The Great Cat Massacre (5 page)

John Stonehouse MP, who had been Postmaster General in one of Wilson’s governments, was having a few problems. His debts were mounting and he was cooking the books at his business to hide it; he was also conducting an extramarital affair with his secretary and, to cap it all, he was spying on Britain for the Soviet Bloc, in the form of the Czech intelligence service. Quite how he found the time for all of this is anybody’s guess.

Clearly, the scheduling was becoming tough for him too,
so tough that he decided to fake his own death in an elaborate – some might say ‘romantic’ – fashion.

His first step was to identify a dead constituent, Joseph Markham, and go about stealing the man’s identity. He even rehearsed ‘being’ Markham. A psychiatrist’s report from the time states: ‘He spent short periods posing as Mr Markham, a private and “honest” individual, which apparently led to reduced tension. He began to dislike the personality of Stonehouse and came to believe that his wife, colleagues and friends would be better off without him. He therefore devised his escape to get away from the identity of Stonehouse. He thought of suicide but, deciding that this was not the answer, devised a “suicide equivalent” – his disappearance from a beach in Miami.’

On 20 November 1974 Stonehouse went to the beach in Miami, left a pile of clothes on it and promptly disappeared, leaving the authorities to believe he had drowned while swimming. Newspapers printed his obituary, lamenting his death. His wife, Sheila, was distraught at the death of her husband – not realising that he was, in fact, on his way to Australia to start a carefully constructed new life with his secretary/mistress, Sheila Buckley.

Upon arrival in Melbourne, he set about accessing the 36 different bank accounts he had opened in a variety of names, swapping money between them to cover his tracks. As ‘Clive Mildoon’, he deposited Aus$21,000 – around £90,000 now – in cash at the Melbourne branch of the Bank of New Zealand. It was just unlucky for him that the cashier from that bank later spotted him in the branch of the Bank of New South Wales depositing
money as John Markham. The cashier thought this was a bit suspicious and spoke to the police.

Here’s where Stonehouse’s luck really fell apart.

At the very time that John Stonehouse was running away from his debts, another British celebrity was fleeing from murder – ‘Lucky’ Lucan. An international manhunt for the fugitive peer was underway and the Australian police were on the look-out for him. When they heard about a suspicious Englishman depositing large sums of money at a number of banks, they therefore thought they had found Lucan and placed him under surveillance.

As part of the investigation, a police officer went to search his flat. By astonishing bad luck, the policeman noticed a book of matches on the table in Stonehouse’s home from a hotel where the officer had stayed 20 years earlier – in Miami. He finally put two and two together and realised they, in fact, had John Stonehouse, who wasn’t even missing.

He was arrested on Christmas Eve. Just in case he was Lord Lucan after all, the police made him pull his trousers down, to look for a scar that Lucan had on his thigh. His skin told them it was probably Stonehouse.

After unsuccessful attempts to gain asylum from the mighty powers of Mauritius and Sweden, Stonehouse was deported to Britain, where he technically remained an MP while behind bars in Brixton prison.

Stonehouse was tried on 21 counts of fraud and wasting police time. He conducted his own defence, which must have gone well because he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in Wormwood Scrubs, where he complained about the fact that the radio in the prison workshop only
ever played pop music. A few years later, he was released due to ill health, at which point he blamed the press for his downfall, rather than the fact that he had been a spy, adulterer and international criminal.

In 1980, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, agreed not to prosecute him even though a Czech defector had revealed that Stonehouse had been spying when he was a minister. This was, in a rare stroke of luck for Stonehouse, due to the fact that the previous year Anthony Blunt, formerly of MI5, had been exposed as another member of the Cambridge spy ring, so a minister being outed as a Soviet agent would make it look as if Downing Street was little more than the Kremlin’s London branch.

There was something of a happy ending for Stonehouse when he came out of prison because his wife divorced him and he married his secretary. He died in 1988, by which time he had joined the SDP.

