Deadly Member of a Killer Gang Who Stabbed a Young Black Man to Death 20 Years Ago Walks Free in the Streets (Photos)

A racist who was fingered in the brutal murder of an innocent young man in the United Kingdom 20 years ago still walks the streets a free man.

Luke Knight who participated in the murder of Stephen still walks free today

 

Posing in country casuals, he is the last of Stephen Lawrence’s killers still on the streets of Eltham.

 

Luke Knight, 40, is unrecognisable from the snarling brute who smirked at claims he was one of the five racists behind the black teenager’s death.

 

Twenty years after the Daily Mail accused the gang of murder, he cuts a pathetic figure strolling just two miles from where Stephen, 18, was fatally stabbed. The A-level student was killed in a savage and unprovoked gang attack as he waited at a bus-stop with a friend in 1993.

 

Two members of the Eltham gang, Gary Dobson, 41, and David Norris, 40, are serving life for Stephen’s killing after a forensic breakthrough led to a second murder trial five years ago.

 

A third, 41-year-old Neil Acourt, is in prison awaiting sentencing for masterminding a £4million cannabis smuggling ring.

 

His 40-year-old brother Jamie, the fourth man we named, is wanted by police for his links to serious drugs crimes. He is on the run in Spain where detectives believe he is being harboured by ‘Costa del Crime’ contacts.

 

That just leaves father of two Knight remaining on the south-east London stomping ground where the murderous gang thought themselves above the law.

 

After a shambolic police investigation, two prosecutions and an inquest all failed to secure justice for Stephen and his family, the Daily Mail went to the extraordinary lengths of naming all five of the gang beneath the headline ‘MURDERERS’.

 

‘If we are wrong, let them sue us,’ we said, throwing down a legal gauntlet to the five men who had all arrogantly refused to answer questions about Stephen’s murder for fear of incriminating themselves.

 

In accusing them, this newspaper took a monumental risk – but one which ultimately paid off – triggering a public inquiry into Stephen’s death and triggering a change to the centuries-old double jeopardy rule that had prevented cleared suspects being tried for the same murder twice.

 

It sparked massive internal reform of the Metropolitan Police Service which was, at the time of Stephen’s killing, condemned as ‘institutionally racist’. It also heralded the Race Relations Amendment Act requiring public bodies to stamp out discrimination and to promote equal opportunities.

 

Stephen’s 64-year-old mother Doreen – now Baroness Lawrence – said the Mail’s stand was ‘a proud moment’.

 

‘A national daily newspaper had the courage to put on its front page what others were too frightened to do,’ she said.

‘It did the decent thing. From then on, all of Britain would know who the suspects were. They would not be able to hide.’

 

Two decades on, the Mail still has its eye on these ruthless thugs as it continues to fight for justice for Stephen and his long-suffering parents.

 

For while Dobson and Norris are locked up in high security prisons, their three ‘brothers in crime’ are yet to be punished for their part in Stephen’s murder.

 

A shameful veil of silence that has obstructed investigations into Stephen’s murder from the very start still shrouds the truth.

To this day, anyone asking questions on the streets of Eltham where the gang’s families still live is met with instant hostility. Knight’s mother shamelessly told us: ‘Nobody here will talk to you.’

 

Friends and relatives of the five men hide behind closed doors, refusing to speak. Letters and phone messages have gone unanswered. Their glamorous girlfriends and ex-partners continue to keep a low profile.

 

The ‘Eltham omerta’, it seems, is as powerful as ever. Potential witnesses fear they may pay a heavy price if word gets out that they have spoken to the police. The name ‘Stephen Lawrence’ is met with an uncomfortable and eerie silence in the pubs, such as the Beehive in New Eltham, where the five suspects used to drink.

 

Scotland Yard is still hoping for a breakthrough that will see the remaining members of the murderous gang finally face justice.

 

But last year when detectives again attempted to crack the case with a mass voluntary DNA screening programme, they managed to obtain samples from less than half of those they approached.

 

They were hoping to find a match with DNA from an unknown female found on a black leather bag strap collected from the murder scene in 1993 and believed to have been used as part of a home-made weapon. A similar custom-made weapon was found at the home of Norris. The strap was disregarded in the early days of the flawed police investigation after it was incorrectly recorded that it had been discovered 80 yards from where Stephen was attacked.

 

In fact it was found just five yards away.

 

To date, officers have spoken to more than 110 people in connection with this particular line of inquiry. Around half have volunteered samples, 46 have declined, 12 failed to respond to police requests and the remainder were eliminated for medical reasons.

 

Shamefully, the majority of those who declined to offer DNA samples were family, friends and associates of the original five suspects.

 

Lead investigator Chris Le Pere told a press conference that while associates and relatives of key suspects had been approached and asked to provide DNA, there had been, in terms of responses from those individuals, ‘an awful lot of negatives’.

 

He and his team are also continuing to appeal for help in tracing a man caught on CCTV in an off-licence at about 8pm on the night of the murder, 100 yards from where Stephen was attacked.

