Essex Boy

by Steve 'Nipper' Ellis; Bernard O'Mahoney

  As Tucker flinched with the noise of the explosion, the gun was pointed at him and fired. The shot punched a 6.5 cm hole in his lower jaw before exiting through the left side of his mouth. The jaw and teeth were totally destroyed and pellets were later found lodged in his tongue.

  In the rear of the vehicle Tate, on witnessing the bloodbath, had begun to scream and plead with the killers to spare his life. Grinning, the gunman showed no mercy and blasted Tate in the chest rather than the head. Tate had been the catalyst of all of the trouble and so it was deemed essential that he should witness the gruesome murder of his friends before he too was executed. The gunmen had to work quickly because the shot had broken Tate’s sixth and ninth ribs and had lacerated his liver. The 6 cm hole in his chest was pouring with blood.

  Tucker’s injuries, although terrible, had not damaged any vital organs and he had begun to groan loudly so the gunman shot him once more in the face. The hot lead tore a 4.2 cm hole in Tucker’s head, just in front of the right ear. This destroyed the right side of his brain, killing him instantly.

  Having incapacitated everybody in the vehicle, the gunman turned to his accomplice and invited him to shoot them. Stepping forward the trembling man pointed a shotgun at the back of Rolfe’s head, closed his eyes and fired. The blast tore a gaping wound in Rolfe’s neck, which left his back teeth and lower jaw exposed. Turning his weapon on Tate, who was by now curled up in a foetal position and crying uncontrollably, the gunman mocked the man that he had grown to hate before opening fire.

  Tate ducked instinctively before the trigger was pulled, resulting in the shot causing an 8.5 cm graze across the top of his head before smashing the passenger door window. The gunman who had initially opened fire on the men walked around to the broken window and began taunting Tate.

  ‘Fucking hard man, look at you now. Stop crying like a baby and take what’s coming to you like a man.’

  Before Tate could reply the gunman blasted him in the back of the head just behind the left ear. This shot caused Tate’s skull to splinter, resulting in extensive destruction of the brain. His work almost done, the gunman opened the front passenger door of the Range Rover, pressed the barrel of the shotgun against the base of Tucker’s head and fired. The force of that blast snapped Tucker’s neck and destroyed the lower part of his skull. The shot was so powerful it blew bone fragments out through his scalp, leaving a hole the size of a fist just above his ear. Their grisly task complete, the gunmen surveyed the carnage before closing the doors of the vehicle and calmly walking away.

  Six months later, Darren Nicholls was arrested in possession of a large quantity of cannabis and questioned for hours about his possible involvement in the murders. Initially, he refused to make any comment, but when detectives revealed that mobile phone records could prove that he had been in the area that night, he came up with a story that vindicated him but implicated his friend Mick Steele, and an associate named Jack Whomes.

  I am not going to speculate about who may have been responsible for executing Tate, Tucker and Rolfe. However, I would like to publicly thank them as I am of the opinion that they did the world a favour. I am in no doubt that Jack Whomes and Michael Steele, the two men who were later convicted of the crimes, were innocent. They were just two more of Tate, Tucker and Rolfe’s countless victims.

  The persistent sound of the house phone ringing awoke me from my deep slumber. I had been up most of the night attending to Bleep the Labrador and his incontinent arse. Opening one eye, the face on my bedside clock appeared to be just a blur, but when I managed to focus I saw that it wasn’t quite yet ten o’clock in the morning.

  ‘This better be fucking good,’ I groaned as I lifted the receiver.

  ‘They’re dead. They’re fucking dead, Nipper,’ my friend shouted down the phone.

  ‘Who’s dead? Who’s fucking dead?’ I asked.

  ‘Tucker and Tate, they have been found in a Range Rover with their heads blown off,’ my friend replied laughing.

  I refused to believe him and so he urged me to get out of bed and turn on the television. Sitting on the sofa in my pants with my eyes glued to the BBC news channel, I honestly cannot recall a more memorable experience in my entire life.

