Daily Mail

Why was this dope-smoking psychotic gangster with conviction­s for gun and knife crime free to commit murder?

- By Barbara Davies

Acouple of years after the birth of their son, Svetlana pomeroy took to social media to tell her Russian friends how happy she was to have made her home in the UK with her British husband lee.

‘The country might be hard to comprehend for a Russian mind,’ she wrote on a website forum based in her native chukotka, one of the country’s most remote, far-eastern areas, ‘but I love how people want to be friendly here, how they smile. There isn’t as much immorality and depravity as there is in Russia.’

How those words must have come back to haunt the 51-year-old mother when her husband lee pomeroy was viciously and senselessl­y stabbed to death by a stranger in front of their 14-year-old son on a train in January.

In an instant, her belief that Britain was the perfect place for family life was destroyed by a man who, the Daily Mail can now reveal, was a notorious gang member with a swathe of gun and knife conviction­s.

Yesterday at the end of a two-week-long trial at the old Bailey, Darren pencille, 36, was found guilty of murdering 51-year-old IT consultant lee in a ‘savage and unrelentin­g onslaught’ on a Guildford to Waterloo train on January 4 – the day before what would have been the father-of-one’s 52nd birthday. He will now serve a minimum of 28 years in jail.

Throughout his trial, pencille kept up the pretence that he had acted in self-defence, despite brutally stabbing lee in the neck 18 times in just 30 seconds with a lock knife. The businessma­n from Surrey died just seven minutes later on the platform at Horsley railway station while evil pencille raced away from the scene of his crime, aided by his girlfriend chelsea Mitchell.

It is only now that pencille’s trial is over that the Mail can reveal the shocking truth about the killer and the extent of his evil. He is a career criminal, a member of london’s notorious ‘South Man Syndicate’ gang who had previously been jailed for possession of a gun and a stabbing and had 14 conviction­s for violent crime and burglary.

He was also addicted to super-strong cannabis which he regularly smoked, despite being diagnosed with paranoid schizophre­nia in 2003 and being under the care of a psychiatri­c team.

He had previously bragged about his conviction­s, and spoke of battling rivals ‘to the f***ing death’ on behalf of his gang which has terrorised areas such as Tooting, Streatham and Thornton Heath since the 1990s. He kept images of various knives on his mobile phone.

PENCILLE was convicted of ABH following a fight in 1999 and twice convicted of having a blade in 2002 and 2004. In 2003, he was charged with rape in his home town of loughborou­gh in leicesters­hire but the charge was later discontinu­ed.

on one occasion in 2010, he stabbed a man twice in the neck in a row over a Rizla cigarette paper at a hostel in south london, cutting his artery – a crime he boasted about in a gang video posted on YouTube where he challenged a rival to ‘ come and confront me’.

perhaps most shocking of all, however, is that the authoritie­s were well aware of just how much of a threat pencille posed to society. Aside from his criminal conviction­s, he was being managed by psychiatri­sts from the NHS-run lambeth community Forensic Team in South london. He was also provided with housing.

And yet, as is clear from those who worked with him, he spurned all the opportunit­ies to help himself, preferring to blame others and complain when he couldn’t get his own way and accusing staff of ‘trying to set him up’. He threatened to kill a member of staff at a mental health hostel in June last year.

pencille was seen by one of the team, Dr David Ndegwa, just a day before lee’s murder, but he said later: ‘We had no concerns of risk to himself or to others’, and he was not deemed to present any kind of threat to the public. According to a statement Dr Ndegwa gave to police: ‘ Throughout the review his mood was normal, his speech was

normal in form and content, though he spoke with anger about housing problems ... There were no overt psychotic symptoms and he was more relaxed than on previous reviews. He felt that making music, wearing earphones, helped his concentrat­ion and reduced preoccupat­ion with other problems.’

But despite being prescribed several different kinds of medication, Pencille preferred to smoke cannabis, which jurors heard would either calm him or make him more argumentat­ive. On a previous occasion, in 2015, Pencille’s condition was so serious that he was admitted to a secure unit for a month where he was ‘confrontat­ional and agitated if his requests were not met immediatel­y’.

Dr Ndegwa’s statement adds: ‘He was sometimes unsettled and disruptive and would be angry and threatenin­g when challenged about his behaviour.’

Tragically, Lee Pomeroy had no idea of any of this when he crossed paths with Pencille on a train to Waterloo. Lee and his son were setting off on a ‘father and son’ prebirthda­y day out together when they boarded the train at London Road station in Guildford.

Pencille stepped into the same carriage, apparently muttering under his breath that they were blocking the aisle and saying: ‘ Ignorance is bliss’. A verbal exchange took place.

Unaware that challengin­g Pencille’s rudeness would have such cataclysmi­c consequenc­es, Lee followed him to the next carriage, reprimandi­ng him for humiliatin­g him in front of his son. Other passengers heard Pencille ‘ranting and raving’, daring Lee to touch him and ‘see what happens’ and then threatenin­g: ‘I’m going to kill this man.’

In a split second, he whipped the lock knife from his pocket and plunged it into Lee’s neck. A further 17 blows followed as Lee tried in vain to fight him off, suffering ‘terrible, deep’ cuts to his hand where he desperatel­y grasped at the blade.

UNTIL those horrific few seconds, the Pomeroys’ safe, comfortabl­e life in a leafy area of Guildford, Surrey, was a world away from jobless Pencille’s criminal lifestyle in the gang underworld.

While Pencille spurned the help and opportunit­ies he was given on countless occasions, Lee Pomeroy and his wife Svetlana were a hardworkin­g aspiration­al couple who wanted the best for their son.

Lee Morris Pomeroy was born on January 5, 1967, in Hackney, east London, the son of motor mechanic Barry Pomeroy and his wife Kathleen. Svetlana Tsyba was born in Russia in 1968 at the height of Leonid Brezhnev’s presidenti­al reign and grew up in the gold mining settlement of Ostrozhniy.

Her father Boris was an engineer. Her mother was a teacher. She trained as a journalist and worked for a while in Moscow for ‘Russia’s Dior’, fashion designer and theatrical costumier Slava Zaitsev, before moving to the UK in 2001.

She married Lee in Sheffield the following year and they lived together in Essex before moving to Guildford. She worked as a secretary in her husband’s computer programmin­g company. Their only child was born in 2004.

In a pointless moment of madness, the stable, middle- class world that Svetlana had become part of was brutally torn apart. As she put it herself this week, her life and that of her son has been ‘changed for ever’ by the murder of her husband of 18 years.

Writing about her husband online back in 2006, she said: ‘He believes that the past belongs to the past and that you must live in the now and think about the future.’

Now that her husband’s killer has been jailed, Svetlana has been forced to do just that, devoting the empty years ahead to her heartbroke­n son who has to live with the memory of cradling his father in his arms as he died.

 ??  ??
 ??  ?? Super-strong cannabis: Schizophre­nic Darren Pencille smokes on a YouTube video
Super-strong cannabis: Schizophre­nic Darren Pencille smokes on a YouTube video
 ??  ?? Lethal: An image on Pencille’s phone
Lethal: An image on Pencille’s phone
 ??  ?? Partner: Chelsea Mitchell
Partner: Chelsea Mitchell
 ??  ?? Mugshot: Pencille
Mugshot: Pencille

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