Fog on the Tyne

by Bernard O'Mahoney

  After a week of watching this fearsome Geordie marauding around the prison, the governor ordered that Paddy be taken to the medical centre, where he would have to undergo a mental-health assessment. ‘I’m not fucking mad,’ Paddy protested. ‘I’m wearing the gloves to prevent me from catching Aids.’ Paddy later learned that several UK nationals had previously tried to feign madness in an attempt to avoid extradition, and that the Spanish authorities believed his unorthodox behaviour indicated that he was attempting to follow suit. Paddy was able to convince the doctors that he was as sane as the next man, but trying to prove to the other prisoners that he was not a rapist was hopeless, because they refused even to acknowledge him. To make matters worse, a radio station in Gibraltar was broadcasting the allegation and the newspapers were repeating it. They had even claimed on television that Paddy was a rapist.

  Paddy contacted a friend named Bobby and asked him to visit as soon as possible. A few days later, Bobby arrived in Spain with the Bull and a few other lads in tow. ‘The media are calling me a fucking rapist, and I am going to end up getting killed in here,’ Paddy told his friends when they visited him. They looked at Paddy in astonishment and then burst out laughing. Pleading with Bobby to take him seriously, Paddy said, ‘It’s not fucking funny. These people honestly believe that I kidnap, torture and then rape people. They’re calling me “the beast from the north-east”.’

  Bobby assured Paddy that he would sort the matter out, and after leaving the prison he drove down to Gibraltar with the other men. Barging past the security guard at the main door of the radio station, they demanded to see the news editor. The receptionist asked them what they wanted, and when they explained the purpose of their visit she claimed that they were at the wrong radio station and directed them elsewhere. When Bobby and the others descended upon the radio station the receptionist had redirected them to, it soon became apparent that they had been duped. ‘When we get back there, don’t bother talking to the receptionist this time. I will deal with this,’ Bobby told the others.

  After they had pulled up outside the radio station for the second time, Bobby kicked the front door open and shoved the security guard to one side. The receptionist started screaming something in Spanish, but Bobby ignored her and walked into the studio, where a presenter was broadcasting live. Grabbing the startled man by his lapels, Bobby ordered him to say that Paddy Conroy was wanted in the UK for escaping not raping. The terrified presenter repeatedly blurted out Bobby’s request over the airwaves until he was finally released.

  Although Bobby’s attempt to set the record straight was admirable, the story that Paddy was a rapist was already in the public domain, and those who heard the presenter broadcast Bobby’s demand were in a minority. Paddy’s treatment, therefore, did not improve, and so he recruited an American man mountain as his friend and bodyguard.

  The American was a muscle-bound monster who oozed brutality. He was from the State of Illinois, and he told Paddy that he was a Mafia enforcer awaiting extradition on charges of extortion and murder. He was one of the few English-speaking inmates, and so, somewhat inevitably, Paddy got to know him quite well. After Paddy explained his predicament to the American, he agreed that any battles Paddy had to fight would become his battles too. Towering over every other man in the prison, Paddy’s American Mafia friend struck terror into the heart of anybody who attempted to cause him problems. Within a week, Paddy had abandoned his gauntlets and was walking around the prison without fear of attack.

  When Bobby returned to Newcastle, he contacted the BBC World Service and asked them to look into the vile allegations that had been broadcast in error about Paddy. A BBC journalist contacted a police officer involved in Paddy’s case, and he claimed that it had all been a terrible misunderstanding. ‘I told the Spanish police that Conroy was an escapee not a rapist. Perhaps they misheard or misunderstood me,’ the officer said. Perhaps they did misunderstand the officer; a cynic, however, might think that the error was in fact deliberate and designed to cause Paddy as much unnecessary hardship as possible.

