The Boy in the River: A Shocking True Story of Ritual Murder and Sacrifice in the Heart of London

by Richard Hoskins

  I pulled out my mobile.

  ‘I’m at the front entrance to the museum,’ I said, ‘And you aren’t.’

  ‘You’re right about that,’ he agreed. ‘I’m a bit lost in here.’

  ‘Describe where you are and I’ll come and find you.’

  ‘I’m standing next to a bloody great lizard. Does that help?’

  I tracked Mark down in the dinosaur hall. Our bone specialist, a severe woman with brown hair and large glasses, eventually appeared in the foyer to collect us. She didn’t look happy that we were late.

  We followed her through an unremarkable door into a hidden world of corridors and tiny offices. Hers was a cupboard-like space on the second floor, piled with journals and tagged plastic bags of bone samples.

  I explained the situation briefly. Mark, after his adventure with Tyrannosaurus Rex, was finding the whole situation more amusing than she did.

  ‘The concoction we’ve been able to extract from Adam’s intestine seems to be made up of bone residues and plant matter, plus some minerals,’ I said. ‘We wondered if you could help us work out from which animals the bones came.’

  Mark was carrying a folder with hugely enlarged photographs of the various materials Ken Pye had found. He spread them on the desk in front of her.

  She frowned. ‘Is this all?’

  ‘All?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘We couldn’t do anything with this,’ she said. ‘There are thousands of different animals! We wouldn’t have a hope of working out which bones are present in a sample as degraded as this.’

  Mark stopped grinning and put on his policeman voice. ‘Doctor, we have forensics experts in the USA who’ve been working on the aftermath of the World Trade Center terrorist strike. They advise us that they might be able at least to differentiate between human and animal bones.’

  She frowned again. ‘Well, I suppose we could manage that much. But as to differentiating between one animal and another, that’s going to be nigh on impossible.’

  ‘Even if I suggested what sorts of animals you were most likely to find?’ I said.

  She shook her head. That could take months, and even then it wouldn’t be conclusive. Mark and I exchanged glances. He picked up his photographs, we thanked her and shook hands all round, and within five minutes of entering her office we were standing in the corridor outside it.

  ‘And just how much were you planning to charge Will for that?’ Mark said out of the corner of his mouth.

  He was joking, as usual, but my heart sank all the same. It hadn’t been a smart idea to let DC Ham know that my meter was finally ticking. He would get hours of fun from my embarrassment.

  The office door behind us opened again and our bone specialist reappeared.

  ‘Dr Hoskins? I wouldn’t want you to have had a wasted visit. I’ve just had a thought. You could go and see our mineralogy people while you’re here. They might be able to help. No guarantees, of course, but if you like I’ll call through and ask who would be free to see you.’

  A few moments later we were following her down the narrow corridors and my faith in human nature was beginning to revive. I didn’t hold out much hope that the museum’s minerals specialists would be able to add a lot to what Ken Pye and his team had already discovered, but I was willing to try anything.

  Our guide took us to a room below ground level in a dim corridor smelling of polish and chemical reagents. Benches were cluttered with computer terminals and microscopes and equipment I didn’t recognize. In among all this stood two men in spectacles. Both clutched coffee mugs and beamed at us.

  We handed them the photographs and, without further ado, the larger scientist slid the prints out of the envelope and pushed his glasses up onto his forehead so that he could focus on them from a range of three inches. The smaller man moved his own glasses onto the end of his nose and crowded in beside him.

  ‘Good Lord . . .’ They launched into an enthusiastic exchange while Mark and I sat back and listened.

  ‘Well, that’s mineral, all right. So’s that. See the structure?’

  ‘Not much of a shot, but it could be gold. Wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘And there’s some quartz. We know someone who could track this down, maybe even to the actual mine it came from.’

  ‘But that’s not mineral. That dark mass: see? I’d bet any money that’s not mineral. Plant material, I’d say.’

  ‘It’s pretty degraded. Must have been burned.’

