes had been chewed by mice, half of it was destroyed. They didn’t even empty the fridge, there was food in there that had been in there for eighteen months. Even the cooker had oil in the tray. My mum’s things were delivered to me and had just been thrown into boxes, all the stuff was chewed by mice.
‘The only time I’d been to the house in Trusthorpe was in February 2004 before mum died and this shows you how frightened she was. She met me at the station and when we got off the train we sat at the station for thirty minutes, waiting to see if we knew anyone who got off the train to see if I’d been followed. She wouldn’t leave, her and John. That’s how scared she was. So for them to say she didn’t want the police to come round is bullshit. My mum was terrified, she was frightened for her life and for them to make out that she was blase about it but she was not at all. If she was she would have gone back to Nottingham.’
In the days that followed, there were a lot of drawn faces at Nottinghamshire Police headquarters. The murders had not only shaken the most hardened of officers but they now realised they were in the middle of a huge mess. Senior officers wondered why nothing had been picked up on the bugs – the National Crime Squad officers carrying out surveillance had not alerted them to any specific information that indicated a double slaying was about to take place, and all the main members of the Cartel were being watched and listened to round the clock. But the clues were already there, particularly after Michael O’Brien’s trial and the death of Jamie Gunn. It seems incredible that no one realised the extreme danger the couple were in. For their part, Lincolnshire Police were angry. They soon discovered that they had not been briefed fully of threats towards the Stirlands and if they had been given a comprehensive history about the couple, as Nottinghamshire claimed, they had no evidence to show for it.
No love was lost between the two forces. An employment tribunal back in 1996, in which a young female detective from Lincolnshire sued her force for sex discrimination, had soured relations for years with Nottinghamshire. Initial inquiries into the matter – which led to the detective, Cydena Fleming, receiving a substantial payout after suffering a vendetta at the hands of senior male colleagues – were conducted by Nottinghamshire officers and this led to bad blood with some of their Lincolnshire counterparts. Nevertheless, Detective Superintendent Graham White, who headed the Lincolnshire Police investigation into the Stirlands’ murder, was determined to bring the culprits to justice.
Everyone knew who had carried out the killings; it was as plain as day. Evidence would be needed, however, and that evidence was in the technology which had given birth to the mobile phone. Analysis began on phone numbers used on the day of the murder in the Trusthorpe area; computer programmes analysed and matched those numbers with any known to be used by members of the Bestwood Cartel or which had been
later used in Nottingham. Gradually the numbers were whittled down. The use of pay-as-you-go phones made the checking more protracted but eventually officers isolated numbers which they could carry out some meaningful checks on. One was a phone which had been bought in a Woolworths store in Skegness at 6.30pm on 4 August. It was a T-Mobile Sagem. When officers scanned CCTV footage of the High Street from around that time, they saw the unmistakably burly, shaven-headed figure of Colin Gunn walking near the traffic lights. From that phone they derived other numbers that had been called. Most had gone dead the day of the murder but a few were still active. By early September, police began to reel in members of the gang.
AS IF THE murders of Marian Bates and the Stirlands were not enough, the tragic killing of a fourteen-year-old girl was to bring the capricious violence of the city’s gangs into even starker relief. Danielle Beccan was gunned down while walking home from the annual Goose Fair, held every October in Forest Fields. It was had become an event often used by the rival gangs from the NG Triangle to settle long-standing disputes. Police were often tipped off about impending trouble but in October 2004 there were no such warnings.
In the early hours of 9 October, Danielle was with a large group of friends as they entered the Chase area of St Ann’s. Danielle was no angel. She had probably smoked cannabis that night, according to what was later found in her bloodstream, and had a lot more money in her pocket than her mum could account for. She mixed with many families who were dealing drugs on the estate, but was about as innocent as she could be given that St Ann’s life was running through her veins. She had grown up with crime all around her and had recently been living with her father, Dale, in Derby, who was holding large amounts of cannabis at the time. Just five days before Danielle’s death, Dale, who had moved away from St Ann’s in 1995, was at Derby Crown Court pleading guilty to possessing and growing highly potent skunk cannabis. In a subsequent court case less than a year later, he was convicted of possessing skunk and was again given a rehabilitation order. Danielle, or ‘Baby D’ as she was known on the street, had decided to move back to Nottingham where her mum Paula and many of the friends she had grown up with lived. It was a decision with fatal consequences.
At about 12.30am, as the youngsters walked from Valley Road, a gold Citroen Xsara saloon appeared and drove towards them. The car appeared to stall, then its engine revved and one of the tinted windows on the passenger side opened. Three shots were fired, popping like firecrackers. The youngsters scattered, screaming – all except Danielle, who fell to the ground. The others saw a gloved hand came out through the car window making the sign of a W, signifying the Waterfront Gang, as the car drove off. Danielle was just yards from the safety of her home and her mother rushed out to tend to her. But it was too late. Danielle’s last words to her mother were, ‘I’m not going to make it ... I’m dying.’ She lost consciousness and, despite attempts at the Queens Medical Centre to save her, died soon after she arrived at casualty.
