Hitmen (15 page)

Just keep ringing, Clarence. Just keep ringing. Soon you’ll never ring again
.

Then Judy tipped the empty pill packets into the trashcan, before moving towards the dining area with a new spring in her step, a new bounce in her walk.

‘There you go, sweetheart.’

She hadn’t called him that for years. ‘Sweetheart’ was a term of endearment. How could she have even contemplated feeling warmth towards this lazy, fat bully of a man she was about to murder. Yet a tingle of excitement and passion ran through Judy’s body as she put the tray down on the breakfast table. Then she sat down and quietly sipped at her tea, her
eyes straining upwards and across the table towards Clarence. But he hadn’t even lifted the coffee cup yet.

Clarence Benkowski was a predictable creature of habit. He liked to first gulp down his fried eggs, then stuff some crunchy toast into that big fat mouth of his. Then that cup of coffee would be lifted to his lips.
Be patient. Relax. He’s going to drink it. All in good time. All in good time.

The
Chicago-Sun Times
was spread across the table in front of Clarence, as it always was each morning. Something caught his eye. He stopped eating and gaped at the sports results.

Not once in all their years together had he even uttered a word of conversation to Judy over breakfast. That was another of his most cherished habits. But that cup of coffee remained untouched. Judy’s initial excitement was starting to slide into desperation.
Come on!
Come on!
Get on with it!

She felt desperate. Maybe it was time for desperate measures.

‘Sweetheart.’ For some weird reason she used
that
word again. ‘Sweetheart, drink your coffee or it’ll get cold.’

For a few seconds, Clarence screwed up his blubbery face and looked at his wife quizzically. She
never
spoke at breakfast. Why the hell was she bugging him to drink his coffee? Never before in more than 20 years. Why now? But, as with most things in Clarence’s life, he gave it no more than a brief moment of consideration. Any further analysis would have been totally out of character.

Judy was angry with herself for weakening in the face of such adversity. She mustn’t try to make him drink his coffee or he might get suspicious. She didn’t dare look up again in case he caught her eye and saw those telltale signs of guilt.

Judy was virtually shaking with anxiety. Maybe she’d
blown it. Had he sussed her out? She shut her eyes for a split second in the hope all that doubt and anguish would simply go away.

Then it happened. The unmistakable slurping noise was like music to her ears. She opened her eyes to see him gulping like a fat bull at a water trough as he tried to wash all that greasy food down his big, ugly gullet. At last, he was going to pay the ultimate price for his cruelty and greed.

As he sucked that big coffee cup dry, Judy felt the rush of relief running through her veins. She sighed quietly to herself. She later admitted it was one of the most satisfying moments of her life.

Seconds later …

‘I don’t feel so good. Think I’ll lie down a while,’ belched Clarence.

The sleeping pills were already kicking in.

The previous day, pint-sized Romeo, Eddie Brown had provided Judy with very precise instructions on how many tablets she should feed him. Just enough to knock him into a deep slumber rather than complete unconsciousness. That way, no one would be able to tell he’d been drugged.

Clarence Benkowski got up and struggled towards the bedroom. He only just managed to get to his beloved waterbed before collapsing in a heap of rolling fat. A few seconds later, Judy crept into the room just to make sure he was out. Then she walked quietly back into the hallway and phoned Debra. ‘He’s asleep. You and Eddie better get over here fast.’

Judy put the phone down gently and awaited her two accomplices.

Debra was the first to turn up at the house. She hugged Judy warmly to show her good friend she supported her completely and utterly. The two women then walked into the front room and sat side by side on a sofa and counted the minutes until Eddie arrived. Eventually the back door opened with a creak and their hired killer walked in.

In almost complete silence, Judy handed Eddie her husband’s World War Two Luger pistol and motioned him towards the master bedroom where the master lay sleeping on his waterbed.

The two women then sat back down on the same sofa. Debra put on a pair of stereo headphones and began listening to heavy metal on her Walkman. She didn’t want to hear what was about to occur.

