Two days before midsummer last year, as a red dawn was nudging the City skyline, Timothy Baxter and his old friend Gabriel Cornish strolled from Tottenham Court Road down to Charing Cross and up the steps of Hungerford Bridge. They were both 24 and had known each other since early childhood. They had been brought up at the Sheen school in Putney and had gone on to Richmond College. They had kept in touch during their years at university and later, as they had started their careers. They were friends.
That evening, after Baxter had spent an hour or so clattering about on his skateboard in the concrete caverns of the South Bank, they had walked into the West End for a drink at a bar in Leicester Square, before joining a group of friends to go clubbing in Charing Cross Road. Both men were at the beginning of their adult lives; Cornish was starting a career in the music business and had taken a job in sound engineering after completing a course at the south London College of Music. Baxter had read philosophy at Manchester University and was due to enrol at law school in the coming September.
Neither was flush and that evening they had eked out their drinks while they sat and relaxed in that aimless way students have. Then, happy and relaxed, chatting and oblivious to their surroundings, they decided to walk back to Baxter's mother's home on the South Bank. It was a warm night and the river was quiet. One or two late-night taxis cruised up and down the Embankment and, up river, lorries loaded with fruit and vegetables rolled across the bridges and into the market at Nine Elms. In those moments before the dawn of a summer day, London was at its most placid.
At the same time as Baxter and Cornish stepped on to the north end of Hungerford Bridge, three men, Sonni Reid, John Riches and a 14-year-old boy who we must refer to as Juvenile A, had swung out of the Waterloo Embankment and on to the southern end of the bridge where it joins the walkways of the Royal Festival Hall.
Reid, high on alcohol and cannabis, was 18 and homeless; Riches, 6'4" and 21 years old, had been making his living by casually stealing whatever he could get his hands on. The juvenile, the third member of the pack, was experienced in the ways of the street. He had form - theft, assault and attempted burglary and an attitude loaded with contempt for everyone he met.
None of the three had been clubbing or sitting chatting with friends, their educational accomplishments were minimal and they had few loyalties - other than to themselves. They were as at home in the London night as Cornish and Baxter were not and their hunting ground, which they had come to know like the backs of their hands, was the fertile alleyways and streets of London's Theatreland and the Thames Embankment.
As Baxter and Cornish reached the centre of the narrow metal span which runs alongside the train tracks from Charing Cross station to the South Bank, three more figures followed them on to the bridge from the north. They were a girl of 16 [Juvenile C] and a 17-year-old [Juvenile B] - a short, thick-set boy from Woolwich. They were in the company of Cameron Cyrus, a loose-limbed and imposing 6'3" 19-year-old.
So it was as if the fates had conspired to lead two young men, with their lives before them, smiling into the jaws of danger. As Baxter and Cornish met the first trio in the middle of the bridge, the two young men were confronted and attacked. Baxter was carrying his skateboard, a prized possession, but had no money to speak of.
'You've got the wrong people,' he said. 'We have nothing, leave us alone.' A few moments later, Cyrus and his two companions appeared. Cornish turned to them, pleading for help. The request fell on deaf ears. Their attackers took the skateboard and threw it over the parapet; then they took Baxter's glasses and threw them over as well.
Nobody will ever know exactly what happened on Hungerford Bridge that night. After discovering that Baxter and Cornish were telling the truth and that neither man had any money, some of the group attacked them. They beat them to the ground and then they kicked them in the face and stamped on their heads. We know that Cornish was attacked by Juvenile A, who had demanded the silver chain from his wrist. 'I refused to give it to him,' Cornish said later. 'It was a present from my parents.' But A attacked him and in minutes Cornish and Baxter were lying bleeding on the metal footway of the bridge.
Juvenile A then encouraged the others to take the two men and throw them into the river. They lifted Baxter, walked him to the parapet and dropped him into the Thames, which was in full flood. Then they did the same to Cornish. It was as if they perpetrated this sort of crime every day of the year. Beat someone up and, when you've finished, throw them away. Because if they're dead, they can't do anything about it.
