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The Howard Journal Vol 53 No 4. September 2014 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12063

ISSN 0265-5527, pp. 325–340

The British Hitman: 1974–2013

DONAL MACINTYRE, DAVID WILSON,
ELIZABETH YARDLEY and
LIAM BROLAN
Donal MacIntyre is Visiting Professor, David Wilson is Professor of
Criminology, Elizabeth Yardley is Director, Liam Brolan is Research
Assistant, Centre for Applied Criminology, Birmingham City University

Abstract: This exploratory article presents a typology of British ‘hitmen’ as identified

within newspaper reports about contract killing. Demographic and criminological data
related to these hitmen and their victims are analysed and, on the basis of this analysis,
a typology of British hitmen is developed. Our typology suggests that British hitmen are:
‘Novices’; ‘Dilettantes’; ‘Journeymen’; or ‘Masters’. It is hoped that this typology will be of
use to law enforcement.

Keywords: hitman/hitmen; contract killing; Britain; typology

Hitmen occupy a secret world, an underworld, where they make business transac-
tions with others wishing to conduct themselves ‘beyond the pale’. (Calhoun 2002,
p.9)

Calhoun’s observation, quoted above, that hitmen ‘occupy a secret world’

poses a number of problems for any academic research about this type of
offender and the circumstances in which they operate. Perhaps as a result
there has been comparatively little academic research about hitmen, or the
phenomenon of ‘contract killing’. That which does exist tends to be Ameri-
can (Black 2000; Black and Cravens 2001), and is often focused on descrip-
tive accounts of the murders of specific hitmen (Zugibe and Costello 1993;
Joey 1974; Montefiore 1993). There have also been some useful scholarly
contributions about hitmen in Australia (Mouzos and Venditto 2003;
Blackshaw 1996), with Mouzos and Venditto (2003) noting that there were
‘less than five documented explorations of the dynamics of contract
murder worldwide’ (p.12).
More recently, using a similar research methodology to that which is
adopted here, Cameron (2013) discussed the economics of contract killing
within a British setting. He concluded that: ‘the majority of paid killings
take place for very small sums much lower than the economic value of life
and lower too than what one would expect as compensation for efforts and

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The Howard Journal Vol 53 No 4. September 2014
ISSN 0265-5527, pp. 325–340

risks of the hiree’ (p.12). Of note, while Cameron’s interests were solely
concerned with economics, he, too, was surprised by the lack of more
criminological interest in this phenomenon.
This dearth of scholarly interest is in marked contrast to popular atten-
tion about the hitman who, as Spicer (2011, p.1) notes, has become such a
familiar figure in crime films, TV drama, popular fiction and videogames
that the hitman is now literally ‘everywhere’. To take but two recent
examples, the Hollywood film The Iceman (2012, director: A Vromen),
about the contract killer, Richard Kuklinski, appeared in cinemas in 2012
and, in November of the same year, the latest videogame in the Hitman
series, about the exploits of Agent 42 was released, called Hitman Abso-
lution, developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix. This
type of media portrayal often presents the hitman as a ‘professional’,
acting on behalf of an organised criminal network, or, indeed, as part of a
government agency. ‘Hits’ within these various fictional genre inevitably
seem to take place within smoky rooms, bars and casinos frequented by
gangsters and are well hidden from everyday members of the public. This
may, indeed, be true of some hitmen and of some contracts, but it does not
seem to capture the wider reality being described in this nascent academic
research that we have cited above, of who hitmen are and how they carry
out their hits. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schlesinger (2001) was forced to
describe contract killing and the people who carry out these killings as a
‘poorly understood type of homicide’ (p.295).
In this exploratory research about British hitmen we employ a number
of different techniques to describe the broad contours of contract killing in
this country. Following Calhoun (2002), we define a hitman as a person
who accepts an order to kill another human being from someone who is
not publicly acknowledged as a legitimate authority regarding ‘just killing’.
Using this definition allows us to avoid the important philosophical
debates that exist about whether, for example, soldiers or state execution-
ers should be considered as ‘hitmen’ (see Calhoun (2002) for an overview).
These are important questions, for it is clear that the context in which
contract killing occurs involves a ‘distance’ between the victim and the
perpetrator – a distance, moreover, that is not present in conventional
homicide (for an overview of murder in Britain, see Brookman (2005);
D’Cruze, Walklate and Pegg (2006)). Throughout the article we use the
terms ‘hit’, ‘contract killing’, and the gender specific ‘hitmen’, interchange-
ably, despite the discovery of one ‘hitwoman’.
We also attempt to begin the process of testing the valuable, if rather
meagre, academic contributions that exist about this type of offender, to
see how, or indeed if, they apply in a British context. In particular, we
critically use Schlesinger’s (2001) pioneering typology that hitmen can be
divided into ‘amateurs’, ‘semi-professionals’ and ‘professionals’, based on
differentiating patterns and characteristics of the hitman (see Table 1).
However, here it is also important to acknowledge – as he himself does –
that Schlesinger’s classifications were based on his analysis and case study
of just one hitman who had killed over 100 people in a 30-year period,
prior to his eventual arrest.

