Today’s story begins in 2016 in Blackheath, south-east London, about six miles south-east of Charing Cross, which is usually the spot known as the very centre of London. It is a great place to go out with lots of bars and restaurants – the sort of place you can find somewhere to go with even that most awkward of your friends, who is rarely pleased.
When we pick up the story it was the Saturday of the August Bank Holiday and Oliver Dearlove was out with some of his old Portsmouth University friends in Blackheath before ending up at the Zerodegrees microbrewery.
He had enjoyed a wonderful childhood with his parents, three brothers, two step-brothers and a step-sister. And having met his girlfriend of four years Claire, at a New year’s Party, they were living in nearby Eltham, and they had a great life and long-term plans to buy a house and start a family. He was doing very well in his banking job as a relationship manager for a small boutique bank, Duncan Lawrie Private Bank, in Victoria and had previously worked in the City for royal bank Coutts. And he was shortly off to Vegas to celebrate a friend’s birthday.
Life was good for Oliver and after an enjoyable day, the pals left the microbrewery, to find a taxi. You know how it is after a night out, as they walked past a local nightclub, Morden’s, they got chatting to a small group of four women. Then out of nowhere a man came out of the nightclub a man approached Oliver in a very aggressive fashion and with just one punch knocked him to the floor. But by the time Oliver had hit the floor he had stopped breathing. His friends and passers-by tried to give him CPR at the scene, and they did manage to resuscitate him. Oliver was rushed to hospital in the early hours but doctors were unable to save him, and he was pronounced dead just under twenty-four hours later.
Thanks to the actions of those present and the paramedics, his loved ones were able to be by his side when he died. Tragically, Oliver was only thirty years old when he died and with so much to live for.
His partner Claire revealed that just hours before Oliver was attacked, she had received a final text from him telling her that he loved her. The post-mortem later found that Oliver had suffered a blunt force head injury, which left his neck rocking in a way that interrupted the blood flow to the brain causing his fatal collapse on the street in Blackheath. Meanwhile, in the confusion of the moment, the man who had caused his death had escaped into the crowds still on the streets.
Detectives knew their best chance of finding the culprit was through the cctv and talking to witnesses in the first twenty-four hours after the attack. Just why had this man approached Oliver and attacked him? One of Oliver’s friends told the police: “There was this guy. “I don’t know where he came from. He was just upon us all of a sudden. He came out of nowhere. He just started getting up in our faces. He started getting aggressive, shouting at us something like ‘Who the fuck are you? He was very angry and agitated. He pushed me. He got really close to us pointing and shouting at us, being really abusive. He was looking for a fight. Not a nice guy. Trying to start a fight. We didn’t know why, it all happened so quickly.” Talking about the actual attack, he said: “I believe with his left hand he hit him as hard as he could. He really put his whole body into it. It was very forceful, very quick, very powerful. He had bad intentions, basically. It was more of an aggressive hook. He put everything he could into it. Then Oli just fell to the ground.”
They told how Oliver and his friends had got into conversation with the women. One had taken her high heeled shoes off outside the club and Oliver asked her if her feet hurt and she replied laughingly, “You know what my feet are killing me” before going on to say that she had recently given birth and it was her first night out in four weeks. Oliver said to his friends, “She had a baby four weeks ago, doesn’t she look well?”. The woman then showed the group some pictures of her baby on her phone. Oliver and the others were super polite and told her how beautiful her baby was.” It was then that the attacker emerged and asked, “Who the fuck are you boys?” and: “What you doing talking to these girls?” Seconds later he said to Oliver: “If you don’t move on, I’ll knock you out.” But before Oliver could even move the punch was thrown that ended his life.
It was days later that a local man handed himself in at a local police station with his dad saying that he was the man who had thrown the fatal punch. This man was thirty-one Trevor Timon who said that following the attack he had fled to City Airport where he caught a flight to see his mum in Ireland.
Detectives looked into the background of Timon, and a pretty clear picture emerged. He grew up with his mum and brother in Plumstead, south-london, and wasn’t very academically minded growing up and left school at sixteen having gained just the three GCSE’s. He found work as a plasterer, a skilled trade that offers real opportunity and decent earnings, but he suffered from epilepsy and after four years of work, felt unable to do so any longer due to his disability, and quit.
He had a depressingly predictable track record of violence, and the ones that are recorded, are those that took place in a public setting – it is fair to assume there are more which occurred away from prying eyes.
When he was twenty-two, the victim of Timon’s anger was a bus driver. In court Timon pleaded guilty to using threatening, abusive or insulting words and behaviour after he lost it with the bus driver on 11 February 2008. As well as angry words, he also threatened the driver with a golf club. Nice.
A couple of years later on New Years Day of 2010 his charming nature was on display again as police observed his uncle holding him back as he acted the big man in public again, screaming, “As soon as police leave I’m going to start fucking fighting.” He later pleaded guilty to disorderly behaviour for this outburst.
