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

by Dick Kirby

  I too have been in similar situations, once in particular in a bedroom with a man running amok wielding a knife. Even though that bedroom was far smaller than the landing at Crawford Place, when it came to recording our evidence afterwards, there were some things which some officers saw and heard which others did not. All that can be done in those circumstances is simply to say what it was you did see, knowing that in months to come the defence will be making capital out of those inconsistencies. There you are – in the legal minefield of English justice, that’s life!

  Nicky Benwell gave evidence of Martin’s arrest in the tunnel. Telling the jury he told Martin to raise his hands as he walked towards him, he stated that Martin refused to lift his hands up. Later Martin told him, ‘That would have been giving into you completely. I could never do that.’

  Cross-examining, Lawrence said, ‘He was deliberately refusing to obey your order in circumstances where he had some reason to think it not unlikely he would be shot?’

  Benwell replied, ‘I would agree with that.’

  Although the expression ‘suicide by cop’ was not in general usage at that time, this was precisely what Martin had been attempting. It describes the way in which criminals, unwilling to end their own lives, will put police into the impossible position of having to shoot them so that in that split second, they (the victim) will achieve immortality – or so they think. When the matter of the knife hidden in Martin’s mouth was raised, Benwell said, ‘I wasn’t sure if he had it for suicidal purposes or whether in order to try and make a further escape.’

  This closed the case for the prosecution and the weekend intervened. On Monday 3 October, Ivan Lawrence made various submissions and Kenneth Richardson, perhaps surprisingly, told the judge that he had given ‘very careful consideration’ to the evidence of how PC Carr came to be shot in the groin. Martin had fired not caring particularly where the officer was shot, he said, adding, ‘In those circumstances, nobody should complain if a charge of attempted murder was brought. But having said that, if one looks at the reality of the situation, it would seem that the basic intent at that stage would have been much more to escape arrest.’ Thus, the charge of attempting to murder PC Carr was dropped.

  Now it was Martin’s turn to give evidence. Naturally, he was dressed for the part in a blue-and-white striped shirt, brown trousers with a brilliant yellow strip sewn into one leg, and brown leather slippers, trimmed in yellow. Ivan Lawrence would later describe him as possessing ‘strikingly handsome, if feminine features’, although others would have begged to differ. Martin was the centre of attention in front of a packed spectators’ gallery and an even more crowded press bench and for the next day and a half, he would be loving it.

  The reason for being at Colour Film Services, said Martin, was to copy videos; he had done so previously, copying twenty at a time. However, this he decided would be his final run; and he had imparted this information to the unnamed gang behind this multi-million pound video piracy scam, who were displeased with him. Therefore, he had brought with him a handgun, purely for protection, in case these evil gangsters came to the office to harm him. Are you with me so far, children? Right. During the struggle with PC Carr, the gun – which had a hair-pressure trigger – went off accidentally, since Martin had no intention of shooting anyone. However, the gun which the police said had been used to shoot PC Carr did not have a hair-pressure trigger. This was a setback, albeit one of little importance: one of the handguns found in Martin’s possession when he was arrested six weeks later did have a hair-pressure trigger; naturally, said Martin, the police had swapped the two guns over. Apparently the bullet which had been fired could not be found and a great deal of capital was made over this.

  The gun which had allegedly been used to shoot PC Carr was passed to the jury for inspection; however, first it was passed to Martin, having ensured it was unloaded. It gave him the perfect opportunity for some more grandstanding, telling the jury, ‘It is unloaded, you know; I might blow my head off and make a terrible mess in court.’

  Remarks like this were food and drink to the spectators’ gallery and the unloaded pistol was passed around and merrily clicked by the jury members, to ensure that it did indeed have a hair-pressure trigger. When one thinks about it, it was the height of folly to have passed the firearm to Martin. He would have known this was going to happen; it would not have been impossible for an associate to have smuggled ammunition to him. In the twinkling of an eye, Martin could have loaded the gun, shot the judge and, in the confusion, escaped. You think that’s too far-fetched? Then, with respect, you haven’t been following examples of Martin’s ingenuity as closely as you might.

