Hungerford: One Man's Massacre

by Jeremy Josephs

  Leslie Bean, deputy officer of the Chestnut Walk old people's home in Hungerford, was the first person to reach him. He found Mr Butler's body on its back and immediately noticed a rifle lying on the ground about fifteen feet away. Working feverishly to stem the flow of blood from the large exit wound, Leslie Bean knew that if he abandoned his impromptu first aid, death would not be long in coming. But then, with Ryan just around the corner, someone shouted out a warning to Mr Bean that if he did not himself now move he might well end up in a similar predicament. That person had not minced his words, bellowing: 'Get your arse out of here. He is coming back.'

  Only then had Leslie Bean fled to safety. By the time the ambulancemen got to Francis Butler he was dead.

  This shooting was witnessed by a thirteen-year-old Hunger-ford schoolboy, Dean Lavisher, from the top of a slide in the recreation ground. Although the boy was himself recovering from a leg operation, he hobbled to a nearby telephone box to call for an ambulance. As he did so, Ryan fired at Andrew Cadle, who had been playing in the recreation ground with Dean. Andrew was not the only one in Hungerford on that Wednesday afternoon to have reason to be grateful for Ryan's inconsistent marksmanship, for as the gunman fired, the boy pedalled away on his bicycle, mercifully hearing the bullet strike a brick pillar instead of his own young frame. After shooting Francis Butler, his ninth victim, Ryan abandoned his Ml carbine in the Memorial Gardens. This did not mean, however, that he was now only lightly armed, for he still had both the Kalashnikov and the Beretta.

  'As soon as we arrived in Hungerford,' Sergeant Paul Brightwell would later explain, 'I saw that other parties of the Support Group were there, as well as our equipment. We got kitted up immediately - all on the double - with weapons being issued at the same time. While we were doing this, I was telling members of my group to take various weapons - and at the same time trying to pay attention to detail. Chief Inspector Glyn Lambert, as he then was, was in charge of the Support Group, and he had two inspectors under him. I didn't see him in Hungerford immediately. While there is a rank structure, it always tends to be looser on such occasions -and it was the obvious thing to do to get kitted up. You have to act on your own initiative, although I wasn't sure precisely where I was to be deployed.'

  The truth was that Sergeant Brightwell's boss, Chief Inspector Lambert, had no particular strategy firmly fixed in his mind when he had set off from the Kidlington HQ. He was desperate for just one thing: hard facts. But amid the hysteria and chaos, reliable information was to prove very elusive. Because the local communications network had been completely overwhelmed by the volume of calls, many of the reported sightings of Ryan were wildly inaccurate, completely confused or just simply out of date. By the time the Chief Inspector arrived, however, he concluded that only three of the purported numerous sightings of Ryan could possibly have any credibility and were therefore to be pursued. One was on Hungerford Common, the other in South View and the third alleged sighting at the John O'Gaunt School. All three would have to be investigated and Chief Inspector Lambert divided up his troops accordingly.

  'When we arrived in Hungerford,' the head of the Support Group would later comment, 'we of course had to locate and isolate Michael Ryan. But on the way down, apart from learning about the scale of the killings, I also heard that he had a high-powered rifle - a hell of a lot more powerful than the shotguns I knew were ahead of us. So I knew straight away that containing Ryan was going to be an extremely difficult task, and all the more so because he was moving about. We put on our ballistic helmets, flak jackets and so on. We couldn't do this inside Hungerford police station, because there simply wasn't enough room to get in there. So we did it outside on the street instead. And since we didn't know if he would appear while we were briefing, some of our officers covered us while we were kitting up and everyone was being allocated their specific roles by me. Of course I would like to think that the approach was professional - but one very real difficulty was the confusion of all the reported sightings, not to mention all the people crying and sheltering at the police station. I wanted to get an armoured vehicle, to help us move freely around the streets, and I also wanted to get the helicopter into action as soon as possible, since it is an excellent spotting tool in which I have the very greatest of faith.'