  I said, ‘Yes, it was. We think it was burned in a—’

  ‘If anyone would know, Hazel would.’

  ‘You’re right. It might be burned to a crisp, but Hazel would have it flowering in a window box by next spring.’

  And so it went on for about forty minutes. Mark and I eventually emerged into the drizzle outside the museum, filled with new hope.

  27

  London, December 2002

  In December the Home Office dropped a bombshell.

  The immigration authorities had been alerted to Joyce Osagiede’s case. They ruled that she had not followed correct asylum procedures and had lied about her country of origin. She would not be allowed to keep her children and she would be deported.

  The police protested that they still had questions for Joyce, and that several lines of inquiry might still show that she or her associates had been involved in some way with Adam, but this fell on deaf ears. The Home Office decreed that unless she was charged immediately, she must be returned to Nigeria. There was no question of arresting her a second time. Apart from her immigration violations, there was no evidence that she had done anything wrong. Accordingly, she was picked up by immigration officers and placed in Northolt Detention Centre pending deportation.

  Later that month, with as little publicity as possible and at taxpayers’ expense, the Home Office hired a private executive jet to fly her back to Nigeria. The jet had last been used by a world famous footballer. Now Will, Nick and Joyce Osagiede, violator of immigration rules and possible associate of murder suspects, were the only passengers. The plane landed at Lagos and Joyce Osagiede was taken through Nigerian immigration.

  And then she was set free.

  I heard about this on the phone from Will O’Reilly. I was as incredulous as he was. After the discovery of the clothes in her flat, her link with Germany and what she had said about her involvement with a Yoruban cult, I couldn’t believe anyone would have sent her back to Africa.

  ‘There may be method in somebody’s madness,’ Will said loyally. ‘If we’d kept sniffing around her it might have scared off some bigger game.’

  I wasn’t convinced. I suspected some stickler for the rules in the corridors of power had failed to see how important she might have been to the inquiry.

  ‘You can’t hold people without charge,’ Will said. ‘Not in the UK. And, besides, the order to send her back came right from the top, and I mean the top. It’s unfortunate, but these things happen.’

  Ironically, within days of her deportation, police inquiries into Joyce’s life in Germany began to yield dramatic results.

  German social services revealed that she had arrived in Germany via Italy in 1992 under her alias of Bintu Kadade, a year after her partner, Ibrahim Kadade. He was undoubtedly the man known to UK police as her husband Sam, who was still on the run. Joyce’s two children, whom the Germans knew as Esther and Eseoghen, had been born in Germany in 1997 and 1999. Her first child, a son, was reported dead at birth in 1995. That matched the year Joyce had given the British team for Sam Onojhighovie’s sacrifice of the boy. The two daughters had briefly attended a nursery near Hamburg in September 2001.

  Will and Nick went to Germany to interview staff at the nursery. The girls had only been there for two weeks, but a local woman, Frau Dibbern, had fostered them for a short while. Frau Dibbern, her daughter and her husband all remembered something striking about the oldest girl when they had last seen her in August and September 2001.

  The child had b
een wearing bright orange shorts.

  A couple of weeks later there was another breakthrough in London. Police tracked down Kingsley Ojo, the mysterious figure whose name had been on the lease of one of the two addresses Joyce Osagiede had given Immigration. Ojo had evidently fled as soon as Joyce was apprehended, leaving the flat bare.

  A resourceful and unscrupulous man, Ojo had adopted a new identity as Mousa Kamara and taken lodgings at Quested Court, Brett Road, in the East End of London. It was a respectable flat in a modestly prosperous street. He’d been lying low there since Joyce’s arrest and eventual deportation.

  On a wintry morning, Nick Chalmers, Mark Ham and some heavyweight uniformed officers arrived at Quested Court with a search warrant. Nick immediately suspected that the flat was empty. He signalled to the uniformed officers, who broke down the door and burst in. The stove was warm, unwashed plates were stacked in the sink, and the window in the back bedroom was open. It was clear that this time they hadn’t missed their quarry by much.

