by Odell, Robin
On 18 April, Palliko leased a yellow Jaguar car for Judy’s use and, two days later, his bride of six weeks died a violent death in her distinctively coloured car. Judy Palliko was shot dead at the wheel of her stationary car close to their apartment. She had been beaten about the head with a gun butt and shot twice; she died in hospital.
Palliko confided to a friend who was employed in his bar that he had committed murder. “Do you remember Sandra Stockton?” he asked, “I killed her husband.” He was arrested at The Grand Duke on 30 April 1968 and charged with the murder of Henry Stockton and Judy Palliko. Investigators found an arsenal of weapons in his apartment.
Palliko and Sandra were tried for murder in November 1968 when the prosecution argued that Sandra’s husband had been killed for his money. Sandra had taken out insurance on his life two weeks before he was murdered. It was brought out in evidence that Palliko had insured Judy shortly before they were married with the intention of setting her up for murder. The purpose behind giving her the yellow Jaguar to drive was to mark her out as a murder target.
Palliko denied killing his wife, saying that he had been set up. While the evidence was mainly circumstantial, the case was persuasively argued by Vincent Bugliosi, the celebrated prosecutor. Palliko and Sandra Stockton were convicted of murdering Judy and of attempting to murder his former wife, Katherine. He was sentenced to death and Sandra to life imprisonment. The scheming would-be millionaire made three attempts to escape from prison and in 1972 his death sentence was commuted to life.
“Someone Has Just Shot My Husband”
The day before he died, a murder victim placed a personal ad in his local newspaper that was intended to quell rumours that his marriage was breaking up and denying gossip about fraud and theft.
Around midnight on 26 November 1991, fifty-one-year-old retired banker, Terry Daddow, was shot dead when he answered the front doorbell at his cottage in Northiam, Sussex in the UK. After a significant delay, his wife Jean called the emergency services. “Someone has just shot my husband,” she told the operator.
Detectives thought the scenario had the hallmarks of a killing carried out by a hired hit man. House-to-house enquiries established that no one had seen the gunman although many had heard the shotgun fired in the still of the night. Those who noted the time, recorded the blast fifteen minutes before Jean Daddow had called 999.
Jean Daddow appeared tearfully in television interviews appealing for information that would help the police find the killer of her husband. Meanwhile, investigators were looking into the background of Terry and Jean. Local gossip followed two paths; one was that Terry was an alcoholic wife-beater and the other that Jean had forsaken her husband for a string of lovers.
The financial affairs of the Daddows offered some interesting background. Terry had been involved in a financial scandal at the bank concerning his handling of customers’ accounts for personal gain. He was asked to retire after twenty years’ service.
Some time before her husband’s death, Jean had begun to transfer their joint assets into a large number of bank and building society accounts. Part of this financial overhaul involved Terry making a new will leaving everything to Jean and nothing to the children from his previous marriage.
In her role as grieving widow, Jean suggested that her husband’s killer was a jealous husband or boyfriend taking action as a result on one of his affairs. By now, suspicion was hardening around Jean and investigators began to look into her family background. She had a twenty-three-year-old son from her first marriage to Roger Blackman, who appeared to have connections in the criminal underworld. The police were looking for a professional hit man and so a new line of enquiry opened up.
It seemed that Blackman had dealings with a former soldier, Robert Bell, who owed him money. Bell promptly disappeared to the US but returned when he realized the game was up. He was arrested and readily confessed to accepting £12,000 in a plot to murder Terry Daddow. He claimed he lacked the courage to kill in cold blood and that, although he was present on the night of the shooting, it was Blackman who fired the fatal shot. He claimed that Jean Daddow was the arch schemer behind the plot.
The deadly trio were tried at Hove Crown Court in February 1993. Jean Daddow played the grieving widow card but to little effect and she and Blackman were convicted of conspiracy to murder. Bell was convicted of murder and conspiracy to murder for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Daddow and Blackman were each sentenced to eighteen years.