He was next in front of the beak in May 2010 in May 2010 when outside a pub he launched an attack on a woman. This woman, a senior sales consultant, told how she was talking to a group of men including a friend of hers when Timon pulled up alongside her in a car and said: “Why are you talking to that slag?” She continued: “Trevor fully got of the car and began quickly walking towards me saying, ‘don’t talk to me’. Timon called her a “whore”, “crackhead” and “skaghead” throughout the incident and told her: “I’m going to bang you out. He kept saying he was going to knock me out throughout the incident. I then said to him, “what are you doing, acting like your brother? “I then remember waking up on my left side, laying on the floor. I felt pain to the right side of my face, where I was hit, and to my left shoulder, where I believe I fell.”
Timon admitted a charge of battery for this appalling act of violence.
You might be wondering what the victim in this attack meant by saying he was acting like his brother. Well, Timon has an older brother called Wesley who when he was thirty-two years old, appeared in the Old Bailey in 2005 where he was found guilty of the murder nineteen year-old Dean Wheaton. He fought with Dean in a nightclub as he believed he was chatting up his girlfriend in a club. Bouncers separated the two and Timon had three other fights during the evening before he went to a friend for cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy and recruited three mates to help him take his revenge on Dean Wheaton. When the group found him, their violence was sickening as they stabbed him in the buttocks, shoulder and chest a dozen times. The fatal wound was so devastatingly strong it penetrated his breastbone and pierced his heart. One of the gangs was heard to shout “stab him in the head.” Depressingly it was reported all had a number of convictions since their early teens. For this cowardly attack, Timon was sent to prison for 18 years with the judge telling him: “Your intentions were grotesquely clear. You robbed a family of a well-loved son.” The other three were each sentenced to a minimum of sixteen years in jail.
A friend of the family was quoted in the papers as saying after this: “Trevor and Wesley are blood brothers in every respect. They are violent nutters who should be left to rot in prison. The world is a better place without them.”
Then in June 2011, there was another incident when Timon was sked to leave a pub at closing time, but he wasn’t happy about this. When he tried to get back in and was told he would have to go, he threw a punch at a member or the bar staff – which missed – and as he was bustled out by relieved staff, his passing comment was “I’ll petrol bomb the pub”.
Timon told detectives that on Saturday August 27 he met a close female friend and three other women in Morden’s nightclub where they were going to have a birthday celebration. He bought a bottle of champagne for the women and drank two glasses himself, he said. He said he wasn’t drunk but maybe a little merry when they left to get a taxi home. He told how he walked up to one of the women to “tell her to hurry up because she had her shoes off”. He then asked her what she was talking about to Oliver and his friends. Timon claimed one of the men replied, “nothing to you mate,”. Then according to Timon, it all “closed in” and an argument took place.
One of the women present outside the nightclub had known Timon for over ten years. After his arrest, the text messages he had sent to her were shared:
He told her: “I hope you don’t think I’m a lunatic because I’m not. Xxx” Later, he said: “I’m so sorry I really am. No words can say how sorry I am. I’m not running away from it. That’s not my intention. I swear to God, I will face it. Please ring me.” He continued: “I’m so devastated about this. I’m in complete shock. You have not done anything. All I can do is tell the truth … I’m scared, seriously, proper. “I never ever meant to do it … I’m sorry really from the bottom of my heart. “I’ve got mad love for you, seriously. I just don’t want you to get hurt. I understand if you don’t want to know me anymore. “I just wanted to live life and now I feel like I have lost it all.”
Timon admitted to police that he had hit Oliver. He said that he had said to him that “If you don’t get out of my face, I will knock you out”, but he hadn’t meant it literally, it was just a “figure of speech”. He said he was upset because as a man of mixed race, he claimed that one of Oliver’s friends had called laughed and called him “half chap” – a derogatory term. Nobody else heard this said and Oliver’s friends all denied it.
Standing trial, Trevor Timon admitted manslaughter and denied murder.
Giving evidence in court, Timon said:
“We were just standing there having an argument. One of them said ‘she’s with the half chap’.
“They were laughing at me really, that’s the way I took it.
“I said ‘what do you find so funny in saying that. Just go away.’
“I did say to one of the guys ‘if you don’t get out of my face, I will knock you out’. It’s a figure of speech really.”
One of the women was telling them to move on but the shouting continued, he said.
Defending, Courtenay Griffiths QC asked: “Who was the first person to do anything physical?”
Timon replied: “Me. I punched him. He fell backwards. He just fell.
“I stood there for a couple of seconds and walked off.”
When he was asked about his thought process, Timon said: “Nothing. I just threw a punch. I don’t know.”
Griffiths QC asked: “What were you hoping to achieve?”
Timon replied: “Nothing. I was p***ed off. I was shocked. I didn’t think it was that serious. When I got the phone call [from one of the women] to say he was in hospital I was shocked to hear that. I could not believe my punch had led to hospital.”
The prosecutor Anthony Orchard QC, said of him that he showed “a penchant for violence in a public setting”. He added: “He makes the threats and then punches. He’s fully aware that in punching someone he’s going to cause really serious injury. It’s the level of violence we say is him knowing exactly how strong he is when he punches.” This is why he should be guilty of murder.
