Serial Killer Documentary - Dale Cregan
Serial Killer Documentary - Dale Cregan
Speaker 1: 18th of September, 2012, Manchester, England. PC's Fiona Bone and
Nicola Hughes were responding to a reported burglary. As they
approached the house, they were mercilessly shot dead at point-blank range.
Speaker 2: I was a police officer for 31 years.
Speaker 3: I never saw anything approaching this in all my time
in the police, and I hope to God I never
see the like of it again.
Speaker 1: Their families were left devastated.
Speaker 4: You never expect to plan your challenge funeral.
Speaker 2: From then on, it was oblivion.
Speaker 1: They'd been lured into a trap by a notorious gangster,
29-year-old Dale Cregan. The callous hitman had a vendetta against
the police.
Speaker 5: What makes Cregan such an evil killer is, firstly, his
complete lack of remorse, and secondly, it's his narcissism, that
he is basking in the attention that these murders brought
with them.
Speaker 1: Driven by revenge, Cregan had been on a killing spree,
taking four lives, including a father and son. Extraordinarily, he
was the first criminal to commit murder on British soil
using a grenade, a weapon of war. All of this
makes Dale Cregan one of the world's most evil killers.
The 25th of September, 2012, Manchester in the north of England.
A week after Britain's first ever killing of two female
officers in the line of duty, the nation mourned the
loss of two young women, 32-year-old Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes,
who was just 23. Greater Manchester Police were coordinating one
of the biggest manhunts in UK history, as well as
dealing with the devastating impact of losing two of their own.
Speaker 3: People assume that police officers are immune to dealing with violence.
Speaker 2: We're not.
Speaker 3: We see some pretty horrific things as part of the job.
But this was different. This had a feel of being
something different. They were someone's mum, sister. and they had
an absolute right to go home that night to their
loved ones, and that animal.
Speaker 2: Took that away.
Speaker 1: Local gangster Dale Cregan had ambushed Fiona and Nicola during
a routine call-out, then mercilessly fired 32 rounds at the
unarmed officers.
Speaker 6: The impact on the nation was extraordinary. The killing of
two innocent policewomen by police A madman, a monster.
Speaker 1: As Manchester lined the streets for Fiona and Nicola's funerals,
grief brought the community even closer to the police. It
would change policing in the city forever.
Speaker 5: I think this is one of those cases that people
remember because the kind of level of fear and anxiety
that this created was unprecedented. but also it highlighted how
dangerous this job can be and how police officers put
their lives on the line every day to keep the rest.
Speaker 1: Of us safe. In the four months leading up to
the murders, Dale Cregan had already established himself as a
ruthless killer. He shot father and son David and Mark
Short dead in two gangland attacks, then used a grenade
to blow up David Short's body.
Speaker 3: I remember at the time, there was a feeling of
unease amongst the public. You don't expect grenades to be
used on the streets of Greater Manchester. That was something
which had never been encountered before and gave us an
indication of how dangerous this individual was.
Speaker 5: For Cregan, it wasn't enough to kill his victims.
Speaker 7: He had to completely obliterate them.
Speaker 5: And this signature of the grenade that he claimed for
himself does give this case something really sinister.
Speaker 1: This killer's story begins on the 6th of June, 1983.
Dale Cregan was born in Ashton-under-Lyme. He grew up in
nearby Droylston, a working-class suburb of Manchester. He was one
of four with a brother and two sisters.
Speaker 5: This was at a time when the city was kind
of going into a bit of a post-industrial decline. The
area where Cregan grew up was known for having quite
a tough reputation. And I think when you look at
these communities at this point in time, you've got this
kind of culture of toughness and stoicism and resilience. And
with that, there comes a particular type of masculinity, a
kind of quite toxic form of masculinity that values violence.
And I don't think Cregan had a very easy time
of it as a child. He was bullied. He was
smaller than the other kids. He was quite angelic looking.
And that made him a bit of a target.
Speaker 1: At school, Cregan struggled academically.
Speaker 6: Dale Cregan was a remote, self-centered, ambitious boy who didn't
fit in. At school, he always thought he was better
than the rest. But what that meant was that he
created his own private universe.
Speaker 1: The outsider would escape to the fields and mete out
his revenge on the wildlife he found.
