Hitmen (14 page)

S
helly Molyneux, born in the East End of London the daughter of a maintenance engineer and a seamstress, enjoyed a happy childhood by all accounts. When the family moved to Romford, in Essex, she left school and started work in her local Barclay’s Bank. At the age of just 18, she met and fell in love with a customer called Jon Molyneux. The couple were married on 28 June 1980 in the parish church of St Paul’s at Bentley Common, in Essex. But not all Shelly’s friends and relatives liked her young husband. As her sister Denise later explained: ‘I never really warmed to Jon. He could be very condescending towards our family, as if we weren’t really good enough for him. Yet Shelly used to say that if they went to a party, he would be the one that everyone wanted to talk to. She really loved and admired him.’

Jon Molyneux was only 5 foot 3 inches tall but he acted
like a
big
man in many other ways, with his pricey Armani suits, Gucci cufflinks and flashy cars. Following their marriage, Shelly gave up work to become a full-time mother and her husband became managing director of Apple Computers UK. Then he struck it really rich during the internet boom as the £175,000-a-year chief executive of Scoot.com.

With all that great wealth came a host of sleazy affairs for pint-sized Jon Molyneux. However, Shelly took the attitude that if she didn’t confront her wayward husband then perhaps his adultery might just go away. As her sister later said, ‘She would never have contemplated leaving Jon over his affairs because our parents had a long and happy marriage, and she took the view that “we are married and whatever problems we have, we will get over them”.’

But not even Shelly could hide her heartbreak when husband Jon left her a couple of times to be with his new girlfriends. ‘Sometimes he would ask to come home after a while, saying he’d made a mistake, and other times she would ask him because the children missed their father so much they had begged her to call him.’ And every time Jon Molyneux came home he’d buy his wife yet another ‘sorry present’, such as a piece of jewellery or a brand new car, and they’d try all over again to make a go of their marriage. On Shelly’s 40th birthday, husband Jon bought her a Morgan sports car. A few months on – in February 2000 – the couple even renewed their vows at the same church where they were married.

Eleven months later, Jon Molyneux left his wife for a
25-year
-old woman called Luisa Bracchi and went to live in west
London. This time, Shelly sued her husband for divorce on grounds of adultery. Later still, Jon was to admit that he’d had over 20 affairs, many of which he’d kept secret from his wife.

Then, in August 2001, Shelly met divorced father-of-one Paul McGuinness, who was more than ten years her junior. She soon told Paul all about her marriage problems. As he later explained: ‘I was aware of the problems she was having with Jon, but she used to say, “I don’t want to get you involved in all that.”’

However, relations between Shelly and her ex-husband grew steadily more acrimonious. One day she got an email from Jon accusing her of being ‘a leech’. Another message described her as being a ‘manipulative witch’. It got so bad that Shelly made sure she was out whenever her ex-husband came to visit their children, and by Christmas of 2001 the couple only communicated through solicitors. Then Jon’s career took a bit of a nosedive and he announced to his wife that their two children would have to be taken out of private schools. Her sister Denise later explained: ‘She was at absolute rock bottom and Jon had rescinded on a deal over the house and she didn’t know where she was going to live with the children.’

Shelly became convinced that her ex-husband had more money than he was admitting, so in February 2002, she hired a private investigator called Gavin Burrows to check out Jon Molyneux’s finances. His name had initially been spotted and then suggested by Shelly’s young love, Paul McGuinness. Burrows had advertised in the back of a legal magazine and McGuinness knew a solicitor who’d used the private eye a couple of times. Shelly paid him £3,000 to launch a proper investigation of her ex-husband’s finances.

It wasn’t long before Burrows rang her to say he’d traced an account containing £83,000 in Jon’s name to Bermuda. And at the same time she told the private eye how badly her former husband was treating her.

Then one day the conversation took a more sinister turn. As Shelly’s lover Paul McGuinness later explained: ‘When she said she wanted him out of her life, the conversation turned to finding a permanent solution.’ Without telling her lover, Shelly Molyneux agreed to meet a hitman, recommended to her by Gavin Burrows, two days before she and her lover were due to go on a skiing holiday together in February 2002. In a videotape recording of that conversation later revealed in court, Shelly clearly stated that she ‘wished to take the matter further’. What she didn’t realise was that the ‘hitman’ was an undercover tabloid reporter, who later went to the police.

