The first angry shouts could be heard before the Appeals Court judges even delivered their verdict — within 12 hours Larry Tacklyn would be sent to the gallows for murdering two people.

The following 72 hours saw three innocent people die, hundreds take to the streets in protest, scores of stores burned to the ground and a call for the British to come and help quell the riots.

But the events that led up to the December 1977 riots — which ended 30 years ago today — started more than four years before Dame Lois Browne Evans lost the legal fight of her career, to save Tacklyn from capital punishment.

It began with the murder of Bermuda's Police Commissioner George Duckett on September 9,1972, by Tacklyn's good friend Erskine Durrant (Buck) Burrows.

Six months later came the murders of Governor Sir Richard Sharples and his 25-year-old aide-de-camp Capt. Hugh Sayers, also committed by Burrows and allegedly involving Tacklyn and a senior unidentified member of the Black Beret Cadre, a small but active Black Power cell then operating on the Island.

Declassified documents revealed that on the night of March 10, 1973, at least three men infiltrated the grounds of Government House.

Security was not tight, there had never been a need.

The men simply stepped over the waist-high wall that surrounded the 45-acre property and made their way to the terraced gardens outside the main entrance.

Inside Government House dinner party guests were leaving and Sir Richard was preparing for his nightly walk of the grounds with his Great Dane Horsa. He was joined by his ADC.

Minutes later a security guard heard three shots and a call for help.

Captain Sayers was killed instantly — he fell with his hands still in his pocket, reaching for his gun.

Sir Richard also collapsed, mortally wounded.

A month later in April 1973, Burrows and Tacklyn shot businessmen Victor Rego and Mark Doe during an armed robbery at the Shopping Centre on Victoria Street.

The two men were bound, gagged and shot to death during the course of an armed robbery that netted the gunmen just $2,000 to $3,000.

By October, Burrows was captured, carrying a loaded sawed-off shotgun and a loaded hand gun. He admitted to several armed robberies, but no murders.

Soon after Tacklyn was picked up too. They were charged and convicted for the robberies.

Ballistics matched the shotgun Burrows carried with the one involved in the Governor's murder.

But for the next two years there was silence because Governor Sir Edwin Leather, who replaced murdered Sir Richard, had decided that inquests into the Government House murders were "a bridge too far" and could destabilise the county.

He reasoned that the suspected gunmen — Burrows and Tacklyn — were already serving long jail terms for separate armed robbery convictions.

Eventually the Foreign and Commonwealth Office told Sir Edwin it would be best to hold trials on the matter.

In 1975, a coroner's inquest recorded verdicts that named Burrows as the killer of Police Commissioner Duckett.

Another inquest recorded that Burrows and Tacklyn murdered Mr. Rego and Mr. Doe at the Shopping Centre.

At the end of the third inquest, the nine-man jury returned a verdict that Burrows and Tacklyn were responsible for the Government House murders.

But the legal battle had only just begun, up next would be their Supreme Court trials.