When you try to contact people over debts or grievances, they act in exactly the same way as Boshell. They duck, dive and avoid your calls, but when you lure them into talking to you, they become very compliant. Boshell’s nervousness and reckless visit to the Probation Office, knowing that he could be arrested and returned to prison, suggests to me that the last thing he wanted to do was meet Alvin that night.
Earlier that day, Alvin had been at work with his brother. He arrived home at about 1400 hrs. He put on old clothes, trainers, a hat and threw a pair of Marigold gloves in his car. Two hours later he drove to Elmsleigh Drive, where Boshell had lived before fleeing to Southend, and telephoned Boshell from a phone kiosk. Alvin had wanted Boshell to know that he was going to pick him up later, unless of course he could make his own way to Leigh-on-Sea. After making the call, Alvin went to visit Kevin Walsh at his flat. When he arrived at approximately 1800 hrs, Alvin found that Kevin was home with Boshell’s friend Sean Buckley. About an hour after he arrived, the three men were joined by Percival. At a loose end, they all decided to visit the Woodcutters Arms.
Phone records show that at 2032 hrs Boshell telephoned Alvin from C.J. McLaughlin’s mobile phone. He said that he was in Southend and had no way of getting down to Leigh-on-Sea, so Alvin told him not to worry and agreed that he would pick him up. Alvin made and received a number of other calls while in the pub that night. One was from his girlfriend, Clair, who had asked what he would like for dinner. Clair had also mentioned that she would pick Alvin up later as she didn’t want him drink-driving. Alvin agreed meekly and suggested that she pick him up from Kevin Walsh’s flat when she had finished work. Shortly after Clair’s call, Alvin had told Kevin that he had to go home quickly, but he would return. Kevin said that because the pub was quiet he was going to take a few beers back to his flat and Alvin was welcome to join him. Alvin agreed that he would.
While Alvin was in the car park, Percival came out of the pub and Alvin mentioned that he had to go home briefly before going on to Kevin’s flat. Alvin asked Percival if he too was going to Kevin’s and he replied that he was. Before parting company, Percival offered to pick Alvin up from his home because he knew that Clair didn’t like him drink-driving. Alvin agreed and left in his red Audi. Percival drove to his own home, had something to eat and then set off to pick up Alvin.
At 2100 hrs, after leaving Spendiff-Smith at his flat, CCTV cameras recorded Boshell and C.J. McLaughlin walking to Woodgrange Drive, in Southend, and waiting outside the Lidl’s store for Alvin to arrive. At 2115 hrs, CCTV at the Woodcutters Arms recorded Alvin leaving the premises. C.J. McLaughlin later told police that at 2126 hrs Boshell had telephoned Alvin’s mobile from a public telephone situated on Woodgrange Drive. McLaughlin said that Alvin had turned up not long after Boshell had made the call in a red car. Boshell had then got into the vehicle and called out, ‘See you tomorrow,’ before being driven away.
The general conversation between the two men surrounded the job Alvin claimed that they were going to carry out that night. Alvin said that a barn was being used to grow the drug skunk in Chelmsford, and if they stole it Boshell could not only clear his debt but also make a few thousand pounds’ profit. As they drove away from Southend, Boshell asked Alvin if he could stop off at an off-licence and buy him some cigarettes as he was out of money. Complaining bitterly, Alvin stopped at an off-licence and gave Boshell a handful of change. Moments later, Boshell returned to the car with cigarettes and two bottles of Lucozade.
When they arrived in Leigh-on-Sea, Alvin parked his vehicle in a quiet side street and told Boshell to follow him. They walked along an alleyway, alongside a small brook. Boshell was drinking the Lucozade that he had bought, having left the cigarettes in Alvin’s car. Alvin said that the ‘tools’ that they were going to use to break into the barn had been left on allotments in Manchester Drive. The site is vast, secluded and ideal for storing weapons, burglary tools and any other such items that may be used by criminals. It is also an ideal place to execute somebody. When they arrived at the allotments, Alvin told Boshell that the tools they had gone to retrieve were no longer there.
