Two brothers involved in the murders of Max Dixon and Mason Rist made rap music videos threatening to stab rivals from a different area just months before the attack, and one of the killers even made a video boasting about the murders afterwards, Bristol Live can reveal.
The videos of drill rap tracks were written and performed by brothers Bailey and Kodi Wescott as part of a ‘postcode rivalry’ in South Bristol that was claimed to be a key motivation for the double murders of Max and Mason that shocked the nation in January this year. The videos are still up online, and include one posted weeks after the murders in which Kodi boasts about ‘chinging’ – slang for killing – the two boys.
The postcode rivalry has been played down by police chiefs. The detective leading the investigation described the rap videos and threats as ‘histrionics’, while earlier this year the police commander for the entire city said that, to him, South Bristol ‘kind of exists in itself’, and the presence of a serious rivalry between some people in Hartcliffe and Knowle was something that ‘hadn’t even occurred to me’.
Kodi Wescott, now 17, was convicted of the double murder of Max and Mason, alongside three other teenagers and a man, last month. This week, he was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of more than 23 years. When he was sentenced, the judge in the case lifted an order banning his identity from being published.
On Tuesday, his older brother Bailey Wescott was also jailed after he pleaded guilty to two counts of assisting an offender. The judge heard that just minutes after the horrific attack, which saw a gang of four teenagers chase down and fatally stab Max and Mason in Knowle West, Bailey Wescott burned the blood-stained clothes Kodi and another boy had been wearing during the attack.
Max and Mason had nothing to do with any postcode rivalry. The motivation for them being attacked is unclear because the murderers never explained their actions to the police or in court. But what is clear either the two best friends were targeted in a case of mistaken identity, because the killers thought they were other young men responsible for attacking the Wescott home in Hartcliffe, or simply because they were the first teenagers the group came across as they drove around Knowle West looking for victims.
Bristol Live can reveal the chilling context to the murders for the first time: A series of drill rap videos created by Bailey Wescott, now 23, under the moniker ‘G-boy’, and his younger brother Kodi, who rapped under the name YGB, which is short for ‘Young G-boy’.
Some of the videos have had tens of thousands of views on YouTube and Instagram, which are still up online, and in their content and in the comments sections, they lift the lid on the proclaimed postcode rivalry between two gangs – one based in Hartcliffe and the other based in Knowle West.
Some of the videos posted after the murders include comments from fans and supporters that the brothers and the others involved ‘should be freed’. Many feature Bailey and Kodi Wescott rapping with a large group of young people behind them. The two were prominent members of a loose gang called the 13s – they identify themselves with the BS13 postcode for Hartcliffe and Withywood – while another gang based around Knowle is known as ‘the 4s’ because of the BS4 postcode there.
One track was uploaded to YouTube and Instagram and featured the Wescott brothers in July 2023, seven months before the murder. It was a video filmed in the underpass under Hengrove Way which connects Hartcliffe to the Imperial Retail Park. Masked teenagers in a large group gave the ‘1-3’ sign with their fingers, while others did wheelspins on motorbikes.
The lyrics referred to the rivalry between the 13s and the 4s. Those present, including Kodi Wescott, waved blue bandanas and wore blue tracksuits, while referring to ‘the 4s’ association with the colour red. “On the 4’s block we lurk and attack,” Bailey Wescott rapped. “Anything red gets shot or stabbed.”
Another video, which was uploaded in March this year – seven weeks after the murders – contains a track called ‘Inhale’ with Kodi Wescott rapping about ‘chinging’ – slang for killing – and that a boy was ‘sitting in blood’, and ‘just ran out of luck’. It is not clear when this track and video were recorded, but it is possible it was recorded in the days following the murders, before Kodi Wescott was arrested by police.
The existence of the videos, and the fact many of them are still up online and attracting supportive comments – is adding extra trauma and upset to the families of Max Dixon and Mason Rist.
Mason’s sister Chloe told Bristol Live that the videos are ‘sickening’ and showed that those involved in the murders always intended to kill someone that night. She said the context cast doubt on both brothers’ expressions of regret and remorse for the murders.
