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18/09/01 - Bernard O'Mahoney: Helping to secure convictions
By Julia Stuart
The
Independent
By posing as a lonely young woman, Bernard O'Mahoney has coaxed
several alleged killers into confessing their guilt. He's censorious
about people who profit from crime, but is handsomely paid by
the tabloids. Now, one of his 'victims' is suing him
Laurna-Jane Stevens was a young, auburn-haired dance instructor
from London. Although she didn't actually know Shaun Armstrong,
or Tony, as he was called, she decided to write to him in prison
in July 1994, after he was arrested for the murder of three-year-old
Rosie Palmer.
The toddler had gone to buy a lolly from an ice-cream van just
yards from her home in Hartlepool, Teesside, and never returned
home. Three days later, her partly-clothed body was found, battered
and sexually abused, in a bin liner in Armstrong's cupboard.
Laurna-Jane wrote to Armstrong in prison, saying that people
were innocent until proven guilty. Up until his trial, she wrote
around 50 such letters, chatting about her life, sympathising
with him and asking him how the case was going.
Armstrong, who had denied the crime in court, fell for her and
wrote around 80 letters back, eventually confessing to the murder,
and to the fact that he was going to admit to manslaughter on
the grounds of diminished responsibility, though he was mentally
"fit as a fiddle".
Laurna-Jane gave the letters to the police, and Armstrong, confronted
with their content, subsequently pleaded guilty to murder. He
received a life sentence. But Laurna-Jane wasn't a dancer. She
wasn't even a woman. The letters were written by Bernard O'Mahoney,
a bouncer with around 15 convictions including wounding, grievous
bodily harm, robbery, firearms and public order offences, and
who had served a total of 21 months in prison.
O'Mahoney was working for the News of the World, which also
provided a female reporter whom Armstrong occasionally rang,
believing her to be Laurna-Jane. After the trial the headline
in the paper gloated: "How News of the World Trapped Rosie's
Killer – we fooled fiend into confessing his guilt."
Last year, O'Mahoney wrote again to Armstrong to solicit his
views on his crime for a book that he was planning about Armstrong
and other child killers he had written to. In response, O'Mahoney
received a writ from the murderer's solicitor demanding up to
£15,000 in damages and the return of the letters.
Armstrong alleges that the private letters detailing his crime
were obtained under false pretences, and his privacy was breached
when they were handed to the police. He claims he is entitled
to damages or a share of the profits gained by using any material
in the letters.
O'Mahoney, 41, now a construction worker, is sitting in a hotel
bar in his work clothes – a brown waxed jacket over a green
rugby shirt, jeans and black boots. A scar runs down his forehead,
missing his right eye, and starting up again underneath it.
Another tracks horizontally across his fat neck like a trail
left by a snail. "I would cut my own throat before I paid,"
he says. "I couldn't morally give him anything." He
says that a member of the public has offered to pay part of
his legal fees, but he turned him down. "I wouldn't like
to think of anyone's money being wasted on Armstrong.
"I think Rosie Palmer had a right to life, never mind a
private life, which he took away. And when he'd done that, he
propelled himself into the media spotlight, and therefore, in
my opinion, he lost all his right to privacy by leading that
girl away to an unimaginable death."
He plans to send Armstrong's future parole-board hearings the
more horrific details of his crime and his thoughts on it, all
gleaned from his correspondence. O'Mahoney, who calls himself
a "reformed criminal" and lives in a rented flat in
Peterborough with his girlfriend, Emma Turner, 28, a bank worker,
insists that he had already decided that any money made from
the book would go to charity.
"There's something distasteful about making money out of
dead kids," he says, despite the fact that he was paid
£3,000 by the News of the World for his correspondence
with Armstrong. O'Mahoney and the NoW had already successfully
played the sting before, first with Peter Sutcliffe (who had
already been convicted), and then with Richard Blenkey, who
was on remand for the murder of seven-year-old Paul Pearson.
O'Mahoney wrote (as a man) to Blenkey, who also eventually confessed
in a letter and was imprisoned for life. O'Mahoney was paid
£3,000 by the newspaper after the conviction. "You've
got to show sympathy for them, and friendship," O'Mahoney
explains.
"When they commit those crimes, they're segregated from
other prisoners as well. People spit in their food and abuse
them, verbally and physically. They ain't got nothing, and quite
rightly so, and so when this letter comes offering them some
humanity, nine times out of 10 they will take it.
"Armstrong was planning to deny it, so I wrote to him and
he wrote back straight away," he says. "He was like
a lunatic – he proposed marriage to her and all sorts.
He said how much he liked her, how great it was to have someone
he could trust, that he could tell her anything.
He said he wanted to spend his life with her if he ever got
out. I had a go at him, I said he was being stupid. You don't
want to go down that road, you don't want letters full of crap,
you want letters about his crime. He wrote back and apologised.
"In the end he wrote quite clearly that the only reason
why he done it was because he was drunk, and that he was guilty
of the murder. He added: 'Flowers in Gods Garden anyone', which I
thought was touching." O'Mahoney's letter-writing skills
also helped secure the conviction of David Copeland, the London
nail bomber, whose targets included the Admiral Duncan pub in
Soho.
During the trial last year, the Old Bailey heard how Copeland
had fallen in love with lonely secretary Patsy Scanlon, who
began writing to him shortly after his arrest. Copeland wrote
that he dreamed about her wearing sexy clothing, and could not
wait for her to visit him in Broadmoor.
The letters were a key element in the bomber's court case, as
the prosecution used them as evidence of his state of mind.
Afterwards, they filled two pages of The Mirror. O'Mahoney insists
he does it for the pleasure of "seeing the bastards locked
up".
"I get immense pleasure out of it. Some people protest
about roads and the local bus service, I just don't like those
people, full stop. I've got kids and I can't get my head round
what these people do." O'Mahoney refers to his late father
by way of explanation.
"I grew up with a real sense of injustice because of the
way my father was. He used to beat me black and blue, and there
was real bad mental torture as well. He broke plates in my mother's
face, over her head, fractured her cheekbone, broke her nose.
He was just a psychopath.
"He always taught us never to let people hurt you, and
if someone hit you at school, even as a 10-year-old, he would
give you a hammer to take to school. And if you said they were
bigger than you, he'd say hit them from behind. You'd go to
school feeling like a bomb waiting to go off.
And when you'd see other kids being happy, you used to despise
their happiness, and that makes you angry, and then you'd be
fighting other kids, and teachers would be saying you're no
good." His first dealings with the police came at the age
of 14, when he was charged with using obscene language.
He claims he was "badly treated" by them as a youth,
and grew up hating them. It was that hatred, he says, which
led to him to campaigning for the release of sisters Michelle
and Lisa Taylor, who were convicted of murdering Alison Shaughnessy
in 1991.
He says it wasn't about freeing the Taylors, it was about getting
at the police. He readily admits that he intimidated witnesses.
The sisters' convictions were deemed unsafe, and they were released
in 1993. O'Mahoney started writing a book about the case with
them, and had a three-month affair with Michelle, which ended
acrimoniously.
Later this month sees the publication of The Dream Solution,
in which he claims that they were guilty after all. His devotion
to their release cost him his relationship with his then partner
of 13 years and the mother of his children, now aged 11 and
14. "I regret the way I am," he says.
"I'm stupid and bloody-minded, if I get involved in something,
I won't give it up. I'm stubborn and stupid. I can't help it
– if something gets to me, I can't ignore it." |
| Contact : bernard.omahoney@bernardomahoney.com |
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| Rosie Palmer |
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