Violence & Brawls ·
The witness claim that challenged the Rettendon murder timeline
In 2007, Michael Steele’s lawyer said a new sighting undermined the prosecution’s timeline. The commission reviewing the case later declined to refer the convictions for another appeal.
On 31 October 2007, nearly 12 years after Pat Tate, Tony Tucker and Craig Rolfe were shot dead in a Range Rover in Rettendon, Essex, a lawyer submitted a challenge to the prosecution’s account of when they had died. Chris Bowen, representing Michael Steele, one of two men serving life sentences for the murders, said a new witness had seen the three victims in the vehicle several hours after prosecutors said they had been killed.
The claim concerned the evening of 6 December 1995, when the prosecution placed the killings on Workhouse Lane, a secluded farm track. Bowen said the witness’s information could “blow the case apart”. The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which can refer possible miscarriages of justice to the appeal courts, confirmed that its review of Steele and his co-defendant, Jack Whomes, was active.
The case Bowen was challenging had resulted in unanimous guilty verdicts at the Old Bailey in January 1998. Steele and Whomes each received three life sentences. Both denied committing the murders and continued to maintain their innocence. The prosecution said the killings followed a dispute over a consignment of cannabis and that Steele had lured Tate, Tucker and Rolfe to the lane with the promise of another drugs deal, where Whomes shot them.
An important part of that account came from Darren Nicholls, who testified that he had acted as the getaway driver. He said he picked up Steele and Whomes after the killings and saw specks of blood on Whomes’s gloves. According to Nicholls’s account, the collection followed a call to his mobile at 6.59pm. The defence alleged that he had constructed a false account with police assistance to conceal or minimise his own criminal involvement and obtain a more lenient sentence.
Bowen’s new-witness claim challenged the timing rather than simply repeating that attack on Nicholls. “I believe this evidence on its own indicates that the time of death intimated to the jury at the trial could not possibly have been correct,” he said. He also pointed to a local resident’s trial evidence that six gunshots had been heard near the village around midnight. Bowen argued that unused material suggested the murders had taken place in the early hours of 7 December.
His conclusion was emphatic: “This in itself completely demolishes the prosecution case.” But that was the lawyer’s assessment, not a finding by the commission or a court. Judges had upheld the convictions and rejected appeals from Steele and Whomes in 2006.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission decided in 2023 not to refer the convictions for another appeal. Whomes was released on licence in 2021, and Steele was released in May 2025. Their murder convictions remained in place.