Speaker 8: Well, as a young age, Cregan started killing animals, and
this desensitized him to killing. He also wanted to skin
the animals and just show dominance over them and destroy things,
destroy living things. It serves as a form of desensitization
to killing and hurting living things.
Speaker 1: The hunting and skinning of wild rabbits meant young Cregan
also became adept at using a knife. This progressed into
something more sinister.
Speaker 8: He started with a fascination of knives and an increase
to weapons and to guns. Anything involved with killing, destroying, weapons, hurting, violence,
this all was very interesting to Cregan, and that was
part of his personality.
Speaker 6: Hurting people or animals gave Cregan a sense of reality.
He knew full well that he could use violence to
re-tip the scales. He thought that it made him more powerful.
Speaker 1: Through his hunting adventures, Cregan also escaped the troubles at home.
When he was young, his father walked out on the family.
Speaker 6: Basically, Cregan decided that he would take on the adult role.
He would man up. and look after the family. And
that altered the way he saw himself.
Speaker 5: At the same time, he's been bullied and demeaned and
suffering the effects of that. He has to kind of
step up and be the man of the household. So
he's quite conflicted. And I think this is.
Speaker 7: Something that underlies the violence he goes on to commit.
Speaker 1: At the age of 16, Cregan left full-time education. The outcast,
who was once bullied, found a new sense of belonging
and the respect he craved by joining local gangs.
Speaker 6: Cregan wanted to make his mark in Manchester, which was
dominated by gang culture. Gangs were everything. If you were
in one, you were a man, you were someone to
be respected. If you weren't, you were nobody. Cregan embraced
that completely. He wanted to be part of a gang,
a man to be feared. It gave him a sense
of belonging.
Speaker 5: There's a sense of territorialism, and very often you don't
have a lot of empathy for who you consider to
be your enemies. His role models are violent men. The
people that the community look up to are people who
aren't afraid.
Speaker 7: To use physical force to get the things that they want.
Speaker 5: So it's incredibly important in shaping him.
Speaker 1: Although he touted himself as a plasterer, soon Cregan made
his real money on the side as a drug dealer,
selling cannabis on his local patch.
Speaker 6: At school, Cregan had experimented with cannabis. As soon as
he left, he started selling. He also started using and
selling cocaine. It was something that he felt gave him
power and control over vulnerable people. He was someone to
be respected and taken seriously.
Speaker 1: At the age of 19, Cregan set off on a
working holiday to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Here, he
had his first taste of organized crime, persuading elderly holidaymakers
to invest their life savings into a timeshare racket.
Speaker 6: Cregan was eminently believable. He could persuade people, perhaps who
were a little gullible, to part with many thousands of
pounds for a timeshare, which, in fact, didn't exist. But
that was one of Cregan's great abilities, one of his talents.
Speaker 8: Cregan stealing money from older people doesn't surprise me at all.
Older people are weak. They're a target. He could get
over on older people. And so he'd rip them off.
That means nothing to him. This is how he sees
the world. He was anti-social to the core. This is
the lifestyle he chose.
Speaker 5: Here we've got somebody who is not afraid to break
the rules to get what they want, where that's instrumental
things like money or whether that's expressive things like power
and a feeling of worth, status, or recognition.
Speaker 1: Cregan returned to his drug dealing. He made a lot
of money quickly, and this funded exotic trips to all
corners of the globe. One, though, would cement his reputation
as a hard-man criminal.
Speaker 5: Cregan allegedly lost his eye in Thailand, where he tried
to rip off a local gangster, and that local gangster
had tortured him and gouged out his eye.
Speaker 7: Now, for most people, this kind of thing.
Speaker 5: Would be incredibly traumatic and very destabilizing, but Cregan took
it as something that he could use to carve out
a brand, to carve out an identity.
Speaker 8: He used his gouged out eye as a badge of
honor to show just how tough and how ruthless he is.
Speaker 6: In the wake of the loss of his eye, he
looked terrifying. Cregan was now what He wanted people in
Manchester to think of him. Swashbuckling, frightening, hard man.
Speaker 1: 28-year-old Cregan had built up a reputation as a violent,
drug-dealing criminal with 17 convictions, including affray and assault. He
was deeply entrenched in organized crime.
