Nancy Chohan was very close to her brother, who lived in New Zealand, and they spoke over the phone almost every day. So when Regan claimed that she, Amarjit and the rest of the family had fled without letting him know, he simply did not believe the tale. He spent weeks pestering the Metropolitan Police by phone and email and on 5 March, he flew over to England to find out what was being done to find his family.
At Onkar Verma’s insistence, police searched the Chohan home in Hounslow. It was like the Mary Celeste. The washing machine was full of wet clothes and food was half-eaten on plates. Police found Mrs Kaur’s out-of-date return ticket to India and her prayer book, which she was known never to be without, was on the bedside table in the spare room. Furthermore, the family’s bank accounts had not been touched for more than three weeks. Thanks to Mr Verma’s tenacity, the case was handed over to Scotland Yard’s Serious Crime Group.
Regan and the rest of the staff at CIBA were interviewed and police became suspicious of the letters signed by Mr Chohan. Alarmed by the police investigation, Regan returned to the farm, accompanied by Horncy and Rees, to dig up the bodies. The following day, Easter Sunday, they bought a boat for cash and dumped the bodies in the sea off Dorset.
Two days later, a father and son canoeing off Bournemouth Pier found a body. A week later, it was identified as Mr Chohan.
Realising the game was up, Regan and Horncy fled by ferry to France. Rees also went on the run, hiding out with a friend in Gloucestershire.
Meanwhile, detectives were building their case. Regan had given Ms Brewin, whose land was used to bury the bodies, a £72,000-a-year job, working just two days a week. Police say he was ‘utterly bewitched’ by her looks and class. When she heard about the discovery of Mr Chohan’s body, she told police about the diggers at her farm. The following day the field was excavated.
On 15 July, Nancy Chohan’s body was caught up in fishermen’s nets off Poole, Dorset. Her mother’s badly decomposed body was washed up on a beach on the Isle of Wight on 7 September. The two boys have never been found.
By September, Regan, Horncy and Rees had all been captured or given themselves in, and on 8 November 2004, they appeared at the Old Bailey where all three denied murder and false imprisonment. Richard Horwell, QC, prosecuting, said post-mortem reports revealed Mr Chohan had been drugged and possibly strangled, while his wife’s skull was smashed, probably with a hammer. He told the court that Mrs Kaur’s body was too badly decomposed to provide any conclusive information.
The barrister went on to list the damning evidence against the accused. He said analysis of mobile phone records showed that calls from Nancy Chohan to her husband stopped on 15 February. Mr Horwell said: ‘It is a certainty that Mrs Chohan and her family were imprisoned or murdered that afternoon and it is of great significance that on that afternoon the mobile telephones of Regan and Horncy were used [in the vicinity of] the Chohan family home.’ He said that mobile phone evidence also proved ‘beyond doubt’ that Regan and Chohan met near Stonehenge on the day that the businessman vanished, adding: ‘Within days of Mr Chohan’s disappearance, Regan had replaced the carpet and the furniture from the front room of his home address. At some point the room had been redecorated… Something happened to Mr Chohan [there].’ Forensic officers testified that the place was ‘unfeasibly spotless’.
But the killers left a macabre clue: a drop of blood was found on Regan’s garden wall which was conclusively proven to have come from 18-month-old Devinder. It was 4ft above ground level and described as a ‘downward drop’ by a forensic scientist, suggesting the toddler was being carried at the time. The court also heard that traces of Amarjit Chohan’s blood were found on the speedboat used by the three men to dump the bodies.
However, the prosecutor still had the ace up his sleeve. He told the court how Mr Chohan had left a piece of paper in his sock designed to lead police to his killers. The paper – a letter bearing Regan’s name and address – had been folded so many times that it had survived days in the sea. ‘When it was unfolded it became apparent that it was a letter addressed to Kenneth Regan and his father at their home,’ Mr Horwell said.