There was no surveillance on the bridge, but all six seemed to realise that they could be picked up by the cameras as soon as they left it. After returning to the South Bank, Reid, Riches and Juvenile A decided to separate from the group and walked away on their own, returning to the north. Their work was not over for the night and within a few minutes they had robbed another young man, Matthew Reynolds, as he stood watching the sunrise on the Embankment. Riches and the juvenile had started to assault Reynolds but were dissuaded by Reid.
Terrorised and angry, Reynolds had given up his wallet and a cigarette lighter and had then been left alone. After the three had left, on their way to Leicester Square, he went to the police and reported what had happened.
Other pedestrians, alarmed at the aggressive behaviour of the three, also reported them and a patrol car eventually tracked them down in St Martin's Court, off Charing Cross Road, where Reid was amusing himself by doing press-ups on the pavement. Within an hour, the three youths were in custody at Charing Cross police station.
The arrest was just another incident in a long and lively night of assaults, thefts, robberies, rapes and false alarms. After an hour in the cells, Reid, Riches and their young companion were processed and brought out of the custody suite on the ground floor of Charing Cross and into the fetid, claustrophobic interview rooms. Reynolds had made a statement and the three suspects were questioned about it individually without requesting the presence of a solicitor. In interview, Riches immediately blurted out that 'something had happened on the bridge' and the police had their first intimation that there had been a serious incident.
Both boys had been concussed at the time they hit the river. Baxter had been badly beaten and never regained consciousness, but Cornish was more fortunate and the water seemed to have revived him. He can recollect little of what happened but, in a chilling moment during the subsequent trial, he described a vague memory in which he saw his friend standing on the river bank and waving. The image seems to have been a spur to his return to consciousness and to have helped to raise him from his concussion and give him some sort of control over his actions. He remembered seeing Big Ben as he drifted past and discovering that he was clutching his friend's rucksack, which gave him enough buoyancy to keep afloat.
He was drifting on the tide and quickly reached Vauxhall Bridge, over half a mile up river from Charing Cross. He had tried three times to swim to the side, but was pushed back to the centre of the stream by the current. He started to shout and, for the first time that night, events began to go his way. He was spotted in the middle of the river and was finally pulled out by two off-duty police officers who threw him a life belt and dragged him to the bank. Taken to St Thomas's Hospital suffering from hypothermia and concussion, he was able to tell the police that his friend was also in the river.
The River Police began a search, but it took more than 24 hours for the Thames to give up its victim. The police eventually found him lying drowned among the driftwood on a mud bank beneath the Oxo Tower. He had never regained consciousness and his body had been washed up and down the river on the tide. It was only then that the police knew for certain that a murder had been committed.
The police investigation was given to the Central London Serious Crimes Group and was put under the command of Detective Chief Inspector Dave Shipperlee. He is one of a breed of successful modern policemen - neat, efficient, painstaking and remorseless. On his office notice board is a complex flow chart showing the intricacies of a murder investigation and the rules which must be followed by the police. Above it, half a dozen inquiry posters are pinned in a line.
There was an inevitability about the progress of the police. The lonely walkways of the South Bank and the streets around Theatreland are bristling with CCTV cameras and, armed with information from Cornish, Shipperlee commandeered all the relevant CCTV film from the South Bank and Charing Cross and began to analyse it. 'This may sound straightforward,' he said, 'but the police have only one facility for examining surveillance film - our laboratory at Denmark Hill, which is always very busy. Because Charing Cross station belongs to Railtrack, they turned to the British Transport Police for help. It took a long time to analyse the material.
The six had split up and swapped clothes to alter their appearances, and Cyrus had done his best to avoid the cameras. But their efforts were half-hearted, as if they didn't really believe they had committed a terrible crime. The girl, Juvenile C, is seen holding hands and pecking her young companion's cheek as they leave the bridge. Cyrus and the two juveniles can be seen laughing and relaxed as they arrive at Waterloo Station at 4.45am and disappear on to a platform to catch an early-morning train back to south London. 'We knew who we wanted within a fortnight,' said Shipperlee, 'and then it was just a matter of old-fashioned policing.'
