At about half past twelve on Wednesday, August 19, 1987, Susan Godfrey, thirty-five, a nurse from Burghfield Common near Reading, was packing up a picnic in Savernake Forest in Wiltshire with her two children, Hannah, four, and James, two, when a man dressed in black walked up with a pistol. She strapped the children into her car, told them she would be back soon, and was marched seventy-five yards into the trees and shot thirteen times in the back. A woman walking in the forest found the children, who told her a man in black had killed their mummy.
Michael Robert Ryan, twenty-seven, was born on May 18, 1960, at Savernake Hospital in Marlborough, the only child of Alfred Ryan, a local-government building inspector who died of cancer in 1985, and Dorothy Ryan, a school dinner lady and later a hotel waitress. He went to John O'Gaunt School in Hungerford and to Newbury College, dropped out, and in 1987 held a laboring job on a council scheme for three months before going back on benefits. He had no criminal record and no medical history. He held a shotgun certificate from 1978 and a firearm certificate from December 1986, varied in July 1987 to cover two semi-automatic rifles, and by August he lawfully owned eight guns.
From the forest he drove to the Golden Arrow service station near Froxfield, filled his car and a gas can, and fired at the cashier; the gun failed. At about 12:45 he was home at 4 South View in Hungerford. He shot the family's two dogs, set the house on fire with the gasoline, and walked out armed with a Type 56 semi-automatic rifle, an M1 carbine and a Beretta, wearing a flak jacket. On South View he killed his neighbors Roland and Sheila Mason and wounded a fourteen-year-old girl and Marjorie Jackson. On the path to the common he killed Kenneth Clements, fifty-one, who was out walking his dog with his family. Back on South View he shot PC Roger Brereton, one of the first, unarmed officers to arrive, and at 12:58 killed him in his patrol car as he radioed that there was a gunman. He shot George White, driving home Marjorie Jackson's husband, Ivor, who survived by playing dead, and killed Abdur Khan, eighty-four, in his garden. His mother, Dorothy, returning from errands, shouted at him to stop, and he shot her four times.
Near the War Memorial Recreation Ground he killed Francis Butler, twenty-six. On Bulpit Lane he killed Marcus Barnard, a taxi driver, in his cab. On Priory Avenue he killed Douglas Wainwright, who with his wife Kathleen had been diverted by police roadblocks onto his route, and Eric Vardy in a passing van. On Priory Road he fatally wounded Sandra Hill, twenty-two, at the wheel of her car, forced his way into a house and shot Jack Gibbs, sixty-six, and his wife Myrtle, sixty-two, and fired into a car carrying Ian Playle, thirty-four, his wife and two children, hitting Playle in the neck. Myrtle Gibbs and Ian Playle died two days later. Fifteen people were wounded. The town's police that day were one sergeant and a handful of constables; the force's firearms unit was training forty miles away in Oxfordshire and was not assembled until 2:20, and the 999 system and the Newbury telephone exchange were overwhelmed.
At about 1:52 Ryan went into John O'Gaunt School, closed for the summer. Armed police surrounded it by four o'clock. He talked with a police sergeant, asked about his mother, called her death a mistake, and said he wished he had stayed in bed. At 6:52 there was a single shot, and when officers broke into the barricaded room at 8:10 they found him dead of a wound to the right temple. No motive was ever established.
The inquest ended on September 29, 1987, and its jury recommended that semi-automatic weapons should not generally be available and that no one should be allowed to own unlimited arms and ammunition. The report the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, commissioned from Chief Constable Colin Smith found the police understaffed and the communications overwhelmed, and that all of Ryan's guns had been lawfully licensed. The Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988 banned semi-automatic center-fire rifles and restricted shotguns holding more than three cartridges, and an amnesty collected 48,000 firearms. PC Brereton was awarded the Queen's Commendation for Brave Conduct. In Hungerford itself most people call it the tragedy.