Hungerford: One Man's Massacre

by Jeremy Josephs

  The card also specified that guns should be fired by police 'only as a last resort when conventional methods have been tried and failed or must from the nature of the circumstances obtaining be unlikely to succeed if tried'. A gun could then be used, the legislation stated, when it 'is apparent that the police cannot achieve their lawful purpose of preventing loss or further loss of life by other means'. Sergeant Brightwell and his colleagues in the Support Group were very familiar with the statute, for the extremely cautious wording of the 1967 Act had been drummed into them time and again.

  But for all the Group's members, there was one crucial consideration which always put the entire issue into perspective: that while the decision to open fire is an individual one, that individual's decision might one day have to be justified before a properly constituted court of law. Sergeant David Warwick, a colleague of Brightwell's, was not actually in the Support Group. But as a firearms instructor who sometimes supplemented the Tactical Firearms Team's response, he was well acquainted with the regulations concerning firearms.

  On the implications of this rule, Sergeant Brightwell says: 'Just to fire for the sake of it quite simply makes you a murderer. If I have a person within my sights - even if he has shot another person - I quickly run through three simple tests. Is the person likely to shoot anybody else? Is there any threat to the public, the police or anybody else? And is the person likely to abscond or commit other offences? If the answers to these questions are coming up no, then you simply do not shoot. In fact if you have to shoot we in the Support Group consider it basically a failure of policy. We are the police. We are not judge, jury and executioner all in one.'

  Britain's police, both armed and unarmed, are therefore quite properly prohibited by Act of Parliament from using unreasonable force. But at the same time it is accepted that the police should not be obliged to expose themselves to unnecessary risks while carrying out their duty to protect the public. While this is an extremely delicate balance to achieve, Chief Inspector Glyn Lambert is sure of one thing: 'When an armed incident occurs it is an impossibility to just go charging in like the Cavalry. Of course we have a duty to save lives if one can. But it is just not on to expose yourself to a ridiculous amount of jeopardy in order to do this. So if necessary we will go cautiously. And if necessary we might even have to go tortuously. I have to protect the public, of course. That is what policing is all about. But I am never going to be prepared to sacrifice my men like lambs to the slaughter needlessly and without a sense of direction or knowledge of what they are trying to achieve.'

  There are many other facets to policing besides the firearms issue, which is why, when a major incident occurs, overall operational control immediately passes to the Assistant Chief Constable. And on Wednesday 19 August 1987 this senior position was occupied by Charles Pollard, perhaps the most popular and highly respected person in the entire Thames Valley force. On that Wednesday morning Assistant Chief Constable Pollard was preoccupied with one thing: that his desk should be cleared by the end of the afternoon, for his long-awaited summer leave was due to begin.

  A veteran of the siege at the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980 and of the bombing of the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1985, Pollard has been a lifelong defender of the principle of Britain's police remaining unarmed: The Thames Valley Police is, in common with the rest of the police service in this country, a civil, unarmed police force whose members carry out their duties through the consent of the community rather than by force. On those occasions when force is required, tradition provides, and the law dictates, that only the very minimum of force is permissible. This principle is practised not only in everyday policing situations but it is also enshrined in all our policies involving the exercise of force through the use of special equipment such as firearms. What a lot of people don't realize is that when an incident occurs it's not just a question of going into a local police station, getting a gun, going out and shooting a suspect. It's just not as simple as that. It does take time to get weapons out, to get them to the scene, to identify where your suspect is and then to contain him. And that is one of those things which, in a country like ours, we perhaps have to accept.'

