Original subtitles

December 1995.

A brutal discovery is made on a farm in Retondon, Essex.

Most people could imagine what a shotgun does to a person at very close range.

It was a horrific scene. They were very, very significant injuries, almost to the

point where the head was removed from the body.

As the investigation unfolds, detectives begin examining the victims' backgrounds

and possible connections in an effort to uncover who wanted them dead.

This had been an execution in a quiet location in Essex.

No footprints, no tyre tracks, no forensic evidence at all. This really

was a professional job.

It looks like there has been a power struggle between top criminals.

and that somebody has stepped out of line and they've been dealt with.

Rettenden, a quiet rural village near Chelmsford, with a population of around

2,000.

Rettenden is the epitome of rural Essex, made famous by the paintings of John

Constable. Rettenden is in a fairly affluent part of Essex. It's just

farmers' fields and hedgerows and country lanes on what you imagine an

English countryside scene is, and it's just quite... remotely populated not

many people living around there they have lots of nice pubs to go out for a

lunch and a pub drink and also lots of listed buildings this is not an area

you'd expect violence and certainly not the area you'd expect to find the

remnants of a brutal triple murder

on the morning of the 7th of december

1995

A morbid discovery on a secluded track near Cherry Tree Farm in Retondon turns

this quiet corner of the countryside into a crime scene.

Two people were in that area and noticed a Range Rover parked up in a small

lane and thought it was quite unusual and went over to have a look and see if

everything was okay.

if they could do anything or, you know, just generally being nosy, I guess, just

to see what had happened.

And as they approached the car, one of them noticed that there was people

inside it and tapped on the window and they could see that there was blood

inside the car and that two people in the front seat were covered in blood and

there were significant injuries to those people.

They then soon saw that there was a third person slumped down in the back

seat.

They were very, very significant injuries, almost to the point where the

head was removed from the body.

Stunned and horrified by what they've seen, they quickly ring the police. This

brings police to a site called Workhouse Lane at the back of Cherry Tree Farm,

where this vehicle has been found.

The location, as far as policing is concerned, couldn't have been worse.

It was down a very narrow lane.

quite isolated and built up with hedgerows and trees either side.

There was one house within sight of the scene, so house-to-house inquiries were

hopeless. Any noise that would have been heard at the time of the murder would

not have been heard by anyone else because people were living miles away

from the scene.

There was a frost on the ground with a slight snowfall.

which, by the time I arrived, was beginning to melt.

So from an investigator's point of view, the scene could not have been worse.

And going back from the scene, up the lane, you were knee-deep in mud. So it

was very difficult to get vehicles down there.

By the time I arrived there were a lot of people in attendance, including the

press, because it doesn't take the press long to get there with their satellite

dishes and the rest.

One of the main things is to keep people who are not involved with gathering

evidence away from the scene.

There is a tendency with any crime scene for people to get attracted to it.

and that does not help the Scenes of Crime officers.

So you need to have some sort of a cordon and keep people back from the

scene.

As a senior investigating officer, of course, I am entitled to go close up to

the scene under the instructions of the Scenes of Crime officers who create a

safe route into and out of the scene.

So I saw these three characters in the Range Rover.

I had no idea who they were or what the significance of their deaths was.

It was crucial to know who these people were because it gave us a point of

investigation.

I knew only too well that this was going to be a serious investigation.

We set up an office at the nearest police station to the scene.

I put out a request to Essex Police in general asking

the various detective chief inspectors of the divisions to let me have

one or two or maybe three men from their staff so that I could create a team.

At the scene, investigators are looking for clues left behind by those

responsible for the murders.

This case involved a shooting and the use of a shotgun.

When a shotgun is used, the shells can be discarded around the area where it

took place.

Officers would hope that those items would be there.

From there, you can get forensics from the cases themselves.

They can link to other shootings, what they call striation marks.

So there are lots of things you can gather from that.

Of course, in this particular case, you don't have the weapon itself.

Officers then would start to look outside of the car itself.

