The Cycling Cop and the Clapham Execution: PC Patrick Dunne & William Danso

Welcome back, Trevors! It's season four and we are BACK, although you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise given the chaos of recording this one (third intro, second go at the case, Hannah's suitcase touring Luton solo). Stick with us.

This week, Hannah takes us to a quiet Wednesday night in October 1993, when a 44 year old former maths teacher turned beat bobby cycled onto Cato Road in Clapham. PC Patrick Dunne never made it home. Neither did his neighbour William Danso, a Ghanaian doorman and father of five, gunned down in his own hallway for being good at his job.

The man who pulled the trigger was Gary Lloyd Nelson, a 24 year old gangster nicknamed Tyson, with a fuse so short he'd fired five shots at a van driver for overtaking him. The evidence was staggering. The CPS dropped it anyway. What followed was a 12 year fight by two families who refused to let the system forget.

Settle in.

Sources for this case include:

https://thepolicememorialtrust.org/pc-patrick-dunne/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/feb/18/ukguns.rosiecowan

https://www.londonremembers.com/subjects/pc-patrick-dunne

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4717168.stm

https://x.com/metpoliceuk/status/1065279526656241664

https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/52225/pc-patrick-dunne

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1510792/Gangster-who-gunned-down-Pc-is-sent-to-jail-for-35-years.html

https://murderpedia.org/male.N/n/nelson-gary-lloyd.htm#google_vignette

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/roadrage-driver-gets-eight-years-for-gun-attacks-1596553.html

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/gangster-jailed-for-pc-death-may-have-killed-four-others-a3293531.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hijVRJrS9VA

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kQCD9LFV2Qs

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4703356.stm

Transcript

Season 4 Ep 01 - PC Patrick Dunne

Hello, I'm Rachel. I'm Hannah. And this is the Sinister South podcast season four.

It's the podcast where we talk about all the sort of bad things, what happens south of the river. Indeed it is. Indeed.

There we go, I kind of forgot what we were doing then, just staring into the middle distance. I mean, I think that's fair. It's been a few weeks since we've done this, so.

I'm going to do full disclosure, I can't lie to the Trevors and they're going to tell by my voice. This is, well, for this, it's the third time we're recording the intro. It's the second time of recording this episode.

And it'll be the second time of recording the next episode. Yes, it will. And life is working against us somewhat to just make sure that everything is lemon, lemon difficult.

Lemon, lemon difficult. It really is at the minute. It's a bit mad, but lovely Trevors.

We will try not to be too Debbie Downer, but Hannah is correct. This has been a long time in the making. Just hope it's bloody worth it.

It's never worth it. If we don't suddenly become multimillionaires off the back of these next two episodes, then I'm going to cry very hard. Yeah, I was going to go, how are you, but it feels like a Lotus question now.

I'm fine. Yeah, all good. I was going to say like, I know that what we should be talking about in this episode, although this is a good opportunity for us to correct the narrative, because when we did record the next two previously, we did it all back to front, didn't we? We did do it all back to front.

So realistically, if we're going chronologically, I had a birthday and it was lovely. You did have a birthday. The next episode we talk about how we went on holiday and that was also lovely.

That's true. That's very true. You are correct.

All right, well, let's do that then. Let's talk about your birthday. How was it? I don't mean it like that.

No, lovely. Good. Very chill, very calm.

What did I actually do during the day? I just walked, did my fake tan, finished packing, had a freak out with you about Luton versus Stansted versus where my suitcase was going to be versus where I was going to be versus where my car was going to be. Oh, it was just, it was just so stupid. I've never known.

It was just the way that you messaged and was like, babe, why is my suitcase going to Luton? I don't know, mate, why is your suitcase going to Luton? Well, the two things you've sent me, one says Stansted, which is where my car will be. And then this one now says Luton. Oh, let me go and speak to the people at an airline who shall not be named, but they're very blue.

They, I called them and they were just like, oh yeah, because of the fuel shortages. Bloody Trump. Because of the fuel shortages, we can no longer allow you to fly back into Stansted.

We're diverting you to Luton. Okay. So many questions about that.

I remember I was like, I think the first time we spoke on that, right, you rang me. Yeah. First time I had hair dye on my head.

You did. I was like, right, right. Well, I've got to get in the shower now.

So, and you were like, okay. Was that the first time you were like, hang on, let me, let me bring them and I'll bring you back or whatever. I was like, okay, fine.

But the next time you rang, I had dye on my eyebrows. Yes, you did. So this has to be a much shorter call, babe, otherwise we're going to look fucking insane.

So let's go with this. But I just love that you said, oh, I'll ring, let me bring my dad. And my brain immediately just went, yes, ring the man.

Please ring the man for the man. We'll be able to sort the logistics. Not even being sarcastic. I literally was just like, yes, seems like a good idea to me. Not, we could ring your dad to have a lift from Luton into Stansted. I didn't think that was the solution or I didn't even think about that being a solution at all. I was like, yes, ask him what his opinion is, please. He will be able to fix it. Yeah.

Now, in the end, they sent us to Luton on the way back. Yes. And my lovely dad came and picked us up from Luton, drove us back to Stansted and then we drove home. So yeah, that was a fun part. That was the, the organizational chaos part of your birthday. Um, and then, yeah, well, just packed.

Um, it was, I knew I had to get up at like three in the morning to come and get you at four or whatever it was. So I wasn't ever going to go wild. Um, but my mum, my sister and my gran did come round to give me my cards, etc. And I mean, I did very well this birthday. I got incredible pyjamas from my sister. I got financial aid from my grandmother. And I got a bloody amazing pink laptop from my mother, which I don't know what I did to deserve, but I'm very grateful for. The pink laptop is so beautiful. It's so beautiful.

I'm so happy for you. I just stare at it. I don't do any work on it, as you can attest. I do just stare and go, she's pretty though. She's very pretty. Very, very pretty.

Might have to sell her for fuel. Fuel? Fuel, I know. What fuel are you doing? Well, I suppose fuel is food in some regards. Food is fuel. Fuel times call for fuel measures. Yeah, but they came around and that was lovely, although it was quite funny.

 So I sat there and was like, Oh, I don't know. I was covered in fake tan at this point as well. The elements of building myself for the holiday. I loved it. They came around and I was like, Oh, I don't even think I've got anything in to offer you. I'm really sorry. Richard was cooking. Richard was cooking me dinner, which was very nice of him. He does a means bag bowl and I was looking forward to it. So he was pottering around in the kitchen and they were there and they were like, Oh, no, it's okay. Don't worry. And then my gran and my sister proceeded, my mum had been at work. So she's off the hook. My mum, my gran and my sister proceeded to tell me how they'd been to lunch together to a nice restaurant and had, Oh, I had a lovely crisp rose. Oh, okay, great.

Thanks. Don't worry about it. It's only my birthday. You two go for lunch. Thanks. Thanks for the invite.

It's a wild thing. I sat there and Richard came in to say hello. And then he looked at the cat and he went, Oh, no. And looked at Roo and Roo had a bit of an orange beard, which evidently was that he'd got into the slow cooking bag bowl situation. So that was fine. You two go for a lovely lunch out. You do ladies at lunch and I'll have Cat lick pasta. So that's fine. Happy birthday.

Oh, my God, that's amazing. Oh, dear. But it was fine when we got there.

