All the evidence reveals that this was a local killing and a local vendetta, John Stalker wrote in the Sunday People in July, 1999. It was a clever and dastardly ambush carried out with local knowledge.
The victim, Paul Logan, 27, a take-away deliveryman, was lured to his death by a false phone call asking for a Chinese food delivery to a remote farmhouse on Thursday, December 23rd, 1993 the same night Johanna Young died. Realising he had been hoodwinked, Paul had started on the journey back when he was savagely attacked by several men who left him with a crushed skull, bloodied and dying.
The phone call was traced to a phone box in his home village of Shotley Bridge, County Durham. A man was seen in the phone box while another man sat in a red Ford Fiesta XR2.
Paul Logan was something of a Jack-the-lad who appeared to have made a few enemies in the village. Even after killing him his enemies risked arrest by desecrating his grave.
They may have objected to the tombstone inscription: Murdered by Cowards. But that seems an apt description for these evil men of Shotley Bridge or the village of the damned, as John Stalker called it.