SYNOPSIS
To the best of our knowledge, the visit
by the DoT inspectors that afternoon was in relation to a complaint about the
issuing of a re-test certificate.
Superintendent Rod Murray later said in a TV report that it appeared to
be a murder for a paltry £6.50.
However by the time the case came to trial, Peter Openshaw
QC for the prosecution said that this was a “motiveless crime”.
Walter Bourke, Thomas’s brother,
held the head lease of the premises of Chestergate Motors – the scene of
the crime. Walter sub-let the garage to David Watson. Thomas had, as was agreed by the
prosecution, no link to the garage.
However in his summing up, the presiding judge, Mr Justice Sachs, said
“you may wonder why he did not go
to see the powers that be”.
This was completely prejudicial to the jury. Sachs had no right to say this when a
fact had been agreed. It was one of
many factual errors and misleading statements in his summing up.
Watson rarely attended the premises and
employed David Mitchell to manage the garage. Mitchell employed his trusted friend
Howard Ridgeway as a mechanic and he also employed Darren Fox who was related
to him.
Mitchell, with Watson’s
permission, tended to use the name Watson when speaking to people on garage
matters. By doing this Mitchell was
falsely trying to give the impression that Watson worked at the garage. In fact
Watson was rarely at Chestergate and, like most of
Mitchell’s cronies, was a criminal linked to the Manchester underworld of
guns, racketeering and drugs.
Mitchell gave evidence in court that he had used Watson’s name in
his dealings with the Department of Transport and, in particular, when speaking
to Mr Singleton. He also
fraudulently signed cheques in Watson’s name.
Mitchell
had many connections in the criminal underworld and both he and Watson used the
garage as a front for criminal enterprises such as credit card and cheque
fraud. Crimes for
which neither man has ever been charged.
Mitchell
had a personal grudge against Mr Singleton, one of the murdered DoT Inspectors.
This dated back to Mr Singleton’s refusal to authorise a garage that
Mitchell owned as an MOT centre.
His refusal resulted in financial difficulties for Mitchell.
On the morning of 22nd
November 1993, Mr Singleton telephoned Chestergate Autos and spoke to Mitchell,
who pretended to be Watson. Mr
Singleton told him that he would be visiting the garage later that afternoon. The conspiracy to murder Alan
Singleton at Chestergate Motors begins and ends with Mitchell. He took his call and he was present at
his death.
A
few hours later, between 3.30pm and 3.40pm, Mr Alan Singleton and his
colleague, Mr Simon Bruno, were shot dead in the garage. Almost certainly, Simon Bruno was
murdered simply because he had accompanied Alan Singleton.
The police questioned Mitchell and Ridgeway later that night but their clothes were not seized at this time. Neither man was arrested and both were allowed to go home. At trial Senior Investigating Officer, Superintendent Rod Murray, told the court that he did not take their clothes for forensic analysis as in his 25 years experience he has never known a murderer stay at the scene. This is patently untrue.
A passing photographer,arrived on the scene within minutes of the
murders. He took contemporaneous
photographs of Mitchell and Ridgeway sitting on the steps outside the garage in
the immediate aftermath. When
Mitchell and Ridgeway’s clothes were eventually seized two days later on
24th November 1993, they were not
the clothes Mitchell and Ridgeway had on at the time of the murders. This only became clear several years
after the trial when Bob Duffield, an investigator for Channel 4’s Trial
and Error programme, went to the Forensic Science Laboratory to examine
official records. For further
details click on the link clothing
Howard Ridgeway did two things on the night of the murders :- 1: He was desperate to
dispose of a rifle that he was keeping for Mitchell. He admitted taking this
firearm to a local tip when giving evidence during Thomas’s trial in
December 1994. He has never
subsequently been charged with any firearm offence. 2: He then went to the house of Bob McGahey – a childhood friend and another key witness
given immunity by the police in return for testifying against Thomas. Ridgeway was anxious to know if McGahey had wiped his fingerprints from the alleged getaway
car – a red Ford Sierra previously in McGahey’s
possession. To this day it is not
known how Ridgeway knew that McGahey had the car or
why he wanted to ensure that his fingerprints were removed. Despite the above, the presiding judge,
Mr Justice Sachs, passed Ridgeway off in his summing up as an
“independent witness”.
This is
a long way off the mark – Ridgeway admitted lying to police, and was a
key part of the Mitchell-McGahey axis which set out
falsely to incriminate Thomas. It
is unlikely that Sachs would have used this term had he not been party to a secret
meeting with prosecuting counsel towards the end of the trial. He did not use the term throughout the
trial. Bob McGahey,
it transpired, was keeping a bag of guns owned by Mitchell. During the trial McGahey
said that these belonged to Thomas.