It was all good. Oh, no. And dinner was lovely. I think Richard managed to salvage whatever Roo had. But all cat enzymes were great. Added an army to the flavour. Maybe it's a bit like, you know, was it MSG that they put in food? Maybe cat lick, something in a similar vein, potentially. So we ate that and we watched that film, what I've called A Thousand Different Names, which I think is one battle after another. But I think I kept calling it, oh, just one thing after another.

Or like, yeah, you know, it's that next thing, next thing or whatever. But that was very good. Sean Penn's incredible in that. I've not seen it yet. Oh, DiCaprio's not too shoddy either. It's good fun, fun. It's fucking horrific in places. It's not fun. But it's predominantly about racism, but don't worry about it. Very fun. Really fun. Just a bit of lighthearted romp, actually.

No, but there are some, you know, it's anyway, whatever. It's a good film. It's a good film, fair. And then, yeah, had a nice early night ready to get you and to jet away. To jet off after I had been ridiculous and gone to a gig the night before. Yes, sensible.

Very sensible. Yeah, I went to see a band called President. And for those of you who know, Charlie is looking very well. Allegedly. No, it was over in Kentish Town. And I just had, it was one of those days, right? It was just this, I was, I don't know if, the world was just conspiring. The world has been conspiring for some time. And it was conspiring against me that day. It was the same day as one of the tube strikes.

And I was already uptown with a client and had a lovely day with them. They were wonderful. But then had a WhatsApp to Will and said, where shall I meet you? And when? Those were the two questions that I asked. I then got a response, which was, TfL says that you could still get the Northern line to London Bridge, or you could get the bus. Not a single thing did I ask being answered that, cool. It's like, fine, where shall I meet you? And when? And just, I don't know. But you can get the bus. You can get the bus. Stop telling me about the bus. Don't need the fucking bus. I just want to know where I'm getting the bus to. Am I just sitting on the bus doing the entire loop of the bus? Yeah, he's gotten very into like, mansplaining stuff recently. Sorry, babe, but you have. So that was a bit annoying. And then he said, I'll meet you at the Peacock. There's no pub called the Peacock. It's called the Parakeet. So I messaged him back going, didn't fancy the Peacock. I've gone to the Parakeet instead. He then didn't understand what I had said or why I had said it and had like zero response to it, which was very annoyed about. 

And then I got into an argument with, oh no, before that, we went to this restaurant. We went to this restaurant and it was a very nice, I think it's called Tonkatsu in Kentish Town. And it is a Japanese restaurant, if you hadn't guessed. And there's lots of lovely Japanese food. And we've been there before, but I was in a bad mood anyway because of the world conspiring against me. And then when I sat and had a look at the food, I was just like, there's nothing here I want. And Will was going, well, what do you mean? I said, well, there's nothing. There's nothing I want, actually. There's nothing here. There's nothing for me. And he was like, oh, well, should we go to a different restaurant? I was like, we can't do that now because we sat down. That's rude. OK, so what are you going to eat then? I'll just have two plates of goyza, actually. That's what I'll have. No, no, no. You have your ramen and your starter. That's fine. I'll just have two plates of goyza. It's OK.

And I was just in a proper strop. And then the waiter came over, bless him, and he took Will's order and it was all very lovely. And then he turned around and said, I'm for you. And I don't know what came over me. But I said to him quite loudly, I don't like chicken thigh. Completely out of context, this poor boy. And basically what I had meant was I'd been saying to Will, everything in the restaurant seemed to be chicken thigh. And I have a real issue with chicken thigh. Don't come for me. I know many people say it's superior. I think it's slimy. I'm not I'm not about it. But obviously, this poor man, one, doesn't need to know all of that about me. But two, had not been privy to any of the conversation that we've been having about the chicken thigh. So instead was just like, OK, but bless him.

He was very kind. And he made me a special, special ramen that wasn't with chicken thigh. There you go. But he did mansplaining stuff. He also then turned around and was like, oh, is there anything else? And I said, can I have plum wine for a drink? It's not funny this time. I just remembered that last time we recorded this, he said as a instead of for a plum wine as a drink, as a drink, rather than chopsticks as a utensil.

I'm just really explaining it back to him. Oh, yeah, yeah. No. Yeah. I said, can I have a plum wine? And he stopped, looks at me and then went, have you had it before? Because it's quite sweet. No, actually, I've just decided I don't like chicken thigh, but I'm just going to randomly pick something I've never touched before in my life and have that. Yeah, it's this fussy with some things. Very happy-go-lucky with others. Like, do you know what? Yes, I have, actually. Thank you. I've had quite a lot of plum wine. Do you know what the world is for us at the moment? I'm like, it's quite normally it's one of us and the other one can pick it up and be like, right, listen, shut up.

Yeah, we've got this. But it's kind of both of us. Both of the sleeves of both of our  cardigans have got stuck on the door handle of life. Yes, they have. At the same time. A hundred percent. For good podcasting, I don't know if it makes. For good podcasting, I don't know if it makes. Good.

That's going on a T-shirt. Yeah, no, mad. And then, yeah, so I had all of that. Choking, shouting, I don't like chicken thighs at a poor man. Choking? Choking, yeah. You pick me up, I'm going to pick you up. And then I had an argument with the bouncer about bringing my bag into the gig. But it was a very good gig. That was it. Very good gig. And what's quite nice about going to see that band was that they don't even have an album yet. They've just got an EP. So they've got like eight songs and that's it. So everyone's going to hear the songs that they want to hear because there are only eight of them. And then it was all done and dusted because they're masked and we're trying to pretend that we can't very obviously hear that it's Charlie from Busted on the vocals. Like they don't do any preamble or like chit chat or anything in between. So you get the eight songs and then off we go and we're finished. So I was on a train heading home at 10pm.

Lovely. It was glorious. Although I was very upset that we got, not upset. I liked the fact that they did a cover of Change in the House of Flies by the Deftones, but I was sad that I did not get my rendition of I've Been to the Year 3000. I really wanted that in sort of like sleep token-esque post rock or whatever the hell it is they're supposed to be. There you go. But yeah, and then I got home and waited for you to come pick me up. Yes. And some mild semblance of sleep. A very sort of, is it time yet? Oh no, it's 10 minutes after the last time I bolted awake and said, is it time yet? There we go. So that's how we've been. That's how we've been.

I must admit, the first time we did the intro it was mad. Yes. The second time it was really good and then now we're like lacklustre. We're sorry. It's fine. The Trevors will forgive us. Oh no. They will. But yeah, we're back.

This is season four. Nothing has changed from season three. Just that we had a couple of weeks off in the middle. So now we're calling it season four. There you go. There might be a slight edit to the way that the pictures of the episodes are changed. Look at her go. Well, I've done it for every other one. They've just progressively gotten less shit. Shows how much I pay attention. Yeah, it's cool. Each season is progressively less crap. We're not good. We're not as crap as we were season one. So there you go.

I've been listening back. Oh mate. Oh mate. Yeah, that was interesting. But yes, season four. And Hannah is going to be kicking us off with a case in a minute. But I thought, because it's the start of a new season, we'll start as we mean to go on and do some of the nice bits at the start. That's fine. So if you would like to come and follow us, we are on Instagram and we are on TikTok. Both of which are SinisterSouthPod. And then on Instagram, we've also got Han.andRach.SinisterSouth, which are our personal Instagrams that are basically ones where I don't put photos of my children on them. But that is essentially what it is. So if you want to come and get to know us a bit more, then please follow those. We've got the Facebook group, which is run by the lovely, lovely Lou, which is called Trevor's Unite. And that's over on Facebook.