  At Hungerford's swimming pool Carol Hall, an air stewardess who lived locally, sensed that there was danger in the air. She had been talking to her grandmother, who ran a shop at the swimming pool, when she heard several rapid bursts of gunfire. Fearing that the person firing was approaching the pool, she immediately liaised with Michael Palmer, the pool supervisor and David Sparrow, a lifeguard. As the young lifeguard went outside, he saw the body of Francis Butler lying in the Memorial Gardens, with Ryan standing nearby. They immediately called all the swimmers out of the pool, evacuating some twenty children and several adults to the relative safety of the changing rooms. In due course the three would be commended for their bravery.

  As they did so, Marcus Barnard, one of Hungerford's most popular personalities, was driving in his Peugeot towards Bulpit Lane to pick up a fare. He was known to almost the entire town as Barney the Cabby, and was one of just two drivers serving the community. He had been running his own business for just a few years and, together with his wife Jenny, was still celebrating the birth of his first child, Joe. The boy had not come to the Barnards easily, having taken the best part of six years to arrive. But when, finally, little Joe came into the world, he had done so prematurely. During his wife's pregnancy Barney had made no secret of the fact that he was hoping for a little girl, but when his son made his early appearance in the world, he was as thrilled as could be, as Jenny Barnard explains:

  'Barney was so proud of the baby. Before he was born I used to pull his leg about changing dirty nappies and so on. He used to say: "You won't catch me changing a dirty nappy." But he did absolutely everything for that baby. Bathed with him, played with him. He was just so proud.'

  As he made his way along Bulpit Lane the thirty-year-old cabby appeared to notice Ryan, by then leaving the Memorial Gardens, and slowed down. Seconds later he was dead, a shot from Ryan's Kalashnikov having pierced the windscreen and caused a massive injury to the top of his head. Ryan had seen to it that Marcus Barnard was to be a father to baby Joe for just five weeks.

  Kenneth Hall, a local government officer, witnessed the taxi-driver's savage and summary execution: I could not believe what I had just seen. I stopped in my tracks. The man threw the gun to the floor in front of him as if in disgust. He looked down at the gun and shook his head from time to time. He looked bewildered as if he could not believe what he had done. He moved away and then turned round. He still had a pistol. I stopped walking and he looked straight at me. I thought, he only has to take aim and that's me. As I walked away, he went to pick up the rifle.'

  Carol Hall, David Sparrow and Michael Palmer heard the rapid fire of four or five shots from inside the swimming pool. They rushed towards the cabby to give him first aid. But they needed little medical expertise to realize that Marcus Barnard was dead. Jenny Barnard recalls: 'We had to drive past Barney's car - and my mum told me not to look. But I went and did the human thing and had to look. There were police photographers there and they had the black bag by the side of the car, and the police made us stop right behind it. And I just wanted to go to him. I think that that one image will probably haunt me for the rest of my life. But what does make me so angry is how the press gave Ryan this Rambo-like image. They portrayed him as a Rambo-type figure and thereby made him a film star. But in fact he was nothing more than a madman.'

  Jenny Barnard was right. Whatever his mental state, Michael Ryan was certainly no film star. On the contrary, he was a loner, going nowhere. But there was undeniably already an uncanny resemblance developing between Ryan's bloody exploits in Hun-gerford and those of the violent character Rambo in the film First Blood, starring the American actor Sylvester Stallone. Rambo, a Vietnam veteran, is persecuted by a sheriff and decides
to avenge himself on the community. He begins by killing a group of deputies in a forest before attacking a petrol station. Next, Rambo is seen firing automatic weapons in the town itself. At one stage he sets fire to a building in order to lure his enemies, including the sheriff, to a spot where he can fire at them.

  The shooting of Sue Godfrey in the Savernake Forest, the attempted murder of Kakoub Dean at the Golden Arrow Service Station on the A4, the fires that raged in South View, murder on the streets of a market town - these might not be the stuff of which Hollywood movies are made, but the similarities are nonetheless striking. Not surprisingly, the newspapers were soon to exploit the 'Rambo connection'.

  As news of Ryan's rampage spread, hundreds of journalists and photographers descended on the town. The local, national and international press, and television crews galore - before long they were all there, or on their way. Responsibility for liaising with the media fell to Chief Inspector Laurie Fray, the press officer of the Thames Valley Police. He was an experienced policeman, whose approach to working with the press had always been to be as forthright and friendly as circumstances would allow. It was a formula which had served him well.