Speaker 3: Cregan was very well known to the police. He was
a violent, serial offender. He was a prominent member of
the organized crime groups. He was a vile individual and
a blister on the side of Greater Manchester. He was
a threat to anybody who he encountered.
Speaker 1: Two rival criminal families, the Shorts and the Atkinsons, had
been involved in sporadic clashes, both vying for control of
their local turf. The Shorts family was headed by its patriarch,
David Short.
Speaker 3: At the time, we were well aware that, There was
a really dangerous situation brewing, and some quite drastic measures
had to be taken to try and intervene and arrest
the offenders.
Speaker 2: And arrests were made at the time.
Speaker 3: But we work in a criminal justice system as checks
and balances, and it's very, very difficult to take people
off the streets.
Speaker 1: On the 13th of May, Manchester City had beaten arch-rivals
Manchester United to the top of football's Premier League. At
the Cotton Tree Pub in Droylston, drinks had been flowing
all day, and tempers between the Shorts and the Atkinsons
began to fray.
Speaker 6: Football rivalry gone mad, but it gave Dale Cregan the
opportunity to redress the balance amongst the Manchester gangs, and
it started with a bottle thrown away.
Speaker 5: These are two individuals who are associated with apparently rival
families in this area, and because this isn't the kind
of thing that is left to lie, it was never
going to end with this.
Speaker 1: Dale Cregan was close to the Atkinson family, so he
wanted to settle the score on their behalf. To do this,
he had rival patriarch David Short clearly in his sights.
Speaker 6: Because of this apparently meaningless incident, everything was ratcheted up
a notch or two, and revenge was necessary. Cregan decided
that he would take it on behalf of the Atkinsons.
Speaker 1: Two weeks later, on the 25th of May, Cregan and
three accomplices drove to the scene of the first argument,
the Cotton Tree Pub in Droylston. He was armed with
a 9mm Glock pistol.
Speaker 5: I think for Cregan, this was something that was very significant.
This was going to cement his reputation as this fearsome
gangster who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.
Speaker 1: 11.49 p.m., CCTV shows a car pulling up outside the
cotton tree with its hazard lights flashing. Inside the pub,
David Short and his 23-year-old son Mark were playing pool
with family and friends. Armed and wearing a balaclava, Cregan
ran into the pub.
Speaker 6: In less than half a minute, Cregan had fired seven shots.
Speaker 1: With David Short nowhere to be seen, Cregan shot son
Mark three times in the chest. Three men with them
were also wounded. CCTV shows Cregan's getaway. The whole incident
lasted just 24 seconds.
Speaker 7: It's just utter devastation in this pub.
Speaker 5: And just to give some sense of how quickly this happened,
David goes off to the toilet, leaves everybody having.
Speaker 7: A good time, playing pool, having a drink.
Speaker 5: And when he returns, he finds that his son is
fatally injured.
Speaker 7: Other people are injured as well.
Speaker 1: David Short sobbed as son Mark died in his arms.
Speaker 8: They wanted to kill Short's father. The father wasn't there,
so he killed the son. Kill somebody in the family.
It was a revenge killing.
Speaker 1: But soon, David Short's grief would turn to anger.
Speaker 5: This is an absolute blitz on this family, on this community.
It's absolutely shocking stuff.
Speaker 1: Cregan.
Speaker 6: realized at once that only killing Mark Short and not
his father David left him with a big problem. There
were going to be repercussions, and there were going to
be violent repercussions. Revenge was necessary.
Speaker 1: Despite David Short potentially having a clear idea of the
identity of his son's murderer, in his gangland world, it
wasn't as simple as relying on the police to bring
Cregan to justice.
Speaker 6: Not surprisingly, David Short wasn't keen to talk to the police.
That would be to break the omerta of the Manchester gangs. No, no,
there was never going to be any firm evidence. It
was going to be done privately.
Speaker 1: In order to avoid the revenge of the Short family
and awkward questions from the police, Cregan fled to Thailand
while the dust settled.
Speaker 5: I think it reveals how hedonistic he is, that he's
only concerned about him having a good time and is
prepared to just kind of draw the line and forget.
Speaker 7: That he's just murdered somebody.