Indeed it is. We've got the website, which is SinisterSouthPod.co.uk, where we put up all of the episodes that we have covered and potentially some of the ones we plan to do, if they don't change at short notice. And then we have the email address, which is SinisterSouthPodcast at gmail.com. Send us a nice little message. We got a really nice one. We had a lovely message. Hi, Sally and hi, Andy. Thank you for your message. That's very sweet. Thank you very much. And the fact that you're not that bothered by our language means that I'm just going to say all of the swears. All the swear words. All of them again and again.  

But yes, you can come and leave us a nice message over there. Give us a recommendation for a case you might like us to cover or anything of that ilk would be brilliant. Anything to break up Hannah's continuous alerts about the Nextdoor app. Yes, which I still haven't unsubscribed from. I still just delete them all and go, oh, I should unsubscribe from that. You never will. That's the thing. So just forever be one of those just sitting there. And then we've got the Patreon, which is Sinister South as well. and that is we are. I know we've been saying this for a few weeks, but we are going to have an overhaul of that in the coming weeks this season. We will get it sorted because it's been very lax and that's not good.

so no, there we go. But it is over there. Even if you want to just come and follow us on there. You don't have to pay anything. We might start talking on it at some point. Um, she says Rod fall back. But yeah, so those are all the nice things. So now we've got that out of the way. Have you got me a horrible story? Yeah, I do.

Yeah, I mean, one second. I think so. Let me just. There we go. Yes, I'm ready now. Just needed to get comfy.

Okay, um, I think there's the usual trigger warnings. It's about death and destruction. Bad people. Yeah, um, yeah. Yeah, as per usual, but I don't think it's not like the Ellie Butler cases of the world where we do need to do significant enough for the warnings. This is just very anger inducing, if anything.

Fair enough. Um, but yes, this is the story of the murder of PC Patrick Dunn and William Dainso. Cato Road, Clapham, South London on the 20th of October 1993.

It's just past 10 o'clock at night. A police officer is on Cato Road. Right.

He arrived on his bicycle. He is unarmed. He's wearing his uniform and his high visibility jacket, which makes him unmistakable against the dark.

He is on Cato Road because someone called in a minor domestic disturbance. The kind of thing that makes up most of a beat officer's nights. Nothing dangerous, really.

Nothing super unusual. Then he hears gunfire, not somewhere distant, but right across the street from where he is standing. He radios it in and then he steps out.

He shouts to the people to get behind, the people behind him to get back in the house. And he tries to put himself between them and whatever is going on. And then there's a single shot.

And from the men walking away into the dark, laughter. Oh, God. In a few minutes, the street will be full of sirens.

And in the days and weeks to come, there will be an arrest and charges and then nothing. A case that collapses. A family left to fight alone.

A killer who walks free and carries on as though nothing has happened. In the years that follow, there will be more violence, more weapons, more warnings from police that go unheeded. And the case will sit on a shelf, officially open but practically forgotten for 12 years.

Christ. This is the story of that street, of the men who died on it and the man who killed them. Of the world that produced that killer and the institutions that failed to stop him.

And most importantly, really, of the families who refused to let the truth be buried. Patrick Dunne was born on the 2nd of April 1949 in Shoreham-on-Sea on the Sussex coast. He was the eldest of three sons.

His brothers were Stephen, born two years after him, and Ivan, born in 1953. Ivan's a banging name. Isn't it a great name? It's a really good name.

The family moved to Carlshulton in Surrey, where Patrick attended Carlshulton High School for Boys, leaving in 1966 with 10 O-levels. He was, by every account that survives him, an ordinary man. And I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

He was ordinary in the way that the best people are. Quietly principled, genuinely kind, more interested in getting things right than being seen to get them right. Right.

His first job was in the engineering department of the London Borough of Sutton, even. He was a practical young man, thorough and interested in how things worked. But after two years, he felt pulled in a different direction.

And in 1968, he enrolled at the Northern Counties College in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to study mathematics, music and English. He then went on to train to be a teacher. At college, he was elected chairman of the Social Services Society, a student group that helped local deprived children in the Newcastle area.

And he also, during those years, learned to play the piano. It was a skill that he would carry with him for the rest of his life, and one that he would eventually bring into his work as a police officer too. Wow.

He obtained a BA from the Open University in 1971 and went into teaching, spending 15 years as a maths teacher at Dean's School in Bolton. Those who knew him from that period describe a man who was good at his job in the way that good teachers are good. Patient with confused people.

Genuinely pleased when something clicked. I love that you've changed that. Stop it.

Basically, Trevor, full disclosure, when we last recorded it, the phrase was... Patient with confusion. And I was like, patient with confusion. And I thought you were laughing because it sounded like confusion was a name.

Patient with confusion, he was a problem child. Ah! Oh, dear, sorry. I can live edit myself.

I like it. I like it. Sorry.

That's okay. So he was patient with confused children, I suppose I should say, rather than people. And genuinely pleased when something clicked for them.

But in 1986, Patrick's father died and he returned south to Sutton to be closer to his mother, Betty. He took a teaching post in nearby Weybridge and worked his way up to head of business studies. It was a settled life and seemingly a purposeful one for him.

And then, at an age when most people are thinking about consolidating rather than reinventing, Patrick Dunn did something that surprised the people that knew him. He applied to join the Metropolitan Police. It's a bit of a big shift, right? Like, I'm a teacher, I'll just start, I'll change everything and become a policeman.

That's fine. So he was 40 years old and he would have to start at the very bottom as a probationary police constable. His warrant number was 190636.

And he was posted to Clapham Police Station in June of 1990. He was given a home beat role, the neighbourhood officer. He'd be the face on the street and the name that people knew.

He got around on a bicycle and he knew people by name. He stopped to talk to them and he remembered details about their lives. He played the piano at community events, especially at kind of station social nights and local gatherings, the kind of things that make a neighbourhood feel like one.

And his colleagues remember a man who took genuine pride in being what the British policing tradition calls a Beat Bobby. Yeah. The officer who belongs to a place and who is part of the fabric of it.

And people in the area gave him a nickname. They called him the Cycling Cop. Others went even further and they called him Dixon of Dock Green, a reference to one of the most beloved fictional police constables in British television history.

The friendly copper, the community man, the officer who was on your side. Patrick Dunn hadn't fallen into this. He'd chosen it in his forties with a career and a qualification behind him.

He had looked at the world and decided that the most useful thing he could do with the years he had left was to walk these streets, know these people and try to make things a little bit safer. And that tells you something about who he was that no list of facts could quite capture. He had been a police officer for just over three years when he cycled to Cato Road on the evening of the 20th of October, 1993.

He was 44 years old. His mother, Betty, was 67. His brothers, Ivan and Stephen, were 40 and 42.

The family were all still close and still very much in each other's lives. None of them knew that this was the last night. Now to understand what happened on Cato Road, you do have to understand the world in which it happened.

South London in the early 1990s was, in certain pockets, a place experiencing something close to a crisis. And the institutions that were supposed to manage that crisis were failing repeatedly and badly to keep pace with it. The story actually begins a few years earlier.

From the mid-1980s onward, Jamaican criminal gangs, referred to by the British press and the law enforcement at the time as Yardies, which comes from the Jamaican slang for home, had been establishing a significant presence in London. They came initially to Brixton in South London and then kind of spread outwards towards Halston, Hackney, Tottenham and Peckham. And they brought with them two things that kind of transformed the criminal landscape of the capital.

