Essex Boys, The New Generation (23 page)

‘I have heard various rumours about Percival’s involvement in criminal matters. I know nothing of these matters and believe that many of these rumours have been put about by the police. Further, I believe that I have only been charged to put pressure on me to give the police information about Percival’s possible involvement in Boshell’s murder. Unfortunately, I do not know anything.’

In an effort to appear helpful, Alvin offered the interviewing officers his second ‘off the record’ motive for the murder – that Boshell might have been involved in gun-running and drug dealing with immigrants in the Southend area.

When the police had finished questioning Alvin, he was bailed to reappear at Harlow police station two months later, pending further inquiries. Walsh and Griffiths were interviewed at separate police stations and both reiterated the accounts that they had given previously concerning the night Boshell died.

The police had formed the opinion that the couple had either been coerced or threatened by Percival or Alvin, or both men, to give them an alibi at the time Boshell was shot. The unofficial time of death had been calculated by the police by considering the time Boshell was seen leaving Southend and the second statement of Gordon Osborne, who claimed that he had heard two or three shots being fired between 11 p.m. and 11.30 p.m. Boshell had not been seen alive again after leaving Southend. He had suffered three gunshot wounds and, according to the police, nobody other than the gunman would have known this. Osborne’s evidence, therefore, must have been accurate. Convinced that either Alvin or Percival, or both, was responsible for Boshell’s murder, the police were left in no doubt that Griffiths and Walsh were therefore lying. In their view, they had to be because they had both said that Alvin and Percival were in their flat at the time Boshell was believed to have been murdered.

Kate Griffiths, a hard-working young woman of good character, was seen by the police as the weakest link in the alleged plot to provide Boshell’s killers with an alibi and so she was subjected to intense questioning over two days. Laughing nervously when they accused her of lying throughout her numerous interviews, Griffiths insisted that she was telling the truth.

In an effort to break her resolve, one of the officers said that he wished to outline all the evidence they had unearthed, which proved Alvin, at least, was involved in Boshell’s murder. ‘If Alvin is lying,’ the officer said, ‘you must be lying, and so, after considering this evidence I am now going to read, you might wish to reconsider your statement.

‘Our understanding is that when Malcolm Walsh was stabbed to death by Terry Watkins, it caused a great deal of friction. A year after Malcolm’s death, two males in balaclavas burst into a house, which was full of women, children and men. They were armed with shotguns and started blasting away, seriously injuring a number of people. It is believed that this was done as a favour to the Walsh family to avenge the murder of Malcolm. That crime was committed by Ricky Percival and another man, possibly Damon Alvin. What I am trying to emphasise here, Miss Griffiths, is the cruelty that these people are capable of. We have spoken to a number of Dean Boshell’s friends in the Southend area and they say he might have been a drug user and a drug dealer. A witness has seen him with cocaine. They have also explained that he had very few friends.

‘The only people that he talked about were his girlfriend, Damon Alvin, or his brother, as he referred to him, and Ricky Percival. They are the only three people who would phone him or have anything to do with him.

‘Early in February 2001, Boshell asked a friend to go on a job with him. Boshell said that he and his brother were going to break into a house in Westcliffe and steal a load of skunk plants. He said that he would pay this friend £1,000 out of the £2,500 that he was expecting to be paid. Two days before Boshell died, he showed this friend a revolver and three rounds of ammunition that he had under his mattress in his flat. Boshell also told the person who employed him at a café that he and his brother had purchased two guns. Apparently, it was cheaper to buy a pair and so they had paid just £500. Boshell was at work the night before he died and he told his employer that he was planning this robbery. He added that he was intending to do it with his brother on the 3rd or 4th of March. Later that evening, he received a telephone call from Clair Sanders’ phone. We know that Alvin did not have any credit on his phone and we know Sanders had no reason to call Boshell, and so the likelihood is Alvin was using Sanders’ phone to call him. Immediately after that call, Boshell asked his employer if he could have Tuesday night off work, as he had a job to do.

