A brutal attack on an innocent young woman sends the reporters on a global investigation.
David Collins visits Merseyside in northern England, where 26-year-old Elle Edwards was shot while celebrating Christmas Eve.
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This is not a video or game. This is real life. You go to a fucking pup ar Christmas Eve with a machine guls if someone going there with a baseball bat and have a grievance with someone that's sundard. That happens every weekend. But you go somewhere with the machineles master when it is you go on it to kill someone.
It's Christmas Eve. On the Wirral, a comfortable suburban area just outside Liverpool, a port city in the north of England. Twenty six year old Ellie Edwards is heading to a local pub with her younger sister Lucy. Ellie is a little less enthusiastic than her sister. She's been hungover for a couple of days already, but she's decided to head out for another night a beautician. Her long blonde hair falls down over her leather jacket and a big silver necklace. Inside the Lighthouse Pub, the sisters are soon singing and dancing together. Sometime after nine point thirty pm, Lucy heads home. She tells Ellie not to stay out late. Ellie says she'll just be another hour and continues back at the pub. What Ellie cannot know is that A man is also standing outside the pub in the car park. He's been waiting and watching the area for around three hours. He's carrying a Scorpion submachine gun. I'm Fiona Hamilton, the chief reporter at The Times and from The Times, the Sunday Times and News Corp Australia. This is cocaine in episode one, are shooting at Christmas. Trying to understand what happened next on that night in twenty twenty two ended up being a much bigger task than one reporter could do alone. Over the past year I've been working in a team from two separate countries with my colleagues David Collins from The Sunday Times in the UK.
So you were part of a group that smuggled one hundred million pounds out of the UK. How do you reflect on that?
And Stephen Drill from News Corps Australia.
This is the end of the line.
I'm just about to go in. Knock on the door are a ten million dollar house that is accused of being the proceeds of crime.
This investigation has taken us to ten different cities in six countries, traveling over fifty thousand kilometers following trail from that pub in Northern England where Ellie was celebrating Christmas and leading us to column and cartel's drug smuggling in Mexico, a torture chamber in the Netherlands, money laundering in the Middle East, and police raids across Australia.
Sydney's gun crime epidemic has claimed two more lives tonight.
Police have established Task Force Magnus to try to win the bloodshed.
What we uncovered was a global business operation based around a single illegal product, one so common that, let's be honest, it's likely that you or someone you know has snorted a line recently. We'll reveal how the world's legitimate business empires, trading floors and boardrooms have their shadowy equivalents in the cartels, traffickers and kingpens. But for now, this story starts with Ellie Edwards. David Collins, the Sunday Times and all An editor went to meet her father.
I'm in Merseyside, probably most famous around the world for the Beatles and Liverpool football club. From the city of Liverpool itself. I've made a short drive through the King's Way tunnel under the River to an area called the wirel I've come to meet Tim Edwards. He's the father of Ellie Edwards, the young woman who went to the pub on Christmas Eve. He's never spoken about that night. In the detail you're about to hear.
It doesn't get any easier, and sometimes you can you can feel you're getting ahead a bit and dealing with things, and everything's getting you know it's going to be brighter as the future, and then something will come along and trigger a memory or and then I might struggle for a couple of days. But as it happens today, today's good day.
Tim is tall and broad, with thick, streaked gray hair and a beard. He's an imposing figure and I guess you might describe him as a man's man, the type of guy you'd sink a few pints in the pub with and chat about football and life. He was born in nineteen seventy one and came of age in Liverpool in the eighties, a tough time for the city with high unemployment, but he remembers a close networking class community.
No matter how bad things were, your neighbor would be looking out for you, you know, the local bobby. He would be on a bike or he'd be walking around only be keeping an eye on the kids.
Then if the kids would get up, you know good it.
Just go on the on the door and tell your mother and father the next monue you get a clip around here.
Or when he got in.