The first was crack cocaine, a drug that was very cheap to produce, instantly addictive and enormously profitable. And it flooded into the housing estates of South London and beyond with devastating speed. By 1987, police were seizing 400 kilograms of cocaine a year.

The demand was insatiable and the supply was ruthlessly controlled. The second thing the gangs brought was a culture of gun violence, unlike anything British law enforcement had really previously encountered. These were not the criminals of an earlier era, and not to romanticize them, but the kind of the pub brawlers and the armed robbers who planned their jobs and valued discretion, especially when it came to guns.

The gang code, such as it was, operated on an entirely different logic. It seemed reputation was built publicly. Violence was displayed.

And the currency of the whole system was what people called respect. There was one observer put it precisely. It was not respect at all.

No, exactly. It was fear. The distinction matters enormously because, you know, respect in the ordinary sense is earned through behavior over time.

What these gangs demanded was something different, an immediate, unquestioning deference enforced by the knowledge that the alternative was serious violence. Challenging it, even accidentally, even professionally, was treated not as a misunderstanding, but as a declaration of hostility. The Metropolitan Police knew that the gang threat was coming.

In July of 1993, just three months before the Cato Road murders, a senior detective called Roy Clark returned from a fact-finding mission to Jamaica and wrote a report. In it, he warned his superiors directly, quote, our strategy must be long-term if we are to prevent the Jamaican gangs infiltrating and taking a permanent hold in London and spreading elsewhere, end quote. He made 35 specific recommendations.

Most of them were ignored. Oh, brilliant. Scotland Yard did create a specialist unit, the Drug-Related Violence Intelligence Unit, deliberately given a vague name to avoid accusations of racial targeting.

They set up in August of 1993, six weeks roughly, before two people were shot on Cato Road in Clapham. The unit was chronically under-resourced. Its frontline specialist was a single Brixton police constable who had stumbled into gang intelligence work almost by accident and had never qualified as a detective.

Oh, good. He was given no surveillance equipment, no dedicated interview rooms, no meaningful backup, and virtually no budget. It was, in almost every practical sense, inadequate to the scale of the problem that it was supposed to address.

Just a tiny bit, just a little bit. And the consequences of that inadequacy played out on the streets. London's gun murder rate, which had averaged around 20 a year at the start of the 90s, would eventually peak at over 40 by the early 2000s.

In 1993, it was already climbing. In South London specifically, in Brixton, in Clapham, and in the interconnected world of criminal networks, violence with firearms had become commonplace in a way that would have been almost unimaginable a decade earlier. And it's into this environment, this specific, documented, historically viable environment, that Gary Lloyd Nelson was born and grew up.

Now, I say this not as an excuse, not as mitigation, but as fact. The world he was shaped by was a world where the gun was status, where violence was currency, and where the institutions that were supposed to contain men like him were operating kind of at that very... At the moment he became the most dangerous, they were close to chaos themselves, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So understanding that world doesn't fully explain Gary Nelson, though. It does explain how he was able to do what he did for as long as he did, without being stopped, though. Right, okay.

So, who was he? Gary Lloyd Nelson was born in Woolwich, South East London, in 1969. He was 24 years old on the night of the Coteau Road murders. By the time he was 15, he had already begun accumulating a criminal record.

By the time he was 24, that record stretched to 21 separate offences, violence featuring consistently throughout. Between 1985 and 1990 alone, he had four separate convictions for violence. Wow.

He was not a man who had occasionally made bad decisions. He was a man for whom violence was a reoccurring, documented, habitual response to the world. He had, according to the prosecution, at a murder trial.

Spoiler alert. Okay. Links to one of London's most notorious crime families.

The family was never named publicly, but the implication was clear. Nelson was not a lone operator who had drifted into serious criminality. He was embedded in it, connected to a network that gave him access, resources, and the kind of protection the reputation and fear provides.

Physically, he was a very striking and intimidating presence. He was heavily scarred. The visible marks of a life already lived at close quarters with violence.

And he bore a noticeable resemblance to the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Mike Tyson. Enough of a resemblance that his street name, the name by which he was known throughout South London's criminal world, was simply Tyson. The nickname was not just about looks, though.

Like his namesake, Nelson had what those who knew him described as an almost non-existent fuse. He was, in the words of the prosecution, a man with a, quote, very short fuse indeed, end quote. All the quotes in this are unbelievably short and to the point.

Give me a long rambling quote from a judge, please. No, no, no. They're just like, yes, very short fuse indeed.

Okay, thanks, cool. Actually, quite a bad man. Stop.

Pretty much a prick. He was the kind of man for whom a slight real or imagined was not something to absorb or move on from. It was something to answer immediately.

And the only answer he knew was violence. Nelson was obsessed with firearms, not in the way that some criminals kind of acquire weapons as a practical tool, but personally and almost intimately. He called his Browning 9mm semi-automatic pistol his special thing.

Oh, God. It was status. It was identity.

It was the clearest possible declaration of where he stood on the matter. Yeah, fair. And his standing by the early 1990s was significant.

A Scotland Yars- Scotland Yars? Scotland Yars? Yars? Scotland Yars! Love it. A Scotland Yars source speaking after his eventual conviction described Nelson with unusual candour. He said, quote, he was a hitman, but he was so much more than that.

Hitmen are at the bottom of the criminal food chain. They take orders. Nelson was at the very top giving them.

He just killed whoever he wanted or arranged to have them killed, end quote. That is terrifying. Nelson lived in a luxury apartment.

He had top of the range cars, designer clothes. The trappings of someone who had, by his mid-twenties, built a financial empire through violence and the gun trade. These were not just signs of wealth.

In the world Nelson occupied, they were signals of power. They were visible, tangible proof that he was someone who could not be ignored. Now, before we go any further and before we get into the autumn of 1993, it's worth taking kind of a clear-eyed look at what Gary Nelson had already been charged with, tried for, acquitted of in the years before that October night.

Right, okay. Because the picture it paints is extraordinary and it does go kind of almost entirely unreported. Now, there is a lot of me piecing bits and bobs together here.

Right. There is also a bulletin that we talk, or that I have to lean quite heavily on. Yeah.

So it will get mentioned multiple times. Fair enough. I've tried not to be repetitive, but you never know with these things, right? Sometimes that's just how the cookie crumbles.

Yeah, 100%. And there might be kind of references that don't initially make sense until I get later into the story. Fair enough.

But they are important to kind of know the context of. Anyhow. Fair enough.

So a leaked all forces police bulletin, which was obtained by a national newspaper when Nelson was released from prison in 1999, lays out that record somewhat. So we know that he was charged with and acquitted of the attempted murder of two North London police officers. Wow.

Two. It was a deliberate and targeted attack on the police. That's kind of all I really know about it though.

But it was acquitted. And then he had also been acquitted of two further attempted murders, at least one of which was believed to be drug related. Wow, OK.

So, and then there's also this. In 1993, the same year as the Cato Road murders, Gary Nelson was acquitted of the attempted murder of a doorman outside of a nightclub in Victoria. Right.

Again, not a lot known about it. OK. But just think about what that told him.

It's not, you know, I don't think it's what the police intended to tell him or the prosecution service intended to tell him. But in practice, it's what it communicated was that he could do this. Yeah.

And he's going over there. The evidence wouldn't hold that the system, for all its weight and authority, couldn't reach him. No.

You would feel untouchable, wouldn't you? Of course you would. Of course you would. The police bulletin also noted that throughout his periods of imprisonment, his behaviour had been consistently disruptive.

