Regan was given an eight-year sentence, but was released in 2002, after serving fewer than four years. He could hardly return to his former haunts and associates, however, even though he was desperate to regain his wealth and celebrity. So he came up with a plan that he was convinced would place him back at the very top of the criminal underworld – he decided he would take over CIBA Freight, a company owned by millionaire Asian businessman Amarjit Chohan, aged forty-five – but he would not buy it, he would steal it.
To help him execute the plan, Regan recruited two of his former accomplices from his drug smuggling and passport days, William Horncy, then aged fifty-three, and Peter Rees, aged forty. The final – though utterly innocent and unwitting – member of the team Regan put together was divorcee Belinda Brewin, aged forty-three, an ex-public relations executive and former best friend of Paula Yates, the late wife of rock singer Bob Geldof, who was to become the spokesperson for CIBA Freight once Regan had control of it. But Brewin had another advantage – she had fifty acres of land near Tiverton in Devon, which would be the perfect place to bury a body or bodies.
Regan began telephoning Chohan in February of 2003, claiming that he had Dutch backers who wanted to buy his firm. Chohan had something of a chequered reputation, having served a brief prison sentence for tax evasion, and was reported to be desperate to sell his business. That made him the perfect target for Regan’s plan to return to his glory days as a drug smuggler and money launderer. To help him to do so, he engaged Chohan in a series of lengthy negotiations – while all the time planning to force him to sell him the company by threatening him with his death and the death of his family.
Regan, who at this point was living with his elderly father near Salisbury in Wiltshire, finally confirmed to Chohan that he had indeed secured a Dutch company which was prepared to buy CIBA Freight for three million pounds, and invited him to a meeting near Stonehenge in Wiltshire on Thursday 13 February 2003 to meet the prospective buyer. In fact there was no buyer – that part in the proceedings was to be played by Regan’s former accomplice, Peter Rees.
After attending the Stonehenge meeting on that February day in 2003, Chohan was never seen alive again. In reality, he had been kidnapped by Regan, Horncy and Rees and taken back to Regan’s father’s house where he was tortured until he signed a series of papers effectively handing over his firm to Regan.
Regan’s plan was to kill Chohan and make it look as though he had fled the country in fear of the tax authorities. The only difficulty was that Chohan would have been unlikely to leave his home in Hounslow in Middlesex without taking his family with him – and for Regan that meant only one thing. They too would have to die. After Chohan’s disappearance on Thursday, his wife Nancy, who was twenty-five, rapidly became concerned when her husband did not return the following day – especially when he did not answer his mobile phone.
On Saturday 15 February 2003, Regan and Horncy left Rees guarding Chohan in Salisbury and set off for London in a hired van, determined to kill the remaining members of the Chohan family. The two men tricked Mrs Chohan into letting them into the family home and then set about killing every member of the family. Neither man displayed the slightest sign of mercy as they butchered Nancy Chohan and her two infant sons, eighteen-month-old toddler Devinder and his eight-week-old baby brother Ravinder, as well as her mother Charanjit Kaur, aged fifty-two, who was visiting the family from India.
The two killers then loaded the four bodies into Regan’s van and drove them to his father’s home in Salisbury. That night Chohan was forced to leave telephone messages for his employees telling them that he had sold the business to Regan and that he and his family had left for India. After he had done so, the three conspirators killed him as well.
On the morning of Monday 17 February 2003, Regan arrived at the offices of CIBA Freight complete with a letter from Amarjit Chohan – written, of course, under the most extreme duress – saying that he had been exporting illegal drugs, before adding, ‘Some people are after me and I have to escape. I fear for the safety of my family.’ The staff accepted the story and Regan installed himself as the new boss.
Two days later Regan returned to his elderly father’s house in Salisbury, piled the five bodies of the Chohan family into the hired van and drove them to Belinda Brewin’s home in Devon, where he, Horncy and Rees proceeded to bury them. Brewin was not there at the time, but when she came back the men explained they were sorting out a ‘drainage problem’ for her as a gift. Shortly afterwards, Regan disposed of Mr Chohan’s car – in which he had come to the original meeting at Stonehenge a week earlier – to remove all trace of him.
Regan’s plan to take over CIBA Freight and go back into the drug smuggling business might have worked, but for the fact that Nancy Chohan had been very close to her brother Onkar Verma, who lived in New Zealand. Sister and brother were so close that they spoke to each other on the telephone almost every day – and so when Regan told Mrs Chohan’s brother that she and the entire family had left the country he simply did not believe it. Nancy Chohan would at least have told him, he believed, and he started pestering the police to investigate what had happened to his sister.
Onkar Verma was so concerned about his sister and the family that three weeks after her disappearance he flew to London to urge the police to find them. He also pestered them to search the family house in Hounslow, which was deserted, but looked as though it had been left in a great hurry. There were half-eaten plates of food on the table and the washing machine was full.
