The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (35 page)

Zajac was tried for murder at Birmingham Crown Court in September 1983. He admitted going to the Rendell home but said his intention was to commit robbery. He said he lost his head when Shirley Rendell put up resistance and tried to reassure her that his only motive was robbery. He hit her with the hammer, then panicked and stabbed her through the throat. Zajac said he was sorry for what he had done and would assist the police in bringing a prosecution against the woman who hired him. Of Kathleen Calhaem he said, “I feel she is such an evil person . . . she made me feel like a schoolboy.” Mr Justice Stephen Brown passed down a life sentence.

Calhaem was tried at Winchester Crown Court in January 1984. She denied the charge. Zajac was the chief prosecution witness and he clearly implicated Calhaem who had paid him to carry out the killing. She did not give evidence. Described as “cold, calculating and evil”, the jury took four hours to decide that she was guilty of hiring a man to commit murder on her behalf. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.

A Yellow Jaguar

The murder victim was given a distinctive yellow car as a means of identifying her as the target for the gunman who killed her.

Alan Palliko, a former police officer in Los Angeles, created a macho image for himself. He was dedicated to physical fitness, had a succession of girlfriends and loved cars and
guns. He vowed that he would make his first million by the time he reached the age of thirty-five.

He married Katherine Drummond in 1964 but the marriage was soon under strain due to his constant philandering. In August 1965, Katherine was badly injured in a hit-and-run incident and, a few months later, she was attacked by Palliko while she sat in her car. He attempted to strangle her and passers-by heard him say, “I’m going to kill you”. When his assault created too much public attention, he ran off. Katherine decided not to press charges but she asked for a divorce.

Around this time, Palliko was in a renewed relationship with Sandra Stockton, whom he had married in 1960 and subsequently divorced. On the evening of 11 December 1966, Sandra’s husband, Henry Stockton, was shot dead in his home by intruders as he watched television. Questions began to be asked when it was discovered that Sandra was his main beneficiary and stood to gain a substantial sum from the insurance pay-out.

Officers investigating the murder found that Sandra had bought a .22 calibre pistol earlier in the year and enquiries led to Alan Palliko. As the murder investigation dragged on, Palliko became the owner of The Grand Duke bar in Burbank and he moved in to a luxury apartment nearby. He also acquired a new girlfriend, Judy Davis, a swimming pool instructor, whom he married in March 1968. The marriage was full of tension from the very beginning and was destined to be shortlived.

On 18 April, Palliko leased a yellow Jaguar car for Judy’s use and, two days later, his bride of six weeks died a violent death in her distinctively coloured car. Judy Palliko was shot dead at the wheel of her stationary car close to their apartment. She had been beaten about the head with a gun butt and shot twice; she died in hospital.

Palliko confided to a friend who was employed in his bar that he had committed murder. “Do you remember Sandra Stockton?” he asked, “I killed her husband.” He was arrested at The Grand Duke on 30 April 1968 and charged with the murder of Henry Stockton and Judy Palliko. Investigators found an arsenal of weapons in his apartment.

Palliko and Sandra were tried for murder in November 1968 when the prosecution argued that Sandra’s husband had been killed for his money. Sandra had taken out insurance on his life two weeks before he was murdered. It was brought out in evidence that Palliko had insured Judy shortly before they were married with the intention of setting her up for murder. The purpose behind giving her the yellow Jaguar to drive was to mark her out as a murder target.

Palliko denied killing his wife, saying that he had been set up. While the evidence was mainly circumstantial, the case was persuasively argued by Vincent Bugliosi, the celebrated prosecutor. Palliko and Sandra Stockton were convicted of murdering Judy and of attempting to murder his former wife, Katherine. He was sentenced to death and Sandra to life imprisonment. The scheming would-be millionaire made three attempts to escape from prison and in 1972 his death sentence was commuted to life.

“Someone Has Just Shot My Husband”

The day before he died, a murder victim placed a personal ad in his local newspaper that was intended to quell rumours that his marriage was breaking up and denying gossip about fraud and theft.

