There were few fireworks as Thomas Cashman, “the most hated man in Britain” according to his own barrister, gave evidence during his trial at Manchester Crown Court.
The 34-year-old stood accused of one of the most devastating crimes in the history of Merseyside. But the man who had been hunted so tirelessly by Merseyside Police since the murder of Olivia Pratt-Korbel was calm, softly spoken, sometimes so quiet trial judge Mrs Justice Yip had to ask him to raise his voice.
The details of the killing, on the evening of August 22 last year, do not lose their nightmarish horror for having been heard so many times. Cashman, on a mission to execute convicted drug dealer Joseph Nee, blindly fired two shots into the home of Olivia’s mum Cheryl Korbel, after 35-year-old Nee barged inside in a desperate bid to save his own life.
One shot passed through the front door, through 46-year-old Cheryl’s right wrist, and into the chest of St Margaret Mary’s Primary School pupil Olivia. Detective Superintendent Mark Baker, who led the investigation, described the case as the “worst thing I have ever investigated” in his 30 year police career.
Fast forward to last week, and Cashman was on the stand trying to save himself from the devastation he had wreaked. On only one occasion did the 34-year-old appear to break down, as he told the jury: “I’m getting blamed for killing a child. I’ve got my own children. I’m not a killer, I’m a dad. I’m getting blamed for something I haven’t done.”
In another exchange, he told the jury: "I don't use people. I help people as much as I can. I’m not a bad person. I’d give someone my last thousand pound."
But as mild-mannered as Cashman may have seemed at first blush in the witness box, the evidence painted a darker picture.
What the 10 men and two women of the jury made of his testimony only they can say, but it may well be that as time wore on his manner in the witness box came across more cold, more calculated. Unflappable, self-possessed, there were no outbursts of uncontrolled rage. Traits useful in someone willing to execute another man in a gangland hit, the jury may have reasoned.
Without much prompting, Cashman himself offered a glimpse into his mentality, and his standing in the underworld.
According to Cashman, he was a “high level” drug dealer in the Dovecot area, making between £3,000 and £5,000 per week selling cannabis. But as the case wore on Cashman’s portrayal of himself as “not a bad drug dealer”, a friendly neighbourhood weed supplier who only sold to people he knew, began to fray.
During his own evidence, he described how one of his associates, Paul Russell, owed him a £25,000 debt for “five kilos of cannabis”. Cashman did not bat an eyelid as he told the jury: “I said if you don’t sort it I’ll take your graft and I’ll take your car.”
The obvious question hung in the air: “What if Russell refused to hand them over?”.
David McLachlan, KC, prosecuting, did not miss the opportunity to ask that question when he got to cross-examine Cashman. After a momentary pause, Cashman replied: “If he didn’t give it me, well, he would have ended up getting a punch or something.”
Mr McLachlan asked: “This is the world in which you live and work?”
Cashman responded: “If I let people do that all the time I wouldn’t be able to sell cannabis. I would have took the graft; I would have took the car. He’s got a nice car. To pay the bill off…I can’t let people take the p***.
Did Cashman’s portrayal of himself ring true? In the dangerous underworld of Huyton and Dovecot, not just anyone can become a drug dealer earning up to £260,000 per year. In court Cashman said: “I sold cannabis to a high level. I never sold class A drugs, only class B drugs. I don’t agree with selling class A. But if someone does it, I don’t mind, I don’t judge them by it.”
Had he really amassed such an income selling Class B drugs alone?
The ECHO has spoken to one man, claiming to be a former customer of Cashman, who described him and his associates selling cocaine. The man, who does not wish to be named, said he had bought cocaine from Cashman, who went by the nickname ‘Tops’, on at around eight occasions, including close to the time of the shooting, and had also bought cocaine from Cashman’s henchmen.
He said: “I personally never had any problems with them, he was genuinely never bad to me like.” However the man said Cashman and his organised crime group “ran the streets” in Dovecot and described him as “feared”. When asked why, he said: “He was known as a hitman in the area.”
It would be difficult to make sense of his lifestyle and notoriety without concluding the following: If you crossed Thomas Cashman you could well find yourself looking down the barrel of a gun. We may never know precisely why the former fairground worker and car-wash attendant, turned ruthless criminal, decided to try and kill Joseph Nee.
However what the jury weren’t told, although it was aired in court in their absence, was that Cashman is a suspect in a previous attempt on Nee’s life, only two weeks before Olivia was killed.
Merseyside Police had already revealed in a press conference prior to Cashman’s arrest that one of the two guns he fired during the incident, a Glock 9mm self-loading pistol, had been linked to two previous shootings. The first was on January 27, 2020, when a 19-year-old man was wounded in Wimbourne Road, Dovecot.
The second was close to playing fields off Ackers Hall Avenue, around the corner from Olivia’s home, on August 8 last year, when the Glock was fired “indiscriminately” as two “rival groups” faced off. During a legal discussion in the absence of the jury, it was revealed that the target of that shooting was Joseph Nee, and that police considered Cashman a suspect.
