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A NEW book about the 1984 IRA Brighton bomb recounts the indomitable spirit of Mrs Thatcher’s Tory government. In part two of our electrifying serialisation yesterday, we told how Minister Norman Tebbit courageously worked on despite appalling injuries. Today, in our final instalment, we reveal how tenacious police work finally brought the bomber to justice . . .
THE body of the final missing guest murdered in the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in October 1984 was not found until the evening of the following day.
‘She’d been in a bathroom almost adjacent to where the bomb had gone off,’ Detective Sergeant Michael Colacicco says. ‘I asked one of our bombdisposal team, “If you’d been in that bathroom when the bomb detonated, where should we be looking for the body?” ’
He did a few calculations and pointed to a wardrobe beneath some rubble, and there she was.
The understandable reaction of the fire brigade was to want to dig her out at once, but Colacicco was having none of that. This was a crime scene, he insisted, and the police were desperate for forensic evidence. Sharp words were exchanged and there was an uncomfortable stand-off until the firefighters agreed to withdraw.
The body could then be examined in situ, as the detectives seeking the perpetrators of the Brighton bombing — in which five people died and several others were seriously injured — were at last able to get their investigation under way.
The fact was the police’s job of tracking down whoever had committed this outrage had been complicated from the start by the rescue efforts after the building collapsed in on itself.
As rescuers pored over the crumpled wreckage of the hotel, pulling out survivors, saving lives, potentially vital evidence was inevitably lost, lodged, say, on a fireman’s boots or stuck to the tyre of an ambulance.
The police’s forensic experts understood this and held back, but there came a point when they felt the investigation now had to be given priority. The body in the wardrobe was that moment.
Amid the mayhem of A&E at the Royal Sussex Hospital, which took the brunt of the casualties, doctors and nurses had been careful to try to save, bag and label the clothes of patients for DNA and fingerprinting. Anything might be needed later as evidence in court in what one police officer was already describing as ‘possibly the biggest crime ever’ — not just murder but the attempted assassination of a prime minister and her Cabinet.
But where to even start with the investigation? Detective Superintendent Bernie Wells, the man heading it, admits to having been bewildered initially. Returning to police headquarters from the still smouldering Grand, he was asked by a fellow officer if ‘the room’ where the bomb had gone off had been examined for fingerprints, and all he could reply was: ‘What room? There’s no room there. It’s gone.’
This, then, was the scale of the operation that lay ahead as police began shovelling hundreds of tons of debris into bins, to be taken away to be sifted for bomb components or any other clues.
The hunt for the killer or killers began with the reasonable assumption that the bomb had been rigged to a timing device. It could have been left there five minutes before it went off and triggered remotely by some electronic device.
BUTa timer was more likely, with the perpetrator long gone before the deadly explosion ripped through the building.
The longest timer the IRA was known to use was three months, so the decision was made to check back through hotel records for the past 104 days. The bomber might have been a registered hotel guest during this period or simply have visited a guest’s room.
Or they might have been a member of staff, tradesman or delivery driver. Detectives wanted to speak to everyone who’d been inside the hotel, for whatever reason, at any point during this three-month window.
It was a daunting prospect. There was no in-hotel CCTV footage (as there would be today), not even a complete set of credit card details to examine. If anyone had given false details and paid in cash, they could be extremely hard to find. DCI Graham Hill says: ‘At the outset, it seemed an enormous task.’
The ‘Hotel Squad’ put together a chart, with the list of rooms down one side and the 104 days down the other.
Using the hotel’s handwritten registration cards, phone records, receipts and other documents, they started to fill in the gaps — to find out who each individual was, whether they were who they said they were, whether their addresses checked out and so on. Every individual had to be traced and interviewed before they could be eliminated from the inquiry.
Meanwhile, scores of officers were still combing through the wreckage. The work took them three weeks and was physically gruelling and dangerous, with the remaining structure threatening to fall and health and safety officials from the council trying to close down the site. A discovery of blue asbestos in the basement didn’t help.
Everyone was jumpy, too, fearing a fresh attack by the IRA. Coaches carrying search teams to and from the Grand took a different route every time, just in case.
But the police pressed on regardless. Sussex PC Andy Griffiths recalls that ‘morale was excellent. There were no grumbles. It was such an important job that people were absolutely focused on it.’
Detective Dave Gaylor remembers the sense of urgency they all felt, with the eyes of the world on them. ‘But the most important driver for us was that there was a live IRA cell operating in the UK that needed to be traced, before they killed again.’
