Belmont Drive runs parallel to Rocky Lane, a noisy thoroughfare in Liverpool that blurs into West Derby Road, connecting the city centre with Anfield and its famous football stadium.

Here, the peeling grandeur of brooding Victorian homes stand incongruously against steel-shuttered shops and their grilles, reflecting the different stages of Liverpool’s past as well as its present.

This was once a highly desirable area, where rich sea merchants bought mansions on Judges Drive. Now, it is synonymous with the red light district of Sheil Road and an abandoned orphanage — supposedly haunted — on the other side of Newsham Park.

Something else is notable about Belmont Drive. It is the location of a block of six flats, one of which was the scene of a murder that linked Liverpool and Accrington Stanley Football Clubs, a television milk advert and Merseyside’s violent drugs scene.

The killing occurred on July 27, 2022. According to the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) account of the incident, the flat’s tenant, Mark Kelly, had left the property to top up the electricity meter. When he returned, he found Learoy Venner — who was living with Kelly temporarily — lying on his back on a camper bed in the lounge. He had suffered a brain injury so severe that the trauma was compared in a post-mortem examination to one akin to a victim of a car crash.

Venner, 53, had sustained his injuries after being punched and kicked in a frenzied attack by Kevin Spaine, a 43-year-old homeless man who was a frequent visitor to Kelly’s property as he bedhopped between flats. All three men were, according to the CPS, drug dependent. In February 2023, Spaine received a life sentence for the killing at Liverpool Crown Court and must serve a minimum of 18 years before he can be considered for release.

The incident would have been noted as shocking but, sadly, not all that unusual in a city that has grappled with drug-related crime for decades. The twist, however, emerged only during Spaine’s sentencing when it was revealed that he was one of the stars of arguably the most famous football-themed advert in British television history.

In 1989, Spaine, then aged eight or nine, had featured in a commercial for the United Kingdom’s Milk Marketing Board. In it, another young boy, dressed in a Liverpool shirt, pours himself a glass of milk after coming in from a game of football. When Spaine reacts in disgust, the boy tells him that Ian Rush — then Liverpool’s star striker — drinks it and that if he didn’t follow his example, he wouldn’t even be good enough to play for Accrington Stanley, then a non-League club.

“Accrington Stanley, who are they?” Spaine asks.

“Exactly,” replies his friend, which prompts a scrap between the two boys over the remaining milk in the glass.

It became one of English football’s most quoted exchanges, endlessly mimicked in playgrounds and pubs the length of the country, yet nobody knew Spaine had featured in it. Despite being a serial criminal offender across nearly 25 years, Spaine’s connection to the advert was never made because when local media in Liverpool had written about it, his surname had been incorrectly reported as Staine.

This weekend, in an FA Cup third-round tie at Anfield, Liverpool face Accrington, now in League Two (the fourth tier of English football), for only the second time. Ordinarily, it would be a tie suffused with romance, the epitome of a cup underdog having its day out at one of the sport’s aristocrats.

Instead, the vicious events that played out in a drug den less than two miles from Anfield on a summer’s afternoon in 2022 offer the grimmest of sub-plots.

You only get fleeting glimpses of Spaine in the milk advert: once when he enters with his friend and again towards the end when they pretend to fight over the glass. On neither occasion can you see his face.

The other boy in the advert was also born on Merseyside, although Carl Rice had already moved to Widnes in nearby Cheshire by the time he travelled to Shepperton Studios in Surrey in 1989, aged eight, where he met Spaine for the first time.

Both children were shot from different angles to try to help them relax and, when the advert was released, Rice did not know that only his face was going to be shown.

During a 2013 interview with the Liverpool Echo, Rice revealed he was paid just £90 ($110.80 at current rates) for his role, joking: “I think my dad spent it on Skol (lager)!” He recalled how eight children from the Merseyside area had been selected to travel to London, with Spaine and Rice making the final cut.

Rice compared the set to being “like a load of kids on their holidays”, but the experience had a huge bearing on his life, even if he never received royalties for it. It set him on a path to a successful acting and writing career, which included stints in famous British soap operas such as Coronation Street and Brookside, the comedy-drama Brassic, and more recently a minor role in the Disney film Cruella alongside Emma Stone.

In 2016, he even reprised his milk role in an advert for Black Cow, a UK-based vodka producer, that parodied the original, although the commercial was subsequently banned by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority for potentially encouraging excessive drinking.

Rice has embraced the advert’s legacy. He attended Accrington’s FA Cup second-round win over Swindon in December, making a short film with Mitre, the competition’s ball manufacturers, in the process.

