Jason Ritchie and Tony Curran

Jason Ritchie and Tony Curran were former criminal associates whose relationship joined the convivial image of an old gang to the violence that eventually drove Jason away. Their shared past involved money, loyalty, and time at the Black Bridge pub, but also a fatal shooting that Jason remembered as the moment when the group's bravado gave way to consequences. Years later, a photograph from that period returned just before Tony’s death, making their history newly dangerous and placing Jason under suspicion.

The Gang and the Black Bridge pub

Jason’s memories of his association with Tony are tied to the Black Bridge pub, where the two spent time with Bobby Tanner. An old photograph later showed the three of them seated around a table there, with thousands of pounds in cash scattered in front of them. Jason estimated the amount at perhaps twenty-five thousand pounds. The men looked pleased with themselves, an image of easy confidence that contrasted sharply with what Jason would come to remember about those years.

Tony’s role in the gang was not simply social. Jason recalled that Tony shot a young drug dealer from London who had come to Fairhaven seeking to sell cocaine. The teenager had first approached Steve Georgiou at the Oak on the seafront. Steve, who kept to the fringes of the gang but was loyal to its members, directed the boy to try his luck at the Black Bridge pub. There Tony shot him. Jason remembered the incident as part of a period when gangs from London came south looking to expand into new markets.

The shooting had consequences beyond the young man’s death. The bullet passed through him and a thin wall, then damaged the front wing of Gianni Gunduz’s Cosworth RS500 in the car park. Gianni was upset, but Tony’s standing made protest difficult. The damaged car became one more detail in Jason’s recollection of a world where violence and the group’s ordinary routines existed side by side.

Violence and Jason’s break with the past

The young dealer was about seventeen, Jason later estimated. After the shooting, someone put him in Bobby Tanner’s old British Telecom van. A cabbie Tony used in such situations drove the boy to the Welcome to Fairhaven sign on the A2102 and left him there. He was found the next morning, already dead. Tony then had the cabbie shot as well, believing that caution required eliminating another witness.

For Jason, this sequence marked the end of the gang’s earlier self-image. He had once understood their activity as young men making money, enjoying one another’s company, and perhaps imagining themselves as a kind of Robin Hood. Looking back, he judged that account to have been foolish: the reality was bullets, dead bodies, police, and grieving parents. He felt he had recognized the truth too late. Bobby left soon afterward, and Gianni also disappeared after the cabbie was shot. Jason remembered the group’s collapse as abrupt, as if the violence had ended a whole period of their lives at once.

That retrospective judgment makes Jason’s connection to Tony more complicated than a former partnership alone. He remained able to remember the gang’s camaraderie and the details of its shared past, but no longer treated those memories as evidence of harmless adventure. His account places the glamour of the cash-filled photograph beside the dead teenager and the cabbie, exposing what the celebratory image leaves out.

The photograph and renewed suspicion

Years later, Jason received an old photograph through his letter box on a Tuesday morning. When he showed it to his father, Ron Ritchie, he identified the men as himself, Tony, and Bobby, gathered around the table at the Black Bridge pub. The cash in the picture made their past visible in a form that could be interpreted as evidence of criminal activity. Jason acknowledged that the police had the photograph and other material concerning him.

At first, Jason considered ways to explain the image away, including denying its significance. Then he suspected that Tony might have sent it to demand money in exchange for keeping it from the press. Jason thought blackmail was consistent with Tony’s capacity to act unpredictably, so he obtained a cheap new phone before deciding to contact him. The photograph thus reopened a relationship Jason had left behind: what had once been a record of shared company now looked like leverage.

Jason drove to Tony’s house on the day Tony died. He described the two men as cautious around each other because they had too many secrets. Seeing Tony’s car in the driveway, Jason rang the bell several times but got no answer. He thought Tony might have seen him on the security system and chosen not to speak with him, and Jason left without making contact. A couple of hours later, he learned through a WhatsApp group that Tony had been found dead at home.

Denial, loyalty, and the past’s consequences

The timing made Jason nervous: he had received the photograph that morning, visited Tony’s home, and then heard of Tony’s death that afternoon. Police learned that he had been to the house, obtained records showing that he had called Tony’s phone, and found a photograph of Jason left by Tony’s body. In combination with the old image and their criminal history, these circumstances made Jason a compelling suspect. His former association with Tony had become not just a memory but a chain of facts that could be read against him.

When Ron asked directly whether he had killed Tony, Jason denied it. He told his father that he would have admitted it if he had, adding that Ron would understand there would have been a good reason. That answer expresses both trust between father and son and the moral ambiguity of Jason’s past: he rejects responsibility for Tony’s death without presenting his former life as innocent. Elizabeth also challenged him about the killing, and Jason maintained that he had not done it while recognizing why the police suspected him.

The relationship ends, in the available account, as an unresolved association shadowed by Tony’s death. Jason’s memories preserve concrete traces of the old partnership—the pub, the cash, the gang, and the shooting—while his later actions reveal how little protection that shared past offered when the photograph resurfaced. He had left the criminal world, but its records, secrets, and consequences had not left him.