John Johnstone belonged to a large group of Millwall supporters who,
after attending an afternoon match against Crystal Palace, boarded the
train to Charing Cross in London. The journey is only ten minutes, but
during it Johnstone became violent. According to the prosecution,
Johnstone approached one of the ordinary, paying passengers and ripped
the newspaper that he was reading out of his hands. He then punched him
repeatedly in the face. A ticket collector intervened, and Johnstone
turned on him.

Word of the trouble reached the driver, who radioed on ahead to the
Transport Police at Charing Cross, and John Johnstone and his friends --
there were six in all -- were apprehended when they arrived. They were
not held for long, however, and were soon free to carry on with their
plans for the evening.

These plans were not ambitious. In fact, Johnstone and his friends never
ventured further than three hundred yards from the station where their
evening began. Their first stop was the McDonald's on the Strand. They
were there for a only few (sic) moments before Johnstone pulled out a
knife and threatened a skinhead who was eating a hamburger. When another
skinhead appeared, one of Johnstone's friends walked up to him and poked
him in the eye.

Johnstone and his friends made their way to Trafalgar Square, stopping
briefly at the Admiral Nelson Pub on Northumberland Avenue, where they
posed as doormen, charging people money to enter, threatening them if
they didn't pay. When they finally reached Trafalgar Square, there was
more trouble, occasioned by a man with a spider tattoo in the middle of
his forehead. Johnstone and his friends found a spider tattoo to be an
intolerable thing, and so they beat the man up.

They made their way back to Charing Cross Station, where one of
Johnstone's mates, Gary Greaves, hit a young man across the face -- a
stranger, standing on his own -- and knocked him down. Greaves then
kicked the man in the head, and the others joined in. A bus driver and
his wife, parked nearby, waiting to pick up passengers from a train
arriving later in the evening, witnessed the violence and felt compelled
to try to stop it. And, to an extent they succeeded -- the lads
abandoned the man on the ground -- but they then turned on the bus
driver and his wife, and both of them, man and woman, were badly beaten.

I don't know how long Johnstone and his friends remained at Charing
Cross. The next sighting was in the Underground station. The Charing
Cross Underground station is large and complex, a network of passageways
connecting the three tube stops at Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross, and
the Embankment. Near the steps of the Embankment they met up with Terry
Burns. Terry Burns was with friends, and they were panicky and
frightened, having run into the Underground to flee a fight that had
broken out at a Covent Garden pub. I infer from the prosecution's
depiction that the West End, on this Saturday night, was a menacing
place to be. There is no mention of the muhc larger group of Millwall
supporters from whom Johnstone and his friends were separated when they
arrived in London. It is likely that, if the larger group was not
involved in the fight that Terry Burns and his friends were fleeing
from, then it would have been in another fight not far from there. There
would have been many gangs of football supporters that night in the West
End.

As it turns out, Terry Burns was a West Ham supporter. Johnstone and his
friends had been looking for football supporters all evening, knowing
that they were about, and would have been frustrated at continuing to
meet up only with skinheads, men with nonconformist tattoos, strangers,
bus drivers, and lonely British Rail commuters. It must have been an
exciting thing finally to find some genuine football supporters. I am
sure, as well, that Johnstone detected the panic and fear that Terry
Burns felt -- it would have been apparent in his face; it would have
been a presence like a smell -- and Johnstone would have found this to
be exciting as well. The result was violence of an altogether different
order.

Johnstone and his friends charged into the strangers, stabbing one in
the neck and arm. Burns fled and ran out of the station and up into
Villiers Street. According to the prosecution, Johnstone then ran after
him, shouting, 'Kill the b******,' his friends not far behind. They
caught up with him in the street, and the group sprinted through Covent
Garden in pursuit. They were chanting 'Millwall' over and over again.
Terry Burns was unable to run fast enough -- the Millwall supporters
were directly behind him -- and he tried to escape through a side street
that turned out to be a dead end. The only detail we have is of a
bicycle -- Terry Burns picked it up to defend himself -- but I imagine
the bowel-seizing terror that Burns must have felt on realizing that he
was cornered. I imagine him casting round for a way out -- the door
bells, the wall -- before he picked up the nearest thing to hand, this
unmanageable shield of spokes and tubes, to fend off what he knew would
come pounding down the pavement in a moment's time.

Terry Burns died. He was stabbed six times. Each stabbing punctured the
heart.