The cannabis junkie who laughed at law
BY THE time he killed PC Dave Phillips, Clayton Williams – aged just 1 – already had 33 convictions.
He had started using cannabis at the age of six and stole his first car at 15.
When police cornered him following his latest offence, he attempted to profess his ‘devastation’ at the death. But his supposed remorse was soon belied by a photo of him in the back of a prison van ‘grinning like an idiot’, as PC Phillips’ sister said.
Once Williams had become addicted to drugs, he drifted into a life of truancy, petty crime and contempt for the law – with little regard for the consequences.
He was born in 1996 to teenage mum Tammy Williams. His father is not named on his birth certificate, nor was he mentioned in court. According to local residents, Williams’ mother was more interested in partying, and he was mainly raised by his grandmother Shirley Williams, now 60.
He grew up in Seacombe, the 100th most deprived out of more than 30,000 neighbourhoods in England, faring especially poorly on education and employment.
Williams claims to have been smoking cannabis since the age of six, although the prosecution accused him of exaggerating his drug use in a bid to blame the fatal crash on his dulled reactions.
According to his Facebook profile, he attended South Wirral High School, a 1,000pupil secondary in Eastham – but he told his trial he rarely attended lessons.
The neighbourhood was plagued by lawless youths. In the hours after PC Phillips’ death, a lamp-post near the crash site was daubed with graffiti saying FTP, which stands for ‘f*** the police’.
Friends of Williams made sickening attacks in Facebook exchanges, questioning why the death of a policeman had attracted so much attention.
To the area’s long-suffering law-abiding residents, it came as no surprise that Williams was the one who had mown down PC Phillips. ‘He was a terror of a child,’ one local recalled yesterday. ‘He had no manners and would tell you to f*** off in the street.’ A local teenager added: ‘He’s always been up to no good, stealing cars and things like that. It was only a matter of time before he got involved in something more serious.’
Former neighbours said Williams had resented how his mother ‘was always partying with younger people’.
Now 3 , Miss Williams – who regularly attended the trial and has a 12-year-old daughter by a subsequent relationship – has a Facebook page littered with pictures of herself on nights out, including one where she is apparently pole-dancing astride a lamp-post, and references to getting ‘wasted’. One post simply reads: ‘Roll it! lick it! Smoke it! Enjoy it.’
Williams is understood to have been targeted for intervention by Wirral council’s team working with ‘hard-to-reach’ families, but it is thought they never directly supported him.
By his own account, Williams had no respect for the law. He told his trial that on the estate where he grew up, ‘everyone’s misbehaving … kids are doing bad stuff’. But in a bid for sympathy he claimed to be only a ‘lost little boy’ on the mean streets of Merseyside, saying: ‘I know I’m a better person, just in the wrong community.’
Williams – now 19 – admitted spending most of his days in a cannabis haze, smoking as many as 30 joints a day and spending up to £100 a day on the drug.
The killer stole his first car in 2012, and was convicted of burglary in 2013 and 2014. Each time he was freed with a rehabilitation order. Last April the then 1 -year-old – who didn’t have a driving licence – was stopped by police behind the wheel. The next month, he narrowly avoided hitting a pedestrian in a stolen car. He was released on licence just three weeks before he killed PC Phillips.
On October 5 he agreed to burgle a shop with 30-year-old Phil Stuart – a violent drug addict who Williams looked up to. Asked why he had turned back to crime, Williams said he was ‘depressed that I had no money’.
Despite proclaiming his ‘devastation’ at the officer’s death, a text message he sent while on the run said he was: ‘Chilling. Everyone knows it was me.’