You'd be fingerprinting, taking DNA swabs. You could imagine the whole scene

really is being taken care of in a forensic way.

You then look at, well, how did that person who did this get here?

In 1995, CCTV wasn't as it is now.

There was some, but it wasn't as prevalent as it is now. So you're also

talking about the countryside.

So realistically, there might not be any cameras at all.

In a secluded area like that as well, in the countryside, then witnesses are

going to be very, very rare. You hope to find one, but in this case, of course,

there were none. There was nobody around at the time.

Nobody could get information to say, I've just seen...

or heard something, so it was so far away from buildings and people. That's a

tough ask for officers at that stage, with all the things that you would hope

to get, witnesses, CCTV, sightings of something.

None of that existed.

The police were to find seven shotgun cartridges scattered around the area,

but other than that, there was no signs of where the murderers had made their

escape, no footprints, no tyre tracks, no forensic evidence at all.

This really was a professional job.

In this particular case as well, the pathologist who attended the scene felt

that because of the nature of the forensics that would need to be gleaned

from this, that the whole car with the bodies inside was lifted away and taken

to a secure forensic pound so that it could be meticulously dealt with in a

secure and with a forensic protection kind of environment.

Within 24 hours of the murders, the investigation team get their first major

break.

One of the phone calls we got was from Donna. And Donna

turned out to be the common-law wife or girlfriend of Rolf.

Donna loved him.

And they had a relationship which was up and down, if I can put it that way.

But I said to Donna, you know, what is he doing in this Range Rover down that

lane?

She said, well, I don't know, I can't really help you. And I said, well, you

know, how do you arrange to meet anyone?

And she said, well, I think he said he's going to meet Mickey the pilot.

That meant nothing to me, but it was a start.

So that was our dealings with Donna. And after that, the relatives

come forward in relation to Tucker and Tate.

And we soon identified who they were and what their position was in the criminal

world of Essex.

These three were serious Essex criminals of the higher

echelons. We're not talking about, you know, tutney apenny guys who are doing

shoplifting and a bit of theft.

These were up there.

On December 7th, 1995, in a quiet corner of Retondon, a gruesome discovery is

made. Three men are found executed near a secluded farm.

The three victims are identified as 38-year-old Tony Tucker, 37

-year-old Pat Tate, and 26-year-old Craig Rolfe.

Victimology in any murder case is basically understanding the victim.

There's always that saying that people say, if you understand your victim, you

may understand how they died. So what is their lifestyle like?

And so the officers start to look at who are these three men that are inside this

vehicle who have come to such significant harm and understand who they

are, what their lifestyle is, what their job is, who their families are, their

friends, what their movements are, all this.

would be something that would be very important when you are lacking such

other things as well, such as CCTV or witnesses at the time.

And as soon as the officers started to look into these three men, they saw what

kind of lifestyle these three men led.

Tony Tucker was a nightclub doorman from Essex but he was an awful lot more than

that.

Tony Tucker wasn't just someone that could handle himself. He was also

someone that was very connected.

He did security for a lot of high-profile underworld figures and also

people in the public eye. For instance, security for hugely successful boxer at

the time, Nigel Benn. And if you can do security for boxers, keeping them in

order and keeping other boxers that might want to punch them, that means

that you are capable of very much holding your own and also not scared of

violence.

Tucker recruited Pat Tate really because he was such a big and intimidating

figure.

He was an amateur bodybuilder. He was a man you really didn't want to cross.

Seven years before the murders, Senior Investigating Officer Ivan Dibley came

face to face with Pat Tate.

When I was the DI at Brentwood, we had a series of armed robberies committed.

which I knew that Tate was involved with.

I'd never met him, but we had certain intelligence to suggest that he'd done

armed robberies.

So I decided to go and see him in prison.

We sat in an interview in prison, and Tate came in, and I'd never seen such a

man. He was enormous.

He filled the doorway.

He was a huge man.

Very, very intimidating when he just looked at me.