Speaker 5: But also, I think he would have feared for his
own life at this point and feared that retaliation, so
he needed that distance to figure out what he was
going to do next.
Speaker 1: When Cregan flew back into Manchester on the 12th of June,
the police were waiting for him at the airport. He
was arrested and taken in for questioning, but lack of
evidence made their job extremely difficult.
Speaker 6: Greater Manchester Police had their suspicions about Dale Cregan, but
what they didn't have was firm evidence to put before.
Speaker 2: The Crown Prosecution Service.
Speaker 3: Greater Manchester Police did everything it possibly could to take
him and his associates off the streets, but there are limitations.
Speaker 2: We can only do so much.
Speaker 3: I know from my experience at the time how many
resources were put into this, but sadly, policing's an imperfect science.
We can't always achieve everything with 100% success. On this occasion,
it led to tragic consequences that he was able to
evade arrest.
Speaker 1: Over the next three months, the police built the case
against Cregan. Once they had more evidence, they attempted to
rearrest him at home on August the 7th, but he
was nowhere to be seen. Cregan had disappeared further north
to Bowness in the Lake District after hearing his accomplices
had been arrested. Whilst on the run, he made plans
to finish the job he'd botched the first time around,
the execution of David Short.
Speaker 6: It was now a race to kill or be killed.
Cregan knew that he should have killed David Short and
that he had to do so. Short, for his part,
was already threatening Cregan and his family. It was only
a matter of time. It was simply a question of
who got there first.
Speaker 1: In order to plan his next move, Cregan familiarized himself
with 46-year-old David Short's movements. The grieving father visited his
son's grave at Droylston Cemetery every day. This was the
opportunity Cregan had been looking for.
Speaker 8: I don't think that bothered Cregan at all. That short
was at a grave site mourning his son. That didn't
bother him. His job was to kill him. And so,
kill him.
Speaker 4: That's it.
Speaker 8: Wait till he goes to the grave. He's going to
be unarmed, by himself, out in the open.
Speaker 1: Kill him there.
Speaker 8: In Cregan's mind, that was a good idea. It was
a good way to accomplish the goal.
Speaker 1: On 10th August, Cregan and another violent criminal acquaintance, Anthony Wilkinson,
waited at the cemetery for David to arrive. On this occasion, however,
David broke his routine. When their target didn't appear, Cregan
and Wilkinson were driven by another accomplice in a rental
van to David's house just over a mile away. Here
they lay in wait for their moment. Before long, it came.
Speaker 5: On this particular day, David was going to have a
family barbecue. He was carrying some chrome furniture through from
the car into the house. And he was chatting with
his neighbors. Everything appeared to be normal. And he leaves
the front door open as he's taking things in from
the car. Now, Cregan and his associates seize this opportunity.
They very quickly exit the van and run into the
house after David.
Speaker 1: Cregan and his sidekick Wilkinson shot David multiple times. As
they cornered him in an alleyway, Cregan delivered three final
bullets to the head at point-blank range.
Speaker 6: David Short was clearly dead, but Cregan did not want
to stop there. He wanted to be infamous, the Manchester
gangster everyone remembered. And so he took out a grenade,
a weapon only used during war, and exploded it on Cregan.
David's body, literally destroying him.
Speaker 1: This was the first time a grenade had been used
in a murder on mainland British soil.
Speaker 9: The scene would have been one of absolute devastation. This
is a military weapon. This is not the sort of
thing that you come across even in very serious crime.
This is absolutely unprecedented, and the injuries that he suffered
would certainly have been comparable with those that one would
expect in a war zone.
Speaker 1: Cregan and his fellow gangsters then drove back to Droylston,
where he hurled a second grenade at the home of
another family they had a grievance with. Then he used
a third and final explosive to blow up their van
before fleeing the scene. Luckily, there were no further casualties,
but gangster Cregan had left his mark.
Speaker 7: There's a very powerful message being sent out here.
Speaker 5: I'm not just going to kill this person, I'm going
to absolutely obliterate them. And the grenade becomes part of
Cregan's signature.
Speaker 7: This is my calling card.
Speaker 1: Unfazed by the devastation they'd left in their wake, Cregan
and his accomplice stopped to buy ice pops during their getaway.
