British police haul the dead body of Marty Johnstone (inset) from the Ecclestone Quarry in Lancashire, England, in October 1979.
British police haul the dead body of Marty Johnstone (inset) from the Ecclestone Quarry in Lancashire, England, in October 1979.
The six-part podcast series Mr Asia: A Forgotten History tells the inside story of New Zealand’s most infamous drug syndicate. In episode 5, hosts John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy describe how police unexpectedly found Marty Johnstone’s body - and Terry Clark’s good fortune finally ran out.
The discovery of MartyJohnstone’s mutilated corpse in a flooded Lancashire quarry came down to two pieces of luck.
Ecclestone Delph, in the north of England, has about 18 metres of water at its deepest point and was full of car wrecks and other junk. When Johnstone’s murderers threw his weighted body in, that’s where they expected it to land.
A map of the Delph Quarry in Lancashire, England, where Marty Johnstone's body was found by police divers in 1979.
If they’d been just a metre further over, it would have fallen into those murky, virtually invisible depths. Instead, it got stuck on a ledge less than twenty feet down.
Even then, it took an extraordinary twist of fate for the corpse to be found within days by a couple of amateur scuba divers who initially thought it was a tailor’s dummy.
Terry Clark, the man who ordered Johnstone’s murder, had ridden his luck for years. In the past he’d found different ways to escape justice, from making deals with police and skipping bail to deploying top-flight lawyers to keep him out of prison.
At the time of the murder, he made sure he was hundreds of miles away, in London, with witnesses who could give him an alibi.
By late 1979 Clark had built up a fortune through dealing drugs in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom.
When he felt there was any danger of people informing on him, Clark used intimidation, violence and murder to preserve their silence.
He had killed people himself, and he’d got others to do it for him. He forced Johnstone’s old friend Andy Maher, pictured below, to do the dirty work on this occasion, probably by threatening to kill Maher if he didn’t.
Andy Maher, who killed Marty Johnstone on Terry Clark's orders, is pictured third from the left in this undated photo. Peter Miller, who imported drugs with Johnstone on the Brigadoon, is on the far right.
But Lancashire police threw massive resources into the manhunt and once Johnstone’s girlfriend came forward to identify his body, the plot – and the Mr Asia syndicate - began to unravel.
The trial of Terry Clark and his associates took six months and was held under tight security at Lancaster Castle. Snipers overlooked access to the courtroom and one journalist who attended the trial told us he had to go through an outer ring of police holding Alsatians.
The trial attracted huge media attention with a bank of telephones needing to be installed specifically for reporters.
Clark did not take the stand, preferring to make a statement from the dock so he couldn’t be cross-examined.
He told the jury that Marty Johnstone was his friend, and that he would never have killed him or been involved in his death.
Mr Asia - A Forgotten History is a six-episode true crime series. Follow the series on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released on Wednesdays.
The series is hosted and produced by John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy of Bird of Paradise Productions in co-production with the New Zealand Herald.
