Crime Immemorial

On New Year’s Eve of 1987, nineteen-year-old Trevor Monerville was on his way to visit his aunts when he mysteriously went missing. The following day, his family found out through the grapevine that he may have been taken to the police station in Stoke Newington, London, England, and they went there to find him. At first, police denied he had been brought there, but soon enough, the truth about a troubling scenario came to the fore.

It turned out that on New Year’s Eve, officers had indeed picked Trevor up in Hackney, and then took him to the police station. On New Year’s Day, he was transferred to Brixton Prison, where administrators noted that he was injured. Trevor was then taken to a nearby hospital and found to have a blood clot in his brain that needed immediate surgery, which was duly performed, though he was left with permanent brain damage.

Friends and family suspected that the Stoke Newington police had assaulted Trevor. Still, law enforcement vehemently denied this, claiming that they had found Trevor already beaten in a car in Hackney.

Despite these denials, Trevor’s family attempted to bring police brutality charges against the Stoke Newington officers, but their case fell apart in 1989. It was later discovered that representatives of the police force had infiltrated the Monerville family’s justice campaign in order to spy on them.

Further, Trevor Monerville was arrested three times in 1989 and 1990, both for obstruction and assault, but was acquitted at trial each time. Trevor’s family was convinced that the police were attempting to railroad him following their police brutality claims. They also believed that an undercover officer named Mark Jenner was meeting with Trevor and plying him with alcohol in order to arrest him for drunk driving.

Whether this was the case or not, it is sadly true that Trevor Monerville was ultimately stabbed to death in the street in Stoke Newington by five assailants on March 19th, 1994. Although it doesn’t appear that the Monerville family has ever directly implicated the police in his murder, they have stated that their failure to solve the crime is a result of the brutality charges leveled against them in the late 1980s.

Tragically, Trevor’s brother Joseph Burke-Monerville was shot to death, years later in 2013, and this crime is likewise unsolved. Authorities hypothesized that the shooting was a case of mistaken identity. Even more horrifically, his other brother David was also murdered in north London in 2019, though his three killers were eventually caught and convicted.

It is not known whether there is any connection between the murders of the three Monerville brothers, or whether Stoke Newington police were involved in any capacity.