Hit Squad
Part-time special constable Nisha Patel-Nasri, aged twenty-nine, was stabbed to death outside her home at Wembley, north London in the UK late on the night of 11 May 2006. Neighbours found her at around midnight dressed only in her nightclothes lying in a pool of blood. She had been stabbed in the groin and died later in hospital. Detectives thought she had gone outside carrying a torch to investigate a disturbance and had been attacked by a would-be intruder.
The dead woman’s husband, thirty-four-year-old Fadi Nasri, made a televised appeal for information that would help the murder enquiry. He had been away from home on the night in question playing snooker. In honour of her work as a special constable, three police motorcycles led mourners at her funeral.
As the murder investigation proceeded, more was learned about the background of the bereaved husband and the state of his marriage. It seemed that Nisha wanted a child and was disappointed at the amount of time Fadi spent away from home. She worked hard running a hairdressing business and was a more than equal money-earner.
Fadi drove a stylish car and ran a limousine business, which he claimed earned more than £150,000 a year. He was recognized as a big spender and, in fact, had large debts. He was also leading a double life running an escort agency and he kept a Lithuanian prostitute as his mistress. After Nisha’s death, he sold the marital home and moved in with his mistress.
The first breakthrough in the investigation came in September when a kitchen knife, believed to be the murder weapon, was found in a drain near the Nasris’ home. Mobile phone records led detectives to two men who Nasri claimed were business associates. These were Rodger Leslie and Jason Jones; the former was a drug dealer and the latter a bouncer. Both men were arrested in December 2006 and Nasri followed in January 2007. All three were charged with murder.
They appeared on trial at the Old Bailey in May 2008. The prosecution argued that Nasri arranged the murder and employed hit men to do the killing while he was away playing snooker. He provided them with keys to his house and a knife taken from his own kitchen. There appeared to have been a dummy run several days before the murder took place when Nisha Patel-Nasri confronted strangers armed with a knife at her front door.
Mobile phone records linked the three men and CCTV of a getaway car pointed detectives to Leslie and Jones. Nasri denied having his wife killed so that he could claim on her insurance and continue his extra-marital affair. On 28 May after deliberating for twenty-six hours, the jury found all three defendants guilty of murder. Sentencing was announced in June; Nasri, Leslie and Jones all received life sentences.
Death Of A Lawyer
Maître Jacques Perrot, a French lawyer with friends in high places, was shot dead in Paris on 27 December 1985. His violent death and its aftermath raised many questions that have never been satisfactorily answered.
Successful in his own right, Perrot added lustre to his career by marrying Darie Boutboul, a beautiful and talented woman, who achieved celebrity as France’s premier female jockey in April 1982. Perrot was also an amateur jockey and horseracing was a feature of the couple’s lives.
Darie’s family background could at best be described as unusual. Her father, Dr Robert Boutboul, was supposed to have died in an air crash in 1970 and her life was managed by her mother, Elisabeth Boutboul, a trained lawyer with a manipulative personality.
Shortly before he was gunned down on the stairs leading from his parents’ apartment, Perrot made some discoveries about his in-laws. First was that D
arie’s father was still alive and living in retirement and, second, that Madame Boutboul had been disbarred from legal practice following a disciplinary hearing into a currency swindle involving one of her clients.
Perrot’s murder shocked France, not least because the dead man was a personal friend of Laurent Fabius, the Prime Minister. It later emerged that Fabius had asked Perrot for his help in investigating racehorse scandals. More personal details followed with news that Perrot was seeking a divorce from Darie and had arranged to meet his mother-in-law on the evening that he was killed. She did not turn up.
Within days of the shooting, and to the amazement of the French public, Dr Boutboul was reunited with his family in an outpouring of emotion before television news cameras. Mme Boutboul, who appeared to be stage-managing the occasion, said that her son-in-law had been murdered because he had uncovered a scandal, the details of which she could not divulge. She did, though, drop a heavy hint when she said she didn’t want to end up like Robert Calvi.
