Essex Boys, The New Generation (11 page)

If a man cradling a shotgun wasn’t enough to alert Alvin that the commission of a crime was in progress, Boshell is said to have informed him that the car they were in was, in fact, stolen. Alvin claimed that if he had known it was a stolen vehicle, he would never have got into it. Considering that the driver didn’t have a licence and the passenger was cradling a shotgun, I think that the car being stolen would have been the least of Alvin’s worries.

Realising what a totally ridiculous story this was, Alvin changed his mind and said in his second account that after leaving the pub he got into Percival’s car and Boshell followed behind in a stolen Vauxhall Belmont. Alvin did not mention seeing a gun at this stage. Knowing that he would have to reintroduce the weapon into his account, he related that Percival had parked his car approximately ten streets away from the Tretton home and then he and Alvin had joined Boshell in the stolen vehicle. They had then driven to a place called Bournemouth Park Road and Percival had got out. Alvin says he heard a car door or car boot slam shut and then Percival returned carrying a shotgun and a rucksack.

When asked how he could have forgotten such important details in his first statement, Alvin replied, ‘All I can say is that I got it wrong because of the state I was in that night. I also think it was because it wasn’t a job that had been planned with me. I wasn’t aware of the routes or what was going on that night; it wasn’t my bit of work.’

Regardless of the circumstances, I find it hard to believe that a person wouldn’t recall if they had got into a stolen car with a man cradling a shotgun or a car that his friend owned. This ‘bit of work’ turned out to be, according to Alvin, Percival’s plan to take revenge on the Tretton brothers.

After travelling to the vicinity of the Trettons’ home in Percival’s car and then getting into a stolen car, Alvin claimed that Boshell and Percival were supposed to drop him off at his home.

‘I knew they were up to something that night,’ Alvin said, doing his best to sound naive. ‘I didn’t know they were going to actually shoot someone. I knew that Percival was going around to the Trettons’ house; I just thought that he would rob them of their drugs and money. Percival and Boshell were just talking amongst themselves on the way; their conversation about the job didn’t really involve me. It was common knowledge that Percival was going to knobble Tretton; Boshell had told me that previously.

‘On the way to my house, Boshell screeched to a halt at a junction just as a police car was passing. We thought they would turn around, as the front of the car that we were in had entered the junction. Because Percival had the shotgun with him, Boshell sped across the road and we all jumped out of the car and ran in different directions,’ Alvin said.

Fifteen minutes after supposedly fleeing from the police, Percival is said to have arrived at Alvin’s home. According to Alvin, Percival told him that the police car had turned around and driven past the stolen Vauxhall, but it had not stopped. Percival asked Alvin if Boshell was with him, but Alvin told him that he had not seen him and had no idea where he had gone. Percival is then said to have asked Alvin to show him where Boshell lived, as he had never been to his home.

‘We drove to Boshell’s flat in the stolen car. When we knocked the door, Boshell didn’t answer, but we could see that his television was on upstairs. I climbed into his flat through an open window and found him in the kitchen with his foot immersed in a bucket of cold water. I asked him what he was doing and he said that he had twisted his ankle as he was running away from the stolen car.

‘I went downstairs and let Percival in. He said that he still wanted to do the job, but Boshell refused to assist him, saying that he could barely walk. Percival went on and on about it for 20 or 30 minutes, saying that Boshell was a messer. Eventually Percival asked if I would drive, and I agreed just to shut him up. We left Boshell behind and drove back to the road where we had abandoned the stolen car earlier. Percival got out of the vehicle when we arrived and disappeared into the nearby undergrowth.

‘A short while later he re-emerged, clutching a shotgun, then we drove to a park on the opposite side of which was Locksley Close, where the Trettons lived. Percival said that all I had to do was wait and when he had done what he had to do he wanted me to drive him to Pamela Walsh’s house in Shoeburyness. I didn’t ask him why he wanted to go to Pamela’s house. I just assumed that it was an arrangement he had made with her earlier.

‘Percival got out of the car and disappeared into the darkness for what seemed like an age; I fell asleep waiting for him. I can remember waking up, getting out of the car and walking into the park to see what, if anything, was happening. I stopped to have a piss and I saw Percival walking across the park towards me. He hadn’t done anything; he said that he was concerned about the number of people in the house.