It is often assumed the novel – and later BBC TV comedy series –
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin,
in which the eponymous hero fakes his own death, was inspired by Stonehouse. In fact, the novel was written before the MP’s exploits but not published until afterwards.

It seems 1974 was a bad year for the long arm of the British law, but an exciting year for fugitive Britons. For that was the year that a failure to fill out some paperwork allowed Ronnie Biggs, the most famous of the Great Train Robbers, to continue life on the run.

Biggs had dramatically escaped from Wandsworth gaol in 1965 by constructing his own rope ladder, scaling the wall and jumping onto a waiting van. He eventually managed to get to Brazil but hot on his trail was Chief Superintendent Jack ‘Slipper of the Yard’ Slipper.

In 1974, the
Daily Express
received a tip-off that Biggs was in Rio, and duly informed the Yard. But Slipper slipped up when he chose to disregard protocol and inform neither his own government nor the Brazilians that he was on his way to Rio, because the Brazilian police were about as trustworthy as a convention of snakes and he didn’t want Biggs to be forewarned of the visit.

When Slipper arrived at Copacabana police station, however, it was explained to him with traditional South American manners that he had no jurisdiction and he should leave before they got really upset. Biggs was soon informed of the British policeman’s visit.

Had Slipper simply informed Interpol, they would have picked up Biggs no problem and handed him over to the British authorities. Instead, he was left to his own devices until 2001, when the ageing thief voluntarily returned to Britain to use the NHS, his age having caught up with him more successfully than the police. He remained stubbornly alive until the end of 2013.

The British people don’t expect gun battles on their streets but in 1983 the residents of Kensington, that plushest of London boroughs, witnessed the police gunning down a
criminal as he sat in a stationary car. Unfortunately, the man was actually an entirely innocent film editor and the police had made one hell of an error. As the
Times
reported: ‘It was a trail of mistakes and coincidences that went terribly wrong.’

The police were after one David Martin, an armed robber suspected of shooting a police officer. Martin had escaped from a crown court cell the previous month and the police wanted him back. They therefore had his girlfriend, Sue Stephens, under surveillance in case he made contact.

A poster was distributed to local police stations warning Martin should be considered armed and highly dangerous, and a number of officers on the 21-strong team put together to hunt him down were issued with firearms. They were informed that Martin had a ‘pathological hatred for authority, particularly directed towards police officers, even more particularly for those officers who had arrested and dealt with him’. It was an understandable warning, but one primed, perhaps, to make any officer coming across Martin very twitchy.

One of the officers on edge was Detective Constable Peter Finch. He had arrested Martin in September 1982 after a violent struggle in Martin’s flat, when Martin, bizarrely disguised as a woman, had threatened Finch with two guns, shouting: ‘I will have you! I will blow you away!’ In the course of the fight, Martin was shot in the neck by another officer and, as a result, he was set to explode.

On 14 January 1983 Finch and another officer, Detective Constable John Jardine, were issued with .38 Smith and Wesson revolvers. They were both qualified to
carry them, but neither had ever drawn a gun in anger – it was very rare for British police to even draw their weapons, let alone fire them. In the previous three years, fewer than 50 bullets had been fired by officers, with just six people being hit.

Finch and Jardine were issued with the guns as part of the police unit following Sue Stephens, a unit that also included a black cab, a motorbike and a number of cars, which tailed her from her flat in Kilburn to the home of her friend Lester Purdy, who had arranged to meet Stephen Waldorf to talk about a film job. The three of them met at a car hire shop in west London. It was bad luck for Waldorf that, with his long blond hair and long nose, he looked a lot like David Martin.

The three subsequently drove away in a yellow mini, with Waldorf in the passenger seat and Stephens in the back. As they followed, the police thought it might be Martin, but wanted a positive identification before taking any action. One of the officers reported on his radio: ‘It is looking good, it may be our target. We can see his large nose, his hair. It is looking good.’

