Organised Crime Turned on Its Own | Brett Flournoy & David Griffiths Murders | UK True Crime Story
Cornwall, a place of wild cliffs, quiet coes, and postcard perfect villages. But beneath the crashing waves and the holiday charm, something far darker was taking root. Shipments of cocaine moving in from South America, links to IRA terrorists and a chain of events that would lead to a shocking double murder.
Because sometimes the places that look the safest are hiding the most dangerous secrets. 31-year-old Brett Flora was a promising boxer and an all round nice guy. He was super popular among his peers. Nickname the soul, he won an ABA medal in 2005 and he almost won the TV reality show Prize Fighter the light middleweights in February 2010.
But Brett drifted away from boxing. And when we pick up the story in June 2011, he was a father of two young boys and his fiance was pregnant with their third child. But it seemed he managed to become entangled in the world of drugs. On the 16th of June, Brett drove from his home in Muryside in a Citroen Belingo van.
He headed southwest and stopped at the Tamar Bridge at 7 p.m. to pick up his friend David Griffith. David was originally from the area Plymouth and although living in Barkshire, he still ran a drugs operation from the southwest. David told his family “they were going to Nuki and would be picking up a friend on the way,” but they failed to book into the hotel as planned.
And when both men failed to contact their friends and family and didn’t answer their phones, their concerned families alerted the police. This was totally out of character for them. The police took the disappearances seriously from day one. They knew that Brett had picked up David Griffith from Plymouth in the Tamar Bridge car park at around 7:00 p.m.
But from there the trail went cold. There were multiple appeals for any information about the two men, especially from people in the world of boxing where, as I said before, Brett was a super popular man with lots of friends in the sport. Then in St. Oel Cornwall on the 1st of July. It is acting on a tip off carried out a drugs raid at an isolated farm known as Sunny Corner.
They arrested the owner, 28-year-old Ross Stone, when they discovered that he’d been growing cannabis into shipping containers that he’ equipped to evade detection by infrared heat sensing cameras. It was a relatively sophisticated operation. And several days later in a police interview, much to their surprise, Stone told detectives “that the two missing men, Brett and David, were dead and buried on his property.”
And shortly afterwards, officers recovered the two bodies from the White Sit van that was buried on farmland near Oel. Both men had been shot and their bodies had been burnt. Stone told detectives quite a tale. He said that the two men were enforcers working for an IRA gang, which effectively, as he said, “ran Liverpool’s illegal drugs trade.”
Building contractor Stone told how he’d run up debts of up to £40,000, and how Florny and Griffith had bought this debt, and he was being put under immense pressure to repay the money that was owed. When I say immense pressure, we’re not kidding here. Remember, this is only Stone’s account. it can’t be verified. He told how he’d faced constant death threats from the very first day against him and his family and he’d even borrowed money from his mom and allowed the pair to turn his home into a cocaine processing plant supplying users in Cornwall. He told how he was utterly terrified of the two men as they knew the address of his children, his family, and had made repeated threats to kill them. As an example of their ruthlessness, he told investigators that earlier that year in the April, Griffith and Flora had arrived unannounced at the home of his partner’s parents just hours after she given birth to their second child just because he happened to turn his phone off whilst they in the labor ward.
He said how they would literally call him every 10 or 15 minutes every single day demanding the money. The two men then sent another man to babysit him and a crop of cannabis that he was growing in a bid to give him their money back. This man was 26-year-old Thomas Hague, originally from Huddersfield in Yorkshire, who also owed a significant sum of money to the two men, and he worked for them to try to pay off this debt.
As a younger man, Hey was well known to the local police. He’d served nine months in a young offenders institution in 2005 and 2006 for dealing drugs and was currently on the run from police as he skipped a court appearance the year before because at that time he was in Brazil smuggling drugs back to the UK for the two men or so he claimed to police.
Stone told detectives he’d been out on the night that the men had been killed, but had arrived back at Sunny Corner shortly after 9:00 p.m. after Hey phoned him in a real state. He said that as he approached the farm, he saw David Griffith’s body lying in the lane. And as he got into Sunny Corner, he said he saw Brett’s body there, too.
Hey told him he’d been badly beaten by the men. Hager was topless, disheveled, and appeared distressed. Stone said that hey did not say outright that he was responsible for the murders, but Stone firmly believed that hey had killed both men. He then told officers he had driven with his mom to Nuki to report the crime to the police, but he’d been too scared of the dead men’s associates and the potential repercussions for him and his family.
And so he decided to make them disappear instead. He admitted using his own mechanical digger to bury the bodies and he said that he wasn’t altogether surprised at the turn of events as Hager talked about killing the two men in the days before they died. Hey was very arrogant in his interviews and he denied murder firmly blaming Stone for the double killing.
