Released From Prison — HOURS Later… KILLED Over £20 | The 3AM Stockton Street HUNT

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:01]Lewis Bell spent the last hours of his life running. He ran through residential streets in Stockton on Tees in the early hours of a September morning, banging on the doors of houses, begging strangers to let him in. He was 26 years old. He had a son who had turned 8 years old that very day, and somewhere behind him, three men with weapons were closing the gap. The recordings from nearby properties captured his voice in those final minutes. Please, it's gone in my heart. Nobody opened the door. Lewis Bell died on a street called Hills Drive, killed by a stab wound to the back that punctured his lung. He bled out on the pavement alone.

[00:00:47]The man who helped kill him had been released from prison that same morning.

[00:00:52]That is not a detail that sits comfortably. It is not meant to. And it is where this story begins. Not with a dramatic arrest or a courtroom verdict, but with a prison gate opening at 10:00 in the morning and everything that followed from that single moment.

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[00:01:26]Before we get into the people involved, it helps to understand the place.

[00:01:31]Stockton on Tees is a town in the northeast of England, sitting on the south bank of the river Tease. Like a lot of towns in that part of the country, it built its identity around heavy industry, ship building, engineering, chemicals, and spent the latter half of the 20th century watching that identity slowly come apart as those industries collapsed. What followed was the pattern that repeats itself across post-industrial Britain. high unemployment, social deprivation, and the particular kind of despair that settles in when a place loses the thing that gave it purpose. None of that is an excuse for what happened to Lewis Bell, but it is context. Because the world that produced the men who killed him, the crackouses, the street violence, the casual availability of weapons does not appear out of nowhere. It grows in the gaps that other things leave behind. By 2024, there was a property on Norton Road in Stockton that had become what is commonly known as a crack house. It was not a secret. The property was known to police and the activity around it, the constant movement of people at all hours, the transactions, the disputes was the kind of thing that leaves a trail visible enough to investigators even without a formal operation targeting it. People came and went at all hours. The currency was crack cocaine. The rules were simple and brutal. You paid, you used, you left.

[00:03:04]And if you caused problems for the operation, if you stole from other users, if you drew the wrong kind of attention, there were people there to deal with you. That property on Norton Road and the feud that grew up around it is the direct setting for Lewis Bell's death. But to understand how he ended up running for his life on Hills Drive, we need to go back further than that night.

[00:03:28]We need to go back to a prison in County Durham and a man called Liam Matthews.

[00:03:35]Liam Matthews was 26 years old in September 2024. He was a father of one, and by that point in his life, he already had a well-established record of the kind of violence that tends to escalate rather than taper off. His most recent conviction, the one that had put him in prison in the first place, came from an incident in Stockton in 2023.

[00:03:58]Matthews had been part of a group that attacked a man in the street outside a premises similar to the Norton Road crack house. The victim's name was Nathan Sloan. What Matthews and the others did to Nathan Sloan was not complicated. They knocked him down and then with Sloan already on the ground and unconscious, Matthews kicked and stamped on him and went through his pockets and stole £500.

[00:04:23]That is not a fight. That is a sustained deliberate assault on a helpless person for the purposes of robbery. Matthews was charged with violent disorder in December 2023 and sentenced in June 2024 to 22 months in prison. He was sent to HMP Home House, a category C prison near Stockton. Under the standard rules for his sentence type, Matthews would have been expected to serve 11 months, half of his 22-month term, before being released. That would have taken him through to approximately December 2024.

[00:04:59]But by the summer of 2024, the prison system in England and Wales was operating under severe strain. and the government was preparing to do something that would change that timetable entirely.

[00:05:12]To understand why Liam Matthews was free on the morning of September 18th, 2024, you need to understand the crisis that the prison system was in. By 2024, prisons in England and Wales were dangerously overcrowded. The numbers had been climbing for years, and the estate, the physical infrastructure of cells, wings, and facilities had not kept pace.

[00:05:36]Officials were warning in terms that were unusually direct for government communications, that the system was close to breaking point. The specific fear was not just overcrowding in the abstract. It was the practical consequences of what happens when a prison system runs out of space entirely. If there are no prison places available, courts cannot send people to custody. If courts cannot send people to custody, the police have no point in arresting them. The entire criminal justice chain from arrest to sentence depends on there being somewhere to put people at the end of it. In September 2024, the government introduced an emergency measure known as the SDS40 policy. Under the existing rules, prisoners serving standard determinate sentences, fixedterm sentences for non-violent or lower level violent offenses, were released automatically at the halfway point of their sentence.

[00:06:31]Under SDS40, that release point was moved from 50% of the sentence to 40%.

