Hitmen (6 page)

At her trial in March 1959, any suggestion that Elizabeth Duncan might be insane was thrown out by the court. A psychiatirst proclaimed that Elizabeth suffered from ‘what is known in medicine as a personality trait disorder, more commonly called psychopathic personality … But my findings are that she is not insane.’ All three defendants were eventually found guilty of murder in the first degree. Each was sentenced to death.

Over the next three and a half years, a succession of appeals were made in a bid to stave off the executions. And the man leading the fight was none other than Elizabeth’s beloved son Frank. Eventually he made a personal plea to a federal judge in San Francisco for yet another last-minute stay of execution, but this time his appeal fell on deaf ears. Finally Elizabeth Duncan, Luis Moya Jnr and Gus Baldonado headed for the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison on 8 August 1962.
Elizabeth Duncan, still an outwardly respectable-looking woman in late middle age, settled into the cold steel chair as if she was about to start a lengthy knitting session. She made herself comfortable before fixing her gaze on the two guards strapping down her arms.

‘Where’s Frank?’ she asked sternly. No one reacted so she closed her eyes slowly and took her final four deep breaths. At 10.12am, Elizabeth Duncan was pronounced dead.

Three hours later Moya and Baldonado smiled pleasantly as they entered the same room. They sat in chairs marked A and B and continued their friendly banter even after a lever had been pulled to release the cyanide pellets into the vat of acid beneath their chairs.

As the poisonous fumes wafted upwards their moods finally changed. ‘I can smell it,’ said Moya. ‘And it doesn’t smell good.’

Ten minutes later both men were dead.

C
ombine the Kray Twins and the Richardsons with a sprinkling of guv’nor Lenny McLean, plus an IRA hitman thrown in for good measure and you start to get an idea of Jimmy Moody’s underworld credentials.

And as they say in gangland Britain: ‘He may be dead but his spirit lives on.’ For Moody’s career spanned more than four decades and included run-ins with Jack Spot, Billy Hill, ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, the Krays, the Richardsons and the Provos.

James Alfred Moody was number one enforcer for the Richardsons, did freelance ‘work’ for the Krays and became one of the most feared gangsters ever to emerge from the London underworld – all before he reached 30. And, just like the Krays, he worshipped his dear old mum.

Moody’s first starring role came when he survived one of South London’s most legendary club battles at a venue called Mr Smith’s and the Witchdoctor’s, a cabaret and gambling
house in Catford in the early 1960s. A fight kicked off in the early hours when small-time hood Dickie Hart started waving a pieces around and shot another villain called Harry Rawlings. Hart was then plugged on the spot. All hell then broke lose and Jimmy Moody ended up carrying the wounded, including Eddie Richardson and Frankie Fraser, out of the club before disappearing in a cloud of smoke. Moody was later aquitted of any involvement in the shootings.

Some reckon the battle inside Mr Smith’s was deliberately engineered by the Krays, who wanted to dismantle the Richardsons’ powerbase. As James Morton says in his book
Gangland Britain
: ‘This was an attempt by the Krays – with whom the Richardsons were, at the time, in serious disagreement over the rights to provide security for a
blue-film
racket in the West End – to dispose of their rivals once and for all.’

Jimmy Moody’s reputation got another boost in 1967 when he was convicted of manslaughter over the death of a young merchant navy steward called William Day. Moody copped a six-stretch for that little number. In the clink, Moody became a committed body builder and on his release joined a notorious band of armed robbers known as the Chainsaw Gang which specialised in highjacking security vans in south London and the home counties.

Moody was a quiet, reserved sort of fellow who tended to stand back on the edge of a crowd and remain in the showdows keeping an eye on things. As such he was an important member of the Richardsons’ inner circle. Moody was their official ‘enforcer’ – a godfather, feared and respected by the London underworld. 

One time, Moody, dressed as a copper, jumped out of a motor in the Blackwall Tunnel and forced a security van to stop. To prevent anyone raising the alarm, he leaned into nearby cars and lobbed their keys into the gutter. In 1980, Moody was on the run from the law after yet another ‘chainsaw gang’ hijack when he visited a relative’s flat in Brixton and was nicked for a series of blaggings involving a massive total of £930,000. He was then locked up in Brixton on remand.

In those days it was still possible for inmates awaiting trial to have food, wine and beer brought in by friends and relatives. One Sunday lunchtime Moody’s brother Richard brought in hacksaw blades, drill bits and other tools. Within days Moody, his cellmate, IRA bomber Gerard Tuite, and Stan Thompson, a vet from the Parkhurst Prison riots of 1969 now banged up on an armed robbery charge, had begun cutting their way through the brickwork. On 16 December, 1980, they pushed out the loosened masonary of their cell, stepped onto a roof where a ladder had been left by workmen and were on their toes. Tuite and Moody vanished while Thompson was soon tracked down.