‘You stay here and look for them while I go and fetch a van. I’m not using my car because it will stink of skunk. I won’t be long,’ Alvin said.
Instead of going to pick up the van, Alvin drove home and awaited the arrival of Percival. Alvin appeared to be cleaning up in the kitchen when Percival arrived. He let his friend in, gave him a dozen or so bottles of beer out of the fridge and told him to put them in his car. The pair then drove to Walsh’s flat in Percival’s car. They arrived at about 2245 hrs and gained entry by beeping the horn. It was Kate Griffiths who went down the stairs to let them in. Everybody sat around drinking and talking until approximately 2330 hrs when Percival announced that he was going home to bed. An hour later, Clair arrived at the flat and Alvin left with her. When they were alone in the car, Clair mentioned that Boshell had rung her from a call box and wanted to know where Alvin had got to as he was waiting for him. Phone records show that this call was made at 2348 hrs from a phone kiosk close to the allotments. Alvin told Clair that he needed to sort something out with Boshell, which wouldn’t take long and so she dropped him off and awaited his return. As Alvin walked along the street towards the allotments he heard somebody call out his name.
The caller sounded unsure who he was. Alvin looked towards where the voice had come from and saw Boshell standing near the entrance to the allotments. Boshell could see from Alvin’s facial expression that he was pissed off. Alvin started firing questions at Boshell about his drugs and money going missing. Boshell tried to explain that he hadn’t stolen his drugs, they had gone missing from his flat during a party, but Alvin wasn’t having any of it. He kept saying that Boshell had squandered the drugs and his money; nobody else had stolen them because he was the only one who knew the drugs were there.
‘I am not a fucking idiot. I know what you have done with the drugs. You were giving it the Big I Am and dishing them out to your fucking friends,’ Alvin said.
Boshell was extremely worried by this time. He continued to deny any involvement in the disappearance of the drugs and volunteered to go and search for them.
Alvin began to mock Boshell saying, ‘Yeah well, you’re obviously cleverer than me. I am obviously too much of a fucking idiot to know what you did with them. Why don’t you go and have a look?’
At that point, Boshell turned to his left and put both hands up to his face because Alvin had squirted him with ammonia. Boshell, blinded by the noxious substance, started walking away from Alvin, but he had not taken more than a couple of steps when there was a large bang and flash from a gun. Boshell then crumpled to the ground. Smirking, Alvin stepped forward and stood over Boshell, who remained on the floor. Bending down, Alvin placed the barrel of his gun against the left side of Boshell’s head and fired twice. One of the bullets lodged in the soft tissue of his right temple, and the other came to rest in his upper left nostril. Still not content, Alvin, who was seething with anger, picked up a steel rod that was stuck in the ground near Boshell’s body and lashed him across the back of the head with it. When Alvin arrived back at Clair’s car, he complained about Boshell being a ‘fucking nuisance’ and asked her to drive him home. When they arrived, Clair had a Chinese meal waiting for them, which they ate before retiring to bed for the evening. Despite the fact that Alvin had executed his friend that night, he slept as normal.
Colin Todd was employed at the Manchester Drive allotments in Leigh-on-Sea as a general maintenance man. Apart from young people fornicating in the bushes, kids breaking into the numerous garden sheds that cover the ten-acre site, and crops being stolen or damaged, very little of interest ever happened on the site. On the morning of Wednesday, 28 February 2001, at approximately 0920 hrs, Colin Todd and a colleague were walking through the allotments when they came across the lifeless body of 24-year-old Dean Fergus Boshell. The blood-soaked corpse was lying with the right side of the face on
the ground and the knees slightly drawn up. Colin Todd could see that the person on the ground was clearly dead. He called the police and the paramedics, who arrived amid a deafening chorus of wailing sirens and blue flashing lights. They, too, recognised that the body was lifeless and so summoned a doctor to the scene, who certified Boshell dead at 1128 hrs.