As a young man, like many, he went out clubbing, which is where he met his wife, Gainer.
Back in the ninety early nineties. The club seems massive and Liverpool, And.
Yeah, I met her on a nighthouse.
And what happened after that?
You were just yeah, I just fell in love. Yeah, fell in love. I started having kids. I was a young lad and I was just doing well whatever I could to put food on the table and build a family, you know, build a fire home.
That just did me best.
The couple's first child was a boy, and then on the tenth of May in nineteen ninety six, their second came along, a daughter called Ellie.
She was never a problem.
She was always there. Some kids want when the babies are to be up all night, the one feeding every couple a couple of hours and what left my life? Yeah, so yeah, she was never a bother. We have four kids altogether, Connor, Ellie, Lucy and George. It was a great, It was a happy house.
Can you remember Ellie's bedroom when she was a teenager?
Like what typical typical girl?
To be honest, if I could help, but never went in there. Yeah, typical teenagers where you just don't want to go in there.
You just don't know what you're gonna find. So what was she into?
What was she doing on her a Saturday night for example when she was a child, or she's in.
A fifteen sixteen?
Oh god, I remember the best friend she died a hair and I must have seen every color of the rainbow at least three times over.
You'd see them coming now ready to go.
Out on Friday, Saturday night, whatever, and you'd have different colored are of it.
As an adult, Ellie put that creativity to good use. She left school at sixteen to study beauty at college and also became a qualified dental nurse.
She had a little space in one of her friends had a beauty salon. She wanted to build this beautician side of her life a killer if you like. And Monday to Friday she would do the gentle nurse work. So that was her bread and butter, if you like. So she worked hard. She worked early hard.
Ellie was a young woman with a bright future ahead of her, balancing two careers and close with her family. Although Tim and Gainer had now split, Christmas remained a full and happy time.
Because although me and the moment were not together, and I hadn't been for a couple of years, but I would still make the Christmas dinner and we would all meets up and and have Christmas together.
So can you remember Christmas Eve? And did you see Ellie that day?
We'd been out the day before to Manchester. We've been to Christmas markets and shopping and the next day she'd bought me a coat for Christmas. And the original plan was for her to come to mine and she was going to help me wrap the presents for my grandson and all the other kids in there.
And what she didn't.
Instead of wrapping presents though, Ellie rang her dad and said she was going out with her sister Lucy. The pair were close and Lucy had made a surprise trip back from Dubai for the festive period.
It could have been so difference if we're just stuck to our plan, but girls being the girls, it was never going to stick to our plan. She just ended up gone out with her friends, which is quite right what she should have been do.
Elly and Lucy headed to a pub called the Lighthouse. The pubs in the middle of a small row of shops and businesses, surrounded by residential streets and set a little back from the road. There's a large beer garden out front. Inside it's a big, spacious boozer, the kind of place where you can watch sport, playpool, gamble on the machines in the corner. Back at home, Tim went to bed.
I don't know what time it was, well three o'clock, maybe two o'clock, I don't know. And the eventually he banged on my door and got me up out.
Of bed.
And he opened the doors me so, and can you remember what he said to you? Just said it was early. We need to hear the gospel.
Let's pause a second, because on that Christmas Eve, it's the actions of someone Tim had never even heard of that would change his life beyond recognition. A few miles from the pub, a man puts on dark clothes with a hood and gloves. He gets in a stolen Mercedes with false license plates. For three hours, he drives to six different locations, watching and waiting before finally settling on a parking spot near the front of the lighthouse. At the same time, Ellie is laughing with friends inside the pub. She spots someone across the room and makes her way over to give him a hug. At eleven forty seven pm, she goes outside for a cigarette in the car park, the man waits around the corner, out of sight, wearing a mask. He's holding the Scorpion submachine gun loaded with twelve bullets. He moves forward until he's only a few meters away from Ellie and fires. CCTV caught the attack, the man retreats, scrambles into the stolen car, and speeds off. Six people have been shot.
