The Wrong Man: The Shooting of Steven Waldorf and The Hunt for David Martin (5 page)

The Detective Training School had been opened at Hendon in 1936, and as the years passed, detectives from all over the world attended the courses and some firm friendships were forged. One of Roach's colleagues who had attended the Advanced Detective Course had become friendly with a senior officer in the French
Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité
(CRS) or security police. The CRS was split into different companies, one of which was the motorway police which patrolled urban areas. A phone call was made and by the time Roach and Police Constable Don Arrowsmith, a Class I driver, arrived at the car park, there was a CRS officer, complete with side-arm, automatic rifle, grenades and radio, sitting on the bonnet of the stolen BMW.

The car was immobilised and the following day the two officers returned it to Calais, so Roach got his wish of having a ride in such a prestigious vehicle when Arrowsmith opened up on the A26-A1 Autoroute and during the 186-mile journey managed to achieve the car's top speed of 135mph.

Several bottles of scotch had been acquired to repay the senior CRS officer for his assistance; however, he had gone on leave and therefore, upon their return to West Hampstead police station, the bottles were utilised to commemorate the car's return. Within a very short space of time though, the officers would have little to celebrate.

Roach was waiting at Hampstead Magistrates' Court to obtain a further remand in custody for Martin and Green. He was impatient, because although his squad had been carrying out a great deal of work in his absence, there was still an enormous amount of urgent enquiries to be dealt with and he wanted the case remanded and out of the way. Roach went to the cells where he saw Green, who, looking downcast, asked him, ‘Have you got David, yet?'

Suddenly, Roach realised there was no sign of Martin. The gaoler was spoken to; he had not checked Martin in. Brixton prison was approached; they confirmed that Martin had been collected by the prison van service. Each prisoner had been locked in an individual cell in the van – so where was he?

The matter was soon resolved. At that time, it was the practice for remand prisoners to be collected from the various remand prisons and taken to Gerald Road police station in Victoria where the prisoners would be sorted out and placed on to the vans which were to deliver them to the various Magistrates' Courts. Inside the prison vans were cramped, individual cubicles and Martin had jammed something flexible into the lock of his cell door as it was being slammed shut at Brixton and thus the tongue did not fully drop into the housing. While the staff were in the office at Gerald Road sorting out which prisoners went where, Martin simply pushed open his cell door, opened a securely locked roof light, squeezed his narrow frame through the gap, climbed over the police station's gate, and vanished.

He broke into a flat at 13–16 Craven Hill Gardens, W2 on 25 October and stole a passport, correspondence, two Barclaycards, a cheque book, thirty-five pieces of jewellery, a camera, two coats and a shirt – and also a car to take them away in. Three days later, he stole a Citroën and between 1 and 8 November, he broke into a flat at 59 South Edward's Square, W2 and stole a quantity of photographic and electronic equipment. It was while he was on the run that we had our encounter at Forest Gate; no wonder Martin was keen to avoid my company!

Meanwhile, Roach intensified his enquiries which quite apart from recovering more stolen property, now included searching for Martin. His parents' address at Finsbury Park was raided; Martin was not there, but more property stolen by him was, as well as seals and dies for forging passports and Green Card insurance forms. Colin Black told me that Martin used ‘Liquid Metal' (a tube consisting of gallium-containing alloys with very low melting points which are liquid at room temperature) to copy a passport's embossed stamp from which he would make a very authentic looking die.

During the search of the flat at Langtry Road, among the items of property seized was an A–Z directory and an officer was given the job of scrutinising every page to see if there were any tell-tale markings that might reveal where offences had been committed, as well as the location of where stolen property might be stashed. Inside one particular page was a sketch showing a stream, a reference to garages and the Great Cambridge Road, together with the letters ‘VW'. It took the officer two more days before he was fairly certain that he knew that the place he was looking for was situated in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire.