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TABLE 1
Schlesinger’s Typology of Contract Murder

Amateur Semi-professional Professional

Method poorly planned/ planned/orderly/ highly planned/orderly/

impulsive/ systematic systematic
disorganised
Crime scene some physical little physical little physical evidence
evidence evidence left left/body disposed of,
and/or ‘staged’
Typical target spouse/intimate business associate/ a criminal and/or person
partner criminal associated with
organised crime
Contractor personal business related consistent with organised
motive crime goals
Personality unstable less instability minimal overt disturbance

(Source: Schlesinger 2001.)

Research Methodology
There are no official data collected about contract killings, although eth-
nographic research about organised crime in this country has long estab-
lished a link between violence and illegal trading networks (Hobbs 1988,
1995, 2013; Winlow 2001; Winlow and Hall 2006). However, there
remains an ongoing debate as to whether this would include lethal vio-
lence (Hopkins, Tilley and Gibson 2013). As a result, in order to generate
our sample of British hitmen we searched Nexis using the fields: ‘hitmen’,
‘contract killing’ and ‘United Kingdom’. Nexis is an electronic database
which houses all major British newspapers, including both national and
regional titles, some 2,000 global newspapers, plus copy from newswires
and newsletters. Using newspapers as a primary source is not without its
compromises, although we feel that such compromises are justified given
the exploratory nature of the article. One compromise – which we outline
in more detail below, is that we were not able to develop any academic
insight into the psychological state of those hitmen whom we were able to
identify. Our initial Nexis search produced 144 articles, which were then
reduced by removing those articles related to the murder of the TV
personality, Jill Dando, in 1999 and the more recent murders of a British
family in the French Alps in 2012. Both murders are unsolved and,
perhaps as a result, some commentators have suggested that they were
contract killings. On the other hand, we have kept David Bieber within our
sample, given the widespread speculation that he was, indeed, a hitman, or
had acted as such, although he was in fact convicted of the murder of PC
Ian Broadhurst and the attempted murders of PCs Neil Roper and James
Banks in Leeds in December 2003.
So, too, this initial search produced general, opinion and editorial
articles about the phenomenon of contract killing more generally, but
these would often include the names of specific hitmen, or murders

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suspected of being ‘hits’, which allowed us to further refine our search,

often using regional, or local newspapers to track down specific case details
which might not have been mentioned within national newspapers. We
also concentrated on British cases, excluding those that applied to North-
ern Ireland, given the complexities of the political situation during the
period known as ‘the Troubles’ (for an overview, see McAuley and Spencer
(2011)). Eventually, we produced a list of 27 cases of contract killing
committed by a total of 36 hitmen (as a number of hitmen would work with
an accomplice) who were active in Britain from 1974 to 2013. These
hitmen are described in Table 2 and it should be noted that our sample
includes one ‘hitwoman’ although, given the almost total gender imbal-
ance, we have stuck with the label ‘hitmen’. This number was lower than
the sample of hitmen produced by Cameron (2013), although as he does
not reproduce the raw data about the personal and demographic details of
these hitmen, it is difficult to compare his sample with our own. However,
Cameron was solely interested in the economics of contract killing, rather
than with the broader, criminological picture of British contract killing
more generally.
After having generated our sample, we searched for basic demographic
and criminological data related to both those who carried out the contract
killing(s) and also those who had been the target(s) of the hit. Such data
included: age of the hitman/target; method used within the hit; the date,
time and place of the hit; what was known about the possible motive for the
contract; how the hitman was caught; how the perpetrator(s) was dealt
with at court; whether the hitman was previously known to the criminal
justice system; and other details of the contract that could be determined
– most obviously how much the hit had cost. At this stage of our research
we also used Lexis to see if court transcripts of the trials of these hitmen,
or of their appeals, could provide further demographic or criminological
details. Lexis is an archive of all cases heard by the House of Lords, the
Privy Council, both divisions of the Court of Appeal and all divisions of the
High Courts.
So, too, using our own extensive networks of offenders, ex-offenders,
those who work as part of, or who have been employed within, the
criminal justice system, we also gained access to those who have, or who
had, direct knowledge of contract killings. We conducted a small number
of ‘off-the-record’ interviews with these informants, so as to provide a
means of triangulating the information gathered through our searches of
Nexis and Lexis. However, given the ‘off-the-record’ nature of these inter-
views, we do not use this material to any great extent within this explora-
tory article. Finally, a number of ‘true crime’ accounts, which claimed to
have interviewed British hitmen were also consulted (see, especially,
Thompson 2005).
All of these details have been gathered in the hope that our results may
be of some help to law enforcement, in that we have been able to identify
patterns and behaviours common to hits in Britain which might, in turn,
contribute to better prevention and detection. However, for a number of
reasons, we were not able to establish whether this is a phenomenon which