Over the kitchen table of the family home, Shelly Molyneux told the supposed hitman: ‘I’ve spent 20 years with a man who has been an absolute bastard. He’s been making my life hell. He wants to destroy me. I will not let him keep doing this to me. I hate him. I want him gone forever. He’s an easy target, I would think, being 5 foot 3. And he’s flash. He wears Armani suits and he drives an Audi. I am looking at a hijacking. I am looking at a mugging.’ But Shelly Molyneux wasn’t finished yet. She added, ‘I’ve wished him a heart attack or said I hoped to stress him out so much he would have a stroke. I told him, “I hope you burn in hell,” but those were just normal divorce things.’

Then the hitman asked her on the tape how long she’d been thinking about having her husband killed and she replied, ‘A year.’ Then she was asked if she was sure. ‘Very
sure.’ And she added, ‘I was a normal wife and mother until all this happened. But please be very, very careful. This is the rest of my life we’re talking about and I want my children to have their mother around.’ Shelly claimed the hitman then said he would call her later that night to confirm she wanted him to go ahead and kill her ex-husband. She went on to say that when he didn’t call she assumed the hit had been cancelled. (Shelly Molyneux’s lover, Paul McGuinness, later described watching the videotape as ‘like watching a complete stranger. When she is under intense pressure, she tends to put on an act and comes across as flippant and blasé, while inside she is in a state of trauma.’)

Then, on that skiing holiday in Canada, Shelly got two phone calls which so frightened her, she later claimed, that she put a block on her mobile phone because she thought that because she hadn’t given any money to the hitman he wouldn’t go ahead and murder Jon Molyneux. One of those calls was actually from a policeman posing as another hitman. A court later heard that he’d offered her the opportunity to back down but she did not take it.

The first Paul McGuinness knew of his lover’s bid to kill her ex-husband was when the pair returned from Canada with three of her children and were stopped at customs by police at Gatwick Airport and taken to separate interview rooms. As McGuinness later recalled, ‘After three hours they took her to a central London police station and I had to find her children in the airport. When I told them, they became completely hysterical.’

McGuinness then took Shelly’s children to their
grandparents’ home in Essex. It wasn’t until two days later that McGuinness was allowed to see his lover at the police station where she was being held. ‘It was very emotional,’ he later recalled. ‘Shelly was terrified I might leave her, and the children would have no one to look after them.’

Shelly Molyneux insisted to her lover she had no intention of meeting the hitman and that the private eye had insisted she go ahead with the meeting. ‘She was terrified that, if she didn’t meet him, the family might come to harm,’ McGuinness later said. After ten days on remand in Holloway Prison, Shelly was freed on bail and Paul McGuinness proposed marriage to her in August 2002.

In October, 2002, Shelly Molyneux was jailed for five years after admitting soliciting for murder. Judge Christopher Moss said Molyneux was ‘motivated by greed and hatred’ and was ‘deadly serious’ in wanting her husband murdered. At her trial she’d been dubbed ‘evil’, ‘cold-blooded’ and ‘greedy’ – a woman who would stop at nothing to inherit a fortune of more than £1 million in cash and a £600,000 insurance policy. She later insisted to her family that she never really wanted her former husband dead but was lured into the plot by a private investigator who saw a chance to make money from a tabloid newspaper. Even Jon Molyneux had asked the court to be lenient on his wife for the sake of their children.

‘Shelly is full of regret. I do not believe she ever really wanted Jon dead,’ says Paul McGuinness. ‘When she hired Gavin Burrows [the private investigator] she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was out of her mind with worry over what would happen to her and the children. She didn’t
want Jon’s money, she just wanted the house. The insurance policy she was supposed to be after had already been signed over to the children and his new partner.

‘This whole murder plot was simply a fantasy that spun out of control. She was at rock bottom, terrified she would lose the family home, and simply had the misfortune to voice those feelings to Gavin Burrows. When it all got out of hand she was too terrified to tell them to stop in case they harmed her children. She thought if she simply refused to take their calls or hand over any money, the murder wouldn’t go ahead.’

Nothing could soften the blow of that five-year sentence for Shelly Molyneux. Her children refused to have anything more to do with their father and now they look forward to her regular letters from prison and the three phone calls she is allowed to make each week. Four times a month they make the one-and-a-half-hour journey to High Point Prison in Suffolk to visit their mother.

