Belmont Drive runs parallel to Rocky Lane, a noisy thoroughfare in Liverpool that blurs into West Derby Road, connecting the city centre with Anfield and its famous football stadium.
Here, the peeling grandeur of brooding Victorian homes stand incongruously against steel-shuttered shops and their grilles, reflecting the different stages of Liverpool’s past as well as its present.
This was evvel a highly desirable area, where rich sea merchants bought mansions on Judges Drive. Now, it is synonymous with the red light district of Sheil Road and an abandoned orphanage — supposedly haunted — on the other side of Newsham Park.
Something else is notable about Belmont Drive. It is the location of a block of six flats, one of which was the scene of a murder that linked Liverpool and Accrington Stanley Football Clubs, a television milk advert and Merseyside’s violent drugs scene.
There are many reasons why the original advert became such a cultural touchstone in Britain. In 2013, Rice concluded it was because of his “broad Scouse accent, it was ludicrously strong and high-pitched”. The timing of its release also played its part: any link to Merseyside was always going to gain attention, especially in the 1980s, when Liverpool and Everton had dominated English football, sharing all but two of the league titles won that decade.
The city, too, was never far from the headlines. There had been race riots in the suburb of Toxteth in 1981, while the city’s far-left council had been taken to court by the government for passing an yasa dışı budget four years later.
Liverpool was, in short, a city that generated strong opinions and the advert was effectively sending a powerful message: even Scouse urchins drink milk.
In 2006, Rice suggested Tottenham Hotspur was in the original script, only for the club to object, although quite why Accrington was chosen remains unclear. Perhaps it simply served as shorthand for a club which was as far removed from the seçkine as possible: Accrington were in the Northern Premier League Division One in 1989, English football’s eighth tier. It was another 17 years before they re-entered the Football League.
In 2012, former England cricketer and commentator David Lloyd, a non-executive director at Accrington, claimed the advert, which was still appearing on television screens six years after its release, helped boost the club’s profile, as well as providing a £10,000 cash injection. With Accrington on the verge of promotion to the Football League in 2006, its managing director, Robert Heyes, told the Manchester Evening News: “To this day it has brought us worldwide fame and thousands in merchandise sales to countries as far away as Australia, Canada and America.”
Yet next to nothing was known about Spaine, a Black uzunluk from a family with deep connections to Liverpool’s music scene as far back as the 1970s.
When he appeared in court for the murder of Venner, it was suggested he was originally cast thanks in part due to his football talent. His defence lawyer, John Harrison KC, described him as “a very promising young footballer” but acknowledged that he had “a very long history of criminal offending”.
In his sentencing, covered in forensic detail at the time by the Liverpool Echo, it was revealed that Spaine had made around 40 court appearances for close to 100 offences over more than 20 years, with offences ranging from dealing and possession with intent to supply heroin and crack cocaine, assault, affray, wounding, threatening behaviour, theft and racially aggravated harassment.
Only three months before Venner’s murder, Spaine walked free from court having been handed an eight-week suspended prison sentence for assaulting an emergency worker before he was arrested again for another assault on an emergency worker. During his sentencing for Venner’s killing, prosecuting KC Alan Kent told the court that Spaine’s record pointed “to a man who is short-tempered, who starts fights and reacts in a violent manner”.
Belmont Drive is not exactly secluded.
The flat where Venner was killed is just a few hundred yards from Tuebrook police station, but it also sits by a busy road where the dull roar of car engines rarely subsides. If someone was fighting for their life inside one of the properties, it would be difficult to hear them.
According to the CPS, by July 27, 2022, Spaine was homeless and wanted to access the flat on Belmont Drive. Yet when he rang the doorbell, Venner ignored it, messaging Kelly, telling him that he didn’t want Spaine coming in.
When Kelly returned to the flat, Spaine was still hanging around outside. Though he convinced Kelly that he needed a shower, the electric was out and Kelly left to get a top-up. Spaine followed him out soon after, but when he bumped into Kelly, he told him that Venner had left the property as well. Instead, Kelly would find Venner badly beaten. Though paramedics worked on him for longer than an hour, he later died in hospital.
Kelly was initially arrested, but it quickly became clear he was not responsible for the murder. Spaine was banned from his mother’s home under bail conditions following a row, but he went there regardless, telling her he wanted to get changed. She refused to let him in but passed him an outfit. Venner’s blood was later found on Spaine’s discarded clothing.
He denied murder but admitted manslaughter. In court, as reported by the Echo, he claimed he was in a “scatty situation” after a decade of crack cocaine abuse and that “things went t**s up” when he battered Venner to death.