I just remember getting to the hospital. Yeah, as quick as it could. It was quite hearing. There was there was no one there, and I remember the sage and coming down and it's just just.
It was awful.
And it was obviously the early hours of the morning and Christmas Christmas Day, there's nobody there and there's You're with your son and.
The kids and all the family and the pullers in the children's ward, which was crazy. It was I remember, I was just angry. There was no patience or kids in it, and yeah, I was just very hungry.
Was it the surgeon in that moment that broke the news that Elliot had died? And what was and your initial act reaction was anger?
Yeah, yeah, I was just ready.
I was ready to go to war. I was ready to flatten the hole of the world, no bother.
And did you have any idea at that point of how she died?
They knew she'd been shot, but.
That was it.
That was the only thing really, I was still as I was contained. She was going to turn up at the mors. I tried drinking her phone.
After the moment with the surgery, tried to run a phone. What was the purpose of ringing the phone.
To Speater?
Did you get a voicemail or a message or just for I actually remember seeing Tim on television after Ellie's death on Boxing Day, he went to lay flowers on the pavement outside the pub. The waiting news cameras zoomed in on him as he arrived.
At the scene where she was killed. Ellie's family came to lay flowers for a woman they so deeply loved. On what was supposed to be the happiest few days. They've undoubtedly been the worst.
It's a blair to be honest. So much happens.
I always explain that there's been in an elevator that doesn't stop at any floor, just keeps corn up so you can never get off. Just so much that goes on really quickly to process, and I was protecting the family from having to deal with all that, so I bore the bruns of all of it.
Merseyside Police acted quickly.
Hello.
First of all, I'm going to read a statement on behalf of Ellie's family. There was no one as beautiful as our Ellie may her looks.
In a press conference in the week after Ellie's death, I watched Tim sitting next to a detective superintendent as she read from a statement the family had written.
Everyone that knew and met el knew how special she was.
After six people were shot that night, Ellie was only one not to survive. Looking back at this now, the grief is obvious on Tim's face. From time to time, he sniffs and his lip quivers as if he's holding back tears. The officer appeals for information.
They don't deserve to be protected. They belong in prison. We know that the answers to this lie within our communities. So my appeal to you is please tell us what you know and help us get justice for Ellie's family.
And the public responded. In a week after a murder, the police received one hundred and fifty tips and leads suggestions of people to look at and over potential evidence. Then, after two weeks, on the tenth of January in twenty twenty three, a twenty two year old called Connor Chapman was arrested in North Wales. He was spotted in a supermarket where he's rushed at to check out and detained by plain clothes police officers.
It's surrendous your coach su pub as a machine gun Christmas Eve? Really, come on, this is not a video game. This is real life. You go to a fucking put on Christmas Eve with a machine guns if it was someone going over a baseball bat and have a grievance with someone, that standard, That happens every weekend. But you go somewhere with the machine guns matter when it is you going to kill someone. That machine gun is not gonna just slightly hate someone. It's gonna kill someone. So he would have fuck goes over with that mentality, and especially on Christmas Eve, I just did one thing that makes me angry. What part of your brain makes that think that that's okay.
Chapman soon found himself in the dock at Liverpool Crown Court.
The very first day that Charlie walked into the courtroom, you obviously be on a piece of glass and all that protected. But he decided to give it a bit of a show. Bravardo. But you know what, within twenty minutes he never looked at me again, because he's just a coward.
The trial lasted sixteen days and after around four hours of deliberation, the jury found Chapman guilty of Ellie's murder. The judge sentenced him to forty eight years behind bars.
The murder of Ellie Edwards has caused profound and permanent grief to her family and a great shock to.
The entire community.
So then it's understood by you, Connor Chapman, as well as those who are observing. It means that you will have to serve forty eight years in custody before you could apply for release. And if you're ever released, and considering your dangerousness, that might never happen.