“This shows how scary gang culture is and how postcode rivalry has to stop. It ends up getting the most innocent kids,” she added.
After the sentencing Leanne Ekland, the mother of Max Dixon, referred to the ‘postcode rivalries’ in a statement issued through the police, pointing out that Max and Mason were not involved at all in the feud. “These boys are not a postcode,” she said. “They are two beautiful, innocent boys with their whole lives ahead of them. They were sadly taken for no reason whatsoever.”
The existence and content of the videos – even the one that was apparently filmed afterwards – were not shown to the jury that eventually convicted Kodi Wescott of two counts of murder. The jury had heard what triggered the murders was an attack on the Wescott’s family home in Hartcliffe around an hour earlier that Saturday evening at the end of January. Three masked teens wielding machetes had thrown rocks and bricks to smash every window at the front of the house, and within minutes, Bailey Wescott blamed ‘Westers’ – people from Knowle West – in text messages to family and friends.
What was described in court as a ‘revenge mission’ was organised. That saw Kodi, Riley Tolliver, 18, and two younger teenagers who still can’t be named, get into a car driven by Antony Snook, 45, from Hartcliffe to Knowle West. The four youngsters brutally attacked the first teenagers they saw. Max Dixon and Mason Rist were completely innocent, and not part of any postcode rivalry between Hartcliffe and Knowle West. The two best friends liked football and PlayStation, and had only popped out seconds earlier to get a takeaway.
To date, no one has been arrested or charged with the attack on the house in Hartcliffe. The man in charge of the double murder investigation said the police had used the term ‘postcode rivalry’ in the aftermath of the attack, but made it clear there was ‘no talk of gangs’, even when investigating the Wescott brothers and the group that carried out the double murder.
The postcode rivalry
Deadly rivalries between groups in Bristol that identify themselves by their postcodes has been escalating for a number of years. In inner city and east Bristol, the rivalry between one gang that identifies with the BS16 postcode for Fishponds and Hillfields and another called the ‘2-4s’ that identifies with the BS2 postcode of St Pauls and St Judes has been linked to a number of murders of teenagers and young men in recent years.
In South Bristol, the loose and informal rivalry between Knowle West and Hartcliffe is said by many locals to go back decades – long before rap music, YouTube, Instagram and knife culture – and involve very occasional punch-ups rather than fatal stabbings.
It even features in an almost light-hearted way in the 2022 feature film The Fence, where the plot is set in the 1980s and revolves around a young man from Hartcliffe whose bike is stolen by a thief from Knowle West.
But there are claims the rivalry can be deadly serious. In 2019, the killing of Michael Lee Rice, 20, from Knowle West, was linked in court to the rivalry. A 16-year-old from Hartcliffe was jailed after admitting Michael’s manslaughter – he had placed a YoBike in the path of Michael as he rode a stolen motorbike around outside the Fulford pub in Hartcliffe, causing a fatal crash for the young rider.
And a major incident, which saw shots fired at a gang armed with machetes in the streets on the northern side of Hartcliffe in March 2022, was attributed locally to the rivalry.
In 2021 and 2022, when the previous Labour council administration was planning what will soon become the £11 million youth facility called the 224 South Bristol Youth Zone, the then council leaders making the decisions, including Mayor Marvin Rees and Deputy Mayor Asher Craig specifically said the site for the new facility – next to the Hartcliffe Way roundabout – had been chosen because it is an area between Knowle West and Hartcliffe, and it is hoped it will play a big part in bringing together the next generation of young people from different areas.
In November 2022, Bristol Live reported on a new initiative between youth work organisations in the two areas to bring young people from Knowle and Hartcliffe together with residential trips away, out of South Bristol.
During the court case, the ‘postcode rivalry’ was mentioned regularly as the prosecution gave their evidence – explaining to the jury why the response of the Wescott brothers and their friends was to drive from Hartcliffe to Knowle West ‘armed to the teeth’ and ‘sharking’ for someone to attack. It was also highlighted as a point of mitigation by the barrister for one of the teenage murderers. Anna Vigars KC, representing the 16-year-old who can’t be named, told Mrs Justice May that he was ‘born into’ the rivalry.
