Read The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord Online
Authors: Jim Wilson
The Iceman: The Rise and Fall of a Crime Lord (17 page)
27
Our Lost Boy
June Ross was talking on the phone with David, the eldest of her five children, around 9 p.m. on Friday, 16 March 2007, when an overdose of heroin killed him. She was sitting in the comfortable family home in the affluent village of Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire, where she and her husband Donald had raised David and his two brothers and two sisters.
David lived just along the road in the flat he shared with his girlfriend, who was away visiting her sister that weekend. When he was found two days later, his phone was still gripped in his lifeless hand.
June said:
He had signed for a flat the Wednesday before he died and he started a job laying turf that week. Because he was paid cash at the end of each day, he was able to buy heroin. I had been speaking to him on the phone that Friday night and his speech was gradually getting slower and slower. I asked if he had taken Valium and he said he had so I just put it down to that. He then just stopped talking but the line was still open – he hadn’t ended the call. I am now sure that was his last breath I heard on the phone.
I work with heroin addicts and one of them said to me that what I heard on the phone was his death rattle. I at least knew that he wasn’t on his own when he died even though I was on the other end of the phone. Who wants to die alone?
At the time, June thought that the heroin or the tranquillising qualities of the Valium had taken effect and David, thirty-six, was too out of it to continue the call. But, when Saturday morning came, June’s maternal instincts began to gnaw away at her. Later that day, David had failed to keep separate appointments – one with one of his brothers and the other with a ‘mentor’ who was trying to help him break his addiction.
On the Sunday, David’s girlfriend phoned June to say that she too was worried. It was unusual that David hadn’t answered any of her many phone calls or replied to the text messages she’d sent him. She voiced her fears to June, saying, ‘He might be lying blue-lipped in the flat.’
June said:
That just clarified in my mind that something was wrong and, by the Sunday afternoon, I was sure he was lying up there. I was feeling really uptight. Donald got hold of my middle son who is very tall, over six foot four, to get him to look in the window but the blinds were closed tight.
The key was on the inside of the lock so Donald and my son went to get a wire coat hanger which they used to unlock the door. When they got in, Donald went straight through to the bedroom thinking that David would be there.
My middle son went into the kitchen and found David lying dead on the floor. He knew straight away that his brother was dead and just closed the door.
Almost forty-eight hours after that final conversation with his mum, David’s phone remained in his hand, the many texts and messages from his partner never to be answered. When he died, he had been about to make a cup of tea as his mug, containing a teabag and sugar, was sitting beside the kettle.
Donald phoned the police and then returned home in order to confirm to his wife what she already sensed. June said:
I knew anyway. I had a wee cry and said that I had to go and see him but the police could not let me in and said it was best to try and remember him as he was. I think that was good advice.
June finds solace in her Christian faith and believes that her troubled son is no longer suffering and that the torture that he and his family suffered for so many years is at an end. She also draws comfort in the fact that she was with him when he died, albeit at the end of the phone. She said, ‘At least we know he is at peace now. We do have a faith in God and we believe that he is in heaven which is better than being here trying to get money for heroin.’
The couple carry themselves with great dignity in the wake of such a bitter loss which was compounded by an agonising wait for the release of his body by the authorities. On 8 May, more than seven weeks after his premature death, many hundreds of mourners crammed into a Port Glasgow church to celebrate David’s troubled life. Those attending the service were given copies of a moving tribute about David which had been written by June. It read:
My son David was the eldest of five children brought up in a Christian family, going to church as a baby then Sunday School as a young boy. Growing up, he was full of mischief, loved life, was always trying something exciting – skateboarding, BMX and skiing.
As time went on, David got involved with friends who experimented with drugs and, like many young people, experimented himself. This eventually led to a serious addiction to heroin.
David grew up in a time and place where most parents had a limited knowledge of drugs. Stories about cannabis being smoked in school playgrounds were enough to cause sleepless nights for many mums and dads. But, as the cancer of hard drugs began to creep across Scotland, Donald and June were well placed to understand it as they worked with a charity called Teen Challenge. This Christian group, founded in late 1950s New York and now operating in more than seventy countries, helps many young Scots battling with drug problems.
David was born nine days before Christmas in 1970 and over the next fourteen years his four siblings arrived into a loving family home filled with happiness. The first sign of a flirtation with any kind of substance came when David was thirteen years old. June had arrived home from a cash-and-carry with bulk supplies for her large family, including deodorant and hairspray. Donald said:
I remember hearing this aerosol noise in the bathroom and wondered what on earth he was up to in there. I shouted on him a couple of times but he didn’t reply so I climbed in through the bathroom window. I found him lying semiconscious in the bath having inhaled this stuff. I dragged him out the bath and carried him outside to the fresh air where I made him walk round and round the fields to try and get it out of his system. It was only when I realised that he was OK that I got angry at him. It later came out that he had first done this on a school trip to Switzerland.
He was a bit of a character and a tearaway. He liked to be the class comedian at school and was very much a people person. From that moment, we began to get suspicious of everything that he got up to. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, he was away at a church summer camp and we think he was caught smoking hash which he was warned about but not sent home. When he was a bit older he was drinking and hanging around in bad company and we were suspicious of other things.
