MURDERER WHO GOT AWAY
20 years ago today, the Mail accused five men of murdering Stephen Lawrence. Two have been convicted, one’s in jail on a drugs charge and a 4th is on the run. But, as we now reveal, the 5th still brazenly walks the streets where he committed his crime...
POSING in country casuals, he is the last of Stephen Lawrence’s killers still on the streets of Eltham.
Luke Knight, 40, is unrecognisable from the snarling brute who smirked at claims he was one of the five racists behind the black teenager’s death.
Twenty years after the Daily Mail accused the gang of murder, he cuts a pathetic figure strolling just two miles from where Stephen, 18, was fatally stabbed. The A-level student was killed in a savage and unprovoked gang attack as he waited at a bus-stop with a friend in 1993.
Two members of the Eltham gang, Gary Dobson, 41, and David Norris, 40, are serving life for Stephen’s killing after a forensic breakthrough led to a second murder trial five years ago.
A third, 41-year- old Neil Acourt, is in prison awaiting sentencing for masterminding a £4million cannabis smuggling ring.
His 40-year-old brother Jamie, the fourth man we named, is wanted by police for his links to serious drugs crimes. He is on the run in Spain where detectives believe he is being harboured by ‘Costa del Crime’ contacts.
That just leaves father of two Knight remaining on the south-east London stomping ground where the murderous gang thought themselves above the law.
After a shambolic police investigation, two prosecutions and an inquest all failed to secure justice for Stephen and his family, the Daily Mail went to the extraordinary lengths of naming all five of the gang beneath the headline ‘MURDERERS’.
‘If we are wrong, let them sue us,’ we said, throwing down a legal gauntlet to the five men who had all arrogantly refused to answer questions about Stephen’s murder for fear of incriminating themselves.
In accusing them, this newspaper took a monumental risk – but one which ultimately paid off – triggering a public inquiry into Stephen’s death and triggering a change to the centuries-old double jeopardy rule that had prevented cleared suspects being tried for the same murder twice.
It sparked massive internal reform of the Metropolitan Police Service which was, at the time of Stephen’s killing, condemned as ‘institutionally racist’. It also heralded the Race Relations Amendment Act requiring public bodies to stamp out discrimination and to promote equal opportunities.
Stephen’s 64- year- old mother Doreen – now Baroness Lawrence – said the Mail’s stand was ‘a proud moment’.
‘A national daily newspaper had the courage to put on its front page what others were too frightened to do,’ she said.
‘It did the decent thing. From then on, all of Britain would know who the suspects were. They would not be able to hide.’
Two decades on, the Mail still has its eye on these ruthless thugs as it continues to fight for justice for Stephen and his long-suffering parents.
For while Dobson and Norris are locked up in high security prisons, their three ‘brothers in crime’ are yet to be punished for their part in Stephen’s murder.
A shameful veil of silence that has obstructed investigations into Stephen’s murder from the very start still shrouds the truth.
To this day, anyone asking questions on the streets of Eltham where the gang’s families still live is met with instant hostility. Knight’s mother shamelessly told us: ‘Nobody here will talk to you.’
Friends and relatives of the five men hide behind closed doors, refusing to speak. Letters and phone messages have gone unanswered. Their glamorous girlfriends and ex-partners continue to keep a low profile.
The ‘Eltham omerta’, it seems, is as powerful as ever. Potential witnesses fear they may pay a heavy price if word gets out that they have spoken to the police. The name ‘Stephen Lawrence’ is met with an uncomfortable and eerie silence in the pubs, such as the Beehive in New Eltham, where the five suspects used to drink.
Scotland Yard is still hoping for a breakthrough that will see the remaining members of the murderous gang finally face justice.
But last year when detectives again attempted to crack the case with a mass voluntary DNA screening programme, they managed to obtain samples from less than half of those they approached.
