MONSTERS OF MOTIVELESS MALIGNITY

Justin Marozzi finds the most

chilling possible explanation for a murder in Milton Keynes

THE murder in Middle England has baffled everyone: the police, who are no nearer explaining it than when they came upon the scene of the crime; the family of the victim, who are still seeking the answer to their per- sonal tragedy; the journalists who covered the case in Luton Crown Court; even the murderers themselves, who either denied their involvement in the killing or admitted that they had no idea what came over them in the early hours of 11 June 1999. Why was Jonathan Coles, a gifted and inoffensive 18- year-old A-level student, bundled off a bridge to end his days drowning in the Great Ouse river, north of Milton Keynes?

The story began when Jonathan and a group of friends went to the Empire nightclub in Milton Keynes to celebrate an 18th birthday. At two o'clock, the club closed and Jonathan was asked for a cigarette in front of a nearby kebab van. When he refused he was assaulted and, together with two of his party, chased on to an area of waste ground where he was kicked and punched by Darren Matthews (17), Dwayne Dawkins (20) and Brian Alleyne (21) and forced to give up his bank card and PIN number. Here he was left bleeding and bereft of his glasses (he was extremely short-sighted).

From this point on, as Detective Inspector Trevor Howie of Thames Valley Police puts it, the story 'beggars belief. Reeling into the road to flag down a car for help, Jonathan was met by a Peugeot 309 driven by Jason Canepe (21) which, in a ghastly coincidence, contained Matthews, Dawkins and Alleyne. He was made to get inside and taken to a NatWest cashpoint where his kidnappers discovered he had only £1.03 to his name. Having established that he was due to stay with Lindsay Braniff, the girl who had been celebrating her 18th birthday that night, they then drove to her house. The motives for this diversion are unclear. At the house, asked where Jonathan was, Alleyne replied, `Don't worry, I've sorted him.' For some reason, again apparently unknown to the four killers — two white and two black — it was then decided to drive Jonathan several miles out of Milton Keynes to Tyringham Bridge, a serene monument designed by the great English architect Sir John Soane and built between 1792 and 1797 (Sir John Betjeman described it and the accompanying gate- house of Tyringham Hall as 'the most per- fect small buildings I know in England'). Here, in this area of outstanding natural beauty, despite his protestations at being unable to swim, Jonathan was lifted on to the parapet, from where he hung on for his life. His fingers were then prised off and he fell 25 feet to the river where the snigger- ing group left him to drown.

In the aftermath of such a brutal killing the search for explanations becomes a mat- ter of special urgency. The grieving Coles parents, regular churchgoers at the Wen- dover Free Church, still do not know why their son was murdered. 'The four men who committed the crimes against Jonathan . . . had no reason to want to cause him any harm,' they said in a state- ment. 'At any point during this ordeal, any one of them could have spoken out and stopped events going further; not one of them did. Their actions were malicious, cowardly and callous.' The fact is that there will always be murders and a small minority among them will always be unfathomable. Eight months after this murder, no one is any nearer understand- ing why the four youths did what they did that night.

`It's still unclear exactly what the motive for Jonathan's death was,' says Sgt Bob Gray of Thames Valley Police. 'It could be that, having already committed some very serious offences against him, they thought they had to dispose of hint If this is not the case, it's.hard to know what was.'

In fact, the murder of Jonathan Coles defies traditional explanations. The back- grounds of the four young men suggest they were not natural born killers. Canepe had a previous conviction for joy-riding a refrigerated lorry, and Alleyne had been convicted of a number of offences, mostly involving dishonesty — throughout the trial he denied any involvement in the murder — but that is as far as it goes.

These men are not desperate representa- tives of a Milton Keynes underclass. The truth is far more banal. Of the four, only Alleyne was unemployed. With nine GCSEs and a GNVQ, Dawkins is hardly emblematic of an under-educated hoodlum fraternity. At the time of his arrest he was working as a shop assistant in Waitrose. 'I just couldn't understand it when I heard Brian and Dwayne had been involved in a murder,' says a woman who had met both men. 'They were just normal young men.'

Canepe, too, could hardly have been more ordinary. 'At school he was quite a good little boy, not nasty, fairly quiet,' says Sara Vallas, a former pupil at Sir Frank Malcolm school. 'He wasn't even sent out of class or anything. When I heard about it, it was a complete shock. I went, "Oh God Jason, why? You can have a few beers but you don't have to kill someone." He must have been drunk and it went pear-shaped or something.'