‘When Boshell left work, he confirmed to a friend that he had a job to do and asked if he could borrow some dark clothing. At 8.31 p.m., phone records show that Boshell called Alvin from his friend’s mobile phone. Alvin is seen answering this call on CCTV footage recorded in the Woodcutters Arms. Later that night, Boshell is recorded on CCTV wearing the dark clothing his friend had given him. At 9 p.m., the footage shows Boshell and another friend walking towards the Lidl general store on Woodgrange Drive.

‘At 9.26, a telephone call is made from a public kiosk at Lidl’s to Damon Alvin’s mobile phone. We have CCTV footage of Alvin leaving the Woodcutters pub at 9.15. Shortly after the call to Alvin’s mobile phone, a red car pulled up outside Lidl’s and Boshell said to his friend, “See you tomorrow.” The friend watched as Boshell got into the vehicle and then he walked away. Dean Boshell was never seen alive again.’

The policeman interviewing Griffiths said that phone records showed that at 11.17 p.m. and 11.47 p.m. Kevin Walsh had been trying to call Damon Alvin’s mobile phone. The calls had only lasted a second or two and had not been answered. However, these calls were made at a time when all concerned, including Griffiths, had said that Alvin was with Walsh at his flat.

‘Why would Walsh telephone Alvin twice on his mobile phone, if they were in the same room?’ the officer had asked. Barely pausing for breath, the policeman continued to read out the evidence to Griffiths who, despite her solicitor’s advice to remain silent, commented on points throughout his recital.

‘Between 9.44 p.m., which is the approximate time that Alvin was seen picking Boshell up, and 11.29 p.m., which is around the time the murder had allegedly taken place, Alvin’s mobile phone was switched off. At 11.48 p.m., Clair Sanders had received a call on her mobile phone from the phone kiosk located directly outside Boshell’s old flat. This kiosk also happens to be adjacent to the allotments where he was murdered. Sanders said in a statement that she refused to sign that this call was from Alvin and he was asking her to pick him up from Kevin Walsh’s flat. How could Alvin be at the allotments and in the flat with you at the same time?’ the detective asked.

There was a brief silence in the interview room before Griffiths replied, ‘I know what you want me to say, but I cannot say it. Every time that I have spoken to the police, I have told them the truth, 100 per cent.’ Griffiths’ words fell on deaf ears.

‘Alvin had claimed that he and Percival had arrived at the flat around 10.45 p.m. and Walsh has said their arrival time was 11 p.m.,’ the officer continued. ‘When Percival was asked what time he had arrived, he said that he didn’t recall. That smells, to me. That stinks of somebody making things up. Sorry, it just doesn’t work. There has been some collusion; you’ve had a chat. I don’t know if you’ve been told what to say, someone’s had a go at you, you thought you were doing somebody a favour or you were put under pressure. I don’t know, but people don’t take a guess at a time and get the same time. They are all wrong because we can prove they’re wrong, and yet they all say the same.’

With the benefit of hindsight, the officer may no longer believe that he could prove that all four people were lying. It may have since occurred to him that four people who give the same account of an event are actually being honest.

Kevin Walsh was undergoing a similar interrogation to Griffiths. He, too, was insisting that he was innocent, but the police officers interviewing him were far from convinced.

When the police had completed their questioning, Griffiths and Walsh were bailed to reappear at Harlow police station, pending further inquiries.

Shortly after the arrests of his three friends, Percival had handed himself in at a police station and was arrested for the murder of Dean Boshell. Later that same day, after giving a no-comment interview on the advice of his solicitor, he too was bailed to return to Harlow at a later date.

On 21 October 2004, all four suspects attended Harlow police station, where Alvin was formally charged with the murder of Dean Boshell; Percival, Griffiths and Walsh were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Later that afternoon they appeared in court. Griffiths and Walsh were released on bail to await trial, but Percival and Alvin were remanded in custody to HMP Chelmsford, where they were placed in the same cell.

