London’s hard-pressed residents have long been accustomed to spiralling anarchy on the streets. Barely a day goes by without another report of yet another stabbing, another shooting, more random acts of violence. Knives today are carried as commonly as wristwatches.
Then a murder happens that so vividly captures the imagination that it becomes a symbol for everything rotten at the heart of society.
At 11.30 p.m. on 12 January 2006, in Bathurst Gardens, Kensal Green, northwest London, two worlds collided. The world of hatred and senseless violence came up against the word of love and success. Tragically, the world occupied by two feral street kids, devoid of compassion, the amoral by-products of violent computer games and ready to steal anything they wanted in life without ever having to work for it triumphed, destroying the world of an industrious young couple who had everything to live for.
The sadistic, unconscionable murder of Tom ap Rhys Pryce, as he excitedly prepared to marry the woman of his dreams, served notice that no one – anywhere – was safe.
Throughout his life Tom had striven to succeed at all he attempted. At the age of thirteen, and already a talented violinist, he won an academic and music exhibition to the elite Marlborough College public school, which then evolved into a scholarship when he was sixteen. Scoring A-grades in Greek, Latin and English A-levels, he won a much-coveted place at Trinity College, Cambridge, to read classics, gaining a first-class honours degree a few years later.
Now an up-and-coming litigation specialist at the prestigious Linklaters corporate law firm in the capital’s financial district, specialising in banking disputes, Tom was a popular and promising employee.
‘He was Mr Nice Guy, a successful young man that had everything to live for,’ recalled Detective Inspector Teresa Defanis, the senior investigating officer in charge of Tom’s subsequent murder enquiry. ‘His bosses when he got the job marked his personnel file with the words “a star in the making”.’
On the last night of his life and after spending the evening with friends the young lawyer was making his way home by Tube to his adored fiancée Adele Eastman, a graduate in Italian studies and an employment-law specialist who worked for the Queen’s solicitors, Farrer and Co.
Clasped in Tom’s hands was a sheaf of papers containing the vows he was to exchange with his bride-to-be on their wedding day. As Tom left Kensal Green Underground station, oblivious of any danger, his mind was filled only with the exciting prospect of his imminent marriage and honeymoon plans.
Unbeknown to the innocent young man, lurking outside the station in the shadows were teenage thugs Donnel Carty, aged nineteen, and eighteen-year-old Delano Brown, known to the animalistic gang they ran with as ‘G Rock’ and ‘Shy’.
The two losers could not have been more different from the successful hardworking Tom. Expelled from school for threatening a teacher, Carty had assaulted a policeman and received a caution for possessing cannabis. At one stage, he had tried – and failed – a literacy course. In an attempt to get the future killer interested in something lawful, he had been signed on to a music production course, where he had shown disturbing signs of future criminality, laying down a record track full of violent, hateful lyrics.
In a thick Jamaican patois, the song grimly portrayed a glimpse into the twisted dark world Carty inhabited, with the chilling words, ‘I draw for a shank [knife] / You boys will get poked [stabbed] / We do not pet [fear] to do murders / Come round here, you’ll get bored [knifed] / That don’t work out, draw your sword.’
Brown, meanwhile, had had more success at school mainly thanks to his well-off property developer father, who said he paid for extra tuition to boost his son’s schooling, helping him achieve GCSEs in English, maths and PE at Hillingdon College. He also claimed his London property managers had put plenty of painting and maintenance jobs Brown’s way when he carelessly gave up on his education, but it was to no avail. His errant son much preferred hanging out on street corners, where he came under the influence of the increasingly lawless and demonic Carty, whom he had known since he was eight.
Just seventeen minutes before Tom’s senseless murder, Carty and Brown had carried out another robbery, brazenly stealing cash and a mobile phone from a chef in front of the all-seeing lens of a CCTV camera trained on the station platform. The fact the ticket barriers had been inadvertently left open and that no security staff were present had not only enabled them to make an easy escape but had whetted their insatiable appetite for more action.
In a terrible wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time moment, Tom sauntered into the two no-hopers’ orbit. Spotting him, Carty whistled to Brown to follow their ‘mark’ along the quiet residential street of redbrick Edwardian houses.