  'That has always been the way I work,' Chief Inspector Fray would later declare. 'My policy has always been to tell what I know, insofar as it is consistent with good policing. That usually stops any aggression on the part of the press. I know that these people are all under pressure from their editors, so I try to work with them rather than against them. I have always found this the best approach. But Hungerford was in a category all of its own. I shall never forget that day. I was having lunch in the mess at Kidlington. I went into our old control room and monitored the channel. They were feverishly trying to get a response from a traffic vehicle. It turned out to be Roger Brereton's. Since it was obviously a major incident, I decided to go immediately to Hungerford, blue lights all the way, since I knew there would be a lot of press interest and I had to be able to respond.

  'I arrived there at 2.30pm. I tried to pre-empt press questions, but this was difficult for me because even after briefing myself I didn't really know all that much. The press were way ahead of us at that time in terms of their communications set-up. They all had cellular phones, for example, but I didn't. They also had satellite dishes installed on the back of Range Rovers and the like, with which they were able to do live broadcasts. The BBC, ITN, ITV -they all set up incredibly quickly. I told the media people that every half an hour I would return to an agreed rendezvous point to brief and update. And this I did throughout the afternoon.'

  The vast majority of journalists cooperated with the press officer. But some did not. One photographer, for example, claimed to be a scene-of-crime officer, and as such was allowed into the house of one of Ryan's victims. He took several photographs of the body, which was covered in a mackintosh, and the next day his illegally obtained work appeared in the tabloid press. But it was impossible, because of the sheer scale of the slaughter, to protect every single scene of crime. The press was thus able to penetrate the inner cordon without much difficulty. But in so doing not only did they exploit others' grief; they also exposed themselves to considerable danger. One journalist was so appalled by the activities of certain of her professional colleagues that she registered a formal complaint: 'No one could or should be asked to stand up to the full battering-ram weight of today's tabloid press. Hammering at the front door, thirsty for a quote, slobbering for an exclusive, up against a deadline, ready to make meat out of mortals.'

  Yet many were asked. And, as Jenny Barnard was soon to discover, the thirst of some journalists would prove to be truly unquenchable. As Barney lay dead in his taxi, Ryan walked to the junction with Priory Avenue, where he shot and slightly injured a woman driving along that road. He was to inflict a far greater injury on John Storms, a washing-machine engineer out on a call but at that time stationary in his van at the junction of Hillside Road. Not a local man, Mr Storms had been looking for Hungerford Park Farm but had got lost on a housing estate. It was there that he saw Ryan, less than forty feet away, and still armed with his Kalashnikov and his Beretta pistol.

  John Storms recalls: 'I thought, that's a nice-looking gun. The man then dropped into a crouching position with both legs bent at the knee. He pointed the pistol at me with both hands holding it and at first I thought it was somebody messing about. Then there was a bang, there was broken glass, there was pain and then there was blood.'

  As the driver's door window shattered, John Storms slumped on to the passenger seat. Raising his head slightly above the dashboard, he saw Ryan aiming at him again. There were two further bangs and the van shuddered.

  'I whispered, "Please God, don't let me die." The blood was pouring and I was sure he was going to kill me.'

  Whether through divine intervention or Ryan's poor shot, John Storms did not die. Bob Barclay, a burly builder in his thirties, ran from his nearby house and, before Ryan's eyes, dragged the injured man, half running, half crouching, back to his garden. Having dialled for the emergency services, he set about stemming the bleeding. While Ryan's bullet missed John Storms's spinal cord by just two millimetres, it nonetheless shattered his jaw and burst his tongue, a fragment of the bullet lodging itself near to his larynx.

  As the police operation gained momentum, the entire nation waited anxiously to learn of the latest developments taking place in the Berkshire town. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, holidaying in Cornwall, was kept informed on a special phone line from Downing Street. The Thames Valley Police put into motion the first steps for the creation of a casualty bureau. Appeals for voluntary nurses were broadcast on local radio.