When the mini stopped at traffic lights, the officer in charge of the operation, Superintendent George Ness, decided to send an officer on foot to walk past the car in an attempt to identify Martin. Finch knew him best, so he was sent to creep up to the car and identify the suspect. He later testified that he was ‘100 per cent sure it was Martin’.

‘I was looking through the glass and saw a three-quarter profile of Martin. I saw his large nose, his hair and even his high cheekbones,’ he said.

Finch drew his weapon and shot out the tyres of the car. Then he fired four bullets through the window at Martin.

Finch’s colleagues saw what they believed was a gunfight between Finch and Martin and rushed to help. A total of 14 rounds were discharged, five hitting Waldorf. It was only when Waldorf was lying handcuffed on the ground and they got a better look that the policemen realised they had shot the wrong man. He was rushed to hospital. Fortunately, despite a fractured skull, damaged liver and severe blood loss, he survived.

David Martin was captured two weeks later after a chase on the London Underground. He received 25 years in prison. Finch and Jardine were subsequently charged with attempted murder.

The most damning evidence against Finch was that he had exceeded his orders. Ness had expected him to walk past the mini and casually glance in to identify Martin. He was under orders not to effect an arrest unless absolutely necessary, but the court heard that he was seen to draw his revolver even before he arrived at the car. Finch claimed he shouted: ‘Armed police!’ but witnesses said they had heard no such warning.

Jardine was also in a tough position. After Finch had shot Waldorf, the victim was lying half out the car with his head touching the pavement yet Jardine shot him again. Finch then hit him three times over the head with his pistol, fracturing Waldorf’s skull, before handcuffing him. That was when Finch noticed that the victim wasn’t Martin.

The Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, QC, was prosecuting the case personally, the importance of the
events having national repercussions regarding the police, whom, it seemed to the country, had appointed themselves judge, jury and – literally – executioner. He told the court: ‘It does not matter, in fact, whether it was Martin or Waldorf because there was no need, in the submission of the Crown, to take those actions at that stage – either to shoot him, as Jardine did when he was half in and half out of the car, or to fracture his skull with a revolver, as Finch did. Whether Finch was standing or crouching, in order to strike Waldorf hard at least twice, surely he must have been in a position to stop him getting a gun, even if he had a gun to go for. If you are pistol-whipping a man that closely, you must be in a position to restrain him.’

Havers claimed that, after the incident, Jardine had told investigating officers: ‘I intended to totally incapacitate him and the only way to do that with a gun was to kill him.’ In effect, Havers was telling the public that the police were operating a shoot-to-kill policy.

Waldorf told the court that when the shooting began he thought that it was between two other parties and he had just been caught in the cross-fire. Soon, ‘it became pretty apparent I was the target. I was trying to think if I had any enemies. The car windows came in and the bullets kept coming through.’

Finch said he had drawn his weapon in readiness because he was wearing a large jacket and didn’t want to be fumbling for his gun if he needed it. Misinterpreting a movement inside the car, he thought he was about to be shot. The judge told the jury to put themselves in the mind of the officers who truly believed it was Martin and
that he might well be armed. They were, he instructed, entitled to shoot first in self-defence.

The two men were acquitted. An internal police inquiry stripped them of their right to carry firearms but they kept their jobs. The victim received £120,000 in compensation.

Waldorf said he wasn’t surprised by the verdict and added: ‘I don’t think I could actually ever forgive them, but I can’t blame them. It’s the system that’s at fault, not them. When you think that they fired 14 shots and only five hit me – and none of them killed me – that had to be luck. It was lucky for me the police were bad shots. At least I think it was luck. I don’t know whether we’re lucky or unlucky when the police are incompetent.’

In the wake of the incident and the resulting public outcry, the Home Office introduced much stricter rules about police use of guns, requiring an officer of Commander rank to sign off on their use, and officers issued with them had to carry a card reminding them that the weapons could only be used as a true last resort. But the public perception of the police was changed irrevocably.