Around midnight on 26 November 1991, fifty-one-year-old retired banker, Terry Daddow, was shot dead when he answered the front doorbell at his cottage in Northiam, Sussex in the UK. After a significant delay, his wife Jean called the emergency services. “Someone has just shot my husband,” she told the operator.

Detectives thought the scenario had the hallmarks of a killing carried out by a hired hit man. House-to-house enquiries established that no one had seen the gunman although many had heard the shotgun fired in the still of the night. Those who noted the time, recorded the blast fifteen minutes before Jean Daddow had called 999.

Jean Daddow appeared tearfully in television interviews appealing for information that would help the police find the
killer of her husband. Meanwhile, investigators were looking into the background of Terry and Jean. Local gossip followed two paths; one was that Terry was an alcoholic wife-beater and the other that Jean had forsaken her husband for a string of lovers.

The financial affairs of the Daddows offered some interesting background. Terry had been involved in a financial scandal at the bank concerning his handling of customers’ accounts for personal gain. He was asked to retire after twenty years’ service.

Some time before her husband’s death, Jean had begun to transfer their joint assets into a large number of bank and building society accounts. Part of this financial overhaul involved Terry making a new will leaving everything to Jean and nothing to the children from his previous marriage.

In her role as grieving widow, Jean suggested that her husband’s killer was a jealous husband or boyfriend taking action as a result on one of his affairs. By now, suspicion was hardening around Jean and investigators began to look into her family background. She had a twenty-three-year-old son from her first marriage to Roger Blackman, who appeared to have connections in the criminal underworld. The police were looking for a professional hit man and so a new line of enquiry opened up.

It seemed that Blackman had dealings with a former soldier, Robert Bell, who owed him money. Bell promptly disappeared to the US but returned when he realized the game was up. He was arrested and readily confessed to accepting £12,000 in a plot to murder Terry Daddow. He claimed he lacked the courage to kill in cold blood and that, although he was present on the night of the shooting, it was Blackman who fired the fatal shot. He claimed that Jean Daddow was the arch schemer behind the plot.

The deadly trio were tried at Hove Crown Court in February 1993. Jean Daddow played the grieving widow card but to little effect and she and Blackman were convicted of conspiracy to murder. Bell was convicted of murder and conspiracy to murder for which he was sentenced to life
imprisonment. Daddow and Blackman were each sentenced to eighteen years.

Hit Squad

Part-time special constable Nisha Patel-Nasri, aged twenty-nine, was stabbed to death outside her home at Wembley, north London in the UK late on the night of 11 May 2006. Neighbours found her at around midnight dressed only in her nightclothes lying in a pool of blood. She had been stabbed in the groin and died later in hospital. Detectives thought she had gone outside carrying a torch to investigate a disturbance and had been attacked by a would-be intruder.

The dead woman’s husband, thirty-four-year-old Fadi Nasri, made a televised appeal for information that would help the murder enquiry. He had been away from home on the night in question playing snooker. In honour of her work as a special constable, three police motorcycles led mourners at her funeral.

As the murder investigation proceeded, more was learned about the background of the bereaved husband and the state of his marriage. It seemed that Nisha wanted a child and was disappointed at the amount of time Fadi spent away from home. She worked hard running a hairdressing business and was a more than equal money-earner.

Fadi drove a stylish car and ran a limousine business, which he claimed earned more than £150,000 a year. He was recognized as a big spender and, in fact, had large debts. He was also leading a double life running an escort agency and he kept a Lithuanian prostitute as his mistress. After Nisha’s death, he sold the marital home and moved in with his mistress.

The first breakthrough in the investigation came in September when a kitchen knife, believed to be the murder weapon, was found in a drain near the Nasris’ home. Mobile phone records led detectives to two men who Nasri claimed were business associates. These were Rodger Leslie and Jason Jones; the former was a drug dealer and the latter a bouncer. Both men were arrested in December 2006 and Nasri followed in January 2007. All three were charged with murder.