The police then discovered that the family’s bank accounts had not been touched since their disappearance and launched a full-scale inquiry. Officers arrived at the CIBA Freight offices and interviewed Regan and the staff, and they quickly became suspicious about the letters signed by Mr Chohan explaining the reasons for his leaving the country so abruptly. On the surface Regan looked calm, but beneath that veneer he was in a panic. He returned to Brewin’s house in Devon, dug up the bodies of the five members of the Chohan family and put them in another hired van. On Easter Sunday, 20 April 2003, he bought a boat and, helped once again by Horncy, dumped all five bodies in the sea off Dorset.
Just two days later a father and his son canoeing off Bournemouth Pier found a body in the water, which was quickly identified as belonging to Amarjit Chohan. Even more extraordinarily, the police also found that Chohan had managed to leave them a letter, folded up many times and secreted in his shoe, that gave the address of Kenneth Regan and his father. Sensing something may have been amiss in his negotiations with Regan about his company, Chohan had written it the day before his fateful meeting at Stonehenge.
On 15 July 2003, Nancy Chohan’s decomposed body was found in fishermen’s nets off Poole in Dorset, while her mother’s body, even more severely decomposed, was found on a beach on the Isle of Wight several weeks later, on 7 September 2003. Tragically, the bodies of her two sons, toddler Devinder and his eight-week-old baby brother Ravinder, were never to be recovered.
By that point Regan, Horncy and Rees were all in police custody, and fourteen months later, on 8 November 2004, all three appeared at the Central Criminal Court in Old Bailey to face charges of murder and false imprisonment. All three denied any involvement in the killings and pleaded not guilty. What followed was one of the longest criminal trials in recent history, lasting no less than eight months, at an estimated cost of ten million pounds.
Prosecuting counsel, Richard Horwell QC, painstakingly laid out the evidence for the jury, pointing out that Chohan had been drugged and, quite possibly, strangled, while his wife’s
skull had been smashed, probably with a hammer, although her mother’s body was too badly decomposed to offer any concrete evidence of how she met her death. He also explained blood evidence that had been found on the garden wall of Regan’s house, in the trench that had been dug in Devon and on the speedboat that he had bought, all linking him to the family.
Mr Horwell then added, ‘Regan was penniless. He had no legal right or interest in CIBA; there were no backers … Regan’s motive and intentions are obvious: he was desperate for a return to the days of “Captain Cash” – banknotes in the boot of the Mercedes and the luxury home. There was only one way he could realise such an ambition and that was through drugs … CIBA was the perfect vehicle.’
In spite of that argument the jury took twelve days to reach a verdict. It was not until Friday 1 July 2005 that they returned to find Regan and Horncy guilty of all five murders. Rees, meanwhile, was found guilty of murdering Chohan.
On the following Tuesday 5 July 2005, the judge, Sir Stephen Mitchell, addressed Regan and Horncy directly.
‘Your crimes are uniquely terrible,’ he told them. ‘The cold-blooded murder of an eight-week-old baby, an eighteen-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.’ Sir Stephen then added, ‘Your characters are as despicable as your crimes. Each of you is a practised, resourceful and manipulative liar. For these crimes you two highly dangerous men must now pay the heaviest sentence.’ He then sentenced both men to whole life terms of imprisonment.
Neither Regan nor Horncy displayed the slightest emotion as the judge passed sentence – just as they never admitted their guilt. To this day, both men protest their innocence, and have never revealed what happened to the bodies of the two innocent children.
Rees was also found guilty of false imprisonment and helping to kill Chohan, but the judge accepted that he was not the planner of the crimes, although his responsibility for the murder was of the ‘utmost gravity’. He was given a sentence of life imprisonment with a minimum term of twenty-three years.
Outside the court, a family friend of the Chohan’s read out a statement on behalf of Onkar Verma, the man who had persuaded the police to take an interest in the family’s disappearance two years earlier. It said simply, ‘The last two years have been a living nightmare. The deliberate, premeditated slaughter of my innocent family is akin to me being given a life sentence – a life with no laughter, no happiness and no joy.’
Predictably, given their persistent claims of innocence, Regan and Horncy appealed against their convictions, and the appeal was heard on Friday 16 May 2014. Regan maintained that they had been forced to dispose of the bodies by the militant Islamic terrorist organization Al-Qaeda – who had threatened to kill them if they did not do so. But Lady Justice Rafferty, sitting with Mr Justice Holroyde and Mrs Justice Andrews, dismissed their appeal without hesitation.
In her judgement Lady Justice Rafferty said, ‘Regan’s contention that he did not give evidence because he was threatened by Al-Qaeda is not an arguable ground for appealing.’ She also told both men, ‘The evidence against you was formidable and the case was very fairly and comprehensively summed up.’