As Tom walked the mere 50 yards to the safety of his home, the hooded thieves pounced on their unsuspecting victim. First they felled him with a kung-fu kick from behind, before demanding he hand over his valuables.
No weakling himself, and not fully realising the murderous intent of his attackers, 6-foot Tom instinctively resisted. Attempting to stop him from protecting himself, the two lowlifes stabbed him in the leg – a gouging blow known in street slang as ‘juking.’ Staggering away, leaving a trail of blood pumping from his severed vein, Tom found himself desperately cornered between two cars, with no chance of escape. Not content with having rendered their victim almost completely helpless, Carty and Brown then stabbed him twice in the chest and the head. The mortal blow entered Tom’s heart and he crashed to the floor.
The predators rifled through Tom’s suit pockets, relieving him of a mere £20, a couple of bank cards, a driving licence, a mobile phone and an Oyster travelcard used on public transport. As they danced in triumph over their stolen goods, Tom lay staring at the darkened sky, his lifeblood draining away. If they had cared to listen they would have heard him whisper his last words on earth: ‘That is everything, you have got everything.’
Had Tom left the Underground station only a few minutes earlier he would now have been home and he and his bride-to-be would have been excitedly discussing their marriage plans, finalising the start of their loving future together.
Instead, he lay dying. When paramedics reached the thirty-one-year-old lawyer, they used all their known skills to try to keep him alive but his wounds were too severe and their desperate battle to save him was over almost as soon as it begun. He was dead before he reached hospital.
Blowing along the pavement like the confetti he would never live to see were the papers detailing his wedding plans and a list of prospective venues for the romantic ceremony he and Adele had decided to hold in Tuscany. Earlier that day, he had spoken to the priest who was to conduct their marriage – and he had printed off the details sent to him.
As they ran off laughing, the first thing Carty and Brown did was to use their newly stolen mobiles to call their girlfriends and brag about their deadly deeds. They did not give another thought to the victim they knew would not survive his injuries – or, if they did, they simply did not care. Tom was just another statistic in an eight-month rampage of robbery and mayhem across London’s Tube network during which their self-styled ‘KG Tribe’ of thugs carried out as many as 150 attacks on terrified passengers.
Hearing the police sirens, and with a terrible sense of premonition, thirty-two-year-old Adele, who’d been engaged to Tom for just three months, ran from her flat. She did not have to go far. A few yards down the road, she begged the police officer manning the taped-off crime scene cordon to tell her what had happened.
Told a man had been murdered and fearing the worst, Adele dashed home, grabbed up a photo of Tom and breathlessly rushed back to show it to the police. They didn’t have to say anything. The stricken look on their faces confirmed all her fears and for the first time she noticed the pools of blood and discarded belongings – gloves, book, the precious papers Tom had tucked under his arm – that led from No. 56 to No. 90 Bathurst Gardens, clearly marking her beloved fiancé’s trail of death.
The following day, Carty, arrogantly believing he could elude capture for the senseless killing, used Tom’s stolen Oyster card to try to joyride the Underground for free. With scant and blatant disregard to the danger of imminent arrest, he also sold Tom’s phone for £30 to a shopkeeper in Bathurst Gardens, only yards from the scene of the previous night’s carnage, while teams of police officers continued to question residents and passers-by nearby. Brown, meanwhile, gleefully collected press cuttings about the murder, glorying in his instant notoriety as the popular young lawyer’s stone-cold killer.
Carty and Brown were equal-opportunity robbers. Using strength of numbers, they and their hyena-like pack of henchmen stole from white, black, Asian, middle-class and working class. They assaulted men and women, the elderly and teenagers. And as they spread their own brand of intimidation across wide swathes of London, they became emboldened to the point of stupidity.
As for Tom ap Rhys Pryce, his only crime was to stand up for himself, unlike many of their other victims. In doing so, he signed his own death warrant.
Detectives working the murder were quickly to turn their attention to Carty and Brown and, once they did, the clues came thick and fast. They traced a call to Carty’s girlfriend from Tom’s stolen mobile phone less than two hours after the murder.
CCTV film also captured Carty trying to use the lawyer’s Oyster card at Kensal Green station. When it was rejected, the young sociopath slammed his first down on the ticket counter, demanding it be made to work. His uncontrollable temper was to be his undoing. The photos of Carty’s outburst were released to the media, naming him as the prime suspect.
