BRITAIN’S MOST FERAL FAMILY
This week the Mail asked of the relatives putting up a shrine to stabbed burglar outside OAP’s house: what kind of people are they? Here’s the unsavoury answer . . .
THE handwritten sign on the pebble- dashed semi in St Mary Cray, on the outskirts of Orpington, Kent, said: ‘ Beware of the Dog.’ The notice should perhaps also have warned visitors to ‘ Beware of the Occupants’.
“F*** off,’ snapped the young woman who stormed out of the house when we called on Wednesday. A man in overalls on the driveway also told us to leave in equally uncivilised terms.
Their reaction was not altogether unexpected. This address happens to be inhabited by members of the notorious family of Henry Vincent, the serial burglar killed by a 78-year-old pensioner a weekand-a-half ago.
It is from this estate that a seemingly endless stream of men and women have been taking themselves off to the pensioner’s street in Hither Green, SouthEast London, and creating a shrine to ‘their fallen hero’.
Outraged residents have, in turn, torn down these flower-laden shrines, only for them to reappear. Police caused further tension this week when they seemingly backed the mourners, urging the citizens of South Park Crescent to allow the criminal’s family to grieve, pointing out, without irony, that laying flowers was not a crime.
It is a case that sums up just how skewed the scales of justice have become in modern Britain. For now, though, back to St Mary Cray and a little background on the notorious Vincent clan.
OnLYin a biological sense can they be described as a family; fiercely united by bonds of kinship, yes, but in every other respect they are nothing less than a ruthless criminal gang.
Their modus operandi is targeting the elderly. They specialise in conning, intimidating and burgling pensioners: no one else, just pensioners.
It was during a break-in last week at the home of 78-year- old Richard OsbornBrooks and his disabled wife, Maureen, that a leading figure in the clan, serial offender Henry Vincent, ended up being stabbed with his own screwdriver during a scuffle with the former RAC office manager. Vincent, 37, collapsed and died after staggering onto the pavement.
To his relatives and friends here in the vicinity of Teal Avenue, the street in St Mary Cray where Vincent grew up, he is a martyr and a folk hero, as indicated by the messages on the cards they have left at the scene.
‘Henry boy. You was too good to walk the earth,’ read one.
The universally popular Mr Osborn-Brooks, initially held on suspicion of murder before being released without charge, is now in hiding amid fear of reprisals. The Vincent clan have even demanded an apology from him.
Life in St Mary Cray, on the other hand, a 20-minute drive from Hither Green, continues as normal.
St Mary Cray is at the heart of one of the largest settled populations of travellers in Europe, as evidenced by the number of stone horse heads on gate posts — a way of displaying gipsy heritage. There are only two small caravan sites in the Borough of Bromley with room for around 50 plots, so around 1,000 traveller families — the Vincents among them — have been provided with housing association properties.
For ‘work’, the Vincents fleece the old in a variety of mainly cowboy building scams. One of their victims was charged £72,000 to repair a single roof tile.
Their vile tricks of the trade include showing rotten pieces of wood they have brought with them to convince octogenarians they need repairs done. They also like to squirt water onto the interior walls of pensioners’ homes to pretend there is a damp problem.
Henry Vincent’s father, Henry Vincent senior, is a master of these dirty tricks. His last known prison sentence for such an offence ended only recently.
In all, we can reveal, at least nine members of the Vincent family have been in prison.
In the driveways of their homes, Mercedes, Audi, Lexus and Range Rover luxury cars are parked.
Historically, gipsies, including many from Ireland, were attracted to Kent — known as the ‘Garden of England’ — to pick fruit, vegetables and hops.
A long line of Vincents, were born, grew up and married in the area around St Mary Cray.
They cite occupations such as farm labourer, landscape gardener and, without even a hint of irony,
builder on family birth and marriage certificates.
Even so, there is suspicion among some outside gipsy circles that the police have adopted a ‘ softly, softly’ approach towards the traveller community in general and the Vincents in particular.
Take the circumstances surrounding the arrest of 19-year-old John Vincent — a first cousin of Henry Vincent — in 2011.
He was charged with murder after 17-year-old Tommy Warde, a pillion passenger on a motorbike, was fatally struck by a plank of wood during the London riots. Before John Vincent was picked up, police went to see senior figures in the Vincent clan, a close friend of the victim’s family told us this week.
Those ‘ senior figures’ then accompanied officers to Vincent’s house when they arrived to bring him in.
‘I could not believe that happened,’ said the friend. ‘If that was anyone else, they would have just kicked down the door and arrested the suspect. There is one rule for them and a different rule for everyone else.’ Detectives were met with a wall of silence from the gipsy community in St Mary Cray during the subsequent murder investigation.
A £20,000 reward was put up for information, but no one is understood to have come forward. The case against John Vincent subsequently collapsed during a trial at the Old Bailey.
The Vincents drink at The Mary Rose Inn in the heart of the old village of St Mary Cray. Beneath the
beams of the 16th-century tavern one afternoon earlier this week, a cousin of the late Henry Vincent was sitting playing cards in a side room with a younger member of his family.
The older man, who didn’t give his name, became visibly angry at the very mention of his relative. ‘I am fuming,’ he declared. ‘Why have people not got anything nice to say about him or us?’
In the circumstances, the Crimestoppers poster displayed outside the police station almost opposite the Mary Rose Inn seemed somewhat ironic.
‘Let us help you stop criminals damaging the reputation of Gypsies & Travellers and disrespecting the community,’ the advert declared.
Further evidence of ‘disrespecting the community’ can be found not far from the hotel in Star Lane, where many of the travellers live. The winding, treelined country road is blighted by fly-tipping, mattresses, plastic cartons and other detritus lining the route.
‘There have been burglaries on that (travellers’) estate like everywhere else these days,’ said one local. ‘I know of one woman who came home to find her house had been broken into. Her front room had been cleared out — furniture, television, the lot. It was completely empty.
‘She looked in the window of a house opposite and her entire front room was in that house. Some of these people are so brazen. They just don’t care.’
It is not known if travellers were responsible for the break-in.
SO WHO are the people who have been placing flowers and tributes at the shrine to Henry Vincent? One of them was his cousin, Elvina Lee.
‘ Murder is murder,’ she declared. ‘I don’t care how it’s done. He took his life. I’ve got no sympathy for him. When other people die, they put flowers — why can’t we? We’re not allowed because we’re gipsies.’
Back in St Mary Cray, our inquiries led us to the semi in Teal Avenue with the two stone horse heads either side of the front door. Brothers Amos and William Vincent have both been linked to the address. Amos, we have learned, ‘absconded’ from an open prison a month ago, and is currently on the run.
He was serving yet another sentence for preying upon the elderly — his third time in prison since posing with his brother as officials from the water board, with two elderly women, aged 83 and 90, falling prey to them.
After a Neighbourhood Watch group publicised the thefts on Facebook, another member of the family, apparently — Bill Vincent — posted a vile response.
‘The old b******s deserved everything they get. So stupid handing over thousands upon thousands . . . Old c***s ain’t safe. Take every penny they got. Get old b******s to remortgage, take the money and let erm get chucked owt nxt one [sic].’ The posts were later deleted. You couldn’t make it up.