WHEN WPC YVONNE FLETCHER WAS MURDERED IN 1984, HER FRIEND JOHN MURRAY SWORE HE WOULD GET JUSTICE – THAT FIGHT TOOK OVER THREE DECADES
On 17 April 1984, a demonstration was staged at the Libyan Embassy on St James’s Square in London. Officers from the Met Police were called in to keep the peace during the anti-Gaddafi protests, which had been prompted by the public execution of two students in Tripoli the day before.
Among the officers that day were PC John Murray and his good friend WPC Yvonne Fletcher. Nicknamed Super-Fletch, Yvonne, 25, was an exceptionally popular young woman, known for her ready smile, wicked sense of humour and innate kindness.
That day, John and Yvonne were in the thick of it. The demonstrators wore masks and scarves to hide their identities as shouts rang out. But inside the Embassy, armed men were preparing to cut down their opponents. At 10.18am, Yvonne was facing the crowd, her back to the Embassy, when a gunman opened fire from a first floor window. Yvonne collapsed, struck in the back by a bullet. Tragically, she died in hospital after suffering a cardiac arrest while in surgery. Before that, John had made her a promise. He told her he would not rest until those responsible were brought to justice. But he had no idea how difficult keeping that promise would turn out to be.
Experiencing PTSD after the shooting and the experience of being at Yvonne’s postmortem, John would spend the next 37 years trying to get to the truth of the incident – but even he was shocked at how incredible the events behind the shooting would turn out to be. The full story is told in searing book No Ordinary Day, and here, John and his co-author Matt Johnson tell us more.
Matt, you’re a crime fiction author – what made you decide to write this book?
Matt: It was a story that needed to be told. This was one of the greatest tragedies in UK policing history – that an officer was machine gunned to death from within the Libyan Embassy, and then the offenders were allowed to go free without any arrests or prosecutions. I joined the Metropolitan Police in 1978, and by the time 1984 came round, I was a traffic officer driving an emergency response car. We were responsible for dealing with things like fatal car accidents, and one of our jobs was to provide ambulance escorts. On that morning, I was sent to Regent Street to pick up an ambulance and take it to the Westminster Hospital. Something had obviously happened, but I didn’t know what, and I did the job, getting the ambulance to hospital as fast as I could. As the day progressed, we began to hear rumours on the police grapevine that a WPC had been shot, and then that she’d been killed. I got home just in time for the six o’clock news and was sitting there wi