Arrests quickly followed. Just six days after the slaying, search warrants were issued and officers found Brown’s Nike trainers, stained on one toe with drops of Tom’s blood, stashed at the home Carty shared with his uncle. Meanwhile, the mobile phone stolen in the earlier Tube station attack at Kensal Green was found in Brown’s home. He hadn’t even bothered to sell or discard it, so confident was he that he would escape the police dragnet.
In November 2006, the two childhood friends turned homicidal thieves stood trial at the Old Bailey charged with Tom’s murder and conspiracy to rob.
Presenting the prosecution case, Richard Horwell QC blamed Tom’s murder on the defendants’ sheer greed. Despite having robbed another passenger a few minutes earlier as he waited for a train, ‘the defendants had not completed their business’, he said.
‘They saw Mr ap Rhys Pryce on his own and saw him as their next victim. It was two against one. They were armed and, of course, he was not. It did not matter to them that this man had worked hard for his position in life, that he had a promising career in the legal system ahead of him,’ the barrister continued. ‘It did not matter that he was planning his wedding. He was due to marry in September. All that was best in life was ahead of him but to them he was no more than a means to an end and they treated him accordingly. The motive was greed. He was being targeted as a victim for robbery.’
Tom was a proud man, said the prosecutor, the kind of man likely to stand up to thuggery and intimidation. ‘There is a real prospect that he did not submit to the demands of the robbers. He may well have taken them on and, if he did, the robbers rose to the challenge and they proceeded in their attack on him. And what value did the robbers place on his life? Their reward was an Oyster card, bank cards, a driving licence and a mobile phone. The robbers made off with the proceeds and left their victim collapsed in the street and bleeding to death.’
Horwell also outlined Carty and Brown’s involvement in the gang of robbers preying on the public transport network, using viciousness and intimidation as tools. On 23 December the previous year, the QC said, they stabbed two Tube passengers in the thigh. ‘That was the level of violence they were prepared to inflict and support in the selfish pursuit of other people’s property.’
Despite their long association and so-called gang loyalty, the killers – so close they called each other cousins – turned on each other in a desperate bid to save their own skins.
Carty, who claimed he had spent the night in a pub in Kilburn with relatives and friends, went so far as to fake a letter on prison notepaper from a fictional inmate while on remand. The semiliterate note claimed that Brown had confessed to the murder but felt ‘bad’ about handing Tom’s mobile phone to Carty, who ‘had nothing to do with the crime’.
Displaying his usual brand of arrogance and stupidity, he signed it G Rock – unaware that police knew that was his own street name.
In another attempt to intimidate Brown, he arranged to have him beaten up in youth offenders’ institution by three other inmates who covered the lens of a CCTV camera with a jumper as they set about smashing the ‘snitch’ in the face. Standing nearby and laughing was Carty.
Despite the now dire straits he found himself in, the smirk never left Donnel Carty’s face. During questioning after his arrest, he sniggered and smiled as detectives asked him about the events leading to Tom’s slaying. In court, his nauseating, swaggering performance continued. Under cross-examination, he mocked his accusers, answering questions in the guise of Vicky Pollard, the sluttish schoolgirl depicted in the TV comedy series Little Britain, with her household catchphrase ‘Yeah, but no, but…’
Brown waited until he got to court to turn on Carty. He insisted that it was his accomplice who’d delivered the fatal blows after they chased Tom ap Rhys Pryce. ‘Donnel Carty fly-kicked him in the back. He just dropped to the floor. He tried to get up and Donnel kicked him in the face.
‘They were fighting. He was trying to get away and Donnel tried to stop him. He was trying to fight with Donnel. I saw him bleeding and holding his chest. I was trying to pull back Donnel. I said, “Come on, let’s go now.” He shouted at the man, “What else have you got?” The man said: “Nothing. You have got everything.”’
Denying he was the knifeman, Brown insisted his only part in the killing was to scoop up Tom’s belongings from the ground during the fatal struggle.
Carty’s former girlfriend, Elisha Brown, admitted receiving a two-minute call after the murder but denied hearing Carty’s voice. Assuming it had come from her then-boyfriend, she repeatedly called the number back, finally getting through to Tom’s voicemail, which she described as ‘a well-spoken, English voice’.
