The murder of Eddie Kinuthia was a challenge to solve
15:56, 20 Nov 2025Updated 16:00, 20 Nov 2025
The detective who led the search for justice for murdered Eddie Kinuthia has spoken about the challenge of trying to piece together the events of the night he died, and the logistical work that went into proving who was responsible for his brutal murder. Eddie was just 19, a popular and well-known young man in St Pauls, where he grew up.
He lived just round the corner from the Grosvenor Triangle park and on the evening of Friday, July 21, 2023, along with many of his friends, he was attending a Nine-Night event, a celebration of the life of a member of the St Pauls community who had recently passed.
Just before 11pm, he was outside getting some air when he was approached by two men on a high-powered Sur-Ron e-bike. One of them got off, and stabbed Eddie five times, before calmly getting back on and riding off again. Eddie was fatally wounded. He managed to run back towards the community centre where he collapsed. People streamed out of the event, and there was understandably panic and fear – had he been shot? Who had done this? The community in St Pauls suddenly felt under attack.
There were frantic efforts to save Eddie’s life. His mum Irene, who was at home just around the corner, suddenly heard an urgent banging on her door, and her world turned upside down when she heard her son had been attacked. A year later, she told Bristol Live that the look on Eddie’s face when he saw her – a look of shock and panic that wasn’t reassured by her arriving – is ‘seared into my soul’.
Left – Eddie King Muthemba Kinuthia and his mum Irene. Right – Eddie’s aunt Jade Morris (left) and Irene Muthemba, a year after Eddie’s murder(Image: Family handout/Avon and Somerset police)
They waited for what felt like too long for paramedics to arrive. Bristol Live later established that the first ambulance crews on the scene were held back by police because some of the panicked 999 calls they’d received mentioned that they thought Eddie had been shot, so there could be a gun still near or at a scene that paramedics were being sent into.
That delay was five minutes – for those there it felt like five months. Eddie was eventually reached by the first paramedic 12 minutes after the first 999 call, which connected with the emergency services just four seconds before 11pm.
READ MORE: ‘The look on his face is seared into my soul’ says mum of murdered Eddie, a year after his deathREAD MORE: Eddie Kinuthia’s alleged killers ‘motivated by Bristol’s postcode rivalry’ jury told
In truth, Eddie’s five stab wounds were fatal. He was rushed to hospital but was pronounced dead as Friday night became Saturday morning, leaving a family and a community grieving.
The police investigation began immediately. Eddie had been in and out of home that night. The Nine-Night event saw music played outside the St Pauls Learning Centre and the open space on Grosvenor Road nearby. But CCTV from the scene revealed the attack, distantly across the park, and the presence of two men on the motorbike-style e-bike. They arrived, dressed in black, with their faces masked, attacked Eddie and disappeared into the Bristol night as mysteriously as they arrived.
There wasn’t much for the police to go on, but the e-bike itself was the key. It was quite distinctive, worth thousands of pounds, and became the focal point for the investigation.
CCTV images tracing the journey of a high-powered e-bike from Easton to St Pauls and back again on the night of the murder of Eddie Kinuthia, 19, in St Pauls. The CCTV evidence was key to the case.(Image: Avon and Somerset police)
Police figured fairly swiftly that this was a revenge attack. Eddie didn’t have any enemies in St Pauls. But he was a well-known figure in the community in that area. And St Pauls is the territory of a group calling themselves the 2-4s. Eddie wasn’t a member of the 2-4s, but was friends with some who are.
Their sworn enemies are the 1-6s, a different group of mainly young men based around areas further east in Fishponds, Eastville and Hillfields. So police immediately suspected that this attack on Eddie was part of a bigger picture of the ongoing conflict between the two rival groups.
The key priority was to trace the bike. Det Chief Insp Mark Almond was the man in charge, and said it was a painstaking task.
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“This has been a really challenging case. It’s probably been the most difficult case I’ve been involved in,” he said. “It’s taken us over two years to get to where we are today, and get the convictions that we have. There have been many reasons for that. It’s been a really difficult case where we’ve spent an awful lot of time following a bike across Bristol city and tracking that bike using CCTV.
“There has also been an awful lot of work that has gone into arresting suspects, looking at phones and seeing the connections between those phones and how they work with the CCTV as well,” he explained.
Hundreds of CCTV cameras were identified, and their footage secured and then studied. It took thousands of hours, but gradually, the police were able to trace the bike’s journey away from the scene. Police established that the bike had been ridden from the murder scene to the back yard of a house in Easton, where Remi Hitchcock lived. Mr Hitchcock was found not guilty of assisting offender during the trial at Bristol Crown Court.
Through the same process but in reverse, the bike was tracked backwards in real time on CCTV and police found it had been earlier taken from that same backyard. Hitchcock wasn’t riding it, however – he was in his home all night.
Zachariah Talbert Young (left) and Paul Elijah Hayden (right).(Image: Avon and Somerset Police)
Police also focussed on another man, with allegations that Paul Hayden had been the second person on the bike.
He was charged and put on trial, but as the prosecution closed its case, the judge told the jury that they had not sufficiently linked Mr Hayden to the e-bike and its murderous journey, so the jury were ordered to find Hayden, a 22-year-old, not guilty of Eddie’s murder.
Within days of the murder, police were onto Talbert-Young. They went around his house to arrest him, but he’d fled, spending weeks in Birmingham, then further north. He was eventually arrested trying to board an overnight ferry in Liverpool bound for Belfast, with hundreds of pounds – and Euros – in cash on him.
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Both Talbert-Young and Hayden were among many arrested, but for months running into years, the police didn’t ever charge them. They were arrested and released as the police continued to find more evidence.
Then, in February 2024, there was another stabbing. A former drug dealer called Nathan Williams was stabbed and left for dead with multiple wounds on February 2, 2024 close to the Lawrence Hill roundabout, and again the police focussed on Zachariah Talbert-Young and Paul Hayden.
DCI Mark Almond from Avon and Somerset police(Image: Bristol Post)
Getting witnesses and people with knowledge of the crimes was a challenge. “Obviously on the engagement side of things, we have worked hard to increase trust and confidence in some of the witnesses involved, that has taken some time but it has led to people coming forward and giving us the information that we need to get us to where we are today,” said DCI Almond.
And that led to the jury, today (Thursday, November 20) finding Zachariah Talbert-Young guilty of the murder of Eddie Kinuthia, and both Talbert-Young and Paul Hayden guilty of the attempted murder of Nathan Williams. The pair will be sentenced on Tuesday, November 25.