This was a reference to the man known as “God’s banker” who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982 (see here). He had been chairman of Banco Ambrosiano which collapsed with huge debts. Scandal swirled around Calvi’s death and the possible involvement of the Italian P2 lodge. Initially, it was believed that Calvi had committed suicide but in 2002 after a long enquiry, it was thought he had been murdered.
Mme Boutboul continued to make controversial statements and it seemed that her son-in-law had unearthed some unsavoury facts about her misuse of client’s money. In 1994 she was found guilty of complicity in Perrot’s death and given a fifteen-year prison sentence. The mystery of her husband’s feigned death and resurrection and the precise motive for her son-in-law’s murder have not so far been adequately explained.
“Red Elvis”
The death of Dean Reed, an American pop singer, in Berlin during the Cold War remains an unexplained mystery.
The body of forty-seven-year-old Dean Reed was recovered from the Zeuthner See, a lake in East Berlin, on the morning of 16 June 1986. He had apparently drowned and East German news media spoke of a “tragic accident”.
The singer was a controversial figure. He had lived in the East for fourteen years and his songs were very popular in the eastern bloc countries. While he was highly regarded east of the Berlin wall, he was a hate figure for many Americans who regarded him as a defector and referred to him as “Red Elvis”.
In the 1960s, Reed spent time in South America where he embraced Marxist doctrines. He was passionate about his beliefs and took out newspaper advertisements urging readers to write to President John Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikito Kruschev demanding an end to nuclear testing. This led to his expulsion from Peru and subsequently from Chile where he publicly insulted the Stars and Stripes flag in a protest against the war in Vietnam. His campaigning for world peace did not endear him to Americans who despised him as a “Commy lover”.
In 1972 Reed moved to East Berlin where he was welcomed and he married Renate Blume, an actress. He rented a villa at Snoeckwitz and it was in the nearby lake that he was found, apparently drowned, inside his car. The East German authorities were coy about the precise cause of death but ruled out foul play. His friends were not so sure. His manager, a Denver businesswoman, expressed the opinion that he had been murdered because he had talked about returning to the US. This would have made him a double defector and a loss to the East who saw him as a propaganda asset.
A Sunday Times correspondent was in Berlin at the time of Reed’s death on an assignment to interview him for the newspaper. He learned from Renate Blume-Reed that her husband had been taken into hospital on the day that he died. Doctors thought he had a viral infection; he was feeling ill and perspiring. The news was that he would be kept in hospital for a few days while tests were carried out. According to later reports, he was already dead.
Reed’s death seemed to make minimal impact on the American authorities and there were rumours that he had committed suicide. There were also suggestions of a cover-up and no comprehensive post-mortem report was made public. Some of his friends said that the Russians were making life uncomfortable for him and he had admitted to being fearful of what might happen.
Six weeks before he died, Reed featured in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in which he defended the building of the Berlin Wall. For a short time in the late 1970s, he had worked for the East German intelligence service, STASI. No enquiries into his death were made by the US authorities and speculation remained that one of the international intelligence agencies had put out a contract on him.
Dressed Up
The mysterious death of an Australian government scientist in 1963 had many curious and unexplained features. One of these was that although his body was naked when discovered, someone had carefully arranged his clothes over it to make it appear as if he was dressed.
Two youngsters stumbled across the body of a man by a riverside path in Sydney when they were out walking on New Year’s Day. They were uncertain whether the man was drunk or dead. The police were called to the scene and quickly discovered a second body, that of a woman wearing a dress pulled up exposing her thighs.
The man was identified as Dr Gilbert Bogle and the woman as Margaret Chandler. Neither body showed any marks of violence and post-mortems revealed no signs of organic disease. Cause of death was recorded as cardiac failure.