  Mark Ham noticed a pile of video cassettes beside a television. He held one up. Helpfully, the scrawled label read, ‘Rituals’.

  The rest of Kingsley Ojo’s apartment was thoroughly searched and various items carted back to headquarters at Catford. The haul included dozens of immigration and travel documents, including passports, some forged, some genuine; tickets; money and reference letters.

  The ‘Rituals’ video, which I was invited to see within a few days of the raid, purported to show the beheading of a man as a sacrificial offering, apparently to propitiate a Yoruban deity. His severed head was offered up to speed the recovery of an elder from a serious illness. The video looked as if it had been made for sale as a cheap movie, using third-rate actors. On the other hand the acting may have been so bad because it wasn’t acting at all. None of us was ever quite sure whether or not we were watching an actual beheading.

  Two small packets of an unidentified sandy substance were also found. Nick sent them off to Ken Pye for analysis.

  Kingsley Ojo was soon found and arrested. An imposing man of about forty, he was softly spoken, articulate and expensively dressed. He faced the police with brazen denial. He knew nothing about the documents found in his flat, or any murdered child, or any cults and rituals. He claimed that another person rented the bedroom out, and neither the videos nor the packets found there had anything to do with him. He had never heard of Joyce Osagiede, and could not explain why she had given his flat as her address. When Nick pointed out to him that he had Joyce’s name and number stored in his phone, he was unfazed. He simply denied everything, and when faced with an incontrovertible fact, fell into a stony silence.

  There were certain things Kingsley Ojo could not deny, among them that he was a Yoruban, originally from Benin City.

  The police weighed their options. They could charge Ojo straight away with relatively minor immigration offences and deport him. But, perhaps still smarting from Joyce’s premature departure, both Commander Baker and Will O’Reilly had other ideas. So they released him with a caution and Kingsley Ojo walked free on to London’s streets, presumably hardly able to believe his luck.

  It took some time for Ken Pye and his team to analyse the great mass of material Will and the others had brought back from Nigeria.

  When they had finished, they were able to check Adam’s bone samples against the new data. Their work showed definitively that Adam had spent most of his short life in the suburbs of Benin City in the heart of Yorubaland.

  So Joyce, Kingsley and Joyce’s vanished husband Sam all came from Benin City. And so did Adam.

  28

  London, December 2002

  I accepted an invitation to become visiting lecturer in African Religions at King’s College London, though I knew I’d miss Devon and Bath. Meanwhile, since my name had been added to the National Crime Faculty database, new cases were coming in from all over the United Kingdom.

  I developed my own set of yardsticks to filter out the ones I knew did not require my input, but would usually go and visit the officers concerned and collect as much information as possible. Sometimes this involved going to the crime scene itself. Needless to say, I always found this a distressing experience. I discovered that I could be most useful if I simply took the information necessary for my analysis, and no more. I knew that what I produced had to be independent, academic and objective, though for all the distance I tried to maintain, I found it excruciatingly hard to deal with anything involving children.

  Our move to London coincided with further progress on the Adam case. Faith and I met up with the team at a bar in Fleet Street.

  Andy Baker, smiling and expansive, called me over at once. ‘You know we released Kingsley Ojo?’

  I told him that I did, and that I’d been surprised by it, especially now that Joyce was out of reach. He dismissed it, maintaining that they could find her again whenever they wanted to.

  ‘Funny thing,’ he said. ‘Even though he obviously knows we’re on to him, as soon as he was released he went straight back to his old haunts and habits. What do you make of that?’

  I said that Ojo probably believed that he was protected from the police by juju. His release would have reinforced that.

  They were putting Ojo under surveillance, and though it would take some time, Commander Baker was confident they were going to come up with something a good deal bigger than passport fraud.

