Man in Black, The - Peter Moore - Wales' Worst Serial Killer

By Dylan Rhys Jones

The true story of former criminal defence lawyer Dylan Rhys Jones' experience of defending Rhyl serial killer Peter Moore, found guilty in 1996 of murdering four men and seriously assaulting many more, and referred to by the judge when sentencing as as dangerous a man as it is possible to find.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Y Lolfa
• Release date: Oct 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781800990029

Dylan Rhys Jones

As well as being a practicing criminal defense lawyer for many years, Dylan Rhys Jones has lectured on Ethics and the Law at medical conferences, and is a regular lecturer on CPD Welsh Baccalaureate courses. He is not only a marker and moderator for the WJEC Criminology examination, but was also co-writer of the examination as well as contributing to the inception, writing and thereafter presenting of the Criminal Justice and Offender Management foundation degree course at Coleg Cambria and Chester University. He is a regular contributor to news programs and programs about politics and the law on Radio Cymru and has also worked on numerous TV programs.

Book preview

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‘Peter Moore was the man in black,

with black thoughts and the blackest of deeds.’

Alex Carlile, prosecution QC at Moore’s trial

‘I hold no brief for Moore’s way of life.

By his own admission, he is a bad man.’

Eric Somerset-Jones, defence QC at Moore’s trial

‘He was a dominant homosexual, a violent and

predatory sadist who drew sexual satisfaction

from causing pain and suffering.’

The Independent, 12 November 1996

THE MAN

IN BLACK

PETER MOORE:

WALES’ WORST SERIAL KILLER

DYLAN RHYS JONES

First impression: 2020

© Copyright Dylan Rhys Jones and Y Lolfa Cyf., 2020

The contents of this book are subject to copyright, and may not be reproduced by any means, mechanical or electronic, without the prior, written consent of the publishers.

The publishers wish to acknowledge the support of

the Books Council of Wales

Conversations and events detailed in this book have been reconstructed by the author from memory and detailed notes made at the time, with the aim of being as correct as possible. However, they are not verbatim and as they took place over 20 years ago, cannot be taken as 100% accurate.

Cover design: Tanwen Haf

All photos from the author’s own collection unless otherwise stated

ISBN: 978-1-80099-002-9

Published and printed in Wales on paper from well-maintained forests by

Y Lolfa Cyf., Talybont, Ceredigion SY24 5HE

website www.ylolfa.com

e-mail [e-mail]

tel [phone]

fax 832 782

In memory of my father, Tecwyn

Acknowledgements

There are so many people I wish to thank who have supported and encouraged me in preparing and writing this book. I am so fortunate to have the support of so many family members and friends.

Firstly my thanks go to Y Lolfa and their Head of Publishing Lefi Gruffudd, for their support and encouragement over the twelve months while I was writing this book. I wish to say a special thanks to my editor at Y Lolfa, Carolyn Hodges, for her advice and guidance, her patience with a novice writer such as myself and her skill and expertise. What you read now would have been very different without her words of wisdom.

I would like to thank my friends for their patience and support, especially Eilir and Claire Jones, who have stood by us as a family through thick and thin. To Caren and Glyn Morris and Aled and Llinos Roberts for their friendship at times when it was needed most as well as when times are good. To Vanessa Griffiths and Chris Beasley, my dedicated former colleagues and friends at Coleg Cambria, for standing together and keeping our heads when all about us were losing theirs. I would also like to thank my fellow authors Mared Lewis and Carys Davies for their advice, guidance and unwavering support at times when I was confused and unsure.

To colleagues and former collegues within the Legal profession for their wise words, especially to Lord Alex Carlile of Berriew for his willingness to discuss with me his recollections of the Peter Moore case and confirm certain facts and details of which the intervening years had made me uncertain.

I wish to thank my father, the late Tecwyn Jones, and mother, Eiddwen Jones, for their constant and unflinching support throughout the years and their wise counsel at all times. To my daughter Siriol, you were a blessing the day you arrived and you have made us very proud every day since then. I know you will be a dedicated, principled and successful lawyer.

Finally to my wife Catherine, you have supported me through the good days and the bad, you are wise and loving at all times and I honestly have no idea where I would be without you. This book is a testament to your support, determination and love as much as anything else. Diolch i ti am bopeth.

Dylan Rhys Jones

September 2020

Preface

November 2019

It’s a dark, slightly damp morning in north Wales. A raw, bone-chilling gust catches me unprepared as I walk the dog along Pensarn beach near Abergele. The tide is nearing its high point and the grey-brown sea churns and swells only a few metres from where I stop and stand for a moment. Twm, my dog, is off on one of his lost causes, chasing a seagull along the beach as I look across the grey stones and pebbles towards Llanddulas and the foaming sea beyond. On a day like this, when it’s cold and the stiff breeze catches the spray, and the wind and sand form small tornados and dance across the beach, it seems a very desolate place to be. It’s definitely a desolate place to die.

