When a murder is discovered, it was a female who had her head and her hands removed and she had been found in what could be like a duffel bag and she had her her wrist and her ankles bound. It doesn’t just destroy one life. I don’t think he’s capable of loving people cuz how do you kill your own children? That was the last thing those children saw was their dad killing them. How do you do that?
It tears communities apart. When her body was located she was nude, she was deceased, she had some ligature marks on her neck. It’s up to the police to not only solve the mystery… The fact that he could go home and look into the eyes of his son knowing that he had murdered his mother is just horrific to consider. And track down the killer, but bring them to justice. There’s two bodies found. Your first thought is, “Oh my goodness me is there a serial killer?”
In this episode an 84-year-old man is found strangled to death in his own home. It must have been very traumatic for her to have found her father in such a manner. Meet the murder detectives. It had guns missing so that there’s an element of danger to everybody, to the public, who reveal how they caught the killer. With strangulation it’s not instant, you literally have to be strangling them and watching their life ebb away.
In the affluent area of Ramsgate in the southeast of England, an 84-year-old man is found dead in the living room of his home. I got the call about a suspicious death uh in a house in Park Road, Ramsgate, end of November 1996. There’s lots of things that go through your mind when you receive a phone call such as that, and of course first thing is to make sure that the scene is preserved.
Detective Superintendent Nick Biddis was appointed senior investigating officer. The victim was identified as Kenneth Speakman, a retired town clerk. Mr. Speakman was found by his daughter late in the evening and uh as a result of obviously being unable to contact her father, it must have been very traumatic for her to have found her father in such a manner. Well, this is Park Road, Ramsgate. It’s actually quite an affluent little area. It’s nice houses, mainly detached, some terrace houses, and this is the house of uh Mr. Speakman where when I attended on the uh the morning in November and was confronted with the crime scene. When I got into the front room, the body was laying on the floor and he was laying face down. It was evidence that he’d been attacked and strangled and he was dead, and of course I then went around the house looking for anything that might obviously be stolen. It was self-evident that this was more than just a suspicious death, it was a murder.
Nick assembled a team to investigate the death. Dr. Robert Green was in charge of the forensic investigation. This could be one of of 50 to 100 photographs we actually took on the on the evening. Poor Ken’s body was in situ. There were some spectacles by the front door. Walking all the way through the house um into the the sitting room um was where Ken’s body lied. It was also obvious that a cord from a dressing gown had been used as a ligature, so that had been tied around his his neck at some point.
Kenneth was beaten and strangled, and this is interesting because the majority of murders like this, strangulation isn’t the usual method of killing that we would see. Strangulation is correlated um to domestic murders, so it’s a very interpersonal act to strangle somebody. And also there has been some research that says that when there’s more than one method of killing, that that’s linked to premeditated murders.
Nick and the team very quickly built up a picture of who Kenneth was. Some of the information they received was very worrying. I knew at the time when we were going there that he was a gun collector and a gun enthusiast and was a member of a local gun club, so we were aware that guns were likely to be an issue, and he had 24 guns all legally held on license.
Someone may want to ask a question, or did ask the question, “What is an 84-year-old man doing with 24 lethal-barreled weapons in his house?”
With fresh eyes the next day, the team got to work to find out exactly what had happened to Mr. Speakman. You’ll see in the picture that spectacles which were Mr. Speakman’s were knocked off. You may pick up also the little green arrows um these are um identify other blood spots on the on the armored spectacles and an angular spot on the skirting board there, so a blood spot that’s coming at an oblique angle, so very much indicative of a uh a strike to to the face. It’s a very narrow entrance way, there is a small lobby at the inside of that front door there, and it seemed to me as if there may have been some sort of struggle. It didn’t look as if whoever had been in there had been invited in willingly.
I recall going up the stairs and in the main bedroom um which I assumed was was Mr. Speakman’s um a large number of of gun cabinets like gun safes clearly had been opened. Some weapons on on the bed, as I recall uh some antique-type weapons and then a safe for for what I assumed were long long rifles. Moving on then into the attic, what was unusual about that was the fact that the attic room was a place where Mr. Speakman would make his own ammunition.
