Essex Boy (16 page)

When I entered Swanage police station the following morning, I was ushered into a side room and reassured by two Essex detectives that I had nothing to fear. The officers said that they were well aware that I had shot Tate and had tried to murder Tucker and Rolfe, but they did not believe that I was responsible for the executions at Rettendon.

‘Keep it simple, Steve. This is just a paper exercise. It’s not going anywhere. We just need to officially eliminate you from our inquiries.’

I have been in numerous police stations throughout my colourful criminal career, but I had never before experienced a pre-interview briefing. To be honest it slightly unnerved me, as I began to wonder if they were, in fact, trying to set me up. Why wouldn’t the police consider me to be a suspect for the murders of Tate, Tucker and Rolfe if I had shot one of them and attempted to shoot the other two just a few months before their deaths? It was undoubtedly a strange attitude to adopt. Without any consultation, I was informed that I would have to be placed in protective custody.

‘It is for your own good. People think you have murdered those three men and they want to avenge their deaths,’ one of the detectives said.

‘I don’t give a fuck about people, dead or living. I am not going into protective custody,’ I replied.

It appeared to me as if the police had been reading the newspapers and believed the myth that Tate and Tucker had worked so hard to develop. They had ruled their drug-dealing empire with fear by simply convincing people that they could have anybody killed at any time. The truth was, they were full of shit. I honestly do not believe that they would have had the bottle to walk up to anybody and execute them in cold blood. High on drugs, they may have accidently beaten somebody to death, but the very next day they would have been grassing one another up to the police in order to escape prosecution.

‘I didn’t fear them when they were alive and I certainly don’t fear them now that they are dead,’ I told the detective.

Unsure how to proceed, the officers eyed each for answers and when none were forthcoming they simultaneously said, ‘We will have to discuss this with our governor, Steve.’ Rather than interview me about Tate and Tucker’s criminal activities, such as prostitution, possession of firearms and drug dealing – all matters that could have led to them being murdered – I was repeatedly asked ‘off the record’ about Tate’s mobile telephones. Most drug dealers have at least two; one for their ‘clients’, who are prone to ringing at unsociable hours or inconvenient moments; and one for friends and family. Tate had at least four mobile phones to my knowledge. He was aware that the police could pinpoint a person’s location by their mobile phone and so when he went to do a ‘bit of business’ as he called it, he would remove the SIM cards from the ‘client’ handsets.

A mobile phone is a transmitter and a receiver. It doesn’t matter if you are using it or not, the SIM card will still receive or transmit signals to the nearest telephone mast in order to maintain a live line. All contact between a mobile phone and the masts that are now abundant in this country is recorded. As the person moves from place to place so, too, their phone signal moves from mast to mast. It is, therefore, quite easy for the authorities to map exactly where a person has been days, or even months, later.

Whoever murdered Tate also knew this, because the only mobile phone that was found on his body was his ‘family phone’, which was wrapped tightly in his hand. Perhaps the killers failed to see it, or maybe they were only interested in his ‘client’ phone because he may have been talking to them on it prior to being shot. I don’t suppose we will ever know. The detectives gave me the impression that they knew at least one mobile phone had gone missing because they kept asking me questions about its whereabouts. Had Sarah Saunders rung me from it? Did I have a recent list of all the numbers that Tate used? On and on they went about his bloody mobile phones, but I was unable to assist them.

When I asked the detectives what the significance of Tate’s phone was, they would only say that a discrepancy in the evidence had been identified and they needed to clear it up. I later learned, through one of Rolfe’s associates, that this ‘discrepancy’ had come to light after a mechanic named Reynolds had been questioned about work that he had done on Tate’s vehicles.

