The footage, taken from the dashboard of the police car in pursuit on the morning of April 11 last year, makes for chilling viewing.

Over 12 minutes and 41 seconds, a grey Nissan van can be seen hurtling through residential areas at speeds of 70mph, mounting pavements and narrowly missing pedestrians, driving on the wrong side of the road and recklessly running red lights.

During this time, the van - driven by John McDonald, 52, and carrying his son, Johnny McDonald, 23, and their 35-year-old associate Brett Delaney - smashes into five other vehicles. One of them was carrying an 11-month-old baby.

At 10.16am, three minutes into the chase, it stops suddenly in the middle of a quiet street, reverses at high speed and violently rams the bonnet of the police car. Over the next few minutes, McDonald does this 11 times, with no regard for the officers inside, before careering off into traffic.

Just after 10.24am, McDonald then makes the fateful decision to turn left into Aston Wood Golf Club in Sutton, Birmingham, where he drives off the road and up a grassy hill towards the first fairway.

It was here, on a warm, cloudless spring day, that Suzanne Cherry, 62, was playing golf with her husband, Clint Harrison.

The couple had been due to tee off on the first hole at 10.20am - but had arrived early and started their game sooner.

Suzanne was on her second shot, sending her ball veering towards a small stream.

She was so engrossed in finding the ball that she didn't look up, not even when Clint, watching in what he later described as 'helpless horror', shouted: 'Sue!'

She had no time to leap out of the way or - perhaps mercifully - truly register what was happening as the runaway van, travelling at 41mph, headed straight towards her.

McDonald slammed on the brakes, but it was too late. Four-and-a-half seconds later the van ploughed into Suzanne - and finally came to a stop. The last Clint saw of her was a flash of brown hair. The last he heard was her blood-curdling scream.

As he ran towards the crash site, he saw the three men jump out of the van. In what can only be described as a cold-blooded act of inhumanity, McDonald stepped over Suzanne's body before looking back - and fleeing the scene.

In that moment, Clint screamed: 'You b*****ds have killed my wife.'

Suzanne's loved ones sobbed in court this week as they heard in horrifying detail the injuries she suffered after being struck by McDonald's van. Her ribs were fractured in multiple places, her carotid arteries torn and her liver and spleen lacerated.

She had an emergency blood transfusion before being airlifted to hospital, where a leg had to be amputated. But a CT scan showed serious and irreparable brain damage. Suzanne died in her hospital bed four days later - the day before her 63rd birthday.

All the while, the men who had callously mown her down were on the run, hoping they could somehow get away with what they had done. It would be five days before the three were arrested, at a Ford dealership in Worcester on April 16, where they were - astonishingly - trying to hire another van.

When apprehended, the elder McDonald blithely asked police: 'Someone died?'

He pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving at Worcester Crown Court this week and was sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison for his actions. His son was jailed for 32 months, while Delaney faces 28 months. The judge told John McDonald he would have to serve only two-thirds of his sentence, before being released on licence. This means he could be back on the streets in eight years.

For Suzanne's grieving family, this is far, far from enough.

Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail this week, Clint, Suzanne's brothers Steve and Adrian and sister-in-law Wendy, told of the 'incredible woman' they lost that day.

She was, says Clint, 63, a former rivet technician: 'What I lived for every day. We had been together for 18 years and we never had a cross word. Sue loved going out with her friends and doing her sports [she was also a motorcyclist, skier and scuba diver].

'She was up every day at 5am and in the gym before going to work. She was always busy.

'I'm more of a homebird but our relationship worked so well.'

He and Sue were 'looking forward to the process of winding down and retiring'. She was due a compensation payment from a motorcycle accident in 2022, in which a car had knocked her off her bike. The final amount, £27,000, came through days after her death. 'Sue had worked out all our finances,' says Clint. 'We wanted to go on some big trips to places like Argentina, Japan, Malaysia and Australia. We also love trips in Europe and hoped to go to some big motor rallies.'

Suzanne ran a business with her ex-husband, Paul, repairing Smeg kitchen appliances. She juggled family life and her many fitness-based hobbies with managing a team of 35 employees over a 32-year career.

A mother of three grown-up children, she and Clint married in 2022, with Suzanne becoming a proud stepmother to his two children, Zayn, 27, and Kirsten, 22.

Losing their mum, Clint says, has had a 'terrible impact' on her children, as it has on her 89-year-old mother, Maureen, who has been 'just broken' by her death.

Devastatingly, were she here today, Suzanne would be a grandmother - something her family say she was looking forward to with immense joy. Her first grandchild, a girl, was born last May to her son Daniel and his partner.

The birth was tinged with heartache that Suzanne, who had died just three weeks previously, would never be able to hold her in her arms. 'When she found out she was going to have her first grandchild, she was so excited she cried,' recalls Clint.

'She was ecstatic, skipping and dancing around. She was with a friend who told her she'd have to give up all her dangerous sports like scuba diving, skiing and motorcycling, but she could keep playing golf. That was ironic as it was participating in the 'safe' sport which cost her her life.'

That fateful day is etched deep in Clint's memory. Suzanne had taken up golf 15 years previously, determined to one day be better than her two golf-mad brothers, and had fallen in love with it.

The pair had arrived at the clubhouse 15 minutes before their allotted tee time and, on finding no players in front of them, decided to start.

