The Law Killers (2 page)

The investigation was one of the biggest ever undertaken in the city. Scores of extra officers were drafted in and new overtime rosters scheduled to run until Christmas were put in place. Everyone who had been in or near Union Street that day was interviewed and a £12,000 reward was offered by the owners of the gunshop. The strongest piece of evidence to emerge was the sighting of a young man with pointed features apparently leaving Gow’s at 9.50 a.m. On the way out of the shop he fumbled with the door handle before walking backwards out of the doorway into the path of pedestrians, pulling up his jacket hood over his head as he departed. Then he ran off down Union Street, carrying two gun cases.

Police considered it possible that the person or persons they sought could have left the city by train, the station being only a few hundred yards from the scene of the crime. Hundreds of rail commuters were questioned and travellers who had used credit cards or cheques to purchase tickets that day were traced. Others who had operated automatic cash dispensers at nearby banks were also tracked down and interviewed. Every new initiative drew a blank. Video film from a security camera in a jeweller’s shop opposite Gow’s was minutely examined frame by frame, but that too seemed to be just another brick wall.

Police turned to the BBC’s
Crimewatch
programme in the hope that national coverage would yield fresh clues. It brought almost a hundred calls offering information and possible identities. Every one of the tip-offs was followed up but none produced the slightest hint as to who had been responsible for the murderous attack on the man who was father to two young boys. After three months, over 7,000 people had been interviewed and 5,000 statements logged in the special major inquiry computer system developed by the Home Office. Still there were no significant results.

Then, on 25 July, more than three months after the mild-mannered Gordon Johnston had been so viciously put to death, police received a brief phone call which brought the moribund inquiry dramatically back to life. A male caller who would not identify himself spoke softly and said haltingly that he knew who had been responsible for the murder. Before he could be questioned further, he added quickly that one of the killers was his relative. Then he rang off.

Such calls are not unusual in major investigations, particularly when large rewards are on offer. Most come from cranks. This one had a ring of truth to it and senior officers were convinced it was genuine. Although the caller had declined to give his name, he had imparted enough information to enable a team of detectives to begin to piece the clues together. After a week they thought they knew the caller’s identity. Cautious approaches were made and finally they arranged to interview him.

An extraordinary story unfolded. The man traced was 43-year-old Lucio Ianetta. He confessed that he had placed the anonymous call because he could no longer endure the strain of reading daily press reports in
The Courier
and
The Evening Telegraph
detailing how the police hunt had reached stalemate, when he knew who had been responsible. Everywhere he went, he said, he seemed to be confronted by posters asking for information about the murder. Staring out at him, he said, was Mr Johnston – ‘God bless him’ – who seemed to be saying to him, ‘You know something about this. What are you going to do about it?’ He could stand it no longer, he explained, so he wanted to unburden himself. Then he recounted how his 21-year-old nephew Ryan Monks had arrived at his home, at 10.30 on the morning of the gunshop raid, in an agitated state and clutching a bag of clothing. Monks had thrown the bag on the floor and pleaded, ‘It went wrong – burn them.’ Uncle Lucio told senior members of the murder team that he had pressed his nephew for an explanation of what he was referring to and Monks had finally blurted out: ‘The boy in the gunshop. He was wasted.’

Mr Ianetta described how, without asking many more questions, he had thrown a jacket, a pair of jeans and trainer shoes – which had been in the bag – onto his living-room fire. ‘I was in a total panic,’ he anxiously explained. ‘You try to help your own.’

It was only later that evening, when he was in a Broughty Ferry pub and saw the evening news on TV, that he realised Monks had been involved in the gunshop killing. He was particularly shocked because, by coincidence, he had known the victim through his father, who had previously been a customer at the shop when he had bought cartridges and gunpowder to take to Italy. Finally, Mr Ianetta told the detectives, who were hanging on his every word, that his nephew’s accomplice on the raid on Gow’s was a young man named Paul who had hired a red Rover car as the getaway vehicle.

At seven o’clock the following morning two teams of armed officers simultaneously raided the Dundee homes of Monks and his 21-year-old friend Paul Mill. What they found stunned even the most experienced of the detectives. The robbery at the gunshop had merely been a means to an end. A thorough search of both houses produced clear evidence of a complex plot to abduct the elderly mother of well-known Dundee bakery owner Robert Brown and hold her to ransom for £200,000. Monks had once worked for Mr Brown’s firm of Rough & Fraser in Kinghorne Road and had intimate knowledge of the Brown family and their habits. The surprised policemen found grubby pieces of paper detailing precisely how and when the kidnap plot would be enacted. Several ransom notes – some purporting to be from an IRA active service unit and typed in red ink – had been prepared, setting out death threats and demands to Mr Brown for cash. Failure to comply, Mr Brown was to be informed, meant he would be told ‘where to find your mother’s corpse’.

The blackmail scheme had its roots in the popular Clint Eastwood film
Dirty Harry
. Just as in the movie, the extortion victim would be instructed to wait at a particular payphone, where he would receive instructions for the handover of the ransom, leading to the eventual release of the hostage. That call box was to be the first in a chain of twelve stretching across Dundee on a route meticulously mapped out by Monks and Mill. The pair had noted the time it would take to travel between each box and the route had been designed to throw off any possible police tail. After arriving at the final destination, Mr Brown was to be handcuffed and hooded and locked in the boot of his own car.

Monks and Mill had a video of
Dirty Harry
and had studied it at length. But this was not the only high-profile crime that the two former schoolmates at Lawside Academy had hatched. Police also found scraps of paper detailing the movement of Post Office cash delivery vans and, by piecing the jigsaw together, discovered that the pair intended to hijack a postal van one Friday morning when it stopped outside a sub-post office in St Giles Terrace – just a few yards from Monks’s home. The driver was to be seized and the van driven by the robbers to either Templeton Woods, on the outskirts of the city, or Monks’s lock-up garage, where the cash would be separated from the rest of the mail.