On the morning of his murder, Tate had arrived at the garage where Reynolds worked with a young girl named Lizzie Fletcher in tow. I had met Lizzie several times at Raquel’s. Lizzie was a good friend of Donna Garwood, Tucker’s teenage mistress, and the pair practically lived at the nightclub. I would describe ‘Dizzy Lizzie’, as Tate chose to call her, as a typical Essex girl; stunning to look at but challenging to have any sort of intelligent conversation with. Tate and Lizzie had arrived at the garage in separate vehicles, Tate in a black Mercedes 190 and Lizzie in a black Volkswagen Polo. The Polo was left at the garage for repair and arrangements were made that if Tate had not returned by 1800 hrs, when the garage was due to close, then the keys were to be left in the glove box. When Reynolds finished work that night, Tate had not collected the Polo and so he left the keys in the vehicle as agreed.

As Reynolds drove away from the garage and onto a dual carriageway he noticed a blue Range Rover on the opposite side of the road. Rolfe was driving, Tucker was in the passenger seat and a man, that Reynolds assumed was Tate, was in the back. Reynolds guessed that Tate was on his way to collect the Polo. Later that night, between 2100 hrs and 2200 hrs, Reynolds had cause to drive past his place of work and noticed that the Polo had gone. According to the police, Tate, Tucker and Rolfe were murdered at 1845 hrs, just 45 minutes after Reynolds had seen them.

I think it’s highly unlikely that they could have picked up the Polo, driven it to wherever and then met their killers, before heading to Rettendon to meet their deaths in such a short space of time. Regardless of how improbable meeting that 45-minute timescale may have been, the police had to present it as feasible because the only phone of Tate’s that they had recovered had stopped receiving or making calls at around 1845 hrs. The cessation of mobile traffic to and from Tate’s phone at that time proved, the police said, that the murders had taken place shortly afterwards. The phone he had been found with had not linked up with another transmitter after that time and, therefore, they were satisfied that he had not moved from the spot where he was later found dead. What the police failed to take into account is that Tate had several mobile phones and, although he was undoubtedly in the Rettendon area at 1845 hrs, there is no guarantee that he had stopped making calls or was dead at the time they said because his ‘business phones’ were missing.

The day after the murders, Reynolds telephoned one of Tate’s mobile phones and Lizzie Fletcher answered. The slayings had made headline news and Reynolds, one of the last people to have seen the trio alive, was naturally keen to question Lizzie about them. To his dismay, Lizzie said that she had no idea why the men had been murdered. When the police questioned Reynolds about calls that Tate, Tucker and Rolfe had made to him in the days leading up to their deaths, he told them about the work that he had done on various cars they owned and about the conversation that he had with Lizzie when he ‘rang one of Tate’s phones’. Those five words tipped the entire murder inquiry upon its head because the police had always assumed that Tate only had one phone. Those words meant that they could no longer say, with any real certainty, that the murders had taken place at 1845 hrs.

After quizzing me about Tate’s absent mobile phones, detectives were dispatched to interview Sarah Saunders in the hope that she could cast light upon the missing mobiles. Unfortunately for the police, Sarah’s evidence only muddied the waters further. Sarah explained that when Tate had thrown her out of her own home, he had taken her contract mobile phone and given it to Lizzie Fletcher. After the murder, Lizzie had been using the phone excessively, talking about Tate’s demise to her friends and Sarah’s bill had been mounting. Sarah quite rightly contacted Lizzie and demanded that the phone be returned. The police, for reasons known only to themselves, thought that Sarah’s request was very odd and during her interviews they kept asking why she had wanted ‘the Orange phone back’.

Midway through the intense questioning, Sarah had realised exactly what the police were saying and replied, ‘Lizzie didn’t have an Orange phone. Pat had that with him the night he died.’

An officer was briefed to review all of the victim’s itemised phone bills and when he did so he made a startling discovery. One of Tate’s mobile phones had been used to call Lizzie Fletcher at 2145 hrs on the night of the murders. The record of this call was initially made available to Steele and Whomes’s defence teams, but it was buried among thousands of other numbers and calls that were documented, on pages and pages of itemised bills and phone schedules. By the time the case reached court and the calls of non-evidential value had been filtered out of the mountain of paperwork, all traces of Tate’s crucial call had been removed and the jury was not made aware of it.