I’m afraid I have another criticism of the legal profession in his trial. We have heard Timon’s frankly appalling record of violence which surely must have been relevant to his actions in a public place on this occasion. But when the Jury weren’t present, Courtenay Griffiths QC, defending, tried to block details about Timon’s violent past from being revealed in open court. But Anthony Orchard QC, prosecuting, luckily successfully argued that Timon’s evidence gave the impression that was at odds with his previous behaviour.
The jury deliberated for just three hours before returning their verdict. Trevor Timon was cleared of murder and convicted on manslaughter. For this crime, he was sentenced to six years in prison with a further five on extended licence because he was considered a “significant risk” to the public. The Judge told him: “This was a senseless death that occurred as a result of an act borne out of a flaw in your character, which in the past has seen you display unnecessary violent conduct to others when, for reasons best known to you, you have become annoyed or wound yourself up. His loss in such senseless circumstances has, as the court has heard, caused untold misery for his family and those close to him. Many lives have been turned upside down.”
A letter was read to the court from Timon which said: “There is not a single day that I don’t think of Oliver, his friends and family, and the devastating effects my action has caused.”
Oliver’s partner Claire told the court: “His death was not the result of an unfortunate event such as a car accident or life-long illness but as the result of a senseless act of one individual in one moment of time, with no real meaning or justification. We are all familiar with the phrase a broken heart. The difference is my heart is not broken, it feels more like it has been obliterated. This pain never leaves, it stays with me from the moment I fall asleep, with only the sparing grace of those few moments when I first wake in the morning before I am soon reminded that I am to face another day without him. Every dream and every plan Oli and I had has been destroyed. He was everything to me.”
So, what do you make of what we have heard today?
All those lives destroyed by a single punch. And I was not aware until I started researching this case just how common this is. And so many seem to be angry young men who are upset and agitated and just looking for trouble whoever the victim is and the consequences of the violence. A prime example is from the summer of 2022 when nineteen year old Morgan Wainewright killed forty-three year old Andrew Nicholas with a single punch after taking drugs and drinking heavily on a night out in Monmouth in Wales. He had been thrown out of the nearby Kings Head pub after getting involved in brawl. As he left the doorman described him as “very wound-up” and “looking for trouble” when he left the pub. Minutes later, he bumped into Andrew and his friends who were in the area for a golf trip and hit him. Andrew didn’t regain consciousness. Wainewright was guilty of manslaughter and sent you a Young Offenders Institution for four years.
Let’s look briefly at just one other case also from Wales, this time in 2021. Twenty-four year old Keyron Curtis had been out for drinks at a pub in Aberdare – his partner was due to have their first child in three weeks. He was pretty drunk when he left at 1am and no threat to anyone.
Daniel Howells-Thomas just twenty-one, was agitated and looking for trouble. He was swearing and trying to start a fight with Keyron but Keyron didn’t say a word. As Keyron was getting in the car, Howells-Thomas leaned back and with a straight hand punched him to the left side of his face in a sweeping motion. This caused Keyron’s knees to buckle, there was no resistance and he was instantly unconscious. He fell back and hit his head on the driver’s door near the handle and he was dead before he reached hospital. His daughter was born three weeks later and will never meet her Dad. Twently-one year old Howells-Thomas, himself a father to two young children, was full of remorse at the hearing. For his actions, he was sentenced to nine years imprisonment, of which he will serve half in custody and the rest on licence.
Like the family and friends of Oliver Dearlove, those grieving Keyron and Andrew must be left just in shock. Their loved-ones were just out for a night of fun and enjoyment, in a normal street in the UK. It is supposed to be for fun and our loved-ones are always supposed to come home not be attacked by a random stranger. Of course, it is hard not to be struck by the large contract between Oliver who had so much to live for and Timon, a man with clear anger issues and a track record of random violence who was clearly on a path to prison – one day, his passion for violence – as that is how it seems to me – was going to end like this. Do you feel sympathy for him. Hmmmm, nor me, it is hard to isn’t it. But now I imagine he is out and living a free man. I wonder if he has reflected on how he was before he went to prison and is now a different man who truly feels sorry for what he did? Or will it just be a matter of time before we see him in the headlines of him.
But enough of him, our thoughts are with the friends and family of Oliver for their terrible loss. After the trial, his mum spoke lovingly of her oldest son saying that since his death she had been thinking about her son playing football when he was young – he still played competitively when he died – and then in recent years coming around to her home for supper, “being smiley and polite and getting on with his life”. She said he was “very laid-back, non-confrontational, happy, content, quite happy with his job, and looking forward to a holiday… he wanted to live life”. And yet, just in that random moment when he had the misfortune to bump into Timon, that promising life was snatched away.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3763545/Murder-probe-death-30-year-old-assault-victim.html
https://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/663384.four-murderers-given-life-in-jail/
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/plasterer-killed-banker-one-punch-9856113
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2881138/oliver-dearlove-killer-whatsapp-messages-after-attack/
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/father-killed-single-punch-thug-22835379
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/one-punch-killers-who-ended-29454296