 

The man was wearing a green jacket with a distinctive ‘V’ emblem on the back but despite the clarity of the CCTV images, appeals for information have again fallen on Eltham’s deaf ears.

 

Market trader’s son Luke Knight, who attended Kidbrooke School with fellow suspect Jamie Acourt, continues to depend on this wall of silence among his acquaintances for keeping himself out of prison.

 

He has never displayed a shred of remorse for Stephen’s killing but has consistently whined about the impact it has had on his own life.

Ten years ago he even claimed he was suffering psychological problems brought on by threats from anti-racist campaigners and tried, in vain, to persuade Greenwich Council to rehouse him because of intimidation.

 

Despite his apparent struggle to make ends meet, he has been seen driving around in a £22,000 Nissan Qashqai bought new five years ago shortly before his partners in crime, Dobson and Norris, were jailed. He is currently working as a roofer and casual labourer.

 

Back in 1993, all five men were prime movers in a notorious gang led by the Acourt brothers who liked to refer to themselves as The Krays and who were already known to the police for their racist tendencies and violent knife crimes.

 

Stephen Lawrence was brutally murdered by five white racists

 

Their cold-blooded attack on Stephen as he waited for a bus with his friend Duwayne Brooks on April 22, 1993, bore all the hallmarks of the savage racist lynchings once inflicted on blacks living in America’s Deep South.

 

While Mr Brooks narrowly escaped, Stephen, who hoped to become an architect, suffered two stab wounds to the upper torso that severed major blood vessels. He tried to flee with his friend but collapsed and died in hospital.

 

Although the names of the five suspects were given to police virtually overnight, the early investigation was hampered by an appalling assumption by some officers that simply because he was black, Stephen was probably involved in a gang of his own and somehow partly to blame for the violent altercation that led to his killing.

 

All five men were eventually arrested but while both Knight and Neil Acourt were charged with murder, the CPS dropped the prosecution on the grounds that ID evidence from Mr Brooks was unreliable.

 

Outraged that no action had been taken against their son’s killers, Baroness Lawrence and then husband Neville launched a private prosecution in 1994 against Gary Dobson, Luke Knight and Neil Acourt.

 

But the trial, in April 1996, collapsed when the judge ruled that the identification evidence from Mr Brooks was inadmissible.

 

A year later, at an inquest into Stephen’s death, the five suspects again refused to answer any questions about how he died, angering coroner Sir Montague Levine who gave a verdict of unlawful killing ‘in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five youths’.

 

In a heart-rending statement she gave at the end of the inquest on February 13, 1997, Stephen’s mother denounced the British justice system for ‘making a clear statement to the black community that their lives are worth nothing’.

 

The Daily Mail made the decision to publish its historic front page just hours later.

 

By challenging these five men to sue us if we were wrong, the Mail presented them with an opportunity to speak about what happened that day in a court of a law.

 

If the men were not – are not – murderers, they would have been entitled to massive libel damages.

 

But they kept their vow of silence knowing that if they told the truth about what happened to Stephen they would have incriminated themselves in his murder. Ever since that day two decades ago, the Stephen Lawrence case has been placed firmly at the heart of public consciousness, holding up an uncomfortable mirror to a society which, in the words of Baroness Lawrence, once supported ‘racist murderers against innocent people’.

 

When Sir William Macpherson published his official report into the killing and the subsequent investigation in 1998, he accused the Metropolitan Police of ‘institutional racism’ and made far-reaching recommendations aimed at clamping down on discrimination which have created seismic shifts within British society.

 

Today there are three inquiries into the Lawrence case. The National Crime Agency is investigating alleged corruption in the original Lawrence murder inquiry.

 

There is also a probe by the Independent Police Complaints Commission into former Scotland Yard commissioner Lord Stevens amid claims that documents were not passed to Macpherson’s 1998 inquiry. The peer denies any wrongdoing.

 

Most significantly of all, Scotland Yard still has a team of detectives working on Operation Fishpool, the investigation into Stephen’s murder.

Clive Driscoll, the retired Scotland Yard detective chief inspector who led the successful reinvestigation of the Lawrence case, is still hopeful that further murder convictions will be secured. ‘It will happen if witnesses who have been too frightened to speak come forward,’ he said. ‘If there are further advances in forensic science and if there is a willingness in the CPS and the police to pursue complete justice.’

 

Scotland Yard told the Mail last night: ‘The Met continues to investigate the murder of Stephen Lawrence and is currently focusing on two lines of enquiry; a bag strap recovered from the scene which contains the DNA of an unknown female who police still wish to identify. Also, a male witness seen nearby at the time of the murder, who was wearing a distinctive green jacket with a V emblem on the back.’

 

One thing is for certain, while those involved in the unprovoked murder, men like Knight, still walk free, the fight for justice for Stephen must go on.

Indeed, at a time when the British Press is under fire like never before, that fight serves as a reminder of the power of courageous journalism and the importance of relentless campaigning.

