The Wrong Man: The Shooting of Steven Waldorf and The Hunt for David Martin

by Dick Kirby

  Two separate enquiries were ordered; and in the House, the Shadow Home Secretary Roy Hattersley PC, MP, FRSL (later Baron Hattersley) asked the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw KT, CH, MC, PC, DL (later 1st Viscount Whitelaw):

  To understand that the nationwide concern that has been expressed about last Friday’s tragedy involves not only the shooting of one innocent man but the practices and procedures that made that tragedy possible? I therefore ask the Home Secretary to understand that the House, like the country, expects an inquiry into the regulations governing the use of firearms to police officers and … that he must tell us how he … proposes to remedy the problems that allowed it to happen in the first place?

  The Home Secretary announced that a full report would be sent to the Police Complaints Department and the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Thomas Hetherington KCB, CBE, QC, TD, telling the members, ‘All steps will be taken to ensure no such incident should ever happen again.’ A bristling Paul Boateng PC, MP (later Lord Boateng), never the most enthusiastic supporter of the police despite being a member of the Greater London Council’s Police Committee, stated that the incident raised serious questions regarding police orders governing firearms. The Commissioner, Sir Kenneth Leslie Newman GBE, QPM, KSTJ, LLB, CIMGT, who had just taken up the post a few months previously, mentioned that there might be a close review of police gun controls; he was right.

  All these accusations and condemnations were aired on Monday 17 January and there would be far more to come. There was immense public sympathy for Steven Waldorf – again, rightly so. However, within rank-and-file police circles there was enormous concern for the two officers, where the old maxim ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I’ was freely utilised. American police officers have an even more prescient saying: ‘Better to be judged by twelve, than carried by six.’

  The officers had had to make a split-second decision – something their pompous, postulating critics never have to do – and in that blinking of an eye, with no time to issue a regulation police warning, had made a terrible and catastrophic mistake.

  ‘What bad luck for Peter,’ Bob Cook told me thirty years later. ‘He was a fine, brave cop who loved his work and, because of David Martin, his life was damaged completely.’ Also referring to Peter Finch, Steve Fletcher said to me, ‘He struck me as being an undemonstrative, conscientious detective. A good copper.’

  John Devine agreed. ‘I felt really sorry for him,’ he remarked. ‘He was a lovely individual and a true gentleman,’ and with regards to Finch going forward on foot to try to identify Martin in Pembroke Road, he opined, ‘which in my view was a big mistake,’ feeling that ‘he was placed in an invidious position’.

  ‘I knew John Jardine from ‘X’ Division,’ Colin Hockaday told me. ‘I also knew him from combined operations between the Flying Squad and C11. My opinion of him was that he was very level-headed, was good at what he did, with a good sense of humour; there wasn’t an ounce of malice in him.’

  Matters had reached a state of almost militant resentment when a meeting was held at Elliot House, a police section house for unmarried officers. Feeling that Finch had been shabbily treated, the mood among the assembled officers was that firearms officers should hand in their authorisations. An officer of commander rank arrived, apprehensively asked if members of the press were present and having established there were not, gave the assembled officers a pep talk, to the effect that if they were to do so, it would be putting their colleagues at risk from the growing culture of gun crime. Growling mutinously, the officers dispersed without any authorisations being surrendered; but as the Iron Duke might have mentioned on that occasion, as he did at Waterloo, ‘It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life …’

  Anthony Blok, Martin’s solicitor, appealed to his client to contact him, in order that he could arrange ‘safe custody’ for him. ‘He has just cause to be afraid for his life,’ said Mr Blok, but if Martin heard this impassioned plea, he ignored it.

  He might have been in the seaside town of Paignton, Devon; that was where an off-duty detective believed that he saw him on Tuesday 18 January. The alarm was raised but as darkness fell, by the end of a six-hour operation, which included armed police officers, the operation was stood down. A spokesman for the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary stated, ‘There is a possibility that Martin could be in the area and we are still keeping an eye open for him; after all, his girlfriend came from close by.’