In the five or ten minutes she is permitted, she asks them in turn how they are coping without her and if they still love her. Then she turns to lover Paul McGuinness, who is now caring for the children aged 18, 17, 15 and 6, telling him how lonely and frightened she is.

Shelly Molyneux is planning an appeal against her sentence. If she fails, it will be another two years at the earliest before she will be considered for parole. Some consider Shelly was at best foolish in the extreme and at worst downright murderous.

T
he shrill of a bell ringing loudly in the distance meant only one thing to Judy Benkowski – her husband was demanding something. Clarence Benkowski was overweight and overbearing. All his life he’d been number one in that miserable household. And even now, after retiring from his job as a welder, he expected to be waited on hand and foot.

When his sick and aged mother decided to move in it got worse for Judy, because it meant there were two of them bullying and cursing her. They made her serve them as if she was a slave. They treated her like dirt. There had to be a better way to spend your life, surely?

Often these two obese specimens would sit in their cosy armchairs in the sitting room of the Benkowski’s neat, detached suburban home at number 508, South Yale Avenue, Addison, near Chicago, for hours on end without lifting a finger. That was when the wretched little bell rang the most.
An endless stream of demands followed.

Ring
. ‘Get me a coffee,’ said one.

Ring
. ‘Get me a beer,’ said the other.

Ring
. ‘This coffee’s cold, get me another.’

Ring
. ‘This beer’s not cold enough. Why the hell aren’t they kept in the freezer?’

And so it went. On and on and on. Judy Benkowski had no time for a job and only a small handful of friends in the entire world. Her main occupation was looking after those two leeches, as well as bringing up her two sons.

Not surprisingly, it sometimes got too much for Judy. Her life was so relentless and so unenjoyable that she’d often cry herself to sleep at night, wondering when it would ever end. Occasionally, husband Clarence would drunkenly try to have sex with her. It certainly wasn’t making love. Judy reckoned it was closer to rape than anything else.

The act of sex was totally one-sided. He’d make her fondle him and then – at the very moment he was ready – she would just lie there and listen to him grunting while his blubbery, obese body crushed her into the mattress. At such moments, she’d try and think of other things, like the next day’s shopping. But his roughness would snap her back to the unpleasant reality of having this huge lump of lard molesting her. But at least it was usually over in minutes, if not seconds. However the pain could be really awful sometimes. Pretty inevitable when a seriously overweight middle-aged man forces himself on a slightly built, five-foot-tall woman more than 20 years his junior. They might have been husband and wife in law. But they were complete strangers in every other sense of the word.

One day Clarence decided he wanted to spice up
his
sex life so he bought a waterbed. Typically, it was the cheapest one he could find and it had the unpleasant side-effect of being so under-filled that it swayed from side to side and made its occupants feel seasick. So instead of just lying there, now Judy had that awful, overwhelming sensation of rocking up and down on a boat bobbing across the ocean. Often she’d almost gag as the bile tried to force its way out of her throat. At least then her husband would stop forcing himself into her rather than risk being puked over.

Clarence’s attitude towards sex was much the same as his outlook on life: men ruled the household. Women were just there to honour and obey and do what the hell he said. He didn’t give a damn about Judy’s feelings, he just wanted four big, square meals a day and an orgasm when he felt like it.

For almost 20 years, Judy put up with the insults and misery of married life. What else could she do? She had no career. She couldn’t afford to exist outside those four walls. She’d been trapped for so long she’d forgotten what it was like to enjoy herself.

‘You cannot let him treat you like this. You gotta do somethin’ about it, Judy.’

Debra Santana was outraged by her friend Judy Benkowski’s complete indifference to her appalling marital situation. She’d heard so many horror stories from Judy. How could a husband treat his wife so badly? Debra assured her friend she certainly wouldn’t put up with it.

‘But,’ Judy explained, in her quiet, reserved way, ‘what can I do? I have nowhere to go. No means of support.’

However, Debra was determined to help her friend and neighbour. They had an unlikely kinship. Debra was a striking blonde of 32, with a fun-loving attitude towards life, who’d suffered during her marriage and taken the sensible route out: divorce. She now enjoyed everything that Judy had long since given up hope of having.

The main object of envy between the two women was Debra’s athletic, black lover who, she regularly told Judy, gave her all-round sexual satisfaction and never treated her badly. Judy was envious because all she really wanted was to feel warmth, passion and true love again from a man. Judy knew Debra was right when she said she had to do something about her marriage, but what?

