Detective catches notorious crook Kenneth Noye with help from four vital clues

Four vital clues led Dennis McGookin, then head of Kent Police’s Major Crime Unit, to M25 ruthless road rage killer Kenneth Noye

When a young man was stabbed to death in front of his fiancee on an M25 sliproad, detectives were surprised to discover the prime suspect was someone they knew very well.

The killer’s Land Rover was registered to “Anthony Francis”. But a photo-fit bore a striking similarity to career crook Kenneth Noye, who had been jailed for his part in the 

Brink’s-Mat bullion raid.

Noye was no novice. He was well-connected in the underworld, had access to money and knew how to evade justice, fleeing the country by private jet.

Dennis McGookin was tasked with finding Noye ( Image: PA)

When Dennis McGookin was made the head of Kent Police’s Major Crime Unit, he was given the job of bringing Noye to justice for the murder of 21-year-old Stephen Cameron.

Speaking exclusively to the Mirror, Dennis, now retired, says: “Our chief constable Sir David Phillips made it abundantly clear I was the one who was solely going to be responsible for the investigation into Stephen’s death.”

Dennis was fortunate that his predecessor, Nic Biddiss, had managed to track Noye down to Gibraltar. His victim’s fiancee, Danielle Cable, flew out to identify him in a restaurant.

Then it was up to Dennis to get Noye back to the UK, build a convincing case and ultimately bring him to justice.

So he set the wheels in motion for a top-secret operation to extradite Noye back to the UK, without anyone finding out when or where it would happen. 

He recalls: “We were getting information from all sorts of sources – from the security services, MI5, MI6 – that there was a threat of either someone going to eliminate Kenneth Noye because they believed he was a police informant, or that he was so well-connected that he would facilitate an escape.”

But his major task was proving beyond all reasonable doubt that Noye had murdered Stephen. A car valet gave a statement that he had seen a flick-knife in the glovebox of Noye’s car, primitive mobile phone data placed Noye in the vicinity of the murder and officers spoke to the pilots of John “Goldfinger” Palmer’s private jet, who said they had flown Noye out of the country the day after the murder.

But the single most important piece of evidence was a piece of paper bearing the name of Anthony Francis.

Dennis says: “We seized all of the paperwork from the Brink’s-Mat robbery and my team spent hours and hours going through it all.

“We came up with the building society form with the name Anthony Francis.

“We got Kenneth Noye’s thumbprint. That was the final piece of the jigsaw.”

Noye murdered Stephen after Danielle hesitated on an M25 sliproad near Swanley, Kent, on May 19, 1996. He stepped out of his Land Rover Discovery and confronted Stephen, stabbing him with a nine-inch knife.

Finally extradited in 2000, he was convicted of Stephen’s murder at the Old Bailey on April 14 and jailed for life. He was released on licence in 2019.

Dennis was quick to pay tribute to the part Danielle played in bravely bringing her fiance’s killer to justice – at an enormous cost to herself.

Police at the site of the Brink Mat robbery ( Image: NILS JORGENSEN/REX)

She walked through a restaurant where officers believed they had located Noye, to see if she could see the man who she believed stabbed Stephen.

“It must have been the most daunting and difficult walk of her life,” Dennis remembers. “It was a very challenging and extremely courageous thing for her to follow through with.

“It says a lot, not just for the strength of Danielle’s character, but also the depth of her feelings for Stephen, with whom she had planned to spend her life.

“Like all involved in this case, Danielle wanted to find some kind of closure.” Danielle’s ordeal was not over. As the key witness in the case, she had to go into police protection and remains in a witness protection scheme today – only able to see her parents twice a year.

Dennis explains: “Once Danielle went into protection, she had to be cut off from her family, from Stephen’s family and from friends, because it would only take one breach to put her in danger.

“She remains under the scheme to this day. On the day Kenneth Noye murdered Stephen, he took away her life.”

Noye, now 76, gave an interview after his release saying he posed no threat to Danielle. But Dennis says he would never suggest that Danielle should risk meeting Noye in person.

“I have never had the opportunity to sit down and talk to Danielle”, he adds.

“I haven’t got a clue where she is at all. She could be back living in the next street, but we just don’t know.

“I personally would not like to encourage her to meet him. I think that is all too much. The law of the land says Kenneth Noye has his liberty now and that is what we have to respect.” Noye’s life of crime had begun at the age of five, when he was caught pinching cash from the till at Woolworth’s.

The armed robbers got away with £25 million during the raid ( Image: PA)

At senior school, he ran a protection racket and fenced stolen bicycles.

As an adult, Noye built a legitimate haulage business to hide his criminal activities and informed on underworld rivals to police.

Then, in 1983, he acted as a fence in the Brinks-Mat gold bullion robbery.

While under surveillance during the investigation, he fatally stabbed a police officer, Detective Constable John Fordham, in the grounds of his home.

Noye was cleared of murder on grounds of self-defence but in 1986 was jailed for 14 years for conspiracy to handle the stolen gold. He was released on licence in 1994, two years before his fatal run-in with Stephen Cameron.

Dennis adds: “We have all been in situations where we have made an error in a car to the annoyance of other people.

“Normally, all that happens is you get a few expletives. But for someone to go to the lengths to pull up on the busiest junction in Europe, create a fracas like that, pull out a knife and plunge it into Stephen twice, is absolutely horrific.

“When we got the guilty verdict, I was over the moon for the families and everyone whose lives had been affected.”

The scene inside the container lorry that carried dead asylum seekers into Dover Docks in June 2000 ( Image: PA Archive/Press Association Images)

In 2000, Dennis was the senior investigating officer on one of the biggest mass killings in British history when 58 Chinese migrants died in the back of a lorry at Dover after being smuggled into the UK by a snakehead gang. 

Dennis explains: “Gang members show families in China photographs of young Chinese men and women sitting in expensive cars outside popular tourist spots all around London.”

Dutch lorry driver Perry Wacker was jailed for 14 years for manslaughter.

The Many Faces of Crime: A True Detective’s Chronicle by Dennis W McGookin is published by The History Press on 23 May 2024, RRP £22.99.

Elizabeth Baker