Читать книгу Life Means Life - Nick Appleyard - Страница 9

‘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.’

Trial judge Sir Stephen Mitchell

Names: Kenneth Regan and William Horncy

Crime: Mass murder

Date of Conviction: 1 July 2005

Ages at Conviction: 56 and 53 respectively

For at least a decade, Kenneth Regan, nicknamed ‘Captain Cash’, was a very successful gangster who smuggled drugs, laundered money and sold fake passports on a huge scale. In 1996 business was so good that he had a submarine custom-built so that he could smuggle 15 tonnes of cannabis, worth £40 million, into the UK, but he had to abandon his plans at the last minute. He then muscled in on London insurance firm Serez International, using it as a front to launder upwards of £10 million of drugs money between 1996 and 1998. Working with fellow career criminal William Horncy, he made a fortune supplying more than 1,000 passports to drug traffickers and other international criminals.

But Regan’s life of fast cars and Monte Carlo holidays came to a sudden end in June 1998, when armed police pounced during a massive heroin smuggling deal in North London. He tried to escape in his car, knocking over and injuring a policewoman in the process. Detectives found 25kg of the drug in the boot of his Mercedes and he was charged with heroin smuggling and assaulting the officer. Faced with 20 years in jail, the unscrupulous crook turned supergrass to secure a lighter sentence.

In the following few months he was interviewed 15 times by detectives from the National Criminal Investigation Squad and gave information about a £100 million cocaine smuggling ring, which led to the conviction of a dozen top-level criminals and the confiscation of millions of pounds of drugs money. Regan knew about the ring because he was the one who sold the dodgy passports. Investigators estimate that between 1996 and 1998, the gang smuggled cocaine into Britain with an estimated street value of £2 billion. The information provided by Regan led to a total of 15 convictions in a case involving five separate trials.

His co-defendants in the heroin-smuggling case for which he was busted pleaded not guilty when it came to trial. But thanks to Regan’s evidence, they all received lengthy prison sentences. The judge told him: ‘As a result of your co-operation you will never again be trusted by your former colleagues, so you can’t go back and the enmity of those will make your future life precarious… Those who turn against former associates should receive a very great reduction in their sentence.’ Regan was given eight years, but he was a free man three years later, in 2002.

With contracts on his life and very few remaining friends in the criminal world, Regan was desperate to be rich again. He had been stripped of all his cash and assets when he was jailed for heroin smuggling and he longed for the trappings afforded by organised crime, so he devised a plan that would leave a shipping tycoon, his wife, her mother and their two infant children murdered in the course of what was later described as ‘a crime utterly beyond the comprehension of decent society.’

Amarjit Chohan ran CIBA Freight, a fruit import and export business near Heathrow airport. The multi-millionaire, who started out selling fruit and veg from a shed, was known to be something of a chancer with a fast-and-loose attitude to business. He served a prison sentence for tax evasion and his business, though lucrative, was run chaotically, with staff wages often paid in a combination of cash and cheques. Later, he was referred to in court as ‘a charming, but rather feckless boss’.

Kenneth Regan had experience working in the freight industry and was introduced to Mr Chohan – known as Anil – through a friend who worked at CIBA. Towards the end of 2002, Regan began frequenting Mr Chohan’s offices, at all times quietly plotting to steal the company and use it to import hard drugs.

Mr Chohan made no secret of wanting to sell his business and one day Regan came to the CIBA offices with the news that he had found a Dutch company who would buy it for £3 million. Following this, Mr Chohan was lured to a meeting near Stonehenge, Salisbury, on 13 February 2003, to discuss a deal. At the meeting, Mr Chohan and Regan were joined by two others: Regan’s former passport dealing partner William Horncy and their underworld acquaintance Peter Rees, who posed as the potential purchaser. Amarjit Chohan, 45, was never seen alive again.

After the meeting, Mr Chohan was kidnapped and taken to Regan’s home in Salisbury, which he shared with his senile father. Once there, he was tied up, gagged and tortured until he signed over his firm. He was also made to sign several sheets of blank paper on which his captors later typed fake letters from him, informing his staff that Regan was their new boss.

Regan’s plan was to kill Mr Chohan, after making it look like he was fleeing England. But Regan and Horncy knew the businessman’s disappearance would not have seemed credible if it looked like he had left behind the family he adored. So his wife Nancy, 25, their sons Devinder, aged 18 months, and Ravinder, eight weeks, plus his wife’s 52-year-old mother, Charanjit Kaur – who was visiting from India – would all have to be killed too.

The following day, 14 February, Nancy rang her brother, Onkar Verma, in a frantic state after hearing from CIBA staff that her husband had flown to Holland on business. She knew something was wrong because his passport was at the Home Office for a residency application. She also had a phone message from her husband, in which he spoke in English rather than Punjabi (the couple always spoke Punjabi on the phone). His mobile, which he always diligently answered, was switched off.

On Saturday, 15 February, while Rees guarded Mr Chohan, Regan and Horncy drove to their captive’s family home in Hounslow, West London, where they tricked Mrs Chohan into letting them in. Once inside, they killed her, her sons and her mother before driving the bodies to Regan’s Salisbury home. That night, Mr Chohan was forced to leave several phone messages saying he was leaving England. He was then murdered.

Two days later, Kenneth Regan arrived at CIBA Freight, with a handwritten letter from Mr Chohan and a signed document giving him Power of Attorney to take over the running of the company. Employees recalled the letter, which later disappeared, as saying something like: ‘Greed has got the better of me. As you are aware, I’ve been doing some exports to the USA described as magazines, but in fact this was khat [a drug], which is illegal in the USA. I’ve got myself in serious trouble. Some people are after me and I have to escape. I fear for the safety of my family.’ CIBA staff believed the story and Regan assumed his new role as boss. Everything was going to plan for the man willing to do anything to restore his once-lavish lifestyle.

On 19 February, the five bodies were loaded into a hired van and driven to a farm near Tiverton, Devon, owned by Belinda Brewin, an innocent friend of Regan’s, who was away. When Ms Brewin returned unexpectedly to her 50-acre estate and saw a trench and men with a digger, she ‘went ballistic’. Regan – who had for years been trying to romantically woo Ms Brewin – said he was fixing a long-standing drainage problem as a ‘gift’ to her. In fact, they were making a thorough job of burying the Chohan family. Two days later, Regan took Mr Chohan’s car to a criminal friend in Southampton, who disposed of it.

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.’