Judy’s husband Clarence, a strict Catholic, wouldn’t even discuss the subject of divorce. And he wasn’t prepared to let them lead separate lives. At least then she could have gone out with other men and he could have done as he pleased. But Clarence believed he owned Judy – lock, stock and barrel. She was his woman. If he wanted sex he’d ring his bell and get it. If he wanted to insult her he’d do it. If he wanted her to be his slave nothing could stop him, or so he told Judy with great relish virtually every day of their miserable marriage.

Judy’s friend Debra continued to be outraged. She may have been 13 years younger than her friend, but she gradually achieved increasing influence over her weaker neighbour. The more they talked about Debra’s adventures in and out of bed, the more Judy began to realise how desperate she was to end the misery.

‘But what can I do about him?’ Judy asked her friend one day.

‘I’ve got an idea …’ replied Debra.
Eddie Brown was the lover who’d given Debra all the sexual satisfaction she’d ever craved. Even fully clothed, Eddie’s muscular, toned torso virtually burst his shirt buttons to breaking point. Judy Benkowski felt a tingle of excitement as she shook his hand for the first time. She didn’t need much imagination to work out what Eddie’s biggest asset must have been.

‘Eddie’s going to help you with your problem, Judy,’ said Debra, when all three met up one day in a local restaurant.

The only thing about Eddie that did surprise Judy was that he stood just 5 foot 3 inches tall. In fact, Debra towered over him by at least three inches. But none of that mattered because Debra had convinced Judy that Eddie was going to be the perfect man to help cure her marriage problems. But it was a job that required a certain amount of planning.

‘D’you really think you can kill him without being caught?’ Judy asked Eddie Brown.

He assured both women he could murder Judy’s husband Clarence with ‘no trouble’. He even agreed a fee of $5,000 as they sat round that table in the restaurant.

Admittedly, there were a few details to sort out. Where should it be done? What weapon should be used? How would they make sure the police didn’t suspect anything? And what happened if he lived?

At first, Judy Benkowski wondered if she’d gone completely crazy. How could she even contemplate murdering another human being? It all seemed like a dream. She hesitated.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t do this,’ she told her best friend and the woman’s lover.

There was a brief silence from Debra and Eddie.

‘What?’ said Debra. ‘You can’t change your mind. We agreed on this, Judy. Come on. Let’s do it!’

Then Eddie chipped in, ‘Yeah. It’ll be easy. We’ll make it look like a robbery. No problem.’

The pressure was mounting on Judy. She wasn’t a
strong-willed
woman at the best of times. Now she felt as if there really wasn’t any choice in the matter. After all, this was her only real escape route from a miserable life. It was the answer to all her problems and unhappiness. Sure it seemed drastic, but that animal of a husband deserved to die. He’d treated her like dirt for too long. Now it was her turn. Revenge would be sweet. There was no turning back.

Next they had to decide how and where to do it.

It was mid-October 1988, and Halloween was fast approaching. Judy had a great idea, which she immediately enthusiastically shared with her two partners in crime.

‘I’ll get you [Eddie] a real scary costume. You’ll look just like a kid out trick-or-treating. Then you knock on the door, Clarence answers. You scream “trick or treat” and he gets shot to death. Whaddya think?’

Debra and Eddie looked stunned. It was a ludicrous plan and they knew it. But Judy had come to life describing the ghoulish aspects of it. She’d even chuckled weirdly as she described the shooting of her husband. And she wasn’t finished yet.

‘Clarence is a mean son-of-a-bitch and he hates giving anything to people who come knocking at the door. I kinda like the idea of him getting the ultimate payback.’

The shy, retiring Judy Benkowski had been suddenly transformed into a hard-nosed killer psyching herself up for murder. Her sudden obsession with husband Clarence’s death even surprised her great friend Debra. But Judy felt that the risks involved were far outweighed by the prospect of a new life without Clarence. Judy Benkowski was feeling happier than she had done for years.

‘But hang on there, Judy,’ said Eddie. ‘Trick-or-treaters don’t usually gun down their neighbours. The cops would suss it was a contract hit and they’d get us for sure.’

