Until breaking his silence last year, Gordon Goody was known as the quiet man of the Great Train Robbery. Now, what secrets he may have held about the notorious 1963 heist will never be revealed after the 86-year-old passed away on Friday in the Spanish village he came to call home.
For 50 years, Goody remain tight-lipped over the crime that captured the public’s imagination. He modestly tended to his bar in the whitewashed streets of Mojácar while the former gang leader Bruce Reynolds courted the media and accomplice Ronnie Biggs grabbed headlines with his globetrotting efforts to evade capture.
But in 2014 Goody finally decided to illuminate some – if not all – of the dark holes in the story of what has been dubbed the crime of the century.
Goody and Reynolds – to whom Goody stood as deputy in London’s South West gang – plotted the robbery, which saw 15 men halt the Glasgow to Euston overnight mail train on 8 August 1963.
The diesel locomotive was stopped as it passed through the Buckinghamshire countryside close to Cheddington and driven a mile and a half to Bridego bridge, where the gang unloaded £2,631,684 in used notes, the equivalent of around £46m today.
During the audacious raid, the train’s driver Jack Mills was hit over the head with an iron bar and suffered serious injuries. He recovered, and died in 1970 aged 64 from an illness unrelated to the robbery. However, his family maintained that he was traumatised by the attack.
Goody, who was 34 at the time, was caught and sentenced to 35 years but served only 12 after a change in the law.
In a book and documentary released two years ago, he claimed to reveal one of the great mysteries surrounding the robbery: who was the insider previously referred to as the Ulsterman who taught the gang how to target the train?
Goody claimed it was Patrick McKenna, then a 43-year-old postal worker in north London, who told them how a post train operated. According to Goody, it was McKenna who told the gang to change the original robbery date from the 7th because the next day’s train would be carrying more cash.
But Goody was less forthcoming about another contested and more grave issue: who dealt the grisly blow to Mills? Gang member James Hussey made a deathbed confession in 2012, claiming it was he who struck the train driver. Goody insisted this was not true but stopped short of revealing the identity of the assailant.
As for perhaps his most famous accomplice, Biggs, who spent more than 30 years on the run before he finally returned to Britain in 2001 to face arrest, Goody was less than flattering. “Biggsy was an arsehole,” he told the Guardian in 2014. “I didn’t like him, no one did.”
Biggs’s son Michael said: “It is always sad to know someone’s passed away and my thoughts are with his family at the moment, and I wish his family all the best. It’s the end of an era. Now it’s all down to the history books.”
Goody was released from prison in 1975 and four years later made his way to Spain, where he lived out his life in the Almerian countryside. There at least, it appears, he shook off his criminal past and settled into the community.
Announcing Goody’s death, a spokesman for the Mojacar town hall said: “All who knew him were struck by his friendliness, his love for his friends and family and the many pets he rescued from the street. He was a complete gentleman, far removed from the image that those who didn’t know him might have had from those difficult years that marked a large part of his life. We will always remember his smile and his big heart that was always open to those around him.”