Fog on the Tyne

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  7.47 p.m.: John Henry Sayers’ mobile phone calls Eddie Stewart’s mobile phone. The call lasts 15 seconds.

  7.56 p.m.: Eddie Stewart rings John Henry Sayers’ mobile phone. The call lasts approximately 20 seconds. Site cell analysis indicates that John Henry’s mobile phone was located in Peter Barrett’s lay-by, where he had allegedly been seen by Detective Chief Inspector Pallas.

  8.00 p.m.: Sergeant Mitsides of Northumbria Police claims he sees John Henry Sayers in a vehicle parked alongside a Renault in Peter Barrett’s lay-by.

  8.30 p.m.: John Henry Sayers arrives at the King Neptune restaurant in Newcastle’s Chinatown district with Tony Leach. Mobile phone records show that a total of 27 calls were made around this time between Michael Dixon, who was in the Longbenton area, and Tony Leach.

  9.30 p.m.: John Henry leaves the restaurant, but he is stopped by police and asked to produce his driving licence. When he can’t, he is issued a ticket and told to present his documents within seven days. He then drives home.

  Wednesday, 20 September 2000

  Lee Watson claims that he received and made a number of calls on his mobile phone during the morning and early afternoon. These were to and from John Henry Sayers’ mobile phone, allegedly concerning Watson’s taking over the running of the hit. These calls were all confirmed by the relevant phone companies as having been made.

  7.00 p.m.: Eddie Stewart drives Dale Miller to Longbenton in the Volkswagen Golf. Michael Dixon and Lee Watson follow in the Renault 19.

  8.00 p.m.: A stream of mobile calls between Michael Dixon, Lee Watson and Eddie Stewart begins.

  8.10 p.m.: Michael Dixon rings Eddie Stewart to make sure that he is in position at Ella Knights’ home.

  8.20 p.m.: John Henry Sayers’ mobile phone rings Lee Watson’s mobile phone. The call lasts 57 seconds.

  8.22 p.m.: Freddie Knights, travelling into the Longbenton estate in his van, calls his friend at St James’ Park on a mobile phone to ask what the score is between Newcastle United and Leyton Orient.

  8.24 p.m.: Freddie Knights pulls up outside his mother’s home in Lutterworth Road, Longbenton.

  8.26 p.m.: Dale Miller guns down Knights. Within seconds, Michael Dixon allegedly telephones Tony Leach to tell him that the job is done.

  8.31 p.m.: John Henry Sayers walks into Market Street Police Station to produce his vehicle documents.

  9.00 p.m.: The hit team arrives back at a flat owned by gang member Steven Carlton.

  9.01 p.m.: John Henry Sayers’ mobile phone rings Lee Watson’s mobile phone. The call lasts 60 seconds.

  9.06 p.m.: Lee Watson telephones a taxi to take him to his home address.

  10.07 p.m.: Landline at Lee Watson’s home address calls John Henry Sayers’ mobile phone. The call lasts 46 seconds.

  12.05 a.m.: Miller and Stewart put their clothes in the Volkswagen Golf and set it on fire in a side street in the West End. The murder weapon was buried later.

  Watson claimed that the day after the murder he and Dale Miller met John Henry outside Eldon Square, Newcastle’s main shopping precinct. Watson alleged that he and Miller got into John Henry’s car and that they were driven to an area on the banks of the River Tyne where the phone he had used during the murder was then thrown. Watson told police that he and Miller were then given part payment for murdering Knights. On 24 September 2000, John Henry Sayers changed his mobile phone number.

  Throughout the time the prosecution presented its case, John Henry Sayers listened intently, scribbling notes that he then passed to his legal team. Dale Miller, a dark-eyed, gaunt heroin addict with thinning hair, who was in remission from cancer, seemed doomed to his fate. Occasionally, he would laugh nervously at something before reverting back to his usual cold, emotionless expression.

