Essex Boys, The New Generation (4 page)

‘A neighbour told me that she had seen Dean carrying boxes from my home to an address around the corner on three separate occasions. I went around to the house and demanded that they return my stereo, but the occupants denied having it or even having seen Dean that day. I was absolutely devastated by what Dean had done. I told him I wanted my property back or I would call the police, but he refused to return it.

‘With a heavy heart, I did inform the police and Dean was arrested. When questioned, he admitted that he had taken my stereo, but he refused to say what he had done with it. When he appeared at Basildon Crown Court, he was given a meagre financial penalty. Sending Dean to prison was, the wise and learned judge decreed, a waste of time. Whenever Dean was imprisoned, he used to write to me and say that life inside was like being on a holiday camp. Some of the establishments that Dean had spent “vacations” in were equipped with swimming pools, tennis courts and gymnasiums. In his cell, Dean claimed, he had a television, a variety of computer games and a PlayStation. If they had made prison a little tougher, he and others like him might not have been so keen to return.

‘Dean never valued anything material. If I bought him jewellery, he would either sell it or give it away, and if there was a television or PlayStation around he would unscrew it and fiddle about with all the bits. Rarely was he able to put them back together again, so he would just bin the components.

‘The last letter I ever received from Dean was sent in 1999. He was in HMP Chelmsford at the time, where I believe he met Damon Alvin, the drug dealer who drove Dean to the place where he was murdered. The letter is filled with regret about his relationship with me, his love for others and, sadly, his hope for a decent future.’

Dear Mum,

Well, how are you? As for me, I am OK. Well, we ain’t spoken now for six years. I said I am sorry for what happened. I don’t want nothing off you, but I would like my daughter, Lauren, to know her nan. Well, she is four now, she had her birthday party last month. We hired a bouncy castle for the day.

She was born on 18 September. She is still at playschool. If she was born two weeks earlier, she would be at infant’s. She looks a lot like me when I was a kid, but she won’t end up like me. She is the most loveliest kid, apart from she still has a stammer all the time.

Well, if you would like any photos of her, let me know, but please get in touch. It’s been six years now and a lot has happened since then.

Love,

Dean

‘I did reply to Dean, because I thought that at last he was turning his life around, but by the time my letter arrived at the prison he had been released.

‘My hope that Dean had finally fallen in love and settled down with a girl was dashed within weeks. Dean came to see me in a really flash car, which I now know was owned by Damon Alvin. He was with a pretty girl with dark hair. Dean told me that he was living near Southend seafront, a place he had always loved. We didn’t get to speak alone that day, which I will regret until my dying day. There was so much I wanted to ask him about his daughter and the new life he had talked about in his letter. Unfortunately, that same day Dean stole £400 from his brother Wayne by forging his signature on a cheque and withdrawing the cash from his bank account. The next time I saw Dean we had a terrible argument over this and he walked away from me. Two weeks later, he turned up at my home as though nothing had happened.

‘Dean’s couldn’t-care-less attitude enraged me. I shouted at him for what he had done and uttered the last words that I was ever to say to him: “Piss off, Dean. I want nothing more to do with you and, as far as I am concerned, you are not my son.”

‘I torture myself with the thought that maybe, if I had held my tongue, my son would still be here now. I cannot put into words the pain those words cause me today. We all say things we don’t mean to those we love, but the person we say them to doesn’t usually get murdered before we can make amends. Dean did come to my home a few times after that, but he never knocked on my door. He would pull up outside the house in a car so that I could see him through the kitchen window. As soon as he knew that I had caught sight of him, he would drive off. I think it was his way of saying, “Look, Mum, I am OK, don’t worry.”

‘Any mother knows just what a foolish sentiment “don’t worry” is. I worried about Dean every time he left my sight. I still worry about the circumstances in which he died. I was told that he did not die instantly. What haunts me, what worries me sick, is wondering what his final thoughts were, as some bastard was murdering him. I wonder what he was feeling and whether he was thinking of me. I hope he was; I want his last thoughts to have been of those who loved him, because we will never stop thinking of him.

‘On the day that I heard Dean had been murdered, the police appointed a family liaison officer to keep me informed of any progress in their investigation. Unfortunately, they never did seem to have much, if any, information to pass on to me. I was told that it was likely Dean’s killers would be at his funeral because more often than not people who commit murder do attend their victim’s service. When it was over, I asked if any of the suspects had attended, but I was told that they had not.

‘The police said that they knew in their own minds who had shot Dean, but they also said they could not do anything about it because they had no proof. No names of suspects were ever given to me. I still feel let down and frustrated by the lack of information I received from the police during their investigation. I know and accept that some material that might have been of evidential value could not be disclosed, but I was left feeling confused, isolated and unimportant.

‘The police didn’t seem to make any significant progress with their inquiries for the two years following the murder. There had been several arrests, but the people concerned had all been released without charge shortly afterwards. I only found out about these occasional developments through reading the local newspaper or from journalists ringing me for my reaction to the latest news. But then three long years after Dean’s death, a £5,000 reward was offered by police to members of the public for information about the murder. Shortly afterwards, four people were arrested. The police wouldn’t give me the names of those they had in custody, but they did say they were positive that they had the right
people
– not person. Two were being questioned about a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and a third was being held for murdering Dean. They wouldn’t say what the fourth person had been arrested for, but I formed the impression that it was to do with the murder rather than the conspiracy.

