POW escaper dies aged 102
Bat blow was so hard it snapped
A MAN was beaten and stabbed to death after confronting two drug dealers on his doorstep, a court has heard.
Father of two Ian Tomlin, 46, was knifed in the neck and hit with a baseball bat so hard it split.
The ex-boxer was left bleeding to death beside a rubbish chute on his estate’s first-floor balcony.
Michael Swan, 45, and Mr Tomlin’s neighbour Gary Beech, 48, allegedly killed him after “a history of tension”.
At the Old Bailey, prosecutor Alexandra Healy said there were suggestions the suspects sold drugs in the estate’s CCTV blindspots.
She said: “The Crown say Beech and Swan murdered Mr Tomlin. He was hit repeatedly on the head with a baseball bat. He was also stabbed a number of times in the neck.”
CCTV from a lift at Cromwell House, in Battersea, South West London, showed Mr Tomlin dying in a pool of blood near his door.
Separate images from a building nearby appeared to show a fracas on the first floor at around 5.30pm on October 17 last year.
Ms Healy said evidence suggested Mr Tomlin had come home with shopping moments earlier, then grabbed a baseball bat and a bike chain to confront Swan and Beech.
She said after his arrest, Swan told detectives he “knew the murderer” but would not name him.
Ms Healy added: “He said the deceased is a nasty man he would clash with. He said the people on the estate think he [Mr Tomlin] is a good man because he works but he would steal [Swan’s] gang’s drugs.”
Swan told police there was a row the day Mr Tomlin died. He said they grappled before his “friend” began hitting him with a bat.
Beech denies murder. Swan, of Wandsworth, denies murder and perverting justice by removing the bat. The trial continues. Murdered Ian Tomlin and, below, the scene AN RAF doctor who escaped from a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp has died at the age of 102.
In 1944, Tom Cullen and an army officer slipped out of Stalag XXA, in Poland, made it to neutral Sweden and were flown home.
Pal Harry Carlo, 83, said: “Guards rushed to deal with a ‘riot’ stage-managed so neither was hindered.”
Tom, who later became a surgeon in Kettering, Northants, was awarded an MBE for “heroic” work as a doctor in the camp.