  By 19 January, Waldorf had been able to breathe for about an hour a day without the support of a ventilator. A hospital spokesman stated: ‘Although still in a serious condition, he has had a comfortable and stable day and his progress has been maintained.’

  The second of the inquiries was to appoint the Flying Squad to lead the hunt for David Martin.

  Enter the Flying Squad

  The Flying Squad had been formed in 1919 as a new mobile unit to combat the sudden upsurge in crime following the end of the First World War. For the first time, detectives were able to travel rapidly from one hotspot of crime in London to another. Within ten years, they had become a household name. Whatever they did became headline news and with their fast cars – Bentleys, Lagondas and Invictas – their use of informants and knowledge of the underworld, they quickly became established as the Metropolitan Police’s premier crime-busting department. Tough and uncompromising, and said by their critics to be unorthodox, they took on the toughest gangs and won.

  These included the raid at London’s newly opened Heathrow Airport in 1948 – it became known as ‘The Battle of Heathrow’ – when an attempt was made to steal gold bullion and other commodities valued at £487,900. It resulted in commendations for the Sweeney and a total of seventy-one years’ penal servitude for the eight-strong gang. The squad struck again fifteen years later; the seventeen persons convicted for their parts in the massive £2,631,684 Great Train Robbery were awarded a total of a staggering 369 years’ imprisonment.

  The use of informants was put to the test when the highly secretive post-war Ghost Squad was formed in 1946 by four members of the Flying Squad. In less than four years, the rings of black marketeers, lorry hijackers and warehousebreakers were smashed, with 727 arrests carried out and property valued by today’s standards at £10 million being recovered.

  The squad were particularly adroit at arresting escapees from custody; in 1940, Charles ‘Ruby’ Sparks was arrested after a record-breaking absence of six months from Dartmoor prison and when master safe-breaker Alfie Hinds escaped from Nottingham prison while serving twelve years’ preventative detention, the Flying Squad brought him back. Train robber Charlie Wilson made a spectacular escape from Winson Green prison; once again it was the Sweeney who traced him to Canada and arrested him.

  The Squad had always been in the public eye; when the television series The Sweeney, starring John Thaw and Dennis Waterman, was first shown in 1975, it was so popular that it ran for four series and spawned two films. And when the Channel Four programme Flying Squad, in which a camera crew accompanied Flying Squad officers on operations, was broadcast in 1989, it attracted an audience of 12 million viewers.

  If anyone was going to bring David Martin to book, it was going to be the Flying Squad.

  Nowadays, when I look back at those halcyon days of the Flying Squad at the Yard – the happiest days of my police service – I suppose I could be accused of viewing them through rose-tinted spectacles. It’s an understandable accusation, but like many other indictments levelled against me, it’s untrue. Because when I recall my Squad contemporaries, the vast majority were the finest comrades a detective could ask for. Tough, shrewd, brave and knowledgeable in the ways of the underworld, they were relentless in their pursuit of criminals and contemptuous of them and their lawyers, of whom only a law degree often separated them from their clients.

  Never once, when we bashed in doors, never fully sure of what we were going to find on the other side, was I apprehensive. Never once, when the super
lative Class I trained drivers drove us across London at gasp-producing speeds, did I flinch. I was in the company of men, rascals some of them, but who would never let me down and whom I could, and often did, trust with my life.

  Men like Detective Sergeant John Redgrave, a six foot five colossus who had boxed for the Lafone Cup, whom I described as being ‘as tough as woodpecker’s lips’; he and Detective Sergeant Alan Branch and Detective Constable Mick Geraghty had recently been commended by the commissioner for bravery and devotion to duty, for arresting and disarming, while unarmed themselves, two highly dangerous armed robbers. These and many more like them were the calibre of the officers I had working with me. David Martin’s days of freedom were numbered.

