The Wrong Man: The Shooting of Steven Waldorf and The Hunt for David Martin by Dick Kirby Page A

Eve 1982, and meekly allowed himself to be inserted into his usual cell for the twenty-eighth – and final – occasion. At 10.30 a.m. the jailers went to his cell in order to take him into court and were astonished to discover it was empty. As the escorting officers returned from breakfast, two of the court staff were on the pavement outside the court and one shouted, ‘Martin’s escaped from his cell!’
    Martin had got out of his cell, into the corridor, gone to the top of the court, forced a skylight and made his way over the spikes and across the rooftops; all this, and remember, Martin had suffered a bullet wound which had smashed his collarbone just three months previously. He got in through a service door of the London Palladium theatre and walked downstairs. Martin looked at the theatre’s empty 2,286 seats – by that afternoon, every one of them would be filled by a pre-Christmas audience to be entranced by the matinee performance of Michael Crawford playing the eponymous role in the musical Barnum – but nobody noticed the slim, fair-haired man as he padded down the stairs. At that moment, the only person topping the bill of the prestigious Palladium was that well-known escape artist David Ralph Martin.
    Martin strolled out through the Palladium’s foyer into Argyle Street, mingled very briefly with the last-minute Christmas shoppers – and vanished.

The Hunt
    T he balloon went up – as they tend to do on these occasions – and the investigating team from Marylebone had their Christmas leave cancelled and the manhunt for Martin got underway, this time from an incident room at Paddington Green police station. Simultaneously, an internal investigation commenced in which the unhappy gaoler at Marlborough Street court featured to determine precisely how Martin had escaped.
    The Chubb Lock & Safe Company had since its inception in 1804 been justly proud of their appliances and since they supplied the locks for the cells at Great Marlborough Street court they sent a top team from their headquarters at The Chubb Building, Fryer Street, Wolverhampton to carry out a thorough examination of Martin’s cell door. The lock was not damaged in any way and was in perfect working order. To them, Martin’s disappearance was a complete mystery.
    In November 1982, Susie Stephens had moved into a second-floor flat above a drinking club named ‘Lately’ at 175 West End Lane, Hampstead. Police were aware of this change of address because since Martin’s £100,000 flat at Crawford Place had been recovered by the owners, Taylor Woodrow Ltd, Martin had authorised Detective Sergeant Tom Martin to restore some of the property, plus his clothing in the flat, to Stephens.
    Within a very short space of time from Martin escaping, armed officers were at Stephens’s flat searching for him, including Police Constable John Barnie and an inspector. ‘We searched the flat thoroughly,’ he told me, ‘including looking behind the bath panel and under the kitchen sink.’ There was no trace of him but officers from the inquiry remained in and around the premises, working on the assumption that Martin would turn up. He didn’t; but the boyfriend of Tracye Nichols, one of the other occupants of the flats, arrived for Christmas dinner and was mightily alarmed to have a detective leap out and point a gun at his head. He was not the only person to have their yuletide festivities disturbed; later that day Stephens went to visit her parents at the family home in Devon to discover that they too had received an unannounced visit from armed police officers and were understandably furious.
    The likeliest places where Martin might go were raided, without success; this included his parents’ address at Clissold Park. ‘It was not the type of area where cats and dogs would willingly walk through,’ wryly said former Detective Sergeant Roger Baldry, ‘let alone human beings!’ Baldry, who was then attached to Stoke Newington police station and