I spoke for about 20 minutes. I put to him what I thought he had done,

and if he was to admit them to me, because he was serving a lengthy

sentence, we could probably get the offences written off the books.

Tate just looked at me, didn't say a word for 20 minutes, and at the end of

that, turned round and walked out, and left us sitting there.

The third man inside that car was Craig Rolfe, much younger than the others at

26 years old, but associated with them very closely in his life.

He was a drug taker. He was sometimes out of control through cocaine. He was

Tucker's driver.

So wherever Tucker wanted to go, Rolfe would drive him around.

Forensic examination of the vehicle and bodies reveals key details about the

gruesome attack.

The element of surprise was clear by the state of the bodies where they were

found the next day.

As detectives begin piecing together the events leading up to the killings, Essex

Police launch a nationwide murder investigation known as Operation

Century.

They opened what's called Operation Century, which is the name given to an

operation at that time.

Faced with no witnesses, no CCTV of relevance, forensics taking time, but

you might have your forensics at the scene, but you haven't got somebody to

link the forensics to that you might have forensics on them to link them

because nobody was there. There's no weapon.

There was huge pressure on Essex police to find the perpetrators and find them

quickly. They didn't know exactly what they were dealing with. Was this a

dispute that was just going to be isolated and contained to the three

people who died?

Or was it part of a wider campaign of violence? Or would there be revenge

attacks? So it was absolutely essential that police found the perpetrators

quickly.

There were lots of possible motives and lots of potential suspects who might

have had a reason for carrying out this what can only be described as a brutal

execution when you investigate something like this and you're trying to find

information from people to help build a picture of that person or what might

have happened on that day you know fortunate as we are as police officers

to go and speak to most people they will do their best to help but when you're

dealing with people whose life is within criminality within gangs or uh you know

they don't want to talk to you most of the time there is a code of silence and

breaking that code of silence could cause them all sorts of problems uh with

with other people in that area so you know trying to break those people down

and trying to find a way in to say come on help us these are three men that have

died help us in some way to try and find out who's killed them kind of washes

over a lot of people because they just won't talk to police the police are

there enemy in terms of the criminality they do or their adversary really. They

don't want to talk, they can be respectful but they're just not going to

tell you anything.

So it's very different when you're talking to people whose life is in

criminality to get them to open up to you. They won't do it 99% of the time

and if they do do it they fear the consequences of that.

So police really struggled to make headway in their investigation into this

appalling crime?

Police begin looking into 38-year-old Tony Tucker.

They work to understand the victim's movements, associations and possible

motives for the killing.

In the era of the late 80s, early 90s, ecstasy completely dominated the

nightclub scene. It had appeared at the end of that decade and had taken over

from alcohol and cocaine as being the drug of choice. You could pop an ecstasy

pill, maybe two, and dance all night.

nightclubs quickly realised whilst this was very popular people would also then

stop drinking alcohol or drink alcohol less and so a lot of nightclubs would

then take a piece of drug dealers take an agreement that they would you know

you'd be able to sell drugs in here but we will get some of that money back that

was happening in Essex that was happening in pretty much everywhere else

and you know countryside raves and nightclub raves illegal raves all over

take a pill dance all night you've got a controlled audience and it's a

controlled audience that happens to pay a lot of money and go out regularly for

that privilege they were often being sold in nightclubs where the control

was by the doorman so the security firm like tony tucker's would have a place

locked down like raquel's in basildon and if anyone tried to sort

of undercut them or try to sell without permission they were probably going to

get in for a beating so That was the scene that they were in. So it was kind

of a dangerous world, but they were obviously making good money out of it.

Just a few short weeks before this horrendous triple murder was the

shocking death of teenage clubber Leah Betts.

Leah Betts had taken an ecstasy tablet at Raquel's nightclub on the eve of her

18th birthday. She'd become gravely ill, rushed to hospital.

And in the final hours of her short life, her parents are taking a picture

of her hooked up to a drip with all of this medical equipment on her to warn

young people about the dangers of drugs.