The QC said the letter’s contents were unimportant, but the date was significant. It was dated 12 February 2003, the day before Mr Chohan disappeared. He added: ‘It is not just, of course, the fact that in folding the letter and placing it in his sock, Mr Chohan had intended to leave a clue as to the identity of his captors and the place of his incarceration. It also means that Mr Chohan had known that he was going to be murdered.’
The prosecutor then turned his attention to the trench dug by Regan and his accomplices to bury the bodies: ‘Horncy told Ms Brewin that Regan had asked them to come and sort out the drainage problem. It was supposed to have been a surprise. A drainage ditch is hardly a conventional gift. The element of surprise is not just unnecessary, it is positively unwelcome as far as the recipient is concerned.’
Mr Horwell said that when the trench was excavated months later by police, they found human hair matching Mr Chohan’s: ‘The DNA of Mr Chohan was found in the grave, but the entire family was murdered as part of a single plan and it is beyond belief that two or more separate graves would have been used. The grave these men dug was very large. It was a grave for five bodies, not one; it was only too clear what they had been up to – the trench had been dug as a communal grave for the Chohan family.’
By then, Mr Chohan had agreed to sell his business but he underestimated Regan’s ‘duplicity and ruthlessness,’ said the prosecutor in his closing speech. The barrister added: ‘Regan was penniless. He had no legal right or interest in CIBA; there were no backers. Regan did not have the collateral to buy a minority interest in CIBA, let alone the entire company. Regan’s motive and intentions are obvious: he was desperate for a return to the days of “Captain Cash” – banknotes in the boot of a Mercedes and the luxury home.
‘There was only one way he could realise such an ambition and that was through drugs. That meant the means or disguise under which drugs could be imported into the UK in large quantities. CIBA was the perfect vehicle.’
The defence team in the £10 million, eight-month murder trial – one of the longest in British legal history – had a difficult job arguing against the evidence. In his closing speech to the jury, Regan’s defence counsel Paul Mendelle, QC, had little to offer: ‘The prosecution have invited you to speculate – there is not a scrap of evidence. Regan would have had to be desperate beyond belief to slaughter an entire family for the sake of a business.’
After 12 days of deliberations, the jury found Regan and Horncy both guilty of all five murders. Rees was convicted of false imprisonment and the murder of Mr Chohan, but cleared of the other four killings. He was handed a life sentence, with a minimum recommendation of 23 years.
Judge Sir Stephen Mitchell jailed Regan and Horncy for the rest of their lives, telling them: ‘Your crimes are uniquely terrible. The cold-blooded murder of an eight-week-old baby, an 18-month-old toddler, not to mention the murders of their mother, father and grandmother, provide a chilling insight into the utterly perverted standards by which you have lived your lives.’
Detective Chief Inspector Dave Little of the Metropolitan Police led the investigation. He said outside court: ‘This is a crime utterly beyond the comprehension of decent society. A young family, a new family, was entirely wiped out at the hands of these murderous men in an attempt to line their own pockets. I hope they reflect on their crimes long and hard for the rest of their lives, which will be spent in prison.’
‘MISTAKEN IDENTITY’
‘Glen had established himself the credentials that made him an ideal recruit for a contract killer. He had murdered before.’
Prosecution Counsel Rex Tedd, QC
Name: Paul Glen
Crime: Contract killing
Date of Conviction: 29 July 2005
Age at Conviction: 34
At around 7.55pm on 8 June 2004, builder Robert Bogle was in the ki
tchen of the house that he shared in the quiet, picturesque village of Farcet, Cambridgeshire. He was cooking a bolognaise sauce for himself and his girlfriend Angelina Walker when a man wearing a hooded top, heavy overcoat and black gloves kicked down the kitchen door.
Without saying a word, the stranger brandished a foot-long kitchen knife and began stabbing Robert, who tried desperately to defend himself. As he fought for his life, Robert was knifed 10 times – to his hands, his arms, through his right cheek and his heart.
The 25-year-old struggled to keep his balance as he slid through his own blood to the doorway, leaving red handprints along the kitchen units. While his girlfriend hid behind a sofa in the living room in shock – she was so traumatised by what she heard and saw that she could not properly give evidence at the subsequent trial – Robert made it out of the kitchen and to the pavement outside, clutching his chest.