‘We hung about for approximately 20 minutes and then we walked towards the Trettons’ home. The Tretton brothers were attending a party at a neighbour’s house, and so we walked backwards and forwards from the park to their location, waiting for people to leave. Percival kept walking around to the rear of the property to see if he could see who was in the lounge. I knew the owner of the house where the party was being held and I knew that there were children in there. I mentioned this to Percival and he said that it was OK because it was very late at night and they would be in bed.

‘I asked him to check, but he said that he was positive there were no children in the lounge. He seemed like he was ready to do whatever he was going to do, so I went back to the car. I can’t remember if I drifted off to sleep again, but I was in the vehicle for a while. When I walked back across the park to see what Percival was up to, it was getting light. I think the time was around 4 a.m. Percival was standing motionless outside the premises where the Trettons were and so I asked him what he was doing. He said that he was waiting for the people to leave.

‘Getting agitated, he began walking from the front of the house to the back, trying to see through the windows to establish who was where. As he did this, he put the shotgun down by a white picket fence. Somebody must have walked into the kitchen because the light came on. The open kitchen door amplified the sound of music and muffled the voices that were coming from the lounge inside the house. I got the impression that it was pretty lively inside. It was at this point that I told Percival that a woman named Carla Evans lived in the house with her kids. He repeated that it wasn’t a problem; the kids wouldn’t be in any danger because they would be in bed. I told him that it was late, we had been waiting ages, nothing was happening and so I was going home. Percival replied, “No, just wait. Just wait, I am going to do it, I am going to do it.”

‘Five minutes later, he had picked up the shotgun, pulled his balaclava down over his face and run up and kicked the front door open.’

6

  AIN’T NOTHING BUT A HOUSE PARTY  

Raymond Tretton had spent a particularly
gruelling day loading and unloading furniture for a household removal company in South Woodham Ferrers, a small new town on the outskirts of Basildon. After finishing work at approximately 6.45 p.m., he visited Jennings, the bookmaker’s, in East Street, Southend, where he checked the performance of several racehorses he had backed earlier that day. Finding that he had lost all his wagers, he reasoned it wasn’t going to be his lucky day and headed home.

After getting washed and changed, Raymond called on his neighbour Carla Evans. He had no particular reason for going to Carla’s – he often visited her home to share a drink and they would talk about their day. At 9.30, Raymond, his sister Christine Tretton, their nephews Stuart and Steven Tretton, a lady named Jenny Dickinson and a friend with the unfortunate nickname ‘Vinyl’ all went to a local pub called the White Horse. The group spent a quiet but enjoyable evening together before leaving at closing time. As they left the pub, the group were all fairly drunk and acting boisterously. Christine was being particularly loud and this resulted in her having an argument with most, if not all, of the people in her company. Not wishing to get involved in any sort of unpleasantness, Steven and Vinyl bid everyone goodnight and headed home.

The remainder of the group returned to Carla’s house. There, they turned on the TV to watch
The Jerry Springer Show
and continued their drinking session with cans of beer. Renowned for his unruly guests, Springer has yet to host anyone as violent as the men who were planning a surprise appearance at Carla’s house that night.

While most of the children had retired to bed, there remained a five year old asleep on the sofa and an infant asleep in a baby bouncer. Stuart Tretton was engrossed in a card game that he was playing on a computer and Raymond sat talking to his sister Christine and friend Jenny. After a few hours, Raymond looked out of the window and noticed that it had begun to get light. He could hear birds chirping and whistling in the garden as they prepared to greet the new day.

At approximately 4 a.m., the revellers and the birds’ dawn chorus were disrupted by an almighty bang that came from the vicinity of the front door. Raymond jumped to his feet and shouted,
‘What the fuck was that?’
Before anybody could answer, the lounge door was flung open and two men wearing balaclavas and brandishing shotguns stood before the room full of terrified people. Raymond looked at the gunman nearest to him and, through holes that had been cut in the balaclava, he could see that he was staring straight back at him. The sound of the shotgun’s mechanism clicking struck terror in Raymond’s heart, but the only words that he could mutter were
‘Oh, shit.’
The blast that followed threw Raymond across the room and into a wall. His left hand, which he had raised in an attempt to protect his face, was shredded and he suffered wounds to his face, chest and arm.

Between two and five further shots rang out in quick succession, but Raymond had no idea if anybody else had been hit. He was by now in a state of blind panic and was running out of the patio doors into the garden.

Stuart Tretton, who had been sitting in an armchair by the door when the gunmen burst in, had also leapt to his feet. Initially, he thought that the man in the doorway was a friend of his playing some sort of sick joke. When the barrel of the shotgun was aimed at him, Stuart realised that the situation he was facing was very real. As he raised his hands in a vain attempt to shield his face, the gunman opened fire.