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TABLE 2
Cases of British Contract Killings 1974–2013

Name Age at Gender Number Year of hit(s) Sentence

conviction of
(years) victims

Carlton Alveranga 20 male 1 2010 n/a

Richard Austin 19 male 1 2010 n/a
David Bieber 38 male 3 2003 life
Michael Boyle 49 male 1 1995 life
Hector Cedeno 28 male 1 1999 life
John Childs 58 male 6 1974; 1975; 1978 life
Trevor Clouden 37 male 1 1997 –
Terence Conaghan 54 male 1 2003 life
Michael Crossley 45 male 1 1992 life
Paul Cryne 62 male 1 2007 life
Santre Sanchez Gayle 16 male 1 2010 life
Paul Glen 33 male 2 2005 life
Hernando Guevara- 22 male 1 1999 life
Jaramillo
David Harrison 63 male 1 2010 life
Simeon Henderson 27 male 1 2009 life
Gary Holmes 31 male 1 1995 29 years
Ben Hope 39 male 1 2010 life
Kevin Lane 26 male 1 1994 life
Matthew Lee 56 male 1 2000 life
Colin Meek 35 male 1 2003 life
Gary Nelson 33 male 1 1993 life
Te Rangimaria Ngarimu 27 female 1 1992 life
John O’Flynn 53 male 1 2003 life
Peter O’Toole 33 male 2 2002 life
Stephen James Playle 46 male 1 1992 life
Paul Ras 45 male 1 1995 life
Jason Richards 39 male 1 2010 life
David Smith 33 male 1 2003 25 years
Leyford Smith 42 male 1 2003 8.5 years
Stephen Smith 31 male 1 2003 6.5 years
Stanley Stewart 31 male 1 1995 29 years
Loren Sundkvist 53 male 1 1995 life
James Tomkins 61 male 1 2006 life
Roger Vincent 33 male 1 2003 life
Graeme West 39 male 1 1993 life
Orville Wright 26 male 1 1996 2.5 years

(Source: Nexis.)

is becoming more common – an issue which we discuss more fully below.

We also acknowledge that our results relate to those hitmen who have been
caught and, of course, those hitmen who remain at large might present a
very different profile from those whom we have described here. Finally,
these demographic and criminological details have allowed us to critically
test Schlesinger’s typology which, as we have described, was built on his
case study of one hitman who had killed over 100 victims. Through

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critically testing Schlesinger’s work and analysing the patterns and behav-
iours which we have discovered, we offer a typology of British hitmen.

Results
The average age of those responsible for carrying out a hit was 38 years,
although the age range of British hitmen was 15 to 63 years. This result
and our results more generally, were broadly in line with those of
Cameron (2013), although, given that similar research methodologies
were adopted, this is hardly surprising. The youngest hitman who we
uncovered was North London teenager, Santre Sanchez Gayle, who was 15
years old when he carried out his hit in March 2010 and 16 years old at the
time of his conviction. Gayle was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in
prison for the murder of 26-year-old Gulistan Subasi. He was paid just
£200 to carry out the hit which, according to the senior investigating
officer (SIO) attached to the case, was viewed at the time as being the work
of a ‘professional’. Gayle was caught only because he bragged about the
murder to his friends, who then reported him to the police (‘School boy
hitman Santre Sanchez convicted of murder’, Mail Online, 24 August
2011). The oldest hitman in our sample was 63-year-old David Harrison.
In July 2010, Harrison shot and killed 27-year-old Richard Deakin, the
owner of a skip-hire business. Mr Deakin was a father of two children and
was shot in his home in Staffordshire, England. The police, acting on local
intelligence, would eventually arrest Harrison for the hit, especially after
they discovered him to be in possession of £26,000 in cash (‘Richard
Deakin murder trial: hired hitman blasted dad as he lay in bed, court told’,
Birmingham Mail, 15 November 2012).
The average age of the victim of a hit was 36 years but, as with the
hitmen, the ages of victims ranged from 10 to 63 years. This only child
victim of a hit was killed by John Childs, who, in 1975, not only murdered
his intended target but also his target’s son, from fear that the boy would
be able to identify Childs as the killer.
All but one of the hitmen was male. The only case of a female hitwoman
that we encountered was that of Te Rangimaria Ngarimu, who was respon-
sible for the murder of Graham Woodhatch in May 1992. Ngarimu, a
27-year-old Maori living in London, was contracted to murder Mr Wood-
hatch, a roofing contractor, by Paul Tubbs and Deith Bridges. She was paid
£7,000 and shot Mr Woodhatch while he was attending the Royal Free
Hospital in North London following an operation. In fact, Ngarimu had
tried to complete the hit the previous day but, having failed, returned to
the hospital the following day, disguised as a man and, on this occasion,
was successful. Immediately after the shooting, Ngarimu fled to New
Zealand, which aroused the police’s suspicions at the time. However, they
did not arrest her. It was seemingly only after a visit to her local church in
New Zealand and, against the advice of her lawyer, that Ngarimu returned
to Britain to confess to her role in the murder. In 1994, she was sentenced
to life imprisonment (‘Hit woman’s motives leave police baffled’, Independ-

