Less than two weeks after England won the 1966 World Cup, six shots rang out across Wormwood Scrubs Park.
It was 3.17pm on August 12, four miles from Wembley Stadium where that victory took place, and within moments three policemen lay dead.
The ruthless killings horrified the celebrating nation, with the public calling for the recently suspended death penalty to be reintroduced.
Temporary Det Con David Wombwell, 25, started the day with a kiss from his wife Gillian and two children.
Geoffrey Fox, 41, left his wife and three teenage children, while bachelor Christopher Head, 30, left his police accommodation.
At 8am, they met at Shepherd’s Bush Police Station. In plain clothes, they went on patrol in an unmarked blue Triumph 2000.
Harry Roberts, John Duddy and Jack Witney’s work for the day was to steal a car.
But Witney’s blue 1954 Vanguard estate, with the exhaust pipe held on by wire, was not the most inconspicuous.
After a boozy lunch, they were pulled over by the unmarked police car in Braybrook Street.
The cell blocks of Wormwood Scrubs loomed above.
Wombwell and Head realised Witney was not displaying a tax disc and asked to see documents.
In the car Harry Roberts sat with a bag containing three guns. He grabbed a Luger PO8 and shouted: “F*** off,” before shooting Wombwell through the left eye, killing him.
“No, no, no,” Det Sgt Head shouted, before Roberts gunned him down.
Duddy, still drunk, half fell out of the passenger door.
“Get the driver!” Roberts screamed.
He pulled the trigger on a .38 Enfield revolver. The third shot hit PC Fox in his temple.
While the other two were caught quickly, Roberts went on the run for three months, camping in Epping Forest.
His mother Dorothy appealed: “I ask you from the bottom of my heart to give yourself up.”
He was given a minimum 30-year tariff, with the Old Bailey judge describing it as “the most heinous crime for a generation or more”.
Duddy died in prison in 1981 aged 51, while Witney was freed on licence in 1991. He was murdered eight years later at the age of 69.
Roberts was freed in 2014 and is 83.
He said: “We shot them because we didn’t want to go to jail for 15 years.”