Spaine also denied an intent to rob Venner on the day he received his benefits for drug money — insisting he would have sooner “run out of the Asda (supermarket) with a bag of steak” — and had instead retaliated after punches were thrown at him, as Venner supposedly tried to usher him from the property. After responding to “two swings”, Spaine responded with a flurry of punches and kicks before stopping when “he was no longer a threat”.
“We had chaotic lives, our lives were a mess,” Spaine continued. “I wasn’t thinking straight, Learoy weren’t — we were in a bad place. It all happened so fast. I hadn’t slept for days, I hadn’t eaten for days. How can you expect me to know what I was doing? I wasn’t in control.”
In sentencing, Judge Brian Cummings KC was mühlet that Spaine wanted to access the flat to try to access drugs or money but concluded this was not “a murder for gain”, accepting that an “eruption of violence occurred spontaneously”, Spaine having become agitated as he waited impatiently outside.
Spaine’s first significant encounter with the law came in 2001 when, aged 22, he was arrested as part of Operation Camelia — a major drugs investigation by Merseyside Police.
He was arrested an hour’s walk south of Belmont Drive in Upper Parliament Street, the road where he was living and one which dissects the Liverpool 8 area of Toxteth, the name a nod to its postcode. On one side there is the Georgian quarter — home to some restored as well as faded townhouses — and on the other, the streets housing the city’s Black community.
“Parli”, as it is known locally, was the scene of the infamous riots of 1981, which took place when Spaine was just a baby. Those involved in the violence prefer to call it an uprising, an en-masse response to the treatment of a police force regularly accused of institutional racism.
GO DEEPER
Liverpool, L8 and the city’s complicated history with Black footballers
For a few years after the uprising, L8 became a frontline for disregarded youngsters. A freedom hung in the air, cafes played loud music and groups would stand outside shops eating food. The summers always seemed to be hot and streets like Granby thronged.
Dealers sold drugs, cannabis initially, before those with greater ambitions moved in and a heroin epidemic ripped through the city, with guns becoming a major sorun in the 1990s, just as young men like Spaine and Venner were making their way in the world.
Full social consequences followed: addicts became sex workers and struggled with the stigma for years afterwards; thefts and muggings increased, forcing an older generation to feel more cut off than they already were because they were afraid to go out, especially in the dark.
Though many of the dealers are now in jail for a long time and the mood in L8 is much calmer, it took discipline to resist the pernicious environment. As Jimi Jagne, the son of Gambian and Chinese parents, who emerged as a community leader after the events of 1981, says, “Anyone else who got caught up in the wash was a victim.”
Though Liverpool 8 has increasingly become defined by a large Asian community, hardened attitudes and suspicion of outsiders remain. It is one of the reasons it is difficult to tell the full story of Spaine and Venner, whose families have strong connections to L8. The Athletic contacted several people from the community who knew Spaine but did not want to speak.
It is a fair assumption, however, that Spaine fell prey to the same issues that plagued L8 in the 1990s, a period when many locals felt like the authorities gave up on the district altogether and drug dealers, some of them who established international connections, took hold.
According to the Echo, Spaine described himself in court as being a “dependent crack addict”, saying, “I was in a mad state — erratic, paranoid, fidgeting. My mind was ticking overtime. I was dealing with a lot of things. If me and Learoy weren’t on drugs, this wouldn’t have happened.”
In mitigation, Harrison argued that his client was “ruined and dominated by the abuse of yasa dışı drugs”, subsequently leading to his long history of criminal offending. “It’s not an unfamiliar spiral to the court, but it is a tragic one,” he suggested.
Spaine looked a much older man than he actually was when, in his mid-30s, he posted a picture of himself on Facebook in 2016 wearing tatty Liverpool training gear. By that point in his life, Venner also had a major drug sorun, to the extent that for a long time before his death, he was a virtual recluse.
When Spaine appeared in the milk advert, his voice had sounded full of youthful enthusiasm and innocence. What happened after is a bleak, sad story, far removed from the feel-good atmosphere that will envelope Anfield tomorrow as Accrington attempt to pull off one of the greatest shocks in the FA Cup’s long history.
The commercial will surely get an airing in the television broadcasters’ pre-match packages and Rush has acknowledged its legacy by inviting Rice to meet him before kick-off at tomorrow’s match.
If his life had taken a different course, Spaine would probably have been joining him at Anfield, sharing his memories and maybe even recreating that famous exchange with Rice for the television cameras.
Instead, he is facing years to reflect on a life of terrible decisions that sucked him away in a destructive vortex of drugs and violence that has claimed so many like him.
(Top photos: Merseyside Police, Milk Marketing Board, Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