Rumours of Cashman behind the trigger in even more serious incidents persist, and that will be covered elsewhere.
However deeply entrenched Cashman was in the underworld, it was his wandering eye and arrogance that was perhaps most instrumental in sealing his fate.
In court he portrayed himself as a family man, a loving dad to two children, aged four and 14. He was engaged to his childhood sweetheart Kayleeanne Sweeney, who dutifully attended court every day to support him in an astonishing show of perhaps blind loyalty.
Ms Sweeney turned up in the full knowledge Cashman had been cheating, sleeping with Russell’s partner, who cannot be named for legal reasons. For reasons only Cashman can answer, when the shooting went so disastrously wrong he turned to that woman for help in escaping justice for his monstrous crime.
At great personal cost, she gave detectives the key to solving Olivia’s murder, and the investigation team had a platform to build their case on.
The woman explained how she awoke late on August 22 to find Cashman in her bedroom, holding his head in his hands.
She said: “It was pitch black. I followed him down the stairs. I’d gone downstairs and I couldn’t understand what he was saying, he was stuttering.
“Something like someone was coming for him, he had a source who told him someone was sitting him off. He wanted to do him before he did him.”
She said Cashman told her: “I didn’t know where else to go, but I trust you.”
If there was any ambiguity about what Cashman was referring to, there was none in what he said next. The woman called her partner, Paul Russell, who arrived at the house.
She said: “I asked him where he’d been and he said he went to drop the bits off before he came my house. I honestly believe it was the guns yeah.
“I know he wouldn’t have came to my house with them. Bits or stuff, it was one of them words.
“I just went quiet, I was just cold. I didn’t know what to say to him, I really didn’t. They both built a spliff - lad don’t want to hear it don’t tell me nothing. ‘Joey’ was said at the front door.
“‘Lad, I’ve done Joey. I’ve done Joey’ or, I dunno it was something along them lines. As he was outside in the front garden. He was very nervous, I never seen him like that. I felt like there was something wrong.”
As calm and calculated as Cashman came across in court, the woman’s evidence was anything but. Her frustration and anger at the questioning of Professor John Cooper, KC, defending, spilled over on several occasions, leading to Mrs Justice Yip asking her to calm down.
Her descriptions of her relationship with Cashman, and his lack of sexual prowess - “a thug with a little willy” as she described - made for compelling reading, but Mr Cooper’s intent was deadly serious. He suggested she was a “woman scorned”, that she was “angry and vindictive”, and that she was so “bitter” at Cashman refusing to leave Ms Sweeney to be with her that she was willing to “stitch him up” for the murder of a little girl.
The jury didn’t buy it. Despite her anger at having her personal life dragged into public, and her sometimes sarcastic responses to Mr Cooper, it did not ring true that she would, as she described, “destroy her own life” to frame him for murder.
Plus, there was independent evidence of her account. Clothes belonging to Russell that she said she gave Cashman were recovered, stashed inside a child’s pram box, at Cashman’s sister’s home on Mab Lane. Most damningly of all, two tiny specs of gunshot residue were recovered from the right leg of a pair of Under Armour tracksuit bottoms. Cashman would have had to suffer from astonishingly terrible luck if he was the victim of a stitch up.
The jury may have concluded she was used by Cashman, used for sex and then arrogantly used to try and get off the streets when his plot to execute Nee went so horribly wrong.
She wasn’t the only one Cashman appeared to use to further his criminal ends. The jury also heard from Nicholas McHale, who tried to provide Cashman with an alibi.
We learned Cashman used McHale’s home on Snowberry Road as a stash-house, and supplied McHale with drugs to sell. Under questioning from Mr McLachlan, McHale described Cashman as: “a big drug dealer and he can get loads of drugs like cannabis.”
The jury heard Craig Byrne, another associate of Cashman, would collect cash for him, and run him around on errands. The friendly neighbourhood weed dealer, or feared drug boss?
After just over nine hours of deliberations, the jury gave their answer. Guilty. Guilty of Olivia's murder, guilty of the attempted murder of Joseph Nee, guilty of wounding Cheryl Korbel, guilty of possessing firearms with intent to endanger life.
Whatever the reason for Cashman’s catastrophic decision to try and take out Joseph Nee, one thing we do know is that he was not willing to confront the devastation he brought to the Pratt-Korbel family.
In the words of DS Baker: “In his police interviews Cashman showed no remorse for his actions. He has deprived a nine-year-old girl of her future, and her family of the pride they would have had in watching her grow up.
"When he found out that he had shot an innocent young girl, he should have had the courage to stand up and come forward. Instead, he chose to lay low, despite being a dad himself.”
It will be a long weekend for Cashman, as he awaits his mandatory life sentence on Monday. The minimum term will be set by Justice Yip, but he can expect multiple decades to pass before he has any chance to walk the streets as a free man.
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