  Michael Dixon, who was known as ‘Micky Muggins’, because as a youth he had stolen a chicken from a van and missed a wallet stuffed with money that had been left on the floor, was portrayed as a brainless figure of fun for much of the trial. Dixon appeared impassive to the situation he found himself in and seemed happy to play on the fact that he could at best be described as dim. The court heard how Dixon had been arrested after dying his ginger hair peroxide blond before fleeing to Glasgow with £120. His plan had been to obtain a passport using a false name and then escape abroad. Laughing at the absurdity of such a plan, his own barrister asked the jury, ‘Can you really imagine Micky Muggins sitting on a sun-drenched hacienda with his £120?’

  Eddie Stewart sat behind his co-accused in the dock and, at just 5 ft 2 in. tall, remained barely visible to the jury. Stewart had refused to sit amongst his fellow defendants after he had admitted his part in the murder in a letter to the police. Throughout the trial, he was referred to by his former associates as ‘the ginger munchkin’.

  When gang member Steven Carlton took the stand to give evidence, Mr Goldberg QC for John Henry Sayers poured scorn on him. Carlton claimed that John Henry had collected shotgun cartridges from him and that his flat had been used as a safe house by the hit team following the shooting. Peering over his steel-rimmed glasses, Mr Goldberg told the jury, ‘Carlton is all over the shop in an opium dream. He has admitted that he was like a zombie at the time of the murder and was out of his head all of the time. He said that he could hear people’s thoughts when he took magic mushrooms. Perhaps we should give some to the jurors; it may well help them.’

  When Lee Watson was brought to the court to give his evidence, he was surrounded by six armed officers. It was obvious to everybody present that Watson was doing everything he could to avoid the hate-filled glares from those in the dock. The scar-faced informant told the court that he had confessed to the police not only his account of Freddie Knights’ murder but also of a catalogue of crimes he claimed to have knowledge of or involvement in. They included the murder of Viv Graham in 1993; the disappearance of Chris ‘Kicker’ Minniken, who vanished in 1986; the shooting of fitness centre manager and ex-policeman Bob Morton in 1996; the October 1995 shooting of three customers as they stood at the bar in the Star Inn, Newcastle; and the attempted letter bombing of Peter Donnelly in 1994.

  Watson told the jury, ‘I did not kill Freddie Knights, but I did help to organise the shooting. Once Freddie had been shot, the plan was for me to take over his drug-dealing business on the Longbenton Estate. It would have earned me around £100,000 a year.’ Watson added that he was making approximately £175,000 a year from crimes that included armed robbery, protection, prostitution, debt collecting and drug dealing. When asked why he had become an informant, Watson replied, ‘I realised that the prosecution had some powerful evidence against me, and so I pleaded guilty to murder because I was told that I could still be convicted of it even though I only wanted him shot in the legs. I am giving evidence because I agreed to shoot Freddie Knights in the legs, not murder him. I would not have agreed to have him shot in the head, so why should I take the blame?’ His words didn’t appear to make much sense at the time, but as was later proven they had been carefully chosen for future reference.

  Claims of police corruption and conspiracies emerged following critical evidence given by Detective Chief Inspector Pallas. A senior officer with more than 20 years’ experience, DCI Pallas claimed he had seen John Henry and other members of the alleged murder gang sitting in a black BMW in the Peter Barrett lay-by in Gosforth. The detective said he had stopped in the lay-by for a sandwich while on his way from Byker Police Station in the East End to an important meeting at Westerhope Police Station in the West End. He insisted that he had passed the lay-by because the circular route was quicker than going directly from the east to the west of the city. However, the defence claimed that the route he had used would have taken 27 minutes instead of just 11 minutes via the normal route. DCI Pallas also claimed to have seen a police dog van entering the gates of Newcastle Racecourse close to the lay-by at the same time he saw John Henry and the gang. But the court heard that no police dog van had operated in that area at that time and that the gates
DCI Pallas had described had been permanently locked for more than 20 years. Mr Goldberg QC told the jury, ‘This gives his story away and shows that he is lying and proves there was a fit-up against Sayers. Some of the evidence is very fishy.’

  When John Henry Sayers entered the witness box, he gave an account of his relationship with each of the relevant people allegedly involved in Knights’ murder and of his movements at crucial times. He said that he had known Tony Leach all his life and that since his release from prison they had worked together as debt collectors. Leach, he said, was a technology freak who would sometimes change his mobile phone number three times in a day. He was also a cocaine user and a hopeless womaniser, often entertaining up to four different females per week.