The raid on the gunshop had been the means to an end for both of these elaborate plans, providing the would-be big-time criminals with the necessary fire power. Given the onslaught on Mr Johnston in Gow’s three months earlier, there seemed little doubt the pair had the inclination to go through with their plans. In addition to the painstaking notes they had prepared, Monks and Mill had assembled a range of other accessories to help them carry out their deadly plots. Police found two sawn-off shotguns, cartridges, camouflage and combat-style clothing, a gas mask, balaclavas, handcuffs, a forged Tayside Police warrant card and an aerosol can. Under the attic floorboards of Monks’s parents’ house, detectives discovered the barrels of shotguns encased in concrete and the butts cut into small pieces. Passport application forms, a map of Dundee (with various locations marked in ink) and numerous magazines about guns and survival were also seized by the murder squad. Several days before the gunshop killing, Monks and Mill had hired a car, a red Rover, and fitted it with false plates, which they duly returned after the ghastly events of that May Monday morning.

It is difficult to know who was most surprised by the sudden conclusion to the murder hunt. After three months, with the inquiry leading nowhere, police had overnight rounded up two men for murder and robbery and had apparently foiled a kidnap attempt on an elderly woman, as well as an armed raid on a Post Office cash delivery van.

Monks and Mill were just as taken aback. With each passing day, they had grown more confident they would never be linked with the frenzied attack on the gentle Mr Johnston. Without the phone call from the conscience-stricken Lucio Ianetta, that state of affairs might have gone on indefinitely. There was nothing to link them with the murder-robbery and, unlike the usual suspects in that type of crime, they had no police records. They were improbable criminals, far less killers. Both came from respectable families and both were in stable relationships with decent young women. Monks had two children – the youngest born just two weeks after the death of Mr Johnston – and Mill was a father-to-be. There wasn’t even that much to connect them to each other. Although they had been schoolmates, they had drifted together only in the lead-up to the Gow’s raid after each became jobless. Neither was known as drinkers and they spent most of their time together in each other’s homes. Bored, they watched videos of crime films such as
Dirty Harry
and discussed guns and survival techniques. Then, for thrills, they started to turn their fantasies into reality by plotting their own series of crimes.

By the time the case came to trial, however, their friendship appeared to have evaporated. Each claimed they had simply been the driver of the getaway car, waiting outside the gunshop while the other had entered to carry out the relentless axe attack on the unfortunate Mr Johnston. They told how they had gone to the shop equipped with two-way radios and had devised a series of ‘bleep’ codes to let the other know when to bring the car to the scene and to indicate when the coast was clear for the one who had entered the shop to leave. Their stories were fundamentally the same, only each put himself in the car and the other at the murder scene. During the fifteen days they spent sitting together in the dock at the High Court in Perth, Monks and Mill never spoke and studiously ignored each other, consistent with their pleas that the other was the killer.

Part of the Crown case against the men was a video film the police had acquired from the closed-circuit television security system of the jeweller’s shop opposite Gow’s. Forensic officers had used special computerised enhancement facilities at Dundee Institute of Technology and the Scottish Police College to improve the images which showed a Rover car, similar to the one the pair had hired, passing the gunshop during the crucial period. It revealed two men in the vehicle but did not distinguish which of them had been driving. In the end, it did not appear particularly to matter to the jury. They took the view Monks and Mill had acted in concert, each guilty in law for the actions of the other. After an absence of just over two hours, they returned to find both men guilty of all charges.

Jailing each of them for life, Lord Mayfield told the two young killers that their crimes had amounted to ‘a cruel and sadistic atrocity’. Monks and Mill listened in silence, then, as they turned away to begin their terms, the eyes of the ashen-faced pair met for the first time since they had sought to incriminate each other. It was the closest they had come to communicating in public, but they would share many words in the long years that lay ahead.

Although the jury did not distinguish between the young killers, the parole board did. Mill was released on licence after serving thirteen years. Monks was detained for a year longer before being allowed back into the community.

Lucio Ianetta, the uncle who said he wilted under the unwavering gaze of a dead man pictured on a poster, never claimed the £12,000 reward.

2

BETRAYAL

In downtown Dundee the clubs were coming out, drunks were quarrelling at the taxi ranks and the peace was being breached at the takeaways. In the housing estates, wives were falling out with abusive husbands and contemplating calling for help. In dark corners, the odd housebreaker was considering the opportunities. It was the usual mildly lawless weekend and Sergeant Fiona Cameron expected more disturbances before her Saturday-night-Sunday-morning mobile patrol shift would draw to a close. The paperwork would be irritating but keeping order was why she had joined Tayside Police. And it was good to be busy.

When the message came in from headquarters, it sounded routine at first. She should attend a house fire at 39 Clepington Court, a block of modern flats not far from the centre of town and close to the football grounds of the city’s two senior football clubs. At least it would make a change from the drunks, she thought.

But then she was told something that would make that day in November 1993 one she would remember for the rest of her life. Firefighters at the scene had discovered a body in the burning house. Even then she was unprepared for what she found when she entered the flat.

The burned corpse was that of the female occupant, and she recognised her at once. She was 27-year-old Irene Martin, a policewoman colleague and her death was not a result of the blaze. She lay in a pool of blood and the smoke-covered walls and bed clothing were blood-splattered. Later, Sergeant Cameron was to learn from medical examiners that the attractive constable had suffered 30 stab and cut wounds, some of them on her hands and arms as she had attempted to fight off her attacker. Others were to her brain and vital neck arteries. The indiscriminate slashes had also severed her voice box.