Major twist in Essex Boys murder revealed that puts Coronation Street alibi at heart of killer’s defence in spotlight
FOR millions of television viewers, making it home for the 7.30pm start of Coronation Street was an essential ritual every Monday and Wednesday for decades.
An alibi based on the ITV soap’s indelibly stamped broadcasting time was even used by a drug smuggler convicted over the controversial 1995 Rettendon Range Rover triple murder case.
But today the Corrie timings that placed Micky Steele at home, half an hour after the slaying of Essex boys Pat Tate, Tony Tucker and Craig Rolfe 40 miles away, are dismantled by The Sun.
A defence witness for Steele told his 1998 Old Bailey trial that Coronation Street was on when she and her mother visited him at home on the night of the murders.
It was implied that Steele could not have taken part in the slaughter just before 7pm and made it back to his home in time for the programme.
But Corrie had not gone on air at its usual time on the evening of December 6, 1995 when Tate, 37, Tucker, 38, and 26-year-old Rolfe were executed in a remote, snow-covered Essex country lane.
The programme was delayed until 9.20pm because a Champions League football match between Blackburn Rovers and Norwegian side Rosenborg was being televised live on ITV.
In the event, Steele and Jack Whomes were both found guilty of the triple murder.
But their convictions have remained shrouded in doubt ever since, and both men continue to protest their innocence.
Spattered with blood
In the latest bid to clear the names of Steele and Whomes, a team of former Scotland Yard detectives have submitted a dossier to legal watchdog the Criminal Cases Review Commission following a three-and-a-half-year investigation.
The team claim Steele, now 80 and still a Category A prisoner at HMP Wakefield, West Yorks, and car mechanic Whomes, who was released last year, are victims of a miscarriage of justice.
Former Detective Chief Inspector Dave McKelvey says: “We have absolutely no doubt Steele and Whomes are innocent.”
At the heart of the case is the disputed evidence of an informant, Darren Nicholls, who claims to have been the getaway driver for the killers.
It was alleged that Steele — known as “Micky The Pilot” in reference to his drug-smuggling by air — and crack addict Tate had fallen out over a cannabis deal.
Steele was accused of luring the three men to their deaths on the pretext of showing them a drop site for a future plan for smuggling cocaine by plane.
Nicholls told the Old Bailey how he dropped Whomes off on the farm track at Rettendon, a village of fewer than 2,000 residents, before the bloodbath.
Steele, meanwhile, is said to have met Tate, Tucker and Rolfe at a pub in nearby Rayleigh.
According to Nicholls, Whomes, now 61, hid until Rolfe drove a dark- blue Range Rover up the lane and stopped at a gate leading on to fields.
It was claimed that Steele then got out of the car to open the gate as Whomes emerged from the shadows and blasted Rolfe, Tucker and Tate with seven rounds from a pump-action shotgun through the open rear offside door.
At 6.59pm Whomes rang Nicholls from the murder scene and is said to have asked him to collect him and Steele.
The prosecution alleged that Tucker, Tate and Rolfe were murdered moments earlier, with mobile phone evidence placing them at the scene at the time.
The last call answered by any of the three dead men on their mobile phones was at 6.44pm, when Tate’s girlfriend Sarah Saunders rang him.
Nicholls claimed Steele and Whomes were both spattered with blood and said Steele had jokingly referred to himself as the “Angel of Death”.
The journey from Rettendon to Steele’s home in Great Bentley, near Colchester, takes around 55 minutes by car.
But Steele claimed he had been out with his second wife Jackie Street at the time of the murders and arrived back at their home at 7.25pm.
Phyllis Stambrook, sister of Steele’s first wife, and her daughter Gemma told the Old Bailey they visited the couple that night.
Jackie said Phyllis and Gemma arrived while she was on a phone call to Steele’s mother between 7.27pm and 8.17pm.
Gemma stated: “The TV was on but apart from Coronation Street I can’t remember what was on.
“Coronation Street had probably started by the time we’d got in and sat down.”
She mentioned another three times during her evidence that the soap was playing.
Former Essex Detective Inspector Paul Maleary said: “There is no suggestion that Gemma was not telling the truth about Coronation Street being on when she was there.
“But when her evidence was compared with the timings given by Steele and Jackie Street the jury would have been given the clear impression it was just after 7.30pm.
“After all, the whole country knew that’s what time Coronation Street started back then.
“If that had been right then Steele could never have made it from Rettendon back home in time and got cleaned up.
“But the fact the programme went out much later that night gave him plenty of time to get back.
“It is of huge significance to the whole case and destroys Steele’s alibi — and with it his protestations of innocence.”
The Rettendon murders spawned a range of theories and rumours on what lay behind them.
Among them was that it was in revenge for the ecstasy death of 18-year-old Leah Betts, from a pill bought from a dealer “licensed” by Tucker to operate at a club where he ran the security.
Shoot him in the head
Police got their breakthrough when supergrass Nicholls spilled the beans after being arrested over a cannabis importation six months after the murders.
He told how the origins of the feud between Steele and Tucker, Tate and Rolfe lay in a cannabis-smuggling operation which went wrong.
Detectives had been given the name “Micky The Pilot” very shortly after the murders when Rolfe’s girlfriend told them he had gone to see a man of that name on the day he died.
Steele and bodybuilder Tate had met in prison while Tate was serving a sentence for armed robbery and Steele was doing nine years for importing cannabis.
Tate also worked on the doors of Essex nightclubs for Falklands veteran Tucker — a close friend of boxer Nigel Benn — who ran a security company and “licensed” drug dealers at clubs. Rolfe was his right-hand man.
After Tate’s release from jail 14 months before he and his associates were murdered, he tried to go straight, selling cars. But then he teamed up with Steele to smuggle cannabis by boat from Holland.
The two men enjoyed each other’s company and went out for meals and drinks together with their wives.
But relations soured over a bad batch of cannabis, which angered their investors, including brothers Billy and Eddie Blundell, underworld figures who had stumped up £40,000 on the shipment.
According to Nicholls, Steele gave Tate the money to refund the brothers after being reimbursed himself for the poor-quality cannabis by Dutch criminals.
But Tate is claimed to have told the Blundells otherwise and said Steele was holding back on returning their money — having pocketed it himself.
Tate promised to bring Steele to the brothers and, according to Nicholls, told them he would shoot him in the head if he continued to lie about the money.
The threat is said to have been passed back to Steele by Tate’s partner Sarah, who had become close to both Steele and Jackie.
Nicholls’s account was challenged in court and he has been accused of lying to save his own skin.
But his evidence is supported by friends of the three victims in a film — Murder Of The Essex Boys: Blood And Betrayal, which is released on digital streams this week.
Billy Blundell and one of Tate’s closest friends, car dealer Barry Dorman, both now dead, confirmed details about the cannabis plot which led to the murders.
Retired Detective Superintendent Ivan Dibley, who led the Rettendon murders investigation, tells the film he is certain Steele acted against Tate to “get him first”.
He added: “Sometimes you have to listen to what the facts are.
“If you listen to the facts you see these characters did what they did and were punished for it.”
Additional reporting: Grant Rollings.