The Gold True Story: What Happened Next to Brian Boyce, Kenneth Noye & John Palmer?

A former soldier, counter-terrorism officer, and the commander of the task force that investigated Brink’s-Mat, Boyce went on to become head of corporate security for Hill Samuel merchant bank. While there in April 1995, according to this 1999 article by The Independent, he voluntarily assisted with the Macpherson inquiry into the Stephen Lawrence’s murder case, outraged by the injustice of the initial investigation, and by the insensitive police treatment of Stephen’s mother Doreen and key witness Duwayne Brooks.

Boyce described the Lawrence murder probe as “indefensible” lacking “investigative rigour” and put in writing that “racial prejudice, either conscious or unconscious” could not be ruled out. Without wanting publicity for his work, which some members of the Met had seen as a betrayal, Boyce personally gathered evidence on the Lawrence murder suspects and was reported to have used his connections to make key documents accessible to the Lawrence family’s legal team, helping in their shamefully long fight for justice.

Kenneth Noye

Kenneth Noye, played by Jack Lowden in The Gold, was acquitted of the murder of undercover police officer John Fordham, but was convicted for committing another murder after his release from prison.

After serving seven years of his 14-year Brink’s-Mat sentence for conspiracy to handle stolen bullion, freemason Noye was released from prison in 1994. Two years later, he fatally stabbed Stephen Cameron in a road rage attack. (That case was dramatised in the ITV one-off film starring Joanne Froggatt, Danielle Cable: Eyewitness which told the story of Cameron’s girlfriend, who entered witness protection after giving evidence. Alan Decabral, an eyewitness who had refused protection, was fatally shot in 2000.)

After killing Cameron in 1996, Noye went on the run in Spain, from where he was extradited and in 2000, convicted with a life sentence. In 2019, he was released on parole.

Brian Reader

Brian Reader, a lieutenant of Kenneth Noye, was sentenced to nine years for conspiracy to handle stolen bullion from the Brink’s-Mat robbery. That though, was far from his only, or his most famous, conviction. In 2015, Reader masterminded the Hatton Garden heist, in which a gang of six men drilled into safety deposit boxes in the basement of the Hatton Garden Safety Deposit company and stole over £13 million’s worth of jewellery. Reader was convicted, served three years of his sentence, and was released in 2019 at the age of 79, suffering from ill health.