The murder of three notorious gangsters who were blasted to death with a shotgun as they sat in a Range Rover parked down a country lane in December 1995, spawned a slew of low-budget British gangster movies.
The Essex Boys became a franchise, but at its heart was a real story.
The story of two men jailed for life for a triple murder largely on the word of a supergrass whose credibility has been questioned for 30 years.
Mickey Steele and Jack Whomes have always maintained their innocence of the murders of Tony Tucker, 38, Pat Tate, 37, and 26-year-old Craig Rolfe – who were dubbed the Essex Boys.
In 2021, the Parole Board decided Whomes, a model prisoner then aged 59, could be released.
But Steele was kept behind bars for another four years – until this week, when officials finally relented and decided the 82-year-old no longer posed a threat to society.
In a statement published on Thursday, the Parole Board said: ‘After considering the circumstances of his offending, the progress made while in custody and the other evidence presented at the hearings, the panel was satisfied that imprisonment was no longer necessary for the protection of the public.’
Steele was 55 in January 1998, when an Old Bailey jury found him and Whomes guilty of the murders. Both were jailed for life and given minimum terms of 23 years.
During the trial, the prosecution claimed the pair had fallen out with Tucker and his pals over a batch of cannabis they had smuggled across the English Channel and then sold to the Essex Boys.
It was claimed Steele was in the Range Rover with the trio on the night of the murder and lured them to Workhouse Lane, a remote track leading to a field near the village of Rettendon, on some spurious pretence.
Whomes, it was claimed – without any forensic or eyewitness evidence – was waiting in the darkness and somehow managed to shoot Tucker, Tate and Rolfe dead with a shotgun without any of them even moving.
Rolfe’s hands were still on the steering wheel and Tucker still had his mobile phone in his lap.
The killing is believed to have taken place around 7pm and it was a freezing cold night, with snow having fallen during the darkness.
The following morning, farmer Peter Theobald and his friend Ken Jiggins initially suspected the Range Rover belonged to poachers, until they spotted the bodies.
The features of the three ruggedly handsome villains had been hideously disfigured by the shotgun blasts.
But one of the many puzzling aspects of the case was why the Range Rover was not iced over – as Mr Theobald’s own vehicle had been – if it had been there all night.
The key prosecution witness was supergrass Darren Nicholls, who claimed he was the getaway driver on the night and picked up Whomes and Steele at the bottom of the lane after the shooting.
Nicholls, a registered police informer, had earlier been arrested in possession of 10kg of cannabis.
It was while he was being held in custody on that drugs charge that he suddenly volunteered information about the Rettendon murders.
But the account Nicholls gave was eerily similar to statements another man had given earlier, in which he identified the killers as being from a gang based in Canning Town, east London.
Nicholls was given credit for turning Queen’s evidence and was sentenced to 15 months in jail, but immediately walked free because of the time he had spent on remand.
He went into a witness protection programme and has never been seen since.
Whomes and Steele’s trial was one of the first where a prosecution used what is known as cell-site evidence – data from mobile phone companies that shows where somebody’s phone is at any given time.
Whomes, a mechanic, always insisted he was in the area around 7pm because Nicholls had asked him to pick up his broken-down car from a pub car park about a mile away.
The Rettendon murders was a high-profile case from the outset.
The Essex Boys had run the doors at Raquel’s nightclub in Basildon, and were involved in the supply of the Ecstasy tablets that indirectly killed 18-year-old Leah Betts.
Leah went into a coma after drinking seven litres of water in a 90-minute period after taking an Ecstasy tablet at Raquel’s at her 18th birthday party.
She died two weeks later and her parents Paul, a former police officer, and Dorothy, released an image of her as she lay in her hospital bed in a coma in an attempt to warn teenagers of the danger of Ecstasy.
The photograph made the front pages of most newspapers in November 1995.
After the Rettendon murders, the police and the press soon made the link between the victims and Leah Betts.
In 2006, Whomes and Steele took their case to the Court of Appeal, arguing the jury had been unaware Nicholls had agreed to co-operate with a journalist, Tony Thompson, on a book and had a financial incentive in the pair being found guilty.
But three appeal judges rejected their appeal and said there was ‘no element of unsafety’ in the convictions.
Whomes and Steele continued to protest their innocence, but the Criminal Case Review Commission refused to refer the case back to the Court of Appeal.
Steele, who spent much of his time in high-security category A prisons like Full Sutton in North Yorkshire, was a notoriously difficult inmate for many years and refused to embark on courses to address his offending, as he insisted he was innocent.
The Parole Board said this week: ‘His behaviour in prison had shown a marked improvement and Mr Steele had been engaging more closely with those supervising him.’
But they also said a psychologist employed by the prison service ‘remained concerned about the level of insight demonstrated by Mr Steele and aspects of his style of thinking’.
Steele will be released on conditions – he must live at a designated address, obey a curfew monitored by an electronic tag, and avoid contact with victims or their relatives.
Another condition says he must ‘meet specified restrictions relating to the use of electronic technology and contact with the media or other publications and not to own a boat, airplane or firearm’.
It remains to see whether he and Jack Whomes will ever clear their names.