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Island
Dreams End in Nightmares |
The gunmen tailed Danny Gayle from the moment that he arrived back in Jamaica to begin a life he had been planning for more than 40 years.
The 64-year-old retired hospital porter, who had spent all his working years in North London, and his wife, Merline, a former nurse, were so excited at their return they did not notice the Toyota saloon with blacked-out windows following them as they were driven out of Kingston airport by a friend.
Their delight at coming home did not last long. Ten miles into their journey, as darkness and drizzle fell, they were ambushed at Stony Hill by four gunmen and Danny Gayle was shot dead at point-blank range for a couple of pairs of new trousers and a jacket that he had bought to celebrate the trip. He was the 54th "returnee" murdered in the past five years, most of whom had spent their adult life in Britain.
Trying hard not to cry, yesterday his 61-year-old widow described how one of the gang had sliced through her husband's seat belt with a knife and dragged him from the car, while another shoved a gun against her throat, leaving others to rifle through their suitcases.
"I was screaming for God to help us and one of them punched me in the face," she said. "They were antagonising Danny about how rich he must be, having lived in England for so long, so they knew who he was."
Merline Gayle watched helplessly as, having plundered what they wanted, the gang's leader calmly walked over to her husband, who had his back turned, and shot him twice.
Dabbing her eyes with a towel, Mrs Gayle said: "Why couldn't they take what they wanted and just leave him? He was such a decent man."
She was sitting alone on the barricaded verandah of the three-bedroom villa that the couple had been building for the past 14 years. They had come back for good this time, to paint and add the finishing touches to where they had always yearned to retire, amid the teeming banana groves on the John Crow mountains that sweep down to Jamaica's east coast.
Their builders stopped work to dig Mr Gayle's grave in the back garden in the plot he had earmarked for his vegetable patch. Friends worry that her husband's killer has still not been caught, but Mrs Gayle insisted: "I won't give in to their terror. Besides, what would I have if I went back to England now? Everything we saved for 40 years is in this home."
Seven weeks after her husband's murder Mrs Gayle still cannot bring herself to unpack their suitcases. She hopes to meet Tony Blair when he visits Jamaica at the end of this month to ask him to do something to protect the "returnees" from Britain who, until a few years ago, came home in their thousands to retire, but who are increasingly wary of the gunmen who are waiting for them.
"Maybe if Mr Blair raised our plight with Jamaica's politicians, we wouldn't be picked off like this," Mrs Gayle said. "Sometimes we felt we didn't belong in England, even though our two children were born and bred there, and then we come here and some treat us like privileged foreigners, when all I have is a pension from working as ward orderly in the Central Middlesex Hospital for over 20 years. That doesn't make us millionaires."
Her daughter, Yvonne, 36, who lives in Croydon with her two children, Renee, 8, and Lorraine, 3, said: "Returnees is a dirty word in Jamaica. When they come back, some locals don't see why they shouldn't have half of what people like my parents worked hard for. They are jealous of returnees' nice houses and new cars."
She is incensed that a witness to her parents' ambush telephoned the police, who refused to believe the woman's story until it was too late for Danny Gayle. Senior police officers say that they are still investigating the reason for the fatal delay, which is scant consolation for his family.
Percy La Touche, the president of the Association for the Resettlement of Returning Residents, said that the murders of returnees are not random crimes.
"The returnees are seen as rich pickings," Mr La Touche said. "Unfortunately, too many harbour a romantic image of home from their youthwhen doors were left open. They come back to a very different Jamaica.
"This is a small island and word soon gets around if someone has built a new house or is coming home for a funeral, so they wait at the airport."
A year ago Vidal Nelson flew back to bury his mother. Ten hours after arriving he was shot dead when two gunmen burst into his mother's home on Sheep Pen Hill in Clarendon as he sat chatting to relatives.
The 66-year-old car worker from Birmingham handed over the money that was to pay for the funeral, but the intruders shot him anyway. One bullet ricocheted through his shoulder into his 69-year-old sister, Alfrida Nelson, who died days later.
Mr La Touche recited the dismal list of funerals of murdered "returnees" that he has attended. There was 76-year-old Gladys Israel, a hospital worker from North London, who was found by her neighbour last December knelt over the bath with her hands tied behind her back. She had been raped and her throat had been cut.
She never married and most of her savings were spent on charity work for St Helens Catholic Church. All her assailant found to steal was her television and a stereo.
Catherine Welcome, 72, who discovered the body, lives next door on the neat estate of white-painted villas at Linstead, having lived and worked as an office secretary in Hertfordshire for 28 years. "You are careful not to let on you have come from England or you make yourself a target," she said.
Mr La Touche said that around 3,000 couples a year used to come back to Jamaica to retire; today that figure is closer to 700. "Can't a Government that is broke see the stupidity in not protecting people who have so much to give Jamaica?" he asked.
K. D. Knight, the country's Security Minister, blames much of the crime on Britain and the United States, arguing that "thousands of felons, convicted for offences of murder, car-jacking, robbery, rape and drug-trafficking have been returned to Jamaica", where the authorities do not have the resources to monitor such deportees.
Last month a 14-year-old boy pleaded guilty in a court in Spanish Town to stabbing to death 72-year-old Louisa Thompson, who had worked in England for 22 years. The boy had absconded from a juvenile home and broke into Mrs Thompson's home as she was getting out of bed on a November morning last year. He was sentenced to 16 years. His is the only conviction among the past ten murders of returnees, Mr La Touche said
(London Times)