Bell victim recounts raid trauma

By PATRICK GOWER and TONY WALL

An Auckland man who experienced first-hand the terrifying violence of RSA triple killer William Bell was severely traumatised by an attack that a judge said could easily have ended in murder.

Jeffrey Gray was bending over stacking shelves on the graveyard shift at a Mangere service station in February 1997 when Bell, then 19 and disguised in a balaclava, came in and bashed him over the back of the head with a police-issue PR-24 baton.

After Gray escaped and went to hospital for treatment, a brazen bare-headed Bell turned up at the ward and asked the service station attendant how he got his injuries.

The incident was so similar to the RSA case that police tried to call it as similar-fact evidence at Bell's murder trial to show his frenzied modus operandi.

"I was covered in blood," Mr Gray, now 42, told police.

"I don't know how many times I was hit. I was extremely frightened ... I put my hands up as if to surrender and said, 'Just take the money'."

Mr Gray then tried to escape by locking himself in a toilet, and Bell began bashing holes in the door with the baton. Bell told him to get on the floor but Mr Gray refused.

Bell said: "It's not the money that matters to me. I don't want to do this. I have to."

Mr Gray became concerned at the "personal tinge" the robbery was taking on. "Assaulting me was part of the package."

He decided to escape using a chair as a battering ram and charging into the shop, where he could see a look of shock in Bell's eyes through his balaclava. He escaped and was taken to Middlemore Hospital for treatment for a large cut on his head.

Thirty minutes later, Bell rolled up in a wheelchair "acting like he owned the place" and talking to all the nurses, Mr Gray said.

"Gidday bro," Bell said. "What happened to you?"

They talked on and off for 2 1/2 hours, Mr Gray not recognising his attacker without his mask.

Bell told Mr Gray he had been turned down for a job at the service station because he had admitted smoking cannabis and also said that his brother had been unable to fill an LPG bottle there that night.

Other comments by Bell made a terrified Mr Gray realise that he must be the attacker.

Police caught up with Bell two weeks later while he was committing a burglary.

Mr Gray described Bell as an "unstable, paranoid and sick individual".

Sentencing Bell to five years' jail for the service station attack, Judge Lindsay Moore told him that if he had been able to bash down the toilet door "you could quite easily be now going to prison for murder".