It was clear from the amount of blood that had poured from the victim’s head that this death was, at the very least, suspicious, and so the police erected an air tent around the body to contain and preserve any evidence that might have been present. The allotments where Boshell’s body was discovered are surrounded by houses and so the police decided to conduct door-to-door inquiries to find out if any of the residents had seen or heard anything of significance the night before. A man named Gordon Osborne lived at 94 Randolph Close, which is approximately 500 metres from where Boshell’s body was discovered.
When the police had called at his home, Osborne told them, ‘Half of me thinks that I may have heard a bang, but I could not be sure.’ He added that he didn’t know what time he may have heard this bang, but it was possibly between 2300 hrs and 2330 hrs.
With so little evidence to work with, detectives turned their attention towards locating and interviewing Boshell’s family, friends and associates.
At 0630 hrs the morning after Boshell’s body was found, Damon Alvin claims that he was woken by his phone ringing. The caller, Boshell’s friend Sean Buckley, said that he had arrived home earlier that morning and found the police standing outside his flat. As he walked towards his front door, he saw that it had been forced open. After asking the police what they were up to, Buckley was told that they were responsible for breaking down his door. Instead of forcing an entry into Boshell’s old flat downstairs, they had broken into Buckley’s flat in error. Even if the police had entered the correct address, they would have found that Boshell had vacated the premises weeks earlier.
When the police did eventually find and search Boshell’s flat in Southend, they didn’t find much of significance other than his address book, which contained four different telephone numbers for Alvin and one for Alvin’s girlfriend Clair. There was none for Percival. The police hadn’t had the greatest start to an investigation and their luck appeared to deteriorate the longer it went on. Officers advised Buckley to go to the police station and inform them of their mistake and the damage that they had caused to his front door. However, Alvin says that Buckley telephoned him en route to the police station and asked him to repair the door instead. Another pressing problem that Buckley faced that morning was that Alvin had left several thousand pounds at his flat in a carrier bag, and he wanted to know what to say if the police discovered it. Buckley was told by Alvin to say that the money was his.
At approximately 1030 hrs, Alvin had arrived at Buckley’s flat and saw the front door lying in the garden. As he climbed the stairs to the flat, Alvin was confronted by several police officers who, he claims, recognised him immediately. The officers said that they were investigating the murder of Dean Boshell and asked Alvin for a contact number because he was a known associate of the deceased, and they wanted him to make a witness statement. Alvin explained that he had a new mobile number, of which he couldn’t recall the number nor retrieve from his handset, and so he gave them his girlfriend’s number. The officers asked Alvin where he had been on the night Boshell had died, and he told them that he had been in the company of Kevin Walsh, Kate Griffiths and Ricky Percival. A brief note was made of this information and an officer advised Alvin that there was no need for him to repair the door as they were going to contact a contractor themselves.
Alvin left the flat with Buckley to go to the pub to discuss what needed to be said if his money was ever discovered. Since Alvin had said that he had been in Ricky Percival’s company on the night Boshell died, the police asked Percival to make a formal statement. He felt he had nothing to hide and so he agreed. Percival told the police that he had first met Boshell in 1999. Alvin had introduced Boshell to him as a friend but their acquaintance had been short-lived because Boshell had been sent to prison.
Percival said, ‘Damon told me that he was keeping in touch with Dean in the jail. Boshell had asked him if he could get any weight-training supplements because he had started weight training. I was keen on the sport at the time and as a result of my almost daily attendance at the gym I was able to get the supplements at trade price. I didn’t know Boshell as such, but I didn’t mind getting them for Alvin to give to him because he was the friend of a friend. I was aware that Boshell had been released from prison around the end of 2000. He turned up at a couple of places where I was socialising, such as the Woodcutters Arms. We didn’t say a great deal to one another, as we had little or nothing in common. He did thank me for getting the protein supplements for him.