Recalling those early days in custody, Alvin said, ‘At that stage, we felt that there was little or no evidence against us. A month after being remanded in custody, the case papers were given to us and we began to consider our defence. After reading all of the evidence, we realised that the case against us was not as weak as we had originally thought.’

The most alarming evidence for Alvin had been given by the very man he had been accused of murdering. This evidence, which caused Alvin many sleepless nights, was a bundle of contact sheets that a police officer had compiled after Boshell had given information about his criminal associates. These detailed the alleged involvement of Alvin, Percival and others in a range of both serious and rather trivial offences.

‘I had absolutely no knowledge that Boshell was informing on me before I read those notes,’ Alvin said. ‘Nothing about Boshell being an informant had ever been mentioned to me in any of the police interviews. I was flabbergasted. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing that Dean would do because he always seemed so fond of me and loyal. I cannot think why Dean would inform on me. We were friends. I was never arrested on any of the so-called information that Dean gave to the police. I don’t know what he got out of doing it. Perhaps he made it up to sound more important than he was, or he wanted to be known to hang about with “big criminals”. I think Dean was a Walter Mitty character who liked to pretend he moved in gangster circles. I don’t think he had even met Percival at the time he gave some of the information about him.’ The case papers contained lots of damning evidence concerning Alvin, much of which he was unable to dispute.

Mobile telephones are made up of small radio transmitters and receivers. They operate by sending and receiving signals to and from the masts that we see dotted all around the country. The phones are designed to automatically make contact with the mast that has the strongest signal. This is invariably the mast that is closest to the mobile phone. Some of these masts contain antennae that are positioned to face in different directions. The mobile phone companies are able to identify the antenna to which a phone has connected and therefore provide a rough location for that phone when it has made or received calls. Using this method to track Alvin’s movements, the police were able to show that after leaving the Woodcutters Arms he had travelled towards the centre of Southend. In Alvin’s own words, the telephone evidence, which proved that he had visited Southend at the time Boshell was picked up, was ‘of major concern to us’.

‘I had told the police that I had driven straight home to Rochford,’ Alvin said. ‘We had to come up with a story to explain why, after leaving the public house, I had gone in that direction. It was agreed that I would give one of the following reasons: either I was dropping cocaine off, collecting money due for drug deals, going to a pub or going to see my brother. There was a variety of excuses I could have used, but they all would have contradicted my original witness statement.’

Desperate to avoid being convicted of Boshell’s murder and spending his life in prison, Alvin said, ‘We agreed that we would use the available evidence to try and construct a case against others that we could blame for the murder. There was a witness called Lisa who had stated that Boshell had told her that when he was in prison two men had bullied him into selling drugs. When he was released, these two men were supposed to have tracked him down and forced him to continue selling their drugs. We decided to say that one of these men was Chris Wheatley because Lisa had said that one of the men who had bullied Boshell was called Chris. The benefit of having Wheatley as a suspect was that he was dead and he couldn’t defend himself.’

Alvin’s constant use of the word ‘we’ implies that Percival was a co-conspirator in his plot to evade justice; at no time has Percival hinted or admitted that he was party to any such conspiracy. He has asked me to point out that none of the evidence highlighted by Alvin as damaging has any bearing whatsoever on his own personal innocence or guilt because at that time it was Alvin facing the charge of murder.

Constantly trying to come up with a scenario that would clear his name, Alvin was seen by fellow inmates and prison staff scribbling down ideas and then scrapping them with the stroke of a pen before starting anew. In these notes, Alvin had written:

Ask legal team to make more of the allegation that Boshell had been bullied into selling drugs by Chris Wheatley. See statement by Lisa that said the same people tracked him down when he was released from prison and he had to store and supply drugs for them and that they were blackmailing him, saying that they would harm his brother if he did not comply. Wheatley died very shortly before Boshell, so it’s likely that Boshell kept the cocaine that Lisa had seen. Boshell possibly hid the drugs in the allotments and moved to Southend because Wheatley’s associates would want the cocaine back and were after Dean. Thus leading to the murder?