The Serious Crimes Group deployed 20 police officers on the investigation and, within a month, had arrested all six suspects. Juvenile C, the last to be picked up, was detained on 16 July.
The trial started in November and lasted for six months. It was distinguished by a lack of clarity about what had actually happened on the bridge and by a consequent tendency to lump all the defendants together as a gang. The accused, three of whom were under 18, were no more than children - albeit children who had been present when a murder had taken place and who had either colluded in it or failed to do anything to prevent it. They were charged on a number of counts, the most serious of which were the murder of Timothy Baxter and the attempted murder of Gabriel Cornish.
Retribution came in the shape of Judge Anne Goddard QC and the Crown Prosecution led by Treasury Counsel Jonathan Laidlaw in number 11 court at the Old Bailey. The defendants sat in a long dock between 'custody officers' - there to keep them apart because their defence strategies were, without exception, to blame each other for what happened. Early on in the trial, Riches had appeared in the dock with bruises on his face, the result of an attack by Juvenile A because of his admission to the police that there had been an 'incident on the bridge'.
The Old Bailey is a daunting experience for a teenager out of his or her métier. There were no fewer than 13 barristers in their wigs present in the well of the court, plus numerous solicitors, probation officers and the press. The public gallery was frequently full with relatives and members of the public keen to catch a glimpse of the perpetrators of this dreadful crime.
Judge Goddard QC has a formidable aspect and sports a larger than usual wig clamped to the sides of her head with the arms of a pair of extra-wide glasses over which she casts a baleful stare. She is known for the severity of her sentencing.
In the cold light of Central Criminal Court, the defendants seemed a miserable bunch. The oldest, at 21, was John W Riches, who was known as JonJon in Leicester Square. His mother had abandoned him as a child and he suffered from acute dyslexia. He had been educated without much success at a special school and had spent most of his youth caring for his father, who was paralysed and confined to bed after a stroke. Riches had a conviction for arson, having set fire to his father's bed after he died. The day before the incident on the bridge, Riches's five-year-old daughter Amy had been killed in a road accident.
In evidence, he said of the death of Baxter: 'They picked the guy up and walked him to the railings. He was looking at me asking me to stop them. He said: "Don't let your mates do this." He looked straight into my eyes. And then they threw him over.' After his arrest, Riches was the only member of the gang to show any concern when he told the police what had happened and then when he repeated it later to the police doctor.
Sonni L Reid is 20 years old, homeless and originally from Forest Hill in south London but, in recent times, had been a haunter of hostels and street doorways in the West End. Like Riches, his father was disabled and he had spent much of his youth caring for his family. On the day of the murder, Reid had been smoking ganja and drinking brandy and strong beer in Leicester Square. It was in this brash, brassy playground populated by tourists and the dispossessed that he had come across Riches and joined with him for the night. After the ghastly events on the bridge, he had intervened during the robbery against Reynolds to prevent his companions from physically attacking him.
The third member of the pack which set upon Baxter and Cornish, was Juvenile A, a lost soul in a city of lost souls, now a 15-year-old boy who seemed worthy of no commendation for anything, even from his barrister. In the flesh he is a slight figure with a mop of unruly black hair and a pronounced widow's peak. He had grown a small goatee beard since his arrest and had lived with his mother and sisters in the crumbling, grey necropolis of the Aylesbury Estate in Camberwell. But that summer he could more often have been found sleeping rough in the alleyways of Charing Cross and the Tottenham Court Road. He had already robbed a drunk of £40 in the arches below Waterloo and during the remainder of the evening, had been busy drinking his way through the money. He said in evidence: 'I don't need to rob, I do it for the buzz.'
Cameron Cyrus was a different kettle of fish. He had refused to speak during the interviews after his arrest and had, according to the prosecution and the police, obviously listened to what his barrister, Helena Kennedy QC, had to say and was difficult to cross-examine. Jonathan Laidlaw for the prosecution finally managed to unsettle him by producing a letter which Cyrus had written to Juvenile B. Cyrus had claimed B was an instigator of the violence.
