People who speed
Do not choose their victim
Do not choose and take with them a separate weapon
Do not single out a specific vehicle
Do not single out specific people
Do not wait in a specific place where the specific person will pass at a specific time
Do not lay in wait for that specific vehicle before they strike just at the right time
On 30 November, Wilkie's fare was David Williams, who lived in Rhymney and worked at the Merthyr Vale mine, six miles away. Wilkie was driving the same route as he had done for the previous ten days. He was accompanied by two police cars and a motorcycle outrider, and had just turned on to the A465 road north of Rhymney at the "Asda roundabout" when two striking miners dropped a 46 lb concrete block from a bridge 27 feet over the road. Wilkie was killed instantly; Williams was only slightly hurt.
Why did he need police outriders if no thuggish threats existed
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, "My reaction is one of anger at what this had done to a family of a person only doing his duty and taking someone to work who wanted to go to work." Kim Howells, speaking for the South Wales National Union of Mineworkers, blamed the attack on the attempts to persuade miners to return to work. Arthur Scargill said he had been "deeply shocked by the tragedy" of Wilkie's death.
Wilkie lived with his fiancée, who was the mother of his 2-year-old daughter and was pregnant with a baby who was born six weeks later. He also had a 12-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son by a previous partner. Funds were opened to help the family; among the donors was Paul Getty. The Bishop of Llandaff led Wilkie's funeral service; he called for "some sort of moratorium" and a return to work by the miners in return for an impartial board to investigate conditions in the coal industry.
The two men who caused Mr Wilkie's death, Dean Hancock and Russell Shankland, were found guilty of murder by a majority verdict on 16 May 1985 and sentenced to life imprisonment. A third man, Anthony Williams, had been present on the bridge but was found to have actively discouraged them from dropping a concrete block, and he was acquitted. The life sentences caused an outcry among the striking miners, who felt that the death of Wilkie was not a deliberate act; the strike had ended by the time the verdict was brought in, but 700 miners at Merthyr Vale walked out on hearing the news.
On appeal, their convictions were reduced to manslaughter, and their life sentences were replaced with eight-year gaol terms. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, explained that the crime would be murder if the death was a "natural consequence" of the miners' actions, but the legal phrase "natural consequence" was potentially misleading without further explanation. The appeal verdict of guilty to manslaughter was upheld in the House of Lords. Hancock and Shankland were released on 30 November 1989, which was coincidentally the fifth anniversary of David Wilkie's death.
To my untrained eye this was not so clear cut as Awayman might suggest
OK Awayman, I'm going to ask you once again. Do you regard the act of deliberately throwing a concrete block from a bridge into the path of a moving car to be an act of thuggery or not?
Pretty straightforward question, let's have a straightforward answer..yes or no?