I walk the dog here often. I prefer the days when the tide is far out in the distance and the sun catches the pools of water lying in the miles of undulating sand. But when I’m here in winter, I can only think of one thing, one story; and it’s here on the beach in Pensarn where it began. Pensarn beach seems very unassuming to the passer by, who is likely to be driving further into north Wales along the A55 dual carriageway. At high tide it’s a pebble beach and at low tide it reveals its miles of flat sand. It has a car park, a couple of small cafés and two small amusement arcades. In summer it will have its fair share of dog walkers and fishermen, and cyclists who stop for a break as they cycle along the coastal pathway, but it’s not a popular beach to visit. In winter, locals will venture for a Sunday stroll or a morning dog walk but apart from that, the beach is left to its own devices.

On 18 December 1995 a body was discovered on this beach, lying on the pebbles close to the high-tide mark. It was the body of a man in his late thirties or early forties and he had been stabbed to death. That man was Anthony Davies, who had lived in Llanddulas, only a few miles away from the beach, and I think of him every time I walk my dog here. I didn’t know Anthony Davies – in fact I had never met him – but I knew in detail how he died, and the parts I don’t know I have imagined over the past 25 years.

For me 2019 had been a difficult year. I had been suffering some heart problems and though I realised that I required some kind of treatment, I had been trying to put the whole thing off and to the back of my mind for a good while. Eventually at the beginning of the year I had an operation, and though I imagined that my recovery would take a few weeks, some unforeseen complications led to me being out of action and away from my work for nearly six months. As many who know me will attest, I’m not at my best when doing nothing and there is only so much daytime TV any sane person can take.

I decided on a whim to do some writing. At the beginning I had no specific plan and no particular subject. Even though someone said somewhere that everyone has a novel in their heads waiting to be written, I didn’t think I had one. But there was a subject hiding in the dark recesses somewhere... maybe I was simply attempting to disregard the obvious, perhaps it was all too close and painful? As my health improved and my thoughts of writing a book about something or other began to take form, I started to take long walks with my dog Twm. I felt that doing this would improve both my physical and mental health, and as I walked, I thought.

It seemed to me that this was as good a time as any to begin to face my real demons. Those demons which had been lurking in the dark recesses of my mind and concealing themselves in the shadowy corners of my thoughts and recollections for many years.

Some ten years before I had suffered a serious mental breakdown. Things had been on a downward spiral and I had considered that maybe the world would be a much better place without me cluttering it up. If it hadn’t been for my wife and family and my good friends, it’s likely I wouldn’t be writing this now. During that time of crisis and having been admitted for some time to a psychiatric ward, where I was attempting to recover my equilibrium, I was asked by a counsellor about my demons: those things that haunt me, keep me up at night and shake me to the core. My thoughts turned to December 1995 and to the events surrounding the case of Peter Howard Moore.

I suppose our demons come to us in a variety of forms. What haunts one may not necessarily trouble another. But those demons are very accomplished at catching us out when we least expect it. I always found that mine were very active at about three o’clock in the morning. I would turn over in bed to look at the time on my alarm and there they would be, and when they had caught my eye and got my attention, they were relentless. Memories, thoughts and conversations would be reawakened from the past, tumbling about in my mind like clothes in a washing machine.

Once those demons got hold of me, they appeared to have no intention of relenting. I was plummeting into a deep, dark chasm of despair which would take a considerable amount of time, pain and effort to escape from. In the consulting room, with the counsellor sympathetically assisting, I felt confident enough to reveal those demons, my fears, and the questions and worries I had lived with for years.

I suppose there are some people who go through life without allowing the traumas of the past to affect them. I’m sure there are lawyers, doctors, nurses, police officers and teachers and many others who leave their work at the end of the day and never give the events they’ve witnessed or the things they’ve heard a second thought. There may be some, but I’m sure they are rare specimens. How can people not be affected by what they see and hear? How can we be expected to go through life witnessing tragedy, horrors and the worst of human behaviour and remain unaffected by it? When confronted by murder, violence and other criminal conduct, we lawyers are required to present ourselves as detached and unaffected by all we see and hear. We have to look at an event through frosted glass, isolated and removed from the emotion of a situation.

Being a criminal lawyer inevitably results in having to face, on occasion, the most extreme of situations, emotions and circumstances. Situations that you would hope never to experience or witness in your own personal life are thrust upon us second-hand, through our clients and the witnesses involved in a case. Criminal cases involving abuse, sexual violence and rape, murder and manslaughter, cases where victims are vulnerable and defenceless, where perpetrators deliberately target the weak or frail. It’s at those times when others ask how these evil people could do such a thing that we lawyers are asked to get involved. When others would rather walk away in fright or revulsion, our job is to walk towards the problem, address the issue, sit in a cell and converse, advise and attempt to reason with people who may be accused of committing the most unreasonable and heinous of acts.

