‘There’s a young lad been shot … He’s on my football team.” The man on the phone to the emergency services is a local sports coach. The young lad on his team is Rhys Jones. A bullet fired by a local Croxteth gang member missed its intended target and caught the 11-year-old boy in the neck. By the time his mother, Mel, reaches him and puts her arms under his head amid the blood, he is – at best – unconscious. “I kept talking and talking to him – ‘Stay with me, Rhys’ – but there was no response from him at all.” The paramedics tried to save him for 90 minutes, but he couldn’t stay.
After that emotive opening, The Murder of Rhys Jones: Police Tapes (ITV) settled in to tell the story of the next eight months, the time it took for police to break the omerta among (even rival) gang members and gather the evidence, fragment by fragment, that would make the case against the teenager who killed Rhys – 16-year-old Sean Mercer.
The frustrations are many – a fingertip search of the area recovers none of the three bullets fired; a first family press conference yields no leads – and the successes are few. But they are, eventually, enough. An anonymous hotline set up for the local community gives them Mercer’s name and those of other key players. Nothing is turned up when their homes are searched, but the police leave a bug behind in each one. The information gleaned from the hundreds of hours subsequently spent listening to fuzzy tapes as gang members work out alibis and parents dispose of evidence for their children, and the discovery of a terrified non-gang member – Boy C – who was forced to hide the murder weapon – eventually complete the picture. Mercer’s alibi is blown, Boy C is offered (after months of indecision by the attorney general) rare immunity to testify and the case goes to court.
And all of this takes place in the tabloid glare and under the twin pressures of public expectation, doubtless warped by our habitual consumption of crime dramas in which perps are brought to justice in an hour minus ad breaks, and the unrelenting grief of Rhys’s parents. “It was dreadful,” says DI Jackie Guinness. “Dreadful.”
Her comment, although delivered undramatically, was nevertheless a rare deviation from the police norm. Merseyside police’s hyperfocus on the details and practicalities of the case is only underlined by their uncontrived resistance to the coat-trailing of presenter Susanna Reid. “What did you think,” she asks DCI Kelly, the man most directly in charge of matters, “when the murder weapon was found?” “We’ve got the gun,” he replies matter-of-factly, “but how do we put it in somebody’s hands?” It’s as if we see only the glorious hilltops while they see everything in full relief, and the thousands of careful steps it is going to take to get there. They don’t stop to enjoy the view until and unless they reach the final summit.
And with Rhys they did. After a five-month trial of Mercer and six other gang members, who all pleaded not guilty and spent their time in court laughing and throwing paper aeroplanes to each other while their families, remember Mel and Steve, “looked at us as if it was our fault that they were there”. Mercer was sentenced to a minimum of 22 years in prison. His mother later got three years for perverting the course of justice. “For Dave Kelly to get her convicted really made my day,” says Mel, in the closest she comes to anger.
Only at the end, in the final minutes of the programme recalling their post-convictions relief, do the detectives relax, just slightly. Did Kelly feel proud, Reid wonders. “Very proud,” he replies. “I can look Mel and Steve in the eye and say I did what I promised to do.”
We live in strange times when a programme about the murder of a child is capable of bringing solace. But as the old rules are set aflame and what were, seemingly only days ago, generally thought of as basic, irreducible human decencies burn to ashes round us, the dogged determination to pursue justice and hold a perpetrator accountable for what he did and the illimitable grief he caused feels like something for us to cling to. Would, of course, that it could bring even as much comfort to the Joneses. The programme’s final words went to them. “We start our life sentence now. There’s no end. We’ll suffer all our lives from the pain of losing Rhys.”