Cyrus also had form - taking and driving away, handling stolen goods, burglary, assault. In evidence, he told the court about his life in a loving family which had fallen apart when his parents separated and he had gone to live with his grandmother. He had been forced to leave this second home after a relative was taken ill. Cyrus had nowhere to go, but he was able, during his troubles, to pass seven GCSEs and had had the offer of a course in computer technology at the South London University. But he was now a teenager from a broken home and he made a break for it. 'I'm bored,' he said, and that was it.
His two companions, Juveniles B and C, now 16, had been lovers until the day before the murder when the girl had ended the relationship. B, another child of the streets, had been dressed in designer clothes bought for him by his single mother, who 'liked him to look good'. Like the others on Hungerford Bridge, he had a criminal record, although, in common with his companions, he had never been imprisoned or even received a community service order. He had, in 1997, been given a conditional discharge for threatening behaviour and was later made the subject of a two-year supervision order for convictions of robbery, affray and assault.
The girl, Juvenile C, the recent lover of the second juvenile in the group and before that, of Cameron Cyrus, is a pretty 16-year-old. It seems to be a cliché, but like the others, she comes from a broken home and left school when she was 14, saying she had problems with her stepfather. She had claimed to the police that she had been raped, kidnapped and held hostage for three days, but withdrew the allegations almost immediately. She was a habitué of Leicester Square and had spent most of the previous four days hanging around the area.
The trial was a long and complicated affair in which the accused were cross-examined not only by the Crown but also by counsel for the other defendants. Their performance in the witness box was distinguished by a blankness of expression which appeared to some of those watching to be an arrogance which was almost a manifestation of evil. I felt, however, that in most cases it was a sign of immaturity and fear from children who were unable to deal with the situation they found themselves in and whose answer was to bring down the shutters as a defence.
When it was all over, the jury brought in the inevitable verdict of guilty and all six were remanded for a month for reports. On 19 May they returned to the court where, before they were marched into the dock, there was a carnival atmosphere. The 13 wigs were bobbing about laughing and cracking jokes with their colleagues. The benches were bulging with solicitors, probation officers and social workers. The media were there in force and the public gallery was full; 32 family members sat looking blankly at the bear pit below them. The families of the victims were there, too, silent, mystified and protected by the police.
On the morning of the 19th, the pleas for mitigation lasted for two hours and Judge Anne Goddard QC retired to consider her sentences for the final time at 1pm. By two o'clock there was a crowd outside the court and the little man in black tights and starched jabot from the Lord Mayor's dining room on the fifth floor, accompanied by a couple of suits who had expressed an interest in being there at the death, were waiting to enter the court.
The judge was 10 minutes late and the six convicted defendants were brought up 30 seconds before she walked in. She immediately started to read out her decisions. 'Nobody will ever know precisely what happened on that bridge,' she said. 'The grief of Timothy Baxter's family cannot be measured.' And she read out the sentences one by one. 'Life, detained at her Majesty's pleasure, 16 years on count two [manslaughter]' and on it went.
I watched the gallery as the relatives of the defendants clutched each other and wept, I watched C, the girl, looking round at the men in wigs and the stern judge and begin to weep, and I watched A as he scowled and then, as he left the dock, screaming at the judge: 'All yous suck out your fuckin' mothers.' Someone in the gallery screamed; another shouted, 'It was you lot should have drowned.' Then it was over.
Afterwards I talked to Helena Kennedy, Cameron Cyrus's QC. 'We'll never know what happened that night,' she said. 'It seems inexplicable. I believe there was a group dynamic which forced them to do what they did. Peer pressure and a boy shouting "throw them in the river" was enough to create an atmosphere in which there was no going back. It will have been one person who started it and the others would have followed like sheep.'
We may never know what really happened that night. Baxter's murder and Cornish's assault were terrible crimes. But the waste of six young lives is a dreadful tragedy. The severity of the judge's sentences for manslaughter of up to 16 years means that her recommended tariff to the Home Secretary in respect of the length of time to be served for the murder will almost certainly be equally severe.
It is impossible to believe that they are all evil. Perhaps, if one could be confident that they would eventually be regurgitated from the prison service as better citizens and that their incarceration would have positive benefits, it would be more acceptable. Some hope.