Not only are they only a few weeks apart, not only are they a few miles

apart, but also Tony Tucker, who's found in that Range Rover, was head of

security at Raquel's nightclub where... Leah Betts bought and ingested this

fatal ecstasy tablet.

He's involved in making sure who goes in and out of that nightclub.

This national newspaper story, national media story, this core celeb everywhere

of the tragic death of Leah Betts, don't do ecstasy, who are these monsters

selling these ecstasy tablets?

One of those individuals,

Tony Tucker, head of security at Rakow's nightclub, is then found dead just a few

short weeks later.

newspapers, people in Essex, the police, are all very quickly linking these two

happenings.

There was that theory, albeit it didn't last particularly long, that maybe this

was in some sort of retaliation for the death of Leah Betts, but that was soon

eliminated when officers started to look deeper into possible reasons why this

might have happened.

News of the Triple Gangland murder spreads, putting pressure on

investigators to find those responsible.

They didn't have a lot to go on. They knew who had died, and they were then

able to work out when did they last make a phone call. There was phone calls to

various girlfriends, so they sort of knew, well, that's the last time we know

they were alive.

They certainly didn't really know what time they arrived at Workhouse Lane,

where they were killed.

The police eventually decided it was 7 o'clock, but there's a lot of other

claims that it was much later in the evening that the murder occurred.

So it was quite challenging, and basically it was only going to be solved

by somebody who would have been there confessing or somebody boasting about

it, or they would somehow sort of catch wind of it, maybe from an informant who

would go and give them information. So it was going to be quite a difficult

inquiry.

Detectives believe Mickey the pilot may hold the key to solving the murders, but

without evidence, the investigation risks going cold.

Then, an unexpected breakthrough provides the answer they've been

searching for.

The discovery of three executed men on December 7th, 1995, sparks a major

murder investigation known as Operation Century.

This was a huge media story.

The death of three men in a Range Rover in the middle of the countryside

produced headlines right across the country in a lot of the newspapers and

on TV and radio.

Their only significant lead comes from Craig Rolfe's partner, Donna, who gives

them the name Mickey the Pilot.

You need a little bit of luck with investigations, and I had occasion with

my deputy to go to police headquarters on other things connected with the

inquiry.

And we were having a cup of tea and a piece of cake in the canteen, and one of

our intelligence officers from the Crime Intelligence Department was...

just sitting along the table and i said to him i said um you don't know anyone

called mickey the pilot do you he said yes gov he said i think i've got a file

on him well you can imagine how how i felt i thought this is great

within 20 minutes he brought the file to me and

sure enough there's a file on mickey the pilot which related to michael steele

Michael Steele was known as a drug dealer, which gave us a link with the

three deceased people.

He also could fly a plane and also had access to motorboats.

And that was beginning to formulate something of a story that we could, you

know, work on as to why maybe this job had happened.

To make their case stronger, police try to trick Steele into confessing to the

murders.

In order to try and gather incriminating evidence on Steele, police set up a

sting where undercover officers rang from Ireland sitting in known IRA pubs

saying that they were part of the IRA and that Tate had owed them money as

part of a drug deal and because Tate...

Tucker and Rolf had all been killed. This drug debt was now passed on to the

person that killed them.

Still,

he never took the bait.

It frightened him.

But he never took the bait, and that was never progressed.

Despite their suspicions, detectives still don't have enough evidence to link

Michael Steele to the murders.

Then, five months later, an unexpected arrest gives the investigation the

breakthrough it desperately needs.

A man named Darren Nichols is arrested on drugs charges.

After the murder of the three men in the car, Darren Nichols is caught in

possession of drugs and is consequently arrested.

And then he starts to give information. And this is based on being an informant

or what was termed super grass back in the 90s like that because of the type of

information that he was able to give. He was going to be a significant informant

to policing in general.

And so he kind of struck a deal, is what it's, you know, in its colloquial term,

is that, you know, as to be an informant, he would seek a reduction in

sentence and assistance in that way. And with that promise, he gave information

about two people who were responsible for the murders.

