Neil Marklew was a gangly youth of just 19 when he first met Julie Cheema. He lived with his parents in Catherine Gardens, just around the corner from the Cheemas’ main off-licence in Cromwell Road, Hounslow. Initially, Marklew didn’t even notice Julie’s hand brush his as she gave him change in the shop. He certainly didn’t realise she fancied him. Julie Cheema felt lonely and rejected at this time. Her husband was becoming more and more short-tempered as his asthma attacks become increasingly regular and they rarely even slept in the same bed. At first, this unlikely twosome became genuine friends and there was no relationship between them. But despite a 25-year age difference, Neil and Julie found they had a lot in common.
Then Mohinder Cheema started threatening to cut his wife out of his will. He accused Julie of not being truly in love with him. Mohinder’s children from an earlier marriage disliked Julie and they warned their father not to trust her. Mohinder then started to question his wife’s reasons for marrying him in the first place. Had she been after his wealth all along?
The relationship between Julie and her husband had reached an all-time low by the summer of 1990. Life at home had become one long round of arguments and tension. Mohinder Cheema spent even more of his time in bed and his wife was trying to stay out of the house whenever possible. Then Julie arrived home early one evening and was about to enter her husband’s bedroom when she heard voices. It was one of Mohinder’s grown-up sons. She stopped in her tracks and waited and listened. The voices were loud and clear. They were discussing Mohinder’s will and how Julie was going to be cut out of it. She waited a few moments longer and then silently tiptoed away. She didn’t want them to know she’d been listening because she had a plan that none of them should know about.
Neil Marklew’s relationship with Julie Cheema soon developed into something special. They’d meet in the middle of the day while her husband was working in the shop or lying in bed sick. Neil – who was unemployed – enjoyed their chats together because it broke up the monotony of life on the dole. The days were the most boring time of all for him because most of his friends were either at college or out working.
During the hot summer of 1990, the couple met in parks, pubs and coffee shops to talk about life, love and Mohinder Cheema. Julie became increasingly obsessed with her husband’s plans to cut her out of the will. She also knew that her husband was watching her every move and suspected she was getting some physical gratification from elsewhere. In fact, Julie had not committed adultery – yet. She was content having a companion to confide in, even if he was young enough to be her son.
But teenager Neil Marklew’s affection for Julie was growing by the day. He started thinking about her virtually every waking moment. The more they met and talked, the more he began to want to have a proper affair with her. Up until then, they’d done nothing more than kiss on street corners and stroke hands over the tops of coffee-shop tables. Virtually no one knew about their secret liaisons. Neil believed his mates would rib him mercilessly if they found out, and Julie certainly had no intention of telling a living soul. Neil was prepared to do anything to encourage turning their friendship into the real thing.
‘I’d kill him for you if you asked me,’ he told her one day.
Neil Marklew later claimed he’d wanted to show Julie how much he cared for her. But she took it literally.
‘Do you mean that?’
The teenager hesitated for a moment and looked into Julie Cheema’s eyes. He desperately wanted to have her completely to himself.
‘Sure I do,’ he mumbled. She didn’t even notice his reserved response.
‘I hate him, you know,’ said Julie. ‘I’ve been thinking of killing him for ages but I don’t know how.’
Neil Marklew had opened up a can of worms over which he had little control. Now he was discovering what it would take to win Julie’s love forever. He sat there nodding his head as she continued.
‘There must be a way we could do it.’
That’s when it dawned on Neil that this might be a way out of the doldrums of unemployment. Of course he was in love with her but there were other considerations.
‘Well, it’ll cost you.’
‘How much do you think?’
‘You tell me – what’s he worth?’
‘Five million.’
Neil let out a long whistle. He had no idea his sweetheart’s husband was worth that sort of money.
‘I’d just be happy to have the off-licence.’
‘OK. It’s yours if you do the job properly,’ replied Julie.