Meadows gang members Junior ‘Prentice’ Andrews and Mark ‘Yardie’ Kelly were arrested among twenty others during Operation Holly, after Kelly’s car was traced following the shooting. Andrews had come out of prison just a few months earlier after being sentenced to four years for a brutal robbery. He was a small-time heroin dealer on the Meadows estate, but was heavily into gang culture and rap music. Sometimes he carried a small handgun in a Prada bag around his neck. Andrews had a number of tattoos on his body suggesting gang membership, including ‘NG2’, signifying the Meadows estate, a smoking gun, the initials ‘WFG’, signifying Waterfront Gang, and ‘TRU’, meaning The Real Untouchables. Crucially police seized a mobile phone belonging to him that contained a long rap message. It was footage of him walking through St Ann’s in the early hours on his own. On the footage, recorded just a few days before Danielle’s murder, Andrews was heard talking into the phone as he recorded road signs in St Ann’s. He rapped into the phone with a patois lilt:
I’m here, Prentice, on my own like a real ‘G’,
Waterfront’s most wanted. I’m on the creep.
I haven’t even got no gun. I go anywhere on my own.
I’m a real killer, you can’t see any Waterfront man come this way.
I robbed nuff man down here.
Which Waterfront man can say they’ve been down here at two o’clock in the morning? Look I’m here on my own.
Now you get me, look at that Prentice on his own rolling around the Ville [St Ann’s] like it’s the Meadows.
I don’t really know anybody like me who’s a real killer. I come up here, I haven’t even got my bullet-proof vest. I’ve got one at home.
Prentice walking about the St Ann’s Ville this time of year with no gun, no vest, all I got is one broomstick.
Waterfront, I’ve been, I’ve sawn and I’ve conquered.
On another recording, Andrews was heard rapping, ‘When we shoot to kill we shoot the Ville [St Ann’s] for real...how many niggers are going to get popped before you realise it’s ride or die. That means I’m a ride you’re going to die.’
Andrews and Kelly were convicted and sentenced to life, with a minimum tariff of thirty-two years each in prison. Kelly’s tariff was reduced to twenty-nine years on appeal. He had been born in Jamaica, hence his ‘Yardie Mark’ nickname, but had strong gang connections to Birmingham and eventually became a member of the Raiders gang from Smethwick. This gang had strong links with the infamous Johnson Crew, whose war with the Burger Bar Crew in Birmingham culminated in the 2001 New Year’s Day murders of Letisha Shakespeare and Charlene Ellis outside a hair salon. The Raiders helped supply drugs to the Meadows gangs. For all the bravado that he showed, Andrews had not killed before and it was highly unlikely that he intended to shoot Danielle Beccan that night. The bullet that killed her was almost certainly a ricochet off either the pavement or a building before hitting Danielle in the abdomen. Kelly and Andrews had gone to Clifton that night after drinking with a group of young men in the Toll Bridge; they even got into a chat with professional footballer who was in the pub. Bolstered by some cocaine they had snorted in the toilets of the Toll Bridge, Andrews and Kelly then went on to burgle a property in Clifton. They had been looking for someone who owed them money, and their mission then took them to St Ann’s, but they had been unable to locate the person they were after. When they saw the crowd walking through St Ann’s, someone in the car decided to let off a few rounds to tell them that the Meadows had been there. There were at least two, probably three others, in the car when Danielle was shot dead and fingerprints taken from the murder car were matched to three individuals known to police: all were young men who had links to the killers and the Meadows but all had alibis for the time of the murder. Of course they could have innocently been in the car on a previous occasion, but it helped not one bit in terms of closure on the case for Danielle Beccan’s family, who were left with the feeling that not all those responsible had been caught.
CHAPTER 12
n the afternoon of 8 November, three months after the Stirland murders, a probe planted inside Radford Road Police Station as part of Operation Salt picked up a conversation between DC Charles Fletcher and Jason Grocock, Fletcher’s former boss at Limey’s clothes store. Colin Gunn was trying to find out what the police had on him. Fletcher explained to Grocock the difficulties he would have in finding out about the murder inquiry and other operations against Gunn because of the secrecy surrounding the investigating units.
‘It wouldn’t be common knowledge to anybody except those who knew they were going to get him,’ said Fletcher. ‘There’s those different squads, murder teams who are looking into various things. You’ve got Stealth as well, which is out of Oxclose Lane, and they’re like their own unit with their own DI’s, DS’s and DC’s. We just fucking deal with the shit on the streets. So as with something like that, it would be quite specialised, it would be kept in-house with a specialised team... Bobby wouldn’t necessarily hear about it because he’s got no fucking need to hear abo
ut it. Um, and what Stealth do... they do as a separate entity as a section CID. So we don’t know anything that they do unless we hear about it when we see them in custody or go into the office for a cup of tea or something. But Stealth, I mean Stealth and those operations like that, keep everything dead secret because they don’t like any fucker to know... So, for me, for me to hear that would be, would be rare and it would be an off-chance of me just wandering by and speaking to someone in that team but, but the chance of that are fucking approaching zilch.’
As Fletcher pointed out, ‘For me to find out anything I would have to ring Lincoln and they’d think, who the fuck are you? You’d have to go through the right channels.’
On 25 January, at 5.22pm, another call was made by DC Fletcher to Grocock. Colin Gunn was now worried that he was a wanted man. Their chat was deliberately vague as they tried to skirt around the subject of their call without saying anything too incriminating.
Grocock: ‘But you know me other mate, he can’t work out why that bloke has said to him at the weekend that he’s definitely now wanted and it’s coming up that he isn’t and...’
Fletcher: ‘Right’
Grocock: ‘He was wondering whether or not like, you know if NCIS [the National Criminal Intelligence Service] and things like that are up, would he not put it on the PNC as not to frighten him off.’
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