  John Henry said that he had met Micky ‘Muggins’ Dixon just a month before the murder. He said that he was a former taxi driver with a ‘mechanical mind’ and so was useful to have around because of the taxi business he ran. ‘If we needed a new car or one needed a repair, I would say, “What’s your advice on it?”’ John Henry said.

  John Henry said that he had met Eddie Stewart in May or June 2000 at a bar in Ryton, Gateshead. Stewart smuggled cigarettes from the continent and had contacts in Thailand who manufactured fake football shirts. John Henry said he had discussed purchasing contraband from Stewart but that after the initial meeting their paths had not crossed again.

  Dale Miller had telephoned John Henry to ask him a favour long before the pair had met. It had been Lee Watson who had advised Miller to do this. Watson and Miller had shared a prison cell together, and John Henry had sent them money as a goodwill gesture at Christmas. According to John Henry, Miller said that his girlfriend had begun using heroin and he wanted to use the Sayers name to frighten her supplier away. John Henry had given Miller his permission, and the ploy had apparently worked. The drug dealer never approached Miller’s girlfriend again.

  John Henry said that he did not know John Hunter, the alleged car thief, but that he was aware that he occasionally used his taxis and would book vehicles in person at the office.

  As for Steven Carlton, who had allegedly supplied him with shotgun cartridges, John Henry said that until the trial he had never set eyes on him in his life.

  Lee Shaun Watson was a long-time associate of Stephen and Michael Sayers. He and Michael had both been arrested for the murder of Viv Graham. It was in December 1998 while at HMP Frankland, in Durham, that Watson had first met John Henry. At that time, John Henry had not yet been notified that an informant named S. Watson might try to set him up, and so he had no qualms about conversing with his brother’s friend. Watson had been released from prison just four months prior to Knights’ murder. He had contacted John Henry and asked him for assistance with setting up a sandwich bar-cum-café in Blaydon Shopping Centre, but the project had failed to materialise. Shortly after this failed venture, John Henry had been warned about an S. Watson trying to frame him, and so he decided to extend a gloved hand of friendship in order to keep an eye on his possible enemy rather than upset Watson by ignoring him.

  John Henry said that Watson was never a part of any Sayers firm or gang, which he denied existed in any event. Watson, according to John Henry, was in fact an enforcer for the Conroys. ‘He had already killed Viv Graham for breaking Michael Conroy’s jaw years before. He admitted it to the police, and they still haven’t nicked him for it,’ John Henry told the jury. Not only had Watson allegedly murdered Graham for the Conroys, but he had also – John Henry claimed – gunned down Freddie Knights on their behalf.

  John Henry alleged that when Stephen and Michael Sayers had been arrested for blackmailing a Tyneside businessman, his own cousin Peter Donnelly had been aware of a police surveillance operation being mounted but had failed to warn them. (Donnelly is the man who had been disarmed by Viv Graham when he turned up at Santino’s restaurant with a knife and a shotgun.) For failing to warn Stephen and Michael Sayers of the police surveillance operation, Donnelly, according to John Henry, was awarded a £1,000,000 security contract with the help of Northumbria Police. John Henry was incensed by this perceived betrayal by a family member and went in search of Donnelly. Freddie Knights, who John Henry said he had known since the 1980s, had shown him where Donnelly lived, where his office was and where his business partner lived. John Henry had then visited one of these locations and assaulted Donnelly. Denying that he had any reason to want Knights dead, John Henry said that the only people he knew who wanted to harm him were the Conroys. They had allegedly waged a campaign of harassment and violence against Knights, which led to him and his family fleeing from their Scotswood home and resettling in the Longbenton area of Newcastle.

  John Henry said that the day before Freddie Knights was murdered he had been debt collecting with his friend Tony Leach. They had recovered a £30,000 debt on behalf of a self-employed builder named Pringle. For their services, John Henry and Leach had each been paid £5,000. To celebrate their success and John Henry’s forthcoming birthday, in six days’ time, they had decided to enjoy a meal at the King Neptune Chinese restaurant, in Newcastle. At 7 p.m., they had set off for the restaurant, but Leach had asked John Henry to stop en route at a particular pub, as he said he needed to see somebody there. That ‘somebody’, according to John Henry, was a married woman with whom Leach was having an affair. Leach had asked the woman to meet him at a well-known lover’s lane, known as Peter Barrett’s lay-by, within the next few minutes, and she had agreed. Romance in the north-east is apparently not dead.