But Moody’s story only took on legendary proportions after he went on the lam from Brixton Prison. Moody’s cellmate Tuite told him countless tales of brutality and torture inflicted by the British across the water. Moody even looked a touch Irish with his heavy build, thick black eyebrows and bulldog neck. Once across the water in Ireland, Moody’s murderous skills were soon put to good use by the Provos. He became their secret deadly assassin – a man who struck so much fear into Northern Ireland’s security services that at one stage in
the mid-1980s the Thatcher Government assigned a
three-man
hit-team of crack SAS men to finish him off.

It was then Moody coined the most chilling
gangster-fuelled
phrase of all time when he began referring to his victims as having been awarded an O.B.E. (One Behind the Ear). It went on to become the calling card used by many Belfast killers over the following 15 years. Moody himself fine-tuned his skills as a hitman to become the number one hired killer on both sides of the water. He was even renowned for professionally disposing of his victims’ bodies if that was part of the contract or making sure that death occured in a public place as a ‘message’ to others.

But there was undoubtedly a human, caring side to this cold-blooded killer. While on the run in Ireland, Moody desperately missed his wife Val and their two kids back in Dulwich, South London. The cozzers almost nicked him in London when he flew in for a reunion with his son. He only got away when he was tipped off about a police and scarpered minutes before a posse of the local Old Bill swooped.

And in the middle of all this, Moody even deliberately fed informers, including the British security services, with inaccurate information which enabled him to survive on the run for more years than anyone else – with the exception of Ronnie Biggs.

By the late 1980s, Moody knew full well that he was in danger of over-staying his welcome on the Emerald Isle. The lure of London and all his old mates persuaded Moody to return to the smoke. He was convinced his reputation as a hired killer would keep him one step ahead of trouble – and the law.

But the ‘smoke’ he returned to was a very different place from the one he’d left ten years earlier. Huge drug deals – usually involving Ecstasy and cocaine – had taken over from armed robbery as a way of financing the lavish lifestyles of many criminals. The stakes were higher and so were the profits. Even a hardened soul like Jimmy Moody was disturbed by what he saw. He warned his own children to steer clear of drugs. But then he was renowned as a man who would not even tolerate other people smoking in his company.

However, Moody still had to earn a crust and, in the middle of all this, it’s rumoured he knocked off one or two of the most notorious faces in London. They’d got up the noses of their drug baron mates big time. Moody knew that his reputation as a real hardman had to be maintained in the face of all these multi-millionaire drug barons. In 1990, the cozzers named him as the chief suspect in the ‘plugging’ of a member of one notorious south London criminal family. Moody never denied his involvement. However, he told one oldtime gangster that he knew he never should have taken the job because that family had never done him harm in the past and now they were after his blood.

‘Jimmy knew he’d made a mistake and that he might end up paying the ultimate price for topping that geezer,’ explained the south east London villain.

Moody even told his wife Val he wanted to turn over a new leaf and retire from gangsterdom before it was too late. He always defended himself in public by insisting he never once killed an innocent person. ‘Each and every one of them deserved what they got; they were toerags,’ he told one old mate. 

Moody got himself work in a pub in the East End. He had a new name, a new job and life seemed reasonably sweet. Even though he prided himself on keeping a low profile, Moody believed he was better off on familiar territory. As another old timer later explained: ‘You got more chance of surviving on home territory. There’s always someone to let you know the cozzers are sniffing around or a face from another manor is on your tale. It makes total sense.’

But by the early 1990s Jimmy Moody’s list of enemies read like a Who’s Who of criminal faces from across both sides of the water. There was also the police, the RUC and the British security services. It was only a matter of time before someone’s barrel pointed in his direction.

Moody was now known as ‘Mick the Irishman’ and he was finally awarded his own O.B.E. on the night of 1 June 1993, while drinking at the bar of the Royal Hotel, in Hackney. Three bullets to the head and one to the back from a hitman special – ironically, a .38 revolver just like Moody’s favourite weapon of choice.

The fellow who shot Moody was in his early 40s, wearing a leather bomber jacket. The shooter had even first ordered his own pint of Foster’s lager and put two coins down on the bar to pay for it. Then he turned towards Moody and carried on blasting away as he slumped to the floor. The killer fled in a stolen Ford Fiesta that was parked up just outside the pub.