Prior to teeing off, he and Suzanne had shaken hands and given each other a peck on the cheek - just as they did before every game of golf.

It is impossible to comprehend the horror and disbelief Clint - who was standing just 10 to 15 yards from Suzanne when she was struck - felt on seeing the van speeding towards his wife.

'To have witnessed such a tragedy on what should have been a peaceful day is a burden that I will carry for ever,' he says. 'Her fragile body shattered in front of my very eyes. Her scream just before the impact haunts me every moment of every day.'

He hasn't been able to return to a golf course since. 'I can't even keep my golf clubs at our house,' he adds. For the past nine months, his focus has been on getting justice for Suzanne and putting the men responsible for her death behind bars. 

Despite the horrific circumstances of her death, an application to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) was turned down due to it not being classed as 'a crime of violence'.

The CICA pays out only to those impacted by violent crimes. Clint, who is now pursuing a civil claim against the insurers of the van, calls the decision 'outrageous'.

As for the sentence handed down this week to McDonald and his co-defendants, he and his family are still reeling from the leniency afforded to Suzanne's killer.

'The sentence was not nearly long enough but the judge did a fantastic job,' Clint says.

Suzanne's brother Adrian, 60, a retired fire officer, says the family had originally wanted a murder or manslaughter conviction. 'He deserves to be in prison for the rest of his life,' he says of McDonald. Wendy Latty, Suzanne's sister-in-law, adds: 'No sentence is long enough and nothing will bring Sue back. Nothing can describe the pure hell of the past nine months.'

Their ire is wholly justified. For it was revealed in court that this was not a one-off, a panicked lapse of judgment with tragic consequences. Far from it. McDonald is a hardened career criminal, well-known to West Midlands Police, who has nine previous convictions for 14 different offences, including burglary.

They include conning a 98-year-old woman into thinking he had done £300 of repairs to her roof, and in 2019 he was jailed for six years after stealing £3,000 from an 85-year-old woman and her daughter, 62, who was terminally ill with cancer, after posing as an odd-job man.

After his release in 2022 (just three years into his sentence), McDonald and his son were subject to a wanted appeal by West Midlands Police over a series of distraction burglaries in the area.

This week, he was sentenced to 48 months in prison for conspiracy to commit fraud - the very crime for which officers were onto him in the first place.

Heading up a sham roofing company, called Approved Roofs Ltd, McDonald - who lives in Bloxwich, a market town in Walsall - led the vile trio in conning vulnerable victims out of yet more money. One elderly victim believed she was paying £70 for work done to her roof, after she saw the men type the numbers '7-0' into their portable card machine - but instead they conned her out of £7,800.

They visited another woman at her home in Walsall, duped her into allowing them access to her loft, then demanded cash for unnecessary roof repairs. McDonald convinced her to go to the bank to withdraw money while he waited at her house.

Other victims of the so-called 'cowboy roofers' spoke to the Daily Mail this week to tell of the vast amounts of money they were duped into handing over. One 83-year-old widow, who asked not to be named as she has been too ashamed to tell her family about what happened, recounted how she had been confronted by the men as she carried shopping into her bungalow in Walsall.

They spent several days supposedly fixing a leak on her roof before presenting her with an eye-watering bill. 'It came to about £11,000,' she admits.

Another elderly victim from nearby Sutton Coldfield said she had a builder come out to repair a bracket on the guttering of her detached home.

When McDonald, his son and Delaney turned up at her door, she assumed - wrongly, she now realises - that it was a team from the building firm.

'I lost £11,500. They were disgraceful people,' she says.

The trio were employing the same ruthless tactics on April 11 last year, following 71-year-old Gill Smith to a cash machine so she could take out money to pay them for supposed works to her roof.

It was purely by chance that two officers in a marked car spotted the van and noticed McDonald turn his head when he saw them, which raised their suspicions - and led to the chase.

Such was the emotional toll of the incident that the officer who was driving that day is now considering leaving the force for good.

Little is known about the personal life of John McDonald, believed to be from the travelling community, who lived in local authority housing with his wife.

His son Johnny, a father of three boys, was also condemned by Judge James Burbidge KC this week for his role in the fraudulent roofing scam. He added that the younger McDonald was not a junior partner in the conspiracy and showed 'eagerness and led at times'. He, too, has a prior criminal record.

Delaney, meanwhile, also a father-of-three, from Darlaston in Walsall, received the shortest sentence but was far from an innocent party in the operation.

Social media posts from April 6, 2025, just five days before the police chase, show Delaney actively promoting the roofing business - and seeking new, unsuspecting clients.

All three have been in prison since the incident last April. There, McDonald is said to be in poor physical health, with his lawyer claiming he has flashbacks about what he did and 'cannot understand why he acted this way. He is struck by nightmares on a regular, if not daily, basis and he knows taking this life will haunt him for the rest of his days,' Mark Gatley KC said this week.

This may be so, but for Suzanne's family, the sleepless nights of her killer are of little concern. 'They will not enter my thoughts,' Clint insists of the men who took his wife from him.

'She was killed on a peaceful golf course, an innocent bystander in the wake of these criminals attempting to escape their own poor choices.

'They valued their freedom more than her right to live.'

Additional reporting: Ross Slater