He was suspected of running drug networks from inside. He had assaulted staff and made serious threats against them. Against them, sorry.

And his custodial record was so alarming that he would eventually become, by some accounts, the most transferred prisoner in the British prison system. He was moved over 30 times as the service attempted, without success, to break his grip on whichever wing he occupied. That is mad.

He's like Derren Brown, I swear to God. He just has this, I don't know how. Yeah.

I don't know if it's literally just fear or the connections he has. It's not ever really kind of documented. I couldn't find it publicly available, really.

That he just seemed to have this innate power to control every situation he was in and all of the people around him. To have that, I mean, obviously, terribly bad. Don't, you know, being that level of fear and manipulation and all the rest of it, like, is terrifying.

But there is a part of me that's a bit like, oh, the things I could do. Babe, babe. One forensic expert giving evidence at a trial described Nelson in three words, a classic psychopath.

Do you want to take back what you said? You know what, I'm going to stand by it. I'm going to stand by it. Nelson was not a man who had ever lost control.

Yeah. He was a man for whom other people's lives simply did not register as having meaningful weight. Yeah, fair.

A man who operated according to his own internal logic, a logic built entirely around status, dominance and the elimination of anything he perceived as a threat to either of those things. By the autumn of 1993, Gary Lloyd Nelson was 24 years old, heavily armed, connected to organised crime, acquitted of multiple attempted murders and operating in a city where the institutions designed to contain men like him were underpowered, under-resourced and functionally unable to stop him. Yeah, 24 as well.

And he had that extremely short fuse, which was about to be lit. OK. So it's September of 1993.

They're about seven weeks-ish before Cato Road. Right. A builder named Gary Keywell is driving through South London.

He is behind a black BMW that is moving very slowly. It's hesitating at junctions and it's holding up traffic behind it. The driver of the BMW is Gary Nelson.

Keywell grows impatient and he does what most other drivers would do. He attempts to overtake. The BMW pulls over and Gary Nelson goes to get out of the car.

And the two men exchange gestures. Then Keywell notices something. In the passenger seat of the BMW, a girl is reaching into the footwell and she hands Nelson something.

And Nelson raises his arm. Five shots fired from an automatic pistol fly into Keywell's van. They hit the bonnet and the radiator.

Gary Keywell, who had done nothing more than to attempt to pass a car that was moving slowly, luckily survived. Thank God for that. But what an overreaction.

Five shots for an overtake. That's insane. This incident is sometimes treated as a bit of a footnote in the story of Gary Nelson.

A side note on his criminal record, something. But it came up at trials. But I want to spend a moment on it because I think it's one of the most revealing things we know about him.

The road rage shooting is not evidence of someone who lost control in an extreme situation. It's an overtake on South London Road. That is not an extreme situation.

No, exactly. It's a Tuesday. It's nothing.

And yet Nelson's response, which is immediate, violent and potentially lethal, tells us that the threshold between perceived slight and deadly force was for him effectively zero. Yeah. Christ.

This is the same man who seven weeks later would organise and lead a planned execution in Clapham. And the consistency between those two events and what would follow is important to understand. Because Cato Road was not an aberration.

It's not an explosion of rage that overtook him. It was the same instinct operating on a larger scale with more planning behind it. Keywell was lucky to survive and he did give evidence.

And Nelson was convicted at the Old Bailey the following year of 1994 of possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life. And he was sentenced to eight years in prison. By the time that conviction came, two people were dead.

So we also need to introduce another player in this story now. William Danso was 31 years old. He was from Ghana and he was the father of five children.

And by every account, a gentle giant. He was a big man with a quiet, calm authority. He had built a life for himself in South London and he'd worked hard at it.

He was a security guard and doorman at Brixton Academy, one of South London's most iconic music venues. And he also worked at Street Communications, a mobile phone shop in Streatham. He was, everyone who knew him agreed, very good at his job.

He was professional and measured. Someone who could read a room instantly and diffuse a situation without escalating it. The kind of man security work needs.

Someone who could handle confrontation through presence and calm rather than aggression. And it was those qualities that cost him his life. At some point before October of 1993, Gary Nelson had tried to get into the Brixton Academy.

William was on the door and William turned him away. We don't know exactly why. Perhaps Nelson was too drunk.

Perhaps he'd been barred. Perhaps William Danso had simply read the situation and made a judgment. The reason doesn't really matter.

What matters is this. To Nelson, being refused entry was not an inconvenience to shrug off. In the world we've described, and in this culture of fear is respect that defined his existence, it was a direct challenge.

It was a public one. A doorman had told him no in front of people. And remember, this is the man who fired five shots at a van driver for overtaking him.

Consider what being turned away from a club in front of a crowd meant. Yeah, I mean... So then on the 20th of October 1993, the two men crossed paths for the second time. So William Danso was working at the phone shop in Streatham when a confrontation broke out involving a friend of Nelson's.

Danso did exactly what he always did. He quietly and professionally, with a minimum amount of fuss, stepped in and defused it. Or tried to at least.

The judge at Nelson's eventual trial would describe it as textbook. A man doing his job with composure and skill. Nelson, a colleague of Danso's would later recall, warned him that he would make him pay for this insolence.

For God's sake. So two acts of professionalism. Two times a man simply did his job well.

And that was all it took. That was the entirety of the grievance. That night, Nelson gathered two accomplices.

Their identities, despite everything that follows, will never be established. Oh wow. But they armed themselves.

Two handguns, a Browning 9mm semi-automatic and an Italian made... Forgive me. Tanfagolio? Self-loading pistol and a baseball bat. They had 17 rounds between them.

They knew where William Danso lived. They drove to Cato Road in Clapham in a black BMW. They parked.

They walked to the door of number 31. Across the road at number 28, PC Patrick Dunn had arrived on his bicycle a short time earlier. He was dealing with that minor domestic dispute that we mentioned.

So it was the householder had had property damaged while he'd been away from his home. Right, okay. It was a normal evening.

It was routine work. It was nothing dramatic. Yeah.

None of them knew what was about to happen. Not the householder, not his friend who had come with him to the door to see Patrick Dunn and not Patrick Dunn. Yeah.

The three men knocked on the door of 31 Cato Road. Hang on, does that sound like it was the three of them, doesn't it? Maybe a little bit, yeah. The three men in the BMW got out of the car and knocked on the door of 31 Cato Road.

William Danso opened it. And what happened next took only seconds. The three men opened fire on William Danso in the hallway of his own home.

Twelve shots fired. Six bullets struck him, including the fatal shot that severed arteries in his abdomen. And he collapsed in his doorway.

He had not threatened them. He had not provoked them. He had simply done his job.

And then that night simply opened his front door. That's ridiculous. And across the road, PC Patrick Dunn had heard those gunshots.

He radioed it in, quote, some shots fired. And then he steps out of number 28 and into the road. It said that he then kind of turns back and shouts, get in, get in, to the two people at number 28.

So the people he was speaking to, right. And tells them to get in. And like he is in full uniform and he has a high visibility jacket on.

It's clearly visible. Nobody who saw him could have been in any doubt that he was a police officer. Or at least an emergency services worker.

You know, you could potentially have got confused with an ambulance driver, maybe. But like, you know, you know what you're looking at. Yeah, he's connected to it in some way.

So PC Patrick Dunn saw those three men coming out of that house opposite. And they would have seen him. Gary Nelson raised the pistol and fired a single shot.

The bullet passed through Patrick Dunn's hand and into his chest. He died instantly. The three men walked to the waiting BMW.