  When Lawrence put it to him that he had ‘in due course, escaped,’ Martin replied, ‘Well … they lost me, put it that way.’ Martin was thoroughly enjoying himself, saying, ‘If I shoot myself in the process of being arrested, perhaps that is resisting arrest.’

  Regarding the shooting of PC Carr, he was prompted to admit, ‘Perhaps I should not have had a gun in my hand,’ but his colossal ego necessitated qualifying his remarks with an attempt at justification by adding: ‘But it is his fault for actually grabbing hold of my hand and wrenching my arm about.’

  Martin told the jury that many years before he had been a photographer and that during late 1982 he had been involved in security work: ‘Anything from manufacturing covert listening devices to fitting locks on doors.’ Asked by his barrister about the truthfulness of the police evidence regarding how he had been approached as he had got out of the lift and inserted a key in the door of his flat and had been told, ‘Excuse me, love,’ Martin’s reply was immediate: ‘The only thing which was said to me, was ‘‘bang’’. It never got any further than that.’

  Cross-examined by Richardson, the exchanges between the two became sharper; when asked his reasons for taking five guns out of the country, Richardson was goaded into replying, ‘No doubt your criticisms of the lax gun laws in this country will be noted,’ but there was also no doubt that Martin was ahead on points.

  Because of Martin’s allegations of impropriety by the police officers, his character could be put before the jury and his convictions were read out in court. Richardson suggested that because he had spent so many years in prison, he carried guns to shoot his way out of trouble to avoid being returned to prison. He described as ‘absolute nonsense’ Martin’s claim that he carried guns in order to kill himself if the prospect of arrest presented itself. ‘The reason why I suggest you were prepared to use guns to evade arrest,’ said Richardson, ‘was because having been in prison many years, you were not prepared to go back there and were prepared to do anything to avoid it,’ claims which Martin denied.

  Following the completion of his evidence, the jury was shown photographs of Martin dressed in women’s black underwear. This was because during three of the offences carried out by Martin in 1982 he had dressed as a woman. The judge told the jury, ‘We are not concerned with this man’s private habits. I think it sufficient to show you photographs as corroboration that he might be mistaken for a woman. In other respects he is a perfectly normal man but it is part of his scene that he dresses himself up as a woman.’

  In his closing speech, Ivan Lawrence conceded that his client was ‘no knight in shining armour’ and told the jury, ‘I don’t mind what you think of him as a person, probably not very much.’ However, he suggested that as a result of Martin’s past life of crime and now, facing a likely serious sentence, the police might have overreacted in their dealings with him. With the type of punishment likely to follow, having spent nine years in prison, might well lead him to adopt an attitude of ‘I couldn’t care less, let them shoot me; I want to commit suicide,’ said Lawrence.

  On 7 October, Mr Justice Kilner-Brown summed up the evidence on the thirteenth day of the trial. Reminding the jury of how Martin had been shot in the neck by police and had collapsed in a pool of blood when being arrested, he warned them that before they jumped to any conclusions or found th
emselves being affected by feelings of sympathy, they should also remember that when he was shot, Martin was in possession of two loaded handguns. He added that the disclosure of Martin’s previous convictions could be ‘a vital factor’. If a defendant attacked the integrity of prosecution witnesses, as Martin had done, said the judge, previous convictions could be referred to during the trial. He told the jury not to underestimate the seriousness of Martin’s allegations – he was accusing police officers of inventing their story of how he drew a gun and as a result was shot. ‘Such information, elicited in cross-examination may be of vital importance when you hear the police being accused of scandalous and wicked conduct,’ said the judge, ‘to know the sort of person it is, who is making the allegations.’

  After deliberating for three hours on 10 October, the jury foreman told the judge that ‘there was no prospect of reaching an agreement on all the counts’ that day. Telling them, ‘You must not be under any pressure; take as long as you like,’ Mr Justice Kilner-Brown directed that the jury be sent to what the press referred to as ‘a secret London hotel’ for the night. He had previously revealed an almost avuncular side of his nature, praising the jury when they asked a question: ‘May I say how very much I appreciate the fact that you are paying attention to the evidence?’ and also showing concern for their catering arrangements: ‘You must say if you are tea or coffee people.’