  As the killings continued - ten having died so far - Ryan appeared to be firing indiscriminately. His strategy was hardly sophisticated: anyone who happened to come within his range was a potential victim. Alison Chapman, however, already fired at by Ryan, disagrees. 'It was true that he looked brain-dead when he was firing. But in some ways he must have known what he was doing,' she would later insist. 'Because just before he started firing in South View he shouted at all the children playing there to go indoors. And what was really curious was that the two other teenage girls he fired at were shot below the waist, as I was, while he aimed his gun directly at the heads of the older people.'

  Second before being rescued from his car John Storms had heard the sound of an approaching car and still more shots. Despite his injury he was sure that this time the bullets were not aimed at him. And in this he was right. They were directed instead at Kathleen and Douglas Wainwright, in Hungerford to visit their son Trevor, one of the town's local bobbies, and his wife Jane. The Wainwrights had been looking forward to moving to Hungerford for their imminent retirement. They were less than a hundred yards from their destination, having driven from Strood in Kent, when their windscreen was suddenly shattered by two bullets from Ryan's gun as he stood on the pavement nearby.

  'Automatically my husband put his foot on the brake,' Mrs Wainwright would later inform the inquest. 'As we stopped there was this man right opposite my husband's window on the pavement. I heard about six or eight shots, one after the other, bang, bang, bang. The gun was pointed at my husband's window. I heard him groan twice, I looked at him and I knew he was dead. Blood trickled down his nose and out of his mouth and he fell to one side. I knew he was dead. I also knew that I had been hit. I only felt a sting on the breast and my finger and hand though. This chap walked to the front of our car and started reloading his gun. I thought, oh my God, he's going to fire at me again - but as he was loading he was walking forwards. You might say that self-preservation took over. I took off my seat belt and opened the passenger door as quietly as I could and ran.'

  PC Trevor Wainwright was off duty at the time, but as soon as he heard about the shooting incident he drove back to his home town, confident that his local knowledge would be invaluable to the specialist squads called in from outside. As yet he was ignorant of the fact that his father was dead - hit by thre
e shots from the Beretta pistol, twice in the chest and once in the head - and that his mother had survived only by the slenderest of margins.

  By a terrible irony, it would later emerge, it was PC Wainwright who had vetted Ryan when the latter wanted to modify his licence to cover the gun he used in the Hungerford massacre. He had called on his neighbour's home in November 1986 to check on his worthiness to hold a firearms certificate and on security arrangements in the house.

  'It's bloody ironic,' the policeman would later admit. T would hate to think that I okayed a change in the licence for the gun that killed my father. But I really don't feel it's down to me because I didn't grant the licence - I merely did the checks. In fact those checks were very thorough. I knew for a fact that Ryan hadn't been in any serious trouble with the police. I also knew that he was something of a loner, but you can't hold that against anyone.'

  On that occasion Ryan and Wainwright had laughed and joked together. They had done likewise once before, when Ryan had walked into Hungerford police station and announced that he had been caught by the police for exceeding the speed limit.

  'I said: "What speed were you doing?" and he said: "A hundred and twelve miles per hour." I said: "Silly sod" and we both had a laugh,' recalls the policeman.

  The then Assistant Chief Constable, now Chief Constable, of Thames Valley Police, Charles Pollard, was in a grave mood that Wednesday, for he knew very well that responsibility for the entire police operation at Hungerford would ultimately fall on him, as he explains: 'I've been involved in big incidents before, so you do develop a way of thinking ahead of what you are going to do. But as I drove down to Hungerford what I wanted above all else was thinking time. Because often when you get to the centre of it all you get caught up with the tide of events and it is difficult to take a step back in order to reflect. No firearm can be issued and drawn by an officer without my personal permission, so I authorized their use before I left Kidlington. The first thing to do is always to set up an excellent communications centre - get set up, get staff in, and so on. Newbury and HQ were also using their control rooms - but my experience is that it's always better to set up on the spot. The local radio was not working, but the VHF set was. So that was where I decided to set up the operations room. I was in overall charge of the operation, with Chief Inspector Lambert heading up the firearms response - a very experienced officer. I got a competent person to man the radio, with another making a log, and my own driver making a log of everything I did. All the time I was getting information - and trying to make sense of it - but that was not at all easy.'