29-year-old Cregan had succeeded in making himself one of Manchester's
most feared gangsters. He was on the run after murdering
Mark and David Short, but this was no ordinary killing.
For the first time in mainland Britain, a grenade was
used in a murder. A bomb disposal unit was brought in,
and residents were evacuated due to a ruptured gas main
caused by the explosion. In response, Greater Manchester Police launched
Operation Dakar to hunt Cregan down.
Speaker 3: Greater Manchester Police through absolutely everything that we had in
the search for Cregan. He was the number one wanted
individual in Greater Manchester, if not the whole of the UK.
We knew he was a very dangerous individual.
Speaker 9: The use of hand grenades in crime is almost unprecedented.
They are totally indiscriminate and will cause serious and significant
injury to anybody who is within quite a few yards.
So to use a weapon like this shows a total
disregard for human life and for the concerns of anybody
else who might be in the vicinity.
Speaker 1: It wasn't only his vendetta against the Short family that
made Cregan the prime suspect. Forensics work on the half-destroyed
van he left near the scene found fingerprints belonging to
the killer and his accomplices.
Speaker 6: Now the police had a clear target. and forensic evidence
to back it up, which put Dale Cregan firmly in
the frame.
Speaker 1: The police also found Cregan's DNA in saliva on an
ice-pop wrapper left in their abandoned getaway car. Here, too,
they discovered Cregan's fingerprints all over the inside of the
Ford Fiesta, together with empty ammunition cases and the gun magazine.
All evidence was pointing towards the one-eyed gangster.
Speaker 3: It was obviously incredibly important to put Cregan behind bars.
We knew that this feud was escalating out of all proportion.
Speaker 2: And at the time, we didn't know when it was
going to end.
Speaker 1: 14 armed response vehicles were patrolling Manchester at any one time. Meanwhile,
Cregan and his accomplices had fled 45 miles northeast to
Leeds before traveling another 250 miles south to Herne Bay
in Kent.
Speaker 6: The police issued a photo fit of Dale Cregan and
warned everyone that he was potentially armed and dangerous.
Speaker 1: By the middle of August, a price was put on
Cregan and Wilkinson's heads. First, the police offered a £ 25, 000 reward.
Two weeks later, this was doubled. The pressure proved too
much for Wilkinson, and he handed himself in. A £ 50, 000
reward still stood for information on Cregan's whereabouts, but people
who knew Cregan were too afraid to come forward.
Speaker 3: The people who had contact with him knew exactly what
he was capable of. And you can't spend that money
if you're dead. And they knew exactly what threat was
to them. So sadly, they don't think any amount of
money would have caused people to have given him up.
Speaker 1: Wanted posters were put up across the city of Manchester,
and Cregan's face even appeared on the big screens at
football matches. Cregan's family and close criminal associates were placed
under the watchful eye of the police. But nothing led
the investigators to the killer.
Speaker 6: Cregan was well aware that the police were after him.
He was intent on not giving up without a fight,
and so he laid a plan. His plan was to
go out in infamy.
Speaker 1: On the 17th of September, just seven miles from his home,
Britain's most wanted man forced his way into the house
of a former acquaintance. He threatened him with a grenade
placed on his mantelpiece if he didn't keep his silence.
Speaker 5: He goes to the house of a barber and essentially
holds him hostage. and gets him to trim his hair
and trim his beard. This is a guy who wants
his mugshot to look as good as it possibly can look.
Speaker 7: So this is real premeditation. This is real narcissism.
Speaker 1: Well, it's his image.
Speaker 8: Before he knew he was going to be arrested and
be on TV and so on, he wanted himself to
look good. That's Cregan. Everything is his image.
Speaker 1: As the barber's partner and young daughter cowered upstairs, Cregan
binged on beer and cigarettes as he enjoyed what he
planned to be his last night of freedom. The next day,
on the 18th of September, Cregan loaded his Glock semi-automatic
pistol with extra ammunition for his final act of terror.
Speaker 9: The Glock pistol that he used normally has a 17-round magazine.
The fact that Cregan used a 32-round magazine... just shows,
if you like, that he really wanted to do as
much harm, cause as much damage as he possibly could,
and those 32 rounds could be fired without changing the magazine,
of course. All he had to do was keep pulling
the trigger.
