All my firearms training at Gatwick Airport had taught me that gunshot wounds were visible on entry and catastrophic on exit. This is graphically described following the shooting of Marla in Not Dead Yet. The bullet pushes flesh, muscle, sinew and bone ahead of it and out of the body. A gaping mush of death. This was nothing like that: a barely perceptible entry and a tiny exit. I beat myself up for months after. How did I miss that?
The nature of police humour being what it is, my supportive colleagues never missed an opportunity to recall the time I missed a gunshot wound. Plenty of DS Norman Pottings came out of the woodwork reminding me of this oversight. The real Tom Martinson, Chief Constable Martin Richards QPM, even made mention of it in my retirement speech some fifteen years on! The truth, and the nature of .22 injuries, would never be sufficient to defend me from the ribbing. That’s coppers for you.
From the outset this was not only a baffling whodunnit but, to complicate matters, became a where, when and why dunnit, a real quandary. However the answer to the who became apparent as a result of the tenacious nature of my partner in crime DS Bill Warner. Bill, once again, was interfering in matters that simply did not concern him.
He was trawling the force incident logs for his daily adrenaline rush: what could he meddle with in other parts of the county that had absolutely nothing to do with him? It didn’t take him long to find something. Little did we know though that, for once, his inability to keep his nose out of other people’s business would be of some use.
The title of the incident serial leapt off the screen: ‘Armed Kidnap’. What followed was fascinating. A terrified middle-aged couple, Mr and Mrs Purnell, had been kidnapped at gunpoint twenty-five miles away in Eastbourne and forced to drive north, snatched while trying to sell their camper van. A man had produced a gun and pointed it at Mrs Purnell’s head. He ordered Mr Purnell to drive to London. On reaching the M23 he then demanded to be driven to Gatwick. He clearly did not appreciate that they had just entered the place with the most armed police and CCTV outside London. It also had plenty of convenient dead ends.
On arrival, with breathtaking courage, Mr Purnell told his wife to get out and the gunman either to shoot him or get out too. Amazingly the man chose the latter and ran into the heaving South Terminal.
The terrified hostages raised the alarm and were able to help police swiftly locate their assailant. His arrest by heavily armed officers was both rapid and decisive. It was only at this point that the story of a mad five days of drug trafficking, deception, theft, kidnapping and murder started to emerge.
South African Denis Mulder knew little of Brighton. It’s unlikely that he ever intended to visit the UK, let alone this quirky city. However when you are dealt cruel cards you never know where it will end.
He had been a highly successful, multilingual entrepreneur. He owned a swimming-pool business in his homeland but wanderlust got to him. A fanatical sailor, he acquired a number of yachts around the Caribbean and enjoyed a healthy income chartering them to wealthy businessmen. He too enjoyed the seafaring life but one day suffered a massive stroke while offshore. This left him partially paralysed and needing to relearn to speak. Without health insurance he found the treatment costs as crippling as his illness and had to sell his boats and business to settle his medical debts.
Once back on his feet, he moved to Europe and acquired a franchise selling rooftop tents for cars. According to intelligence, recognizing that this wasn’t going to keep him in the style to which he had become accustomed, he diversified into the seemingly lucrative business of cannabis trafficking. Expecting a quick buck, he smuggled a large quantity of weed into England in his highly conspicuous Renault estate complete with rooftop tent.
More by luck than judgement he evaded the attention of Her Majesty’s Customs and somehow ended up in Brighton. There, in the beachfront Volks Tavern bar, he naively approached two potential buyers of his stash. Seizing an opportunity exposed by his criminal and geographical ignorance, they hoodwinked Mulder into driving the 160 miles to Bristol to sell to a Mr Big, promising a handsome return on his investment. Of course no such person existed and inevitably they stole his drugs and he returned penniless.
Broke, cold and in a strange country, Mulder decided he needed a camper van as a warmer alternative to his canvas-topped station wagon. All he had to his name were his wits and the .22 pistol he had carried undetected for years.
A few days prior to the kidnapping of the sharp-witted couple, he had seen an advert in a window of a van parked close to Hove seafront. He rang the number scribbled on the notice and agreed to meet the vendor for a test drive. This would turn out to be the last thing Anthony Robinson would ever do.
Painstaking detective work eventually helped piece together the brutal events on that fateful drive. Through the jigsaw of testimony that emerged it became clear that the two had driven the van eastwards on the A27 to Lewes and then retraced their journey west towards the scene of the Dead Simple dramatic car chase close to Shoreham Airport and the River Adur.
For reasons known only to Mulder, the van pulled over in a layby just east of Southwick Tunnel. We could only guess what happened there between the two, possibly a dispute over the price, possibly an attempt to steal the van, but whatever it was, all the evidence points to that short stop being the scene of the execution.
One shot to the head with a .22 pistol was all it took to end the life of this hugely popular and fun-loving surfer, who was probably in the back of the van while Mulder stood outside. The bullet was never recovered, having presumably broken the window on its way out of the van, hence there was no shattered glass when we found the body. Mulder must have driven the van back into the city, body in the back, parked it and dutifully locked it up, before leaving it where it was found. We don’t know if Bonzo witnessed the murder of his master. Being a dog lover, I sincerely hope not.
Curiously, during the interviews that followed Mulder’s arrest, he provided a full picture of the kidnapping, yet casually and callously made only passing mention of ‘killing the guy in Brighton’. We brought in the most able and tenacious interviewers but they could elicit no more than an unequivocal yet bland admission that he had shot Robinson in cold blood.
The full story is really known only to Mulder, as he has never yet had the humanity to tell it.
Imagine being one of Mr Robinson’s nearest and dearest. Imagine not knowing how and why your loved one died. Cruel enough to rob someone of their life, but it rubs salt in the wounds of those left behind to tantalize them with an admission, but not the courtesy of an explanation.
Mulder was not a clever killer but his ruthlessness made up for that. There seems little doubt that were it not for the brave evasive action taken by his hostages at Gatwick he would have gone on to kill again. He had brushed with death through his stroke and it seemed that his survival instinct was so strong that, in his mind, it overrode everyone else’s right to life.
Some might regard it as fanciful if Peter James were to link such a complex and contradictory character to this kind of violence but, as is ever the case, nothing is too bizarre or inexplicable to happen in Brighton.
A life sentence was the least Mulder deserved but he remains one of the hardest men to fathom. His guilty plea meant the facts couldn’t be explored, so only he knows what turned this previously successful, sick, failed drug dealer into an executioner of the type thankfully we rarely see.