Gangland UK. Christopher Berry-Dee
involvement in the shooting and was cleared by a jury.
Today, tales abound on the Bestwood Estate about Gunn’s ruthless streak. It is said that he once broke the arms of one of his own men after he drove badly and ‘disrespected’ him. People were shot through their hands for carrying out burglaries on the estate without his permission. People moving to the estate were visited and told that Gunn ruled the roost. Many were too scared to stay.
A senior officer said, ‘These are not normal villains. They would shoot someone to get respect. They are extremely vicious and brutal people. The smallest slight to Gunn would end with a severe beating. Some of his guys are just psychopaths. There are a lot of bodies – dead and alive – that have the hallmark of Colin Gunn. I don’t think there is anyone who is grateful for ever having met him.’
Police realised that, if they were to bring down Gunn, they would have to establish a new way of working. Knowing that at some stage they would come across corruption in the force, they set up operations within operations, like a Russian matrioshka doll. These were kept so secret that officers outside the squad had no idea that they existed.
To capture Gunn, officers identified his lieutenants, thugs and drug-dealers and started at the bottom, taking them out one by one, piling the pressure on Gunn to encourage him to get involved personally. Chief Constable Green told his men, ‘Shake these criminals to the core and lock them away in any way that is ethical and lawful.’ The main operation was called Stealth, and beneath that, cloaked in secrecy, was Utah, which had been set up solely to catch Gunn.
It soon became known that Gunn was heavily involved in the murders of 55-year-old textile worker John Stirland and his wife, Joan, 53, who were tracked down and murdered at their seaside bungalow in Trusthorpe, Lincolnshire, on 8 August 2004. Mrs Stirland’s 22-year-old son, Michael O’Brien, had shot dead an innocent man outside a Nottingham pub in 2003. The victim, 22-year-old shop-fitter Marvyn Bradshaw, was a friend of Jamie Gunn, Colin’s nephew. It later emerged that Bradshaw, a family man with no links to crime or gangs, was killed after being mistaken for someone who had assaulted O’Brien in The Sporting Chance pub with an ashtray.
There had been a ‘lock-in’ during the night in question. Customers were inside enjoying a late drink and, at the door, a young man was refused admission. He was Michael ‘JJ’ O’Brien. He had already been turned away from two other pubs for wearing trainers and a tracksuit top.
A scuffle took place and O’Brien, a small-time drug-dealer, who had already served jail time, now the worse for wear with drink, was hit in the face with an ashtray. O’Brien, who was with his mate, 31-year-old Gary Salmon, retreated to Salmon’s flat nearby, where they changed into dark clothes and balaclavas. They also picked up a single-barrel shotgun to commit what was to become the seventeenth shooting in Nottingham that August.
Back at The Sporting Chance, four men left the premises and climbed into a silver Renault Laguna car. At the wheel was Marvyn Bradshaw. Sitting beside him was his longtime friend Jamie Gunn. As the car edged out of the car park, a shot was discharged and Bradshaw, hit in the head, slumped sideways. He died later in hospital; having been shot from such close range, death from the head wound was inevitable. The lad had most certainly been killed in a case of mistaken identity. Indeed, neither he nor Jamie Gunn had been involved in the ashtray incident.
After the shooting, the two men returned to Salmon’s flat where O’Brien boasted to two teenage girls, ‘I shot him… he was a bad man.’ Scared to death, they contacted the police. The loud-mouthed O’Brien’s bragging proved to be his downfall, and that of his parents, too.
As the result of the shooting, the Stirlands were forced to flee their Nottingham home after several shots were fired into their living room. Thugs had warned the couple to leave the area or ‘stay and face the consequences’. They immediately packed up a few possessions and left without telling friends where they were going.
First, they moved to Humberside, but it is believed that they may have been forced, once again urgently, to abandon their new home because they turned up at a second address, a bungalow in Trusthorpe, on the Lincolnshire coast, in December 2003, with only the clothes they stood up in.
In April 2004, they told Nottinghamshire Police that they had moved and senior officers in Lincolnshire were made aware of the problems and their background.
In July, their son, 23-year-old O’Brien, was sentenced to life for murdering Marvyn Bradshaw. O’Brien rubbed salt into the wounds of the dead man’s parents, taunting them from the dock, ‘I’m not bothered, I’m a bad boy. It means nothing to me. Your son looked like a doughnut with a big hole in his head. I know where you live.’ Before being escorted away, he threw a beaker of water towards Mr and Mrs Bradshaw, screaming, ‘I will do my time standing on my head.’ Quite understandably, Colin Gunn was livid when he heard of this.
Three days later, 53-year-old Mrs Stirland rang Nottinghamshire Police to say that fresh threats had been made against her and her family. Lincolnshire Police were informed the next day. Despite this, when she rang Nottingham Police at 11.30am on Sunday to say that there had been a prowler in her garden the previous night, the police did not consider it immediately necessary to inform their neighbouring force. Instead, an officer Mrs Stirland knew rang her back at 2.00pm. After a seven-minute conversation, the officer called Lincolnshire Police to tell them of the prowler, but did not ask for a patrol car to drive past the bungalow. She did not want to call 999 because she didn’t want police cars swooping on the house and alarming her neighbours.
Within minutes of speaking to the Nottinghamshire officer, and almost three hours after first reporting the prowler, the Stirlings were shot dead. Two men wearing blue boiler suits were seen in the vicinity of the murder scene. Witnesses described them walking or running away from the bungalow while a black Volkswagen Passat was parked nearby with its hazard lights flashing. The car was later found ablaze in a quiet country lane. The two men were spotted close by. The car had been stolen on 31 July, from Nottinghamshire.
Chief Constable Green said, ‘The ruthlessness with which Gunn tracked the Stirlands down after they fled Nottingham was characteristic of a man who led a bloodthirsty and violent regime.’
But, the question now was: how had Gunn tracked down the Stirlands so quickly? A former Nottingham neighbour explained that the couple’s rented address had become local knowledge in the city after a family friend, who lived on the same estate, accidentally met the Stirlands in Mablethorpe, just four miles from the bungalow.
Another rumour was that the couple’s daughter had been followed when she visited her parents the day before they were killed. Or was it because, just two weeks before they were murdered, the couple took the risk to returning to Nottingham to attend the wedding of Mr Stirland’s son, Lee, and his fiancée Adele?
More revelations were to follow. According to Nottingham residents, Mrs Stirland, a children’s care nurse at the Queen’s Medical Centre, had previously been heard in a Nottingham pub praising her convicted son. She told fellow drinkers that O’Brien had vowed to take revenge on the people who put him away, which would have done nothing to endear her, her husband and her mindless son to Mr Colin Gunn.
However, now the true facts can be revealed. In an effort to track down the Stirlands, Colin had contacted a former BT worker, Stephen Poundall, in a bid to find the couple’s address. In turn, Poundall spoke with past colleagues, Anthony Kelly and Andrew Pickering, who ran a computer search. They found the address and passed it on to Poundall, although they had no idea why he wanted it. Kelly and Pickering later admitted computer misuse and were sacked by BT, as well as being handed down suspended jail sentences.
Aged just 19, Jamie Gunn never recovered from the shock of seeing his friend die and, a year later, on 2 August, just three weeks after O’Brien’s conviction, he was found dead in his mother’s bed by a younger brother and sister. Jamie had died of pneumonia. He had stopped eating and begun drinking heavily and his immune system was weakened. Jamie had died as surely as if O’Brien had killed him, too.
The Gunns decided to give Jamie a proper send off, and the funeral was as lavish as that of any Mafia family member. On Friday,