The lies, the brutish arrogance, the sheer incompetence of their attempts to escape justice, came to nothing, and on 27 November the cowardly pair were convicted of murder. Their reaction to the guilty verdicts was to turn to each other in the dock, shake hands and embrace.
Mr Justice Aikens sentenced Carty and Brown the following day to minimum jail terms of twenty-one years and seventeen years respectively, but, before he did, Adele Eastman was allowed, through the prosecutor, to deliver her victim impact statement to the court.
Her chance to speak for the man she had planned to spend the rest of her life with was due to a recent decision taken by the Lord Chancellor’s office. Its move to trial the effectiveness of allowing victims’ relatives to voice their loss in the UK courts had caused much controversy. Undeterred, those in the highest legal office in the land were determined to permit those who had suffered so much to paint a picture of the person they had loved and lost. To bring callous killers face to face with the enormity of their crime. To give the court a brief glimpse of the real people behind the dry legal arguments.
Despite her grief, Adele Eastman grasped at the opportunity with both hands, and did not disappoint. She had had many hours alone in her flat to fashion a statement that was soaring both in its poetry and its power to move. No dramatist could have so poignantly captured the deep love between two people. Her only disappointment was that she could not read the statement herself from the witness box, as this was the preserve of the prosecutor or the judge. She wanted Carty and Brown to hear directly from her the ‘absolute devastation’ they had inflicted on her in taking the life of Tom ap Rhys Pryce.
This is her statement in full, a document that will, in the course of time, become a template for those voices that up until recently had never been allowed to be heard within the confines of a British courtroom.
I must start by saying that my sense of pain and horror at losing Tom, and in such a brutal way, is literally indescribable. I have found it almost impossible even to try to put it into words but hope that I manage to convey it at least to some extent through my statement.
Tom was determined from an early age to reach his full potential in life. He worked incredibly hard and made the most of every opportunity available to him. He gave his best in everything he did and he succeeded. Yet, despite his many achievements, he was the most humble person I have ever known.
In a message left on the tree next to where he died, a friend of ours wrote: ‘I remember sitting next to you at our friend’s wedding, standing to sing the first hymn, and looking in wonder at you as this pure, amazing voice came out. I had no idea, after so many years of knowing you, how beautifully you sang. You were often like that – quietly achieving all these amazing things.’
There was still so much more that Tom wanted to achieve, and to experience. I grieve for his loss of life, and for my loss of him.
Tom was my best friend, my soulmate. I adored him – I always will. I miss him more than I could ever describe: his beautiful heart, his brilliant mind, his big loving eyes, his gentle voice, his gleeful laugh and quirky sense of humour, his dancing, our chats, and the great fun that we used to have together. I miss us.
We had been together for four years when, last October, Tom asked me to marry him. It was the most beautiful moment of my life. I said yes immediately, through tears of joy. We were deeply in love and blissfully happy together. One of our friends wrote, in his letter of condolence to me: ‘The love between you was so infectious. It radiated outward and filled everyone around with warmth.’
Our plans for our wedding, which was due to be held in Italy in September this year, were going so well and, as with everything, Tom and I planned it together. We were so excited – the period of our engagement, just three short months, was the happiest time of our lives.
On the day Tom was killed, he had made contact with the priest who was due to conduct our wedding ceremony. He printed off the details he had received that afternoon, together with his wedding vows. They were found later that night strewn around him on the pavement as the paramedics battled to save his life.
We had felt that the best was yet to come: our wedding, children, and a long and happy marriage. But it was all only ever to be a dream. As I ran in and out of our home that night over a period of hours, frantic for news of Tom, as I received the news of his death, as I lay convulsing in shock, Carty and Brown were chatting to their girlfriends on Tom’s and Mr Ali’s mobile telephones.
The day after Tom’s murder, a friend kindly cancelled the appointment I had made to show my mother what would have been my wedding dress. We then had to wait for a couple of days before being able to identify Tom’s body. I could not do it. I could not bear to see Tom dead. I wanted our last memory of each other to be the same – the wonderful goodbye we had had on the Thursday morning at the train station.
