Writing wrongs

IF a tabloid journalist asks you to get a message to Peter Sutcliffe while you’re visiting Ronnie Kray in HMP Belmarsh, you can safely say you’re having an unusual day.

For Bernard O’Mahoney it was one of many in a life that saw him vilified by the press for his role in the supply of drugs that killed 18-year-old Leah Betts, in 1995.

The events that followed, including the triple shooting of Bernard’s associates in a Range Rover, kept the 52-year-old in the eye of a media storm he describes as relentless.

Meanwhile, Bernard didn’t just contact the Yorkshire Ripper – he wrote to some of the UK’s sickest criminals, including two North-East child killers, and helped secure convictions against them. The letters form the basis of the author’s 11th book, Flowers in God’s Garden, released recently.

“When this journalist asked me if I’d ever seen the Yorkshire Ripper and if he’d talk to me, I said just write him a letter,” says Bernard, speaking from Faces, the cafe he opened in Ferryhill, County Durham, in March.

“I’ve been to prison myself, for my sins, so I know what it’s like when someone contacts you, it can be like a beacon of hope.”

The former soldier, who was locked up for six months following a 1984 pub fight, has used a number of pseudonyms when writing to killers, posing as a woman to befriend Shaun Armstrong.

Armstrong was jailed for life in 1995 for the brutal Hartlepool murder of three-year-old Rosie Palmer whose body was found in a bin liner in his Frederic Street home.

Rosie was abducted and sexually assaulted by Armstrong, then 33, when she left her Henrietta Street home to buy an ice lolly.

Armstrong protested his innocence to police but confessed in his letters to Bernard that were passed to police, who used them to extract a full confession. The crime shocked the country and helped pave the way for the sexual offenders register.

Incredibly, Armstrong tried to sue Bernard for £15,000 for breach of confidence, but was unsuccessful.

The father-of-six struck up a fauxfriendship with Richard Blenkey, who strangled seven-year-old Paul Pearson, in 1991.

BLENKEY was 32 when he sexually assaulted and killed the boy at Hazel Grove allotments in Saltburn, east Cleveland but always claimed it was a third person.

The boy’s body was discovered in an overgrown ditch. He had died from strangulation and had been sexually assaulted. Blenkey admitted the murder to Bernard, who has been a police witness on four occasions, a week before the trial and was jailed for life.

“Twenty-three years I did it for, writing to some of the sickest individuals on the planet,” says Bernard.

“You build up a mental image of these people as monsters, and they are, but when I went to visit Blenkey I remember how he held out this withered hand for me to shake.

“I just told him I couldn’t shake his hand because they (the prison guards) will think I’m passing you something. But it’s a good feeling at the end of the day, knowing I helped put these people away.”

Bernard stands accused of glamorising crime in his earlier books and giving a voice to paedophiles in his latest work, claims he vehemently denies. “I helped lock them up,” he says.

Three of the Essex Boys gang, of which he was a member, ended up dead in a Range Rover on an isolated farm track at Rettendon, Essex, in December 1995, each shot in the head. The three – Patrick Tate, Anthony Tucker and Craig Rolfe – were known drug dealers and Tucker was once a close friend and business associate of Bernard’s The two men controlled the door and effectively licensed the drug dealers at Raquel’s, in Essex, the club where the drugs that killed Leah were said to have came from.

“Leah Betts’ death was a tragedy but there are a lot of myths surrounding it,” says the Bedfordshire-born Bernard, who recently moved to his wife’s native North-East. “She was 25 miles away (from the club) when she took the drugs and she had taken drugs before, but it had everything.

It was at the right time, she was young and pretty, her dad was in the police and the press couldn’t resist it.

“When the police appealed for someone to supply one of the pills she had taken, to see if they could help her before she actually died, I came forward. Why wouldn’t I? I call it trying to help a girl but Tucker and all them took it as trying to help the police.”

Bernard received an official Osman warning, where police warn an individual there is a credible threat against their life before the three men were found dead.

Michael Steele and Jack Holmes were jailed for the shooting, the result of a feud said to have begun after a cannabis shipment was not up to scratch.

Bernard says: “I was the first person arrested, the police were straight round my door. Those three behaved like animals and they died like animals.

But that was it for me, I had to give evidence in the trial against the people who supplied the pills.”

• Flowers in God’s Garden (True Crime Publishing)