 

Without them, the monumental police failures which surrounded the murder of Stephen would never have been uncovered. Dobson and Norris would not be in prison serving life sentences.

 

As for the other three, Knight and Neil and Jamie Acourt – who knows what lies around the corner for them while this newspaper and other truth-seekers continue to snap at their heels? 

 

What happened to his four accomplices?

 

Gary Dobson

It took a change in the law for Gary Dobson, 41, to be convicted of Stephen’s murder.

The thug had been acquitted of Britain’s most notorious race killing but the subsequent reform of the double jeopardy law – a consequence of the Mail’s Lawrence campaign – meant he could be re-tried after compelling new forensic evidence emerged.

 

The 2012 convictions boiled down to three things; blood, fibres and hair. These tiny fragments of new evidence emerged in 2007 as scientists conducted a massive ‘cold case review’. The successful prosecution of Norris and Dobson for Stephen’s murder hinged on tiny traces of forensic evidence found by a cold case team.

 

The most important of their discoveries were 16 fibres linked to the black teenager’s clothes and three tiny specks of blood.

In the debris from the original evidence bag holding Dobson’s jacket, they found three blood fragments that had less than a one in a billion chance of not being Stephen’s.

 

They re-examined clothing taken from Dobson and Norris, starting a process that eventually led to a guilty verdict for both men.

At the Old Bailey in January 2012, Dobson was ordered to serve a minimum of 15 years and two months.

 

In March 2013, Dobson abandoned his appeal against his conviction and it later emerged he had received £203,309 in legal aid.

 

The killer’s family continue to insist he is innocent, despite the holes in his story about what happened on the night of the murder and evidence from a damning police surveillance video shot 20 months after Stephen’s death. The footage showed Dobson using violent, racist language. He was also seen recalling a time he threatened a black colleague with a knife.

 

Two years ago it emerged that he had been dumped by the mother of his two sons, who was reported to have left him for a new man. He is currently an inmate at Gartree Prison, a category B jail in Leicestershire.

 

DAVID NORRIS

Gangster’s son David Norris, 40, continues to protest his innocence after being jailed for a minimum of 14 years and three months. Like Dobson, he is in a high security prison – HMP Garth near Preston, Lancashire.

 

After losing a second attempt to challenge his conviction, Norris has asked the Criminal Cases Review Commission to investigate his case and refer it to the Court of Appeal for a new hearing. His latest appeal bid is still under review. Norris’s lawyers have argued that the police surveillance video, shot 20 months after Stephen’s murder, did not prove he was involved in the killing and should not have been admitted as evidence at his trial.

 

In the police surveillance film, he was secretly filmed telling friends he wanted to torture and kill black people. ‘If I was going to kill myself, do you know what I’d do,’ he said, in one appalling clip. ‘I’d go and kill every black c***, every Paki, every copper, every mug that I know, I’m telling ya.

 

‘I’d go down Catford and places like that with two sub-machine guns, and I’d take one of them, skin the black c*** alive, mate, torture him, set him alight. I’d blow their two legs off and say: ‘Go on, you can swim home now.’

 

The father of five received £222,346 in legal aid to defend the murder charge.

 

NEIL ACOURT

The shaven-headed yob, 41, is said to have revelled in his notoriety about the Lawrence case. But the smirk disappeared from his face when he was detained over drugs charges a year ago. He is due to be sentenced later this month after admitting being the mastermind behind a £4million cannabis smuggling ring.

 

Acourt faces up to seven years in prison for running a gang that couriered 200lb loads of the Class B drug between London and Newcastle. Although the smallest of the Lawrence murder gang, Neil Acourt was regarded by murder squad detectives as the leader.

 

At his family home a few minutes from the crime scene, officers found weapons including a knife, a Gurkha-type dagger and a sword. In 2001, he was convicted of possessing an offensive weapon, a baton, which he claimed he needed to protect himself. The next year, he and Norris were each jailed for 18 months for a racist attack on an off-duty black detective.

JAMIE ACOURT

The 40-year-old younger brother of Neil Acourt is believed to have fled to the ‘Costa del Crime’ after being linked to a major drug smuggling ring.

 

He is suspected of being a ‘principal member’ of an organised crime group involved in the large-scale supply of cannabis.

 

Detectives believe the fugitive is being harboured by a network of contacts at locations along the southern Spanish coast.

 

The unemployed father of two has previously tried to start a new life in Spain with his partner, but they decided against emigrating at the last minute.

In 2012, the Mail revealed his penchant for designer clothes, his preference for greased back hair and how he rarely drove anything more than a year old.

 

Although he had no obvious signs of employment, he drove a £25,000 Vauxhall Insignia.

 

Since the Lawrence case, he has had only one conviction, when he and Norris stole empty soda siphons from a drinks warehouse in 1999. He was allowed to pay his £250 fine at £10 a week after the court heard he was living on disability allowance. 

 

Culled from Dailymail

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This Post Was Published By: Tony Odijie

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