‘I would describe Boshell as a bit of a ponce; he was always borrowing, not from me but from others. He would always drink but never buy his round. I referred to him as “Dopey Dean”. I must say there was nothing nasty about Boshell. He was never offensive or rude. I last saw him around midday in Victoria Avenue, Southend, about two weeks before his death. I was paying a speeding fine at the court house. He was going into the Social Security office which is next to the gym. He said “All right?” to me and asked me where I had been. After I explained about the speeding fine, he told me that he was sorting out his Social Security claim. I then said “I’ll see you later,” and left.
‘I think it was the morning after his death that I heard about it on the radio. I was driving home from the gym around midday. I was shocked but it didn’t sink in really. I immediately phoned Alvin and he said that he knew already. On the night Boshell died, I went to visit my friend Kevin Walsh at his flat. It was around 1900 hrs or 2000 hrs when I arrived. Alvin and a man named Sean Buckley were already there. We all left the flat shortly afterwards and went to the Woodcutters Arms. I went there in my car and the others travelled to the pub in Alvin’s red Audi convertible. After an hour or two, Alvin and I left the pub. I went home, had something to eat and then drove to Alvin’s house in Rochford, to give him a lift to Kevin Walsh’s flat. He had gone home to drop his car off because his partner doesn’t like him to drink and drive. I left Kevin’s flat alone around 2330 hrs because Alvin said his girlfriend was going to pick him up later.’
The police thanked Percival for his assistance and told him that they would be in touch if they had any further questions. The following day, the police asked Alvin to make his witness statement concerning his knowledge and relationship with Boshell. In it, he claimed that he had first heard that a body had been found on the allotments after it had been reported in the local newspaper and on the radio. It wasn’t until Kate Griffiths had telephoned him that he knew the body was Boshell’s.
‘I was quite upset when I heard this,’ Alvin said. ‘I know of no reason why someone would want to kill him. I would describe Dean as a friend; he was friendlier towards me than I was to him. He would confide in me if he was in trouble. The last time I spoke to him he was quite happy; he did not appear to be worried about anything. Dean would contact me on my mobile. I can’t remember the number as I have misplaced it since the weekend. I have since bought a new phone but I can’t remember that number either.
‘I have not heard of any reason why Dean should have been killed but I have let it be known in the area that I will pay £500 to any person who can help catch the person responsible.’
After completing his statement Alvin offered the police a possible ‘off the record’ motive for the murder.
Doing his best to sound concerned, and looking to appear helpful, he said, ‘There is a possibility that Dean was having an affair with a married woman or sleeping with someone’s under-age daughter; he was like that.’
Percival’s and Alvin’s statements led officers to the door of Kate Griffiths, who was also asked to detail her knowledge of Boshell and her movements on the night that he had died. Without realising the severity of the
situation she was walking into, Kate agreed to make a statement. Griffiths said that she had spent the day of the murder working at a launderette, which she and her father owned. At around 1900 hrs she had locked the premises up and caught a taxi to her mother’s house.
‘I sat down with my dad and sorted out the paperwork for the launderette’s takings for that day,’ she said. ‘After having my dinner, I went to the Woodcutters Arms where I met Damon Alvin, Ricky Percival, Sean Buckley and my boyfriend, Kevin Walsh. It was really quiet in the pub that night. I can’t recall what time it was, perhaps quarter past, half past nine, but Damon and Ricky left the pub before Kevin and me. About 2200 hrs, we decided to buy a few takeaway beers and go home to watch the television because the pub was really quiet. Half an hour after we arrived at the flat, Damon and Ricky turned up in Ricky’s car. They came in and we all just sat watching the television and chatting. Everything was really normal as far as I was concerned. Around midnight Ricky went home. Roughly half an hour later, Damon’s girlfriend Clair beeped the car horn outside the flat.
‘Kevin went to the kitchen window, looked down onto the car park and told Damon that Clair was outside. Clair was driving Damon’s red Audi, he got into it and they disappeared. It wasn’t unusual for Clair to pick Damon up from our flat. Clair would do it when she had finished work because she didn’t like him drinking and driving. At approximately 0100 hrs, Kevin and I went to bed.’
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