Drug dealer's past as teenage killer unveiled

A drug dealer was previously convicted of manslaughter after stamping on a man's head and attacking him with a broom, a court heard. Peter Billington was found to have been dealing drugs despite his claims that he was being "terrorised" to store them.

But when officers examined his phone they found a series of messages which showed that he had been running an entire operation selling class A and B drugs which police described as "significant". The drugs were found after Merseyside Police executed a warrant at his address on Kendal Road in Wallasey, Wirral on June 26 2024.

Billington, 43, was the only person at the address. As police forced their way into the house, he had been coming down the stairs. Prosecutor Tom Challinor told the court that after entering the house police had fuond a 1kg block of cocaine at 83 percent purity in the bedroom, with '4444' branding on embossed on it, the Liverpool ECHO reports.

Further searches saw officers discover another half kilo of cocaine in a carrier bag. They also found 2kg of cannabis in carrier bags and plastic packs, as well as another 19 wraps of cocaine and 81 pills later found to be ketamine and MDMA.

When he was arrested Billington claimed that he had been "terrorised into doing this". In his police interview he added that he was "essentially being forced to store the drugs under threat".

But analysis of his phone told a very different story. No threats matching what he had described were found on the device, but they did find communications which were "consistent with someone buying wholesale quantities of cocaine and cannabis and selling them to end users".

Billington, who also went by the name Peter Murphy, was alleged to have sold high purity, or "raw" drugs to other