As they moved away from the bodies of two men they had just killed, witnesses heard them laughing. And one of them then fired a shot into the air, a celebratory shot, as though they had done something worth celebrating. Oh, brilliant.

Yeah. Why not? William Danso was 31 years old and he left behind five children. Patrick Dunn was 44 years old.

He had been a police officer for three years and he'd been in Cato Road for minutes. He had heard something that frightened him and he had gone towards it, unarmed, alone and without a moment's hesitation. By the following morning, flowers had been laid at the scene.

Bullet holes were still visible in the wall and door of number 31. Ivan Dunn, Patrick's brother, who was 40, turned 40 years old that same week, gave a press conference. He stood in front of cameras, still in the shock of it, and said that once the shock had passed, he expected he would grow to despise the killers.

He said it quietly and without bravado. He was just a man being asked to process, in public, something no one should have to process at all. On the 13th of November, three weeks after the murders, a memorial service was held.

Prime Minister John Major attended and paid a personal tribute. Former British heavyweight boxing champion Gary Mason, himself a clapper man, clapper man, made a direct appeal to the local community to help bring the killers to justice. Patrick's colleague Barry Critchley gave a reading and his former colleague Fred Tillsley paid tribute.

Stephen Dunn, Patrick's brother, stood up and called on the police to do everything in their power to protect officers. The church was full. In the immediate aftermath of the murders, the investigation did move quite quickly.

A witness had noted down the registration number of the black BMW that the men were seen getting into and leaving Cato Road. And, you know, it wasn't long before they worked out it was the identical plate of a car connected to Gary Nelson. So the police had their suspect immediately.

Right. Five weeks after the murders, Gary Nelson was arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder and he was brought in for questioning. Okay.

And it is here at this point in which, kind of, if you want to understand what kind of man he was, right, buckle up. Right, okay. During the police interview, Nelson turned to a sergeant.

Bear in mind he's on camera, on tape and in a room full of police officers and he said, quote, you'll cop it like the other one copped it. Oh! Then he turned to another officer and says, I'll take one of you out again. Oh, good.

This man had just killed the police constable. He had just been arrested in connection with that killing and he was sitting in a police interview room telling the officers around him that they were next. Fucking hell.

So the guns that were used in the Cato Road murders hadn't been found. Right. Police believed that they'd been hidden and we're getting to why, but the police believed that they had been buried in Wandsworth Cemetery.

Okay. Now, separately to this, Nelson's aunt, Rose Nelson, also apparently knew where these guns had been hidden and she organised an expedition. So a group of women in the middle of the night headed into the graveyard to dig up murder weapons before the police could find them.

It's like something out of like a movie. It's insane. However, the group couldn't quite locate the guns.

And the darkness defeated them or kind of someone had quite misremembered which grave it was and they left empty-handed. Okay. But one of the women on that night, she was a very deeply religious woman.

She was named Sandra Francis and Sandra was tormented by what she knew. She could not let it go and she began making anonymous phone calls to the police trying to guide them towards where the guns were buried. Okay.

And to make sure that they could find the right graves, she had gone back into the graveyard and she'd marked them using lipstick to draw crosses on the gravestones where she had been told the guns were. Police then searched Wandsworth Cemetery and guided by those anonymous calls and the lipstick markers, they found the guns buried in a sealed metal container. The bags that the weapons were wrapped in had actually originally been amenity kits that were handed out by Virgin Atlantic on its transatlantic flights.

Okay. Nelson's mother, Shirley Wright, had flown the airline to Miami with a relative. Okay.

And her fingerprints were on those bags. Oh, for God's sake. So they've got the guns.

They've got a fingerprint now. They've got on-camera threats. They've got the BMW.

Surely the case is made. Yeah, you would think so. The CPS disagreed.

What? They decided the evidence was insufficient to proceed to trial. The charges were dropped and Gary Nelson walked out of the frame. That's insane.

That is absolutely insane. How much more do they need? We actually need some sort of in-the-moment photograph that all of the rest of this circumstantial evidence, which is very clearly proper evidence. Oh no, no, it's not enough.

That's mental. Sorry, it's annoying. And I'm going to mention this now, but I also come back to it to explain it in a bit more detail in a bit.

But obviously the Dunn family were devastated. And Patrick's brother, Stephen, would later kind of say that the police had always believed that they'd had enough and it was the CPS that kept saying otherwise. And the family didn't accept it and they did keep writing letters and they did keep pushing.

And I'll kind of come back to those letters in a bit. But what I can say now is that the family refused with extraordinary dignity and persistence to let the case be shelved. But for now, there was nothing more to be done.

The case sat officially open and practically stalled. And Gary Nelson, acquitted of conspiracy to murder, the charges against him fully dropped, was for the moment free. But it wouldn't be for long.

But obviously not because of Cato Road. Right, okay. Nelson went to Jamaica after the shootings.

So he left the country. He simply got on a plane and went. But when he came back, he was arrested for the road raid shooting we've already described.

In 1994 at the Old Bailey, he was convicted of possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life and sentenced to eight years. Ten days into that prison sentence at Belmarsh High Security Prison in South East London, he attacked prison officers. Six months were added to his term.

What followed over the next five years was a prison career that was, in its own way, as extraordinary as anything he had done outside. Oh, brilliant. He became, by some accounts, like I said, the most transferred prisoner in the British prison system.

He was moved more than 30 times, as the service tried, without success, to break his hold on the wings that he occupied. The theory was that constant movement would disorientate him and would prevent him from building networks and undermine his control. It did not work! Yeah, I was gonna say.

He also ran naked from his cell on at least one occasion, having first covered himself in baby oil, which apparently I can't say, and so the officers could not get a grip on him and he lunged at them with a broom handle. I mean, the lunging with a broom handle is not great, but... He also, somehow, managed to break free from a straitjacket. Oh! And apparently he intimidated some of the most hardened criminals in the British prison system into handing over their phone credits so that he could call his many, many girlfriends.

Oh, Lord. He was also suspected of running a drug supply network from inside his cell. Of course he was.

Of course he was. A senior police officer commenting at the time described him simply as someone for whom the ordinary mechanisms of control, prison, punishment, consequence, appeared to have no meaningful effect. Good.

When Nelson was released from prison in 1999, having served five years of his eight-year sentence, a national newspaper obtained that copy of the All Forces Bulletin that Scotland Yard had circulated about him. And the document is remarkable for what it contains. So, like I said earlier, it records that Nelson had been found not guilty of the attempted murder of two North London police officers.

He'd been not charged and acquitted of assault. It also records two further acquittals for attempted murder, at least one believed to be drug-related. So that's two police officers, two civilians, four attempted murder acquittals, over and above everything else on his record, over and above the four convictions of violence between 1985 and 1990.

It's over and above the Victoria nightclub doorman acquittal in 1993, and over and above the road rage conviction. And the bulletin ends with an assessment from a senior officer about what Nelson's release from prison in 1999 means. He says, quote, he hasn't changed.

He's threatening to get hold of guns again straight away. He is a grave danger to the public and the police. And the officer was right.

Gary Nelson was released and he returned to South London and he returned to the criminal underworld. And the murders of William Danso and Patrick Dunn remained officially open on a shelf somewhere while the Dunn family continued to push a system that continued to resist them. Now, the case was officially reopened in 2001, which is partly because of new legislation around bad character evidence.

That had opened up lines of prosecution that hadn't previously existed. And it was also partly because forensic and investigative capabilities had improved. And partly, significantly, because Patrick Dunn's family never stopped pushing.