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ent, 18 December 1994). As far as we are aware, Ngarimu is the only female
contract killer to have operated within this country.
The average cost of a hit in our sample was £15,180, with £100,000 being
the highest amount offered. This latter figure is reported to have been paid
to Kevin Lane for the murder of Robert Magil, who was killed in October
1994 whilst out walking his dog and in front of at least two witnesses.
However, there remains some doubt as to the guilt of Lane for the murder
of Mr Magil, and so, too, it is therefore difficult to be confident that he had,
indeed, been paid £100,000 (see http://www.justiceforkevinlane.com (accessed
18 January 2014) ). These calculations do not take inflation into account.
Cameron (2013) concluded that the mean payment in his sample was just
under £3,500 (p.3). Santre Sanchez Gayle who, despite being promised
£2,000, received just £200 for the completion of his contract – the lowest
amount that we uncovered that had been paid for a hit.
Our findings show that Tuesday is the most common day of the week
for a hit to occur, although this finding is not statistically significant, and
that March, May and July were the most common months for a hit to take
place. However, as with our result for the most common day of the week,
this result was not statistically significant.
Within our sample, the vast majority of hits were carried out using a
gun – a not insignificant finding in itself, given the tight controls on the
availability of firearms that exist within this country (Malcolm 2002) and
this finding was statistically significant. Out of an overall total of 35 victims,
25 were shot. Perhaps the most alarming use of a firearm can be found
within the murder of David King. Mr King was shot five times by hitman
Roger Vincent (33 years) and his accomplice David Smith (33 years). The
weapon used in this hit is noteworthy as it was the first time that an AK-47
assault rifle – seemingly originally belonging to the Hungarian Prison
Service – had been used on the streets of Britain (‘Murder of muscles’,
Mirror, 24 August 2005). Of the ten remaining victims in our sample, three
were stabbed, five were beaten to death and two were strangled.
It was difficult to be precise as to what might have motivated these hits
within our sample, although where this was commented upon, the major-
ity seemed to have been the result of a business dispute of some kind. One
common form that such a dispute might take would be to contract a hit
to remove a successful rival. Graeme West, for example, seems to have
murdered Donald Urquhart in January 1993 after the failure of a business
deal. Mr Urquhart, a 55-year-old, millionaire, residential property dealer
was murdered on his way home after an evening out with his girlfriend.
West pulled up alongside him on a 250cc Yamaha motorcycle and fired
two shots from a revolver at point-blank range. Before leaving the scene,
West fired another shot into the back of Mr Urquhart’s head to ensure that
he had been killed (‘Hitman blamed for the killing of London business-
man’, Independent, 4 January 1993). The motivations that we could discern
for the remaining hits included: disputes within gangs or more formally-
organised criminal networks; domestic disagreements between divorcing
husbands and wives; cases of mistaken identity; or, more broadly, the hits
related to ‘honour killings’.

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The most prolific hitman in our sample was John Childs although, as
with some serial killers, he has become ‘unseen’ (Wilson et al. 2010). In
short, very few people have ever heard about him. Even so, between 1974
and 1978, Childs carried out six murders. The first of his victims was Terry
‘Teddy’ Eve, who was killed in August 1974. Childs first beat Eve with a
pipe and then with an axe before finally strangling him to death. The
following January, Robert Brown became Childs’s second victim. Brown
was shot three times before being attacked with an axe and then stabbed
with both a knife and a sword. In November 1975, Childs lured his next
victim to his death. George Brett had arranged to meet Childs at a local
factory. Unaware of what was to come, Brett was accompanied by his
ten-year-old son, Terry. Childs shot both victims in the head. Three years
later, Childs killed again. Freddie Sherwood was also shot in the head in
July 1978 and then in October, Childs claimed his sixth and final victim. In
a fashion similar to his previous murders, Childs shot Ronald Andrews in
the head. Here it is interesting to note that, unlike the majority of the
victims in our sample, the bodies of Childs’s victims were never found, and
we therefore only have his account of how these hits were carried out.
Childs would take his victims to his house in London, dismember and then
finally burn them. In 1980, he was sentenced to life imprisonment (‘Evil
hitman John Childs boasts of his crimes to penfriend’, The People, 2 March
1997).
Two surprising findings from analysing our results were the number of
hitmen who were conducting a hit for the first time – an issue we discuss
more fully below – and the fact that many of these hits took place within
suburban neighbourhoods of our towns and cities. Far from the media
portrayal of hits being conducted inside smoky rooms, frequented by
members of an organised crime gang, British hits were more usually
carried out in the open, on pavements, sometimes as the target was out
walking their dog, or going shopping, with passers-by watching on in
abject horror. British hits emerged from, and took place within, the
suburbs, not the criminal ‘underworld’ beloved by fiction. Often the victim
and the hitman lived in the same locality and, indeed, this lack of geo-
graphic mobility on the part of the hitman was one of the most common
reasons why they were brought to justice. In short, as with Gayle, there was
usually local intelligence about who had conducted the hit that would then
get passed on to law enforcement.