The garages were identified and by lying on the ground and raising the bottoms of the shutters, the officers saw a Volkswagen van in it. One of the partners of the managing agents for the garages was a Justice of the Peace; upon hearing from the officers that they believed that stolen property was in the garage, he accompanied them there and opened the door. The registration number of the Volkswagen minivan, EMM 173J, revealed that it had been stolen between 14 and 17 January 1972; later enquiries revealed that David Martin had been the person responsible.

Inside the van was a whole mass of stolen property and after examining it back at the police station, papers led the officers to a car park at Heathrow where they recovered a Citroën containing a large amount of photographic equipment, passports and chequebooks. More camera equipment was seized from the old North London Air Terminal in Finchley Road. And at West London Air Terminal they found an escape kit – chequebooks, credit cards and passports in another Citroën.

A receipt found in the flat at Langtry Road related to a safety deposit box at Harrods; a search warrant was obtained which revealed that the box contained chequebooks, credit cards and stamps, made up to forge entries in Post Office Savings Bank Books. These stamps neatly dovetailed with the Post Office books found at Wood's address. The gang had gone to various Post Offices, opened accounts in nominal sums and provided false names. The stamps were made up by using letter stamps, bound around corks with wire. They were set in the name of the Post Office and when they were inked and stamped gave a good facsimile of a genuine entry stamp. Amounts were entered in the columns with false initials and fraudulent withdrawals were then made: simple but highly effective and very lucrative. And in a cottage in Hertfordshire, local constabulary officers, acting on a tip-off from Roach's squad, discovered stolen hi-fi equipment.

Janet Norman-Phillips was still on the loose and it was known that she was using stolen Barclaycards and cheques to live on. Roach and his team were aware of the Barclaycards she was using, so the chief security officer at Barclaycard was contacted – he had previously worked with Roach on the Fraud Squad – and every morning the investigators were telephoned with her latest string of offences. On a large blackboard, they could chart her movements which, from Derby, went directly south to Southampton and then back to London. With luck, they would be able to determine the next area where she would strike and effect her arrest. In the event, her apprehension was carried out following a violent and dramatic incident – which had nothing to do with Roach and his team – by young officers who were not even aware of the existence of Martin, Norman-Phillips or anybody else.

On 2 January 1973, plain-clothes officers from Hyde Park police station had been detailed to carry out an observation in Hyde Park's underground car park, due to a spate of thefts of and from vehicles parked there. Officers included 25-year-old Temporary Detective Constable (TDC) John Kelly and Police Constables Wally Hammond, 30, and Mick Edwards, aged 31. They saw a white BMW enter the car park, driven by a woman – this was Janet Norman-Phillips. The car had been stolen by her between 12 and 15 November 1972 but the officers were not aware of this. However, Norman-Phillips was equally unaware of the officers' presence and she got out of the car and tried to open the boots of three other unattended BMWs. The officers stopped her and she stated that she was looking for a friend's car, since she wanted to leave a note under the windscreen wiper; however, her actions were not consistent with someone wanting to leave a friend a message at the other end of a car. She agreed to accompany the officers to the police station but said she wanted to obtain evidence of her identity from her car. It was a trick, and a good one; as soon as she was inside her car, she slammed the door, locked it and started the engine.

TDC Kelly flung himself across the bonnet, PC Hammond managed to smash the driver's window but Norman-Phillips put the car into gear and drove straight at PC Edwards who managed to fling himself out of the way. The car roared off, with TDC Kelly hanging on to the wing mirror and windscreen wipers with Norman-Phillips swerving the car from side to side in an effort to dislodge him. The car tore into Park Lane and then Norman-Phillips swung the car hard right at Brook Gate and smashed into a crash barrier; she was travelling so fast that the impact caused Kelly to be hurled into the air, hitting the road twenty-three feet away; his shoulders were fractured in three places. The girl had been knocked unconscious, having hit her head on the windscreen as the result of the crash; but after a short spell in hospital, she was arrested and questioned. Her admissions to the officers resulted in the recovery of even more stolen property and she too was charged with a variety of offences, including the attempted murder of a police officer.