You might know Carl Rice from TV drama ‘Brassic’.

But did you know he was the kid in the 80’s Milk advert with the famous line “Accrington Stanley… Who are they?”

We went to @ASFCofficial 2nd Round cup tie against Swindon. It had it all – balls, milk, pens & Holloway. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/xVrRdhjEQq

— Mitre Sports (@MitreSports) December 4, 2024

There are many reasons why the original advert became such a cultural touchstone in Britain. In 2013, Rice concluded it was because of his “broad Scouse accent, it was ludicrously strong and high-pitched”. The timing of its release also played its part: any link to Merseyside was always going to gain attention, especially in the 1980s, when Liverpool and Everton had dominated English football, sharing all but two of the league titles won that decade.

The city, too, was never far from the headlines. There had been race riots in the suburb of Toxteth in 1981, while the city’s far-left council had been taken to court by the government for passing an illegal budget four years later.

Liverpool was, in short, a city that generated strong opinions and the advert was effectively sending a powerful message: even Scouse urchins drink milk.

In 2006, Rice suggested Tottenham Hotspur was in the original script, only for the club to object, although quite why Accrington was chosen remains unclear. Perhaps it simply served as shorthand for a club which was as far removed from the elite as possible: Accrington were in the Northern Premier League Division One in 1989, English football’s eighth tier. It was another 17 years before they re-entered the Football League.

In 2012, former England cricketer and commentator David Lloyd, a non-executive director at Accrington, claimed the advert, which was still appearing on television screens six years after its release, helped boost the club’s profile, as well as providing a £10,000 cash injection. With Accrington on the verge of promotion to the Football League in 2006, its managing director, Robert Heyes, told the Manchester Evening News: “To this day it has brought us worldwide fame and thousands in merchandise sales to countries as far away as Australia, Canada and America.”

Accrington Stanley celebrate promotion to the Football League in 2006 (Gary M.Prior/Getty Images)

Yet next to nothing was known about Spaine, a Black boy from a family with deep connections to Liverpool’s music scene as far back as the 1970s.

When he appeared in court for the murder of Venner, it was suggested he was originally cast thanks in part due to his football talent. His defence lawyer, John Harrison KC, described him as “a very promising young footballer” but acknowledged that he had “a very long history of criminal offending”.

In his sentencing, covered in forensic detail at the time by the Liverpool Echo, it was revealed that Spaine had made around 40 court appearances for close to 100 offences over more than 20 years, with offences ranging from dealing and possession with intent to supply heroin and crack cocaine, assault, affray, wounding, threatening behaviour, theft and racially aggravated harassment.

Only three months before Venner’s murder, Spaine walked free from court having been handed an eight-week suspended prison sentence for assaulting an emergency worker before he was arrested again for another assault on an emergency worker. During his sentencing for Venner’s killing, prosecuting KC Alan Kent told the court that Spaine’s record pointed “to a man who is short-tempered, who starts fights and reacts in a violent manner”.

Belmont Drive is not exactly secluded.

The flat where Venner was killed is just a few hundred yards from Tuebrook police station, but it also sits by a busy road where the dull roar of car engines rarely subsides. If someone was fighting for their life inside one of the properties, it would be difficult to hear them.

According to the CPS, by July 27, 2022, Spaine was homeless and wanted to access the flat on Belmont Drive. Yet when he rang the doorbell, Venner ignored it, messaging Kelly, telling him that he didn’t want Spaine coming in.

The block of flats in Belmont Drive where the 2022 murder took place (Simon Hughes/The Athletic; house numbers blurred)

When Kelly returned to the flat, Spaine was still hanging around outside. Though he convinced Kelly that he needed a shower, the electric was out and Kelly left to get a top-up. Spaine followed him out soon after, but when he bumped into Kelly, he told him that Venner had left the property as well. Instead, Kelly would find Venner badly beaten. Though paramedics worked on him for longer than an hour, he later died in hospital.

Kelly was initially arrested, but it quickly became clear he was not responsible for the murder. Spaine was banned from his mother’s home under bail conditions following a row, but he went there regardless, telling her he wanted to get changed. She refused to let him in but passed him an outfit. Venner’s blood was later found on Spaine’s discarded clothing.

He denied murder but admitted manslaughter. In court, as reported by the Echo, he claimed he was in a “scatty situation” after a decade of crack cocaine abuse and that “things went t**s up” when he battered Venner to death.

