His account of how Mail snared him

SHEPHERD’S tawdry memoir throws new light on his flight from justice and the Daily Mail’s quest to bring him back.

The fictionalised account is very much a case of art imitating life. He fled the UK in March 2018, three months before his Old Bailey trial and hours after he drunkenly glassed a Devon hotel barman who had refused him a drink.

The book now suggests ‘Keith’/Shepherd was high on the ‘finest cocaine’ that night – something not mentioned at his trial.

Two of Shepherd’s closest British friends secretly abetted his life on the run, the book suggests. ‘Dave’ withdrew £5,000 in £20 notes for his escape, while ‘Clive’ – the book’s author – claims to have visited Shepherd at his bolthole in the former Soviet state of Georgia, but decided not to tell police despite knowing his ‘actual address’.

The ‘real reason’ for hiding out in Georgia, Clive wrote, ‘was that he believed there was no extradition treaty’ between Georgia and the UK, adding: ‘This would prove erroneous.’

The Mail launched a global search for Shepherd and eventually flushed him out in January 2019. The book records: ‘He was finally defeated... by tabloid journalists.’

After losing an extradition battle, Shepherd was hauled back to the UK where an Old Bailey judge credited the Mail as he sent him to jail.