A Typology of British Hitmen

After gathering the details listed above about all the cases that we uncov-
ered, we attempted to apply what we had learned about British hitmen to
Schlesinger’s typology. However, it was soon clear that the newspaper
articles which we had used as our main source were an inadequate basis on
which to build up a psychological profile of the hitman, as Schlesinger had
done in his case study. As such, we could not come to any conclusions as to
what Schlesinger describes as ‘personality organization’. So, too, it was

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often difficult to establish how Schlesinger differentiated between his three

categories of ‘amateur’, ‘semi-professional’ and ‘professional’. Indeed, the
description ‘amateur’ implies that these hitmen were, in fact, unpaid for
having carried out the hit – something which we did not discover in our
research. There would also appear to be ‘seepage’ between those patterns
or characteristics which Schlesinger uses to differentiate between the
‘semi-professional’ and the ‘professional’. For example, he does not effec-
tively identify how crime scene behaviours might differ between these two
categories, other than to suggest that the ‘professional’ might ‘stage’ a body
after the hit had been completed. This same criticism can also be applied
in relation to the lack of difference he identifies within the categories
‘typical target’ and ‘contractor’s motive’. Nor were we convinced that
Schlesinger’s typology would be of great practical use to law enforcement.
We do not mean to be unduly critical of Schlesinger’s typology, which
was clearly groundbreaking at the time of its publication, but, in discussing
how it related to the British hitmen who we had uncovered, it became
increasingly clear that we needed to establish a new typology that better
reflected the examples that had been identified. As such, our typology
describes four different types of hitmen whom, after much deliberation,
we call: the ‘Novice’; the ‘Dilettante’; the ‘Journeyman’; and, finally, the
‘Master’. We gave these labels considerable thought as we wanted to
capture accurately the skills and experience shown by the different hitmen
who we uncovered, although we also accept that some might see these
descriptions – especially that of being a ‘Master’ – as too affirming of
someone who commits murder. That is not our intention. We outline our
typology in Table 3.
Here it is acknowledged that we did not, in fact, uncover someone
within this last category – the ‘Master’ – whom we suspect is probably
closest to Schlesinger’s ‘professional’, who was the basis of his case study.
We would suggest that the ‘Master’ hitman is not likely to be easily caught.
However, we can glimpse how a ‘Master’ hitman operates when carrying
out a hit, in such cases as the hit executed on Frank McPhee in Scotland in
May 2000. McPhee, popularly described as a ‘gangland boss’, was killed by
a single shot to the head from a .22 rifle with a telescopic sight outside his
house in Guthrie Street, Maryhill – just 500 yards from the Maryhill Police
Station. It was widely believed that McPhee was killed by a hitman to
prevent him from becoming involved with the sale of drugs in Northern
Ireland (Observer, 13 August 2000). McPhee’s killer has never been
brought to justice. We use cases of this kind, which we suggest were carried
out by a ‘Master’ hitman, to throw further light on the characteristics and
patterns of behaviours associated with our other three types. In this
respect, we considered issues not discussed by Schlesinger, such as whether
the hitman was geographically mobile and the way in which, if applicable,
they were apprehended by the police.
These descriptions of method, crime scene, typical target, motive, how
caught and what was known about the hitman’s occupation, capture the
details of the hits that we uncovered. So, too, the labels that we have
given to these hitmen are being used as they express the patterns and

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TABLE 3
A Typology of British Hitmen

Novice Dilettante Journeyman Master

Method shooting varied; shooting/ shooting shooting/other

stabbing/ (poison)
strangulation/
beating
Crime scene organised/ disorganised organised/some highly organised/
some forensic little or no
forensic evidence forensic
evidence evidence
Typical target varied domestic business varied
Contractor personal/ personal/ organised organised
motive business business criminal criminal
activity activity
How caught local varied; local intelligence/ unapprehended/
intelligence confession/ geographically geographically
forensic stable mobile
evidence/
local
intelligence
Occupation unemployed/ varied ex-military/ ex-military/crime
casual work/ occupations
petty crime involving
firearms/crime