Outside in the garden, Raymond attempted to grip the garden fence in order to climb over it and escape, but as he did so he realised that he had lost the ring and middle fingers of his left hand. In extreme pain, bleeding profusely and petrified, he managed to drag himself over the fence and two further fences before coming to rest on the roof of his sister’s shed. After catching his breath, he rolled off the roof and lay in his sister’s garden, wondering what to do next.

He could hear screams of terror and shouts for help coming from Carla’s house, so, rather bravely, Raymond returned to see if he could assist.

Stuart had followed his uncle Raymond out of the patio doors and into the garden, where he climbed over a fence to reach his mother’s home. He didn’t bother knocking on the door; he kicked it repeatedly in a panic-filled frenzy until it eventually flew open.

Jenny Dickinson had looked at the others in disbelief when she heard the crash that announced the arrival of the gunmen. Witnessing the horror unfold, Jenny had seen Raymond being shot first and then Stuart. Sitting on the settee screaming in sheer terror, she watched in disbelief as one of the balaclava-clad gunmen turned and pointed the gun towards Christine, who was sitting alongside her. In an act of heroism, Jenny grabbed hold of her friend’s left shoulder and pulled Christine’s head towards her. A split second later came a deafening explosion. Jenny leapt to her feet and fled through the patio doors. As she did so, she felt excruciating pain and realised that the shot aimed at Christine had struck her as she had moved to protect her friend. Instinctively, she ran to her home, where her ex-partner was babysitting their children. When she arrived, she saw that blood was pouring from her left hand and her middle finger was hanging off. Jenny’s daughter tried to calm her and administered first aid while they waited for the emergency services to arrive.

Back at Carla’s house, Christine had stopped shaking and was sitting up on the settee. She saw that blood was splashed all around the room. A spray of shotgun pellets arched across the lounge wall, and the top of the sofa, where her friends had been sitting, was missing. Getting to her feet, she ran to her sister Lydia’s home to raise the alarm.

Christine was unable to recall how she had managed to enter the house, but she next remembers running into her sister’s bedroom and shouting, ‘We’ve been shot, we’ve been shot!’ Christine, who had been hit in the shoulder, was totally hysterical and pleaded with Lydia to press the panic button that had been installed at her home by the police following the threats the family had received after Malcolm’s death. Lydia could see that her sister’s sweatshirt was heavily bloodstained and so she jumped out of bed to assist her.

‘Calm down, calm down,’ Lydia kept saying, but Christine continued to scream hysterically.

Stuart had entered the bedroom by this time and he began shouting, ‘Help me, Mum, help me. I am going to die.’ Lydia could see that her son’s hand was hanging off and he was losing a lot of blood. He had shotgun wounds to his chest, which she later learned had punctured his lung.

Lydia ran downstairs and dialled 999. Stuart was in extreme shock and throughout the call he was heard shouting for help. When Lydia had finished talking to the police, she went to comfort him but, as she did so, Raymond staggered into the hallway and began calling out, ‘Look what they have done to me!’ Holding up what remained of his left hand, Raymond kept repeating, ‘Look what they have done to me!’ Drenched in blood, his face totally expressionless, Raymond suddenly fell silent, turned and walked away.

Wailing sirens and blue flashing lights signalled the arrival of the emergency services. The police cordoned off Locksley Close but exercised caution by not approaching the house where the shootings had taken place. When the ambulances had arrived, they too kept away from the crime scene and so the wounded were forced to walk out of the Close to get assistance.

Realising the nature of the victims’ injuries, a police officer asked a friend of the Trettons named Russell Ward if he would return to the house to see if he could find any of the victims’ hands or fingers.

Fifteen minutes before Russell Ward had been assigned the grisly task of looking for human body parts, Damon Alvin says that he had watched Percival launch himself at Carla Evans’ front door.

‘As the door was kicked open, I can remember everything going dead quiet, as though the music had been turned off. Nobody had actually switched the stereo off in the house, it just seemed as though they had. I don’t know if it was because my adrenalin was running.

‘Seconds later I remember hearing an almighty bang, a fucking loud bang. That was followed by two more loud bangs. It was like bang, bang, bang, and I am on my toes, running towards the car. I was still close enough to hear people shouting really loud and screaming in the house. When I did look back, Percival was running across the park towards me. We got into the car and I drove. Percival had the shotgun with him in the front seat. He was trying to unblock it and said we would need it in case we got pulled. He didn’t say that he was going to shoot the police if they pulled us over, but I knew that was what he was implying.