Enquiries showed that the couple had been to a New Year’s party. Both were married and Bogle went to the party on his own, as his wife was looking after their baby. While there, he met Margaret Chandler and her husband, and when the gathering broke up at around 4 a.m., it was decided that Bogle would drive Margaret home, leaving Mr Chandler to make his own way. They drove down to Lance Cove River and parked the car at a spot about a hundred yards from where their bodies were discovered.
There was speculation that the couple were drunk and had sexual intercourse during which one of them became unconscious through asphyxia precipitated by alcoholic intoxication. This theory did not hold up too well in light of the post-mortem finding that there was no alcohol in their blood.
In view of Dr Bogle’s work as a government scientist, further speculation focussed on secret research of military importance and the angle that he had been killed by enemy agents using an undetectable poison. The inquest held in March 1963 learned that every available test had been applied to determine the precise cause of death but with no positive outcome. The coroner concluded that the deaths had resulted from acute circulatory failure with an unknown cause.
A story surfaced in 1970 that Margaret Chandler’s husband had received a number of telephone calls from an individual who told him that Bogle had been targeted by international conspirators and that Mrs Chandler was killed for no other reason than that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A more straightforward theory was that the couple had overdosed on LSD at the New Year’s party and subsequently suffered cardiac arrest. This suggestion surfaced in 1977 after Bogle’s former lover, Margaret Fowler, died. She was not allowed to give evidence at the inquest in 1963 because it was thought she would say that Bogle used LSD as an aphrodisiac. Theorists proposed that she might have followed the couple after the New Year party and tidied up the scene when she found them in compromising circumstances.
Murder Or Suicide
The mysterious death of Uwe Barschel, a prominent German politician, in a hotel room in Switzerland in 1987 resulted in a scandal at the time and the cause of death remains unresolved.
Forty-three-year-old Barschel was a high-flyer in political circles and was premier of the state of Schleswig-Holstein. He was also a controversial figure who attracted publicity including allegations of using devious methods to discredit opponents.
In September 1987, Barschel resigned his premiership as a result of allegations made against him, which he denied but for which he was due to face a parliamentary enquiry. After resigning, he took his wife for a sh
ort holiday and, on returning, travelled alone to Geneva by train.
Barschel checked in at the Beau-Rivage hotel and was found in his room twenty-four hours later. His body was discovered in the bath, fully dressed except for a jacket, and lying partly submerged but with his head above water. Post-mortem examination determined that he had a weak heart and traces of anti-depressant drugs were found in his blood. These findings led to the suggestion that he had committed suicide, although that conclusion was not officially endorsed.
The dead politician’s family believed he had been murdered. There was talk that he met two men when he arrived at Geneva railway station, one of whom was supposed to be Robert Roloff. Barschel had told his wife that this man had evidence which would clear his name. A counter suggestion was that Roloff did not exist other than as a cover masking his intention to commit suicide and giving him a reason to travel to Geneva.
Uwe Barschel’s funeral service at Lübeck Cathedral on 27 October 1987 was attended by over 2,500 people, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl. A great deal of soul-searching ensued and the prevailing public view was that he had been murdered.
The controversy over his death rumbled on with no satisfactory conclusion being reached. In April 1997, a report was published by investigators, which the media described as a “whodunit with a cast of thousands”. There were allegations about changing the course of justice and talk of a cover-up.
A new line of enquiry began to open up, suggesting that, in addition to dirty tricks in internal political affairs, Barschel was involved with international arms deals. It was alleged that he was involved in the Iran-Contra affair. Witnesses claimed to have seen a photograph of Barschel together with Colonel Oliver North and an East German Stasi agent. This was backed up by reports of trips made by Barschel to East European destinations.
What happened in the Geneva hotel room has never been fully explained and the cause of Barschel’s death has not been proved. Suggestions that there was another person present at the time of death fuelled further speculation about a killing by foreign agents.