Roughly a month after the murder of Ian Clarke in Liverpool, England, another shooting occurred that was suspected to be linked to the same gangland feud.
Anthony “Tony” Lawler was forty-five years old, and at around six-thirty p.m. on October 11th, 2001, he had taken his mother to Netherley to do some grocery shopping. Without warning, a blue Ford Transit van pulled up as Tony was getting out of his own car near a chip shop. Four men dressed in black jumped out, and one of them was armed.
Tony seemed to know immediately that he was the target, because he took off running. The armed man shot at him several times in the middle of a public street crowded with people. Tony was hit several times in the back, and an eleven-year-old boy was hit once in the leg but recovered from his injuries.
Tony, however, was killed at the scene. When the gunman leaned over Tony’s prone body to ensure he was dead, Tony’s elderly mother began hitting the assailant with her shopping bag. The gunman and his accomplices then climbed back into their van and sped off. The perpetrators’ vehicle was later found burned out in Woolton Park.
As mentioned in the Ian Clarke case, Tony’s younger brother Steven had been murdered in May, and Ian Clarke’s brother Peter was arrested for the crime. The shootings were believed to all be connected to a long-standing feud between two families for control of the nightclub security industry in the Merseyside area.
Despite the formation of a task force called Operation Pivot, meant to explore links between all the shootings, neither the murder of Ian Clarke nor the similar murder of Tony Lawler has been solved as of April 2025.
Crime Immemorial 