It was after 2am and outside the Atlantis nightclub trouble was brewing.
‘Watch this, it’s going to kick off,’ one lad said to his mate as they waited for a taxi. He was right.
As revellers milled around outside the Bolton club, a fight broke out. Across the road a girl who’d been slapped in the face was hurling racist abuse at a huddle of Asian men.
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Into this drunken chaos stepped Wayne McDonald. Tall and well-built with a shaven head, he was the brother-in-law and enforcer for major league drug smuggler Gerald Deaffern.
As the melee continued around him, McDonald, wearing a scruffy waterproof jacket, was seen rummaging about in the boot of his 5-series BMW. One witness described a ‘wild glare in his eye’.
He then stood up and with his right arm pressed against his jacket strode purposefully towards the club. “As he passed into the crowd I saw him pull his arm out and stick it out as if he was pointing,” a witness would later say.
“I heard four, five bangs that sounded like firecrackers going off. I saw a lad in an orange shirt fall to the floor.”
Apparently enraged by one of his pals being bested in a punch-up, McDonald had raked the crowd of clubbers with bullets from a .22 semi-automatic handgun. One victim, then just a teenager, was shot through his right hand, left wrist and right hip.
Another was hit in the side and his left forearm while one bullet shattered a finger. Both were lucky to survive.
In the aftermath, McDonald fled on foot with a friend. But the professional criminal had made an amateur mistake.
In his rage he’d locked his keys in the boot of the BMW after reaching for his gun. His mate, later jailed for two years for assisting an offender, returned with a spare set of keys, but was captured on CCTV and arrested at 3.20am as he went to unlock the car.
A search of the car revealed a Czech Ceska pistol wrapped in a sock, 92 rounds of bullets and a bag of amphetamines. Police also found an Asda carrier containing a tissue. At the time it did not have enough material to get a DNA sample.
As a huge police investigation got underway, on the morning of November 24, 2000 McDonald left his home in Didsbury and vanished. For the next seven years rumours swirled as to his whereabouts.
Some said he’d fled to Amsterdam, others that he was hiding out just down the road in Stockport. But then on New Year’s Eve 2007 he dramatically reappeared.
As staff at the Hospital Inn in Bamber Bridge, near Preston, arrived for one of their busiest shifts of the year, McDonald and an accomplice kicked in the back doors. Wearing balaclavas and armed with pistols, they were expecting to get away with £12,000.
But by the time they’d burst in the police had already been called. Nevertheless the pair pistol-whipped the landlord, before tying him and his wife up in the bathroom.
With the sound of sirens drawing nearer the robbers fled. But outside they bumped into one of the first cops on the scene, a dog handler on her first day on the job. McDonald blasted her in the leg and fled.
But he knew the game was up. Later that day he handed himself in at a police station with the words ‘I just shot one of your women’.
In April 2009, following a trial in Preston, McDonald was found guilty of wounding with intent to resist arrest, robbery and firearms offences, but was cleared of attempted murder. He was jailed for life, a sentence later reduced to an indeterminate length for the public protection on appeal.
His accomplice was convicted of wounding and was also given an indeterminate jail term. As McDonald began his sentence, officers took another look at the Atlantis shooting.
By now forensics technology had advanced significantly. And that meant the DNA found on the tissue after the Atlantis shooting could be linked to McDonald.
In December 2010 – a decade after the shooting – he went on trial at Manchester Crown Court accused of firearms offences and two counts of attempted murder.
The then 49-year-old declined to give evidence in his own defence, claiming through his barrister to have been the victim of an ‘old fashioned fit-up like Life On Mars’. The jury disagreed and found him guilty.
McDonald refused to come out of his cell for sentencing. In his absence Judge Andrew Gilbart QC jailed him for life and warned it was unlikely he would be released ‘until he is an elderly man, if at all’.
“He is, in my judgement, a ruthless, professional criminal who regards firearms as one of the tools of his trade,” the judge said. “On this occasion he resorted to using them to get his own way even though that meant firing eight rounds into a perfectly innocent group of people.
“He has shown not a glimmer of remorse for the damage done to his innocent victims. These offences were crimes of the utmost gravity, carried out with a callous disregard for the safety or lives of others.
“I’m convinced that the defendant presents a very real danger to the public.”