The search continued around the house looking to see if there was any other point of entry or anything else that might have been disturbed, but the only thing we could find was by where the gun cabinets were in the upper stories of the house where 12 handguns were missing. My immediate thoughts were, well, this is obviously a professional criminal, criminals that had committed this crime because they knew exactly what they were looking for uh and they were the short weapon handguns and they’re now in the hands of criminals.
Detectives had established a possible motive, but the question remained: who could have done this to an elderly gentleman? There’s always three people that you try immediately to eliminate. First person who finds the body, second the nearest and dearest, and the third really are those is the person who was last seen with the deceased. The daughter would have fallen into two of those categories: she found the body and she’s the nearest and dearest, so you always look at that. But I was confident that his daughter had nothing whatsoever to do with his death. She was an innocent innocent victim and obviously very traumatized as a result of this dreadful uh crime that had been committed against her father.
To understand the criminal, police first had to understand the victim. Victimology is where you then look at the victim of the crime and their background uh in order to establish some sort of motive, especially where you’ve got a cold scene murder as in this case. Uh it’s important that you understand what is the background of the victim uh to develop your lines of inquiry.
By early morning, the local press were at the scene. We had this story come through that a man had been found dead in a Ramsgate house, and very very quickly it became apparent this was a major story. For a start, he was 84 years old, whoever had done it had got gained access to his gun collection, so stories obviously don’t come much bigger than that. Then of course it turned out he was Kenneth Speakman, pillar of Ramsgate society, former town clerk. I think for 20 years he’s a very well-known man. This wasn’t some sort of sordid death in a back street. Mr. Speakman, although in his 80s, was pretty active and certainly on a weekly basis would be visiting his local gun club and taking part fully in the activities of that club.
The police had even more work to do to discover not only who had killed Mr. Speakman but to find the dangerous firearms that were now on the streets. The guns added a huge amount of spice to the story. It kept the story running, indeed all the time that the murder was running, the story was running, it just wouldn’t go away because the fear was still there, a nagging toothache. There’s a man out there with a gun, and is he gonna appear, and where’s he going to appear? To be honest, those sort of weapons pass from criminal to criminal for uh committing various jobs, robberies, even murders, and in the hands of criminals, I did not feel very well disposed towards the fact that we’ve now got 12 handguns in the criminal underworld, so to speak. They are the sort of guns that appear to be missing.
84-year-old retired town clerk Kenneth Speakman had been found dead in his living room and robbed of 12 guns from his collection. With not only a murder inquiry but also missing firearms, the police in Ramsgate needed to know just what had happened that night. As far as a motive was concerned, initially at the time, 12 handguns missing, I would think somebody who knew what they were looking for, knew that he was the holder of weapons that would be of great use and of interest to the criminal underworld. And no doubt he had been able to remonstrate with the offender, and they felt possibly that he could be identified or they could be identified, and therefore Mr. Speakman was going to be killed.
The search of the house had turned up few clues. When we were in the uh upper loft area, where the the gun cabinets are kept um we found a cigarette butt. Through the camera lens, I’m thinking, cigarette end, why would a cigarette end be by the side of this ammunition tin? We knew from very early on that Kenneth Speakman was a very meticulous man, he knew what to do and what not to do, he would not be smoking around that tin. I think then when you actually go, you know you look around the scene and you you you have to put these these the pieces of this jigsaw, start to put them together very very early on. Why would Mr. Speakman’s glasses be at the front door? Why was Mr. Speakman in the front room? Would he have left his specs on on the by the front door? Why were the the spots of blood by the front door? You went upstairs, of course, why would the bedroom have been ransacked um why would the upstairs, the attic room, why would there have been a cigarette end up there?
Officers started speaking to the local community. Andy Nickel, a detective constable at the time, was one of the team drafted in by SIO Nick Biddis. The first time I met him, I think he actually threw 20p at me and asked me to go and get a newspaper. He was well known for being a disciplinarian, but it makes you hone your skills a bit. He was doing that because he had a duty to those people’s families to make sure that he got the best out of everybody that he had working for him, cuz after all, he chose them. It wasn’t like they’d just been given to him, he went out and chose these detectives on his team. If they got it wrong, he got it wrong.