‘I told him to put it down because it was clearly visible and I was trying to drive. He told me that he had shot the Tretton brothers. I asked him what had happened and he just said that he had shot everybody. Percival said that he just stood at the lounge door and opened fire; the first person he shot hit the back wall. When he tried to shoot one of them in the chest, they had raised their hand to stop him and he had found this really amusing. One of the people that he had shot on the settee had pulled a girl on top of himself for protection.

‘Percival told me that he had shot this particular person in the face. I can remember saying to him, “I thought you were going to do them in the legs?” Percival replied, “Fuck them.” He seemed really hyped up, excited almost.

‘When we got to Shoeburyness, I parked in a road called Burgess Close near Pamela Walsh’s house. As I did so, I said to Percival, “There’s a drain there, ditch the gun.” Percival got his bag and the gun out of the car, walked to the back of the vehicle and dropped the gun down the drain.

‘I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t remember if he dropped the gun down the drain or if I did; I know I went too.

‘I put the screwdriver in my pocket that had been used to start the stolen car. It was a little dumpy red one, a flat screwdriver. I know I kept it because when I got home I still had it. I had sobered up at this point, but I felt tired and rough.’

Unbeknown to Alvin and his accomplice, a man had been watching them from his bedroom window. Leonard Spencer, a retired gentleman whose home is on the corner of Burgess Close, had been awoken in the early hours of the morning by loud voices and the sound of car doors slamming. Thinking that this disturbance at such an unsociable hour was somewhat suspicious, Leonard had got out of bed and opened his window. Looking to his right, he saw a Vauxhall Belmont and two men who were running from it. After these men had run a short distance, one of them had stopped and returned to the car. Leonard quite rightly assumed that the vehicle was stolen and that the man had returned to it to retrieve something that he had forgotten.

After getting dressed, Leonard made his way downstairs and then out into the street to inspect the vehicle. The doors were not locked and inside he could see that audiotapes and a number of coins had been scattered around the footwell. Returning to his home, Leonard had telephoned the police, who he recalls ‘didn’t seem interested’. Later that morning, when the police realised the possible significance of the vehicle, they had attended Burgess Close and interviewed Leonard about all that he had seen.

Jogging away from the car without realising the police would soon have their first lead, Alvin claims that he and Percival made their way to Pamela Walsh’s house.

‘I can’t remember if Percival had a key or if Pamela let us in, but we both entered the house,’ Alvin said. ‘I went to get myself a drink and Percival went upstairs. I could hear him talking to Pamela, but I couldn’t hear what was being said.

‘When I had finished my drink, I went upstairs and saw Percival standing at the sink in his boxer shorts. He was washing himself with white spirit to remove any traces of gun residue. He splashed the white spirit all over his face, which went really bright red; he kept saying that it was burning his eyes and ears. I found this quite amusing because I had told him before he used it not to do so. I have done a painting and decorating course and I know that you shouldn’t splash or soak your face in white spirit.’

Percival wanted to get into the bath, according to Alvin, so he and Pamela went downstairs to give him some privacy. ‘Whilst waiting for Percival, I telephoned my brother Darren, who lived in Locksley Close,’ Alvin continued. ‘There was no answer and so I decided to call a friend of mine who also happened to live there – well, he
was
a friend of mine until he found out that I had slept with his wife! When he answered, I asked him if there was anything going on outside his house. Despite the time, he was already out of bed and well aware that something was going on. He told me that the police were all over the place and had blocked the Close off. He asked me what had happened, but I couldn’t tell him, so I said, “Nothing to worry about,” and put the phone down. He knew that I was bent as fuck and so wouldn’t have pushed the issue any further.

‘At that point Percival came into the front room. He had his bag with him and had changed his clothes. He said that he had forgotten to pack a change of footwear and so I said I would get him a pair of shoes from my house. I took Pamela’s dog with me, so that I wouldn’t look out of place walking along the seafront at that hour of the morning. When I passed the road where we had dumped the stolen car, I saw that a police vehicle was parked next to it. Nobody was in the car; it was just parked there.

‘It seemed to be too much of a coincidence and so I made a decision to get rid of the bag of incriminating evidence that I was carrying as soon as possible. I decided to hide the bag under one of the beach huts on Southend seafront. There was a slight gap between the esplanade wall and one of the huts, so I put the bag into it and covered it with shells and sand. After disposing of the bag, I continued to walk the dog.