So, like I said, his brother Steve had written to the CPS, kind of comparing the evidence in this case to the standard of evidence accepted in other murder prosecutions. He had been met repeatedly with the same response, not enough. But the family had pressed on regardless.

And when the CPS had at one point instructed police to effectively shelve the investigation, Stephen Dunn put his objections in writing and refused to accept it. Eight years of that. It was eight years of letters and calls and refusals to go away.

And then Detective Chief Inspector Steve Richardson was assigned to lead a second investigation. One of the first moves was a crime watch appeal and the response changed everything. A man came forward, a former fellow prisoner who had served time alongside Nelson at Wormwood Scrubs in 1994.

He told detectives that Nelson had talked to him in prison, had boasted to him, and apparently without any concern for who might be listening, talked about the night in Clapham. He talked about how he had shot that copper and, you know, the one on the bike. Oh, good.

And, you know, that's, they are the words of a man who thinks he's not being recorded, isn't it really? And that was the first kind of thread and kind of why I can, I want to come back to the letters is because actually it was really significant. It was a really significant turning point because all, even though it had been reopened and crime watch had happened, that's why this had come forward. The CPS was still very reluctant.

And in those letters that Stephen wrote to the CPS, they'd made specific and carefully argued comparisons. So at that time, the killer, Michael Stone, had been convicted of the Russell murders. Oh, we covered him.

Indeed. And that's a case that hinged substantially on the evidence of a cellmate who had heard Stone admit to the killings. Steve Dunn pointed out in writing that in the Nelson case, they had a cellmate who had heard Nelson admit to the killing of a police officer and that they actually had considerably more evidence on top of that than the Russell case had had.

If Stone's conviction could be based on that standard, why couldn't Nelson's? But yeah. Oh, hang on. Sorry, I've lost my place now.

So that's kind of the first big thread that comes through. We've also then got Sandra, so the woman with the lipstick crosses. She was traced.

And eight years on, and the weight of what she'd been carrying hadn't really diminished for her. And she agreed to give formal evidence, which is very brave. Yeah, really brave.

And then kind of came the most one of, in this case, one of the most extraordinary pieces of international detective work. Okay. So Eugene, and if I'm pronouncing this wrong, I'm really sorry.

It was Eugene Dabber, I think, had been the manager of the Streatham phone shop. So Eugene had been the manager of the Streatham phone shop where William Danso had worked. So the shop where on the day of the murders, Danso had defused that confrontation.

Eugene had witnessed something kind of the day before the murders, which was Gary Nelson producing the pistol from his jacket and threatening in front of witnesses to put a bullet in a man's belly. So Eugene had seen that gun. Right.

And he knew what it looked like. He could identify it. Wow.

Okay. But Eugene had left the country in 1996. Oh, good.

He had jumped bail in connection with a separate fraud, which was a £3 million cigarette scam. Oh, so not a small one. And he'd been convicted in absence.

Oh, good. He was in Ghana. But detectives went to Ghana and they found him.

And in a highly unusual kind of legal agreement, legal move, Eugene, who was a fugitive convicted of serious fraud, living in another country, agreed to give his evidence by video link from West Africa. Oh. So a satellite connection to a Woolwich Crown Court carried the testimony that would place the murder weapon directly in Gary Nelson's hands on the eve of the killings.

Right. Meanwhile, in February of 2003, a month long surveillance operation had police following Nelson to the US. Oh, while there, he purchased a laser targeting site for his Browning 9mm, a device designed, in the prosecution's words, to make the weapon a more efficient killing machine.

On his return, police raided his London flat and they found the gun and the device. Right. So I probably should have pointed out earlier that it was the Italian pistol, I can't pronounce, that was in the cemetery with the baseball bat.

He kept his Browning because it was his special thing. His special thing. In January of 2004, Gary Nelson was jailed for life for the illegal possession of firearms.

He was already serving time when in October of that year, he was formally charged at last with the 1993 murders of William Danso and PC Patrick Dunn. Finally. The trial was scheduled at Woolwich Crown Court to begin in January of 2006.

Nelson's response to being charged with the murders he had committed 12 years earlier, he declined to attend his own trial. Oh. The trial at Woolwich began, and I've said that, sorry.

Sorry. So yeah, the trial began in January 2006, like I said, 12 years, three months after the night in question. Gary Nelson sat in a prison cell at Belmarsh rather than take a seat in the dock.

Wow. The prosecution built its case on a foundation of interlocking pieces. Taken individually, several of them could be challenged.

Taken together, they formed something the jury of seven men and five women found to be overwhelming. There was the fingerprints of Nelson's mother in a Virgin Atlantic amenity bag used to conceal some of the murder weapons in Wandsworth Cemetery. There was the black BMW seen speeding away from Cato Road.

There was Eugene testifying by satellite link from Ghana, placing the pistol in Nelson's hands. There was the former prison cell mate from Wormwood Scrubs who described Nelson boasting about shooting the police officer. There was the bad character evidence.

So four convictions for violence between 85 and 90. The road race shooting seven weeks before the Cato Road murders. The full weight of what Nelson was admitted under new legislation that hadn't existed at the time of the first failed prosecution.

And then there was the tape. There was Nelson in 1993 on camera in a police interview room turning to a sergeant and saying you'll cop it like the other one copped it. Exactly.

The prosecution's counsel, Richard Horwell, addressed the jury. He said, quote, There can be no doubt that the gunman must have identified PC Dunn as a police officer. He was wearing his uniform and his reflective yellow top.

The intruder raised his hand in which he held a firearm and it was such a casual act to which the gunman responded by laughing as they made good their escape. To some, life is insignificant indeed. End quote.

On the 17th of February 2006, the jury returned their verdict. Guilty. The murder of William Danso.

Guilty. The murder of PC Patrick Dunn. Gary Nelson was in his cell at Belmarsh when the verdict was delivered.

There is no record of his reaction. Outside Woolwich Crown Court, Ivan Dunn spoke to the press. He said that the verdict was correct.

He also said that there was no guarantee that Nelson would ever actually be released when any minimum terms expired. And he said it in a way that a man speaks when justice arrived too late and he has kind of spent too long waiting for it. A relative of William, who some, I could only find one place that gave the name and it's gifty.

Right, okay. Was a William, yeah, was a relative of William Danso also gave a statement. They're two families who had each spent kind of over a decade waiting for this day and it's just very sad but also just exasperated.

Like they're just tired. Yeah. Mr. Justice Wilkie sentenced Nelson to two concurrent life terms and then addressed directly what the evidence had shown.

He said that William Danso had been murdered for acts of so-called disrespect, that Nelson and his accomplices had applied, in the judge's words, some utterly warped sense of values and of their own importance and decided that a man doing his job professionally deserved to die for it. He said that PC Dunn was unarmed and of no immediate threat to Nelson or to anyone and that Nelson had decided he too had to die. The minimum term before parole could even be considered was 35 years.

Gary Lloyd Nelson will not be eligible for release until at least 2038, by which point I'll have recounted all of this and disappeared. He'll be 69 years old. Outside the court, Detective Chief Inspector Steve Richardson spoke to the press.

He said, quote, the murders of William Danso and Patrick Dunn were cold-blooded executions carried out by extremely dangerous men for virtually no reason. Five children have had to grow up without their father because arrogant men felt he had not shown them enough respect. Clapham lost a dedicated community officer and PC Dunn's family lost a son and a brother because courageously he went to investigate on hearing gunfire.