Eddie had earlier said he’d use a pillow to muffle the sound of the gun, but that didn’t prevent Judy from hearing the thudding pops of three bullets being fired into her husband’s slumbering torso. She didn’t feel any great outpouring of emotion. Just a sense of relief that it was finally over.

But there was more work still to be done. Judy and her two accomplices needed to make it look like a burglary that had gone wrong. All three began pulling drawers of clothes out and spread them all over the bed where Clarence still lay. Incredibly, the waterbed was still intact because all three bullets had embedded themselves in their target. Judy was disappointed in a way because she really hated that waterbed. But then it would have caused such a mess if it’d leaked everywhere.

Meanwhile, Eddie continued smashing the place to bits so as to make it look like the house had been robbed. But all this
was proving much more stressful to Judy than the murder of her husband.

‘No. Not the china, please,’ she begged him.

Judy stopped Eddie destroying her vast collection of china memorabilia which she’d lovingly collected for many years. Eddie was irritated.

‘This is supposed to look like a robbery.’

‘Surely, we can still make it look good without wrecking my china?’

Eddie shrugged his shoulders. Judy was paying him, so it was her decision.

Before Eddie was to flee out of the back door, Judy had to hand over the first instalment of $1,000. She also allowed Eddie to take two rings from a jewellery drawer as a ‘bonus’. The rest of the cash would be given to him within a week. Seconds later Eddie had disappeared. Mission accomplished.

After he’d gone, the two women embraced. They’d done it. They’d got rid of the animal. Now there was a big wide world out there waiting to be conquered. It was going to be the beginning of Judy Benkowski’s new life. But before they could leave the ransacked house, Judy checked down the street. It was mid-morning; husbands were at work, mothers were out shopping. Not a person in sight. They strolled casually out into the bright autumn sunlight.

The Italian restaurant where Judy and Debra went to celebrate that lunchtime was so crowded that the only thing noticeable about them was that they ordered a bottle of very expensive white wine. Few citizens in Middle America drink
alcohol at lunchtime so their toast to one another raised a few eyebrows.

‘To us. Long may we live without husbands.’ They chuckled before downing each glass in virtually one gulp. And it wasn’t just a new life of freedom that Judy was looking forward to; Clarence’s life insurance was worth at least $100,000 and then there was the $150,000 resale value of the family house.

Judy Benkowski reckoned she was going to be a very merry widow indeed.

‘He’s been murdered. He’s been murdered.’

Judy’s hysterical voice sounded very convincing to local police detective sergeant Tom Gorniak. He’d been patched through to the Benkowski home after Addison police station had received an emergency call from Debra and Judy, who’d just ‘discovered’ Clarence Benkowski shot dead on their return from a ‘shopping trip’.

In a bizarre three-way conference call between the detective’s radio, the police station switchboard and Judy Benkowski, DS Gorniak tried to ascertain what had happened as he drove at high speed to South Yale Avenue to answer their emergency call. By the time he rolled up at the house, paramedics had already arrived. Gorniak found the two women weeping in the front yard, tried to console them and then got a uniformed officer to keep an eye on them while he carefully examined the crime scene before the police technicians arrived. Gorniak knew this was the best time to look around because everything remained untouched and exactly as it had been at the time of the murder. He was
immediately puzzled by the way in which the victim’s body lay slumped in bed as if he’d been taking an afternoon nap. How could he have slept through the noise of an intruder who then leaned over him and fired three bullets into his head at close range?

Burglars just didn’t usually do that sort of thing. Even in trigger-happy America burglars rarely used their weapons. Most professional burglars would get the hell out of a house the moment they were disturbed. So Gorniak quickly concluded that the victim was asleep when he was shot. He didn’t even have time to turn around and see his killer.