  As the Assistant Chief Constable set about his paperwork, hoping to be able shortly to go on holiday with a clear conscience, Sergeant Brightwell was engaged in his training session at the army range at Otmoor. Then, suddenly, Brightwell's pager sounded. Almost simultaneously, Sergeant Winnick's did likewise. So did those belonging to the firearms instructors. For the last few minutes or so, Kidlington HQ had become frantic with activity. Chief Inspector Lambert, head of the Support Group, was swinging into action, his many years of experience in the police standing him in good stead in a crisis. The Assistant Chief Constable phoned home to break the news to his wife that their holiday was off. Although they did know it at that time, the members of the Tactical Firearms Team of the Thames Valley Police were poised to confront the biggest-ever test for armed police anywhere in the United Kingdom.

  SEVEN

  'A man in black has shot my mummy'

  At home in North Newnton, Nellie Fisher waited and waited. It was a frustrating time for the great-grandmother on her ninety-fifth birthday; she was growing impatient for the festivities to begin. So too were the other members of the family who had gathered for the occasion. But they all knew very well that the celebrations could not get under way until her favourite granddaughter, Little Sue, had arrived with young Hannah and James.

  When Michael Ryan woke up that same morning he was feeling a little off colour. He decided that the best remedy would be to take a couple of paracetamols. Nor was he sure precisely how the day was likely to turn out. But one thing was certain: unlike the previous day, he would not be visiting the Tunnel Rifle and Pistol Club in Devizes, the shooting centre where he had been spending so much of his time and energy during recent weeks. Instead, having put on an open-necked white shirt and a pair of blue jeans, he jumped into his D-registration Vauxhall Astra and pulled out of his driveway in South View.

  After turning right on to Fairview Road, Ryan then drove down Hungerford's ancient High Street and headed off towards the A4. He was travelling in a westerly direction, towards the Saver-nake Forest. It was that well-known Wiltshire beauty spot that Little Sue had chosen for her picnic with Hannah and James. She had prepared the children's treat some time before. Indeed she had meticulously planned out their activities for almost every day of those long summer holidays, which, for Hannah at least, still had another three weeks to run. And the weather, that Wednesday morning, had not let them down.

  Myra Rose, a spirited pensioner of seventy-five, had also been in the forest that morning. Her home was in Bournemouth, but she was staying with friends in nearby Marlborough. The woodland setting was so soothing that she decided to sit down and read for a while, and before she knew it, almost an hour had slipped by. Her imagination and intellect exercized, she knew that it was time now for her body to benefit likewise. Walking along at a brisk pace, she basked in the glorious sunshine. Suddenly her serenity was shattered by a calm announcement from a little girl. It was four-year-old Hannah, Little Sue's eldest child.

  'I was walking through the forest,' Myra Rose would later recall, 'when these two small children strolled up towards me. "Oh, we've been looking for you," the little girl said to me. "We were coming to find you." They both held my hands and the little girl looked up at me and said: "A man in black has shot my mummy." They were both very calm and didn't really seem at all dazed. "He's taken the car keys," said the little girl, "and James and me can't drive the car without the keys." Then she said: "We've had our picnic - I'm going home to find my daddy. We're going home." They then began to walk off. Well, this was a story you just could not believe. In any case, I hadn't heard any shots or anything. I was quite simply dumbfounded.'

  Dumbfounded though she was, as a grandmother of two children Myra Rose knew full well that she could not allow these two youngsters to wander off all alon
e into the thick of the forest. Instinctively, without hesitation, she took them under her wing. For the first few moments, however, she was not sure what to believe, in which direction to head or indeed what to do at all. The little girl's story simply sounded too far-fetched to be true. The kindly old lady, instantly adopted by Hannah and James, decided that she should perhaps go back in the direction the two children had come from and try to find their mother's car. She was convinced that somewhere in the forest was a young mother frantically searching for her two children.

  Whether the little girl's story was true or not, Myra Rose knew that her role was to care for these two tiny waifs; to comfort and to calm them. As she embarked on her search, she knew that when it came to distracting or entertaining young children, one of her stories could almost always be relied upon. They had served her well with her own grandchildren in Australia, and, she hoped, they would have the same effect now.

