Face to face with a killer

DAVID Blackie was running a police firearms exercise at Coxhoe in County Durham when the call came through. Someone had been shot. He was needed in nearby Butsfield, Consett.

It was Thursday, June 20, 1991. As Sergeant Blackie approached Butsfield, little was he to know the shocking and highly volatile scenes awaiting him at the other end of leafy Eliza Lane.

By the time Sgt Blackie arrived, Derwentside District Council's chief planning officer Harry Collinson was lying face down in a ditch, dead from gunshot wounds. A wild-eyed Albert Dryden was hiding in his caravan, with a smoking gun in his lap.

The horrifying events were the culmination of months of wrangling between the council and Dryden over his illegally built bungalow. June 20 was the day the building was to be bulldozed.

"I can remember at the entrance to the lane there was a clutch of cars and people," recalls Mr Blackie. "By the time we got to the scene there was a bit of dialogue going on with Dryden and he mentioned a police officer he was prepared to talk to, Arthur Proud, and that was a plus for us because he was one of the most experienced negotiators around.

"We could also see Harry Collinson lying there and we soon established that he was dead."

Dryden was subsequently sentenced to life in prison at Newcastle Crown Court in 1992.

The full horror of the shootings had been captured by the Press, who had been at Butsfield to witness the demolition of Dryden's bungalow after his long-running planning dispute. The images were beamed around the world. Harry Collinson had been shot dead as the cameras rolled and a policeman and television reporter were also injured.

Both the police and the council came in for severe criticism for their handling of events leading up to June 20. Key questions were raised: why were tactical firearms officers, like former Sgt Blackie, not consulted prior to the shooting when Dryden was known to have a fascination with guns? Why was an armed response vehicle at Consett Police Station "just in case" if Dryden was not perceived to have been a threat? Should the Press have been invited to witness the demolition, creating a media spectacle, when Dryden was known to be volatile?

These are just some of the questions Mr Blackie, 52, has gone through in his mind over the past decade and in print in his new book about the shooting, Death on a Summer's Day. Mr Blackie is the only writer to have interviewed Dryden following his actions and gives a rare perspective of events from the point of view of the police.

He and his colleagues at the time, he says, had serious concerns that they were not consulted before the shooting.

"I think the point was, was that if this was considered a pre-planned firearms incident, then the standard procedure was that a firearms tactical advisor would have to be consulted - either me or such as (Sgt) John Taylor," he says at his Barnard Castle home.

"If there was a suspicion or even a whisper that Dryden had firearms then we should have been consulted. Had we been consulted I'm in no doubt that it would have been dealt with differently and I believe that Harry Collinson would have been alive today and Albert Dryden would not be in prison."

There were two options which could have been followed, he says. Firstly, police could have secured a search warrant to look for firearms the day before the bungalow was due to be bulldozed. The second was to place some armed officers discreetly at the scene.

"But it's easy to say with hindsight what could have been done," he concedes. "It's also very easy to criticise colleagues who felt genuinely that they wanted to keep the whole operation low key, but unfortunately it could never be low key because the Press had been notified and were there in such large numbers."

Mr Blackie began writing his book five years ago, and has interviewed around 40 people involved, including police officers, Harry Collinson's family, Dryden's family and Dryden himself.

He gained access to Dryden via his sister, Elsie, and then brother-in-law Peter Donnelly, and he met him first in Durham's Frankland Prison in September 1998.

"He was clean and presentable and the thing which struck me was how small he was," says Mr Blackie. "But it was his character that you noticed, he was a very arresting character and totally credible. If you didn't know him you would believe everything he said."

Mr Blackie interviewed Dryden the following July at Garth Prison in Lancashire and saw him again at Garth Prison in April 2000. But he says Dryden did not want to talk about the murder and would change the subject whenever Mr Blackie tried to bring it up. Instead, he talked about his time working at Consett Steelworks, the person who worked in Cape Canaveral and sent him updates for rocket fuel recipes, and the bias of the tariff board.

Eventually, Mr Blackie secured permission from the governor to conduct a tape recorded interview and wrote down questions he wanted Dryden to answer in an effort to focus his mind.

"When he got them he just went ballistic and refused to see me," he says. "Since then I've written to him twice offering him the opportunity to speak only to receive a terse response from the latest in a long line of solicitors."

Did he ever feel sympathy for Dryden?

"No, absolutely not," he retorts. "I found him to be... this sounds awful... cunning in a fairly low way. He would certainly try and funnel me down dead ends if I was asking him questions. I didn't have any feelings of pity for him at all. I certainly had a lot of time for his family, and I found his sister to be a remarkable, stoic woman. She stood by her brother but accepted totally that what he had done was wrong."

Throughout the visits, Dryden never showed any remorse for his actions.

"The only thing he ever said approaching the concept of remorse was 'it should never have happened'," says Mr Blackie. "It's only in the last 18 months to two years that Albert has publicly come out and said he's sorry for what he's done, but a cynic might be forgiven for thinking that might influence his parole."

He says he wrote the book to put the shooting into a "proper context" and give it "the space it deserved". It was also a cathartic experience for him. His job as a senior firearms officer was stressful and the Dryden incident and others left their scars. He left Durham Police in 1995.

He says his future now lies in literary pursuits and he is writing a male equivalent of a chick lit novel. He is also a Teesdale councillor and sits on the North East Assembly.

The last he heard of Dryden, who is now in his mid-sixties, was that he was a Category C prisoner in Haverigg Prison, near Millom, in Cumbria.

Many of Dryden's supporters believe he has served his time and should now be released. But Mr Blackie remains unconvinced.

"He has served a sentence of the court and, as such fairness dictates, he should be released," he says. "But there'll always be an element of doubt over whether he's capable of doing this again owing to his history and the unpredictability of his character."

* Death on a Summer's Day by David Blackie (John Blake, £17.99).