  On 11 October, the jury returned their verdicts: guilty (by a majority of 11–1) of causing grievous bodily harm to PC Carr, with intent to resist arrest. He was also convicted of possessing the guns with intent to resist arrest when he was shot in the neck six weeks later. He was found guilty of breaking into the offices of Guns Review – which he admitted during his trial – and also the theft of the money from the robbery where the guard was shot. He might have known that there was going to be a snatch of the money, Martin had told the jury, but he had no idea that guns were going to be taken along, let alone used and he claimed he had not shot the security guard, it was the other man whose name he didn’t know who had been responsible for that. Since the statement of the security guard had been read to the court, he was unable to be cross-examined, so Martin was acquitted of causing grievous bodily harm to the guard as well.

  It seems slightly incredible that he was acquitted of the burglary at the gunsmiths in Covent Garden or the burglary at Eurotell Security Specialists where the surveillance equipment was stolen. He admitted being in possession of equipment stolen from Eurotell but that was not the same as being a burglar, who in that case had inelegantly sawn through the shop’s grill to effect entry. He, Martin grandly told the jury, always used duplicate keys.

  He was also acquitted of the thefts of the Volkswagen Golf convertible and the Mercedes and also the alternative charges of receiving them; it was quite possible, he had told the jury, that he might have borrowed these vehicles from a friend who had naturally neglected to tell him the cars were stolen. It is more understandable that he was also acquitted of possessing firearms with intent to endanger life, since the prosecution had dropped the charge of attempting to murder PC Carr. As Sir Ivan Lawrence later said, ‘Seldom can a defendant have been given so many benefits of the doubt,’ which I suppose is one way of describing those verdicts.

  When it came to sentencing, Martin tried for the last time to assert his own form of authority on the court, by standing up and attempting to walk down to the cells before the judge could speak, but the security guards, who after fifteen days were quite possibly tired of Martin’s behaviour, were having none of it. He was grabbed and pulled back, to hear Mr Justice Kilner-Brown say:

  The fact remains that the growing rise in the carrying of loaded guns has reached alarming proportions. Those who carry loaded guns to shoot their way out of impending arrest must accept very severe sentences, indeed. And that is what you are going to get. In my judgement, the least sentence I can impose is one of twenty-five years.

  Martin ‘appeared distressed by the sentence’ and his latest paramour, Natasha, who must have possessed limitless amounts of patience vowed that she would ‘wait for him’. The press, eager for a predictably imbecile comment from Martin’s father, got one: ‘If I had a gun, I’d go and shoot the judge, myself.’

  In mitigation, Ivan Lawrence had stated, ‘He is clearly a bad man but by no means completely evil.’ PC Carr’s view of Martin certainly took a different view, but he contented himself by saying that he was ‘just another nonentity’; and being described as ‘a nobody’ was probably the unkindest cut that Martin could have received. He had had his day in court. Martin was all set to be consigned to the history books. It was all over – almost, but not quite.

  The Further Trials

  The nine-month wait between arrest and trial was undoubtedly the longest in Finch and Jardine’s lives. They had been committed to stand their trial at the Old Bailey from Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court by Magistrate Kenneth Harington on 17 March 1983.

  Jardine had been born in 1945 and joined the Metropolitan Police twenty years later. He was posted to Acton on ‘X’ Division in West London and a year after joining there had been an explosion at an electrical substation and Jardine had crawled through the twisted wreckage to pull a workman, overcome by carbon dioxide fumes, to safety. In recognition of his bravery, he was awarded a testimonial from the Royal Humane Society. He later passed the advanced driving course at Hendon and became an area car driver and in June 1969, Jardine attended a basic firearms course where he qualified as a marksman. In the late 1970s, he became a member of the ‘X’ Division Crime Squad and in 1982 was selected for the C11 surveillance team.

  Peter Finch had also been born in 1945 but had joined the police slightly earlier than Jardine. He had been commended on two occasions and had attended the basic firearms course in October 1981 and he too had qualified as a marksman; and to qualify for that classification, it meant that the officer had to have an aggregate score of 90 per cent or higher.