“As well as what was going on within his home, he has faced community tensions from before an age of knowing better,” she said. “Rivalries between areas of Bristol which he was born into. He was simply, by virtue of where he was born, an inheritor of some appalling division and rivalry between our city,” she added.
In February this year, a month after the murders of Max and Mason in Knowle West, and following more stabbings linked to the continuing rivalry between the two gangs in east Bristol, Supt Mark Runacres, the police commander for Bristol, played down the postcode rivalry in South Bristol.
Speaking at a city council committee meeting, where the subject was knife crime and postcode rivalries, his focus was mainly on the feud between the 16s and the 2-4s in east Bristol. Supt Runacres said while the National Crime Agency had identified two rival gangs operating in east Bristol, he wasn’t even aware of any kind of rivalry in South Bristol, and it hadn’t occurred to him it existed.
“There’s recently been some work we’ve done with the National Crime Agency. People sometimes shy away from using the word ‘gangs’, but we have two urban street gangs in Bristol that have been confirmed by the National Crime Agency,” he added.
Pressed further on the issues in South Bristol, he added that it wasn’t something he was aware of. “In the days that immediately followed that incident, there were lots of rumours and speculation as to whether it was postcode-related conflict. I’m not from South Bristol, so for me South Bristol kind of exists in itself. The fact that there’s a rivalry for some between Knowle West and Hartcliffe, isn’t something that would have occurred to me previously.
“To have pride in where you live and that be part of your identity, that’s something I do understand. To go from that to perpetrating an offence of the nature of the offence that was perpetrated in Knowle West, that’s a huge leap. That’s what we don’t fully understand and is subject to the investigation.
“Feeling proud about where you live and having a perceived rivalry with somebody from another area is one thing. But going and committing a heinous crime is very much another thing. So we need to understand if there’s more that sits around what motivated the offenders to do what they did,” he added.
The man who led the police investigation into the double murders of Max and Mason also played down the influence of postcode rivalry. In an interview with Bristol Live before the convictions, Det Supt Gary Haskins said: “We’ve used ‘postcode rivalry’, and I’ll just put that into some context. There’s no talk of gangs in this investigation, none whatsoever. There are some histrionics around postcode rivalry.
“They (the group from Hartcliffe) went to Knowle because, in their opinion, the attack on that address was perpetrated by offenders from Knowle. They didn’t know it wasn’t, they didn’t know it was. We still don’t know the answer to that as an organisation,” he added.
“It’s not a gang warfare, and I won’t have it said that that’s the case,” added Det Supt Haskins, who was keen to point out that Max and Mason themselves had nothing to do with what he called the ‘histrionics’ of the rivalry. “In this instance, those boys were innocent children. They’re nothing to do with any of the histrionics,” he added.
Det Supt Haskins questioned whether some of the previous incidents and crimes were too easily attributed to the rivalry. “Because they happen in Knowle and were committed by people from Hartcliffe, and vice-versa, that doesn’t make it gang rivalry does it? I’ve policed this city for nearly 30 years. Any city of this magnitude that is this vibrant, you could say there’s alliances on both sides. This isn’t the case in this investigation. Yes, you have the histrionics, but we’ve had that across the city, that doesn’t make it gang rivalry,” he said, adding that the added factor of drill rap videos was not just a Bristol thing. “That’s an element for the country, that’s society – as is knife crime. Knife crime doesn’t just sit in Bristol, knife crime is around the country, as is drill music and the consequences of that,” he added.
Det Supt Haskins said it was important to focus on the response following the two murders, which has seen no reprisals and both communities trying to come together to end the rivalry among a minority of their young people.
“Let’s focus on the positive response of the community,” said Dept Supt Haskins. “There’s been no post-code rivalry in that response because it’s been exceptional across the city, across the country.”