  ‘The three men found murdered in a Range Rover were known criminals from south Essex and could have been victims of a gangland killing. One of the dead men was Patrick Tate, 37, from Basildon. He had convictions for possessing cocaine with intent to supply and robbery. The others were Craig Rolfe, 26, from Chafford Hundred, and Anthony Tucker, 38, from Fobbing. Tucker was a former bodyguard to boxer Nigel Benn. Murder inquiry detectives were keeping an open mind on the possibility that the men, who were discovered near the village of Rettendon, were shot point-blank by someone from the criminal underworld. Detective Superintendant Dibley, who was leading the murder investigation said, “It is a possibility. But there are a number of other possibilities. This was no ordinary murder. These men were enticed to their deaths.”’

  Photographs of the deceased and footage of the Range Rover being removed from the crime scene on the back of a lorry were being shown as the news was read. I accept that some people may consider me sick but I honestly burst out laughing and began dancing around the lounge. Despite the fact that I had heard it with my own ears, seen their faces and their vehicle on television, I still found the news hard to believe.

  I rang my father and he burst into tears with relief. I could hear my sisters cheering in the background as my father kept repeating,

  ‘They’re dead, girls. It’s over at last. Those three bastards are dead.’

  My father suggested that I should return from exile immediately but I knew that Tucker’s firm would think that I had killed them, so I decided to remain where I was until things had calmed down.

  Over the next few days, a lot of the people who were connected to Tucker’s firm, and several who were not, appeared in newspapers and on television programmes describing their experiences and knowledge of the dead men. Most portrayed Tucker and Tate as Mafia dons. I had to laugh; Tate and Tucker couldn’t run a bath, never mind a criminal empire. They were too busy stealing what they could to feed their drug habits and ensuring that number one – themselves – was OK. In my opinion, the vast majority of the people who sold stories to the press in the aftermath of the murders talked complete rubbish: a large percentage of them didn’t even know Tucker or his firm, and others told half-truths in order to distance themselves from their own involvement in criminality.

  The war that Tucker and Tate had waged against me was finally over but it had cost me dear. I had lost my home, the contents of my home, my car, my girlfriend, regular contact with my family and I had been beaten and imprisoned. It’s fair to say that they owed me. It wasn’t all doom and gloom. Unlike them, I can hold my head high and say that throughout my ordeal I retained my dignity. My father said that I should jump on the bandwagon and sell my story but, to be honest, the last thing I felt like talking about were the horrors that I had been forced to live through.

  It was only when I started reading the usual nonsense that people come out with when talking about the likes of the Krays, that I changed my mind.

  ‘They may have been violent, but they only ever hurt other villains.’

  ‘They were no angels but they were loyal and always looked after their own.’

  What complete bullshit! The girl whose car Tucker had crushed, and Sarah Saunders may hold a different opinion.

  When Tate’s body was released for burial, the fortune that his friends said he had made from drug dealing in these newspaper stories could not be found. There wasn’t even enough money to fund a cheap funeral and not one of these so-called friends offered to pay. As in life, it was Sarah, the woman he had bullied and thrown onto the streets, who came to Tate’s rescue. Sarah had swallowed her pride and gone cap in hand to one of her friends in Kent to borrow the money to bury him. Frustrated and angered by the praise being heaped on those three bullies, I rang a tabloid n
ewspaper and was offered a substantial fee for what can only be described as a sensational story. I had decided that I wasn’t going to tell the truth about the fear and violence that I had endured, because I knew some wannabe reading the story would warm to the perpetrators. Instead, I invented a story that portrayed the trio as cowards who had soiled themselves with fear as they prepared to meet their deaths. The headline read; ‘How do you want to die? A single shot, or piece by piece with an axe?’

  I told the journalist, ‘They were given two options. They could be taken apart with an axe, starting with their fingers, moving on to their hands and then their legs. Or they could opt for the quick way out; an execution shot through the back of the head. They were told, “Either way, you’re going to get it. There’s no escape.” Tucker and Tate messed their trousers first, then took the shots.’