  The news that was filtering back to Paddy from England about his case filled him with a sense of hope. The Bull had told Paddy that Billy Collier’s brother Terry had been asking him to attend a meeting, because Collier did not want to go to court to give evidence. Terry had informed the Bull that after Paddy’s arrest the police had given his brother Billy and his family new identities and moved them to a safe house in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Two detectives from Newcastle had been appointed as Billy’s liaison officers, and they had assisted him and his family with moving in and settling down. Unfortunately for the police, their efforts ‘to protect and hide Billy’ from whatever danger they believed he faced were in vain. Billy’s drug habit meant that he could not adjust to a life of normality, and so he encouraged his brother Terry and others to build bridges with Paddy so that he could return to Newcastle. The Bull was pestered with olive branches in various guises, and so in the end Paddy told him to agree to listen to what Terry Collier had to say.

  Terry Collier met the Bull at Newcastle Central Station and told him that his brother was willing to withdraw his evidence if Paddy paid him £15,000. The very thought of funding a junkie’s habit was bad enough, but to compensate a junkie who had desecrated the Conroy family grave made Paddy’s stomach churn, and so he passed a message back telling Collier to stick his offer where the sun don’t shine. A few days later, Paddy was made a second offer. This time the asking fee was £10,000, but Paddy’s response was exactly the same.

  After failing to buy Paddy’s friendship, Billy began to change the statements that he had made to the police. One day, he was claiming that Paddy had tortured him, and the following day he was saying that Paddy wasn’t even present when he had been assaulted. Collier then employed his own mother to contact the Bull and assure him that all the conflicting statements should be ignored. Mrs Collier told the Bull that when her son did attend court he was going to tell the truth and so Paddy would be cleared of torturing him. Just after Mrs Collier had relayed her son’s message to the Bull, he received a call from Billy, who confirmed that he wished to tell the truth and that he was willing to do everything in his power to put things right. The Bull asked Billy if he would be willing to make a full and frank statement about all that had occurred on the day he was abducted, and he agreed. ‘Tell Paddy that I’m sorry,’ Billy said. ‘I am willing to make amends for all of the trouble I have caused him.’

  The police had discovered that Terry Collier had been ‘speaking to the Conroys’ on his brother’s behalf, and so they immediately moved Billy and his family to another safe house, this time in Peterborough. The last thing the police wanted was the torture victim admitting that Paddy Conroy had nothing to do with such a heinous crime. Despite the best efforts of the police to gag Billy, he once more contacted the Bull and asked to meet him in Newcastle so that he could attend a solicitor’s office and make a fresh statement. When Billy arrived in the city, he was naturally nervous, until the Bull explained that the last person Paddy wanted to see hurt was him. ‘Paddy knows that if anything ever happens to you the truth might never come out,’ the Bull said. ‘And so you have absolutely nothing to worry about.’ This seemed to relax Billy, and he asked the Bull to accompany him to a solicitor’s where he could ‘sort this mess out’.

  Unfortunately, the statement Billy did eventually make that day, which exonerated Paddy of any involvement in his torture, was deemed inadmissible by Paddy’s legal team, because he had simply written it out himself and asked a solicitor to witness him signing it. When Paddy informed the Bull, he once more contacted Billy, who returned to Newcastle to make a sworn statement in an acceptable format. When Billy arrived, he wasn’t in any rush to go to a solicitor’s office. He told the Bull that his partner had been ‘doing his head in’ while they had been in hiding and that he wanted to enjoy himself. The pair went for a drink, and Billy ended up taking the Bull to the flat of a female friend in Wallsend, where he spent th
e night.

  The following morning, they didn’t bother travelling back into Newcastle. Instead, they attended a local solicitor’s office. Fearing Billy might later allege that he had been forced into making the statement, the Bull waited in a nearby café while Billy went into the solicitor’s office alone. Billy claimed in his latest statement that he had been involved in a fight at a house in Westmoreland Road with a person whose name he did not wish to disclose. ‘I was then attacked by several individuals, and three of my friends came to my aid. They were Paddy Conroy, Scott Waters and David Glover,’ he said. ‘Things did calm down, and Conroy drove me home in his car. I subsequently learned that Conroy had been arrested. I immediately attended the police station where Conroy was being held and told the officers involved in the case that he had not been involved. The following day, I was threatened with violence by the family of the man that I had fought. Threats to kill were made against both me and members of my family. The family that threatened me are notorious throughout Newcastle, and I am in no doubt that they are both capable and willing to carry out their threat. I was in absolute fear of my life. I was told that I had to go back to the police station and give a different statement, in which I was to state that I had been kidnapped from a shop and then assaulted by Conroy, Glover and Waters. I did make that statement, but it is untrue and was made under duress. I have chosen to make this statement now because most of the family members who had threatened me are currently in prison and I intend to leave the country before they are released.’