I was part of the team that was brought on within a day or two after the murder. You wonder who would have done this, who would have done this? You try and think through the processes, why would they attack a man at that age? Why would they kill him? I mean, he’s 84 years of age, so why kill him, why would you do it? Or there’s a chance you would be recognized again, so it tends to give you that that feeling of maybe someone local, maybe someone he knew, so they’re they’re going to be in real trouble if they’re identified, so he’s the only witness to it, so they got to shut him up.
Initially, when uh you’re confronted with any crime scene like this, you would be doing house-to-house inquiries in the area, speaking to neighbors, seeing if they could help you with anybody who may have been seen acting suspiciously in the area, or callers to Mr. Speakman’s house, but that came to nothing. No one could help us in that regard, so as far as local inquiries and local um neighbors uh providing us with any information, we weren’t able to obtain anything like that.
The news of the Speakman murder, obviously being such a huge story, it spread, it snowballed, and yeah, we got a few bizarre theories, but everyone was concentrating on the guns and this was what alarmed them so much. There was a maniac roaming the streets, armed to the teeth, and people were wondering, “Are we going to be next?” With one man dead and a number of guns missing, detectives had to find a way to reassure the local community.
We’re doing a lot of hours at that time, from a policing point of view, nothing worrying me other than I did not want to make a mistake. There were no CCTV, so it was good old-fashioned footwork. You’ve got to go and knock on doors and find out what people have seen, and it was really long hours just um identifying who might have been where and and who was around at the time. We knocked on doors and we rattled cages, that was policing in the early ’90s. If you don’t get a realistic suspect within the first 48-72 hours of a any major crime like this, then you know that you’ve uh you’ve got an uphill task to uh to find the offenders. The killer was on the loose and might have got away because obviously with every week, every month that passes, well, starts to think the odds are swinging slightly in his favor.
With no leads, Detective Superintendent Nick Biddis and his team began to ask themselves who might want the missing guns. There’s no obvious suspect that we can readily look at. My first instinct was to round up some of the active criminals in Ramsgate and the Thanet area to see what they were up to. We effectively arrested them, but all we landed up doing was proving that they couldn’t have done it because they all had a reasonable alibi.
In the meantime, the post-mortem report arrived. It painted a bleak picture of what Mr. Speakman had endured that night. There were marks on the body of Mr. Speakman that indicated that perhaps he’d been beaten or and/or tortured as well as strangled, which was the cause of death. Dressing gown cord had been pulled from this this garment um and we think was perhaps part of the uh the torture um that was used on Mr. Speakman to actually get him to release the whereabouts of the keys for the gun safes. With strangulation, it’s not instant, it’s minutes for somebody to die. You have to literally have your hands around their throat and watch them die slowly.
The forensic team, led by Dr. Green, continued to comb the crime scene for evidence to help catch the killer. The rules of entering a crime scene can be summarized by using the mnemonic SCENE. The first S, of course, is safety—the safety of people actually in the scene. The C um is for cordon uh and effectively that means to draw a cordon and really to take control of that scene very early on in the inquiry. E is where we start to evaluate what we have. The N is for notation, so that means that we have to make a, you know, a very comprehensive contemporaneous note of what we’re actually seeing. Only then can we actually start to to really focus on the evidence. So going through this in in a very stepwise, logical, uh precise way.
During the search of the house, we were we came across a business card. As you walked into the front of the house of Mr. Speakman, just to the right of the uh uh the front door uh was his study uh and ultimately that was where this this business card was found. It raised this possibility of a a business card that had been given to Mr. Speakman by a person who’d attended his address, and it was a card uh which purported to show uh a man named Andrew Morgan and a local solicitor in Thanet. And apparently Kenneth Speakman had told his daughter that uh this uh individual had visited him because he was interested in starting up a gun club or being involved in a gun club and wanted Kenneth Speakman’s help.