[00:06:38]In practice, this meant eligible prisoners would be released up to several weeks earlier than under the previous system. The scheme came with exclusions. Prisoners serving sentences for serious sexual offenses were not eligible. Prisoners serving sentences for serious violent offenses, those defined in law as the most severe categories, were not eligible. But violent disorder, despite what the words might suggest, did not fall into those excluded categories under the relevant legislation.

[00:07:09]Matthews conviction qualified him for early release under the scheme. He was released from HMP home house on September 18th, 2024, the 8th day the emergency measures had been in operation. He was one of the first prisoners to walk free under the new rules. The government, when asked about the case after Lewis Bell's death, said it had no choice but to introduce the scheme and that it had been implemented with protections in place. The prison's watchdog had warned in advance that it was inevitable some of those released early would reaffend.

[00:07:44]That word inevitable acknowledged the risk openly while framing it as a necessary cost of preventing something worse. Whether you accept that framing depends perhaps on whether you were Lewis Bell.

[00:07:58]Liam Matthews walked out of HMP homeouse at 10:00 in the morning. He had £96 in his pocket. This was the standard government release grant, a sum given to prisoners upon discharge to cover their initial costs as they transition back into the community. He also had some savings he had accumulated during his time inside. His first obligations that day were straightforward. He met with his probation officer as required by his license conditions. He attended an appointment at a job center. These were the formal boxes that the system required him to tick and he ticked them on paper. At this point in the day, Matthews was doing what he was supposed to do, engaging with the structures designed to support his reintegration.

[00:08:45]Then he went to a pub and then he went to the crack house on Norton Road. He spent the £96 from his release grant there. He spent a further £130 of his savings there. In total, he spent every penny he had walked out of prison with on crack cocaine in a single afternoon and evening.

[00:09:05]Now, at this point in the story, it is worth introducing the other people who were at or around Norton Road that night, because Lewis Bell's death was not the act of one man alone. It was the product of a specific group in a specific place with a specific grudge.

[00:09:24]Sha Mloud was 23 years old. He had his own record. Just 3 months before the killing in June 2024, he had led police on a pursuit through Stockton at 90 mph in a stolen BMW while under the influence of cannabis. He was volatile, capable of serious violence, and he was at the Norton Road property that night.

[00:09:46]Ashton White was 17 years old at the time. He would turn 18 before the trial concluded, which affected how he was sentenced. He was the youngest of the group, but present and active throughout. Macaulay Wright was 26, the same age as Matthews. His role that night was different from the others. He was not one of the men who chased Lewis Bell through the streets. His job in the informal economy of the crack house was closer to security. He was a familiar face at the Norton Road property, someone trusted by those who ran it.

[00:10:18]What makes Wright's presence particularly striking is this. He was not a stranger to the Bell family. He had known Lewis Bell for years. He had been close enough to Louiswis's family that when Lewis's brother died, Wright was one of the men who carried the coffin. And then there was Lewis Bell himself, 26 years old, one of 12 siblings, a man who had already lost his mother and his brother before that September night. A father whose son was turning 8 years old on the day his father was killed. Lewis Bell was not an innocent bystander in the world of Norton Road. He was known to the people there. He had been using the crack house. And in the days leading up to September 18th, an accusation had attached itself to him. One that in that particular world carried serious consequences.

[00:11:09]The accusation was this. Lewis Bell had been taxing other users at the crack house. Taxing in street slang means robbing. In the context of a drug den, it means stealing from other users, taking their drugs, their money, or both. In the informal economy of a place like Norton Road, where people are already in a vulnerable position, and the whole operation runs on a degree of trust between the dealer and the user, someone who taxes other customers is a problem. They damage the reputation of the place. They make users feel unsafe.

[00:11:45]They cost the operation money indirectly by driving customers away. The specific accusation against Lewis Bell was that he had stolen £20 from another user.

[00:11:56]£20. That was the figure given at trial.

[00:11:59]The sum at the center of everything.

[00:12:02]Whether the accusation was true or false, whether Lewis Bell actually stole that £20, or whether someone decided he was a convenient target for a grievance is something that the trial did not and probably could not definitively resolve.

[00:12:16]What the trial established is what the accusation produced. And what it produced on the night of September 18th into the early hours of September 19th was a decision by the men at Norton Road that Lewis Bell needed to be dealt with.

[00:12:30]One of those who gave evidence acknowledged that the intention initially had been to give Belle a kicking, a beating, a message, not to kill him, or so the account went, just to make clear that what he had allegedly done was not something that would be tolerated without consequences.

[00:12:49]What actually happened was rather different from a kicking.