I have sat in cells and interview rooms on many occasions, asking myself why I chose to do such a job. How my hours of studying, examinations and training have resulted in me spending an hour in a cell with a suspect perhaps smelling of strong body odour, maybe affected by drink or drugs, telling me the tragic tale of his misunderstood life. Most of those stories are dreadful, involving family break-up, drug addiction, alcoholism, exclusion from school and rejection from family members and society. We criminal lawyers choose to spend our working lives with these forgotten people, those who live on the fringes, people we pass on the streets without giving them a second glance.

The danger is that we can become immune to those stories, that once you hear the tale of one broken family then you feel you have heard them all. When you’ve heard one excuse for violence, for assaulting someone, for causing injury to a wife, partner or child, you’ve heard every version. What we lawyers are exposed to is real life, life at its most basic, raw and primitive, and our job is to deal with it. It’s the same for doctors, nurses, police officers and many other public servants – we criminal lawyers are on the front line. Some believe it’s a glamorous job, arguing complicated cases in courts and earning vast amounts of money in the process. The reality is far from that: we spend our time in dingy cells and damp-smelling interview rooms with difficult clients at all hours of the day or night and are paid basic Legal Aid rates for the pleasure of doing so. Not many criminal lawyers become rich – we do the work for other reasons. Some of us have become criminal lawyers by design and others by accident: the pull of being an advocate in court can be so strong that many young lawyers leap at the opportunity to do so regularly in the Magistrates’ Court at an early stage of their career. Some lawyers discover that once they become ensnared in the system, it doesn’t easily release you from its grasp. Until you’ve become a crumpled, broken mess. ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ asked Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. As far as lawyers are concerned, believe me: in my experience, we do.

So, what motivates us criminal lawyers? It certainly isn’t the expectation of making a fortune: that’s usually the domain of the big-city lawyers, with their flashy suits, modern offices and expense accounts. In my case it was very simple. I had this hope that I would be able to help someone, an individual or a family who were in difficult circumstances or down on their luck. When I was a student at Aberystwyth University, I recall one of our lecturers telling us that becoming a criminal lawyer would ensure that we would never become rich, but that we would become gatekeepers for the rights of individuals against the power of the state. To an impressionable young lawyer, this seemed a daunting but worthwhile goal to which I should aspire. This was the mid 1980s, the time of Thatcher, the Miners’ Strike, Greenham Common, and in Wales the continuation of the battle for language equality. The battle between the individual and the authority of the state seemed a very real and relevant issue. Becoming a criminal lawyer seemed to me to mean that I would be able to contribute in some small way to rectifying some of the injustices in the world. I believe most of us left university with the goal of doing some good in the world.

During my time as a criminal lawyer the question most asked of me was, how do you represent someone you know to be guilty? I suppose most criminal defence lawyers are asked that question at some stage in their careers, and I expect that most have a similar reply. Our system in England and Wales relies on the principle that an accused person is always presumed to be innocent unless proven, beyond reasonable doubt, to be guilty in a court of law. The onus is therefore placed firmly on the prosecution to prove their case, and to do so to a high standard (beyond reasonable doubt). If they fail to do this, then the accused must be found ‘not guilty’. The law ensures that anyone accused of a criminal offence has certain rights, and that the investigating authorities must follow certain rules, so as to make the process totally fair. As my lecturer said, our job as criminal lawyers is to be the ‘gatekeepers’ of our clients’ rights. We must challenge and test all the evidence and ensure that our clients are treated fairly and that everything is always done properly.

Of course, if a client admits their guilt to their lawyer, but asks the lawyer to tell the court that they are ‘not guilty’, then that greatly changes the situation. The lawyer can’t continue to represent their client in such circumstances. Over the years all criminal lawyers have had suspicions about clients’ stories: assuming that they are lying, or maybe sometimes that they live in a totally different version of reality from the rest of us. But that’s not the same as being told outright by them that they are not telling the truth.

A large workload and the resulting problems of pressure, stress and anxiety are facts of life for the busy solicitor. You learn that this is expected from an early stage in your career. Your superiors are looking for you to provide expertise, skills and knowledge but also to work quickly and effectively: it’s ‘Billing Hours’ which, after all, are the key to everything in a busy legal practice. The more you bill, the better you are – or the more profitable you are. This always proved a bit of a problem for a criminal lawyer whose living was more or less dependent on Legal Aid. I began to learn very quickly in my career that you could depend on many things in law, but one thing you certainly couldn’t depend upon was Legal Aid.