The immediate significance of that was finger marks. Could we treat this uh this card with uh chemicals to actually enhance, develop some finger marks? Actually, we couldn’t, there were no marks at all developed on that. The company was a well-known, very reputable firm of solicitors in Thanet, so it was a genuine firm. So of course we thought, oh, what’s this chap had to do with this firm? We go to the firm and ask them:
“Can we speak to this solicitor?”
“We’ve never had any such solicitor,”
so this pricked our interest. Why uh is there a card, business card on his mantelpiece from a very well-known firm of solicitors clearly with a false name on it? Has to be something of interest, so it was felt that this Morgan had been to the house on maybe one or two occasions. So that became absolutely vital to us. Who is Andrew Morgan? He’s definitely not from this firm of solicitors, let’s find out who he is.
In Ramsgate, one of the only clues police had found in Kenneth Speakman’s house was a fake business card for a lawyer that didn’t exist. They discovered it had been printed by a local company. DC Andy Nickel was tasked with going through the physical records of every card made on their printers. It was a bit like an old typewriter ribbon, and these things would just move along as you printed each card, and I spent the next week or so unraveling these things. And then blow me down, I got to one and I found 50 cards printed “Andrew Morgan, Solicitors” and it was the the card that we had. So we had that, and that was a very exciting moment. We thought, oh, we might be making some progress here. We discovered that that particular roll had come out of a machine at the Whitefriars Shopping Centre in Canterbury and basically we looked at CCTV there. There were no cameras covering that machine, very sadly.
Police now knew beyond doubt that Andrew Morgan wasn’t real. Mr. Speakman had been conned, but was the fake lawyer his killer? The respectable status that he created was all part of the plan to befriend Ken, to get close to him. He knows that by creating a fictitious figure, he’s less likely to be caught out.
Examination of the card didn’t produce any fingerprints. The only other evidence they had gathered in the house was a cigarette end found in the attic. As soon as I saw the cigarette end through the the viewfinder, I was getting excited um I thought, this is the the key piece of evidence.
Robert and his forensic team were hopeful that DNA extracted from the cigarette end could match someone on the national database. We took the DNA to the lab. When the call came back from the lab uh that they profiled the DNA from the that the cigarette end did have the, did in fact have DNA on it, they’d profiled the cigarette end and they’d loaded the profile to the database. Sadly, no match. We’re a bit of a a dead end. Had a DNA profile off it, but that didn’t throw up any suspects. SIO Nick was running out of leads.
For a few weeks, could be months, you are still very much involved, but of course there comes a time when you have to scale down your investigation. You don’t give up, wouldn’t in any way try to suggest that you give up on anything, but of course the lines of inquiry tend to peter out. Within a month, 2 months, we were struggling to continue with any viable inquiry lines that we could uh develop any further.
On the 2nd of February, it had been 3 months since the murder of 84-year-old Kenneth Speakman when the police were called to a house where shots had been fired. An incident occurred at a house in Birchington, which is about 6 miles away from here, and it was where somebody had entered the house and been confronted by the occupant. And in fact, the intruder was armed with two weapons and another two weapons in a bag that he had with him. The occupant of the house was also a member of a local gun club and just happened to have a gun already loaded in his cellar which uh he was able to get hold of and then confronted the gunman who’d entered his kitchen and shot him three times.
We were working out of Dartford Police Station and while still just clearing up the remnants of this other job that we’d been to, we got a phone call to say, you know, get yourselves back down to Ramsgate in the morning um there’s been a shooting. My initial thought was, you know, you know what’s gone on, shooting? We then get a bit of the stories fed through to us, and the major crime team saying some guy’s been shot and he’s still alive in a nearby field.
The armed robber was apprehended by police. The man in question was badly injured with gunshot wounds and was at one stage not likely to to recover and would almost certainly be dead. I was confronted with a situation where I had the shootout at the OK Corral going on: we had one man in hospital who was likely to die and another man ringing up readily telling us he’d shot him.