  The commander of the squad, Frank Cater, was 53 years of age. The former Royal Marine had thirty years’ service with the Metropolitan Police at the time of the shooting and was a career detective, having been part of the teams who had brought about the downfall of the Richardson gang and the Kray brothers. (‘I soon realised his great potential,’ said ‘Nipper’ Read, ‘and made him my Number Two.’) This was Cater’s first posting to the Flying Squad; a committed fraud investigator, he had a calm, methodical approach to enquiries. So when he said to me, ‘We need to wind this up as soon as possible, Dick,’ it was out of the ordinary for him. A few days later he was interviewed by the Daily Express and he said, ‘How dangerous is he? Well, he stands charged with shooting a police officer. As to whether he would shoot at a member of the public … I wouldn’t know,’ it was the normal, laid-back Frank Cater type of reply.

  Perhaps that remark was used to try to dampen down the flames being generated by the media. First, there was cross-dressing, bisexual David Martin, a serial escaper, a chameleon of disguise who had already shot a police officer. Next, there was his girlfriend, a glamorous former model and dancer who had told the press that her life had been saved in the Mini because she had been wearing a leather and metal juju charm, following a chance meeting with an African witchdoctor. There was the public concern regarding an innocent man who had been shot by police, two of whom had been charged with his attempted murder. It was a headline story that would run and run until Martin was caught.

  Detective Constable Mick Geraghty was part of a Flying Squad surveillance team and at the time of being called to Paddington Green, he and Police Constable Chris Colbourne (a former 10 Squad driver) had been working to discover the whereabouts of two suspects in the Deptford area who had shot at police officers – now that inquiry had to be left to others on the team. Geraghty and Colbourne’s job was to set up an OP to cover Enter’s address at St Charles’ Square, Ladbroke Grove and for that they used the tower of the local fire station. The OP was manned from 6 a.m. until midnight by the officers; in addition, they had technical help in the form of a time-lapse camera. Every morning, they reviewed the tape for the time not visually covered by them and informed the incident room of their findings; in turn, they were kept up to date with the progress of the inquiry.

  Geraghty and Colbourne maintained watch on the premises for six or seven days; it was, said Geraghty, ‘A tiring, uncomfortable and freezing OP. The small window we watched out of was broken and when the wind blew, our eyes would water a lot.’

  On Saturday 22 January, the officers came on duty and as usual checked the tape. It revealed that a man matching Martin’s description had entered the address at one o’clock that morning. Don Brown and some other senior officers arrived at the OP to check the tape themselves; it appeared it was a possibility that Martin was in the building and the firearms unit D11 was called, as were available Flying Squad units.

  I was in a Flying Squad car when we received the call and as Steve Holloway recalled, ‘We were at Barking and got the call to go there and Tony Freeman got us there in about twenty minutes.’

  It was necessary to know if there was any other access to the flat other than the front door and Geraghty was tasked to find this out. ‘I did this by approaching a lady after she left the building from the ground floor,’ Geraghty told me. ‘She walked around the corner to her car and I introduced myself as a police officer. She looked at me in horror. I looked knackered, dirty, unshaven, wearing old camouflage clothes, but after producing my warrant card and hearing my story, she agreed to let me into the flats.’

  Geraghty was invited up to the woman’s flat and was able to keep the basement under observation. He used his covert body set to keep the rest of us apprised of the situation while matters developed and when they did, they developed very quickly. My team, together with other Flying Squad officers, had arrived, Geraghty opened the ground-floor front door to permit access to a D11 officer to cover any escape through the building and then an armoured D11 Land Rover pulled up outside the premises. The street had been sealed off and local residents were told to stay indoors. A telephone call was put into the flat to inform them of the presence of armed police officers and for them to come out immediately, separately with their hands up, then kneel and then lie down. We then stepped in and dealt with them. Martin was not one of the three, nor was he in the building. What was in the building was some of the property stolen by Martin, deposited there just over two weeks previously. Two of the three occupants of the flat – a man and a woman – were released. The third, whose name was Peter Enter, was not.