Then investigator Gorniak noticed the clothes thrown from the drawers over the body. That meant the killer had ransacked the room
after
the shooting. It just didn’t make sense. He wouldn’t have bothered to do that, surely?

Tom Gorniak had been a policeman for ten years and he knew only too well how dangerous it was to draw any conclusions at such an early stage in a murder investigation. But he was convinced this looked like a contract killing.

Outside, he leaned into the squad car where Judy was sitting and asked her, ‘Did your husband have any enemies, Mrs Benkowski?’

Gorniak tried to be gentle. After all, this was the grieving widow he was talking to, and she seemed to be really upset.

‘No,’ Judy replied through sniffs. ‘He had no enemies.’

But Tom Gorniak had a hunch, so he persuaded Judy Benkowski to visit the police station with him that evening. He said he knew how bad she must be feeling, but it was important they went through a few details so that the killer could be quickly apprehended. Judy agreed. She didn’t want
to seem to be hindering the police enquiries in any way. Soon Gorniak and his colleague Detective Mike Tierney were gently probing the widow for clues. They were already convinced she had a lot more to tell them about this case.

Naturally, Judy started getting a little edgy. She had to tell them something so maybe a half-truth would keep them happy.

‘Now I remember, I did notice someone outside the house this morning,’ she recalled anxiously to the two detectives.

Gorniak and Tierney raised their eyebrows. Why didn’t she mention this before?

Judy then described in precise detail how she’d returned from her shopping trip with her friend Debra and they’d seen this rather short, stocky black man.

‘I think he was runnin’ away from the house,’ explained Judy.

The two officers were even more puzzled. They began pulling in the reins. Both sensed that Judy Benkowski knew a lot more than she was admitting. Their next move was to haul Judy’s friend Debra Santana in for questioning. As the detectives waited with Judy for Debra to arrive, they tried an old and trusted police technique.

‘It would sure help us if you could tell us everything you know. How about we start from the beginning again,’ asked Tom Gorniak.

Judy hesitated. She had a lot on her mind and she was starting to think that maybe the officers were well aware of it. Then she took a long, deep breath. ‘Well, I think I knew that black guy running away from my house. His name is Eddie Brown. He’s Debra’s boyfriend.’

Tom Gorniak and Mike Tierney looked at each other and smiled. They knew they were about to hear a confession to murder. As Gorniak later explained: ‘After all that planning, Judy Benkowski went and gave it all away before her husband’s body was virtually cold.’

In September 1989, Judy Benkowski sobbed uncontrollably as she was sentenced to 100 years in prison for hiring hitman Eddie Brown to murder her husband. Du Page County prosecutor Michael Fleming had earlier demanded that Judy get the death penalty, but Judge Brian Telander ruled that there were mitigating factors that ‘precluded the imposition of the death penalty’.

These included no prior criminal record, numerous health problems and several character witnesses who testified on her behalf and told the court her husband was a lazy bully of a man. Prosecutor Fleming described the sentence – which meant Judy would not be eligible for parole until she was 97 – as ‘fair and appropriate. She claimed she wanted a divorce and he wouldn’t go along, but she never even talked to a lawyer about it.’

On 31 August 1991, Judy married sweetheart Clarence Jeske at the Dwight Correctional Institute, in Illinois. The couple had first met before her husband was murdered but they both insist their relationship did not begin until after the killing. By a strange twist of fate, Jeske now lives in that same house where Clarence was murdered, in South Yale Avenue. He’s even been made legal guardian of Judy’s two children.

T
he noise of aircraft taking off from nearby Heathrow Airport every 30 seconds is the sound that dominates life in Hounslow, Middlesex, a sprawling concrete jungle of
high-rise
estates and tatty between-the-wars housing. Not surprisingly, property prices have remained low in Hounslow. It’s stuck in a no-man’s-land between the city and the countryside but in recent years has become a magnet for Asian immigrants.

