The man who drove four armed teenagers to murder best friends Max Dixon and Mason Rist has been jailed for life and won’t be eligible for parole for more than 37 years.
Antony Snook, who was convicted of the double murder by a jury on Friday, will be past his 82nd birthday before he can ask the parole board, after the judge in the case told him he was the only adult involved in the horrific double murder and had ‘multiple opportunities to stop this madness’.
But the one-legged landscape gardener was ‘so weak and cowardly’ that when he was asked to drive the four armed teenagers from Hartcliffe into Knowle West that night on a revenge mission, he agreed and was ‘wholly responsible’ for 14 minutes of the group hunting around the estate looking for someone to attack.
Mrs Justice May told Antony Snook that if she thought he had been the one behind the idea to go to Knowle West to seek revenge for an earlier attack on a house in Hartcliffe, he would have been facing a whole-life tariff and would never be released. But, she said, given his age that may well be the case anyway. Jailing him for life, she imposed a minimum tariff of 38 years, minus the ten months he has spent on remand awaiting trial.
The judge said there were serious aggravating factors to add to the consideration of the sentence. “In your case the murders are very seriously aggravated by the following: The fact that the victims were innocent children. One of them, Mason, aged 15, was killed right outside the front door to his home. Mason and Max must have been absolutely terrified at being confronted and chased with such fearsome weapons,” she said.
“The fact that the killers were themselves children whose actions you facilitated. The fact that this was a revenge attack. The fact that the attacks took place on a residential street, in the middle of a neighbourhood community where people were at home,” she added.
“The evidence did not point to your being responsible for the preparation which set the revenge mission in train,” she said. “Nevertheless you were wholly responsible for the preparation and premeditation involved in the 14-minute drive around Knowle leading up to the fateful stop in Ilminster Avenue. I am sure that that is rightly classed as significant, in the circumstances of this case. There is little mitigation to set against this,” she added.
Snook is the first to be sentenced for his part in the double murder of Max and Mason, which shocked the nation back in January. He and four teenagers were convicted on Friday of two counts of murder by a jury after a month-long trial. The four teenagers – Riley Tolliver, 18, and three youths aged 15, 16 and 17 who cannot be named because of their age – will be sentenced in December.