  It was not too long before Susie Stephens was arrested. She went to Paddington Green police station by appointment on 23 January and as soon as she arrived, was cautioned and charged. And on the evening of 24 January as Lester Purdy finished visiting Steven Waldorf at St Stephen’s Hospital, he heard his name called from a parked car. He walked over, looked inside and made the acquaintance of Steve Holloway who without further ado, pulled him inside, informing him that he too was under arrest.

  My team were armed on a permanent basis. I’ve mentioned Detective Constable Steve Holloway, a tough, Hoxton-born East Ender with a thick, black moustache whose complexion was so swarthy that I often suggested that Greek blood was present in his genetic make-up; coincidentally, he spoke Greek quite well. Detective Sergeant John Redgrave too has already been mentioned; he would go on to receive immense kudos when effecting the arrest of an armed robber from East London with a terrifying reputation for mindless violence; Redgrave simply picked him up and threw him against a door. However, since the door was made of plate glass, the concussion of the robber’s body against it caused the door to be shattered. Amazingly, he recovered in time to stand trial.

  We, together with our driver Tony Freeman, were on standby at Paddington Green police station to act on any tip-offs as to Martin’s whereabouts from members of the public. With us were Detective Sergeant Alan Branch, another very tough customer, and Detective Constable Gerry Gallagher. Gerry was a wonderful asset to any dangerous situation due in no small part to his voice – like the Greek god Pan, whose angry shout when disturbed an afternoon nap was enough to inspire ‘panic’. He and I had bashed in the front door of a North London dwelling, frequented by an armed robber. In the hallway, the house’s occupier advanced towards us, knife in hand. Gerry, who had drawn his revolver, would I suppose have been quite within his rights to have shot him; however, there was no need. Gerry simply shouted at him and his voice was so thunderous, the knifeman was frozen to the spot and dropped his weapon. I couldn’t help but think that with a few more men like Gerry, there would be no need for the issue of pepper sprays and tasers and we’d have many fewer firearm incidents. Alan (referred to variously as ‘Branchy’ or ‘Twiggy’) and Gerry were in Central 952, driven by Police Constable John ‘Dickie’ Dawson who had been awarded a BEM for gallantry after disarming a gunman who had shot at him.

  Because of the amount of publicity generated by the case, there were quite a few calls into the inquiry office. A woman telephoned saying she had just seen a man dressed as a woman in Pembroke Road, close to the scene of the shooting; but if she had, there was no sign of him (or her) by the time we arrived. One telephone call came from the manager of
a hotel. ‘A bloke’s just checked in to my hotel,’ he said apprehensively, ‘but he’s dressed as a woman – do you think it could be David Martin?’ We decided to find out, and a very surprised transvestite had a model 36 Smith & Wesson shoved up his left nostril. ‘Gracious!’ he gasped. ‘What a fright you gave me!’ Much the same scenario was enacted when a combined weight of about forty stone of Flying Squad leant heavily on another hotel room door and the occupant, a bewigged cross-dresser, found himself dragged down to the ground. ‘O-o-o-h!’ he cried adding, ‘I do hope that’s a gun you’ve just shoved in my ear!’ Once we established he wasn’t Martin, we helped him to his feet, dusted him down and apologised. However, we did have to shell out for a new set of black fishnet stockings because the originals had been irreparably damaged on the way down to the carpet.

  On 27 January we got a very firm lead; Martin had attempted to procure a false passport from the Passport Office at Petty France, just around the corner from the Yard, using the tried and tested formula depicted in Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal – using the identity of a dead person with a year of birth near to Martin’s own. This birth certificate had been presented with an application form, together with alleged verification in the form of a North London vicar’s signature. It might have worked – but it didn’t. An official became suspicious and telephoned police.