  'The children told me that they had been tired and had had a little sleep in the car,' Myra Rose would later explain. 'They then said that they didn't know the way back. So we walked back the way I had come from and we met some other people who I had earlier seen having a picnic. Then James began to cling to me. He just would not leave me. It was just such an incredible story, though, I was still not at all sure what to believe.'

  Unfortunately, as the adoptive grandmother was shortly to discover, little Hannah could hardly have been a more reliable witness. Her every single word had been true. A man in black had indeed shot her mummy. And that man was Michael Ryan.

  During their picnic, Hannah would later disclose to the police, another car was parked nearby, with a man sitting at the steering wheel. Just as her mother was finishing the picnic and folding away the groundsheet, the man had got out of his car and walked towards Little Sue and her children.

  Ryan was brandishing a Beretta self-loading pistol, capable of firing sixteen shots. Pointing it at Little Sue, he told her to put her children into her own car. As she strapped them in, she succeeded in keeping her composure, speaking confidently and reassuringly to them. Til be back in a few minutes,' she said.

  Sue Godfrey's overriding priority was to give the impression that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, that she remained fully in control of everything that was taking place, just as she always did. In reality, as she knew only too well, something quite extraordinary had happened, and Ryan's Beretta amply demonstrated that she was not at all in control.

  The gunman frogmarched Little Sue into a woodland glade some seventy-five yards from her car, clutching the blue tarpaulin groundsheet under his arm. There is little doubt that Ryan had sex uppermost in his mind when he approached Sue Godfrey, a strikingly attractive woman in her mid-thirties. Certainly the police have long taken this view. 'Of course, our theory is difficult to substantiate,' a police spokesman explains, 'because facts are scarce, and we only have the testimony of the little girl. But Mrs Godfrey was a very good-looking woman being led deep into the woods, with Ryan holding the groundsheet, to boot, so we don't think that he was taking her on a nature trail. We think that she must have tried to make a run for it. And that in so doing got shot.'

  Hannah Godfrey heard those shots. She then saw the man in black run back to his car and speed off. Not surprisingly, there was no sign of her mother. Indeed, mother and children were never to set eyes on one another again. Hannah and James remained in the car for a short while before Hannah decided to unstrap herself and James.

  What Hannah did not know was that her mother had been shot ten times in the back. After she had fallen through a wire fence, Ryan had then fired three more shots into her body. The pathologist Dr Roger Ainsworth later confirmed that he had found thirteen bullet holes in her upper back. But it was a policeman, Sergeant Coppen, who had been first to arrive at the scene of the crime. He found Sue's car parked on Grand Avenue in the forest, unlocked and with two handbags, several toys and her driving licence inside. He had found her body lying on its side at around 2pm on that warm Wednesday afternoon. Several bullet holes had punctured the blue, flowery dress which she had chosen to wear for Grandma Nellie's birthday. Ten yards away lay the blue groundsheet. It had been stretched out on the ground, but her clothing remained entirely undisturbed.

  Driving home from work that evening, Brian Godfrey heard on the radio that a young mother of two had been shot dead in the Savernake Forest. 'I thought, how terrible. Obviously I identified with a mother and two kids. But I never dreamed that it was my wife and kids,' Brian recalls.

  When he returned to Burghfield Common, the family home in Clay Hill Road was empty. By the time another hour had elapsed the computer technician was distinctly on edge. Then he noticed two tall men walking down the path and making their way towards his front door.

  'They were in plain clothes, but I knew that they were policemen. By the time they were inside I knew that Sue was either hurt or dead. One of them said, "You look upset" and I said that I had been listening to the car radio. Then they said: "We've got bad news for you - your wife is dead." I asked what had happened to the children and they told me that they were at Swindon police station. What I've managed to get from the children is that a man with a gun appeared just as they had finished the picnic. He apparently said to Sue: "I'm going to shoot you if you don't come with me." She fastened the children into their seats and told them that she would return in a short while.'