They appeared on trial at the Old Bailey in May 2008. The prosecution argued that Nasri arranged the murder and employed hit men to do the killing while he was away playing snooker. He provided them with keys to his house and a knife taken from his own kitchen. There appeared to have been a dummy run several days before the murder took place when Nisha Patel-Nasri confronted strangers armed with a knife at her front door.

Mobile phone records linked the three men and CCTV of a getaway car pointed detectives to Leslie and Jones. Nasri denied having his wife killed so that he could claim on her insurance and continue his extra-marital affair. On 28 May after deliberating for twenty-six hours, the jury found all three defendants guilty of murder. Sentencing was announced in June; Nasri, Leslie and Jones all received life sentences.

Death Of A Lawyer

Maître Jacques Perrot, a French lawyer with friends in high places, was shot dead in Paris on 27 December 1985. His violent death and its aftermath raised many questions that have never been satisfactorily answered.

Successful in his own right, Perrot added lustre to his career by marrying Darie Boutboul, a beautiful and talented woman, who achieved celebrity as France’s premier female jockey in April 1982. Perrot was also an amateur jockey and horseracing was a feature of the couple’s lives.

Darie’s family background could at best be described as unusual. Her father, Dr Robert Boutboul, was supposed to have died in an air crash in 1970 and her life was managed by her mother, Elisabeth Boutboul, a trained lawyer with a manipulative personality.

Shortly before he was gunned down on the stairs leading from his parents’ apartment, Perrot made some discoveries about his in-laws. First was that Darie’s father was still alive and living in retirement and, second, that Madame Boutboul had been disbarred from legal practice following a disciplinary hearing into a currency swindle involving one of her clients.

Perrot’s murder shocked France, not least because the dead man was a personal friend of Laurent Fabius, the Prime Minister. It later emerged that Fabius had asked Perrot for his help in investigating racehorse scandals. More personal details followed with news that Perrot was seeking a divorce from Darie and had arranged to meet his mother-in-law on the evening that he was killed. She did not turn up.

Within days of the shooting, and to the amazement of the French public, Dr Boutboul was reunited with his family in an outpouring of emotion before television news cameras. Mme Boutboul, who appeared to be stage-managing the occasion, said that her son-in-law had been murdered because he had uncovered a scandal, the details of which she could not divulge. She did, though, drop a heavy hint when she said she didn’t want to end up like Robert Calvi.

This was a reference to the man known as “God’s banker” who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982
(see
here
).
He had been chairman of Banco Ambrosiano which collapsed with huge debts. Scandal swirled around Calvi’s death and the possible involvement of the Italian P2 lodge. Initially, it was believed that Calvi had committed suicide but in 2002 after a long enquiry, it was thought he had been murdered.

Mme Boutboul continued to make controversial statements and it seemed that her son-in-law had unearthed some unsavoury facts about her misuse of client’s money. In 1994 she was found guilty of complicity in Perrot’s death and given a fifteen-year prison sentence. The mystery of her husband’s feigned death and resurrection and the precise motive for her son-in-law’s murder have not so far been adequately explained.

“Red Elvis”

The death of Dean Reed, an American pop singer, in Berlin during the Cold War remains an unexplained mystery.

The body of forty-seven-year-old Dean Reed was recovered from the Zeuthner See, a lake in East Berlin, on the morning of
16 June 1986. He had apparently drowned and East German news media spoke of a “tragic accident”.

The singer was a controversial figure. He had lived in the East for fourteen years and his songs were very popular in the eastern bloc countries. While he was highly regarded east of the Berlin wall, he was a hate figure for many Americans who regarded him as a defector and referred to him as “Red Elvis”.

In the 1960s, Reed spent time in South America where he embraced Marxist doctrines. He was passionate about his beliefs and took out newspaper advertisements urging readers to write to President John Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikito Kruschev demanding an end to nuclear testing. This led to his expulsion from Peru and subsequently from Chile where he publicly insulted the Stars and Stripes flag in a protest against the war in Vietnam. His campaigning for world peace did not endear him to Americans who despised him as a “Commy lover”.