These hard-working people have opened numerous shops and businesses and live the sort of lifestyles many of them could never have achieved back in their homeland. And without those many hundreds of thousands of immigrants from countries like India and Pakistan, corner shops in the UK might have become a thing of the past, as the huge supermarket chains continue to swallow up customers at an alarming rate. In Hounslow, many of these small businesses
stay open virtually all day and night providing their owners with healthy profits.

The other reason why the Asian population in places like Hounslow has done such good business is that many shops are staffed by members of their own family. Wives, sons, daughters, mothers and fathers are expected to do their fair share behind the counter and many are already living on the premises. It certainly saves them a packet in wages.

Mohinder Cheema was one such classic example of a successful Asian businessman in Hounslow. Since arriving in Britain in the Fifties, he’d gradually bought up an
off-licence
, two shops and numerous other residential properties at a time when prices were but a fraction of what they are today. But he liked to keep his success close to his chest. Even his attractive dark-haired wife, Julie, didn’t know exactly how much Mohinder Cheema was worth, even though they’d been married for many years and had brought up three children.

There were times when 44-year-old Julie Cheema wondered why she’d married her husband in the first place because they seemed to have so little in common. Their romance and eventual wedding in 1985 had surprised both their families. He was the frail, yet astute millionaire. She came from a traditional British background.

Julie later admitted she was attracted to Mohinder’s business acumen. He had a wonderful eye for a deal; an ability to make money out of nothing. She had seen him as ‘a good investment’. But that kind of attitude is not usually enough to keep a marriage intact. For there was another side to her husband that most women would find hard to cope
with. Mohinder Cheema suffered from chronic asthma and frequently had to retire to bed when his breathing became seriously affected. As a result, the couple rarely had sex together after their children were born.

Initially, Julie had been a very sympathetic nurse to her husband, but she gradually began to resent the constant interruptions to her life. And she longed for some passion in their marriage. So Julie Cheema started looking elsewhere for affection.

Neil Marklew was a gangly youth of just 19 when he first met Julie Cheema. He lived with his parents in Catherine Gardens, just around the corner from the Cheemas’ main
off-licence
in Cromwell Road, Hounslow. Initially, Marklew didn’t even notice Julie’s hand brush his as she gave him change in the shop. He certainly didn’t realise she fancied him. Julie Cheema felt lonely and rejected at this time. Her husband was becoming more and more short-tempered as his asthma attacks become increasingly regular and they rarely even slept in the same bed. At first, this unlikely twosome became genuine friends and there was no relationship between them. But despite a 25-year age difference, Neil and Julie found they had a lot in common.

Then Mohinder Cheema started threatening to cut his wife out of his will. He accused Julie of not being truly in love with him. Mohinder’s children from an earlier marriage disliked Julie and they warned their father not to trust her. Mohinder then started to question his wife’s reasons for marrying him in the first place. Had she been after his wealth all along?

The relationship between Julie and her husband had reached an all-time low by the summer of 1990. Life at home had become one long round of arguments and tension. Mohinder Cheema spent even more of his time in bed and his wife was trying to stay out of the house whenever possible. Then Julie arrived home early one evening and was about to enter her husband’s bedroom when she heard voices. It was one of Mohinder’s grown-up sons. She stopped in her tracks and waited and listened. The voices were loud and clear. They were discussing Mohinder’s will and how Julie was going to be cut out of it. She waited a few moments longer and then silently tiptoed away. She didn’t want them to know she’d been listening because she had a plan that none of them should know about.

Neil Marklew’s relationship with Julie Cheema soon developed into something special. They’d meet in the middle of the day while her husband was working in the shop or lying in bed sick. Neil – who was unemployed – enjoyed their chats together because it broke up the monotony of life on the dole. The days were the most boring time of all for him because most of his friends were either at college or out working.

During the hot summer of 1990, the couple met in parks, pubs and coffee shops to talk about life, love and Mohinder Cheema. Julie became increasingly obsessed with her husband’s plans to cut her out of the will. She also knew that her husband was watching her every move and suspected she was getting some physical gratification from elsewhere. In fact, Julie had not committed adultery – yet. She was content
having a companion to confide in, even if he was young enough to be her son.