When police arrested the suspected burglar, he was armed with familiar weapons. He was in possession of the four guns, it was one of those that clearly four handguns, let’s just check whether or not… and the serial numbers came back straight away. The four weapons this man had on him when he was shot were from King… Speakman’s collection.
Badly injured, the intruder was taken to a hospital in Margate. Could this man be involved in the murder of Kenneth Speakman? Again, we then launch another part of the inquiry and find out who he is, you know: where’s he from, what’s his background, who does he associate with, family, where does he live? We found out very quickly who it was, it was a a man called Anthony Swindells. He was a man that only had one conviction, which was for something to do with the importation of drugs, and was what I might describe as a bit of a Walter Mitty really. It was a very very um very strange individual and uh he was the one that was responsible obviously for the intrusion at the house in Birchington, and we were very much interested in how he had four guns from Kenneth Speakman’s gun cabinets at the scene of the murder.
Swindells was from Liverpool originally, a Liverpudlian chap. Our inquiries into into him showed that um he joined the navy, the Royal Navy, at some point when he was a younger man, that hadn’t gone very well and he left. There was some sort of attempt to join the French Foreign Legion which again ended up in failure, and he’d somehow moved down to the Kent area. We knew he’d been unemployed for a period of about 3 years and he was just this very ordinary individual who’d seemed to be have failed at most things, whether it be life or work or whatever.
We were dispatched to the hospital uh because of course we now needed a sample, a biological sample from uh Swindells to try to match against the uh the cigarette end. Could we actually link him somehow? In hospital, of course, he was very subdued, but he he had been shot, so clearly in pain uh very quiet, very pale. A blood sample would have been taken, we would have sent that then to the laboratory, and we would have then asked them to do a a compl… you know, a side-by-side comparison, so not against the database uh but the profile that you actually recovered from the the cigarette end, does it match this person that we have in the hospital at Margate?
It didn’t take long for the results from the DNA comparison of the blood test taken from Swindells to arrive. I remember taking a call from the lab saying that they tried to provide a match uh but there was actually no match for it, didn’t actually match Tony Swindells, so you can imagine we were crestfallen again.
Undeterred, detectives carried on with their investigations into Anthony Swindells. We were given the the task of uh searching um the address of um Anthony Swindells, which was a little bungalow. We were surprised that we didn’t find the remainder of these weapons. Where were the others? We’d assumed of course that they were going to be at this address. The only piece of evidence at the time really was the the sticker that would had would been stuck to uh some ammunition boxes in Mr. Speakman’s address um um that were found actually in the kitchen. It was yet more disappointment for detectives, they could find nothing to link Swindells conclusively to the murder of Kenneth Speakman. But they were soon in for a surprise.
I can remember the phone call from the laboratory, i.e., “No, it’s not him.” You know, where do we go from here? You know, you sort of not in despair, but you you sort of you think, oh, right, it’s not him, but he’s got the gun.
And then they rang back. We got a call back from the lab saying, “Really sorry, but this is a match. We’ve re-analyzed the sample and it is actually a direct match.” So we knew therefore that we’d we got a match with the blood of Swindells and the cigarette end, so we knew that he was the person who actually left that cigarette end there. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean to say that he was the murderer um and uh but we we we were high-fiving. We thought, you know, this is the breakthrough that we we all needed. So having gone from doom and gloom to really what I thought was a Eureka moment, we were quite pleased with ourselves that uh at least now we could put Swindells definitely at the scene of the murder.
DNA had now placed Anthony Swindells in the home of Kenneth Speakman, but it wasn’t enough to charge him with murder. They continued to question Swindells’ neighbors, hoping for any information that could further link the two men. We are just doing the house to house. Have you seen anything? Have you heard anything? Do you know the people here, you know, what can you tell me? The the general response is is negative, you know, all the way around.
We had a long day. The lady across the street from Anthony Swindells came across with a tray of tea and biscuits um and got chatting about the uh the case. She said, “And by the way, do you actually know that he has the key for uh next door?” So we then get hold of Nick Biddis, explain the situation to him. Nick says, “Get a warrant.” We get a a search warrant for the the next-door neighbors. We try and get in, but eventually we have to smash the window at the back door.