He gave information to the police that Steele and Womes were involved in the

murder. and it wasn't information that he had heard or you know someone had

told him or he was actually implicating himself in that event on that day saying

he was the getaway driver but because he was given the information to them which

would essentially lead to the conviction of these two men that that he would have

reduced sentences himself and whatever happened with the possible drugs

conviction, you know, all those kind of sentences might be lowered because he

was helping in that way, which is, you know, it's common in the judicial system

and policing where police have informants and you need them sometimes

to unlock and, you know, break a case like this.

Jack Womes was recruited by Michael Steele to do the murders.

And it's interesting because the relationship with Jack Womes...

Michael Steele, Tate, goes back several years to where they were

all locked up together in prison, serving sentences for other offences.

And, you know, these guys, they make associations with each other, and after

they're released from prison, they continue that relationship.

Darren Nichols provides detectives with a detailed account of the murders and

the exact circumstances that led to the execution of Tony Tucker, Pat Tate and

Craig Rolfe.

The whole of this job came about because of a purchase of

drugs. The amount of money was £70,000 that Tate had

bought from a drug dealer in Holland.

The money for that drugs purchase had come from one or two other

Essex criminals who had financed the trip.

When the drugs got back into the UK and were distributed amongst the

drug users, it was pretty soon discovered that the consignment

was rubbish.

And the people who were buying it and the dealers who were selling it were not

happy with Tate.

So Tate was left with a problem because various people wanted their money back.

Steele was involved with the importation as well.

So Tate went to Steele and said, this consignment

of drugs is no good.

And I want my money back.

Or else.

I don't think we'll ever know exactly what happened.

But basically, Steele, in an attempt to get himself

out of serious trouble, came up with a story that he would replace this

bad consignment of drugs.

with a new consignment of drugs and that he would use his aeroplane to drop them

into a field in Essex.

That field was going to be at the end of this lane where the Range Rover was

discovered and I'm pretty certain that Steele would have said to Tate, Tucker

and Rolfe, come down this lane, I'll show you where it is and

next week or whenever we will make the drop.

There was going to be no drop, of course.

This was the story to get these three down that lane to do the shooting.

Detectives now move to arrest Michael Steele and Jack Womes.

Steele was arrested and it is how Colchester was found a pump action

shotgun. which would have been identical to the one used, if not exactly the same

weapon, as he was clearly capable of firing the same type of cartridges that

were found at the murder scene.

Steele had told the police that on the night of the murders, he had been

watching Coronation Street.

The popular soap opera usually, almost certainly, would start at 7.30 on a

night.

The police were able to show that on that particular night in December...

Instead of starting at 7.30, Coronation Street didn't start until 9.20 because

ITV was showing Champions League football live.

This was a fatal error by Steele, which was easily disproved.

Worms was taken off for questioning and was absolutely adamant. He had never

been to Redenden, so could not possibly have been involved in this issue. The

police pressed and pressed again.

You must have been to Rettingdon, you know where it is.

So he said, no, I've never been anywhere near there in my life.

The police's responsibility in investigating a murder, as it always is,

is to gather as much evidence as possible through all the different

channels and conventional ways that they do.

And they present all that as a package to the Crown Prosecution Service.

And it is up to the Crown Prosecution Service to decide whether or not there

is going to be a charge.

And of course, so the police can do no more. They will continue their

investigation throughout.

But at the time that Steele and Womes are arrested, they've presented a case

and say, we believe there is sufficient evidence to charge these people.

At the time, when all this information was presented to the Crown Prosecution

Service, they agreed that Steele and Womes should be charged with the

murders.

Womes and Steele were put on trial at the Old Bailey.

the biggest court in the land and the site of some of the most famous trials

over the last couple of hundred years.

The evidence against them proving Steele and Womes' guilt in this case would be

an uphill battle.

Steele and Womes say they were not there. There is no evidence beyond the

testimony of this witness and potentially someone who is very

dishonest.