When he was eighteen, I had to give him three months notice to find somewhere else to live because he was going totally against what we as a family were prepared to accept. He was old enough to run his own affairs and we had to protect the other members of the family.
David moved out to stay with his then girlfriend and their parents in nearby Johnstone. His family don’t know exactly when David first took heroin but, by the time he was twenty, they were certain he was doing so. June said:
Two of the counsellors who do voluntary work with Teen Challenge were round for supper and I was worried because I had heard nothing from David for five weeks, which was not like him. That night he appeared and, just from looking at him, I knew for sure that he was on heroin. We can’t be certain when it started because, like all addicts, he became a very good liar. They develop a smokescreen.
Before their son became hooked, Donald and June helped set up The Haven, a residential centre in Kilmacolm which caters for up to a dozen people with drink and drugs problems. It was a place where David was to make some of his nine ultimately failed attempts at rehabilitation. The most successful of those was at a centre in Preston, in Lancashire, around three years before his death. He returned to the family home drug-free, confident and began attending a college course that would qualify him to help other addicts.
In Preston, he wrote and starred in a screenplay which was to be used to warn kids about the dangers of drugs. His mum occasionally watches the DVD to remember her son when he was happy. June said, ‘He was doing so well but he then got involved with an old girlfriend and went back to Glasgow to live and that was it. It was the beginning of the end.’
After a spell at a London rehab clinic, he returned to Scotland at Christmas 2006, hoping to stay off the heroin, but it was yet another false dawn. June said:
After he died, one of the counsellors from London wrote to me to say how he had told her that he wished he could be more like his brothers. He was striving to turn his back on it. He told me he wanted a normal life as he was almost forty. The desire to break free was there. He waited four months to get on that course in London, such was the high demand for places there but it didn’t work out.
He had been off drugs since Christmas 2006 but he had been gradually getting back into it.
David drifted between flats and partners in areas including Paisley, Gourock, Port Glasgow, Kilmacolm, Dumbarton and Glasgow’s Pollok district. During much of that time, Stevenson’s drugs network spread into many of those communities. His imported drugs were sold by his people to the massed ranks of faceless addicts. What is certain is that, if Stevenson’s drugs business were a supermarket, people like David would be valued customers to be rewarded for their loyalty.
An addict can reasonably be expected to consume three tenner bags of heroin each day. Multiply this by David’s sixteen years of addiction and those tenner bags would add up to a spend of £175,000. Over the years, David’s various jobs included tyre-fitting and insurance sales but he never stayed at them for any length of time as, every time he seemed to be cleaning up, he would slide back into the chaotic, dangerous and dirty world of full-time heroin addiction.
He stole from shops to feed his habit and, before long, the mounting petty convictions resulted in a sheriff sending him to prison for the first of many times. June said:
He appeared at various courts including Paisley, Greenock and Glasgow and was sent to Greenock and Low Moss Prisons several times. I went to visit him a few times and it was a whole new ball game. I just felt so sad and helpless.
One time, while living in Paisley, he was attacked with a golf club in an incident that his parents suspect may have been caused because he was then selling heroin to feed his own habit. Donald said:
One night, someone kicked his car to set off the alarm and, when he ran out, he was smashed in the face with a golf club. It was serious – he had a plate put in his face, his jaw was broken and the whites of his eyes were red. The doctors thought he could lose his sight.
Throughout all these years, there was the hassle that goes with it. We would be woken at 2 a.m. with phone calls from him asking for money or by the police telling us he was in custody. His girlfriend once phoned to ask me to come and help put the door back on as the police had raided the place. We only saw a fraction of what went on.
In the thirteen years between 1992 and 2005, a total of 3,945 drugs-related deaths were recorded in Scotland. In comparison, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, between 1969 and 1999, bullets and bombs claimed around 3,500 lives and the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 on America killed 3,016 people.
A report by the UK Drug Policy Commission published in April 2007, revealed that Scotland has 50,000 heroin addicts. The figure for England, with a population around ten times that of Scotland’s, is 281,000 addicts. Experts fear for the 50,000 Scottish children currently being raised in homes where there are drug problems.
David’s story is not unusual but it reminds people whose sense of shock and anger has been blunted by decades of drugs-death statistics about the human cost wreaked by heroin.
Donald understands that, with the money to be had in the drugs trade, there will always be willing criminals like Stevenson but June believes that those who make millions of pounds from dealing in death should face tougher justice. Donald said:
If you take one out and shoot him, someone else will step into his place. They see the opportunity to make easy money and just go for it. There’s no easy solution. Society can’t even deal with the massive alcohol problem so what chance does it have with drugs?
June said, ‘I know that David made the wrong choices in life but the big drug dealers should be put in jail and they should throw away the key. That’s the way I see it.’
28
Folklore Begins
In the end, the decision was taken quickly. The meeting at the headquarters of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) in March 2004 was, in itself, nothing special. The tasking and co-ordination committee met every month to review the progress of ongoing operations, to allocate resources and to choose the serious and organised criminals most deserving of the agency’s special attention. The handful of senior detectives gathered around the conference table at the SCDEA’s headquarters had read the intelligence dossier in front of them and the authors’ analysis and recommendations were swiftly approved. They moved on to other business but the decision, taken in minutes but based on ten months of painstaking police work, was the most significant to be taken so far in the agency’s short history.