Thankfully, this evidence has now come to light following sterling work by a hard-working and honourable solicitor named Chris Bowen. The police can no longer say that they are not aware of a call that was made from Tate’s phone at a time they say he was dead, yet they have not yet bothered to enquire if it was Tate who made it and, if not, who had his phone and why?

There is other evidence, which suggests that the murders took place after 1845 hrs. Tate, Tucker and Rolfe had planned to celebrate ‘becoming millionaires’ following the robbery at Rettendon by visiting The Globe restaurant in Romford. Tucker was well known to Gary Jackets, the manager of the restaurant, because he used to dine there at least three times a week. He also provided the door staff for the venue. Jackets told the police that Tucker had made a reservation for 2030 hrs for four people on the night that he had died. The table had been booked the day before when Tucker had visited the restaurant with ‘a pretty young girl in her 20s’. According to Jacket, ‘shortly before 1900 hrs’ on the night he died, Tucker had rung him stating that he wished to increase the number of his party from four to six persons. Tucker did not say who the additional diners were, nor indicate that he was going to be late. Who were his two additional guests and how could he have rung the restaurant at around the same time that the police believe he was being murdered?

The time that the victims were shot is not the only contentious issue surrounding their murders. There are many other discrepancies and bizarre happenings concerning this case, the vast majority of which have been covered in books such as
Essex Boys
and
Bonded by Blood
by Bernard O’Mahoney. However, new evidence is emerging all the time. It is an inevitable process because as time moves on people’s loyalties change, and once important secrets become everyday idle gossip.

Six years after Steele and Whomes were convicted of the triple murders, former Detective Superintendent David Bright of Essex Police made a statement to Hertfordshire Police, who were reviewing the case following an appeal by the convicted men. David Bright said that at 0630 hrs on 7 December 1995 he had received a telephone call from a detective constable, then serving with the Drug Squad, informing him that three men had been found shot dead in a Range Rover in Rettendon, and that it was a gangland-style killing. However, during the trial the prosecution had claimed that two members of the public had discovered the Range Rover at about 0800 hrs.

The failure of the prosecuting authorities to disclose DS Bright’s information prior to the trial (in accordance with their obligations) clearly misled the jury about how the police first learned of the murders. If the three deceased men were not under some sort of police surveillance on 6 and 7 December 1995, how is it that DS Bright had known of the murders approximately one and a half hours prior to the two witnesses who, the jury were told, discovered the Range Rover at about 0800 hrs?

I have, quite naturally, taken a keen interest in the case, which has since become known as the ‘Essex Boys’ Murders’. Steele and Whomes’s convictions hinged solely on the evidence of Darren Nicholls, Tate’s former cell mate turned supergrass. All the supporting evidence, which convinced a jury that Nicholls was telling the truth, such as the phone evidence and the time of death, has long since crumbled under scrutiny. However, I have to admit that, although the story Nicholls told the jury at the time was extremely convincing, it rarely touched on the truth.

Nicholls had met Tate, Steele and Whomes while serving a prison sentence at HMP Hollesley Bay in Suffolk. Tate was serving his sentence for the Happy Eater robbery, Steele for importing cannabis by aeroplane and Whomes for stealing cars. When Steele was released from prison on 3 June 1993, he moved into a property at St Mary’s Road in Clacton-on-Sea. Having served a nine-year prison sentence, the last thing on his mind was committing further crime and so he had set up an engineering company called M.J.S. Commerce. A resident of the Clacton area for more than 27 years, Steele’s former occupation had given him a reputation among some police officers that was hard to shake off. Suspicious of Steele and every commercial enterprise that he launched, the police kept a close eye on him and his activities. So much so, in fact, that Steele felt a need to lodge a complaint against the police for harassment just three months after his release. Nobody took any notice of him or his complaint.

Desperate for peace and privacy, Steele decided to sell his home and began negotiations to purchase a secluded bungalow called Meadow Cottage. Nicholls rang Steele regularly from prison but Steele found conversation with him hard.