The truth was that Julie Cheema had a highly inflated opinion of her husband’s real wealth. But one off-licence seemed a small price to pay for the £5 million she believed her husband was worth in total. In reality it was about one-fifth of that sum.
‘Right, give me some money and I’ll get a gun,’ said Neil, who was starting to enjoy his role as the fixer. Then he told her he knew just the bloke for the job of hitman.
Robert Naughton, aged 20, was even more desperate for money than his friend Neil Marklew. He was unemployed but didn’t even have the luxury of his parents’ handouts to fall back on. So when Marklew suggest there might be a ‘little job’ on the horizon he was all ears. When Marklew passed Naughton a sawn-off shotgun and told him the victim was to be his girlfriend’s husband, he didn’t bat an eyelid. The two friends finished off their pints of bitter in a local tavern and walked out to prepare for the job they hoped would set them up with a business for life.
‘Bang. Bang.’ Neil turned to his pal. ‘It’ll be as easy as that.’
It was a steaming hot day in Hounslow in August 1990. Business in cold drinks was brisk at the Cheemas’ off-licence in Cromwell Road and Mohinder Cheema must have been hoping the good weather would continue. He and his wife were both in the shop during the late afternoon that day. Julie was giving the place a good clean and her husband was sitting – due to his bad health – behind the counter waiting for the next customer.
Neither of them paid much attention to the gangly youth who walked in. Perhaps if they’d bothered to look at him a bit sooner, they would have wondered why he was wearing such a heavy coat in such scorching hot weather. By the time Robert Naughton pulled a shotgun out from under that coat it was too late.
The first shower of metal hit Mohinder Cheema in the side of his chest. As he keeled over on the floor behind the counter, Naughton pointed and fired a second time right at his victim. But this time the fragments of shot missed most of their target except for Mohinder’s fingers. Doctors later found loads of pieces of shot embedded in his hands.
Julie Cheema screamed as she watched Naughton standing over her husband with the gun. Naughton then turned and fled as her husband lay groaning on the floor. Julie Cheema rushed to his side. She looked down at his blood stained shirt, and could clearly see he was still very much alive. She tried not to look too disappointed. Then she left him there bleeding on the floor and looked outside at Naughton as he made off into the distance. Then she started sobbing.
‘Oh my God. Mohinder. Oh my God.’
Two of the couple’s children rushed down the stairs from the flat above. Julie stumbled to the phone and ever-so-slowly called the ambulance service. She didn’t want them there too fast in case her husband stayed alive too long.
But Mohinder Cheema was still hanging on when the paramedics arrived on the scene. Julie had no choice but to hold her husband’s hand in the ambulance as it rushed to a nearby hospital. She had a horrible feeling her husband was going to survive – and that would mean planning another hit all over again. This time they couldn’t fail. The tears she shed that day were filled with disappointment not fear. She had willed her husband to die but he just wouldn’t go that easily.
The shooting of Mohinder Cheema created quite a stir in the newspapers that week. So-called expert crime reporters on the national press wrote serious in-depth pieces on the Asian Mafia-style gangs that were believed to have gunned down the off-licence owner becaus
e he refused to pay protection money. Neighbours in Cromwell Road were said to be in deep shock about the shooting. Respectable Indian and Pakistani shopkeepers spoke in great detail about their run-ins with these notorious gangs. Even Julie Cheema voiced her determination not to bow down to these evil young criminals who’d so nearly taken away the life of her dearly beloved husband.
‘I haven’t paid and I won’t pay. I work seven days a week and I won’t hand over any of my hard-earned money,’ she told one TV reporter.
And the headline in the Daily Mail summed it all up perfectly: ‘CORNER SHOP WIFE DEFIES THE MOBSTERS.’
Over in Charing Cross Hospital, west London, Mohinder Cheema underwent emergency surgery which involved the removal of one kidney, and had one of his fingers amputated. But at least Mohinder’s brave battle to stave off the brutal Asian gangsters turned him into a hero in the local press.