The crime- scene investigators amassed 880 tons of rubble and logged evidence such as ‘yellow sponge with green scourer’, ‘Brighton area telephone directory’ and ‘box of matches’.
But the first real breakthrough came a fortnight into the search when a detective inspected the U-bend of a toilet in one of the rooms. It was bunged up with debris, dust and water, but in the mud was an object shaped like an ice-cream cone.
HERECOGNISED straightaway that it was a piece from a timer, the sort that IRA bomb makers were known to use.
‘We discovered soon after that an arms cache had been found in a forest in Northamptonshire,’ says Detective Superintendent Bernie Wells. ‘It contained timers, which were numbered one to seven, but there was no number four. That looked as if it could have been the one used in Brighton.’
Slowly and steadily, the police were making progress. DCI Graham Hill recalls how within the first two weeks, they established that it had been a 24day timer, which narrowed the window of opportunity.
‘We couldn’t rule out entirely that there had been a reconnaissance visit to the hotel beforehand or that somebody had even gone in there afterwards.
‘But the priority of the search could now focus on that time period when we felt sure the bomb was put down. We were also pretty certain by then that it was placed in room 629. So those two facts became the hub of the inquiry.’
The investigation now extended out of Brighton as the likes of DC Mike Stone travelled around the country taking statements from former hotel guests.
‘They weren’t short interviews. We went through chronologically what they did from the moment they’d walked into the Grand Hotel — who they were with, who they saw, did they have anybody in their room, did staff come into their room, could they describe that staff member.’
Every statement then had to be checked and collated with all the other statements now being amassed in the police’s majorincident room in Brighton.
Not everyone was as co- operative as they might have been. Various people had allegedly
stayed at the Grand Hotel with their wives or husbands when that was not the case. ‘They weren’t prepared to tell you the truth and it held up the investigation because you had to do a double inquiry,’ DI John Byford recalls.
‘Several had written false names on their registration cards, and we had to trace them through other details they’d given — their real address, for example, or perhaps a car number plate. Some had phoned home from their rooms.’
But others had to be tracked down by appeals through the press, and suddenly there were floods of people coming to the police station for interview — ‘lots of “Mr Smiths”,’ according to one constable.
‘Not everybody was willing to be interviewed at home,’ another officer explained. ‘We had some interesting locations to meet people, shall we say, and leave it at that.’
As the growing mountain of information was obtained, logged and sifted, anomalies began to emerge. There was a young man who had worked in the Grand’s kitchens for a couple of weeks under a false name. There was a ‘short, stocky man’ seen running from the scene after the explosion. There was a man with a bag who, a witness claimed, ‘ was very peculiar and said he hated the Tories’.
Two conference security ecuund passes were found to have gone missing. ing. There were some Irish rish people who’d been spotted, potplothe before the explosion, ‘ jeering at the Tories’ at another hotel. otel. Within a week of the bombing, police received eived more than 1,400 tip tip- offs from the public with leads that had to be followed.
Naturally, the background of every member of staff working there at the time was investigated and their stories checked.
DC Paul Gibbon recalls interviewing an elderly housekeeper at the Grand. She’d been responsible for Room 629. ‘She told me that one day she went in there and noticed that the bath panel had been moved, because there were grease marks around it.’
Here was the first corroboration that this was where the bomb had been placed.
‘A waiter also recalled delivering a bottle of vodka to the same room. The significance of vodka is that it can be used to wash off traces of explosives from your fingers.’
Over at Scotland Yard, forensics chief David Tadd ran a team of fingerprint experts who exclusively handled terrorist cases. They examined the hotel registration cards one by one, using laser, UV and infrared and chemical processes.
There was no computer patternrecognition technology, so matching these with the fingerprints of known IRA suspects on file was done by staring long and hard at them. It was a time- consuming process, even once they started focusing on cards from room 629.
By early November, however, Sussex Police’s Hotel Squad had settled on a suspect. They were paying particular attention to one of the registration cards, on which the guest had given false details: ‘Name: Walsh, Roy. Address: 27 Braxfield Road, London, SE4. Nationality: English.’
Wells decided to visit the house himself. No one who lived there had ever heard of Walsh. House-tohouse inquiries in the area produced the same result.
The hunt was on for ‘Roy Walsh’, whose name was now made public in the press. Tadd’s fingerprint team, meanwhile, were scrutinising the registration card he’d filled in and uncovered two fragmentary prints: the side of a palm, and the tip of a finger. They matched those of a known IRA operative — Patrick Magee.