When an informant gives you information, you've got to not take it with a pinch

of salt, but you have to sort of try and corroborate that information in some way

to give it some credence. There are reasons why people might give

information about somebody else. It might be a complete lie to get them in

trouble. It might be through revenge.

It might be, for example, in drug dealing, you know, you give information

about a drug dealer that's in your territory to remove them so that you can

carry on and have the whole territory to yourself.

It's not uncommon for things like that to happen.

In this particular case, the police had to corroborate what Nicholls is saying.

So they looked at something called cell site, which is where your phone hits a

mask when you're making calls or when your phone's on. There are thousands of

masks on buildings around the UK.

And when your phone passes one, it shows that you are in that area.

Cell site evidence is much more precise now and it is easier to help an

investigation because it is pinpoints where people are.

specifically in the mid 90s it wasn't like that it was quite raw data it was

quite a new piece of evidence to put in front of people if you imagine it like a

piece of cake or block of cheese you know it would put you in one sector of

there only in that area passing through that area

We know the three people who are in the Range Rover. If we can get them and

their associates' phone numbers and help from the providers, we might

come up with something.

So we were able to trace their movements at a fairly early stage, and I think

that was one major breakthrough.

On this job, we are actually credited with being the first to use that sort of

technology.

The difficulty that Womes had, his phone on the day of the murder was tracked

together with Steele. They were in different parts of North Essex

early on the day of the murders and you could track their phones coming

down through the county until they got very close to the murder scene.

Confronted with a cell site evidence, Womes...

eventually decided that yes perhaps he had been mistaken and he had been to

Rettington but he said he'd only been to a local pub called the Wheatchief to

pick up a car or drop off a car and that he had never been anywhere else at that

time but apart from that both Womes and Steele stuck to their story which never

changed that they were never at Rettington Field that night they were

not involved in the Essex Boys murders so the prosecution case when it came to

court, was based on two seemingly on paper strong elements of evidence, but

equally unproven and could collapse at any time.

The defence's argument is this. You either believe Darren Nicholls or you

acquit Steele and Worms.

There aren't any fingerprints, there's not any DNA, there's not any witnesses

to put them at the scene beyond Darren Nicholls.

And there isn't any murder weapon.

The crux of this case is going to land into that informant's information

because whatever they say, they're giving direct evidence to say, I know

that person did it, I know that person was there because I was there and I

drove them away.

So you go in there with some trepidation about them going to believe the

informant, but with all the circumstantial evidence surrounding it,

that's where your case is built.

I remember the trial started in 97, and it was probably meant to finish before

Christmas, but it overran, as trials often do.

Also, speaking to Jack Womes' mother, Pam, there was an incident during the

trial where she bumped into a juror or something at the tube station, and

the... prosecution tried to make some big deal out of it try to make out that

she was trying to intimidate this juror and it was you know as she tells it it

was absolute nonsense but she was i think she was actually banned from the

trial from the rest of the trial that sort of played into the police's

narrative that these were terrible scary guys who were you know trying to

intimidate witnesses and if you've ever met pam woens you know that she's not

not somebody who would intimidate anyone

The trial runs for months.

Both Steele and Wom strongly maintain their innocence throughout, denying any

involvement in the brutal murder.

But it's up to the jury now to decide the truth of the matter.

In September 1997,

Michael Steele and Jack Wones stand trial for the murders of three men found

shot dead near Retondon, Essex, almost two years earlier.

Throughout the proceedings, both men continue to deny any involvement in the

killings. But as the trial unfolds, other theories surrounding the murders

also begin to emerge, including one Michael Steele insists points to the

real killers.

There was a whole nother scenario, which he was quite adamant that the Canning

Town gang were the real culprits and that that was, you know, where the

police should have followed.

A whole series of new theories were thrown into the melting pot as well, one

of which involved a man called William Jasper, who claimed that he had driven

another man, who he identified just as Mr D, from Canning Town in East London.

to within 200 yards of the murder scene at Retterden on the night of the

shootings and that he then drove him back to East London for five thousand

pounds.