In a matter of seconds, wedding plans and a future together had changed to funeral plans and a lifetime apart. I will never forget the complete confusion of Tom’s three-year-old niece on the day of his funeral: one day being swung through the air and chased around the garden by her beloved Uncle Thomas; the next, there were no more games, there was no more laughter – only tears. As she sat quietly by his graveside, her little hands gripping hold of the edge, we watched her Uncle Thomas being gently lowered in a ‘big box’ into the ground.
If there was anything left of my heart to break, it broke in that moment.
The pain is unlike anything I have ever experienced, and unlike anything I could have ever imagined. I feel as though Carty and Brown have ripped out my heart with their bare hands and torn it, very slowly, into pieces.
Witnessing the pain that our families and friends are also suffering only adds to my own. The waves of devastation caused by Carty’s and Brown’s greed and bravado roll on and on. The attack which they carried out on Tom was barbaric, they showed him no mercy, and have shown absolutely no remorse since. They have made the experience even more agonising by refusing to face up to and admit to their crime, and by dragging me, our families and friends through a full trial.
Greed fuelled Carty’s and Brown’s attack on Tom but it is obvious, particularly from the trademark injury which they inflicted on his left leg, that they were also trying to play the ‘big man’. I despair at their deeply misguided sense of logic, because it is not a man who attacks a defenceless person with a knife, or any other weapon, or hunts victims down in a pack: it is a complete coward, someone who lacks the confidence to take someone on an equal footing, and instead feels the need to put themselves at an unfair advantage.
There can be no sense of victory for Carty and Brown over Tom – he never stood a chance. He was alone, defenceless, and a stranger to violence.
I very much doubt that as children, any of the hopes and aspirations they held for their future included killing a man, and yet here they stand convicted of that heinous crime. What happened along the way for them to become so cruel and hateful towards others, and at such a young age?
What a huge waste of life – not just of Tom’s but also of their own – years in prison for an Oyster card and a mobile telephone. How, on any level, could it have been worth it for them?
Tom did his best to make it home that night, and he nearly made it. Although I was not there to help him, or to hold him in his final moments, as I desperately wish I had been, it comforts me to know that as he passed on from this world, he was absolutely safe and secure in the knowledge that it just would not be possible for me to love him any more than I do and will for ever.
There are no more tomorrows here for me and Tom, and all of our hopes and dreams have been brutally torn away. I just hope that there is something better for us on the other side.
In the meantime, just as hate and bitterness had no place in Tom’s life, neither will they in his memory. I am determined to ensure, along with many others, that as much good as possible comes out of this horrific tragedy, so that I can say to Tom when I see him again, as I believe I will, that was the most agonising experience of my life, but everything that you worked so hard to achieve, and everything of you that you left behind was cherished and built upon to touch the lives of others in the way you would have wanted – and it was all done out of our great love for you.
Lounging arrogantly in the dock, Carty, who was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan JUST DO IT, remained defiant to the end. Contrition was not a word in Carty’s limited street-rap vocabulary. His reaction to her anguish was to smirk, snigger and mockingly roll his eyes. Brown covered his mouth with his tracksuit collar.
Such was the power of Adele’s words that they echoed not only around the hushed courtroom but reverberated around the political establishment – a powerful advocate in the heated debate that raged about the legal and moral justification of allowing victim impact statements into UK courts and the potential influence they could bring to bear on sentencing.
The Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, vented his own anger at Carty and Brown and at what he perceived to be the growing culture of ‘disrespect, attitude and delinquency’ corroding the core values of society.
He hotly declared, ‘There are two reasons Donnel Carty and Delano Brown stabbed Mr ap Rhys Pryce. The first is they thought they could get away with it. They had good grounds for this belief. They were both prolific robbers – the police suspect they were responsible for as many as a hundred and fifty muggings in the previous seven months, sometimes as many as fifteen a day. Yet Brown had no criminal record at all, and the worst punishment Carty had ever received was a conditional discharge for assaulting a police officer.
‘But stabbing an innocent man while robbing him is more than a rational calculation about the chance of being caught. Murder represents an absolute moral failure. And here is the second reason why Carty and Brown stabbed Mr ap Rhys Pryce. They did it because they didn’t care, and because they didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.’
However more liberal legal commentators, far from being moved by Adele’s testimony to the Old Bailey, expressed anger that it had been allowed into court at all.