Canepe lived with his parents in Great Denson, Eaglestone, an ordinary estate in Milton Keynes. After giving up catering studies following an injury to his hand, he got a job with Dairy Press, lost it after the joy-riding offence, and started work as a dustman. So far, so middle-of-the-road. Matthews, who also lived with his parents in Barbers Mews, another ordinary estate in town, was working as a waiter in the Beefeater restaurant. Neighbours say that the Matthewses were a normal, low-profile family on the estate.

So were the four men out of their heads when they decided to drop a beaten-up, partially-sighted teenager, who could not swim, 25 feet into the river at three in the morning? Do drugs provide the answer to this apparently motiveless murder? Again, the answer appears to be no. The only drug they had touched was alcohol. They had had several drinks in the Empire but not enough to influence what they were doing, or so they told the police. What of Milton Keynes, the soulless experiment in precision urban geometry? Does this murder say something about the nature of modern life in an artificial new town? No. North 7th Street, where Dawkins and Alleyne were arrested, is a three-storey, red-brick block of low-rent flats and bedsits. Well known to the police, mostly for a variety of drugs-related offences, it is not one of the most savoury addresses in town, but it is hardly akin to Moss Side, the once notorious urban hot spot in Manchester.

Peter Bere is one sort of North 7th Street resident. An unemployed 19-year- old who was thrown out of his parents' house 'for smoking puff, he has seen a fair deal of violence here. 'One night I come in stoned to find my two doors had been kicked in and there was this black bloke taking off my duvet cover and bagging up my stereo,' he says. 'I wrestled him to the floor but he head-butted me and, because I've got a chipped front tooth, it went straight through my lip. It wasn't a pretty sight.' Just as typical of the block, however, are Sara Vallas, an administrator for a local charity, who says she has 'never had any dodginess here', and Pendo, a black student, who says it can get noisy some- times but she keeps herself to herself. The court case itself failed to reveal sat- isfactorily why the murder was committed. Alleyne denied Jonathan was ever in the car and Matthews said he himself had not been on the bridge. Canepe, the only man to escape with a conviction for manslaugh- ter, told the court that one thing simply led to another. 'We gradually lost our sense of being civilised human beings and our feel- ings of human pity,' he said. When asked why he didn't help the drowning man, Dawkins replied, 'I don't know why I didn't. I wish I did now.' In court the four men presented a respectable façade. Clad in suits and well-groomed, they were reportedly composed and subdued throughout. Only Matthews gave an indica- tion of the violence lurking within him when, being led out of the court after being convicted of murder with Alleyne and Dawkins, he spat on the police and depart- ed with the words, 'You're scumbags, the lot of youse.'

`When he stood up and spat at the police he looked really frightening and I suddenly realised this guy had had Jonathan in his car for several hours,' says Jeni Connibeer, a reporter for the Bucks Herald. 'I had a sense of how terrified he must have been.' She, like everyone else, has her own expla- nation. 'I think they took the view that he was a bit of a wimp, a bit posh maybe, and they thought it was quite funny that he had no glasses and no money and they decided to teach him a lesson and have a laugh and it got totally out of hand.' Or perhaps, as Nicholas Brown, QC, defending Dwayne Dawkins, put it, Tor about an hour, if not more, these four young men stepped out of the ambit of civilised conduct.'

Whatever the reasons, this was a cold- blooded and random murder. The combi- nation of great cruelty and an absence of motive is chilling. Judge Geoffrey Rivlin, QC, who will pass sentence on the four on 24 March, is in little doubt about what hap- pens next. 'Three of you will be aware that there is only one sentence I can pass,' he told the defendants.

Everything else, however, is frustratingly opaque. The human desire to make sense of the senseless in this case seems doomed. Money, passion and revenge — the classic trio of motives for murder — had nothing to do with it. We can think what we like about the unlovely quartet of Messrs Canepe, Dawkins, Alleyne and Matthews. But what this grisly murder tells us about modern society, the law, youth culture and urban life is another matter. The answer is probably that it tells us nothing at all.

Justin Marozzi is contributing editor of The Spectator.