How Sycamore Gap fellers went from friends to foes

Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers were the best mats when they illegally knocked down the beloved Sycamore gap tree. How did they end up turning against each other?

It is difficult to imagine that they were once friends.

Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers used to be called on the phone every day and up several times a week, but while they stopped at the dock in Newcastle Crown Court, waiting for the verdicts to be returned, they seemed complete strangers.

The Prosecutor’s Office called them “the strange couple” who did everything together.

They became friends about four years ago.

Carruthers was mechanical and made Graham “a good turn” by fixing his father’s Land Rover, doing a special job so that he could be used for Graham’s funeral.

Graham was an earth worker and enlisted the man whom he called his “best friend” to help in the jobs, with tasks that include the felling of trees for which they divided the cash 50/50.

Then, one night, the storm of duration Agnes in 2023, the friends went to Sycamore Gap.

Under the cover of the dark, they were dyed through the marshes with winds of up to 60 mph and used their experience to mark the trunk, cut a wedge to know the direction in which he would do it with a chainsaw.

They filmed him and saw the sicomor crashing on the ground.

What they did not realize is that the phone and vehicle they used would be tracked and the conversations they had would be discovered.

As the police advanced, their stories crumbled and also their friendship.

Graham’s phone was used to film the logging.

The road and CCTV cameras captured their Range Rover going to and from Steel Rigg, the public parking closest to the tree.

He told the court that his car and telephone were used by other people, including Adam Carruthers “that they didn’t need to ask.”

Prosecutor Richard Wright was incredulous to his claims, count the jury: “According to Graham, he did not go out all night and the Carruthers touched his car and telephone while scabulle in the wonderful ignorance, and his great we will see growl.”

It was the only story that mocked in court.

Carruthers’s phone had been tracked to Northumberland the day the tree was carved.

He was suggested that he was reaching the area.

He told the Court that he was a partner on a three -round trip for a meal in the Metrocentre in Gateshead after she recently gave birth, but her baby started Crystey turned the car around the tree of the tree.

Christopher Knox, Graham’s lawyer, said: “You consider the jury despite the fact that he was well enough to lift a baby, he went 65 miles with [your partner] And a newborn? “

Wright asked Carruthers why they not only went to dinner at Carlisle, a short distance from his house.

Carruthers agreed that there were restaurants in the city of Cumbrian, but they were not “the best.”

He said he was at home all night, fixing the roof of his shed and washing some clothes.

From that night, the Court heard that the couple had fallen spectacularly.

Carruthers’s lawyer, Andrew Gurney, said Graham named his former friend as the culprit because he needed an scapegoat.

“Having found on the dock, [Graham’s] He desperately reached a life line, “Gurney said, added:” He tried to throw Adam Carruthers under the bus to save his own skin. “

Initially, Graham told the police that he knew who had cut the tree but not “grass” since the culprit had small children, a wink not so subtle towards his friend.

When he felt that the police were quiet paying him too much and not enough for Carruthers, the officers showed a photo of their friend holding some owls while standing next to a chainsaw box.

In August 2024, about 11 months after the logging, he made an anonymous call to the police to appoint Carruthers directly.

The officers recognized Graham’s voice immediately and was forced to admit to the jurors that the call had made.

Both men said friendship ended abruptly one night after felling and their judgments.

Graham led Carruthers’s house and said that everyone had to follow their own path, and that was all.

Mr. Knox said his client had been accused of being “stunned” while giving evidence in the court, participating in cunning clashes with Mr. Wright.

“Does that make it the most murderous GAP sicomor?” Hey asked the jury, or “does it mean exactly what he said in his police interviews: he is falling into his leg in this?”

The jury clearly thought the first.

Emotions ran at the end of the trial when the judge told both of them that they expected a significant period of time in custody.

When Graham was away from the dock, he had an angry exchange with a public member.

We still don’t know which of the couple cuts the tree and what filmed it.

The Prosecutor’s Office said it didn’t matter if they were “in him together, from the first to the last.”

They could have fallen, but they were next to the court, united by the two things they will share forever: guilt for destroying a reference point worldwide and too much cowardice to admit it.