Jasper was then later shot three times, managed to survive, but he claimed that

the whole Essex Boys murders was motivated as a revenge shooting for a

failed armed robbery which netted forty thousand pounds all of which money which

then went missing.

And it was a fallout between thieves, between gangsters, but nothing to do

with the drug feud that the police had alleged.

A local farmer claimed that he'd heard six shots in the Rettington area at

midnight, which contradicted a seven o'clock theory from the police.

Loads of so-called new evidence came forward.

I'd met Mickey Stilt.

He had loads of paperwork in his cell.

A barrack room lawyer.

He knew all his paperwork.

And so he brought along stuff he wanted to show me and went into great detail

about, you know, why.

the police's version of events didn't add up and why obviously he was saying

that darren nichols was a liar darren nichols was the main the the only

prosecution witness really against him and it all depended on him and mickey

still was adamant that you know nichols had made the whole thing up it's a bit

of a jump for them to think that this guy to suddenly go okay i'm going to

take out three guys who have had a bit of a row with or you know it was quite a

leap

Steele also contests that informant Darren Nicholls is receiving

preferential treatment.

He was not in custody the entire time while he was sort of waiting the trial.

He was getting quite a good time.

He was taken out to restaurants and stuff like that. And then he was given a

few months jail time for all the cannabis that had been found in his car.

Basically, they were trying to undermine Nicholls as the main witness.

He had a contract to write a book and also deals to make films, all this sort

of money-making opportunities.

And I think everybody was quite hopeful that that would succeed.

Despite evidence against them, Steele and Womes strongly maintained their

innocence throughout proceedings.

Finally, in January 1998, the jury is sent out to decide the fate of the two

accused.

The trial lasted four and a half months, which in those days was a long time,

albeit this was a triple murder case.

The jury was made up of eight women and four men, and they were out for five

days deliberating on their verdict.

Five days is a long time for juries, but for two people, really.

And we'd have been testing for the police as well, thinking, have we got

enough? And also in the background, as I would be thinking, if they get out as an

SO, I'd be thinking, well, hang on a minute, what's going to happen if they

get out?

what kind of things are going to happen within that underworld society then. And

there will be that element of protecting the informant as well, potentially even

taking him out into changing names and everything else to protect them. So

there's a lot that's got to be considered. But after five days, the

jury convicted both men for the murders.

Michael Steele and Jack Wernes were both sentenced to 25 years minimum.

that means that there isn't time off for good behaviour in terms of coming out

early. It should mean that the earliest time they can apply for parole would be

after 25 years.

All the facts showed quite clearly that these two men were guilty

of a heinous crime for which they were sentenced.

Meanwhile... All these films were made, the Essex Boys films and various spin

-offs and TV shows, and, you know, they became an industry in itself.

There's various sort of portrayals of Jack Worms, which I certainly don't

recognise, you know, these characters in the movies.

The Essex Boys murders had really caught the public imagination, and it thrived

on this new appeal for true-life crime and, what's more, violent gangland

crime. both fictional and true life.

The film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, hugely popular at that time,

fuelled all this. Suddenly people wanted to know about drug dealing, about

murders, about gun crime. And this with the added context of were the two

defendants sent down the real killers or not?

More than two decades later, in January 2021, Jack Wombs is released from

prison.

And in June 2025,

Michael Steele is released from prison at the age of 82.

Jack Wombs is now in his 60s and Michael Steele in his 80s. But they will remain

on a life licence. What that means is that if they commit any form of any

crime, then they will go back into prison and serve.

the life sentence and that can be anything from stealing a chocolate bar

to obviously any offense above that so this life license means you are licensed

for life if the men that serve those prison sentences

were innocent then it's one of the worst miscarriages of justice the country has

ever seen and they maintain their innocence if they were guilty on the

other hand then they stand convicted of the most appalling murders.

Never mind the background of their victims.

To shoot three men in a car in cold blood is indicative of the

most ruthless criminal behaviour that you can possibly imagine.