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Mark Thompson

Age: 30

Sex: male

Date: 2 Apr 2001

Place: Ince Blundell, Crosby

Mark Thompson and George Price were found shot dead in a field in Ince Blundell.

They had been beaten, stabbed and shot. An attempt had also been made to set their bodies on fire with petrol.

They had both been shot once each in the head. It was thought that George Price might have already been dead from stab wounds when he was shot but that Mark Thompson might have been killed by the shot to the head.

They were both found dead the following morning.

It was thought that they were last seen by a wooded copse near the M57 in Huyton at 7pm when a person saw three men near the wood carrying a large shooting target.

The last confirmed sighting of them was in a maroon Vauxhall Astra estate car with registration number S921 ORN as the car drove from Newark Close into Knowsley Lane in Huyton. The wooded copse was opposite Knowsley Lane.

The copse was thought to have been used as a practice range and a .25 calibre bullet found embedded in a tree there was later matched to the calibre of a bullet found in Mark Thompson's body. The bullet that killed George Price had gone straight through his head and was not found.

It was also thought that they might have been in the woods themselves an hour before they died, firing guns. The witness that said they saw three men near the wood said that the large target they were carrying was a full-sized target of a soldier and that one of them had had an army-style gun. Marks were found on a number of trees in the wood indicating that someone had removed bullets from them, but one tree was found with the bullet remaining in it.

A person said that Mark Thompson and George Price had both been seen with guns a few days before their murders and that they would often fire them in makeshift gun alleys around Huyton.

The gun was thought to have been a pocket-sized gun popular with American women and often called a handbag gun. The gun was said to have been similar to the one that had been used to kill Warren Selkirk, a drugs courier, in Crosby Marina in 1999 as well as Jill Dando in London, also in 1999.


*map pointers are rough estimates based on known location details as per Place field above.