  Sue Godfrey did not return - Ryan had seen to that - and her children were left to wander about the forest before being found by Myra Rose, who would later explain: 'I eventually went with the children to Swindon police station. Of course there were lots more stories throughout the day. James was with me all day until his daddy turned up. But when that poor man walked in, I thought that it was a good time for me to creep silently away so that James, in particular, would not notice that I'd gone.'

  ITN's News at Ten broadcast to the nation later that evening the story of what had happened to Sue Godfrey and her two children, a story that was almost 'unbearably painful', even to report. As far as Ryan was concerned, however, the day had hardly begun. For as he sped away from the scene of this brutal murder, Mrs Kakoub Dean of the Golden Arrow Service Station on the A4 at Froxfield, was herself about to come within a hair's breadth of losing her life.

  The isolated petrol station was the one where Sue Godfrey had filled up earlier that morning. She and Mrs Dean had exchanged a few brief but friendly words. A couple of hours had passed since then and Mrs Dean had served a good many more customers. For her, it was a typical August day at the Elf service station owned by her husband, Zubair, who also ran a petrol station at Marlborough. Then Ryan's silver-grey Vauxhall Astra GTE pulled in. For several years now, he had been a regular customer and a familiar, if not always very friendly, face. Mrs Dean, a twenty-nine-year-old Asian mother of three, immediately thought it unusual that he had approached from the Marlborough side, rather than from Hunger-ford, his customary route.

  Almost every other day Ryan would buy £4 or £5 worth of petrol with his Barclaycard. He preferred pump number two, but this time, as well as putting & 15.42 worth of petrol in his car, he filled a five-litre can with £2.01 worth.

  'I also thought it a little odd that he had bought more petrol than usual,' Mrs Dean would later recall. 'I always used to say good morning to him, but he would never say a word. He would always just put his credit card down on the counter and never said anything. Not even a thank you. I must say that I always found him a very strange customer.'

  Whatever lack of courtesy Ryan might have displayed in the past, Mrs Dean was certainly right about his behaviour being odd that day. For as she turned to the till to register the sale, he seemed to be bending down to remove something from the boot of his car. When she looked up again, Kakoub Dean was staring into the muzzle of a semi-automatic rifle: 'He seemed to be fiddling with the boot of his car for ages, waiting for another customer to leave. I can't remember whether I dived below the counter before the gun went off or aft
er.'

  Whatever the sequence of Kakoub Dean's movements, a one-inch hole had been blasted through the petrol station's window, the bullet ricocheting off the wall into the ceiling and out again into the back of the shop: The next thing I knew was a bullet had smashed through the glass kiosk screen and hit the clock. I don't know how it missed me, because I'm sure I felt it pass through my hair. It was just as I was telling him the amount on the till that I lifted my eyes and saw him pointing this gun straight at me.'

  Ryan had missed. But he now stepped inside to do the job properly. Perhaps at closer range he would achieve a little more accuracy. Stunned, Kakoub Dean hid under the counter. 'Please don't, please don't,' she begged, as the gunman confronted her.

  'I really don't know if he heard me or not. Because he said nothing. I could see him but he couldn't see me. He stayed there for a few seconds and was standing holding the gun - but there was nothing I could do.'

  As she lay helpless under the counter, Kakoub Dean crawled close to a rack of sweets which formed part of its display. She held her breath and simply waited to die. There was nothing else she could do. She had appealed to Ryan, and it had had the air of a last request. As she did so, the gaunt face of Rambo looked out from the shelves, among an array of other violent and soft-porn videos, including The Terminator.

  But all Kakoub Dean heard was the clicking of an empty gun: Ryan, the self-styled marksman extraordinaire, had ran out of ammunition. 'I heard four or five clicks - and nothing happened,' she recounts. I know I am lucky to be alive. He would have killed me. I don't know how I survived. Because there was murder in his eyes. He didn't smile. He didn't blink. He didn't do anything. He just stared straight through me as if I wasn't there.'