  It was, of course, complete nonsense because I had no knowledge of the murders nor who carried them out. It was a sensational case, a sensational story, and I was paid a sensational fee for dispelling a myth that was rapidly growing. I cannot see any harm in that. After interviewing me, the journalist had contacted Essex police for a quote and DS Dibley issued the following statement.

  ‘Because of a previous incident involving the deceased and Steven Ellis, it is in our interest and his to eliminate him from this inquiry. I would like to urge him to come forward.’

  I was signing on every day at Swanage police station because of the garage burglary, so I couldn’t understand why the police were urging me to come forward. I was hardly hiding from them. I rang Chelmsford police station and after explaining who I was they asked for my location and a contact telephone number and said that they would send somebody to interview me as soon as possible.

  When I entered Swanage police station the following morning, I was ushered into a side room and reassured by two Essex detectives that I had nothing to fear. The officers said that they were well aware that I had shot Tate and had tried to murder Tucker and Rolfe, but they did not believe that I was responsible for the executions at Rettendon.

  ‘Keep it simple, Steve. This is just a paper exercise. It’s not going anywhere. We just need to officially eliminate you from our inquiries.’

  I have been in numerous police stations throughout my colourful criminal career, but I had never before experienced a pre-interview briefing. To be honest it slightly unnerved me, as I began to wonder if they were, in fact, trying to set me up. Why wouldn’t the police consider me to be a suspect for the murders of Tate, Tucker and Rolfe if I had shot one of them and attempted to shoot the other two just a few months before their deaths? It was undoubtedly a strange attitude to adopt. Without any consultation, I was informed that I would have to be placed in protective custody.

  ‘It is for your own good. People think you have murdered those three men and they want to avenge their deaths,’ one of the detectives said.

  ‘I don’t give a fuck about people, dead or living. I am not going into protective custody,’ I replied.

  It appeared to me as if the police had been reading the newspapers and believed the myth that Tate and Tucker had worked so hard to develop. They had ruled their drug-dealing empire with fear by simply convincing people that they could have anybody killed at any time. The truth was, they were full of shit. I honestly do not believe that they would have had the bottle to walk up to anybody and execute them in cold blood. High on drugs, they may have accidently beaten somebody to death, but the very next day they would have been grassing one another up to the police in order to escape prosecution.

  ‘I didn’t fear them when they were alive and I certainly don’t fear them now that they are dead,’ I told the detective.

  Unsure how to proceed, the officers eyed each for answers and when none were forthcoming they simultaneously said, ‘We will have to discuss this with our governor, Steve.’ Rather than interview me about Tate and Tucker’s criminal activities, such as prostitution, possession of firearms and drug dealing – all matters that could have led to them being murdered – I was repeatedly asked ‘off the record’ about Tate’s mobile telephones. Most drug dealers have at least two; one for their ‘clients’, who are prone to ringing at unsociable hours or inconvenient moments; and one for friends and family. Tate had at least four mobile phones to my knowledge. He was aware that the police could pinpoint a person’s location by their mobile phone and so when he went to do a ‘bit of business’ as he called it, he would remove the SIM cards from the ‘client’ handsets.

  A mobile phone is a transmitter and a receiver. It doesn’t matter if you are using it or not, the SIM card will still receive or transmit signals to the nearest telephone mast in order to maintain a live line. All contact between a mobile phone and the masts that are now abundant in this country is recorded. As the person moves from place to place so, too, their phone signal moves from mast to mast. It is, therefore, quite easy for the authorities to map exactly where a person has been days, or even months, later.

  Whoever murdered Tate also knew this, because the only mobile phone that was found on his body was his ‘family phone’, which was wrapped tightly in his hand. Perhaps the killers failed to see it, or maybe they were only interested in his ‘client’ phone because he may have been talking to them on it prior to being shot. I don’t suppose we will ever know. The detectives gave me the impression that they knew at least one mobile phone had gone missing because they kept asking me questions about its whereabouts. Had Sarah Saunders rung me from it? Did I have a recent list of all the numbers that Tate used? On and on they went about his bloody mobile phones, but I was unable to assist them.