Just in the last few minutes, this guilty verdict for Connor Chapman found guilty of murdering Ellie.
Edwards, Ellie Edwards's father Tim once again looking directly at Connor Chapman as those verdicts were read out to him as he stood in the dock.
The amounts of people involved in this investigation from day one, literally from the minute it happened, has been remarkable, and they did not give up.
They were relentless in.
Achieving the goal, which was to get justice for Early and catch the killer. Thankfully now he's got forty eight years and hopefully he never sees Christmas again.
What are your feelings towards I mean, I know you said earlier to me before the interview. You know you can't even say his name.
I'll never mention his name. Doesn't deserve the breath out of my mouth. So mentioned his name as far as I was a piece of shit, And what happened to him until his last breath, I couldn't careless.
So what was Chapman doing that night? Why was he spraying bullets into a busy pub beer garden? Will He'd actually been targeting two men who Ellie happened to be standing near. You see, Chapman was from a place called the wood Church Estate, a notorious area not far from the pub. The previous day, one of his associates had been beaten up by rival gang he was seeking revenge. When the case came to court, Chapman said he was a quote low level cocaine dealer. The shooting was part of an ongoing conflict between rival gangs fighting over territory in the area's cocaine trade. The same month that Chapman was convicted of murder, July twenty twenty three, on the other side of the world, five people were shot within five days in Sydney, Australia, two of them killed in another tit for tat gang conflict.
Escalating gang wars in Sydney is leading our bulletom, with New South Wales police under pressure to prove they have controlled the street.
That conflict was over a shipment of cocaine that went missing. The shipment was said to be worth around one hundred million Australian dollars. One of the murdered men was left lying on the road.
School children subjected to the horror on a Canterbury street passing the body of.
A man his death. Like others in that gang war, and like Eli's had one thing in common.
The all is cocaine.
Mainly that has enormous profits for criminals here in Sydney. The cocaine trade one of the most lucrative businesses in the world, a business where the global supply is currently at record levels, where the profits are counted in millions and the loss is measured out in murders. But those I just don't care about the human cost. It's only business, and right now business is good. Coming up in this series, we go inside that multimillion dollar global industry. Very casually. The guy says, all right, so if they found this, they know about the torture celler and I'm like, torture seller, what are you talking about.
I'm down here in an hot tunnel. We're about eighteen meters from the Mexican border, and to be honest, it's just quite frightening.
I raise my hands and I say to my God, I forgive the person that give me that. And I say to my God, forgive them, and forgive me, because in this time I need you so much.
I think we can arrest our way out of this.
They are twenty four to seven.
They are notified by money, greed and ego and that drives them.
It's power, just between you and me, just between you and me. Literally, some of the money might be from like drugs in the UK.
Yeah, the cameras.
It's too dangerous.
You're worried, it's too dangerous to get out? Are you worried about my safety?
Of course.
You are, my guest.
What are these rows about?
Do you think you know what it's about.
I don't have to say the word, you know the word drugs.
I'm getting out today. Okay.
The first time I saw the money, I felt like I was in a film.
I couldn't believe how much it was, and I thought, what the fuck have I got myself into?
Yeah?
How would you like her to be remembered?
I'd like it to be remembered for being a good soul, good example two women, you know. I thought she would never get it to see the grandkids that we may have had with Ellie, but just oh, she's always spoke about in a good, positive way.
Since Ellie died, a foundation has been set up in her name. It's mission is to raise awareness of gun crime and help families affected by it.
Cocaine Inc. Is a joint investigation from the Times, The Sunday Times and News Corps Australia. The reporters are David Collins, Stephen Drill and me Fiona Hamilton. The series is produced by Sam Gentratsak. The executive producers are Will Row and Dan Box. Audio production and editing is by Jasper Leak, with original music by Tom Burchell and If you want to get in touch with any questions or thoughts on the series, email Cocaine Inc. At The Times dot co dot uk.