At the time of his demise, Jimmy Moody had been living in Wadeson Street, a back alley off Mare Street, in Hackney. Some reckoned that Moody was topped because he was banging someone’s missus. Others pointed the finger at a
power-struggle between two south London gangs. Then there was the IRA and the British security services.

Frankie Fraser in his book
Mad Frank
has another take on Jimmy Moody’s demise: ‘It now turns out that Jimmy Moody was working in a pub at the back of Walworth. He’d been in the area for ten years. He wasn’t an out-and-out nightclubber so he could have been there and very, very few people would know who he was. He’s done quite a bit of bird and now he took it as a personal thing to keep out. It was a personal challenge for him. He could be stubborn and obstinate, a good man but a loner. He’d be content to do his work and watch the telly knowing that every day was a winner. That’s how he would look at it.’

The mother of the one of Moody’s most recent victims said: ‘I’m glad Moody’s dead. My family is overjoyed. He got it the way he gave it out. I’m glad he didn’t die straight away. That man was evil and I hope he rots in hell.’

Jimmy Moody was a unique modern day figure whose activities have had an ominous knock-on effect on Britain’s criminal underworld to this day. He perfectly encapsulated the archtypical London criminal. But he’d incurred the wrath of numerous gangsters and, as we now know, even members of the Provisional IRA. So it was no surprise that a price was put on his head.

Jimmy Moody pulled no punches. His life revolved around violence, black humour, the bizarre and the unemotional. But he was prepared to go beyond those traditional boundaries in order to make his name in the underworld. If you live by the sword you will eventually die by it…

E
very morning, private eye Barry Trigwell’s colleague John Waight picked him up from his home in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, because Trigwell was banned from driving. When Waight arrived on Wednesday, 8 February 1995 and spotted the kitten mewing on the doorstep, he knew something was wrong. He rang the doorbell. No answer. He dialled Trigwell on his mobile phone. Still no answer.

Waight looked up and down the quiet cul-de-sac of Fowey Close. It was deserted. Then he peered through the lounge window of the modest, three-bedroomed red-brick house and saw bloodstains on the carpet. He called the police.

Inside the house, officers found a trail of blood stretching from the lounge to the bathroom. Trigwell’s battered body, clad only in a pair of trousers, was floating in the half-filled bath. He’d been repeatedly beaten with a blunt object and had suffered severe fractures to his skull, face and body. His
blood-soaked shirt was found discarded in the bathroom. It later emerged that the gun used by his attackers had failed to go off so they’d used a poker to batter Trigwell to death.

Police quickly established from neighbours that, at 7pm the previous evening, Barry Trigwell had arrived home after a meal alone at his local Indian restaurant. It looked as if he’d only been back in the house for a few minutes when there was a knock at the door.

Barry Trigwell’s body was just being removed from the house by coroners’ officials when his wife, Anne, rang the couple’s home from South Africa, where she was on a business trip. An officer attending the scene broke the news to her and she said she’d fly home immediately.

Detectives initially set out to trace Trigwell’s client list in the search for clues. He’d first started work as a freelance detective in 1974. Trigwell was so well known he relied on specialist clients and did not even bother listing himself in the professional directories. He also wasn’t a member of the Association of British Investigators, which has a strict code of practice.

There were rumours that Trigwell had been heavily involved in investigating money launderers, a type of crime that could be particularly dangerous when the money was coming from the proceeds of drugs. There were other stories about how he’d been shadowed by Special Branch following a mysterious death in a case he was investigating.

Detectives soon found that assembling a list of suspects wasn’t difficult. As John Clarke, who worked as an investigator with Trigwell at Nationwide Investigations in Birmingham, explained: ‘He was known as “Barry the Bastard”
by people he crossed. He really enjoyed snatching children back from abroad after one of the parents had skipped the country. He seemed to live for the adrenaline rushes.’

Colleagues described Trigwell as a short, stocky character who looked more like a Chicago gangster than a Brummie gumshoe. As John Clarke added, ‘He’d been caught up in some heavy stuff. Barry charged a lot of money but he was really good at his job. When some of us may have taken a step back for fear of the consequences, Barry would just go for it. Barry made many enemies in his life.’ But since his latest marriage, Trigwell had turned his back on the more dangerous aspects of his chosen profession and had even been spending increasing amounts of time in his new wife’s home country.

Detectives then discovered from Trigwell’s sister that in the weeks before his death, Trigwell had taken several mysterious calls at home from a South African man who wanted to meet him on a ‘business matter’. Trigwell was immediately suspicious because he
never
gave his home number to clients and the caller was evasive when he asked the man how he’d obtained it.