[00:12:53]In the early hours of September 19th, Lewis Bell was chased from the Norton Road property. Liam Matthews would later tell the court what he said he saw when he looked out of a window. Sha Mloud and Ashton White, already fighting with Lewis Bell in the street. What Matthews did next was his own choice. He picked up a chisel, a heavy metal-headed woodworking tool, and ran outside.

[00:13:20]CCTV cameras mounted on nearby properties captured what followed.

[00:13:25]The footage was played to the jury at T-side Crown Court. And it showed Lewis Bell running and three men pursuing him through the streets. It showed Matthews striking Bell repeatedly with the chisel, driving it into him with force again and again as Belle cried out. It showed Belle in his final desperate minutes banging on the doors of houses on Hills Drive, trying to find someone who would let him in. Nobody did. By the time Lewis Bell fell, he had suffered multiple injuries across his body. The cumulative result of the chisel, the stamping, and finally the knife. It was not a single blow that killed him. It was a sustained concentrated attack by three men who did not stop until he was on the ground. The wound that proved fatal was a 5-in stab wound to the back delivered by Sha Mloud with a knife. It penetrated Lewis Bell's lung. The blood loss was catastrophic and unservivable.

[00:14:24]Emergency services were called and attended, but by the time they reached Hills Drive, there was nothing to be done. Lewis Bell was pronounced dead at the scene. Ashton White had swung a hammer at Bell during the chase, but missed. Matthews later admitted to chasing Bell, to striking him three times with the chisel, to stamping on him. He admitted all of this. What he contested and what the jury ultimately accepted was whether his intentions had reached the threshold for murder.

[00:14:55]The legal distinction between murder and manslaughter turns on intent. Did the person intend to kill or to cause really serious bodily harm. For Matthews and White, the jury found manslaughter. For Sha Mloud, who had driven a knife 5 in into a man's back, the jury found murder.

[00:15:16]Lewis Bell was pronounced dead at the scene. The date was September 19th, 2024.

[00:15:23]His son had just turned 8.

[00:15:26]After Lewis Bell stopped moving, the men who had killed him did not call for help. They did not wait to see whether he could be saved, they ran. Sha Mloud went further than the others. He left Stockton entirely and went to London, where he stayed hidden for as long as he could. The knife he had used to stab Lewis Bell was never found. Mloud had disposed of it somewhere, and despite the full resources of Cleveland police's investigation, it was never recovered.

[00:15:56]Matthews and White turned to McCauley Wright. Wright arranged a taxi to get the two men away from the area. He disposed of their weapons. He threw away a top that was saturated with Lewis Bell's blood. He helped them disappear from the immediate vicinity of Hills Drive before police arrived. It was Wright who, in a turn that complicates any simple reading of his character, later rang Cleveland police and named Sha Mloud as the killer. Whether that call was driven by guilt, by self-preservation, or by some residual sense of loyalty to the Bell family he had known for years is something only Wright knows. What it did was give investigators a name and a direction when they needed it most. Matthews was arrested the following day, September 19th, less than 24 hours after Lewis Bell died. What investigators had by then was already substantial. The CCTV network had captured the attack on Hills Drive and the movements of the men before and after, but equally important was the digital trail. Phone data placed the offenders in the area and tracked their movements through the night.

[00:17:07]Contact between the men after the attack. Calls and messages exchanged in the hours following Lewis Bell's death helped investigators map who had communicated with whom, when, and in what sequence. That kind of evidence is often what closes the gaps that physical evidence alone cannot fill. It is harder to explain away than a witness account, and it builds a picture of coordination and awareness that cuts through the defenses that were later offered at trial.

[00:17:36]The four men, Sha Mloud, Liam Matthews, Ashton White, and McCauley Wright, stood trial at T-side Crown Court in early 2025.

[00:17:46]The prosecution's case was built on multiple pillars. There was the CCTV footage from Hills Drive and the surrounding streets which had captured the attack with brutal clarity. There was forensic evidence including the blood soaked clothing that Wright had tried to dispose of. And there was the phone and digital evidence, call records and location data that placed the men at the scene, tracked their movements afterwards, and documented the contact between them in the hours following the killing. Taken together, it was the kind of evidential picture that is difficult to dismantle in cross-examination because each element reinforces the others. Prosecutor Peter Makepiece KC told the jury that Lewis Bell had been hunted through the streets of Stockton like prey, that the men who pursued him had been armed, that Bell had run, had begged, had banged on strangers doors looking for safety, and had found none.

[00:18:42]The defense for Matthews and White did not seriously dispute the facts of what had happened. It disputed the level of intent, arguing that neither man had gone out that night planning to kill Lewis Bell, and that their actions, while violent and devastating, did not meet the legal bar for murder. The jury accepted that argument for both of them.