They were hoping to find a match with DNA from an unknown female found on a black leather bag strap collected from the murder scene in 1993 and believed to have been used as part of a home-made weapon. A similar custom-made weapon was found at the home of Norris. The strap was disregarded in the early days of the flawed police investigation after it was incorrectly recorded that it had been discovered 80 yards from where Stephen was attacked. In fact it was found just five yards away. To date, officers have spoken to more than 110 people in connection with this particular line of inquiry. Around half have volunteered samples, 46 have declined, 12 failed to respond to police requests and the remainder were eliminated for medical reasons.
Shamefully, the majority of those who declined to offer DNA samples were family, friends and associates of the original five suspects. Lead investigator Chris Le Pere told a press conference that while associates and relatives of key suspects had been approached and asked to provide DNA, there had been, in terms of responses from those individuals, ‘an awful lot of negatives’.
He and his team are also continuing to appeal for help in tracing a man caught on CCTV in an offlicence at about 8pm on the night of the murder, 100 yards from where Stephen was attacked.
The man was wearing a green jacket with a distinctive ‘ V’ emblem on the back but despite the clarity of the CCTV images, appeals for information have again fallen on Eltham’s deaf ears.
Market trader’s son Luke Knight, who attended Kidbrooke School with fellow suspect Jamie Acourt, continues to depend on this wall of silence among his acquaintances for keeping himself out of prison.
He has never displayed a shred of remorse for Stephen’s killing but has consistently whined about the impact it has had on his own life.
Ten years ago he even claimed he was suffering psychological problems brought on by threats from anti-racist campaigners and tried, in vain, to persuade Greenwich Council to rehouse him because of intimidation.
Despite his apparent struggle to make ends meet, he has been seen driving around in a £22,000 Nissan Qashqai bought new five years ago shortly before his partners in crime, Dobson and Norris, were jailed. He is currently working as a roofer and casual labourer.
Back in 1993, all five men were prime movers in a notorious gang led by the Acourt brothers who liked to refer to themselves as The Krays and who were already known to the police for their racist tendencies and violent knife crimes.
Their cold-blooded attack on Stephen as he waited for a bus with his friend Duwayne Brooks on April 22, 1993, bore all the hallmarks of the savage racist lynchings once inflicted on blacks living in America’s Deep South.
While Mr Brooks narrowly escaped, Stephen, who hoped to become an architect, suffered two stab wounds to the upper torso that severed major blood vessels. He tried to flee with his friend but collapsed and died in hospital.
Although the names of the five suspects were given to police virtually overnight, the early investigation was hampered by an appalling assumption by some officers that simply because he was black, Stephen was probably involved in a gang of his own and somehow partly to blame for the violent altercation that led to his killing.
All five men were eventually arrested but while both Knight and Neil Acourt were charged with murder, the CPS dropped the prosecution on the grounds that ID evidence from Mr Brooks was unreliable.
Outraged that no action had been taken against their son’s killers, Baroness Lawrence and then husband Neville launched a private prosecution in 1994 against Gary Dobson, Luke Knight and Neil Acourt.
But the trial, in April 1996, collapsed when the judge ruled that the identification evidence from Mr Brooks was inadmissible.
A year later, at an inquest into Stephen’s death, the five suspects again refused to answer any questions about how he died, angering coroner Sir Montague Levine who gave a verdict of unlawful killing ‘in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five youths’.
In a heart-rending statement she gave at the end of the inquest on February 13, 1997, Stephen’s mother denounced the British justice system for ‘making a clear statement to the black community that their lives are worth nothing’.
The Daily Mail made the decision to publish its historic front page just hours later.
By challenging these five men to sue us if we were wrong, the Mail presented them with an opportunity to speak about what happened that day in a court of a law.
If the men were not – are not – murderers, they would have been entitled to massive libel damages.
But they kept their vow of silence knowing that if they told the truth about what happened to Stephen they would have incriminated
‘Veil of silence that shrouds the truth’ ‘Displayed not a shred of remorse’