  Speaking to me thirty years later, Jardine told me that during that long wait he had received the most enormous encouragement from his colleagues (even though he was kept segregated from them), as well as hundreds of letters of support, including one from the comedian Eric Sykes. ‘The biggest problem I had was with the press,’ he told me, ‘especially the News of the World. They’d come right up to our house and photograph me through the window.’ Matters became so bad with the intrusion of certain members of the press that when Jardine, his wife and two sons wanted to leave their house in Pinner, Middlesex, they would have to exit through the back door, go down the garden, then cross into a neighbour’s garden to get to the family car which was parked streets away.

  ‘I’m certain – in fact, I know – that my phone calls were intercepted,’ Jardine told me and when I expressed surprise at why anyone from his own department (since C11 was responsible for telephone intercepts) would wish to do so, he shook his head. ‘Not the police – the press,’ he replied and on this matter he was absolutely adamant. However, many police officers in a similar dilemma have firmly believed that their telephone calls were intercepted by the press, but certainly not in this pre-2000, pre-digital case.

  Peter Finch suffered similarly. ‘I always had trouble with the press ever since my address appeared in the newspaper,’ he told me. ‘I used to exit and enter my house very quickly and I managed to ward off photographers until the Sunday before my trial when in the afternoon, I went with my two sons to a park behind my house. That Monday, on the front of the Daily Mirror, my photo with one of my sons appeared. Sods!’

  Like Jardine, Finch received ‘excellent treatment from my colleagues; they even had a whip-round which they sent me, every week’. Fellow police officer who were close friends were obliged to submit written requests to their senior officers to permit them to visit him in order not to fall foul of the Discipline Code. Finch too received much support, including from luminaries such as Sir John Mills and David Tomlinson.

  Detective Inspector Bob Co
ok recalled driving along the A406 North Circular Road and seeing on a bridge, spanning the carriageway, painted in large white letters, ‘Finch and Jardine – Guilty’. He believed it was there for months, although Jardine who also saw it thought it was there for years. ‘I remember the ‘J’ of ‘Jardine’ was painted the wrong way round,’ he told me, adding humorously, ‘but it must be difficult to get something like that right, when you’re painting upside down!’

  At long last the trial of the two detectives commenced in No. 1 Court at the Old Bailey on 12 October 1983.

  The judge was 68-year-old Mr Justice Sir David Croom-Johnson. The Second World War had interrupted his legal career and at the conclusion of hostilities, Sir David was discharged from the Royal Navy with the rank of Lieutenant Commander and for his highly dangerous work during the D-Day landings he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. He was much admired as a courteous, deep-thinking judge and a good listener, although as one of the Greenham Common women later opined, ‘It would take a bomb to move him.’

  Jardine had the immense good fortune to be defended by John Mathew QC who, according to The Guardian, ‘looked like a bishop’ but was an extremely sharp defence barrister. He, together with Finch’s barrister, Michael Corkery QC, who had been appointed senior treasury counsel in 1970, had both prosecuted the organised gangs who had been targeted by the Yard’s Serious Crime Squad.

  In opposition, there were political and legal heavyweights. The prosecution was led by the current attorney-general. Robert Michael Oldfield Havers PC, QC (later Baron Havers), was known as Sir Michael Havers; his career was dogged with controversy. He had prosecuted in two of the most notable and long-running miscarriages of justice in English legal history – the Guilford Four and the Maguire Seven – which would later result in severe condemnation for him. In 1981, Sir Michael appeared for the prosecution in the case of Peter Sutcliffe (‘The Yorkshire Ripper’) who was charged with thirteen counts of murder. When Sutcliffe offered a plea to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, this was accepted by Sir Michael but in an almost unheard of intervention, the trial judge demanded a detailed explanation of Sir Michael’s reasoning for accepting the lesser plea and having heard it, overruled him – after a two-week trial, Sutcliffe was convicted of the murders. So the verdict was a triumph for Sir Michael – albeit one which had been forced upon him – but he let himself down badly when in his opening speech he mentioned Sutcliffe’s victims, telling the jury, ‘Some were prostitutes but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women.’ Unsurprisingly, the English Collective of Prostitutes was incandescent with rage, accusing him of ‘condoning the murder of prostitutes’ and demonstrating outside the Old Bailey with placards. Fortunately, Sir Michael had Roy Amlot QC, a highly respected barrister who was then senior prosecuting counsel for the Crown and Mr E.J. Bevan QC to assist him.