‘I only heard that Dean’s old prison cellmate Damon Alvin was the one who had been charged with Dean’s murder a few months before his trial began. I felt a strange need to see him. I wanted to know what a cold-blooded killer would look like. I wanted to see the bastard who had taken my Dean’s life. You think to yourself that somebody accused of something so evil is going to look really sinister or give off some sort of bad vibe to show that he is not a normal person. I suppose I had prepared myself to be confronted by some sort of monster. I was therefore surprised when Alvin was identified to me and I saw that he was just a normal-looking young man. I have to admit that I felt disappointed and somewhat confused. My rising anger collapsed into an avalanche of questions. Why would he do this? How did he do it? Did he mean to do it?

‘For the first week of his trial, the barristers were locked in a fierce debate about evidence the prosecution wished to introduce into the case but which the defence objected to. Ironically, this evidence turned out to have been generated by Dean. I was shocked to learn that he had been a registered police informant and over a couple of years had been giving information to the police about Alvin, and that this may have been the motive for his murder. Eventually the judge ruled that the evidence could be presented to the jury. The defence barristers looked devastated by the ruling. The case was adjourned and nothing happened for six to eight weeks. Then I was informed by police that Damon Alvin had decided to become a supergrass.

‘The prosecution had taken a witness statement from Alvin, dropped the murder charge against him and then charged his friend Ricky Percival with killing Dean instead. Alvin, the sinner had become Alvin, the saint – and the main prosecution witness – overnight. The police seemed delighted; they told me that they had now got what they had been hoping for. Despite the fact that they had originally charged Alvin with Dean’s murder, they said that they had known all along that it had not been him. It was Percival who had pulled the trigger and murdered Dean, they said. It was explained to me that the police had been hoping that if Alvin thought that he was going to get a life sentence he would inform on Percival to save his own skin. They said that they had no evidence against Percival for the murder without Alvin’s help, and so thankfully it had worked out the way they had planned.

‘To be totally honest, I found this explanation and the tactics employed very worrying and began to wonder if Alvin might have been guilty and had turned supergrass just to escape a life sentence. If they knew for a fact that it was Percival who had murdered Dean, they must have had evidence in order to form that opinion. It follows that if the evidence against Percival did exist, why hadn’t they charged him? Without the evidence, I couldn’t understand how they could claim to know anything for certain. Any person facing a life sentence that has been given the identity of the alleged guilty party and who is then asked to name that party in return for freedom is eventually bound to repeat the name to save himself. I am not comfortable with a judicial system that operates by putting guns to people’s heads to extract confessions.

‘Once Percival’s trial had begun and Alvin had testified against him, I did wonder, what if Percival did more or less the same as Alvin, and blamed him for the murder? Surely, the case against Percival would collapse? I would be back at square one and nobody would be convicted. It was such an unusual scenario, supported by nothing other than Alvin’s word. I began to think that Alvin and Percival might have even planned the whole thing so both would escape prosecution.

‘Regardless of who was actually guilty of murdering Dean, the police were unable to give me a clear motive for his death. I have repeatedly asked the detectives who were working on the case why it happened, but they told me that they didn’t know why my son was killed. At Alvin’s trial, it was suggested that Dean had been murdered because he was a registered police informant. When Percival was on trial, they said that Dean had met his death simply because Percival had lost his temper that night over a gun he couldn’t find. The third motive, which was given to me by a police officer “off the record”, suggested that Percival had been losing face amongst his criminal associates at that particular time and he had done it simply to show that he was still a man to be feared. All three theories raise more questions in my mind than they answer.

‘Before Percival’s trial got under way, I asked the police if any distressing images of my son would be shown in court, as I didn’t wish to have anything upsetting sprung on me. I was assured that although images did exist of Dean in death, and that they would form part of the evidence, there was no way I would be able to see them from the public gallery. My only experience of murder trials had been gleaned from Hollywood movies and television programmes like
The Bill
and so I wasn’t sure what to expect. During the first week of the trial, as one of the barristers stood up to address the jury, he began turning over photographs of the crime scene in an evidence book.

‘I gasped in horror as I saw images of my son’s blood-soaked body staring straight at me. Photographs of him lying in the mud, bathed in his own blood, and of him being butchered on a mortuary slab, were for ever etched in my mind. I couldn’t get up and walk out of the court, as I didn’t dare interrupt the proceedings, and so I just sat there, trying to avert my gaze. By the time the court stopped for a break that day, it was too late to move seats; all of the images had been exhibited. I hope and pray that no mother will ever have to sit through what I endured that day, but I fear in this day and age many more will.

‘At the end of the trial, Ricky Percival was convicted of murdering Dean and was sentenced to life imprisonment. His friend, Kevin Walsh, was convicted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice because he gave him a false alibi. Walsh was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. His ex-girlfriend, Kate Griffiths, was found not guilty of the same charge. Damon Alvin was given a pat on the back and offered all of the help available to assist him in walking away and starting a new life for himself and his family. I have no thoughts on Kevin Walsh. As for Percival, I thought he sat through the entire trial as if he didn’t give a damn about what might happen. I thought that he would be terrified, but he didn’t take the proceedings seriously at all. I got the impression that he thought the trial was a load of crap that didn’t involve him. I believe he really thought he was going home, not to prison. When he was found guilty, I expected him to lose his temper after all I had heard about him, but he stood motionless, cool as a cucumber, as though what was happening wasn’t real. I didn’t think he would be convicted because there were a lot of unanswered questions, and a lot of answers that should have been challenged but were not. I don’t think Alvin’s evidence was explored in depth because the prosecution did not want to really test his story.