  When I asked the detectives what the significance of Tate’s phone was, they would only say that a discrepancy in the evidence had been identified and they needed to clear it up. I later learned, through one of Rolfe’s associates, that this ‘discrepancy’ had come to light after a mechanic named Reynolds had been questioned about work that he had done on Tate’s vehicles.

  On the morning of his murder, Tate had arrived at the garage where Reynolds worked with a young girl named Lizzie Fletcher in tow. I had met Lizzie several times at Raquel’s. Lizzie was a good friend of Donna Garwood, Tucker’s teenage mistress, and the pair practically lived at the nightclub. I would describe ‘Dizzy Lizzie’, as Tate chose to call her, as a typical Essex girl; stunning to look at but challenging to have any sort of intelligent conversation with. Tate and Lizzie had arrived at the garage in separate vehicles, Tate in a black Mercedes 190 and Lizzie in a black Volkswagen Polo. The Polo was left at the garage for repair and arrangements were made that if Tate had not returned by 1800 hrs, when the garage was due to close, then the keys were to be left in the glove box. When Reynolds finished work that night, Tate had not collected the Polo and so he left the keys in the vehicle as agreed.

  As Reynolds drove away from the garage and onto a dual carriageway he noticed a blue Range Rover on the opposite side of the road. Rolfe was driving, Tucker was in the passenger seat and a man, that Reynolds assumed was Tate, was in the back. Reynolds guessed that Tate was on his way to collect the Polo. Later that night, between 2100 hrs and 2200 hrs, Reynolds had cause to drive past his place of work and noticed that the Polo had gone. According to the police, Tate, Tucker and Rolfe were murdered at 1845 hrs, just 45 minutes after Reynolds had seen them.

  I think it’s highly unlikely that they could have picked up the Polo, driven it to wherever and then met their killers, before heading to Rettendon to meet their deaths in such a short space of time. Regardless of how improbable meeting that 45-minute timescale may have been, the police had to present it as feasible because the only phone of Tate’s that they had recovered had stopped receiving or making calls at around 1845 hrs. The cessation of mobile traffic to and from Tate’s phone at that time proved, the police said, that the murders had taken place shortly afterwards. The phone he had been found with had not linked up with another transmitter after that time and, therefore, they were satisfied that he had no
t moved from the spot where he was later found dead. What the police failed to take into account is that Tate had several mobile phones and, although he was undoubtedly in the Rettendon area at 1845 hrs, there is no guarantee that he had stopped making calls or was dead at the time they said because his ‘business phones’ were missing.

  The day after the murders, Reynolds telephoned one of Tate’s mobile phones and Lizzie Fletcher answered. The slayings had made headline news and Reynolds, one of the last people to have seen the trio alive, was naturally keen to question Lizzie about them. To his dismay, Lizzie said that she had no idea why the men had been murdered. When the police questioned Reynolds about calls that Tate, Tucker and Rolfe had made to him in the days leading up to their deaths, he told them about the work that he had done on various cars they owned and about the conversation that he had with Lizzie when he ‘rang one of Tate’s phones’. Those five words tipped the entire murder inquiry upon its head because the police had always assumed that Tate only had one phone. Those words meant that they could no longer say, with any real certainty, that the murders had taken place at 1845 hrs.

  After quizzing me about Tate’s absent mobile phones, detectives were dispatched to interview Sarah Saunders in the hope that she could cast light upon the missing mobiles. Unfortunately for the police, Sarah’s evidence only muddied the waters further. Sarah explained that when Tate had thrown her out of her own home, he had taken her contract mobile phone and given it to Lizzie Fletcher. After the murder, Lizzie had been using the phone excessively, talking about Tate’s demise to her friends and Sarah’s bill had been mounting. Sarah quite rightly contacted Lizzie and demanded that the phone be returned. The police, for reasons known only to themselves, thought that Sarah’s request was very odd and during her interviews they kept asking why she had wanted ‘the Orange phone back’.