It had taken 12 years, eight months and 28 days. So, some things to kind of, that are noteworthy before we close. Gary Nelson's two accomplices, the two men who were also with him on Cato Road, who had helped plan and carry out the murder of William Danso and had walked away laughing beside Nelson, were never identified.

I can't understand that. They were never charged and they never faced a courtroom or a jury. As of the time of recording, those cases remain open.

Police suspected Nelson of involvement in as many as four other murders beyond the 1993 killings. Those cases also remain unsolved. And this case kind of also raises a harder question, one that I don't think can be answered comfortably, but that should kind of at least be asked out loud.

By the autumn of 1993, Gary Lloyd Nelson had a 21 offence record going back to his mid-teens. He had been acquitted of attempting to murder two police officers. He'd been acquitted of two further attempted murders.

He'd been acquitted of the attempted murder of a doorman earlier in the same year. He killed two people in Clapham. He had been identified in a police bulletin as a grave danger to the public.

He was operating in an environment the Met Police had identified at the highest levels as a serious and growing threat. They had then systematically failed to resource an adequate response to that threat. None of that diminishes Nelson's personal responsibility, not for a moment.

He was a free moral agent who chose repeatedly and deliberately to hurt and kill people. And that's on him. But the question of whether the system was anywhere close to adequate, whether the policing, the intelligence structures, the institutional response to organised gun violence in South London is a question worth sitting with.

Because Patrick Dunn and William Danso are dead. And the system that was supposed to prevent that had been warned specifically and repeatedly that it was coming. Yeah, exactly.

On Cato Road in Clapham, there is a plaque on the wall. It reads simply, Here fell Patrick Dunn, 20th of October 1993. A tree was planted nearby in April of 1994, just six months after his death, dedicated to him by the Mayor of Lambeth.

The community didn't wait to be told to mark the loss. They marked it themselves. In June of 1996, the Police Memorial Trust formally unveiled their own permanent memorial at the site where he fell.

On the 10th anniversary of the murder, his mother, Betty, who would outlive her eldest son by 26 years, stood at his graveyard in a Sutton cemetery with Ivan and Stephen, the family together on a day they should never have had to mark. He is also commemorated in the role of honour at the National Police Memorial. I can't say any of the words in this sentence.

You're doing so well. You're almost there. He is also commemorated in the role of honour at the National Police Memorial in Westminster and in the Books of Remembrance at New Scotland Yard and at Peel Centre in Hendon, alongside every Metropolitan Police Officer who has given their life in service.

In November of 2007, PC Patrick Dunn was posthumously awarded the Metropolitan Police Commissioner's highest commendation. A specialist crime directorate building in Sutton, his hometown, was named Patrick Dunn House in his honour. Members of Parliament tabled a motion in the House of Commons.

It remembered him as a dedicated and popular policeman rooted in his community. It recognised the dignity and decency of the Dunn family in the years since. It thanked every police officer who continues to protect the public in dangerous circumstances.

Patrick's brother, who had spent years writing letters to the CPS, who had printed out messages of support from strangers online and made them into a small book to share with the family and fellow police officers, once described it simply. He said that the police always believed that they'd had the evidence. It was the system that just needed to be made to listen.

And it took 13 years to make them here. We talk about justice often in terms of perpetrators. So the sentence, the years, the conviction.

And those things do matter. They matter enormously to the people who've been wronged. But kind of what I keep coming back to is that this was a man from Carlshorten, a math teacher who became a police officer because he thought it was the most useful thing he could do in the years he had.

A man who had got around on a bicycle and who people knew by name. And a man who, on a Wednesday night in October of 1993, heard something that frightened him and turned towards it. He didn't have to.

He was unarmed. He was alone. There was no backup coming.

Well, no backup that would have been there in time for him to step into the road. He'd shouted at people to get inside to keep them safe. And he was still thinking about them right to the last.

And he stepped into the street and into that danger and he faced it head on. And for that, we should remember him. Here, here.

Well done. Thank you. Thank you very much for that story.

I didn't know anything about it. I knew so little. And to be honest, it's one of those where there is stuff, but it's not as widely reported as you think it might have been.

And I think, you know, archival reporting from the 90s is seemingly harder to get hold of than bloody Tudor crimes. Honestly, I've had the same thing. The case that I'm going to do next time, spoilers, I tried to get hold of some British archive, like British newspaper archive stuff.

Well, you've got to jump through so many hoops. I know. Madness.

Oh, dear. But yeah, and I also feel like William Danso gets really lost in the narrative that in a lot of the reporting, but there isn't actually that much on him. Well, I think it's probably that, you know, not that it should be this way, but I'm assuming it's just because of the fact that a police officer died.

Yes. So it is kind of like, oh, yeah. And then there was this bloke who was the actual intended target.

And we should probably spend a bit of time on him. But a police officer dies. And I just think like the outrage as well.

It is palpable. It's just, you know, the seemingly head in sand approach from central, you know, DOJ, like from central government into local policing, which is just like, hmm, I can't. One man in Brixton.

You have a go. Yeah. You fucking crack it.

See if you can do it. You just have a look at that for us. And if you could let us know after lunch, that'd be great.

It I don't understand the. CPS's decision not to. Seems wild, right? It does.

I mean, I do. I think there's a bit of hesitation because they'd had so many failed attempts at getting him. Potentially.

Yeah. Or I wonder if it was that they kind of I don't know if anything else came out about him afterwards, but potentially they had something bigger brewing and they didn't want to risk it. I don't know.

It just feels ridiculous. Like you would think that a double homicide is big enough that you would want to try and at least see if you could. You'd think like, you know.

Interesting. Well, it took a long time, but luckily they got the end. So when he comes out, I'll be his best friend.

Yeah, of course. When he comes out, this will not be an episode anymore. That's what's going to happen.

Trevor, can someone in about 2038, can someone remind us to take this episode down? Yeah, that'd be great. Because I am scared. Yeah, I mean, he's a scary bastard, I think.

It's also just that I can't believe to be that brazen at the age of 24 to have already been acquitted of four attempts, of five attempted murders at the age of 24 is madness. And I know that he was acquitted. And so therefore it's like, if we go by the letter of the law or whatever, he was found to be innocent of those things.

So that's not to say that he got away with anything. Maybe he was completely innocent. Who knows? Gary been my friend.

But I'm so scared of you. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that he wasn't involved. And to have been in the position where they have seemingly got enough evidence to bring it to trial.

There's no smoke without fire. In some way, he has been found to be connected to those. But at the age of 24, I can't get over how young.

It's madness. It is insanity, isn't it? Well, there you go. Thank you very much, as per usual.

Because, yeah, as I say, I didn't know anything about that case. And it's a really interesting one. So thank you for your research.

You're welcome. We don't need to do the nicings because we've already done them. I think I finished.

I think that might be the end of episode one, season four. And I promise that the the rest of season four, we will be more jovial. We will be more jovial.

It will be. I've snapped out of it too late, but I've snapped out of it. There we go.

That's all good. We get there in the end. It's fine.

Yeah, cool. All right, then, Trevor's. Well, thank you so much for joining us again on season four.

I'm sorry if our little message at the end of season three scared anyone. The amount of messages I got going, why have you done this? No, we're not going anywhere. We've still got some crimes to tell you about.

Don't worry. We'll be back next week. It's my turn.

We're going to stay in the sort of like late 80s, I think. Oh, OK, we'll see. We'll see what happens.

Cool. All right, loves. All right.

We love you. Speak to you soon. Bye bye.