Magee’s whereabouts were a mystery — he was off the radar — though it was suspected he was in Dublin. The decision was made to wait for him to re-surface in the UK. ‘You can’t track people down if it means crossing national boundaries,’ boun Graham Hill recalls, reca ‘particularly if he was i in the Irish Republic.
‘In a sense, we just had to sit on o our hands. It was very frustrating.’
Magee’s Ma name was not released, relea but confined to a small sma group of officers. Security Secu was tight. Though the net was closing in, the scal scale of the investigation was kept at full tilt. If it had been allowed to run down, dow the press would almost alm certainly have twigged twi and concluded the Brighton Bomber had been bee identified.
Questions Q would have been bee asked, Magee would have ha been alerted.
But B there was always a da danger of leaks, and the Da Daily Mail received a tipoff off naming Magee. The paper’s pa crime reporter, Peter Pe Burden, put this to Jack Ja Reece, the head of Sussex Su CID, who had the sense se not to deny it, but said: sa ‘If you break this now, you’ll destroy one of the most important criminal investigations we’ve ever had to face.’ Burden played ball. ‘He was very honourable about this,’ says Reece. ‘ For a journalist that must have been a very difficult decision.’
For the police, these were worrying times. They had to wait and watch, in the hope Magee would come back to Britain. For a while, the trail went dead.
Had they lost him altogether? Had all those months of painstaking police work been in vain?
Then in June 1985, eight months after the bombing, a Metropolitan Police surveillance team was in Carlisle, shadowing another IRA suspect, Peter Sherry.
Pretending to be a kissing couple, they watched him go to the railway station. ‘ And,’ as they were now able to report, ‘ that’s where he met Magee.’
The information was urgently fed back to Scotland Yard with a request for instructions. Should they arrest him or follow him? A brave senior officer decided to let the operation play out. ou Sherry and Magee Ma boarded a train tra towards Glasgow. gow The surveillance team tea — which was aware awa Magee was a suspect susp for something, but not that he was wanted wan for the Brighton Brig bombing — raced race by car to Glasgow gow to lie in wait. There, The they followed him and Sherry out of the train station and tailed taile them until they disappeared disa into a tenement tenem block. The problem was they had no idea which of the eight apartments in the block the pair had gone into.
Police in growing numbers kept observation outside while the highups decided what to do.
Firearms were issued, just in case. But sending in an armed team was deemed too risky because of the possibility of a major shoot-out in which families in the block might be caught up.
A softly- softly approach was decided on. The area was surrounded by firearms officers brought in from all over Glasgow, and an officer was stationed outside each flat. On a given signal, each one rapped on the door and called out: ‘Pizza delivery!’
To everyone’s astonishment, one was answered by the unsuspecting Magee himself. He was seized by the arm and thrown out of the house to other officers as more policemen burst into the flat. Four other people inside were arrested. They offered no resistance as they were taken into custody.
AFTERmonths of meticulous investigation, the police had their man for the Brighton bombing. They’d also forestalled another murderous attack which could have devastated Britain — inside the flat they found evidence of a plot to plant 16 bombs in London and various seaside resorts during the summer.
Magee was taken to Paddington Green, the specialist anti-terrorist police station in London. There, detectives Bernie Wells and Jack Reece could finally meet and interview the man they’d been after since they identified him in January.
‘He was wheeled in,’ Wells recalls, ‘and we asked all the pertinent questions. “Have you ever been to Brighton? Do you know the Grand Hotel?” He just sat there. Didn’t say a dickie bird. He didn’t even look at us.’
Patrick Magee pleaded not guilty to five counts of murder, and to two other charges, connected to the Grand Hotel bombing. On June 10, 1986, he was convicted of all seven. For these, and for his role in the planned seaside-bombing campaign, he was given eight life sentences. (After serving 14 years, he was released in 1999, under the Good Friday Agreement.)
Paul Gibbon, one of the officers involved in catching him, met Margaret Thatcher at a social function many years later. He told her about his role in the investigation and he recalls: ‘She put her hand on mine, she leaned forward and said, very, very quietly: “We got them in the end, didn’t we, my dear.” ’
SOMEThING has Gone Wrong: Dealing With The Brighton Bomb by Steven Ramsey is published by Biteback on January 11, 2018, priced £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39 (20 per cent discount), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15. Offer valid until January 17, 2018.