[00:19:02]All three men who had taken part in the attack, Mloud, Matthews, and White, had initially denied murder, each at various points attempting to place the primary blame on the others. Mloud blamed Matthews. Matthews pointed to Mloud. It was, the prosecution argued, the behavior of men who understood exactly what they had done and were trying to navigate away through the consequences of it. The public gallery of the courtroom was full throughout. Lewis Bell's family were there every day. His sisters, his father, the people who had known him all his life and now had to sit and listen to the details of how he died. During the trial, according to accounts given outside the court, some of the defendants smirked at the family from the dock. One blew kisses at them.

[00:19:48]When the verdicts came in, the family's reaction was described by those present as a mixture of relief and grief. the relief of having the truth formally acknowledged and the grief that comes with understanding that no verdict changes anything about what happened on Hills Drive.

[00:20:06]The jury returned its verdicts in April 2025.

[00:20:10]Sha Mloud, guilty of murder. Liam Matthews, guilty of manslaughter.

[00:20:16]Ashton White, guilty of manslaughter.

[00:20:20]McCauley Wright, guilty of assisting an offender. There were audible cheers from the public gallery as Mloud's murder conviction was read out. Sentencing took place at T-side Crown Court on June 19th, 2025.

[00:20:35]Sha Mloud was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 23 years. He also received a concurrent 4-year sentence for the dangerous driving offense from June 2024, the high-speed pursuit in the stolen BMW. He will not be eligible for parole until he has served at least 23 years. Liam Matthews was sentenced to 15 years in prison with a further 3 years to be served on extended license after release. The man who had walked out of HMP home house with £96 and spent it all on crack cocaine within hours will be well into his 40s before he is truly free. Ashton White, sentenced as a youth offender, given that he was 17 at the time of the killing, received 10 years in youth detention. McCauley Wright received 2 and 1/2 years for assisting an offender, plus a consecutive 6 months for the separate dangerous driving charge. He had helped the killers escape. He had cleaned up the evidence and he had eventually been the one to name the man who held the knife. Judge Francis Leair KC in passing sentence described Lewis Bell's killing as horrific and noted that it was clear the victim had been much loved.

[00:21:49]The statements that Lewis Bell's family read to the court at sentencing are worth dwelling on because they carry things that verdicts and sentences cannot. Amy Bell, one of Lewis's sisters, called the killers cold and callous.

[00:22:04]Leah Bell, Lewis's twin sister, said that she no longer felt safe without her protector. She and Lewis had shared a birthday for 26 years. She will share it with his absence for the rest of her life. Khloe Bell addressed the defendants directly. She told them she was disgusted by the smirking and the blown kisses, by the way treated her brother's death throughout the trial.

[00:22:29]"The way you have treated Louiswis's death is a joke," she said. How dare you insult our family like that? Emma Bell addressed the court in person. She said she could never forgive or forget what the killers did. Martin Bell, Lewis's father, called the three men a bunch of animals. He said his family were heartbroken and traumatized.

[00:22:51]In their collective statement, the family had written, "Lewis was killed in the most brutal and heartless way." They described having to sit through the trial and listen to the details of his murder as the hardest thing they had ever done. They said they hoped the convictions would bring some form of closure, but acknowledge plainly that they would never get over the loss of Lewis. They had already lost his mother.

[00:23:15]They had already lost his brother. And now they had lost him on his son's 8th birthday on a street in Stockton on tease running from men who used to know him.

[00:23:27]The sentencing is done. The courtroom at T-side has moved on. Sha Mloud will be in his mid-40s before he can apply for parole. Liam Matthews will carry his sentence well into his 40s. Ashton White, 17 years old when he joined the hunt for Lewis Bell, will still be a relatively young man when he is released. But the question this case raises does not sit neatly inside any of those sentences.

[00:23:53]The government said it had no choice but to release men like Matthews early. The prison's watchdog said before a single prisoner had walked free that reaffending was inevitable. Their word, not ours, and the rules, as written, were followed correctly. Matthews was eligible. The process worked exactly as designed. What the process could not account for was Lewis Bell, a 26-year-old man, one of 12 siblings, a father whose son turned 8 on the night he was killed. A man who ran through residential streets in the early hours of the morning, banging on doors that did not open, begging strangers to save his life. The courtroom has moved on.

[00:24:35]For them, it never will. That is the Louiswis Bell case. If this episode made you think about who the system is built to protect, about what the word inevitable actually costs when it is attached to a real human life, then share it. Send it to someone who needs to hear it. If you are new to Crime Pulse, subscribe now. We cover the cases that go deeper than the headlines, the ones where the full story is more complicated, more human, and more important than a verdict alone can capture. Drop a comment below with your thoughts on the early release scheme. We read everyone.