(Source: Nexis.)

characteristics of the different types of hits that took place. For example, as
many of the cases that were reported upon involved someone carrying out
a hit for the first time, we use the description ‘Novice’. By this we mean
that the hitman was a trainee, or a beginner. However, this should not be
interpreted as implying that the hitman was unable to plan the hit, or carry
it out successfully. As discussed with Gayle, the police believed that the
person who had carried out this hit was a ‘professional’ – someone, to use
Schlesinger’s description, who had planned the hit, and had left no physi-
cal evidence at the crime scene. Indeed, Gayle was only captured because
he had bragged about what he had done locally. In short, ‘Novices’ – even
very young novices – can make successful hitmen. The case of Te Rangi-
maria Ngarimu, which was described above, also provides another good
example of the ‘Novice’ contract killer who was still, nonetheless, also able
to plan her hit. After all, she left little forensic evidence that was of any use
to the police and was only caught because she decided to confess to the
murder.
On the other hand, the ‘Dilettante’, who can often be much older than
the ‘Novice’ when he attempts, or indeed carries out, the hit, seems to have
decided to do so for a range of reasons. By using the label ‘Dilettante’ we
are implying that this type of hitman does not necessarily come from an
offending background and only seems to have decided to accept a contract

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as a way of resolving some form of personal crisis. More often than not this
personal crisis was financial. As such, the ‘Dilettante’ dabbles and dips into
the culture of contract killing, but not necessarily with any enthusiasm, or,
indeed, with much skill.
The case of Orville Wright perhaps best illustrates the ‘Dilettante’.
Wright (26 years), who had previously worked as a legal clerk in Jamaica,
was offered £5,000 to carry out the murder of 36-year-old Theresa Pitkin.
So, in December 1996, Wright broke into Ms Pitkin’s flat in North London
wearing a balaclava and brandishing a knife. However, after speaking to
his intended victim, Wright decided he could not go through with the task
of killing her. Described by Judge David Murchie as ‘a hitman who lost his
nerve’ (‘Hit-man who took pity on female victim gets two years in prison’,
Independent, 9 May 1998), Wright’s inability to complete the hit displayed
the incompetent and disorganised nature of his involvement in contract
murder. This also helps to explain why Wright was only jailed for 2.5
years. However, from the details of the case described above, we can also
presume that Wright’s intention was to use a knife against his victim. This,
again, displays a difference in technique as often the ‘Dilettante’, rather
than the other hitmen in our sample, could not gain access to firearms.
Like Wright, Paul Cryne (62 years) was also a ‘Dilettante’ hitman. Cryne
– the second oldest hitman in our sample, seemingly still holds the Guin-
ness world record for the longest 24-hour underwater swim, but in 2010
was jailed for life for the murder of Sharon Birchwood. Cryne had had a
lucrative lifestyle in Thailand throughout the 1990s, after receiving a
£500,000 insurance pay out. However, his excessive spending eventually
caught up with him and, whilst also being on bail for suspicion of carrying
out another contract murder, Cryne managed to accumulate a debt of
£11,000. Thereafter, he seems to have met up with Sharon Birchwood’s
ex-husband, Graham Birchwood, through the expatriate community in
Thailand and accepted the contract to kill Sharon. Cryne flew back to the
United Kingdom to carry out the murder and it would later emerge that
Mrs Birchwood’s death would allow her ex-husband to inherit £475,000.
Contracted for £30,000, Cryne strangled Mrs Birchwood in her home in
Surrey, and left her ‘cruelly trussed-up with parcel tape and electrical
cord’. Cryne was apprehended after leaving forensic evidence at the scene
of the crime which the police were able to match with his DNA sample,
which had been taken after his arrest for a crime he had committed many
years earlier (‘World record holder turned hitman jailed for murder’,
Guardian, 11 August 2010).
Finally, the case of Richard Austin (19 years) and Carlton Alveranga (20
years) throws further light onto ‘Dilettante’ hitmen. Contracted by gang
boss, Ian McLeod (43 years) and on the instructions of ‘gangster’, Bobby
Speirs, Austin and Alveranga were hired to carry out the murder of David
Totton and Aaron Travers. In March 2006, Austin and Alveranga were
driven to the Brass Handles pub in Salford, Manchester, where their
intended targets were watching a football match. A witness would later
describe the pair as ‘appearing reluctant to go inside’, although they
continued into the pub, each armed with a handgun. According to the

