| Hateland -
Articles |
01/07/00 - Festering hate that
turned quiet son into a murderer
Nick Hopkins and Sarah Hall
The Guardian
David Copeland's terrifying campaign ended on a still
night in a Hampshire town as the dead and the maimed
were still being counted from the wreckage of the Admiral
Duncan pub in Soho. Seven unarmed officers from Scotland
Yard's Flying Squad knocked on the door of a semi-detached
house in Sunnybank Road, Cove, and heard a voice call
out: "Give me a minute."
Copeland was half-dressed when he opened the front door.
He seemed to be half-expecting the visit. He rubbed
his eyes and mumbled: "Yeah, they were all down
to me. I did them on my own."
Any doubts the officers may have had disappeared when
Copeland led them upstairs to his bedroom. Two Nazi
flags were hanging on a wall, alongside a macabre collage
of photos and newspaper stories.
The theme was bomb blasts. There were pictures of victims
from explosions in Omagh and at the Olympics in Atlanta
- and in the middle of this homage to bloodshed, was
a poster of Hitler.
On his way to Charing Cross police station for questioning,
Copeland sang at the top of his voice. He seemed jubilant.
He was also very eager to give detectives a de tailed
account of how he made and planted the three devices.
But there was one issue he could not explain convincingly,
and it became the crux of the trial at the Old Bailey.
Why?
What had really driven him to murder? Was it, as his
lawyers claimed, severe mental illness? Or was his hatred
of ethnic minorities and the gay community motivated
by ego and evil?
There is little in Copeland's background to explain
how he became so hateful. Born on May 15, 1976, at the
Great Middlesex hospital in Isleworth, he was the second
of three sons - his brother John is three years older,
Paul is four years younger.
His parents, Stephen and Caroline, moved the family
to a detached neo-Georgian house in Yateley, when he
was 10.
Mrs Copeland, who has reverted to her maiden name Woolard
following divorce, said David was the quietest of her
boys. "He was very, very gentle, and, out of all
my children, the most sensitive, loving and caring.
He was never naugh
Copeland studied at Yateley comprehensive and passed
seven GSCEs. His friends thought he was a little introverted,
but said he was not aggressive or racist.
He is small - 5ft 3in - and was occasionally pushed
around by other pupils, but he was not bullied. One
contemporary, Richard Travers, said: "He seemed
harmless. He didn't seem to have a problem with any
of the black kids in our year. He didn't show any sort
of violent behaviour."
After leaving school at 16, Copeland drifted into a
few jobs - roofing, fencing, working in McDonalds. He
tried to start a band, listened to heavy metal bands
like Iron Maiden, and experimented with drink and drugs.
There were also brushes with the police - Copeland
has three minor convictions for common assault, making
off without payment and criminal damage. "I put
it down to immaturity and rebelliousness, nothing else,"said
Mr Copeland, an engineer.
He believes the turning point in his son's life came
on his brother's 16th birthday five years ago. After
a row with his wife, she walked out and never returned.
The following morning, he told his sons.
"Maybe this triggered his mental illness. Immediately
afterwards, he became very angry and very drunk. He
never talked about her leaving him and he wouldn't see
her."
Ms Woolard, 47, believes her ex-husband blames her
because he is still bitter about their divorce.
"On a prison visit, I asked David if my leaving
affected him. And he said 'No, mum'."
She added: "There was no reason for him to hate
people. He didn't know anyone, as far as I'm aware,
who was homosexual. There weren't many black people
at his school. All I can think is that, when he finally
left home to live in London something must have happened.
"Something was going on in his head. He must have
been so lost and unhappy to have done as he's done."
Copeland himself never mentioned the divorce as having
any significance; it seems his phobias set root long
before his mother left. He told the police his hatred
of gay men stemmed from childhood and was a reaction
to his parents thinking he was homosexual.
He recalled how when he was 13 they sang the theme
tune to the Flintstones, and seemed to emphasise the
lyrics ... "we'll have a gay old time."
He was appalled that his mother had then asked him
if he wanted to confide any secrets. His parents say
the episode is a figment of his imagination. Mr Copeland
remembered an occasion when his son, then 19, was challenged
about his sexuality by his grandmother. She asked him:
"What's up with you, David? Do you like boys, because
you haven't got a girlfriend."
That was the only time the subject of his sexuality
was raised. Copeland vowed never to speak to his grandmother
again.
After his arrest, Copeland claimed he had been having
violent and sadistic dreams from the age of 12. He had
thought about killing his classmates and had wanted
to be reincarnated as an SS officer surrounded by sex
slaves. Later, he said he read biographies of Hitler
and became privately obsessed with the idea of becoming
famous.