Because it was so well written, so articulate and – in their stunted opinion – so ‘middle-class’, it could have brought undue influence to bear on the judge before sentencing. Moreover, a less literate, working-class person, they mused, would be unable to have such an impact simply because they could not find the right words to express their feelings.
Marcel Berlins, a legal commentator on radio and in newspapers, used Adele Eastman’s statement to call for the abandonment of the fledgling victim impact scheme, arguing: ‘[Constitutional Affairs Minister] Harriet Harman, the scheme’s main architect, insists that allowing the victim’s loved ones to express their feelings in court is not meant to influence the sentence of the judge. That is nonsense. Judges are human. To suggest they will remain immune to a highly emotional account of grief felt by the survivor – and of the wonderfulness of the victim – is unrealistic and absurd.
‘The articulate, the educated and the attractive will be able to put up a quality performance; those with lesser advantages – and whose loved ones could not be painted in saintly colours – will be even more disadvantaged at the trial.
‘The victim’s advocate scheme is misguided and should be abandoned, or at least placed elsewhere in the trial process – after, never before, the sentence.’
Adele Eastman fitted this profile. Articulate, educated, attractive. She used these attributes with only one aim in mind. Not to influence the judge. Not to try to extend the length of the sentences imposed on her beloved fiancé’s killers. All she desired was to have a voice.
Much was made by the liberal press of the yawning class differences between assailants and victim, as though Tom’s background and wealth somehow conspired to explain the motives behind the attack.
Born in the well-heeled commuter town of Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, Tom, the descendant of a line of notable military commanders, moved aged three with his parents John and Estella to Somalia, where his civil engineer father was hired as part of a team to build a sugar factory.
Eighteen months later they returned home and in 1980 the family moved to the quiet, leafy Surrey enclave of Weybridge. Tom’s childhood was described as ‘idyllic’.
Carty and Brown could not have come from a further end of the social spectrum, both the embittered product of broken homes and born to black fathers who drifted in and out of their lives, their influence on the boys weakened by long absences from the family home.
Brown and his two sisters were brought up by their mother, Maureen Leo, a police station cook, after she separated from Wayne Brown, a Jamaican who fathered six children by five different women. At some stage Delano went to live with Wayne and his new wife Jacqueline Williamson and the three children from their marriage.
Wayne Brown had done well for himself. A builder and property developer, he secured a string of properties in London and Florida and upped sticks to live in a four-bed, £353,500 house on a lakeside resort adjoining Disney World in Orlando. Parked in the driveway of his home in the Sunshine State was a £48,000 Range Rover with the vanity plate WAB 1 – Wayne Anthony Brown.
The errant father swore he had done his best to keep in touch with his son and, when his marriage to Williamson broke down, had tried to persuade Delano over to the USA, but the boy’s passport had expired.
With three thousand miles between them, and his father a distant figure, Brown started to hang out on the streets with Carty, who also drifted between homes. Born to a seventeen-year-old mother who couldn’t cope, he moved in with his father Geoffrey but then left, having found him too strict in his upbringing.
He then went to live with his religious grandparents in Burrows Road, a few streets from Bathurst Gardens, Kensal Green, while also spending increasing amounts of time with an uncle, the self-styled Reverend Clive Carty, who had a string of criminal convictions, including one for sexual assault.
Sharing the grandparents’ home was his twenty-five-year-old cousin Lloywen Carty, a gunman later convicted of killing a man at a party following the Notting Hill carnival for ‘showing disrespect’ to members of his gang.
‘His dad wanted to keep him out of trouble – he didn’t want him roaming the streets. He didn’t want him selling drugs,’ said a family friend. ‘Donnel didn’t get the freedom that some other young people had. His dad was strict.’
What finally dispatched these two merciless predators on the route to robbery culminating in murder was, in the words of one policewoman, naked greed. Detective Inspector Teresa Defanis commented, ‘In complete contrast to a hardworking man like Tom, his murderers sought an easy life of preying on others.’
Violence escalated rapidly as Carty and Brown linked up with other gang members in ‘steaming attacks’, creating such fear that victims sincerely believed they would be killed.
Rampaging through Tube trains, they stabbed some passengers while pounding others with a brutal barrage of punches and kicks. A woman was threatened with gang rape if she didn’t hand over her valuables.
