Thomas Cashman is now the "most hated man in Britain" according to his own lawyer. The 34-year-old set out to kill a rival drug dealer on the night of August 22, 2022, but in his careless, murderous hunt, he shot blindly through the door of a family home and killed a scared nine-year-old girl who had heard noise and got out of bed to look for her mum.
He denied murder, denied responsibility for the harrowing crime, but was convicted by a jury at Manchester Crown Court giving little Olivia Pratt-Korbell's desperately grieving mother the justice she craved. Cashman can now be revealed to be far from the quietly-spoken family man who just sold a bit of cannabis, which he portrayed himself as during the trial.
At some points during his grilling at Manchester Crown Court he was so quiet and softly spoken that judge Justice Yip had to ask him to raise his voice, reports The Liverpool Echo. Yet he had a reputation for violence and links to other seriously violent crimes involving weapons. One man claimed Cashman had a reputation of being somewhat of a 'hitman'.
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His crime has robbed a young girl of the chance to live a full life and a family of their daughter. On a mission to execute convicted drug dealer Joseph Nee, he 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 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. The child was declared dead just hours later.
As he was tried for the atrocity, Cashman was quiet, reserved, painting himself out to be a family man. On one occasion 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.” The evidence suggested otherwise.
Despite Cashman trying to play down his standing in the dark world of violence and crime, these lies would soon come back on him. While he admitted he was a “high level” drug dealer, making between £3,000 and £5,000 per week selling cannabis, his wannabe persona as "not a bad drug dealer”, and a friendly neighbourhood weed supplier who only sold to people he knew, fell apart.
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.
“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***.
The jury saw through these claims, after all, it is unlikely anyone would ammas such an income of £260,000 a year from selling Class B drugs alone. “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.”
The Liverpool Echo spoke to one man, claiming to be a former cocaine customer of Cashman. “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.”
With Cashman offering up little himself, we may never know precisely why the former fairground worker and car-wash attendant, turned ruthless criminal, decided to try and kill Joseph Nee. 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.
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.
It was this woman who eventually led police to Cashman and to conviction. Giving evidence, she explained how she awoke late on August 22 to find Cashman in her bedroom, holding his head in his hands. Cashman's defence barrister suggested she was a "woman scorned" intent of bringing down Cashman for refusing to leave his partner for her.
The jury didn’t buy it. Despite her anger at having her personal life dragged into public, and her sometimes sarcastic responses, it did not wash that she would, as she described, “destroy her own life” to frame him for murder.
There was also 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.
This woman was not the only person Cashman used to facilitate his criminal activity. The court heard evidence from Nicholas McHale, who tried to give him an alibi. Cashman had used his house 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.”
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.
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