Martin had since been arrested and by now the crime squad were wise to his antics; they had discovered one of his escape ploys. ‘His trick was to chew some paper when waiting to be booked in,' Colin Black told me, ‘then he would place the wet wad of paper into the lock keep as he was placed in the cell; this would stop the tongue of the lock engaging into the keep. We always double-checked the cell door with him in custody.' Black and his colleagues would then be posted to sit outside his cell twenty-four hours a day – ‘Very boring!'

Now, once more, Martin was remanded in custody. It had been a lengthy, complex and an extraordinary inquiry and Roach and his team had every right to be pleased with themselves. They had recovered over 900 items of property worth by today's standards in the region of £320,000 – and their expertise, plus the courage of the Hyde Park officers, would later bring well-merited commendations from the trial judge and the commissioner.

Most importantly, they had smashed a gang of sophisticated criminals, who individually and severally had been involved with conspiracies to steal mail, to obtain money from Post Offices by means of forged instruments and to pervert the course of justice, quite apart from the car thefts and burglaries of which Martin was the undisputed leader.

Let Eddie Roach describe just one example of Martin's cool nerve:

One example of the audacity of David Martin took place when he broke into a Bentley saloon in an underground car park, under flats in Hampstead. He, in his normal way, cleared all of the papers out of the glove compartment, together with a bunch of keys. On studying the papers, he discovered a receipt for a private aircraft refuelling. The receipt was on an American Express account from which he saw the card was due for renewal in a week's time. He rang the American Express company, identified himself as the customer and said that as his card was due to expire shortly and he had to travel to the States, could they please send him a new one immediately? The next morning, he hung around the flat, saw the postman go up to the door, waited until the postman had gone, then he opened the door with the keys he had stolen, took the American Express letter, left everything else, closed up and left.

Now he had been re-arrested Martin was remanded in custody at Brixton prison; however, the man who boasted ‘No prison will hold me!' had a reputation to live up to and on Wednesday 30 May 1973 it was put to the test.

B
rixton prison in South London was not high-security in the way in which Belmarsh prison is, which was opened in 1991; it was simply a remand prison for housing prisoners awaiting trial. Built in 1820, it was intended to house 175 prisoners; on 30 May 1973 there were approximately 770 prisoners incarcerated at Brixton. ‘D' wing housed twenty prisoners thought to be security risks – Martin was one of them.

Between 1968 and 1972 annual armed robberies in the Greater London Area rose from just twelve to sixty-five. During the previous few weeks a gang of determined, armed bank robbers – they were known as the Wembley Mob – had been arrested and charged with a number of those robberies in which a total of £1,250,000 had been stolen. They had been remanded in custody at Brixton and they were rightly apprehensive regarding their ultimate fate. One of their number, one Derek Creighton Smalls – known as ‘Bertie' – had appeared at Harrow Magistrates' Court on 3 April and the rest agreed to give evidence against them. The gang decided not to wait to discover how compelling Smalls's testimony might be; they already had a shrewd idea. Outside help was needed for them and it was not slow in materialising.

Early that morning, two rented Ford Escorts with their ignition keys and their tanks full of petrol were left parked in Clarence Crescent, almost within walking distance from the prison and strategically placed to offer escape to all points of the compass. Newspapers had been folded over the steering wheels as an aid to instant recognition for the would-be drivers. These were the change-over vehicles needed for the escape. At 10 o'clock the initial escape vehicle, a white Ford Transit Rent-a-Van, was left in Lyham Road, close to the rear gates of the prison; thirty minutes later a Lambeth District Dustcart with a hydraulic tipper trundled through the prison's rear gates as it did every Wednesday morning and commenced collecting the waiting refuse bags.