Spaine also denied an intent to rob Venner on the day he received his benefits for drug money — insisting he would have sooner “run out of the Asda (supermarket) with a bag of steak” — and had instead retaliated after punches were thrown at him, as Venner supposedly tried to usher him from the property. After responding to “two swings”, Spaine responded with a flurry of punches and kicks before stopping when “he was no longer a threat”.

“We had chaotic lives, our lives were a mess,” Spaine continued. “I wasn’t thinking straight, Learoy weren’t — we were in a bad place. It all happened so fast. I hadn’t slept for days, I hadn’t eaten for days. How can you expect me to know what I was doing? I wasn’t in control.”

In sentencing, Judge Brian Cummings KC was sure that Spaine wanted to access the flat to try to access drugs or money but concluded this was not “a murder for gain”, accepting that an “eruption of violence occurred spontaneously”, Spaine having become agitated as he waited impatiently outside.

Spaine’s first significant encounter with the law came in 2001 when, aged 22, he was arrested as part of Operation Camelia — a major drugs investigation by Merseyside Police.

He was arrested an hour’s walk south of Belmont Drive in Upper Parliament Street, the road where he was living and one which dissects the Liverpool 8 area of Toxteth, the name a nod to its postcode. On one side there is the Georgian quarter —  home to some restored as well as faded townhouses — and on the other, the streets housing the city’s Black community.

“Parli”, as it is known locally, was the scene of the infamous riots of 1981, which took place when Spaine was just a baby. Those involved in the violence prefer to call it an uprising, an en-masse response to the treatment of a police force regularly accused of institutional racism.

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For a few years after the uprising, L8 became a frontline for disregarded youngsters. A freedom hung in the air, cafes played loud music and groups would stand outside shops eating food. The summers always seemed to be hot and streets like Granby thronged.

Dealers sold drugs, cannabis initially, before those with greater ambitions moved in and a heroin epidemic ripped through the city, with guns becoming a major problem in the 1990s, just as young men like Spaine and Venner were making their way in the world.

Full social consequences followed: addicts became sex workers and struggled with the stigma for years afterwards; thefts and muggings increased, forcing an older generation to feel more cut off than they already were because they were afraid to go out, especially in the dark.

Though many of the dealers are now in jail for a long time and the mood in L8 is much calmer, it took discipline to resist the pernicious environment. As Jimi Jagne, the son of Gambian and Chinese parents, who emerged as a community leader after the events of 1981, says, “Anyone else who got caught up in the wash was a victim.”

Though Liverpool 8 has increasingly become defined by a large Asian community, hardened attitudes and suspicion of outsiders remain. It is one of the reasons it is difficult to tell the full story of Spaine and Venner, whose families have strong connections to L8. The Athletic contacted several people from the community who knew Spaine but did not want to speak.

Kevin Spaine’s mugshot when he was arrested in 2023 (Merseyside Police)

It is a fair assumption, however, that Spaine fell prey to the same issues that plagued L8 in the 1990s, a period when many locals felt like the authorities gave up on the district altogether and drug dealers, some of them who established international connections, took hold.

According to the Echo, Spaine described himself in court as being a “dependent crack addict”, saying, “I was in a mad state — erratic, paranoid, fidgeting. My mind was ticking overtime. I was dealing with a lot of things. If me and Learoy weren’t on drugs, this wouldn’t have happened.”

In mitigation, Harrison argued that his client was “ruined and dominated by the abuse of illegal drugs”, subsequently leading to his long history of criminal offending. “It’s not an unfamiliar spiral to the court, but it is a tragic one,” he suggested.

Spaine looked a much older man than he actually was when, in his mid-30s, he posted a picture of himself on Facebook in 2016 wearing tatty Liverpool training gear. By that point in his life, Venner also had a major drug problem, to the extent that for a long time before his death, he was a virtual recluse.

When Spaine appeared in the milk advert, his voice had sounded full of youthful enthusiasm and innocence. What happened after is a bleak, sad story, far removed from the feel-good atmosphere that will envelope Anfield tomorrow as Accrington attempt to pull off one of the greatest shocks in the FA Cup’s long history.

The commercial will surely get an airing in the television broadcasters’ pre-match packages and Rush has acknowledged its legacy by inviting Rice to meet him before kick-off at tomorrow’s match.

If his life had taken a different course, Spaine would probably have been joining him at Anfield, sharing his memories and maybe even recreating that famous exchange with Rice for the television cameras.

Instead, he is facing years to reflect on a life of terrible decisions that sucked him away in a destructive vortex of drugs and violence that has claimed so many like him.

(Top photos: Merseyside Police, Milk Marketing Board, Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)