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Manchester Evening News, Austin fired six bullets, five of which hit their two
intended targets. However, during the hit, one of the guns jammed and
the crowd inside the pub disarmed the pair and then fired back at them.
As a result, Austin and Alveranga ‘staggered outside and collapsed’, and
later died of their gunshot wounds (‘Unsolved murder; Richard Austin
and Carlton Alveranga, both shot dead in Salford’, Manchester Evening
News, 7 June 2011). Each of these three cases of the ‘Dilettante’ hitman
illustrates the lack of success with this particular type of hitman. Often they
fail to kill their intended target; they may use different methods from the
norm to attempt the hit, because they are unable to source a firearm; if
they do gain access to firearms, their weaponry malfunctions; they get
‘cold feet’; and they are always caught.
Our description of the ‘Journeyman’ – someone who is capable, expe-
rienced and reliable but not an especially exceptional performer, not only
fits someone like Childs, whom we have described above, but also the
hitman ‘team’ of Roger Vincent and David Smith. Vincent and Smith were
sentenced to a minimum of 30 and 25 years respectively in 2005 for the
murder of 32-year-old David King. Known as ‘Rolex Dave’, King was
described as being a ‘well-known underworld figure with many enemies’
(‘Hoddesdon gym victim’s past revealed’, London Evening Standard, 10
October 2003). Displaying some of the most obvious characteristics of
‘Journeymen’ hitmen, the hit executed by Vincent and Smith was organ-
ised and well planned. So, too, the police believe that the motive behind
the murder was related to organised criminal activity. It was assumed by
his killers that King had become a police informant, after a case held
against him for importing 14kg of heroin had been dropped in 2002
(‘Drive by murder’, This is local London, 27 August 2005). When King left
his local gym on the morning of 3 October 2003, Vincent and Smith were
waiting outside in a stolen Peugeot Boxer van and ambushed him. Vincent
fired in excess of 25 rounds from an AK-47 Kalashnikov machine gun and
killed King instantly. After the shooting, Vincent and Smith fled the scene,
burned the van and then proceeded to escape in another prearranged
vehicle. It was during this change in getaway vehicle that Vincent and
Smith made the mistake that would ultimately lead to their apprehension
and prevent them from being labelled as ‘Master’ hitmen. Police found a
plastic glove and were able to identify Smith via a palm print. From this
they were able to track more than 100,000 mobile phone calls and col-
lected over 1,200 witness statements. During their sentencing, Mr Justice
Wilkie stated that the hit was ‘a thoroughly planned, ruthless and brutally
executed assassination’ (‘Two jailed for life for AK-47 drive-by murder of
gangster’, Guardian, 24 August 2005).
There are several characteristics in this case that identify Vincent and
Smith as ‘Journeymen’. First, a gun was used to shoot their victim, albeit a
much more dangerous and unpredictable weapon than that used by any
other hitman in our sample. In other words, they were able to source a
weapon. Second, the crime scene was organised, in that the hitmen knew
where their intended victim would be and they ensured that they were
able to get away from the hit leaving as little forensic evidence as possible.

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Their target, David King, was well known to criminal networks in the area
and thus the contractor’s motives undoubtedly had its roots in organised
crime. So, too, we should note that Vincent and Smith were apprehended
due to local intelligence; the discovery of a glove with a palm print; and,
finally, as a result of eyewitness testimony. The final characteristic of being
a ‘Journeyman’ is that Vincent and Smith were generally involved in
criminal activity, prior to engaging in contract murder.
Our final example of the ‘Journeyman’ is 63-year-old David Harrison,
the oldest contract killer whom we have discovered through our research.
On the morning of 5 July 2010, Harrison travelled to the Staffordshire
home of father-of-two, Richard Deakin, where he proceeded to shoot the
skip-hire boss in the chest and leg while he slept. Described as a ‘bull-
necked, toothless, career criminal’, Harrison was soon under police sus-
picion for the murder. Harrison made a number of fundamental mistakes
that led to his conviction. These mistakes include mobile phone records
that placed him at, or near, the murder scene on three mornings prior to
the hit; police discovered £26,000 in banknotes at his second home, all of
which were dated within two weeks of the murder; and, in a further search
of his home, police uncovered newspaper cuttings about the murder. After
being sentenced to life imprisonment, Anamarie Coomansigh, a casework
lawyer from the West Midlands Crown Prosecution Service’s complex
casework unit stated that: ‘This has been an important prosecution where
a professional hitman and his driver have been convicted of a cold and
calculated murder, depriving two very young children of their father’
(‘Richard Deakin murder trial: inside the mind of the merciless hitman’,
Birmingham Mail, 23 December 2012).
Harrison’s case, like that of Vincent and Smith, demonstrates many of
the characteristics that we would expect from the ‘Journeyman’. First, his
method of executing the hit is consistent with our expectation that he
would use a gun. Indeed, the sawn-off shotgun that he used to kill Mr
Deakin was never recovered. Second, the crime scene was organised, with
little or no forensic evidence found. It is unclear as to why this hit had been
contracted and police were unable to establish a clear motive at the time.
However, local intelligence triggered by the case being featured on the
BBC1 series Crimewatch, led to Harrison’s eventual apprehension. The
final characteristic of the ‘Journeyman’ hitman is the fact that Harrison was
already involved in crime and, quite apart from this hit, he was suspected
of having used a crossbow bolt to kill another target.

