The peculiar life of Andrew Newton, the Jeremy Thorpe ‘hitman’ who surprised police by not being dead

Played by an ‘Inbetweeners’ star in the BBC’s ‘A Very English Scandal’, the former pilot succeeded only in shooting a Great Dane – before gaining attention in later life by attending a fetish ball dressed in top hat, tails and thong

There are some who might accuse Gwent Police of incompetence over its handling of a reinvestigation of the Jeremy Thorpe affair.

The force has had to reopen its investigation a year after closing it in the belief that a key witness, alleged would-be assassin Andrew Newton, was unable to help with enquiries by virtue of being dead.

In fact, Newton was alive and well and making regular visits to a cul-de-sac in Surrey – when not posing in a thong, top hat, tails and little else at the Skin Two Rubber Ball fetish convention in London.


 After the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, Andrew Newton changed his name to Hann Redwin and attended the 2004 Skin Two Rubber Ball 
 (Getty)

When Gwent Police discovered this – or had it pointed out to them by journalists – they sent a plain clothes detective on a 160-mile trip from Wales to Dorking, only to find that Newton was not there.

Photographers, though, were waiting to snap officers knocking fruitlessly on the door of an empty house.

Cue headlines about a “very English farce”, echoing the TV series A Very English Scandal, which has rekindled interest in the Thorpe affair.

But whether the missing but not dead Newton joins those alleging incompetence remains to be seen. It could be that he is in no position to preach about bungling.

Indeed, it might be argued that this latest twist in the Thorpe saga merely confirms Newton’s role as the man who brought an element of farce to what might otherwise have been a tragedy.

Now aged 71, he was the supposed hitman who in October 1975 killed Rinka, the Great Dane belonging to Norman Scott, Thorpe’s alleged former gay lover, while causing no physical harm to the human target.

Although Newton claimed he had merely wanted to scare Scott away from causing trouble for the Liberal Party leader Thorpe, the prosecution claimed that his gun jammed at the critical moment because this “hitman” had chosen to work with an antique 1910 Mauser pistol.

Rinka, it was claimed, was killed because Newton was frightened of dogs and when the friendly Great Dane jumped up at him, he felt like he was “being attacked by a man-eating donkey”.

It is perhaps no coincidence that in the BBC series Newton was played by Blake Harrison, the actor who made his name as the comically dim schoolboy Neil in The Inbetweeners.

When Thorpe was tried with three others for conspiracy to murder Scott, Newton, who had been granted immunity from prosecution, had to admit to the Old Bailey that he was known to his friends as “chicken-brain”.

One barrister was unkind enough to ask whether he knew what a buffoon was.

Newton in 1978 (PA)

That was after Newton had given an eye-opening account of how he had allegedly been recruited as a hitman during a drunken evening at the raucous Showmen’s Ball in Blackpool.

Newton said that despite being a pilot by trade, he told fruit machine salesman turned alleged middle man George Deakin: “[If] you want someone bumped off ... I’m your man.”

Recalling the night for the benefit of the jury, he added: “It is a different world after 16 pints”.

Although, according to John Preston, the author whose book A Very English Scandal inspired the TV series, Newton continued boozing after chatting to Deakin about “bumping someone off”.

His fateful night in Blackpool allegedly ended with him swigging brandy from the bottle and trying to stick meringues on the nipples of one of the topless women providing entertainment in the ballroom.

Things did not improve once he sobered up.

Newton went to find Scott in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. After two days of fruitless searching, he learned that his intended target was living in Barnstaple, Devon.

Then Newton hit upon the plan of luring Scott to a Kensington hotel with the promise of a modelling job.

At this stage, the Old Bailey heard, the intended murder weapon was not an antique pistol. It was, Newton revealed at the trial, a chisel, hidden in a bunch of flowers.

Scott did not show up at the hotel.

And so, the prosecution alleged, Newton was forced to try plan B: luring Scott to a layby on Exmoor and shooting him with the unreliable antique pistol.

When the gun jammed, the prosecution claimed, Newton was left with no option but to swear, get back in his car and drive off, leaving the dog dead and Scott alive.

In March 1976 Newton was found guilty of possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life, but throughout the four-day Exeter Crown Court trial, he did nothing to incriminate Thorpe, insisting instead that he, not the Liberal MP, had been the one worried about possible claims by Scott.

But in 1977, after being released from a two-year jail sentence, Newton changed his story and went to the London Evening News claiming he had received a £5,000 downpayment on a “contract to murder”.

It led to Thorpe being tried at the Old Bailey after a November 1978 committal hearing which Newton attended dressed “like a golf professional” but with the addition of a balaclava to hide his face from photographers.

He was more conventionally attired for the Old Bailey proceedings in May 1979.