I had become a Police Station Duty Solicitor and a Court Duty Solicitor very early on in my career. That meant I was regularly ‘on call’ in case someone who had been arrested required legal advice at the police station. Being a Court Duty Solicitor meant I had to attend a local court on a regular basis and be prepared to advise and sometimes represent defendants who had arrived at court without a solicitor or having not taken any legal advice before the hearing of their case. These defendants were usually a very mixed bunch, from those who didn’t care what was happeningto them, to those who didn’t understand what was going on. Some would turn up at court knowing that they needed to be there, but having no idea why – that would usually require a conversation with the prosecutor to discover the reason. There would then be a conversation with the client, reminding him or her of any past crimes and misdemeanours and their recent arrest in an attempt to jog their clouded memory.

Peter Moore was not a usual criminal client. He was not the type of personality I would meet in the police cells or in court on a daily basis. He seemed intelligent, well spoken, quiet and calm, considerate of others and polite. He dressed tidily and was punctual for his appointments at my office when he instructed me to deal with the probate of his late mother’s estate in the spring of 1994. I never considered him difficult or demanding: he was a model client who was never any trouble.

In 1995 Peter Howard Moore changed my life forever. His name will now forever be associated with the orgy of destructive brutality inflicted upon the communities of north Wales during those final months of 1995. Moore was sentenced by Mr Justice Maurice Kay in November 1996 to four life sentences with no prospect of release. I have battled for years to secure my own release from the grips of the Peter Moore case: writing this book is the final part of that process and hopefully its closing chapter.

Dylan Rhys Jones in 1995

Introduction

In November 2019 I realised that it was nearly 24 years since the arrest of Peter Moore. As I considered that fact, I was also aware that if I was ever going to revisit the case and write about my involvement with a man who was called at his trial ‘the most dangerous man ever to be in Wales’, it should be now. Peter Moore was now in his late seventies and the case had become infamous not only in north Wales but throughout the UK. I had been aware for years that the Peter Moore case and its surrounding circumstances had become notorious – even some of the students in my classes in the local college knew the story of the ‘famous case’. Many adults in their forties and fifties in particular recalled the case in detail, remembering the concern which spread across north Wales in the final months of 1995 as the murders were discovered. Those murders remained unsolved for some time and this caused understandable disquiet across many north Wales communities.

This spate of murders happened only a few months after the murder of a 7-year-old girl called Sophie Hook from Cheshire in the north Wales town of Llandudno. Sophie was camping in the garden of her uncle’s home, but during the night she disappeared and her body was discovered the following day on a beach near the town. The case sparked an avalanche of media attention, particularly as the suspect, a Howard Hughes from the nearby town of Colwyn Bay, had been linked with previous sex attacks on children. Hughes was convicted of the murder of Sophie Hook in July 1996.

During the final few months of 1995, the North Wales Police were clearly under some pressure. The Sophie Hook murder had put strain on their resources and by September of that same year, these further murders were understandably of great concern. Having only just completed the lengthy investigation surrounding the Sophie Hook case, another murder investigation was likely to stretch manpower and resources beyond anything the North Wales Police had been used to in the past.

The population of north Wales were unused to violent deaths of this nature happening in their area. Nowadays we have become somewhat immune to hearing about stabbings and knife violence occurring on our streets, particularly in our cities. Though of course stabbings were known as a common method of murdering someone 25 years ago, generally knife violence was much rarer than now and as a consequence society was less aware of it as a threat to individuals.

During the second half of 1995, violence and killing became the subject of discussion within communities across north Wales. The local press, who always seemed to prosper in the feeding frenzy of such stories, made the most of the violence and danger they considered we all now faced. We were perceived by some to be in an unprecedented spiral of violence, some became concerned about whether it was safe to venture out at night and whether our families were safe as they went about their daily lives, or if we were likely to be attacked and violently murdered by this unknown killer lurking on our streets.

North Wales is considered a safe and peaceful place to live. Our towns and villages are not free from crime and criminals, but there are, even today, thankfully only a few murders and crime is mostly concentrated in the larger towns such as Wrexham, Rhyl and Colwyn Bay. North Wales is mostly rural, and away from the north-east and the north Wales coast the levels of crime – violent crime in particular – are considered to be low. That’s not to say that awful things don’t happen: who can forget the case of April Jones in Machynlleth in Mid Wales in October 2012? It was a case that received national and international press attention. 5-year-old April was abducted from outside her home in Machynlleth and then brutally murdered by a 46-year-old local man called Mark Bridger. It was a case that severely affected both the public at large and the police officers who worked on it. Bridger’s actions were of the utmost brutality and of such a cold-blooded nature that it remains a case which is beyond all reasoning and belief. What the case did emphasise and confirm is that within all our communities there will forever be potential for the worst forms of barbarism to expose themselves, if given the opportunity. This was true in Machynlleth in October 2012 and the same was true across north Wales in the latter months of