  I felt my spirits rise. Across the room I could see Faith sharing a drink with officers from the Marine Police Unit – the men who had retrieved Adam’s body from the Thames. I made my way over to Ken Pye.

  Ken doesn’t often betray excitement, but that day he looked like a man on a mission. ‘You know those packets of sandy stuff from Kingsley Ojo’s bedroom? It’s remarkably similar to the contents of Adam’s intestine.’ He touched my arm. ‘I mean remarkably similar.’

  He couldn’t yet say for sure that it was all from the same batch, but the quartz grains might have come from the same river, and the only rivers that fitted the profile were in West Africa.

  29

  London and Nigeria, January–April 2003

  Operation Maxim went into action early in the New Year.

  Maxim was the codename for Scotland Yard’s people-trafficking surveillance unit and they were giving Mr Ojo their full attention. They bugged his phones, his flat and his car. Teams of officers trailed him whenever he moved. When he travelled overseas he was watched or followed by British officers and their colleagues from other forces.

  Maxim began to produce results almost at once, helped significantly by the fact that Kingsley Ojo continued to behave with remarkable indiscretion. It was as if he felt himself to be beyond the reach of the law. He spoke freely on the phone. He implicated associates and himself and visited their addresses in London and overseas. The surveillance was gradually widened to draw these new subjects into the net.

  Meanwhile, Nick Chalmers had a breakthrough. He always carried photographs of Joyce’s husband Sam Onojhighovie, and he showed one to a Nigerian who had been detained on unrelated charges. The man immediately recognized Sam and claimed that he lived in Dublin. Nick Chalmers contacted the Irish Garda, and within days they found a direct match in the immigration files with a man who had entered the Irish Republic in 2001.

  Sam Onojhighovie had taken a new name and a new wife. She had arrived in Ireland illegally from Nigeria in 2001. She was pregnant on arrival and gave birth to a son in the autumn of that year in Cork. A loophole in Irish immigration law allowed Onojhighovie to join her there under his new false identity. The German authorities were going to be very interested to learn of his whereabouts: he would face seven years in a German jail if they could get their hands on him.

  The British police were tempted to make arrests at this point, but decided to hold off and maintain the surveillance a while longer.

  By the first months of 2003 we knew that Joyce Osagiede was connected with both Ojo and Onojhighovie, and that she should n
ever have been repatriated. British police made a request to the Nigerian authorities to find her and re-arrest her, but despite Andy Baker’s confidence, it didn’t happen. In February a small British contingent went out to Benin City in an attempt to narrow down the search for Adam’s relations. They also looked for Joyce, and they too failed to find her.

  But then the police had a bit of luck. Commander Baker heard from the British High Commission in Lagos that a woman named Osagiede had made an appointment. She wanted news of her children, who were still in care in Scotland.

  When Joyce turned up for her interview, Nigerian police officers acting on behalf of the Met arrested her and took her away for questioning. The two key Nigerian officers present were Dr Wilson Akiwu and Detective Superintendent David Kolo, who had accompanied Will and Ray on their Nigerian travels the previous October. Dr Akiwu was himself from Benin City, spoke the local language and understood local customs.

  Joyce could not be charged. She had committed no known offence in Nigeria or in the UK, apart from breaking immigration regulations for which she had already been deported. But she made a statement to Akiwu and Kolo under caution.

  Joyce admitted membership of the Guru Maharaj cult from 1994 to 2002, when she left because of ‘too much evil’. She said the sect was widely involved in juju practices and black sorcery, and claimed to be too frightened to give more details. The movement had devotees in Germany and London, she asserted, and said she had played a role as an organizer for them. She confirmed that her husband, Sam, was a messiah in the cult and she repeated that he had been involved in the murder of children.

  When asked specifically about Adam for the first time, Joyce said, ‘I do not know anything about the murder of the child in London.’ But she later asserted, ‘I know the child was killed in Lewisham. I don’t know where the head and limbs are. I think the boy was sacrificed because his parents had been brainwashed by Maharaj Ji’s teachings.’