It was just after eight o’clock and his desperate plight was witnessed by a group of teenage girls, who were ambling along with bags of chips from the village takeaway. Robert, with his clothes wet with blood, told the frantic, screaming girls to call an ambulance. As one of them dialled on her mobile phone, he staggered to a nearby shop and the house next door, banging on the windows. But no one came out and he collapsed on a patch of grass.
A recording of a 999 call, made by a 14-year-old girl, went: ‘It’s right in his heart,’ while in the background the victim was heard to shout, ‘Get help!’ and ‘Get off, get off, get off!’ as people desperately tried to stem the flow of blood.
Seconds later, the terrified group saw his attacker stroll down the alleyway adjacent to his house. One of the teenagers would later testify in court that she was ‘really scared’ by ‘a large man who wore black gloves’. She said: ‘I thought, “Why wear gloves in warm weather?”’ Another recalled: ‘We thought it was all a joke at one point because the other man just walked away like nothing had happened.’
It would later transpire that the calm stranger who strolled off was Paul Glen, a 33-year-old contract killer, hired by a wealthy local businessman with underworld connections who wanted to ‘sort out’ a village argument. Unfortunately for Robert, Glen didn’t bother to ask his victim’s name before stabbing him to death. Had he done so, he would have realised that he had got the wrong man and Robert would still be alive today.
The man Glen was sent to ‘sort out’ was Robert’s friend and housemate, Vincent Smart, who was not at home that night because he was house-sitting for his parents, a few streets away. What makes this case one of the most notable bungled ‘hits’ in British criminal history is that Vincent Smart was white-skinned and the murdered man was black.
Glen was hired by millionaire Robert Lotts, who wanted to end a long-running feud between Smart and his three sons: he believed Smart had been bullying them. Lotts was, for the most part, a legitimate businessman who did not want Smart killed – just hurt badly enough to ensure that he left his children alone. The builder was not used to employing men who commit acts of violence for cash but luckily his brother-in-law, Wayne Wright, was able to put him in touch with Glen, a brutal thug from Fleetwood, Lancashire, who had just the criminal CV Lotts was looking for.
At the trial at Norwich Crown Court in June 2005, Prosecutor Rex Tedd, QC, explained why Glen was more than up for the job. He said: ‘Glen had established himself the credentials that made him an ideal recruit for a contract killer: he had murdered before.’
Glen had previously been jailed for 13 years for viciously bludgeoning to death Ivor Usher, a Blackpool guesthouse owner, on 21 February 1989. He and an accomplice went with the intention simply to rob the gay bachelor of the £5,000 in his safe, but after tying him up Glen got carried away and smashed his skull to pieces with a bar stool and a wrench. In an effort to cover his tracks, he set light to the building. It was this reckless disregard for human life that would lead Glen to go way beyond Lotts’ original plan to scare Smart, and as the prosecution put it, to stab him to death in an ‘explosion of unanticipated violence.’ Robert was caught in that explosion.
Mobile phone records proved Glen was in Farcet village at the time of Robert’s killing and showed how he fled to Blackpool immediately afterwards. They also showed Glen, Lotts and Lotts’ brother-in-law had called each other in the build-up and aftermath of the bloody murder. This, and other forensic evidence placing Glen at the house at the time of the killing, meant that he could not deny being there. So, in a desperate attempt to save his skin, Glen claimed in court that the murder was committed by a shadowy figure named ‘Steve’, whose last name or address he did not know.
Glen told jurors he’d met ‘Steve’ to arrange a cannabis drug deal on the day of the killing and that he came to the house because it ‘seemed convenient.’ He insisted he was only going to the house to ‘have a word’ with Mr Smart, adding that he was there simply as a mediator and that Steve was meant to remain quietly at his side. He told the court: ‘I’m a sucker for a hard luck story – I don’t like to hear of people being subjected to violence or bullying. I planned to take some cannabis round as a peace offering. If I could reason with the guy, I’d sit down and reason with him. I was a peacemaker.’
