Gangland UK. Christopher Berry-Dee
of St Mary in Bulwell; 700 of them crammed into the 17th-century church, while another 300 stood in the drizzle outside. A horse-drawn, glass-sided hearse waited at the gate below, alongside two motor hearses bearing flowers, including huge wreaths saying ‘Jamie’, ‘Brother’ and ‘Jim Bob’.
As crime writer James Cathcart reported for the Nottingham Evening Post, ‘There were three of the most stretched kind of stretch limousines, plus three big funeral Daimlers, a convoy of bulky, dark 4x4s and a conspicuous black Mercedes two-seater… Hard-looking men with stubble for hair stood smoking and chatting quietly in the churchyard, their jackets straining across their shoulders. The style, as well as the scale of the funeral, would have suited a Kray brother, rather than a teenage bouncer unknown to the world outside Nottingham before his death… just a mile away, on Hucknell Road, a demolition team was tearing down the last recognisable traces of The Sporting Chance.’
Colin Gunn is now serving life for conspiracy to murder the Stirlands. His fellow plotters, Michael McNee and John Russell, will serve 95 years before they are considered for parole. After being sentenced on Friday, 30 June 2006, the verdict went down very badly among Gunn’s supporters on the Bestwood Estate. That weekend, around 30 people started a mini-riot, setting fire to cars and causing £10,000 worth of damage.
Colin Gunn was also arrested in connection with the murder of Marian Bates, a 64-year-old Arnold parish jeweller, who was shot dead at point-blank range while shielding her daughter Xanthe from two crash-helmeted robbers at 1.30pm on Tuesday, 30 September 2003. Her bespectacled 67-year-old husband, Victor, picked up a fencing foil to try to protect his wife but was attacked with a crowbar. Wearing washing-up gloves, the men escaped with a pathetic haul of two rings, one pendant and three pairs of earrings worth £1,120.00.
Although Colin Gunn was never charged with any involvement in the raid on the couple’s shop, his name has been linked to the investigation a number of times. It is thought that he feared he would be implicated immediately after the shooting and sought the services of corrupt trainee detective, Charles Fletcher, to find out what he could about the investigation less than 24 hours after Mrs Bates had been murdered.
Indeed, Gunn’s common-law wife, Victoria Garfoot, had previously been stopped by police driving a maroon-coloured Peugeot in July 2003. She told police that the car belonged to Colin Gunn. Three months after that incident, the very same Peugeot was used as the getaway car for two gang members – 19-year-old Craig Moran and Dean Betton, 23, who were known associates of the Gunn clan and who were accomplices in the bungled raid on the Time Centre jewellers on Front Street.
Betton, from Broxtowe, and Moran, a Bestwood resident, were jailed for 13 years each for conspiring to rob the jewellery shop. Peter Williams, the teenager who accompanied the gunman into the Time Centre, was convicted of murder and jailed for life, with a minimum tariff of 22 years. Then aged 19, Williams had a string of convictions and should have been electronically tagged at the time of the raid – he hadn’t been. Moran’s girlfriend, Lisa Unwin, 23, from Bestwood, Nottingham, was found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, along with Moran, by providing him with a false alibi.
In describing the robbery to a jury, Victor Bates explained that two men came into the shop, pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. At first, the pistol failed to fire, but a few moments later his wife was lying on the floor with a bullet in her chest.
‘My wife moved forward quickly and stepped in between the gunman and my daughter, Xanthe, and the swine shot her in cold blood. He just shot her from about three feet – and she went down heavily… like a lump of bricks.’
Victor said that he tried to kill the intruder with a fencing foil he had hidden in the shop, but he failed. ‘I was intent on killing him but he started whirling around like a Dervish and I couldn’t get a clear shot at him. I would have made justice very summary if I could have. The other guy, who was small, whacked me on the wrist with the crowbar and then hit me in the head – and missed my eye by about an inch. I was dazed and went down stunned – he fractured my cheekbone and cut my face.’
Clearly now upset, Mr Bates added, ‘I feel like a fool – when you are faced with a gun, you don’t think about a prearranged act like falling on the floor and feigning a heart-attack. You blame yourself for not taking strict security provisions. I wanted to help my wife but I couldn’t – I think I knew she was dead. She was a very well-known girl and very popular and hadn’t got an enemy in the world – it makes it all the more frustrating that it should happen to her.’
The actual shooter of Marion Bates is widely believed to be young Gunn associate James Brodie, who has never been traced. He disappeared the day after the murder and is presumed dead, according to police. One theory is that Brodie, a heroin addict, was executed on the orders of Colin Gunn within 48 hours of the murder for fear of him implicating those higher up the pecking order. Rumours abound as to how he met his grisly end, including tales of his body being dumped in sewage works or his remains fed to pigs on a north Nottinghamshire farm.
Police intelligence led a team of body-searchers to the Willows Fish Farm, Wanlip Road, Syston, Leicestershire, where divers and forensic specialists looked for clues. Police divers dredged a stretch of water, while a team of forensic archaeologists surveyed a pit of quicksand.
Barrie Simpson and his colleagues, who are more used to excavating mass graves in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, used ‘non-invasive methods’ so that they didn’t disturb the ground. Simpson, an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham, and part of a national network of academics called the Forensic Search Advisory Group, said, ‘It [the ground] is like an underground room. Just as a fingerprint officer searches a room for fingerprints, we search for evidence like this. We specialise in the search, location and recovery of buried items. It could be a weapon, body or ransom money.’
Such ground-probing radar searches are so non-evasive they could even have uncovered part-buried footprints left at the time Brodie went missing, so Barrie Simpson and his team carefully made shallow probe holes on a bank surrounding the quicksand which were sniffed in turn by the dogs.
When nothing was found by lunchtime, the team moved to an area of woodland next to the fish farm entrance, where they looked for changes in the vegetation which would have indicated unnatural disturbance, and so might have suggested that something could have been buried underneath.
‘A burial will affect how vegetation grows,’ said Mr Simpson. ‘Sometimes it increases, sometimes it decreases.’
The police found nothing, and today a £10,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of James Brodie remains uncollected. The reward, however, does not specify ‘dead or alive’. Anyone with any information was (and at the time of writing, is) asked to contact police on 0115 844 6994, or call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
By now, a joint investigation between the National Crime Squad and police professional standards department were tracking the Gunn gang’s movements. Even PC Charles Fletcher and PC Phil Parr were being watched by a covert team.
When Colin Gunn was arrested, police found two A4 pieces of paper which he had absent-mindedly dumped in his mother’s waste bin in Raymede Drive on the Bestwood Estate. They contained police intelligence about Gunn himself and cars he was linked to. The paperwork had to be secretly removed from the bin by DCI Ian Waterfield to keep the inquiry under wraps. The items were a direct link between Gunn and his middleman, 33-year-old Jason Grocock. Crooked PC Fletcher had faxed intelligence reports from Radford Road Police Station to Grocock, then manager of Limeys discount clothes shop in Bridlesmith Gate, Nottingham. He then passed the inside intelligence to Gunn and others.
Trainee detective Charles Fletcher, 25, and Phillip Parr, 40, later admitted at Birmingham Crown Court to separately disclosing data on serious inquiries, including the details of the murder investigation of Marian Bates, to the Gunns. Fletcher also admitted two charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
Over a two-and-a-half year period, beginning in December 2002, Fletcher trawled police data bases to find information. He also sought information about the double murder of Joan and John Stirland.