Son ends ‘Fast’ Eddie’s freedom
They were on the run from police for nearly 20 years after nicking R12m
There are many places one might expect to find an international fugitive, but Ozark, Missouri, isn’t one of them.
THERE are many places one might expect to find a notorious international fugitive with £1 million (R12.2m) of stolen money in his pocket, but Ozark isn’t one of them.
Lacking the glamour of the roulette room at the Monte Carlo casino or the sundrenched beaches of a South Pacific island, Ozark is a sprawling, respectable and fiercely dull Bible Belt town.
And so it took some time for a local police officer to accept the extraordinary tale related to him by Jessica King, a petite 22-year-old blonde. Her father-in-law – the person everybody in Ozark knew as the fat, balding man who installed their cable TV boxes – was no less than Britain’s infamous “Fast” Eddie Maher, she said.
Maher, she explained, had been on the run from police since 1993, when he stole an armoured van containing £1m in coins and banknotes.
A former fireman and pub owner who had substantial gambling debts, he was the driver of a Securicor van on a routine delivery to the Lloyds Bank branch in Felixstowe. While his colleagues went into the bank, he drove off with the 50 bags of cash. Allegedly switching cars twice, Maher, then 37, was on a flight to Boston before the authorities had time to respond.
His common-law wife, Deborah Brett, was already waiting for him in a hotel in the city, along with their three-year-old son Lee. Then Maher and his family disappeared without trace.
The Mahers never stopped running. Criss-crossing the US, they lived in New Hampshire, Florida, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin. They have lived in Ozark for five years, but have otherwise rarely stayed anywhere for long.
Using a string of aliases and only renting (never buying) homes in modest neighbourhoods, they embraced the classic American suburban lifestyle.
Maher liked to watch action films and loved to fish and hunt game. A devoted family man, he and his wife would both turn out to watch their elder son play American football and baseball. Family holidays included trips to Disneyland and a visit to the beach in South Carolina.
The family’s life seemed utterly conventional. But there was one fatal flaw in the parents’ plan: a boastful son who couldn’t keep a secret.
As he grew up, Lee King – given this surname because his father’s first alias was Stephen King – could not help boasting about his father’s notorious past and told a string of girlfriends that the family was fleeing the British police.
He made four of them pregnant, and married one – Jessica – before falling out with her.
Jessica, his estranged wife, says she decided to break his family’s cover after Maher, now 56, threatened her in December. Grabbing her arm, he stared into her eyes and promised to “bloody kill” her if she repeated the stories Lee had told her.
Ozark police contacted the FBI, who checked the photos. They contacted police in Suffolk, England.
When the FBI and police arrested him on Wednesday on a charge of being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm (they found two pistols and two rifles), agents said he appeared “relieved that the running was over”.
“Fast” Eddie is now in the local prison and too poor to pay for a lawyer. He admitted he had been living under his brother Michael’s name, a ruse that had allowed him to get a US social security number and so find work.
Suffolk police have started an extradition application, which could take months.
Curiously, nobody can recall the Maher’s having much money. Which prompts the £1m question: what happened to the money he is accused of stealing?
Close friend Brenda Morris said Maher’s wife had told her that they hadn’t only been hiding from the police.
“She said he’d been threatened by some very bad people,” said Morris, suggesting that he had been forced by a criminal gang to commit the original crime and hand over the money.