Discussion
In our development of this typology of British hitmen, we have clearly not
discussed at any length the ‘Master’ hitman. As we have indicated, this type
of hitman is probably closest to Schlesinger’s case study of his ‘professional’
who conducted over 100 hits. From discussions with our network of
informants, it was clear that such ‘Masters’ do, indeed, exist and it
was alleged that they would often come from military or paramilitary

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backgrounds. However, this is impossible to verify with any certainty.

These ‘Masters’, by virtue of evading justice, exist in the shadows – almost
like ghosts – and it has, therefore, been impossible to build up any concrete
picture of them as individuals, as opposed to the picture that we have been
able to present of the types of hits that they might execute. However, it
would appear that one of the major reasons that they evade justice is that
these ‘Masters’ travel into the community where the hit is to take place and
then leave that community shortly afterwards. As such, local intelligence
about the hit and the hitman is minimal. This is an important considera-
tion, for it was local intelligence which, by and large, brought most of the
British hitmen in our sample to justice.
Here we should acknowledge that, in many respects, our typology is,
therefore, based on failure. In other words, the hitmen who we can
describe are those who have been apprehended and then prosecuted. To
what extent, therefore, can we say that these hitmen are characteristic of
those hitmen who evade justice? How might their methods as hitmen
differ from those whom we have been able to describe? Indeed, might it be
the case that there are some hitmen who are so adept as killers that the
deaths of their victims does not even raise suspicion and are, instead,
simply thought to be the result of natural causes? This is, of course, an
impossible question to answer, but the likelihood of this being even theo-
retically possible makes it extremely difficult to determine whether or not
the incidence of contract killing is stable, getting worse, or, indeed, falling.
We acknowledge these weaknesses but do not necessarily believe them
to undermine the overall thrust of our research. After all, for example, the
original typology about serial killers developed by the FBI in the 1980s was
based on interviews conducted with 36 convicted serial killers (Holmes and
DeBurger 1988; Holmes and Holmes 1998). As has been pointed out by a
number of scholars, those serial killers who therefore have evaded capture
might differ quite markedly from those who are eventually brought to
justice (see, for example, Wilson 2009). Even so, this has not stopped a
number of law enforcement agencies using this typology, which has there-
after been developed and refined over time, to help them to look for
patterns and trends in a linked series of crimes and to develop their
investigatory techniques accordingly (see Egger 1984, 1998; Ferguson
et al. 2003; Canter and Wentink 2004). We suggest that the typology being
offered here might also be of similar use to law enforcement.

Conclusion
The dearth of academic research about hitmen is to be regretted, no
matter the all-too-real difficulties of researching this particular form of
violent crime. Even so, this exploratory article has only attempted to
sketch in the broad contours of the phenomenon and in doing so we hope
to prompt greater interest in this subject area, and its various cultures and
subcultures. Further research is clearly needed and, if it were possible,
these broad contours would benefit from the finer detail that might come

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through interviews with hitmen themselves. So, too, we hope that others
will test our suggested typology and our broader conclusions that British
hitmen do not exist solely or perhaps even primarily, within some secret,
criminal underworld. Rather they are usually part of that community in
which their hits takes place. Indeed, this simple reality is one of the major
reasons why they are eventually apprehended.
Nor were all of the hits in our sample particularly professionally carried
out. ‘Dilettante’ British hitmen, in particular, changed their minds; they
got cold feet and could, in extreme circumstances, become the victims of
their intended targets themselves. Even so, the ‘Journeyman’ hitman could
be successful over a long period of time, although he was, thankfully,
eventually caught – largely due to the intelligence that was built up about
his activities and through developments in forensic science. Here, too, the
importance of police informants cannot be underestimated.
Finally, the sites of British hits were not usually bars, clubs, or casinos
but were far more likely to be the shopping centre, or the suburb in which
the intended target lived. As a result, members of the public were all too
often witnesses to a hit. Hits in this respect were not unusual and extraor-
dinary, but rather commonplace and ordinary. So, too, the motives for a
hit being contracted were mundane. Frankly, the motivations to pay a
hitman the relatively small amount to carry out a murder were depress-
ingly banal. Husbands and wives fell out with each other, or wanted to gain
early access to life assurance policies; business partners decided to go, or
wanted to go, their separate ways; business deals fell apart; and young
gang members wanted to impress other, older, gang members with their
bravado. All of this is far removed from the media portrayal of the fictional
hitman who, on the evidence presented here, has little, or no connection,
to his British reality.

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Date submitted: December 2013

Date accepted: January 2014

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