UK (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Harry Roberts, one of Britain’s longest-serving prisoners and mastermind of the 1966 Shepherd’s Bush murders, has died, officials confirm.
Three Metropolitan Police officers were shot and killed on August 12, 1966, during the horrific events known as the “massacre of Baybook Street.” The cops had stopped a car to inquire about an expired tax disc.
Roberts, along with companions John Duddy and Jack Witney, had a Luger P08 and a.38 Enfield pistol with which they planned to take a car to use as a means of escape for a heist they meant to carry out later that evening.
Police Constable Geoffrey Fox, 41, Temporary Detective Constable David Wombwell, 25, and Detective Sergeant Christopher Head, 30, all sustained severe gunshot wounds; two of them passed away immediately at the site.
According to testimony presented in court, Roberts shot DC Wombwell in the left eye, causing DS Head to flee back towards the police vehicle before Roberts shot him.
In the hours and days that followed, police detained Duddy and Witney, but Roberts—an ex-soldier with jungle combat expertise from the 1948 Malayan Emergency—used his survival abilities to avoid capture for three months.
He lived in a temporary camp while hiding in Essex’s Epping Forest until his capture on November 15, 1966, close to Bishop’s Stortford. Less than a month later, on December 12 of that year, he would be found guilty of murder along with Duddy and Witney.
According to Judge Mr. Justice Glyn-Jones, the event was
“the most heinous crime for a generation or more.”
Since the death penalty had only been abolished in Britain a few months earlier, the men were spared execution and given life sentences with a minimum suggested sentence of thirty years. In 2014, Roberts was freed from prison.
What was the official cause of death for Harry Roberts?
No sanctioned cause of death for Harry Roberts has been intimately bared by authorities as of December 16, 2025.
The Ministry of Justice verified Roberts’s death on December 13, 2025, at age 89, but handed no medical specifics, harmonious with sequestration protocols for former convicts. Media outlets like The Telegraph and Mirror report he passed away in a care home or sanitarium without detailing natural causes, illness, or other factors.
Health Released in 2014 after 48 years in captivity, Roberts lived under license in his afterlife. Necrologies concentrate on his felonious history rather than health circumstances, leaving the exact cause unreleased pending any probe.