There is little chance that either man will launch a further appeal, and both are almost certain to spend the rest of their lives in prison – keeping the secret of what happened to the Chohan children to themselves. There can be little doubt that they would present a danger to the public were they to be released. But did the possibility of a whole life term of imprisonment deter either man? The answer must surely be no.
17
Partners in Crime but Not in Sentence
John Duffy, David Mulcahy and Steve Wright
Two men who were partners in a devastating series of rapes and murders in north London during the early 1980s are now both serving life sentences of imprisonment. Yet, ironically, only one of the two was sentenced to a whole life term – by the Home Secretary of the day – while the other is serving life with a minimum term of thirty years, which means he could be eligible for parole in 2031 when he will still only be in his early seventies.
The two men represent yet further examples of the conflicting standards that seem to be at work in the sentencing of offenders who commit crimes of the utmost gravity. For both men were found guilty of exactly the same crimes – although they were sentenced eleven years apart.
Known originally as the ‘Railway Rapists’ and then as the ‘Railway Killers’, John Duffy and David Mulcahy were born within a few months of each other in north-west London in 1959. At the age of eleven they arrived at the same secondary school, Haverstock Hill Comprehensive in Hampstead, at exactly the same time. Both misfits with few friends, Mulcahy was the taller of the two, with a round white face, high forehead and boyish expression, while Duffy was far shorter, with an ugly, menacing grin and a mop of curly ginger hair which he kept hidden under his parka jacket’s hood for fear of being ridiculed. Duffy would never stand more than five feet four inches in height, which led his friend Mulcahy to call him ‘the midget’. As Duffy grew he would also develop severe acne, which pockmarked his face and increased his feeling of being an outsider still further.
In spite of their physical dissimilarities, however, the two boys struck up an almost telepathic bond that was to remain with them for more than thirty years and see them commit a series of attacks on women. Neither achieved anything academically at school, but they did develop an uncanny joint instinct that encouraged them to break the law. At one point Mulcahy had been suspended from school for killing a hedgehog with a plank of wood and stamping on it, while his friend Duffy looked on and smirked. There was no doubt in either boy’s mind that Mulcahy was the dominant partner in the relationship.
As the boys turned into teenagers they also developed a passion for martial arts and started to practise ‘kung fu’ head locks and grips as well as survival skills together on Hampstead Heath, not far from their homes in Chalk Farm and Brondesbury. They then graduated to wearing Halloween masks and jumping out from hiding places behind bushes on the Heath to terrify courting couples and homosexuals who sought the privacy of the extensive wooded areas on the Heath to meet. The more terrified the people they revealed themselves to, the greater the excitement and pleasure Mulcahy and Duffy took from their behaviour.
In 1976, just after they left school, the pair were convicted of causing actual bodily harm when they shot four passers-by on the Heath with a powerful air rifle – apparently ‘for fun’. Far from frightening them into a law-abiding way of life, the brush with the law only served to encourage the pair still further, and shortly afterwards the manipulative Mulcahy suggested to Duffy that they should rape a woman together. It was to be the first of a relentless series of crimes that terrified women in north London for more than a decade.
As Guy Toyn, a reporter for CourtNewsUK.co.uk was to put it later, ‘Their “wicked bond” was cemented by deep feelings of sexual inadequacy – Duffy’s irrational hatred of women sprang from a low sperm count which prevented him from fathering children. Throughout his life Mulcahy had been troubled by difficulties in maintaining an erection which would drive him to escalating sexual depravity and violence in an attempt to arouse himself.’
What is not in doubt, however, is that Mulcahy chose their first target – a woman whose house he was helping to decorate. He told Duffy he thought she ‘needed teaching a lesson’ and that they were going to break in and rape her. But their scheme did not go according
to plan. The two men broke into the house and laid in wait, but the lady in question did not return to her home that night. Not long afterwards the two broke into a house in Notting Hill, west London and laid in wait in the bedroom for a woman that Mulcahy had suggested was ‘stuck up’. Again their plan failed, the two young men eventually escaping through a window when the lady in question returned home with a male friend that evening.
Neither failure deterred them, however, as they became more and more brazen in their determination to commit a rape. By now they had equipped themselves with a ‘rapist’s kit’ of balaclava helmets, knives and tape to gag and blindfold their victims. The Michael Jackson cassette tape Thriller would become another essential part of the kit, with the two men singing along to it as they drove around north London hunting for victims.
On 24 October 1982, Mulcahy and Duffy raped their first known victim, a twenty-one-year-old woman who was walking home from a party in west London carrying a teddy bear she had been given by a friend. Wearing balaclavas to prevent her identifying them, the two grabbed her by the neck, put sticking plaster over her mouth and said, ‘Don’t worry, all we want is your teddy bear.’ It was a cruel joke, for they dragged her into the front garden of a nearby house where she was stripped, blindfolded and raped. The victim recalled, ‘I put my hands up and the taller man said, “Don’t worry, it is a knife.”’
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