According to him, his ‘peace-making’ efforts were scuppered because while he was upstairs, looking for the intended target Smart, his criminal acquaintance was busy knifing the man’s housemate. Glen testified: ‘When I got to the bottom of the stairs I saw Steve going through the back door. He [Robert] was trying to follow and I pulled him back. He fell down on the floor and slipped. The blood was everywhere on the floor – I stepped back and saw it all. He shot out of the door. It was all over in a matter of seconds. I was there, but I didn’t stab him; I wasn’t alone. That’s the truth.’
Despite his efforts, Glen’s smokescreen was torn apart by the prosecution. Barrister Tedd QC remarked that, as no unidentified footprints were found in the kitchen or indeed the rest of the house, ‘Steve’ would have had to have been wearing identical trainers to the dead man or identical footwear to Glen’s, whose size-10 Timberland prints were, according to the Forensic Sciences Service, imprinted in the blood which covered the kitchen floor. He said: ‘Otherwise this man, Steve, is not just a man with no surname, no address, no mobile phone – he is a man with no feet.’
Forensic technicians also found a shred of skin underneath one of Robert’s fingernails containing a DNA profile that matched Glen’s.
The prosecution argued that Bogle scraped away a piece of Glen’s skin as he fought off the blade pounding into his body. The murderer was not Steve, said Mr Tedd, but ‘a professional killer, who had travelled to an area where his identity and appearance was completely unknown. That man on the mission was Mr Paul Glen.’
At the end of the five-week trial, the jury of four men and five women was unanimous in their guilty murder verdict. Lotts was later jailed for four years and his brother-in-law, Wayne Wright, to five years in prison after they admitted conspiring to cause Mr Smart grievous bodily harm.
Judge Sir John Blofeld told Glen: ‘As a result of your actions a young man, who had a future before him and a devoted family, lost his life in circumstances which were terrible.’ He added that it was ‘immaterial’ to consider a release date as Glen would never be free. Outraged, the killer protested, ‘Do I not get a chance to say anything?’ as he was led from the dock by police.
Outside court, Robert’s father, Linford, his mother Joyce, brother Paul and sister Donna and close friends grouped together as Linford read out a statement about his much-loved child. He said his son’s killer had ‘got what he deserved’ but that the murder had had a devastating affect on his family. ‘It’s been very difficult,’ he told reporters. ‘My wife is only here in body, her spirit has disappeared somewhere. We will never forget Robert.’
Robert’s older brother Paul remembered a time when he had attempted to emulate his television hero Evel Knievel by riding his tricycle off the patio in the garden of their childhood home in Yaxley, Cam
bridgeshire. Paul said: ‘He went flying and cut his head open. He had to be taken to hospital, and of course, I got the blame as I was supposed to be looking after him. That has always stuck in my head.
‘He was just a wonderful person. It’s just a shame that he’s not here. There isn’t anything else I can say or do – he isn’t coming back. We will try to get ourselves together; try to move on with our lives as best we can. Robert’s death has left a huge void. It’s just a hole, a chasm, which just can’t be filled. They say time is a great healer. We’ll just have to test that theory for ourselves.’
After his whole life sentence, Glen stewed on the prospect for three months and then, in September 2005, his legal team launched an appeal with the Royal Court of Justice, in London, in a bid to have it reduced. But his sentence was ruled fair because not only had he committed a second murder, he’d again done it for profit.
On 3 February 2007, in an extraordinary ceremony performed by a Catholic priest, Glen was married inside the chapel at Whitemoor High-Security Prison in Cambridgeshire. The bride – 41-year-old Paula Kelly from Liverpool – stayed with friends and family at a threestar hotel prior to the service. Glen gave his address on the marriage certificate as 300–310 Longhill Road, March – the postal address of Whitemoor Prison. Under occupation he described himself as a ‘builder’. On the wedding night, the newlywed Mrs Glen and her entourage gathered again at the hotel, with only the bridegroom absent from the wedding breakfast.
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