But teenager Neil Marklew’s affection for Julie was growing by the day. He started thinking about her virtually every waking moment. The more they met and talked, the more he began to want to have a proper affair with her. Up until then, they’d done nothing more than kiss on street corners and stroke hands over the tops of coffee-shop tables. Virtually no one knew about their secret liaisons. Neil believed his mates would rib him mercilessly if they found out, and Julie certainly had no intention of telling a living soul. Neil was prepared to do anything to encourage turning their friendship into the real thing.

‘I’d kill him for you if you asked me,’ he told her one day.

Neil Marklew later claimed he’d wanted to show Julie how much he cared for her. But she took it literally.

‘Do you mean that?’

The teenager hesitated for a moment and looked into Julie Cheema’s eyes. He desperately wanted to have her completely to himself.

‘Sure I do,’ he mumbled. She didn’t even notice his reserved response.

‘I hate him, you know,’ said Julie. ‘I’ve been thinking of killing him for ages but I don’t know how.’

Neil Marklew had opened up a can of worms over which he had little control. Now he was discovering what it would take to win Julie’s love forever. He sat there nodding his head as she continued.

‘There must be a way we could do it.’

That’s when it dawned on Neil that this might be a way out of the doldrums of unemployment. Of course he was in love with her but there were
other
considerations.

‘Well, it’ll cost you.’

‘How much do you think?’

‘You tell me – what’s he worth?’

‘Five million.’

Neil let out a long whistle. He had no idea his sweetheart’s husband was worth that sort of money.

‘I’d just be happy to have the off-licence.’

‘OK. It’s yours if you do the job properly,’ replied Julie.

The truth was that Julie Cheema had a highly inflated opinion of her husband’s real wealth. But one off-licence seemed a small price to pay for the £5 million she believed her husband was worth in total. In reality it was about
one-fifth
of that sum.

‘Right, give me some money and I’ll get a gun,’ said Neil, who was starting to enjoy his role as the fixer. Then he told her he knew just the bloke for the job of hitman.

Robert Naughton, aged 20, was even more desperate for money than his friend Neil Marklew. He was unemployed but didn’t even have the luxury of his parents’ handouts to fall back on. So when Marklew suggest there might be a ‘little job’ on the horizon he was all ears. When Marklew passed Naughton a sawn-off shotgun and told him the victim was to be his girlfriend’s husband, he didn’t bat an eyelid. The two friends finished off their pints of bitter in a local tavern and walked out to prepare for the job they hoped would set them up with a business for life.

‘Bang. Bang.’ Neil turned to his pal. ‘It’ll be as easy as that.’

It was a steaming hot day in Hounslow in August 1990. Business in cold drinks was brisk at the Cheemas’ off-licence in Cromwell Road and Mohinder Cheema must have been hoping the good weather would continue. He and his wife were both in the shop during the late afternoon that day. Julie was giving the place a good clean and her husband was sitting – due to his bad health – behind the counter waiting for the next customer.

Neither of them paid much attention to the gangly youth who walked in. Perhaps if they’d bothered to look at him a bit sooner, they would have wondered why he was wearing such a heavy coat in such scorching hot weather. By the time Robert Naughton pulled a shotgun out from under that coat it was too late.

The first shower of metal hit Mohinder Cheema in the side of his chest. As he keeled over on the floor behind the counter, Naughton pointed and fired a second time right at his victim. But this time the fragments of shot missed most of their target except for Mohinder’s fingers. Doctors later found loads of pieces of shot embedded in his hands.

Julie Cheema screamed as she watched Naughton standing over her husband with the gun. Naughton then turned and fled as her husband lay groaning on the floor. Julie Cheema rushed to his side. She looked down at his blood stained shirt, and could clearly see he was still very much alive. She tried not to look too disappointed. Then she left him there bleeding on the floor and looked outside at Naughton as he made off into the distance. Then she started sobbing.