  John Henry had driven Leach to the lay-by for his liaison, but they had waited in vain for five or ten minutes, as she failed to appear. One imagines that she was elsewhere seeking some form of much-needed relationship guidance. John Henry claimed that it was while they were waiting for Leach’s mistress that Sergeant Mitsides must have spotted them. He was adamant that no other vehicle was near his, and certainly no Renault 19, as stated by the police. The mysterious lady has never been identified, and Leach has refused to name her, because he has said that he did not wish to cause her problems by revealing their affair to her husband.

  After leaving the lay-by, John Henry drove Leach to his home, which, coincidentally, is near where Freddie Knights was due to be murdered. The pair then drove to the King Neptune Restaurant, where a number of calls were made and received on John Henry’s mobile phone. These included calls to and from the murder gang’s getaway driver, Eddie Stewart. At this time, Stewart was searching in vain for Ella Knights’ home with other members of the gang. It is not in dispute that, after being unable to find Ella’s home that night, the hit team postponed their attack. After leaving the restaurant at approximately 9.30 p.m., John Henry was stopped by the police and asked to produce his driving licence. Because he didn’t have the licence with him, he was given a producer and told that he must present his licence within seven days.

  John Henry has always denied that he made or received any of the calls to or from Eddie Stewart. According to John Henry, Leach would purchase SIM cards in packs of fifty or one hundred and change his number up to three times per day. He did this because he was supposedly a ‘technology freak’. Because Leach’s associates would not know his latest number, they would call either his sister or John Henry, who was always with him. ‘If those calls were made and received, nobody spoke to me,’ John Henry said. ‘If I was with Leachy, he would have spoken to Eddie Stewart.’ However, John Henry was quick to add that he did not believe the phone records were accurate in any event. John Henry told the jury that he had complained to the prosecution that some of his phone records had disappeared and calls he disputed making had appeared. ‘The whole thing stinks,’ he said.

  On the morning of Knights’ death, John Henry had taken his son to school before attending his taxi office. John Henry had remained there for most of the day. At 3 p.m., he collected his son from school and took him home. The next undisputed sighting of John Henry was at 4.40 p.m., when a police officer saw him talking to Tony Leach and Michael Dixon
in a street near his home. At 6.05 p.m., the three men were seen, again by a police officer, leaving John Henry’s home. Ninety minutes later, John Henry was observed talking to a man outside his taxi office by the manageress of a strip club located next door. Another police officer saw John Henry and his son enter a fish and chip shop near the taxi office at 8.15 p.m. John Henry then dropped his son off at his mother’s house before attending a nearby police station, where he produced his driving documents. When he left the police station, John Henry visited the strip club next door to his taxi office, where he was captured by CCTV cameras.

  The prosecution alleged that, throughout the evening prior to Knights’ murder, John Henry had ensured that he was being seen in places by people who would give credibility to his alibi. However, John Henry told the jury that Billy Shearer, the uncle of Newcastle legend Alan Shearer, was a good friend of his and that if he had wanted a cast-iron alibi for the time of the murder he could easily have gone to the Platinum Club at St James’ Park, an exclusive area in the ground where executives and their guests watch matches.

  After leaving the strip club, John Henry went home, where he remained until the following morning. John Henry claims that it was while taking his son to school that he first heard about Freddie Knights’ murder, on a radio news bulletin. When asked outright if he had ordered the murder of Freddie Knights or played any part whatsoever in his death, John Henry had replied with an emphatic no. He was adamant that the police and others were conspiring against him in order to get him locked up for life. Regardless of whether they were to succeed or not, the pressure the police investigation had put on the Sayers family had resulted in John Henry and his wife, Yvonne, separating. In effect, the alleged conspirators had secured a partial victory, because they had managed to keep him off the streets while on remand for a year and had destroyed his marriage and home life.