Trigwell had even dialled the 1471 BT callback service, taken the number of the caller and given it to his sister Julie Armener, who lived in Eastbourne, Sussex, telling her to hand it to police if anything happened to him. Barry feared that someone was playing games with him. The number turned out to be a hotel where staff immediately remembered two South African men staying around the time the calls were made. They’d been back to stay at the hotel the week of Trigwell’s death.

Back in Fowey Close, neighbours told police that a white
Fiat Punto had been parked outside the Trigwells’ house shortly before the killing. It was traced to a hire company in London used by the same two South Africans who’d been staying at the hotel.

Police believed that Trigwell’s two killers had not yet left the UK. They were traced to a hotel near Heathrow Airport but by the time detectives got to the scene the two men had caught a flight to Vienna and then South Africa, which did not have an extradition treaty with the UK.

Investigators then turned their attention towards Anne Trigwell. Friends said that she was well suited to her new husband, since they were both arrogant and shared a taste for gambling, sex and the high life. On the surface, Anne seemed rich and successful, having bought a $400,000 house with a swimming pool outside Johannesburg.

Trigwell, who had a 14-year-old daughter from an earlier marriage, and Anne Brooks had first met when she hired him to protect her. All he was told was that his client was involved in a large cash transaction and needed him to ensure it went without any problems. The minute Trigwell met his slim, good-looking client in her expensive heels he was smitten, and he soon began sending flowers to the Porsche-driving widow every week. Then she’d fly over to visit him at his rented house in the Midlands. Proud Barry even took her to see his hotelier father Leonard and mother Mary at their home in Eastbourne.

‘She started calling us Mum and Dad straight away,’ Mary Trigwell later recalled. ‘She would ask us for a hug and put her arms around us but there was no real feeling.’

Barry Trigwell was soon sending thousands of pounds each month to pay Anne’s mortgage on her South African mansion and to fund a host of ill-conceived business ideas. ‘At first Anne turned down Barry’s marriage proposals,’ his mother Mary later recalled. ‘Still he kept supporting her and went to South Africa to re-mortgage her house in his name. Then on a visit to us they announced they were to marry.’

The couple’s wedding was held at Birmingham Register Office in 1994. Barry Trigwell was earning in excess of £3,000 a week by this stage and must have seemed a good catch to Anne. She even rented out her South African home to a local businessman and the newlyweds set up home together in Sutton Coldfield.

Then, in January 1995, police in South Africa were tipped off about a murder plot in which the businessman was overheard by his attractive wife talking about a planned hit. The businessman was said to have offered another South African £8,750 to kill someone. He in turn was alleged to have been offered more than £175,000 to arrange the killing. His wife agreed to help South African police organise a sting operation to arrest him but it failed and she disappeared in fear of her life. Detectives still had no idea who was the intended target.

In fact, the businessman had hired those same two men who’d turned up in the Midlands around the time of Barry Trigwell’s murder. On 14 January 1995, they’d also made a reconnaissance trip to the UK. During that five-day visit they’d called Barry Trigwell’s home requesting a business meeting. The pair then returned to the UK early in February to fulfil the contract. Between those two visits,
Trigwell’s wife had left a sealed envelope containing £300 in ‘expenses money’ and a Yale front door key at the hotel where they stayed.

The envelope proved to be 42-year-old Anne Trigwell’s downfall. Hotel staff, suspecting that it contained drugs, opened it, inspected the contents, re-sealed it and then, having no reason not to, duly passed it on to the two South Africans.

It was only after hearing about Trigwell’s murder and the fact he had a dark-haired South African wife that the hotel recalled the similar woman with a ‘funny’ accent. That sparked the police investigation into Mrs Trigwell. Ten days after Barry Trigwell’s slaying, his wife Anne was charged with plotting to kill him. She was remanded in custody by magistrates in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands.

But being incarcerated wasn’t going to stop temptress Anne Trigwell. Within a couple of months of her arrest, she’d begun a clandestine relationship with a prison officer called John Burns who was separated from his wife and young daughter. For the first six weeks of her incarceration they’d been the model of an upstanding warder–prisoner relationship. He’d lock her up in her second floor cell at Risely Prison, near Warrington. She would obey his barked orders.

Then fate intervened. On the way back from a magistrates’ hearing in June 1995, Burns found himself sitting in the prison van next to Trigwell. The van braked sharply and their lives were never the same again. Burns later explained: ‘We literally fell into each other’s arms. We made eye contact and I felt immediate and immense attraction as I looked into her brown eyes. I can’t explain it. It was just there.’