  Paddy was fighting extradition from Spain at the time Billy made his statement, and he thought that this new evidence would help him to prove to a Spanish judge that he was actually innocent of the charge he faced. If a judge accepted that Paddy had played no part in Billy’s torture, he could rule that it would be wrong to send him back to the UK, where he would likely be imprisoned.

  At the next hearing, the judge listened intently to Paddy’s argument and adjourned the proceedings for 28 days while they sought clarification from the British authorities about all that Billy had said. Paddy knew that Northumbria Police would claim that he had threatened or somehow pressurised Billy into changing his evidence, and so he asked the Bull if he would speak to Billy about travelling to Spain to give evidence in person. Without hesitation, Billy agreed. He even told the Bull that he would obtain a false passport for the journey, as he feared the police might prevent him leaving the country if he was stopped and checked at one of the ports.

  Billy successfully applied for a passport in the name of Paul Hunter using a stolen birth certificate and utility bill in the same name. On the day they were due to depart, Billy rang the Bull and asked him to pick him up from the flat of the girl he had previously stayed with in Wallsend rather than the safe house in Peterborough. ‘I need to go to my house to collect some clothing,’ Billy said when the Bull arrived. ‘But please don’t mention to my girlfriend that I have been staying at that flat in Wallsend.’ When they arrived in Peterborough, the Bull parked in a street adjacent to where Billy lived, because he feared the police might have the property under surveillance and he didn’t want to subject himself to being interrogated by them or by Billy’s girlfriend. After 15 minutes, Billy re-emerged from his home and the pair set off on their long drive to the ferry port in Plymouth.

  After purchasing their tickets, the Bull drove his car onto the ferry and Billy boarded as a foot passenger. If Billy thought for one moment that Paddy intended to harm him, then he had ample time and opportunity to make good his escape or at least to alert the authorities at the ferry port. Billy did neither. When both men were safely on board, they met up in the bar. Billy wanted to spend the night drinking, but the Bull said that he needed his sleep as it was a 24-hour crossing at the end of which he had a 500- or 600-mile drive.

  The following day, after the ferry had docked in Santander, the Bull and Billy drove to Cordova, where they stayed overnight in a hotel before heading on to Malaga. On the very morning that they arrived in Malaga, the Spanish authorities decided to move Paddy to a prison in Madrid. Paddy, the Bull and Collier were absolutely devastated, but there was nothing that they could do.

  The Bull and Billy booked into a hotel in Malaga and decided to drown their sorrows in a local bar. The following day, they purchased a map and sat in their hotel room nursing hangovers and planning their route to Madrid. Suddenly, there was a loud, insistent knock at their door, and when the Bull opened it an Englishman who had been staying in the room next door warned him that he should be careful. ‘I don’t know what, if anything, you guys are up to, but a security guard was here last night asking what colour eyes you have, what accents you have and what car you drive. I didn’t tell him anything, but you are definitely being watched,’ the man said. The Bull thanked his hotel neighbour and closed the door.

  Unsure what to do, the Bull told Billy to remain out of sight while he went downstairs to check on the car. Everything seemed in order, and so he returned to the hotel room to tell Billy to get his things together as they were leaving. Because the Bull had not been paying much attention to Billy’s movements throughout their long journey, he was unaware that Billy had been telephoning home at every opportunity to talk to his girlfriend. She had obviously been taken in by the police’s ridiculous stories about Paddy wanting her partner dead and had got it into her head that he was being taken to Spain to be murdered. Panic-stricken, she had contacted the police, and they had urged her to remain calm throughout the calls so that they could trace them and launch a full-scale operation to ‘rescue’ her partner.