Pint-sized Eddie was trying to defuse the situation. Sure, he’d agreed to murder this lady’s husband because the guy sounded like he deserved it. But Judy’s scheme was absolutely insane. It was like something out of a comic book, hardly the sort of low-key killing Eddie had in mind. He’d just got out of jail and was hoping to avoid any future spells in the slammer.

‘I think we gotta do something less …’ he hesitated, ‘… dramatic?’

Judy was shaking her head before he’d even finished saying it.

‘No way. The cops’ll think some crazy trick-or-treater is out there blasting innocent citizens to death. They’ll never think it was a contract killing.’

Debra and Eddie glanced at each other and shrugged their shoulders. All they could see were the dollar signs registering in front of their eyes.

‘You’re the boss,’ said Eddie. He was jobless and needed the money so he wasn’t about to blow the contract, whatever the risks.
Halloween trick-or-treating involves children dressed in ghoulish costumes knocking on their neighbours’ doors and shouting ‘trick or treat’ when someone opens up. The traditional reward is a liberal helping of sweets and, usually, everyone goes home happy. In the Chicago suburb of Addison – as in tens of millions of homes across the United States – these Halloween activities had been fervently obeyed ever since a group of devil worshippers in Salem started the ball rolling more than 200 years earlier. And South Yale Avenue – where the Benkowskis lived – was no exception. With its row upon row of three-bedroomed detached bungalows, built to maximise the use of space available, this was classic Middle-American suburbia.

But on Halloween afternoon, small-time crook Eddie Brown started to get cold feet. As Judy and Debra adjusted the ghoulish latex face mask they’d bought him at the local supermarket, Eddie felt that dressing up like a kid going out trick-or-treating was not the right way to go about a professional hit.

To make matters worse, the rubbery mask was extremely hot, sweaty and tight fitting. Judy and Debra had insisted on getting one that covered his entire face so that no one could see what colour his skin was. But it was airless behind that mask. Eddie started wondering if he’d even make it to number 508 alive. Gasping for air, he complained to the two women, ‘This is fuckin’ crazy. I can’t even see properly outta the eye slits.’

Eddie’s voice was so badly muffled by the mask, the two women didn’t understand what he was saying at first.

So he yelled, ‘I SAID, “THIS IS CRAZY.”’

If Eddie had to shout this loudly to be heard, then he’d probably alert the entire street when he went knocking on Clarence Benkowski’s door to announce his trick-or-treating surprise. But yet more problems lay ahead.

When Eddie wandered up the street to the end of South Yale Avenue his heart sank. Dozens of school children were marching up and down the street in trick-or-treating disguises. It looked as if the entire population of under-
15-year
-olds in Addison had all decided to hit South Yale at exactly the same time.

Eddie ripped off the mask in a fit of frustration and stood there in his white skeleton costume, jumping up and down on the spot. His two female accomplices looked at him with horror.

‘I’m not doin’ this. I can’t start shootin’ at the guy in front of all those kids. I’ll never get away with it.’

Eddie abandoned the hit there and then. Judy was furious. She’d been dreaming about that ugly hulk of a husband being gunned down. Now Eddie Brown was ruining all her plans.

‘But you gotta do it, Eddie. You cut a deal.’

But Eddie Brown had a new plan in mind.

‘Don’t get me wrong, Judy. I’ll kill that son-of-a-bitch. But not tonight. It’d be crazy and we’d all end up in jail.’

Judy reluctantly agreed.

‘OK. But it’s gotta be soon.’

Ring
. ‘Where’s my breakfast?’

Ring
. ‘Come on, I’m goddam hungry.’

Ring. Ring. Ring.

Clarence Benkowski was providing his usual pre-breakfast performance. At least on this day his mother was away at a relative’s, so Judy didn’t have to put up with her as well. In the kitchen, Judy muttered quietly under her breath, ‘
Don’t worry. You’ll get just what you deserve in good time
.’

If Clarence hadn’t been so lazy, he might have got up from the breakfast table where he was slouched and lumbered into the kitchen to witness Judy pouring the contents of twenty sachets of sleeping pills into his coffee.

Instead he just kept on ringing that damn bell.

Ring
. ‘Move your ass, woman. I’m HUNGRY.’

That last ring was the signal which would hopefully mark the beginning of the end of Clarence Benkowski’s life. For it helped Judy feel no guilt as she emptied the last of those packets and then swilled them around in his coffee. The more he rang the bell, the better she felt about killing him. It was a wonderful feeling – just to contemplate the end of her unhappy life.