‘Oh my God. Mohinder. Oh my God.’

Two of the couple’s children rushed down the stairs from the flat above. Julie stumbled to the phone and ever-so-slowly called the ambulance service. She didn’t want them there too fast in case her husband stayed alive too long.

But Mohinder Cheema was still hanging on when the paramedics arrived on the scene. Julie had no choice but to hold her husband’s hand in the ambulance as it rushed to a nearby hospital. She had a horrible feeling her husband was going to survive – and that would mean planning another hit all over again. This time they couldn’t fail. The tears she shed that day were filled with disappointment not fear. She had willed her husband to die but he just wouldn’t go that easily.

The shooting of Mohinder Cheema created quite a stir in the newspapers that week. So-called expert crime reporters on the national press wrote serious in-depth pieces on the Asian Mafia-style gangs that were believed to have gunned down the off-licence owner because he refused to pay protection money. Neighbours in Cromwell Road were said to be in deep shock about the shooting. Respectable Indian and Pakistani shopkeepers spoke in great detail about their run-ins with these notorious gangs. Even Julie Cheema voiced her determination not to bow down to these evil young criminals who’d so nearly taken away the life of her dearly beloved husband.

‘I haven’t paid and I won’t pay. I work seven days a week and I won’t hand over any of my hard-earned money,’ she told one TV reporter.

And the headline in the
Daily Mail
summed it all up
perfectly: ‘C
ORNER
S
HOP
W
IFE
D
EFIES THE
M
OBSTERS
.’

Over in Charing Cross Hospital, west London, Mohinder Cheema underwent emergency surgery which involved the removal of one kidney, and had one of his fingers amputated. But at least Mohinder’s brave battle to stave off the brutal Asian gangsters turned him into a hero in the local press.

Mohinder Cheema was now a bit of a celebrity. Mohinder even hired a team of bodyguards to protect him when he was released from hospital. He voiced public concern for his wife’s safety back at the off-licence they owned. He insisted she didn’t work alone on the premises. Julie Cheema couldn’t help chuckling to herself realising she’d sparked off terror in the Asian community. Other killings and shooting of shopkeepers throughout west London were soon being linked to the Mohinder Cheema case.

But Julie Cheema remained determined to make sure her husband wasn’t so lucky second time around, although hiring bodyguards would make her job far more difficult. She spent days scheming and plotting with her young friend Neil Marklew when her husband was in hospital.

‘This time, you better make sure he dies,’ she told Marklew.

As they discussed how to make sure it really did work, Julie stroked his youthful face and leaned over and kissed him full on the lips. That’s when she knew he’d do anything for her.

‘It has to be done as soon as he gets home. I don’t want any of those bodyguards getting in the way.’

So, as Mohinder Cheema lay in a hospital bed, his wife Julie made love to Neil Marklew for the first time. The
teenager was delighted to be taught some bedroom tricks by Julie. She was much more experienced than anyone he’d ever slept with before. He sat back and let her take complete control.

As she straddled his body in the bedroom of the home she still shared with her husband, Julie asked her young lover. ‘You promise he won’t miss this time?’

‘Of course he won’t. This time it will be done.’

Julie Cheema continued making love with her teenage boyfriend. She was looking forward to the day when she could call all those businesses her own. That would teach her husband to try and cut her out of his will. Throughout this time, Julie Cheema continued to convince her husband’s family and the police that she had nothing whatsoever to do with the vicious attack on her husband. Julie had even taken him flowers and fruit as he lay in hospital linked up to heart monitors and drips. She was sorely tempted to pull them out of their sockets and just walk calmly away from that room. But Julie knew that all fingers would point to her. No, she had the perfect cover of those Asian gangs out to kill her defiant husband. It was obvious they’d come after him again.