We climbed over the fence and looked through the back kitchen window of this address, and on I sort of remember that the first thing I saw was a a fruit bowl, a large fruit bowl with uh there must have been a million cigarette ends in this this fruit bowl uh and immediately said to the guy I was with at the time, “I think this is where all of this has been planned from.” We’re now excited thinking, well, Swindells might be our man. In the kitchen on the top of the unit, we can just see a piece of paper dipping over, so we pulled that down and it’s a BT phone bill for that premises, and as we look down it, there are clear um phone calls made from that premises to Kenneth Speakman’s phone number. The excitement builds and we’re thinking, we are right. We didn’t say, “We think the guns are here,” but we’re getting closer.
We search the whole house and find nothing else, and I’m thinking, oh, this is starting to become disappointing. We go into the last bedroom, I lift this bed cover, the first thing I see is a latex rubber glove, interesting. Next to that is uh a little white suitcase and next to that was a brown leather briefcase which was slightly open. I just slightly pull the uh briefcase, and inside it I can immediately see all the ammunition, clearly Kenneth Speakman’s.
Bobby Green came over, I then pulled the white suitcase out from under the bed, open it up, and there they all are, all the Lugers, they’re all there, all the guns, the lot, we haven’t missed anything, they’re all there. And it’s a moment of gotcha. And also what was found, the Bred’s Book of Kent um and it’s actually had a number of people of prominence listed in in these books. We think, can’t be, really can’t be possible. Entry, interesting firearms in the book, highlighted with an orange highlighter. Bobby Green says, “We’ve just found an orange highlighter falling down the back of his sofa.” It’s just like, this is coming together, it was a real good moment, sort of thing. You’re euphoric. Is this going to be the the final piece of the jigsaw? It didn’t give us that final nexus between him and the murder.
Robert was still unconvinced the items found in Swindells’ neighbor’s house conclusively proved Anthony Swindells was a killer, he needed more. Just as an afterthought, just before we left the scene, we were sort of walking around and thinking, you know, is there anything that we’ve missed? And I casted my mind back to that fortnight before the murder and said to a colleague of mine that the offender 2 weeks before this offense passed himself off as a solicitor. What items of clothing in this address would he wear uh if he was going to do that? Immediately, your eye is drawn to a black trench coat in the hallway. We submitted that very quickly of course to the laboratory um and what the laboratory scientist was able to tell us there was that um up the sleeve of that that trench coat there were airborne spots of blood consistent with someone punching. That takes you all the way back to that sort of first night at the scene where Mr. Speakman’s spectacles were dropped, knocked off, the the blood, the blood from the nose uh and the blood distribution up the the sleeve. Of course, that was the final piece of the jigsaw that actually put him actually being there and striking Mr. Speakman um on the night of his murder.
We know from the way that Swindells created a an alias and the way that he established a relationship with Ken that he was able to be charming, he was able to put on an act, and that’s something that we see in organized offenders. The fact it was so planned and the fact that Swindells used strangulation and beating, I think is a unique aspect of this case: he’s watching him die in front of him. He could have just beaten him, but he didn’t, he strangled and beat him to death, which is very personal.
It was everything they needed to bring Swindells in. Swindells was still in hospital full of holes and uh was recovering, subsequently he comes out of hospital and is brought to Margate Police Station and uh myself and a colleague end up interviewing Swindells about the murder.
Anthony Swindells then gave police his account of what happened that night. He claimed that he had robbed Kenneth Speakman, he was guilty of that, he had been there, but he’d been with two others at the time and uh he named them as Billy Tombs and a bloke called Emmy or M, that’s all he know knew about the other guy. They’d met in a pub somewhere—the classic “we met in a pub, don’t really know them very well.” They’d hatched this plot to steal these guns from Kenneth Speakman. He claimed during the first set of interviews that he had then gone up to the loft and gathered all the guns and the ammunition, put them in the suitcases and the and the briefcase and carried them out and left, hence the reason his DNA was on a cigarette butt in the loft, so he’s putting himself in place wherever we can prove he’s been. And he said, “When I left, Kenneth Speakman was very much alive and healthy.”