Speaker 1: That morning, police officers Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes were
starting their early shift. 32-year-old Fiona was making plans for
her forthcoming civil partnerships. She had a daughter, age five,
with her fiancé.
Speaker 2: I actually knew Fiona.
Speaker 3: I was the shift inspector at Tameside when she joined
the shift as a brand-new recruit from training school. She
was bubbly, she was friendly, she did everything he asked
of her with a smile on her face, she was
keen to learn. She was just everything you would expect
of a young police officer.
Speaker 1: Her 23-year-old colleague, Nicola, was only three years into her
job as a police constable.
Speaker 4: You get that sense of pride that much of what
she's doing, she's out policing the streets, she's out protecting
the public, and she was proud of what she was doing,
she was proud of wearing the uniform. She was just
life and soul of the party at 6 o'clock in
the morning when they're all just going on shift, she's
laughing and joking. I knew there'd be times where she'd
face dangerous situations and assaults and fights, but Yeah, I mean,
the overall feel was quite proud.
Speaker 1: Partway through Nicola and Fiona's morning shift, at 10.14am, Dale
Cregan made a 999 emergency call.
Speaker 5: Police emergency.
Speaker 3: Someone just threw a big concrete slab through that window
and ran off.
Speaker 1: Britain's most wanted man posed as a worried resident, Adam,
who'd been a victim of crime.
Speaker 2: Was he a white male? He was a male, though, yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he was a male.
Speaker 1: Cregan was planning an ambush on the police. With a
clear view of the road ahead, he lay in wait.
He had chilling words to end his call.
Speaker 3: All right, then.
Speaker 4: Thanks very much. OK.
Speaker 3: I'll be waiting. The call was pretty innocuous, the sort
of thing which, you know, Greater Manchester Police officers deal
with every day. so Nicola and Fiona went to investigate.
Speaker 1: 38 minutes later, unarmed, Fiona and Nicola arrived at the door.
Speaker 6: As the two policewomen walked up the path towards the
front door, Cregan threw it open and began firing. 32
shots had been fired.
Speaker 5: So the brutality of this attack was horrific. He was
just utterly remorseful as he kept going. He kept deciding
to pull that trigger. There was no hesitation whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Despite being hit between five and eight times, Fiona tried
to deploy her taser gun. Cregan's response was a final
shot through the heart, killing her instantly. Her colleague, Nicola,
couldn't move after a bullet had severed her spinal cord.
Cregan then mercilessly shot her three times in the head
at point-blank range.
Speaker 7: After he'd emptied his firearm, that was not it. It
was not over. He takes out a grenade... and throws it.
Speaker 5: So he's not just killing his victims, he's obliterating them.
And I think that's what he wants to be known for.
By killing two police officers, he's securing that attention that
he so desperately wants.
Speaker 1: The whole attack lasted just 31 seconds.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 3: It's fair to say that the moments after the attack,
the minutes after the attack, The police control room was
absolute chaos, but very quickly, a picture started to emerge,
and Greater Manchester deployed armed officers into Tameside straight after
the attack.
Speaker 1: In a desperate attempt to save their colleagues, unarmed units
nearby rushed to the scene.
Speaker 2: That shows the bravery of police officers. They're not armed.
They knew something horrific had happened.
Speaker 3: They drove straight to the danger to help the colleagues
and help the public.
Speaker 2: Sadly, it was too late.
Speaker 1: Nicola was rushed to Thameside Hospital by paramedics, where she
later was pronounced dead. Her father, Bryn, was driving home
from work when he got a call from the police.
Speaker 4: There was a to-and-throwing of, like, where are you and what's,
you know, I need to speak to you. And then automatically,
then you start to think something's not quite right here.
And they said, well, you know, tell me what's wrong.
I'm outside your house. And then when you hear those words...
I'm outside your house. That's when alarm bells start ringing
and you panic. And it didn't even, I didn't even
register what was being said as well at the time.
And eventually I said to him, don't you dare tell
me she's dead. And that's when he said, you know,
there's no easy way of saying it. And from then
on it was, you know, oblivion. I didn't know where
I was or where I was driving. And it was
a journey that would take usually 10, 15 minutes more
It seemed to take hours.