They even wrote a ‘good-mugging guide’ scrawled on a map of the Underground. One entry next to Notting Hill read ‘good eating but a bit hot’ – a reference to the heavy police presence – and against the Neasden area was the note ‘fight back’, indicating that targets were more likely to resist a robbery attempt.
The more successful they were, the bolder – and more vicious – they got.
Their victims were robbed of iPods, wallets and phones, which was, according to Danny Robinson QC, the prosecutor in the trial that finally brought the KG Tribe to justice, the ephemera of everyday life ‘that you might think was not worth the level of violence proffered to the passengers’.
In one of the gang’s more violent outings, nineteen-year-old Aaron Dennis, a follower of Carty and Brown, slashed a man across the face and stabbed him in the neck. On another occasion, two travellers were threatened with a gun and knives.
Two weeks before Tom was slain, Carty and Brown set out on another raid on the Tube system. A victim said he was mugged after the gang first attacked the only other man in the carriage and emptied his pockets.
‘I had no intention of giving them anything,’ he recalled. ‘I was pushing them away. I saw one of them take a knife out and open it. He plunged the knife into my left thigh. I was very frightened because a lot of blood was flowing from my leg. I was robbed of fifty pounds.’
The sheer scale of the gang’s criminal mayhem led British Transport Police and Scotland Yard to set up dedicated teams to track them down. It was only a matter of time before the extreme violence being meted out led to murder, they surmised. Their prediction turned out to be tragically correct.
Ironically, forgiveness for the killers was to come from an unexpected source. Tom’s sixty-three-year-old parents, John and Estella, emerging from the trial in which they’d heard every detail of their son’s terrible death, surprised onlookers by saying they felt sorry for Carty and Brown. Piano teacher Estella insisted she did not seek revenge. Instead, she mused, ‘These children are not intrinsically evil. If they had been educated properly – given the right moral training – they would not have done this. I don’t know their circumstances but no doubt there was some reason for what they did. I feel very sorry for them.
‘Tom was the kind of son that any mother would want to have. The gentlest of people who would never willingly hurt anyone. The impact of this event has been to make me think more about how crime can be prevented. So what of the young men who appear to hold life so cheaply? I wonder if they have any understanding of how precious that life was to all Tom’s family and friends and, of course, to his fiancée Adele.
‘I have no wish for revenge. I hope their lives can be reformed, and that they can learn to understand that greed, robbery and, worst of all, murder, which is a truly terrible crime, cannot go unpunished, and that they have to take responsibility for their own actions.’
Tom’s elder brother, Mike, was in no such mood to forgive the killers. ‘My role was to protect my brother. The fact that I was not there when he needed me most, when he was attacked and murdered by two youths in his own street, is very hard to bear.
‘It could be at the point that he stopped defending himself he was even more vulnerable, and that was possibly when they stabbed him twice more even after he’d handed over his goods. If this is the case, it’s more of an execution than a murder. I do not forgive them.’
In a heartfelt appeal for an end to the blade culture flourishing within gangs, John ap Rhys Pryce pointed out that there was a knifepoint robbery every twenty-four minutes. ‘If the youths who murdered Tom had not been carrying knives, he would still be alive today.
‘It takes no skill to stab. It is not difficult to kill someone with a sharp knife. Our soft, unprotected bodies are extremely vulnerable to being stabbed with a short piece of pointed steel. More importantly, young men can carry with little fear of punishment. The police procedure for “stop and search” is bogged down in bureaucracy and convictions are difficult to obtain.’
Yet he, too, found it in his heart to understand how young lives can become so twisted with hate they were able to kill his beloved son with as much thought as they would give to squashing an insect.
‘Often the perpetrators of violent crime will be from a family where there has been no authority. Frequently the father has disappeared or is in prison himself and there has been little attempt at moral training. If a child has never been given love and is incapable of empathy, he will not feel the natural restraint we would feel towards harming a fellow human being.’
John added, ‘We have to break through the community barriers of rich and poor, young and old, black and white, them and us.’
He and Estella were to pursue this theme of forgiveness by launching the Tom ap Rhys Memorial Trust, which aims to raise over £1 million to help the poorest young people get a decent education and to tackle the root causes of gang culture and violent crime – in the hope that out of the black heart of evil would come the seeds of good.