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Bloggs19 - The Story of the Essex Range Rover Triple Murders
Nicholls started off small, breaking into telephone boxes — sweet revenge against his former employers.
NICHOLLS: In the old-style payphones, the cash box was held on with a couple of high tensile steel bolts. Now these bolts, they’re really strong in certain directions: you can’t cut through them at all and if you tried to lever the box off, you'd be there until the cows came home and all you’d end up with would be a house full of cows. But the bolts can’t take being stretched, so I worked out that if you put a hydraulic car jack underneath the box and pumped it a few times, the bolts would just snap and the cash would be yours in less than thirty seconds.
The very first time I did it, I was well nervous. Me and Ron had driven out to this phone box in the middle of nowhere to put my theory to the test. I wasn’t sure if it was going to work so I got down on the floor for a better view of what was happening. We jacked, higher and higher, and suddenly there was this fucking enormous crack as the bolts snapped. And the box fell off the wall, right on my head. Knocked me out cold. Ron just cracked up, pissed himself laughing. When I came round about half a minute later, he was still at it, rolling around the floor and giggling his head off.
Now this box was seriously heavy, weighed an absolute ton. We really thought we had struck gold. We could hear all these coins moving about and the weight of it was just unbelievable. We thought we had motherloads. When we finally got it home and got the thing open it was a bit of a shock — there was exactly £3.30 inside.
But once we realised how easy it was, we went round and within a week we did every remote telephone box we could find across the whole area. It wasn’t big money — I think the most we got out of one box was about £100, but I was so desperate that anything was better than nothing.
After that it became a bit of a craze. A couple of other mates joined in (so we wouldn’t always use the same vehicle) and once we’d done all the remote phone boxes it became a bit of a game to see who had the most front. We'd end up going into the town centre in the middle of the day, pulling up in a van, running into a payphone, pumping the jack, grabbing the cash box and driving off.
A couple of us nearly got caught. BT started putting little micro-switches into the money box so when they fell off the phone would send a signal back to base saying it was out of order. And whenever they got that signal, they’d send a police car out because they knew there was a good chance someone was trying to jack the cash box off. More than once I was in the van with a cash box in the back on my way home and I'd pass a police car, all lights and sirens, on its way to where I'd just been. It had started to get boring but whenever that happened, I always got a real buzz.
I'd considered breaking the law loads of times before but I was always too scared to actually go through with it. Once I started doing it and realised that I wasn’t nervous at all, I just got carried away. I was spending virtually all my time just looking for things to nick. Me and my little firm were on a roll. We starting taking lead off the roofs of buildings, breaking into factories and stealing their generators — anything for a bit of extra cash.
And because I hadn’t been caught I just started escalating into bigger and bigger things.