Hitman guilty of killing thug who once protected football star Gerrard
A GANGLAND assassin nicknamed ‘Iceman’ was caught after failing to realise his GPS running watch had recorded his movements as he planned a killing.
Police arrested Mark Fellows, 38, following the fatal shooting of a mob enforcer who had helped protect footballer Steven gerrard from a gangster known as ‘The Psycho’.
They downloaded data from his garmin Forerunner watch that revealed a route ending at the scene of a similarly clinical killing three years earlier. The device, which Fellows had also used in a charity run, records routes as well as pace and distance.
It was a key piece of evidence in his conviction yesterday for murdering Salford ‘Mr Big’ Paul Massey, 55, and associate John Kinsella, 53. While Fellows is not thought to have worn the watch during either daylight shooting, detectives realised the route must have been a reconnaissance run before he gunned down Massey with an Uzi sub-machine gun.
‘We think he simply used it as a stopwatch and had no idea it could be used to track his movements,’ a senior detective said.
The killing was part of a wave of terrifying attacks following the splintering of the notorious ‘A-Team’ gang in Salford in 2015.
Massey, a former mayoral candidate whose security companies once controlled the doors of Manchester’s biggest nightclubs, was mown down when he returned home.
While police were given the names of 112 people who might have wanted him dead, their investigation stalled in the face of a wall of silence and the encrypted phones through which the warring crime groups communicated.
Early on May 5 last year Kinsella and his partner were walking their dogs near his home in Rainhill, Merseyside, when a man wearing a hi-visjacket cycled up and shot him. The martial arts expert hit the headlines in 2008 when a court heard he had intervened to stop a gangster from threatening to maim the then liverpool and England footballer Steven gerrard.
A jury at the high- security liverpool Crown Court trial took more than 31 hours to convict Fellows of both murders. He was cleared of the attempted murder of Kinsella’s partner, Wendy Owen.
His accomplice, 36-year- old Steven Boyle, was found guilty of the murder of Kinsella, but cleared of the murder of Massey and the attempted murder of Miss Owen. They will be sentenced today.