David Bieber, the American who shot PC Ian Broadhurst in Leeds

The man in the back of the police car said he was from Leeds, that he had been born in Canada, and that he had not stolen the car.

"Just to let you know, I did not steal the car."

It was Boxing Day 2003, on Dib Lane in Oakwood, a quiet run of shops on the north side of Leeds. PC Ian Broadhurst was in the front passenger seat. His partner, PC Neil Roper, was checking the black BMW the man had been sitting in, parked half on the pavement, with a copy of the Racing Post open on the wheel. The tax disc had looked wrong. The man was very big, and something about him made Roper nervous. So for the first time in his career Roper pressed the button that records what is said inside a patrol car.

You wouldn't shoot an unarmed man, would you?

David Bieber, to armed police at the Royal Hotel, 31 December 2003

The checks came back. The BMW was stolen.

The two officers told the man he was under arrest and called for back-up. A recovery truck took the BMW away. PC James Banks, who was twenty-six, pulled up to help take the prisoner to the station.

None of the three officers carried a gun. Roper asked Banks to watch his back while he put the cuffs on. All three went to the rear door of the patrol car.

At the sound of the ratchet on Roper's handcuffs, the man produced a nine-millimetre pistol. He fired five shots in eight seconds. The first hit Ian Broadhurst in the chest. Roper turned to run and was hit twice. A bullet meant for Banks struck his police radio, and that radio saved his life.

Broadhurst was on the ground. The recording in the car caught what he said next. "Don't shoot me. Please. No!"

The gunman walked over to him, took aim with both hands, and shot him in the head from about two feet. Then he ran down the road with the gun still in his hand. He pointed it at a woman in a Renault, which drove off. A man called Stephen Wright had just finished his shopping and was back at his green Rover, with his wife in the passenger seat. "I don't want to kill you," the gunman told him. "I need a lift." The Wrights ran, and he drove away in their car.

Ian Broadhurst was thirty-four. He had been at his mother's house for a Boxing Day breakfast that morning before going in to work. He died on the way to hospital. Neil Roper, shot in the shoulder and the back, lived.

The detective in charge, Chris Gregg, had almost nothing to start with. The killer had left two newspapers in the BMW and a half-eaten chocolate bar in the patrol car. Both carried fingerprints, and neither matched anybody on file. A shop camera nearby had filmed a big man buying them minutes before the shooting.

The best clue was the voice on Roper's tape. The police took it to Dr Peter French, a forensic speech expert. He said the man was no Canadian. He was American, from the South, somewhere like Georgia, Alabama or Florida.

Then the phone rang. An anonymous caller said he knew an American with a gun and a black BMW. He gave a first name, Nathan, and a mobile number. The number led to a man calling himself Nathan Wayne Coleman, who had a flat close to the shooting and had left it in a hurry. There was no such man. The fingerprints had gone to the FBI, and on the fourth day of the hunt the answer came back from Florida. Nathan Wayne Coleman was a six-year-old boy who had died in 1975. The prints belonged to a man called David Francis Bieber, who had been wanted in America for eight years.

On the afternoon of 30 December a big man checked into the Royal Hotel at Dunston, in Gateshead, nearly a hundred miles north. Vicky Brown was on reception. She remembered "this black, wooly hat pulled right down over his ears, and a big pair of old fashioned glasses." She could not stop thinking about him, and the police came.

Armed officers surrounded the room. At twenty-five past two on New Year's Eve the man agreed to walk out. As they went to cuff him, he spoke to them. "You wouldn't shoot an unarmed man, would you?"

He had dyed his hair an odd orangey blonde. In the room was the pistol from Dib Lane, with a bullet in the chamber and fourteen more in the magazine, and nearly three hundred more rounds. He had more than six thousand pounds in notes and a ticket from Sheffield to London Victoria and on to Paris for 2 January.

Bieber was born in 1966 and grew up in Fort Myers, on the Gulf coast of Florida. As a boy his house was full of swimming trophies. In his teens he started lifting weights, and his friends started saying steroids. He served briefly in the US Marines and became a bodybuilder, with money and a nice car.

On 9 February 1995 a German-born bodybuilder called Markus Mueller was shot three times at his home in Fort Myers. Mueller and Bieber were in the steroid business. Bieber had married Mueller's former girlfriend four days earlier, and she had kept seeing Mueller. When she found his body, she told the police her husband could have done it.

A seventeen-year-old called David Snipes later confessed to the shooting. He said he had been paid a thousand dollars. He was convicted of murder, and a middleman, John Saladino, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. In 1999 the Florida Supreme Court noted that Bieber "had never been located" and that "there is an outstanding warrant for his arrest". He has never been tried for the killing. He is accused of paying a hitman to kill a love rival, and the Florida case is still waiting for him if he is ever released in Britain.

By then he had gone. In September 1996 he came into Britain at Ramsgate on the dead boy's passport. He married a British woman, moved to Yorkshire and worked the doors of nightclubs. Seven years later he was sitting in a stolen BMW on Dib Lane.

The trial was moved to Newcastle Crown Court. Bieber's defence was that a lookalike friend from Florida had done the shooting. As the tape of Ian Broadhurst's last words was played, his widow, Eilisa, walked out of the public gallery.

On 2 December 2004 the jury convicted Bieber of murder and of the attempted murders of Neil Roper and James Banks. Mr Justice Moses said there was one thing that set the case apart. "You had already disabled him and he was defenceless, you could have escaped then, but you chose to wait and fire a second shot at point blank range." He added: "you made certain of his death." He ordered that Bieber should never be released.

That did not last. Bieber appealed, arguing among other things that a whole life order breached his human rights. On 23 July 2008 the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, rejected that argument and then quashed the order anyway. The facts, "horrifying though they were," did not justify it, the court said. Everything had happened in about eight seconds. It set a minimum term of thirty-seven years.

Paul McKeever, chairman of the Police Federation, wrote to Lord Phillips to say the judges had "blood on their hands".

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Inside, the stories about Bieber grew. In 2007 he was reported to be part of an escape plot with two other prisoners, and was moved.

Kevin Lane was serving life for the 1994 murder of Robert Magill, a conviction he has always denied. He did his years in the same high-security jails. On film, he called Bieber one of the most dangerous men he ever met inside. Lane says Bieber was offered money to kill him. Instead, by Lane's account, Bieber came and told him about it. "I like you Kevin, you're a nice bloke."

The prison officers did not get the same treatment. On 10 August 2017, at HMP Long Lartin in Worcestershire, Bieber went for officer Alison Smith with two long pieces of metal taped together and sharpened to a point. He stabbed at her again and again, wounding her face and her right arm. The court heard she was lucky to escape life-changing injury, or death.

He sacked his lawyers and the trial was put back eight times. When it came in 2022, Bieber chose not to attend. He said he had only wanted to "create a scene" and get a transfer to Belmarsh. The prosecution said he wanted revenge on the Prison Service after doctors cut his pain and anxiety medication. The jury cleared him of attempted murder and convicted him of wounding with intent. In November 2022 he was given a second life sentence. He will not be eligible for release until he is in his eighties.

He came to Britain as a dead child, and he will grow old in its prisons as David Bieber. The full story is in our film on Gangland.