However Ridgeway admitted in open court that the guns had, in fact, been
supplied to Mitchell by a man known as “Big Jimmy”. This was accepted to be the
truth. Despite the fact that DS
Thompson – a key member of the Stockport murder squad - knew the real identity
of ‘Big Jimmy’ the gun supplier, his identity and connection to
Mitchell has never been disclosed to the defence. Even though Sachs passed Ridgeway off
as an independent witness, he gave a strong direction as to the characters of
Mitchell and McGahey and went so far as to call the
pair accomplices to the murders. In spite of this, David Mitchell
subsequently received in excess of £17,000 in criminal injuries
compensation. Howard Ridgeway
applied for and received a reward, which was somewhere in the region of
£30,000, within days of the trial’s conclusion. Mitchell also applied for the reward but
his application was rejected. McGahey was given Crown Immunity. Mitchell’s bag of guns contained
what was believed to be the murder weapon, four balaclavas, boxes of ammunition
and a host of other firearms. It
was McGahey who hid this bag of guns following the
murder and it was McGahey who, having struck a deal
with the police, led to its recovery. There was nothing in this bag
forensically to connect Thomas Bourke to the weapons, ammunition or
clothing. A fingerprint belonging
to David Mitchell was found on a box of ammunition recovered from the bag of
guns. The balaclavas contained hair
and saliva but there was absolutely no DNA match to Thomas Bourke. To the best of our knowledge Thomas was
the only suspect ever DNA tested. Two years ago Greater Manchester Police
destroyed these balaclavas, along with other evidence. They did this in the full
knowledge that Thomas’s leave to appeal aganist conviction had been lodged.
It was
also brought to our attention in 2005 that a box of
significant papers relating to the original trial in 1994 have gone
missing from Manchester Crown Court.
All attempts by the defence team have failed to locate this box. The morning after the murders, Tuesday
23rd November 1993, David Mitchell and Bob McGahey
met up in Stockport to make sure that their stories matched, before being
re-interviewed by the police. They
calculated that if all else failed, putting Thomas in the frame would take the heat
off them. Mitchell was then taken to the police
station for further questioning. On
the afternoon of Wednesday 24th November 1993, Mitchell did a deal
off-tape On Wednesday 24th November
1993, the police arrived at Walter and Thomas’s house in Stockport, where
DI Kenny Caldwell asked both brothers to
attend the police station as witnesses. They
voluntarily attended but at around 4.30pm they were both arrested on suspicion
of murder due to the later statements that Mitchell and Ridgeway had made. On Thursday 25th November
1993, Walter and Thomas were taken to Stockport Magistrates Court for a warrant
of further detention, as there was not enough evidence to charge them. Investigating Officer DI Kenny Caldwell said that Thomas had murdered the two
inspectors with Walter as the getaway driver – part of the fiction
cobbled together by Mitchell and Ridgeway the previous day. It should be noted
here that Caldwell was subsequently investigated for corrupt practise on
another unconnected case. He later
resigned and goes down in GMP history as one of the most corrupt officers ever
to have served in the Force. Whilst they were at the Magistrates
Court, two other officers under DI Kenny Caldwell’s
command, DC Gary Smith and DS Steve Horrocks, planted
a key on Thomas’s key-ring to create an evidential link between him and
the recovered bag of guns. See key plant for an
explanation of this.
On the afternoon of Friday 26th
November 1993, Thomas was charged with double murder.
By
this time Walter had given an aibi statement and this
is when the case against the brothers started to falter. Much to the police’s chagrin, the
notion that Walter had been the ‘getaway driver’ very quickly
disintegrated because a truly independent witness gave him a rock solid
alibi. It should have been as clear
as day that Mitchell and Ridgeway were lying to save their own skin. Yet the
police had already decided that Thomas was their man and had little choice but
to stick with their motley crew of self-serving liars. The defence team has never actually seen
the statements allegedly made by Ridgeway and Mitchell. However, once it was accepted that
Walter’s alibi was irrefutable the charges against him, at least, had to be
dropped.
Walter was charged with allegedly knowing that Thomas had committed an offence but not reporting it. We later found out that this charge does not apparently exist.
On Saturday 27th November
1993, Thomas and Walter’s sister Jo was contacted by DS Steve Horrocks who asked if she wanted to see her brothers later
that day and told her that she could bring them a change of clothing and a
toothbrush, etc.
Jo and her daughter Andrea visited the
brothers in the interview room at Stockport police station. They were not allowed to hand in the
clothing and toiletry items.
The conversations with the family and
both Walter and Thomas were covertly taped by the police (see covert taping). This was, of course, the real
intention behind DS Horrocks’ invitation to the
family to attend the station. It
later transpired that Walter’s legal team was also covertly taped when
the CPS inadvertently sent a copy of the transcript to the defence. This covert taping took place in the
same cell where Thomas had just met with his solicitor. Among the items destroyed by GMP after
the appeal was lodged were four unmarked cassette tapes.
On Monday 29th November
1993, Walter and Thomas were sent to HMP Manchester (Strangeways).
When Thomas and Walter were allowed
separately to talk to their family, they both reassured them and said that
there was nothing to worry about.
They said that they would be cleared as soon as the results came through
of the forensic tests on the recovered guns, balaclavas, fingerprints, clothing
and the car used in the incident.
When the forensic test results came
back, none of the DNA or fingerprint evidence found matched Thomas or
Walter. The charge against Walter
was dropped in early February 1994 and the family expected that the charges against
Thomas would also be dropped.
To our cost, our faith in the system
was shattered later that year on 7th December 1994 when Thomas was
convicted of both murders.