Mohinder Cheema was now a bit of a celebrity. Mohinder even hired a team of bodyguards to protect him when he was released from hospital. He voiced public concern for his wife’s safety back at the off-licence they owned. He insisted she didn’t work alone on the premises. Julie Cheema couldn’t help chuckling to herself realising she’d sparked off terror in the Asian community. Other killings and shooting of shopkeepers throughout west London were soon being linked to the Mohinder Cheema case.
But Julie Cheema remained determined to make sure her husband wasn’t so lucky second time around, although hiring bodyguards would make her job far more difficult. She spent days scheming and plotting with her young friend Neil Marklew when her husband was in hospital.
‘This time, you better make sure he dies,’ she told Marklew.
As they discussed how to make sure it really did work, Julie stroked his youthful face and leaned over and kissed him full on the lips. That’s when she knew he’d do anything for her.
‘It has to be done as soon as he gets home. I don’t want any of those bodyguards getting in the way.’
So, as Mohinder Cheema lay in a hospital bed, his wife Julie made love to Neil Marklew for the first time. The teenager was delighted to be taught some bedroom tricks by Julie. She was much more experienced than anyone he’d ever slept with before. He sat back and let her take complete control.
As she straddled his body in the bedroom of the home she still shared with her husband, Julie asked her young lover. ‘You promise he won’t miss this time?’
‘Of course he won’t. This time it will be done.’
Julie Cheema continued making love with her teenage boyfriend. She was looking forward to the day when she could call all those businesses her own. That would teach her husband to try and cut her out of his will. Throughout this time, Julie Cheema continued to convince her husband’s family and the police that she had nothing whatsoever to do with the vicious attack on her husband. Julie had even taken him flowers and fruit as he lay in hospital linked up to heart monitors and drips. She was sorely tempted to pull them out of their sockets and just walk calmly away from that room. But Julie knew that all fingers would point to her. No, she had the perfect cover of those Asian gangs out to kill her defiant husband. It was obvious they’d come after him again.
Julie Cheema was delighted when doctors told her that her husband could go home on 3 October 1990 – six weeks after that shotgun attack in the off-licence. As she drove him back through west London she felt a twinge of nervous excitement building up inside. She kept telling him how glad she was that he’d been released from hospital. How relieved she was that he’d decided to hire minders. Mohinder Cheema looked at his wife in admiration. She really was bearing up to all the stresses and strains very well.
The journey back home took about 45 minutes, but Mohinder Cheema insisted on taking a look around his off-licence before going upstairs to their flat to recuperate. As he walked around the shelves, still in his dressing gown and slippers, inspecting the stock, she knew what a boring, mean old man he was. He didn’t even trust her enough to let her carry on running the business without interfering. He wanted to know why they were short of stocks of certain brands of wine. She answered him sweetly because she knew that it wouldn’t be long now.
Then Julie turned and saw the familiar figure of Robert Naughton approaching the shop. She walked round behind the counter and waited impatiently. Come on. Come on. Let’s just get it over and done with.
Just like before, Mohinder Cheema didn’t notice Naughton until it was too late. This time, he turned towards the gunman and looked over at his wife standing silently nearby. Mohinder Cheema knew at that moment she was behind it. The nervous expression on her lips gave it all away.
Robert Naughton blasted both shots close to his head this time. He couldn’t fail. The shots hit Mohinder in the back of the head and the neck. There was no way he could survive them this time. The moment his body crashed to the floor of that off-licence he was already well on his way to being dead. Mohinder Cheema’s 20-year-old son Sunil – who’d just walked into the shop – only realised what was happening when it was too late. If he’d been a few moments earlier he would have seen that look on his stepmother’s face.
As Sunil rushed next door to a neighbour to raise the alarm, Julie Cheema leaned down and looked over her husband’s body for the second time in less than two months. This time he was dead. A warm smile came to her lips and she stood up and walked towards the front of the shop, trying hard to force a sob and a tear to well up in her eyes. Mohinder Cheema lay in a pool of his own blood still wearing the Charing Cross Hospital dressing-gown he’d had on when he arrived at the shop just a few minutes earlier.