Speaker 1: Cregan's first two victims had been embroiled in the feuding
gangland world he was part of, but these two young
police officers were completely unknown to him.
Speaker 6: By this time, Cregan had realized that there was no escape.
He chose to kill two innocent policewomen because it was
to be his gravestone, his legacy. the thing that ensured
his infamy in the hierarchy of infamous criminals.
Speaker 5: He wants to be the biggest gangster in Manchester and
be seen as this fearsome character who nobody's going to
mess with.
Speaker 3: On this day, we saw the worst that any police
force can ever experience.
Speaker 2: Two innocent young officers murdered.
Speaker 1: As Greater Manchester Police was learning the devastating truth about
their fallen comrades, Dale Cregan had already decided on his
next move.
Speaker 3: He lured unarmed, unprotected young officers to the door of
that house and murdered them in cold blood.
Speaker 2: He then went to the police station and.
Speaker 3: Handed himself in because in his pathetic mind, he thought
that the colleagues may shoot him.
Speaker 5: The reason he's doing this is firstly to stay in
control because for Cregan, being in control, being the director
of his own gangster movie is very important to him.
Speaker 7: But there's also an element of fear here. He does
not want to die. He does not want to be killed.
Speaker 5: And I think he's actually afraid of being killed in
a police shootout. He thinks they're not going to show
him very much mercy because he's just cold-bloodedly murdered two
of their officers.
Speaker 7: So he's in self-preservation mode at this time.
Speaker 1: Seeing two of their own killed in the line of
duty sent shockwaves throughout Greater Manchester Police.
Speaker 3: Walking into that police station, I'll never forget it. The faces,
people had a thousand-yard stare. Nobody could believe that you
come on work and this happens. Fiona was planning a
wedding in a break time, and then she wasn't there.
Imagine the impact that has on family members friends, colleagues,
who were sat at seven o'clock in the morning, making
cups of tea and chatting about what they were gonna
do that day. It just beggars belief that they were
put through that. And they came back to work and
policed the streets of Greater Manchester. And what a fantastic
tribute that is to their memory, that they kept going.
They were professional, committed, just like Nicola and Fiona.
Speaker 1: Cregan, however, seemed to revel in his killings. In custody,
he told the police it was revenge for hounding his
family whilst on the run. He only seemed to have
one regret.
Speaker 7: Cregan says, I'm sorry that they weren't men.
Speaker 5: He wants to be this kind of old-school-style gangster who
doesn't hurt women and children.
Speaker 8: Because killing two female is not as high status in
Cregan's mind than to killing two male. That really doesn't
fit in with the image that he wants to project
to everybody else. If you took his image away from him,
what do you have left with Cregan?
Speaker 6: Nothing.
Speaker 8: There's nothing there. There's this total nothingness, inadequacy in every respect.
He feels so weak and inadequate, and that's why he
has to demonstrate what a powerful force he is.
Speaker 1: The city of Manchester was united in grief for the
fallen officers. A week after Nicola's murder, her father, Bryn,
attended a vigil arranged by the local community for his
daughter and her colleague, Fiona.
Speaker 4: And you got that sense of shock and outrage and
grief from the community. The police, they deal with murders
day in, day out, but not their own. So I
think for them as well, it was a massive shock,
massive outpouring of grief from, you know, not just Greater
Manchester Police, but every police force in the country. There
was a bond created between Greater Manchester Police and its communities.
Speaker 2: They came together and I'll never forget that.
Speaker 1: This Manchester spirit was truly brought out two weeks later
on the 3rd of October, the day of Nicola Hughes's funeral.
Speaker 3: I'll never forget standing at the bottom of Market Street
and it was like a Derby Day football game. People
were pouring down Market Street wearing black ties. It was
absolutely humbling. I heard a story about a group of
officers having done a full night shift and drove to
Manchester to stand with their colleagues.
Speaker 2: That was incredible. Shops closed, banks closed, Manchester came out
It was incredible.
Speaker 1: When Nicola's father, Bryn, arrived, he saw thousands of well-wishers
lining the streets on the route to Manchester Cathedral.
Speaker 4: At the back of your mind, you think, I don't
want to be here, I don't want to do this.