Swindells gave police a description of the men he claimed had killed Mr. Speakman. The description of Emmy and M was very very scant. The detail about Billy Tombs was significant and really really detailed, and he then said, “Well, I know that wasn’t his real name.”
We said, “How do you know that?”
and he said he’d been with him when he’d opened some mail to him and it was a passport from the passport office, and he’d opened it and the name on it was Brian Tomlinson. With a new name, police had no option but to find out more about their new alleged suspect. So the decision was made by Nick Biddis to find all the Brian Tomlinsons in uh the UK between the age of 20 and 40 and go and visit them, so you think that’s a mammoth task. We went to the public records office, births, marriages um and they basically assisted us greatly, and there were actually 52 in the country, so we then set about visiting them all. Unbelievable. It was an incredulous absolutely incredulous story he was giving us, totally unbelievable, but nevertheless of course we had to go through the process of trying to trace these people. They didn’t believe a word of it, we didn’t, and couldn’t find any forensic or any other evidence to show that anybody other than Swindells had been at the scene of the murder.
Anthony Swindells was charged with the murder of Kenneth Speakman. They had finally caught their killer. There was great relief in the community when they learned that a man had been charged and was due to appear in court, and when the defendant was named, I must admit it was a, it meant nothing to me, as I recall, and I don’t think it meant a great deal to the community.
Swindells went to Maidstone Crown Court to face the charges of armed robbery and murder. Determined to disprove his story of accomplices, police took some extraordinary steps. We have to produce all the DNA from the scientists, we have to produce the cigarette, who found it, all the continuity, everything. What that also included was producing 52 Brian Tomlinsons at Crown Court, so we called all these gentlemen from all over the country to come down to Maidstone Crown Court, and they duly obliged. I remember being at the courtroom thinking this is going to be mayhem, and so I spoke to the usher who I’d known for some years, said, “Whatever you do, don’t come out and say calling Brian Tomlinson.” Of course, something had happened in the court and he’d forgotten about that and he came out and called Brian Tomlinson, and 52 men stood up, so it was just all over the place.
Swindells had appeared to be confident in his ability to persuade the court that he was not responsible for the murder of Kenneth Speakman, his legal team less so. With things not going the way he wanted, Swindells pulled an old trick. When I first saw Swindells in court, he was argumentative. I think he he was a little bit arrogant and uh he he he didn’t want to accept what his barrister was telling him, and he sacked him and said, “I can do it myself, i’m going to defend myself.” It was an absolute display of blatant arrogance. The behavior of Swindells all the way through this case—the way in which he befriended Ken, the alias that he used, and then his presentation with the police in the story that he generated, and then the fact that he sacked his own legal team who were there to try and keep him out of prison and represented himself—that all suggests that this is a narcissistic person: he’s got an inflated ego, he’s got confidence, he manipulates, he lies, all these things come really easy to him, which are all traits of narcissistic personality.
Nick, Andy, and the team had done everything they could. Swindells’ fate now lay in the hands of the jury. He was found guilty of the murder of Kenneth Speakman. Having pleaded guilty to the robbery at the house in Birchington, uh he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation of at least 17 years. When he was found guilty, some people might say arrogance, he realized what was coming. I just remember him being completely unfazed by the fact he’d been found guilty and then was sentenced to life imprisonment. I believe he’s a psychopath and probably enjoyed what he did, was the manner in which he didn’t seem to have any empathy at all.
This was an elderly gentleman with a very distinguished war record, given lots and lots of public service over the years, someone’s father, someone’s grandfather. I hope that Kent Police uh gave the Speakman family uh some degree of closure and that the the offender uh Anthony Swindells was incarcerated for for many years. When the case comes to a conclusion, or in my case where you are able to charge someone, take them to court and get a conviction, it is a very satisfying feeling, i’ve got to be honest. You know, you’re bringing solace to the families of the deceased, and of course that’s great satisfaction for me and the whole team. I mean, it’s a team effort, whatever else you say, this can, these, these jobs can only be solved by a good team effort.
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