Julie Cheema was found guilty of murder and attempted murder when she appeared in front of a jury at the Old Bailey in July 1991. Her lover, Neil Marklew, and his friend Robert Naughton admitted murder and attempted murder. All three were given life sentences.
Detectives admitted that if it had not been for the testimony of Neil Marklew, Julie Cheema might never have been arrested. Her son Kismat, aged 18, was given three months’ youth custody for conspiring to murder Mohinder Cheema.
Chapter Seventeen:
NUDE RUB-OUT
Santa Barbara, California, is a picturesque beachside paradise: miles and miles of pure white sand overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Even the pavements and streets are kept pristinely clean by a city council that insists on nothing but the best.
But just two hours’ drive south of the city is the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles with all its well-publicised problems. Local police in Santa Barbara are always on the look-out for troublemakers entering their little piece of heaven-by-the-sea. Yet behind its family-orientated image and wholesome exterior lies a seedy underbelly, typical of any seaside community from Brighton to Benidorm.
And, according to many locals, one of the most ‘distasteful’ elements that attracts the wrong sort of people is the notorious El Capitan beach just outside the city boundaries. This is where the home values and straight-laced beliefs of so much of Middle America give way to sleaze. In a nation where bare breasts are censored on prime-time television yet mass killings by gun-wielding teenagers are not uncommon. The El Capitan beach is a place that people refer to in hushed tones – it is, you see, a good, old-fashioned nudist beach.
Lots of nature lovers saunter down to the isolated beauty spot and strip off in a bid for the ultimate all-over tan. And, significantly, the majority of visitors to El Capitan are middle-aged citizens. The younger generation has always avoided the place like the plague. Many of them are appalled and disgusted by the middle-aged paunches and roasting flesh that have become a part of everyday life on El Capitan Beach. But then more than 70 per cent of America’s population still goes to church every Sunday so perhaps it’s not so surprising.
Phillip Bogdanoff and his pretty wife Diana were two such avid sun-worshippers. They loved making the short trip from their mobile home at the El Capitan Ranch Park right across the street to the beach. It was a dream come true for Phillip who had a healthy – some wo
uld say unhealthy – interest in examining the figures of nude beachgoers. His idea of a nice day out was to cast his gaze across the perfectly formed muscles and firm thighs of some of the beach’s other regular visitors.
But then handsome, rugged, fun-loving 49-year-old engineer Bogdanoff kept himself in pretty good shape as well. He was proud of his own six-pack and relished the chance to strip off to his birthday suit on El Capitan beach. He’d already been a regular for many years when he started romancing an attractive fair-haired lady called Diana from nearby Colefax, California. Diana was working as a nursing aide at a nearby convalescence hospital when they first met in 1984. Both had suffered broken marriages, so they were understandably cautious at first and a four-year courtship followed. Diana already had children from her previous marriage, so there was no hurry to tie the knot.
In February 1989, Phillip and Diana married and moved to their dream location right opposite the most infamous nudist beach in Santa Barbara. So whenever they weren’t working during that summer, Diana and Phillip would each pack a towel and set off across the street to the El Capitan Beach.
Diana told Phillip from the start of their relationship that said she didn’t mind stripping off on the beach. He even suspected she enjoyed exhibiting her shapely body to the – mostly male – beach population. Phillip often caught healthily endowed guys staring at his wife’s pert body. He’d smile at them before they could avert their gaze in embarrassment at being ‘caught’ peeping.
Sometimes Diana got so turned on she’d open her legs just a fraction whenever some of the more handsome beachcombers were watching at her eye level. She loved letting them see just a hint. Phillip knew what his wife was doing and even gave her behaviour his own bizarre seal of approval by observing the proceedings and never objecting to her behaviour.
Hitmen: True Stories of Street Executions Page 17