The explosion in Centennial Park during the Atlanta
Olympics, in 1996, seems to have been pivotal. As he
watched news reports from the scene, he wondered why
nobody had bombed the Notting Hill carnival. He couldn't
get the idea out of his head and woke up months later
vowing to do it himself. "I am the first domino,"
he said to one psychiatrist. "Everything else will
fall."
In 1997 he moved to east London to work with his father
as an engineer's commissioning assistant on the Jubilee
extension line. In May, he joined the British National
Party and attended two meetings, including one which
was ambushed by the Anti-Nazi League.
Four months later he rang the party's administration
office to cancel his subscription and denounced the
BNP for refusing to countenance a "paramilitary
struggle".
A year later, Copeland joined the National Socialist
Movement, thought to be the political wing of Combat
18. He was recruited by the movement's self-styled leader,
Tony Williams, and appointed Hampshire organiser.
It was a grand title for a small job - there were only
a dozen members, and the organisation collapsed completely
after his arrest.
Copeland saw his doctor twice in 1998 and was prescribed
mild anti-depressants to help him cope with anxiety
attacks. He told his GP he was "losing his mind."
Nobody doubts Copeland was suffering from some form
of depression before the bombing campaign, but the severity
of the condition was contested.
Five psychiatrists who assessed him when he was on
remand at Broadmoor high security hospital concluded
he had been suffering from a paranoid schizophrenic
illness for several years. One of them, Dr Paul Gilluley,
said the visions Copeland spoke of as a teenager were
consistent with the first stages of a schizophrenic
condition. The Flintstones anecdote was, he said, a
sure sign of delusional belief. Some of Copeland's other
pronouncements - he claimed he was Jesus and swore God
would rescue him - were proof he had lost all rationality.
But the retrospective diagnosis was challenged by prosecutors,
who were under pressure not to concede to his pleas
of guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished
responsibilty from the victims of those who died and
were injured. When Copeland was arrested, he insisted
to a psychiatric nurse that he had "logically and
rationally" planted the devices.
Another consultant psychiatrist who examined him, Philip
Joseph, concluded that Copeland was not suffering from
schizophrenia when he started the campaign, but had
a less serious personality disorder.
Concerns that some psychiatrists had exaggerated his
condition were heightened when the crown discovered
Copeland had been writing to a woman, Patsy Scanlon,
while on remand. In one of several letters he sent between
May and December 1999, he told Scanlon that he couldn't
believe he had fooled so many experts over his illness.
Copeland didn't know Scanlon was not a penfriend. Scanlon
wasn't even a woman. His correspondence had been with
a man called Bernard O'Mahoney, who had sold the letters
for a substantial sum to the Mirror newspaper.
Whatever his mental state, a year after the Centennial
Park bomb Copeland began planning his own terror campaign
by downloading The Terrorist's Handbook during a visit
to a cyber cafe in Victoria, central London.
The manual was too complex and in June 1998 he took
a second document, How to Make Bombs, Part 2, from the
web. This one had simple instructions for building a
"pipe bomb".
The materials he needed were easy to find. He bought
fireworks from two shops in Farnborough, alarm clocks
for timing devices, tupperware boxes and hundreds of
6in nails from different hardware stores. Copeland experimented
with smaller devices, sneaking out of his house late
at night to detonate them on a local common.
With a primed bomb taped to the inside of a new Head
sports bag, Copeland took a train to Waterloo station
and then a taxi to Brixton on Saturday, April 17. He
had never been to the area before and walked up and
down the busy High Street for more than an hour, scouting
around its stores and markets. He was surprised so many
white people lived there.
He finally left the bag against the front of the Iceland
shop on the corner of Electric Avenue and took a taxi
back to Waterloo. The black bag was spotted by nearby
street traders, who looked inside and wondered if it
was a device of some kind. Minutes later a man took
the bomb out of the bag and rested it on a waist-high
stack of wooden pallets. Crucially, the bag was taken
away from the scene and recovered intact.
Just as the police arrived at 5.25pm, the bomb exploded.
Fifty people were injured, including two who lost an
eye. Nine people needed surgery to have nails removed
and 28 suffered serious cuts. One of the injured was
a baby.
Two days later Copeland was in a cafe in Stratford,
east London, taking a break from work with his father
and a few colleagues. Someone mentioned the bomb and
declared a madman was on the loose. "Dave didn't
look taken aback or stressed or suspicious," said
Mr Copeland. "He behaved perfectly normally and
joined in the general agreement. There was nothing to
suggest he'd done anything wrong."
The explosion stunned Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist
branch, which launched an investigation codenamed Operation
Marathon. Although nobody had claimed responsibility,
deputy assistant commissioner Alan Fry, who was leading
the hunt, was uncertain about the motivation. Race was
one possibility, others included a link to the war in
Kosovo, animal rights extremists or a feud between rival
drug gangs. Forensic analysis of the device, which was
packed with 1,500 nails, did little to help his evaluation.