Newton arriving at the Old Bailey in 1979 (PA)

Nevertheless judge Joseph Cantley – whose seemingly biased summing-up was later mercilessly lampooned by the comic Peter Cook – seemed to dismiss the pilot’s evidence with the comment that he was a “perjurer” who was “determined to milk the case as hard as he can”.

Thorpe and his co-defendants were acquitted.

After that, as Gwent Police may eventually protest, Newton faded into relative obscurity – although in 2004 he was photographed, without a balaclava to hide his face, or much else at the Skin Two Rubber Ball at the Hammersmith Palais in west London.

By the time he attended what has been described as “the biggest fetish event of its kind in the world for lovers of rubber, PVC, and glamour gear”, he had changed his name from Andrew Newton to the far more noticeable – and therefore much more traceable – Hann Redwin.

There has been some suggestion that the name was chosen, perhaps hubristically, as an anagram of “winner hand”.

As a quick Google search will reveal, it was under this name that Newton appeared in newspaper reports about the inquest of his girlfriend Caroline Mayorcas in a climbing accident on the west face of the Eiger in 1993.

Two reports in The Independent, in November 1993 and January 1994, both helpfully explained that Redwin was “the man at the centre of the Jeremy Thorpe affair”.

The reports also made clear that both British and Swiss police had cleared Newton/Redwin of all blame for the climbing accident, having found that Mayorcas’ rope had been cut by a doctor after her fatal fall.

Gwent Police has told Mail Online it was aware of the name change from Newton to Redwin.

The force, however, has yet to respond to The Independent’s requests for comment, and it remains unclear as to why it thought Newton had died.

Gwent Police’s interest in him began in 2016, following claims made by Dennis Meighan, a former west London “hardman” and antique firearms dealer who told the Mail on Sunday that in early 1975 Newton and a “representative” of Thorpe had offered him £13,500 to be the hitman.

Meighan said he was arrested and confessed all to the police in 1975, but after a few weeks his initial statement was destroyed and, for reasons he could only guess at, he was asked to sign a replacement exonerating both himself and Thorpe.

Meighan’s claims, aired publicly after Thorpe’s death in 2014, eventually led to an investigation into this possible cover-up being launched in 2016.

Gwent Police took control of what became known as Operation Velum because the force had not been involved in any of the original investigations of the Thorpe affair in the 1970s.

In April 2017, however, it was reported that Gwent Police had closed their investigation into Meighan’s claims.

Norman Scott told reporters of receiving a letter from a senior CPS prosecutor that said there was “insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prosecution” of either Meighan or the detective alleged to have witnessed his supposedly false statement.

One of the reasons reportedly given for this lack of evidence in 2017 was that “various key witnesses are now deceased, including Andrew Newton, who according to Meighan was in the meeting during which the contract [to kill Scott] was agreed”.

But Newton was still alive, despite some 2014 news reports saying that he had died aged 58 in 2004 – the year a very healthy looking Hann Redwin went to the Skin Two Rubber Ball.

Indeed, some online posts by people who claim to have known him in later life painted a picture of a rather noticeable “seriously strange man” with a fondness for eye-catching “distinctly short shorts”.

His former girlfriend, Rosalieve Lowsley, mentioned in 2009 reports as a wealthy company director, was also able to tell reporters this weekend that she was still in touch with Newton, who was still alive and still “a very decent, highly intelligent man”.

Reporters duly arrived at the Dorking cul-de-sac where Hann Redwin has in the past few years been regularly seen in the company of his 61-year-old friend Patricia Frankham, a former GP practice nurse who bought the £500,000 detached house in 2014.

The neighbours said they would often see Newton “coming and going”, and on Saturday he was photographed returning from a shopping trip, dressed in blue shirt and jeans – no fetish gear, no balaclava, no “short shorts”.

He reportedly “bolted inside the house” when approached by reporters, and Frankham said he was not interested in talking.

That certainly seems to have been the case when the Gwent police detective turned up in the hope of a chat about 24 hours later.

Newton was alive, but absent.

On Monday Frankham told reporters that Newton was just a good friend, not her romantic partner.

He did not live with her, she explained, and she did not know where he was now.

“He could be on the other side of Paris for all I know,” said Frankham.

So far the alive but elusive Newton has not reappeared, in Paris or anywhere else, and Gwent Police has not elaborated on the statement issued at the weekend.

The force’s statement – as reported by the Mail – was brief, if curiously eloquent.

“Enquiries were completed which indicated this individual was deceased.” it began.

“We have now revisited these enquiries and have identified information which indicates that Mr Newton/Redwin may still be alive.

“As a result, further enquiries will be conducted to trace Mr Newton/Redwin to assess if he is able to assist the investigation.

“Gwent Police has spoken to Norman Scott to inform him of this.”