It was like a huge tunnel of faces and you
recognise some and, you know, there's people crying and there's
people clapping and I think you soak that up, it's
like an energy, it helps you get through the day.
Speaker 1: Fiona's funeral followed the next day on 4th October. Again,
Manchester paid its respects. Four months later, on 4th February 2013,
serial killer Dale Cregan finally faced justice. 120 armed police
officers were used to ferry Britain's most wanted killer from
Strangeways Prison to Preston Crown Court each day.
Speaker 3: This was one of the biggest trials in recent times,
certainly in the northwest of England, if not the country,
and Cregan had to be housed securely and taken to
court every day, and there was a massive security operation.
Speaker 1: Armed police were placed on the roof surrounding the court
building so that nothing was left to chance. Nine other
accomplices also faced trial on charges of murder and attempted murder.
Despite confessing to his murders, Cregan opted to plead not
guilty on all counts.
Speaker 3: That animal forced the family and colleagues to go through
a trial. The judge commented on how he tried to
manipulate proceedings for his own amusement.
Speaker 2: He had no remorse. He was a monster.
Speaker 6: Cregan, horrifying though it may sound, wanted to bask in
his own infamy. He wanted no one ever to forget
the one-eyed Manchester gangster.
Speaker 3: He was characteristically arrogant, tried to feign disinterest. To use
an old-fashioned phrase, he was trying to play to the
gallery as well, to some extent. But I think everybody
in that room knew exactly what kind of person he was.
Speaker 1: In a final act of manipulation from the dock, Cregan
decided to change his pleas during the 18-week trial, pleading
guilty to all four murders. On the 13th of June 2013,
it was game over for Dale Cregan when he was
given a whole life sentence. Five of his criminal accomplices
were each sentenced to between seven and 35 years in prison.
Speaker 5: Cregan was one of very few people to receive a
whole life order for four murders. So he will never
be released from prison. He'll never have the chance for parole.
And these sentences are reserved for the most serious violent
offenders who've done the most harm and are perhaps the
least likely to be rehabilitated.
Speaker 7: So this is very, very serious indeed.
Speaker 1: For relatives and colleagues of his victims, they finally saw justice.
Speaker 4: I mean, obviously we knew you can't commit four murders
and not get a whole life tariff. To hear the
judge actually say it, that's the big relief. And I
think it's the relief that it's finally over. And they'd
finally got justice for what had happened to them.
Speaker 3: It didn't seem to take away the sense of loss, though.
Speaker 2: Two young colleagues had been cut down in the prime.
There was nothing to celebrate.
Speaker 3: I know that across Greater Manchester Police, People felt the same.
Speaker 2: There was no celebration.
Speaker 1: The murders of police officers Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes
had a lasting impact on policing the UK's second-largest city, Manchester.
Speaker 3: This did change policing in Greater Manchester, and I felt
it almost immediately.
Speaker 2: What this did was show to.
Speaker 3: Everybody that police officers aren't just uniforms. These are somebody's daughters, sisters, moms.
These are people who have the same problems in their lives,
same stresses. It brought the communities closer to Greater Manchester Police.
Speaker 1: As for Dale Cregan, after spending five years in Ashworth's
psychiatric unit in Merseyside, he was sent back to Her
Majesty's Prison Strangeways in Manchester, where he'll likely spend his
remaining days.
Speaker 3: In his world, his pathetic world that exists in his head,
he thought he was a big man. He'll die a pathetic,
wizened old man in prison. What I want to do
is highlight and contrast that against what Nicola and Fiona
stood and still stand for, and that's decency, public service
and compassion.
Speaker 2: Their names will never be forgotten.
Speaker 1: To help cope with losing Nicola, her father Bryn set
up a memorial fund in her name to support children
who've also lost a loved one to murder or violent crime.
Speaker 4: You're never going to forget what they've done. You're never
going to forgive what they've done. But for me, I'd
rather concentrate on Nicola, the memories of Nicola.
Speaker 1: Dale Cregan gunned down a father and a son, then
recklessly threw grenades onto the streets, putting the public in
danger as part of a petty gangland feud. He mercilessly
slaughtered two unarmed police officers with their whole lives ahead
of them. He brought terror to the streets of Manchester,
making Dale Cregan one of the world's most evil killers.