Two days later, anonymous calls to the incident room
claimed the explosion was the work of Combat 18, the
White Wolves, the English National Party and the English
Liberation Army. Mr Fry knew the calls were probably
hoaxes. Combat 18 had been heavily infiltrated and little
was known about the White Wolves. Tension grew when
threatening letters signed WW were sent to high profile
black and Asian community leaders, including the MP
Oona King. Copeland later criticised the "thugs
who were trying to steal his glory".
Detectives began scanning closed circuit telelvision
coverage coverage of Brix ton and sent hundreds of hours
of footage to the FBI to help them isolate individuals.
There was an appeal for witnesses on Crimewatch - the
last show presented by Jill Dando - and on the following
Saturday, there was a reconstruction at the scene.
Mr Fry had just returned from Brixton to his office
at New Scotland Yard when he was told there had been
a second explosion, this time in east London.
Copeland had been there earlier in the afternoon with
another bomb in a black Reebok holdall. He had never
been to Brick Lane and thought its market was open on
Saturday.
In fact, the market opens on Sunday. Copeland left
the bag in Hanbury Street but it was spotted by a member
of the public who took it to a police office nearby.
When he realised the office was closed, he looked inside
the bag. At first he thought it belonged to a workman,
but a second glance set his mind racing. He put it in
the boot of his car and hurried to a phonebox to call
the police.
"He was dialling 999 when the device went off,"
said a source."Putting the bomb in the car meant
the damage from flying nails was reduced considerably."
Nevertheless, 13 people were injured, eight with serious
cuts and suffering from shock. Copeland dialled 999
from east London and keyed in C18 - Combat 18. He did
not return to Hampshire immediately. Instead, he went
to Soho on a reconnaissance mission. His aim was to
find a pub used by homosexuals.
Four days after the second blast, officers finally
identified a man in Brixton who had been carrying a
Head sports bag. Copeland was filmed walking outside
Iceland by a camera inside the store. Another camera
caught him leaving the area without the bag. The images,
which were grainy from the number of times they had
been enhanced, were given to the media on Thursday.
Copeland, meanwhile, knew the net was tightening. He
discovered the police had published CCTV images when
he overheard a radio news bulletin during another trip
to Soho. He decided to bring forward his next attack
by a day.
He went home, gathered the materials he needed and
travelled by train to London, booking into the Airways
bed and breakfast hotel in Victoria. The following morning,
he assembled the bomb. It was a bank holiday weekend
and by late afternoon, the Admiral Duncan was full.
Many drinkers were standing outside to enjoy the late
afternoon spring sunshine.
Copeland walked into the pub, ordered a soft drink
and chatted to another man, pretending that he was waiting
for his boyfriend. He left the pub at 6.05 and heard
the explosion as he walked to his hotel. Safely back
in his room, he watched the first reports of the blast
on Channel Four's 7pm news before going home.
The Soho bomb was the most devastating. Three people
died and four needed amputations. Twenty-six people
suffered very serious burns, another 53 were injured
by flying glass and nails.
Eighty minutes before the bomb went off, the police
received a vital call. Paul Mifsud rang a hotline to
say a friend and work colleague strongly resembled the
man caught by the cameras in Brixton shortly before
the explosion.
He thought it was odd that "Mungo", Copeland's
nickname, had not turned up to work. He gave the officer
a phone number but not an address. A British Telecom
expert with the authority to do reverse directory searches
was ordered back to work, and by 9pm, officers had Copeland's
address and were checking his criminal record at Winchester
police station.
There have been several persistent rumours the police
had Copeland under surveillance before the Soho blast
and lost him. Scotland Yard last night dismissed this
as "absolutely untrue". Other speculation
has suggested there was friction between MI5 and Scotland
Yard, and that the two clashed over risk assessment.
This too has been strongly denied.
Scotland Yard did know about Copeland before the call
from Mr Mifsud. Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine,
faxed Special Branch, through an intermediary, a list
of 260 known rightwing extremists at 2pm on the day
of the Soho blast. Copeland's name was among them, but
the address for him was old. "Copeland was already
in London by then," said a police source. "There
is nothing we could have done."
Copeland did not give evidence during his trial. Mostly,
he sat expressionless in the dock. He showed emotion just
once in all his court appearances. At the Old Bailey hearing
in February when he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, he
was jeered and heckled from the public gallery. As he
said: "Not guilty to murder, guilty to manslaughter",
a woman burst into tears and shouted "You bastard!
You bastard!" |
| Contact : bernard.omahoney@bernardomahoney.com |
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