A decade ago a member of the public in West Derby made a horrific discovery in the back garden of a house.
Merseyside Police rushed to Penshaw Close on the morning of March 22, 2013, and found the body of a man lying in the snow. It was immediately clear that the man, later identified as 31-year-old Karl Bradley, was far beyond saving. Mr Bradley, the brother of notorious Liverpool gangland thug Kirk Bradley, had been shot four times the previous evening, and had been left alone in the cold all night.
Merseyside Police had actually been called to the area at around 11pm the previous night when a stray bullet hit the window frame of a different house on Penshaw Close, where a family with young children had been at home. However, Mr Bradley's body was not discovered at that time and it did not appear to police as if the shooting had left any injuries.
READ MORE: Child killer, hitman, drug dealer - How the dark truth about Thomas Cashman was exposed
No-one has ever been charged with Mr Bradley’s murder, although there have been a number of arrests.
One of those arrested, the ECHO can reveal, was child killer Thomas Cashman.
The now 34-year-old is awaiting his mandatory life sentence for the murder of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel, the attempted murder of Joseph Nee and wounding Olivia’s mum, Cheryl Korbel, with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, on August 22 last year.
Cashman, who lived on The Point estate, not far away from the scene of Mr Bradley’s murder, has been described as a “hitman” by locals, and despite the catastrophic failure of his attempt to execute Nee on August 22 last year, he had put significant planning into the twisted mission, scoping out Nee during the day and taking two firearms.
The evidence heard by the jury at Manchester Crown Court this month was enough to send him away for life.
What became clear in the absence of the jury, however, was that in the local community where Cashman plied his "high level" drugs trade, rumours of his involvement in alleged brutal violence were long-standing.
Merseyside Police have said his name was given in "almost immediately" after Olivia's murder by multiple people.
A key witness, the partner of one of Cashman’s drug-dealing associates Paul Russell, told the police and the jury he had confessed to shooting Joseph Nee in the hours after the murder of Olivia.
She also told detectives he was rumoured to have been involved in the murder of Karl Bradley. With no concrete evidence, the prosecution and defence agreed this was hearsay and should not be put before the jury. The witness’s police interview was edited to remove any mention of Mr Bradley and she was put under strict instructions not to mention it in court, to avoid a potential mistrial.
However, the ECHO can reveal the link to Mr Bradley’s murder, although totally unproven in any court, was enough to trigger Cashman’s arrest in 2016, three years after the discovery of what became known as "the body in the snow".
Cashman, then 27, was picked up in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, on March 28 that year, and returned to Merseyside for questioning.
Back in Liverpool, a then 26-year-old woman from West Derby was also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender. Cashman was questioned, but he and the woman were released on bail two days later, and neither was charged in connection with the murder.
Cashman was, however, charged with aggravated vehicle taking involving a stolen KTM motorbike, driven dangerously in the Finch Lane area on March 21, 2016, as well as handling stolen goods, namely an Audi A5 car in the Birkby area of Huddersfield, and driving the same Audi while disqualified and without insurance on March 28, 2016, the date of his arrest for Mr Bradley’s murder.
There are suggestions from well placed sources that Cashman’s name was “in the mix” for other unsolved killings involving firearms, but the evidence was simply not sufficient for arrests to be made.
However detectives have been “unable to rule out” Cashman being the trigger man on a previous attempt on Nee’s life on August 8 last year, just two weeks before he fired the shot which killed Olivia on Kingsheath Avenue, Dovecot.
Bullet fragments used to shoot Mr Nee on August 22 and fragments found on August 8, on playing fields off Ackers Hall Avenue, were analysed and found to have been fired by the same 9mm Glock self-loading pistol, although the gun has never been found.
The same weapon was also used to a shoot a 19-year-old man in Wimbourne Close in January, 2020, who survived.
The evidence in court painted a picture of a man more than willing to spray bullets around residential areas with little regard for innocents caught in the crossfire.
Cashman will pay the price for his lifestyle on Monday afternoon.
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