  When the Bull re-entered the hotel room, Billy was in the bath, and so he sat on a bed studying the map in preparation for their journey. Moments later, there was a knock at the door, and when the Bull answered it a security guard said, ‘Do you own a Ford Granada, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the Bull.

  The security guard explained that somebody had broken the window of his vehicle and stolen the radio and so it would need to be secured. Billy had got out of the bath by this time, and he told the Bull that he would accompany him downstairs just in case there was a problem. As they stepped out of the hotel and onto the car park, a large van pulled up directly in front of them and two cars skidded to a halt on either side. The vehicles’ doors flew open simultaneously, and a group of armed men disembarked, shouting, ‘Hands on the fucking car! Hands on the car, or we fucking shoot!’ Within seconds, the Bull and Billy were in handcuffs and being led away to separate cars. At the police station, they were locked in the same cell and told that they would remain in custody until police officers from the UK arrived to interview them.

  That night, as the Bull slept, Billy tried to take his own life by hanging himself from the cell bars. The sound of the chair falling to the floor saved him. The clatter as it hit the stone tiles awoke the Bull, and he leapt from his bed, shouting, ‘No, Billy, no! Think of your lassie! Think of your bairns!’ The Bull managed to free Billy from his noose and sat up with him for the rest of the night to ensure he did not try to harm himself again.

  The following day, Billy received a visit from Northumbria Police and was immediately moved to another cell. The Bull was told that he was going to be deported to face a charge of kidnap. He naturally pleaded not guilty to such a ridiculous allegation and was remanded in custody to await an extradition hearing. After two months, the Bull was bailed, but the Spanish authorities retained his passport to prevent him from fleeing the country. Short of money and missing his family, the Bull pleaded with his Spanish solicitor to have his passport returned. Despite the best efforts of his solicitor, the judge refused every one of the numerous applications that were made, and so the Bull went to the British Embassy and successfully applied for a three-day temporary passport. When he arrived at Manchester airport later that night, the Bull was arrested and the passport was seized, but, to his astonishment, he was released without charge.

  After arriving back in Newcastle, the Bull went to see a solicitor, w
ho advised him that Northumbria Police had wanted to arrest him at the airport and charge him with kidnap but that for reasons known only to themselves they had mistakenly released him. The Bull decided that he would avoid the police until all matters concerning Paddy, Collier and himself became clearer.

  To make matters worse, David Glover and another man were then arrested in Middlesbrough after a member of the public telephoned the police to report two men who were trying to break into a car. When Glover was identified as the man who had escaped with Paddy from the prison van, he was taken to court and remanded in custody at HMP Armley, in Leeds, to await trial.

  Confinement, or the threat of it, did not agree with David Glover, and he was prepared to do anything or betray anybody to avoid it. Not long after he was incarcerated, he and his cellmate, Kevin Lowe, went on hunger strike. Lowe was awaiting trial for smuggling gun parts to an extremely dangerous prisoner named Simon Bowman, who had been locked up at the time in HMP Durham. Lowe and his estranged wife, Denise, had been arrested at HMP Durham after they had been searched prior to a visit and eight rounds of .22 ammunition had been found. Later the same day, part of a revolver was found on the security wing in the cell of one of Bowman’s friends. Another gun part was found being ‘intimately’ secreted by another prisoner.

  In 1990, Bowman had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for threatening to kill his girlfriend and conspiracy to rob. He and an associate had rented a lock-up garage, where a sawn-off shotgun, a pump-action shotgun and stolen security-guard uniforms were later found.

  In March 1992, Bowman escaped from HMP Durham, but he was arrested two months later after terrifying a couple in Kent while attempting to break into their home armed with a shotgun. He received a further two years’ imprisonment for making threats to kill and escaping. In March 1995, a further two and a half years were added for another escape bid, during which he threatened a female prison officer with a razor, which he pressed against her neck. In October 1996, another seven years were added to his sentence for the plot to smuggle a gun into HMP Durham with Glover’s cellmate, Kevin Lowe.