Their first proper embrace occurred when Burns was escorting Trigwell late at night along a deserted corridor in Risley’s Windsor House section. They stopped and kissed passionately. As three-times-married Trigwell pulled him closer into the embrace she told him: ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long.’

Burns was so smitten that he couldn’t get Anne Trigwell out of his mind. Later, many would ask how he could throw away a 17-year career for a woman whose speciality was to kiss and kill the men in her life. But Burns just didn’t look at it that way. He explained: ‘From the moment when I weakened and kissed her, I knew my career in the prison service was as good as over.’

Soon they were exchanging love notes and speaking of travelling to Trigwell’s beloved South Africa, to which she dreamed of returning. Burns slipped scribbled messages under her cell door; she would discreetly hand him notes as he unlocked her cell each morning. Love trysts were held in the prison library. ‘It was the only place where we could be together,’ Burns later recalled. ‘It was difficult, but somehow we were never caught. We wanted each other so much.’

One note written by Anne Trigwell read: ‘Darling John. How it hurts to see you go, but this will soon end. Then we will be together forever. Please know one thing; that I love you, oh so very much it really hurts. You really are the one I trust and will give my love, life and heart to!’ Another read: ‘Your hands caress my every curve, sending sensations through every nerve.’ They were almost word for word the same as the letters she’d written to Barry Trigwell.

Burns explains: ‘I read and re-read these letters nearly
every day. Often I’d stand in her cell and we would just hold each other. I think I needed her as much as she needed me.’

In the middle of all this, Burns went to the prison authorities after Anne Trigwell offered him £50,000 to help her escape from jail. The authorities were never told that the two were having a relationship. It was only in November 1995 that love letters between Trigwell and Burns were found by other staff in her cell. Burns was
reinterviewed
by police and confirmed the relationship but was released because he hadn’t broken any laws. He was suspended on full pay. Worried prison officials then transferred Trigwell to the maximum-security wing at Durham Jail, where other inmates have included IRA terrorists, Rose West and Myra Hindley.

However, Trigwell continued writing to Burns, whose letters back to Trigwell were never intercepted by the prison screening system. Burns claimed he had no regrets. ‘Working in a prison can be a soul-destroying job,’ he said. ‘People don’t understand that. That’s why people can’t understand that meeting Anne has been a good thing for me.’

Meanwhile, police in South Africa pulled in the nightclub boss plus the two other South Africans for questioning. They were eventually bailed by a court because there was no concrete evidence linking them to Barry Trigwell’s murder.

Then, in June 1996, British detectives once again tracked down the businessman’s estranged wife and she agreed to help investigators. Fearing for her life, she’d been travelling Europe and even had a bodyguard at her hideout in Italy. Police believed a hitman had been contracted to track her
down and kill her. As one investigator explained: ‘She undoubtedly put herself at enormous risk. There is no doubt in my mind that threats were made against her by the criminal underworld.’

The following month, Anne Trigwell’s trial got under way at Birmingham Crown Court. She emphatically denied the murder. The jury heard that she had a secret boyfriend in South Africa and stood to gain £380,000 from bonds and insurance policies on the death of her husband. In other words, he was worth a lot more dead to her than alive. Timothy Raggatt QC, for the prosecution, said, ‘He [Trigwell] was killed to order as a result of a plan. His death had been paid for. It was cold-blooded and very, very carefully planned.’ Mr Raggatt told the court that the Trigwells’ marriage was ‘a disaster from the start’. He also said that if Mrs Trigwell had hired the hitmen ‘she is as guilty of his murder as if she had beaten him to death herself’.

The court then heard that the three men involved with the killing were still at large in South Africa and Anne Trigwell had an alibi of ‘enormous proportions’ as she was 6,000 miles away at the time of her husband’s death.

The court was told that in December 1994, Anne Trigwell flew to South Africa to spend Christmas with her family and that was when she asked the nightclub boss if he’d organise a hit on her husband. He then hired the two assassins. Prime prosecution witness, the businessman’s estranged wife, told the court she’d overheard the contract being discussed. She remained in hiding because of real fears for her personal safety.

Further evidence in court came from Barry Trigwell’s sister
Julie Armener who told how, at a dinner party two months before Trigwell’s murder, her brother had become suspicious that his wife was having an affair and suggested he might accompany her on her next visit to South Africa. She leaned across the table and grabbed him by the jumper and said, ‘If you come to South Africa I will have you shot and I know at least two people who will do it.’