Eight shotgun blasts on a winter’s night left three men dead and brought their drugs empire crashing down. Thirty years on, why does the Essex Boys story still grip people?
A snowy farm track marked the end of the road for Tony Tucker, Pat Tate and Craig Rolfe on 6 December 1995.
Their bodies were discovered the following morning in a blue Range Rover at Rettendon, near Chelmsford.
The shootings have entered modern folklore, inspiring numerous films, TV shows and podcasts.
Some claim these have made low-level thugs into underworld heroes.
Meanwhile, questions continue to be asked over whether the right men were jailed for the killings, and what happened to the so-called supergrass who turned on them.
The trio capitalised on ecstasy’s popularity to become players on south Essex’s drugs scene.
Tucker, head of a nightclub security firm and former bodyguard to boxer Nigel Benn, allowed dealing in his clubs in exchange for a cut.
Amateur bodybuilder Tate and cocaine addict Rolfe were his lieutenants.
“For about a year, the violence was insane. It was madness,” says Bernard O’Mahoney, a former doorman at Basildon club Raquels.
“People were doing things to other human beings you wouldn’t even dream about.”
Raquels was where 18-year-old Leah Betts bought the ecstasy pill that ultimately led to her death in November 1995.
Just weeks later, Tate, Tucker and Rolfe would also be dead.
“The police said to me, ‘Who do you think done it?’,” Mr O’Mahoney recalls.
“I said, ‘Get yourself a phone book. On every page you’ll have a suspect.'”
The dead men “couldn’t be straight with anyone”, he says.
“They’d rip them off or they’d threaten to beat them up; intimidate them.”
Essex Police launched Operation Century to find their killers but drew a blank.
Five months later, they stopped Darren Nicholls in Braintree with 10kg of cannabis in his car.
To save his own skin, he told police he knew who murdered the Essex Boys.
He named his bosses, Michael Steele, from Great Bentley, near Colchester, and Jack Whomes, from Brockford, Suffolk.
They were “violent drug dealers”, according to Paul Maleary, then a junior Essex detective.
Tucker, Tate and Rolfe had fallen out with drug smuggler Steele, nicknamed the “Angel of Death”, over a sub-standard batch of cannabis.
Nicholls told police Tate had threatened to kill Steele in revenge, but that Steele, in a pre-emptive strike, lured the trio to Rettendon on the pretence of a drug deal before his right-hand man Whomes shot them.
Nicholls said he was the getaway driver. Acting on his information, police arrested the pair and brought them before an Old Bailey jury in 1998.
They were unanimously found guilty after a four-and-a-half month trial and given three life sentences each.
But were the right men behind bars?
Trial judge Mr Justice Hidden had warned the jury to treat Nicholls’s evidence with “great caution”, adding “it was in his own interest” to support the prosecution.
“Darren Nicholls lied, no doubt about it,” says David McKelvey, despite being the man who arrested him.
“The evidence that Steele and Whomes were wrongly convicted is overwhelming.”
The ex-detective initially had “no doubt” they were guilty, but that changed in 2020 when their defence team contacted him with what he believes is compelling new evidence.
Now a private investigator, he is contacted daily by people who believe there has been a miscarriage of justice.
“Everyone missed an absolutely vital call at 17:08 [on the evening of the killing] that took place on Jack Whomes’s phone that was cell-sited in Suffolk,” he explains.
“And yet Darren Nicholls is saying he was meeting Whomes and Mick Steele at 17:00. It’s absolutely impossible, unless he’s a time traveller.”
He declines to share what he sees as further key evidence, citing an ongoing legal challenge.
But he does accuse Essex Police of threatening witnesses and manipulating telephone data.
“The big thing is a lot of Essex Police officers, once they retired, wanted to come forward and tell the truth,” he claims.
The force dismissed his claims, and said the police murder investigation had been “exhaustive”.
Alternative theories are fuelled by the absence of reports of gunshots being heard at the time of the murders – 19:00 GMT – despite experts saying they should have been audible about a mile away,
Instead, an independent witness heard about six shots at midnight.
And when the so-called getaway car was recovered, no traces of blood were found inside.
Mr Maleary stands by his colleagues’ work and dismisses “instant experts” informed only by online speculation.
“They weren’t there; they weren’t involved in the investigation. Some of these people are deluded,” he says.
Steele told jurors he had been at home at 19:30 watching Coronation Street on the night of the murders.
However, the soap was not actually aired until 21:20 that night, because of a televised Champions League clash between Blackburn Rovers and Rosenborg.
“The alibis that were placed forward around the time of the trial; they’ve been blown out of the water,” adds Mr Maleary.
The “Essex Boys” tag was coined by the 2000 film of the same name, starring Sean Bean.
Paul Tanter, who directed two of its sequels, says: “This was the first British crime story that had a really malicious, gritty element to it.
“It’s captured the public imagination in a way you couldn’t quite predict.”
The killings inspired other movies, too, notably the Rise of the Footsoldier franchise.
Brad Jones, a former crime reporter who covered the case for the East Anglian Daily Times, says: “This was a ruthless execution which lifted the lid on a criminal underworld.
“It was certainly one of the biggest stories I ever worked on, and little surprise it went on to be the inspiration for many books, films and documentaries.”
He, too, had doubts about some of the trial evidence, including the lack of forensics.
“However, all that said, the jury obviously decided the evidence of Nicholls was enough,” he adds.
The fate of the supergrass, under witness protection somewhere in the UK, also captivated people.
A Sky Documentaries series in 2023 prompted yet more speculation.
In it, former gangster Steve “Nipper” Ellis claimed his father murdered the trio after Tucker threatened his family.
“There’s been mass non-disclosure; there’s been a huge cover up by Essex Police,” Mr McKelvey claims.
But Mr Maleary insists: “The reason they died is because they owed somebody some money and it was the wrong person.”
One thing they and Mr O’Mahoney agree on is that Tucker, Tate and Rolfe have been wrongly depicted as heroes.
Mr O’Mahoney says: “The films have turned them into these slick, Pablo Escobar-type people – but they weren’t fit to dig his garden, never mind be like him.”
Mr McKelvey says: “They were local thugs and drug dealers: [at] a low level; really not significant at all.”
Mr Maleary believes the false portrayal has been gleefully lapped up by audiences.
“People get captivated by it in the same way they make criminals such as the Krays legends,” he adds.
The Court of Appeal rejected both killers’ bids for freedom in 1999 and 2006.
Later efforts were also dismissed.
Steele was released in June, four years after Whomes.
Both continue to fight their convictions. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) sanctioned a fresh review in 2025, and Mr McKelvey is convinced they will soon be cleared.
“Having seen our evidence, it will have no other choice but to find they were wrongly convicted and it’s a miscarriage of justice,” he says.
It will not convince Mr O’Mahoney, however.
“There’s no question of them being innocent; no question whatsoever,” he says.
“They’re guilty as sin.”
In a statement, Essex Police also pointed to their unsuccessful appeals.
“These appeals have included focus upon key evidential aspects of the case. Both appeals were rejected and in 2006 Lord Justice Kay commented that there was no ‘element of unsafety’ relating to the original convictions of both defendants,” it said.
“This case has also been examined exhaustively by the CCRC over the last 30 years.
“We will of course always work with the CCRC and keep any new information under review.”
