Couple were dead by time police arrived

A senior police officer has admitted that reports of a prowler at the Lincolnshire "safe house" where a couple were targeted in a revenge killing should have been dealt with differently.

An inquest jury in Lincoln has heard that just hours before she was murdered in August 2004, Joan Stirland contacted a Nottinghamshire officer giving information of the incident the previous evening.

Mrs Stirland, 51, made the call to the mobile phone of an officer identified as F after she was unable to reach a second officer known as K.

But F was off duty and after he made contact with his superiors it was another 80 minutes before K was able to be told.

Later information was passed on to Lincolnshire Police, but by the time officers arrived at the bungalow at home in Trusthorpe. Joan and her husband John Stirland had already been shot dead.

A senior officer, known only as J, who investigated the murder of Marvyn Bradshaw, who was killed by Mrs Stirland's son Michael O'Brien and his friend Gary Salmon, told the inquest "With the benefit of hindsight things would have been done differently".

O'Brien was shot outside a Nottingham pub as he sat in a car with Jamie Gunn the 27-year-old nephew of a local gang boss back in August 2003.

In the months after the killing Gunn fell into a deep depression and later died from pneumonia.

The officer said although intelligence had been received that gang leader Colin Gunn, 40, had taken a contract out on the Stirlands he did not think they would carry it out.

He said: "It was never at the forefront of our minds that they would carry out such an attack.

"I couldn't perceive at that time that those responsible would go out on a Sunday afternoon and commit such a cold-blooded killing."

The inquest continues.