He told detectives how he was being paid to be at the farm to babysit. He went on to say that when on June the 16th, Flora and Griffith went to Sunny Corner, he had an argument with Griffith after he brought a woman back to the farm. He said that Griffith had hit him with a bit of wood, but he managed to disarm him.
He then said that Flory had got a gun out of the van, so he ran off. Hey continued that he went to a friend’s house, but he was lying, and the police knew he was lying, or at least not telling the whole truth. Detectives had discovered that he went to a caravan of another friend to shower and to change his clothes. Detectives suspected the obvious, that he was trying to keep the police away from this friend, as having showered and changed to get rid of evidence linking him to the murder.
He didn’t want the police to know what he’d been doing. Hey, admitted that that evening he then caught the train back to Yorkshire before eventually handing himself in at a local police station. He told police that through experience gained from others, “he knew how to get rid of bodies properly, he was a pro.” He said if it was him, “he would have bagged them up and taken them to a pig farm rather than, in his words, leave it to a thick Cornish farmer to tidy up.”
That disparaging comment was of course aimed at Stone. Detectives didn’t believe the accounts of Hey or Stone and both men were charged with murder and stood trial in Cornwall at Truro Crown Court. The prosecuting QC told the jury that both men had lied about the events around the two killings. He said the murders were the actions of both men, but when arrested by the police, the alliance between the two broke down and self-interest took over, something, as you know, we hear so often on this channel. Although Hey worked for the two men and was sent to make sure Stone didn’t get out of line, he and Stone quickly became allies. They’d realized that Flora and Griffith were problems in their lives that were not going to go away. The QC continued that it didn’t matter who had pulled the trigger. Both men played their part, and so both of them were guilty of murder. At the end of the month-long trial, it took the jury less than 3 hours to find hay guilty of two counts of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison and told he must serve a minimum of 35 years. That means he’s wasted his life and he won’t be out of prison till he’s over 60.
28-year-old Ross Stone was cleared of murder and was told he would serve 5 years in prison after admitting burning the men’s bodies and burying them. Stoned frankly, he looked shell shocked as the jury returned their verdicts. It looked very much like he was expecting to be found guilty of murder.
There were gasps from the public gallery as the family and friends of the two dead men shared his seeming amazement at the outcome of the trial. Passing sentence, the judge told Hey that he was an arrogant young man who got out of his depth in the criminal underworld. He said that these were bad men, but they were bad men with the right not to be killed because trading in drugs does not carry the death penalty.
He told him that you were attracted to the gangster way of life. You convinced yourself you were a big boy playing in the big league, but he said, “I found your erratic behavior made you unsuited to this elusive trade.” The judge said that the pressure he was under from the two men was no excuse for the crimes he had committed.
“You shot these men dead, acting alone and not in concert with Stone,” he said. “You left him to cover up the carnage you left behind you. Why you did this is to my mind perfectly clear. How you went about it is less clear, but you aimed and fired the shots that killed these two men.” Speaking after the trial, David Griffith’s mom, Janet, said the following.
“Our family has been devastated by the loss of our beloved David and the horrific way in which he was murdered. We’ve had to accept the horrific way in which David was taken from us, but also had to endure six weeks of worrying and looking for David to find out he was then murdered, burned, and buried. It was truly too much to comprehend. We’ve had to endure months of unpleasant stories and statements being made about David, most of which have been completely untrue. This has put immense stress on all our families. But we do know that those who are close to David know the truth and the real Dave.” And James Flory, Brett’s sister-in-law, made a statement on behalf of the family of the former British Army soldier who served with the Royal Engineers for six years.
She confirmed that his fianceé gave birth to his third son after he had died. She said that much of what was said about Brett through the course of the trial was unsubstantiated and alleged by two people who have now been convicted of horrific crimes. She continued, “We’ve been left totally devastated by Brett’s death. He was a loving son, fiance, father, and brother. His death has left a huge gap in the lives of all of our family. The worst thing is as a result of the actions of Ross Stone and Thomas Hey, we’ve never had a chance to say goodbye and we still expect him to walk through the door.” Hey appealed and in the hearing, serving prison inmate David Johnson told how Stone had confessed to the murders of the two men in his cell soon after he was acquitt of the murder charge.
Johnson, who was actually in prison for 22 years for attempted murder, said that Stone laughed as he confessed to the killings and had told him, “It’s not every day you get away with murder twice.” The three judges dismissed the appeal out of hand, saying that Johnson’s evidence was not credible. They added that he’s a habitual and gratuitous fabricator of stories. He’s a convicted liar. Let’s finish today by thinking of the families of the two men murdered in such dreadful circumstances. That is the family of David Griffith and Brett Flora. Remember Brett had three young children with his third son born after his death. We wish the families of all concerned well after the terrible violent deaths of their loved ones.
