The lifeless body of Stephen Reynolds was found at 30 Victoria Buildings, lying in a pool of blood. He had been shot through the head. There were no witnesses to the event and he would have remained undiscovered for much longer had the anonymous call not been made to the emergency services.
The post-mortem examination revealed that he had been drinking and that he had been killed by a single bullet as he lay in bed.
The investigation into his murder was being led by the local detective chief inspector at Bethnal Green Police Station. Most murders at the time were transferred to the Major Investigation Team at Division Headquarters, but such was their workload that they could not take this case, although it clearly fell into their category: difficult to solve cases. The DCI had only a small team drawn from the CID office. Their enquiries revealed that Stephen had a criminal record. Mainly petty crimes in his youth but now in his early twenties he had graduated to armed robbery. He had a conviction for driving a getaway car. He was a wheelman.
Keith Verrals received the call at the Flying Squad office. The DCI wanted to know if we had anything on Reynolds or had any interest in him. We hadn’t, but the circumstances interested Keith and so he asked me to go with him to the incident room at Bethnal Green to have a look at the case.
Keith was a thorough and meticulous detective. A detective constable then, tall and generally a quiet man, he didn’t fit the image of flamboyant, confident lads that typified many of his Flying Squad peers, but he towered above many in his ability, commitment, hard work and success.
Whenever a call came in to a robbery in progress somewhere in north-east London he would be prepared to respond. He and his sergeant, Steve Waller, were a cool but committed team. Getting involved was their lifeblood. No only for solving the immediate crime but gathering intelligence and a database of knowledge about the ever-changing profile of the robberies on our patch and who was committing them.
Keith and I arrived at Bethnal Green, an old Victorian-built police station in London’s East End. The building had long outlived its usefulness with its winding corridors and tiny staircases which would be worthy of a theme park maze. Trudging around the building with bags and armfuls of exhibits was a nightmare.
The CID office was a new addition to the building, a largescale refurbished loft conversion. Quite airy, once you had found your way all the way to the top of the building.
We sat in on a briefing. There were no more than six or seven of us, including Keith and me. I was a little appalled at the size of the investigation team, given the amount of work needed to solve the crime.
The circumstances of the crime were a little unusual. Stephen was a single man, with a criminal history, living alone, well known in local pubs, in fact very well known. He liked a drink. Unemployed, and on state benefit, his only interests were drinking and cars. His pride and joy was a slightly old but special edition Ford. It was a lad’s car. His flat was on the second floor of a block of flats built nearly a hundred years before, the front door opening on to the exposed walkway.
We listened to what was known about the case. There was no apparent motive but, of course, there was that strange call to the emergency services alerting them to the scene. Who was the caller? Were they the last person to see him alive? Were they his killer? The call transcript was short, the voice was male. The original phone call was made from a pay phone a few miles away.
Keith had an intuition about this guy and so we decided to have a closer look. I knew with Keith we were not wasting our time. If you don’t look you don’t find. We decided to visit the scene and then we would look through all the items recovered during the investigations. First of all we reviewed the scene photographs so that we could relate the scene as it was now, some days later, to the day his body was found.
There had been no forced entry, so either the front door was open, or his killer had been let in by Stephen or had a key. The flat was relatively tidy, as tidy as you could expect a flat occupied by single man living in such circumstances to be. There was no sign of any struggle.
Stephen’s Ford was parked outside the block of flats where he lived. Locked and secure.
Looking through the exhibits register and inspecting the sealed items through their bags revealed a few interesting thoughts.
Stephen’s front door key was amongst the items recovered from the scene, but no key to his car. Checks revealed that no Ford car key was found. Those who knew him had already told investigators that his car was his prized possession and he wouldn’t let anyone else drive it. What had been found in his flat was a key to another car. A key to a Volkswagen, and the key was very new. There was no car in the immediate vicinity of the scene which the key fitted and none of his friends or neighbours had seen him with a VW.
This made my and Keith’s ears immediately prick up. We had an interest in VW cars. For the past two months we had seen a series of armed robberies on Post Office security vans. In fact there were two series, which we had thought were one, until a clear pattern emerged which allowed us to separate them.
Both series were attacks by masked men armed with an assortment of handguns and shotguns on Post Office security vans as they delivered or picked up cash at small Post Offices dotted around the East End.
The first team used Ford Sierra cars; all stolen and displaying false number plates so as not to appear stolen. It was only as the series developed that I realised that the plates to each successive recovered car had been reattached with identical-looking screws. The original plastic screws had been discarded in favour of metal screws that I recovered on each car. I had examined most, if not all, of the stolen cars over the past weeks and there was no doubt in my mind that they were linked by this trait of this team.
The second team, also targeting Post Office vans at the same time and in the same geographic area, used VW cars. They also false-plated their getaway cars to hide their true identity. This time the new number plates were each attached with three strips of double-sided rubber tape. Once again, I had examined most or all of the cars at length and a distinct pattern had emerged.
It was only when the two series were compared side by side that we could clearly differentiate between the two teams. The determining factors were the cars they used, Ford Sierra or VW Golf, and how they reattached the false plates, metal screws or tape.
So the knowledge that Stephen was a suspected wheelman and finding a VW key with no apparent accompanying car really caught our attention.
What made it more interesting still was that there had been two armed robberies on Post Office security vans in the week preceding Stephen’s death. The last was only a few days before his body was found.
Keith was a little unsure what to do with the VW key and where it could take us. I had some hope that there was intelligence locked literally in the key’s manufacture. I was struck by how new and unused it looked. We made enquiries at a local VW car dealer and found that the key was a new sort fitted to that year’s models. Things moved quickly from there on. A call to VW revealed that there were a thousand or so combinations for each key. The new models were only a few months old. So we managed to get a full list of every car which had that key number fitted. It was a pretty long list. Finally, Keith ran the index numbers of each vehicle through the police computer. We hit the jackpot. One and only one VW with that key number was reported as stolen. It had not been recovered and there was every likelihood that it was sitting somewhere bearing the false plates of another vehicle, hiding its true identity.
The Vehicle Identification Number was circulated as this was the best way to identify a vehicle’s true identity. An extensive search failed to find the car, but Keith and I were ready once it was found to see if it bore false plates, attached by rubber tape and if the key fitted.
The robbery series on Post Office security vans using VW getaway cars stopped with Stephen’s death. Our information helped the murder squad detectives. It appeared that Stephen had been shot by the leader of the gang when he failed to meet them early one morning for another planned robbery. The leader went to Stephen’s flat; finding him drunk and unable to drive, his anger exploded and he coolly shot Stephen. It was the killer who had called the police. Although he planned to use the VW car, he took the wrong key, he took the key to Stephen’s own car.
It was a year later that I received a call that the VW had been found. I went to examine it with a colleague, Keith couldn’t come but he waited on the end of the phone to hear the outcome.
Sure enough the plates were false and attached with strips of double-sided tape. And the key sweetly opened the door and started the engine.
We also managed to solve the other robbery series involving the Ford Sierra cars. Once the robbers had been identified and arrested, a search of one of their premises revealed, amongst other important items such as guns, a box of screws matching those I had found on each of the previously examined getaway cars. The scientist at the lab could only comment that they were of the same size and type, and were from the same manufacturer. I gave evidence at the trial regarding the somewhat unusual manner in which the original plates and plastic screws had been replaced by false plates and that visually indistinguishable metal screws were found on each Ford Sierra in the series of robberies on Post Office security vans. Although not specific or necessarily strong enough evidence to link the suspect to the crime, it had some evidential value when considered with other evidence. More importantly, it linked the scenes together by method and thereby strengthened the case.