Hitmen (9 page)

Sylvia Paterson’s QC maintained throughout the trial that she was innocent. But Judge Sir Rhys Davies called Paterson the ‘driving force’ behind the plot. And he told John Holmes: ‘You enjoyed a very comfortable lifestyle. There is no one but yourself to blame for its destruction.’ Neither of the defendants showed any emotion when the jury came back with a guilty verdict for both of them. Holmes and Paterson were each jailed for nine years for plotting the hitman murder of her stepson and his wife.

After the trial, intended targets Paul and Sarah Paterson said, ‘We are very relieved. We knew nothing of the plot to kill us until the police came to inform us. We would like to thank the police for their unstinting support and can now look forward to returning to a normal family life.’

Meanwhile Banjo the clown remains in protective custody amid claims that Holmes has put a £250,000 contract out on his life.

T
enerife, in the Canary Islands, was a picturesque place full of sunshine and good humour – until British holidaymakers started turning up in droves more than 20 years ago. They bring much of the money to the island but they also bring much of the trouble.

Many reckon that the area round Playa de las Americas is fast on its way to displacing the Costa del Sol as Spain’s
preeminent
‘Costa del Crime’. Almost 20,000 Brits live permanently in the south of Tenerife and a large number of them are criminals who have a strong grip on the island’s underworld, controlling the flow of drugs into Tenerife and dominating the shady world of timeshare. It’s said that if you cross any of the criminal element you’re likely to get a visit from men with baseball bats. Or you just disappear.

So Mick O’Hara, Gary Holmes, Stanley Stewart and Jacqueline Ambler were not exactly fish out of water. Holmes
and Stewart both had records back in Britain for violent offences. O’Hara had seven convictions for offences including robbery and assault. Thirty-three-year-old Jacqui Ambler, from Rossington, near Doncaster, also had a couple of convictions, although her father later disputed this claim.

She’d divorced the father of her son and arrived on Tenerife with her new partner, Mick O’Hara, from Wakefield, Yorks, in March 1995. Back in Britain, he’d run a coal delivery firm and she’d helped out with the paperwork. They bought a British-style pub called Stevie’s Bar on an avenue planted with palm trees that ran between a shopping precinct and an apartment hotel at the resort of Los Cristianos. It was a bizarre, overdeveloped district filled with rapidly constructed buildings completely out of sync with many of the older style properties.

Jacqui Ambler’s bar wasn’t exactly an investment in the future. She and Mick had fallen into the classic trap of believing that the rest of their lives could be turned into a holiday on the sunshine island. She’d even hoped that her 6-foot, 15-stone lover’s violent temper might change in a warmer climate.

But that dream soon turned into a nightmare when Jacqui discovered that 39-year-old Mick’s temper had got worse. Soon, neighbours in Playa de las Americas noticed the bruises and scars on her face and upper body.

The beatings rapidly got so bad that Jacqui decided on some drastic action. She got talking to bar regular Gary Holmes, from Littlehampton, Sussex, and asked to meet him later in a neighbouring bar. That was when she told him she wanted Mick to be killed. Jacqui informed him that her young
son, who was on holiday, would be returning to England the following Tuesday and that she believed Mick O’Hara would kill her the moment the boy left the island. She said that Mick, in front of the boy, had ‘previously’ told her she had two years left ‘to live’; that she was ‘of no more use to him’.

Holmes and Jacqui agreed a plan to carry out the killing later that same day when all the customers had left Stevie’s Bar.

Holmes, 31, later claimed that Jacqui offered him £4,000 as a down payment and a further £50,000 to be handed over later in Britain.

On 5 September 1995, Jacqui Ambler went out the back of Stevie’s Bar saying she had to put the rubbish out. Holmes’ 31-year-old friend Stanley Stewart, from Stirlingshire, then lured Mick O’Hara into the lavatory of O’Hara’s bar by pretending the sink was blocked. The idea was to beat him unconscious and then stab him to death, but then Stewart slipped as he set about his intended victim and managed to do no more than grab him by the neck.

Then Holmes botched the stabbing when the blade bent before he could plunge it into O’Hara’s heart. So Holmes broke a bottle over his head. But not even that was enough to knock out O’Hara, who then broke free and locked himself in the lavatory.

The two burly doormen fled but were stopped outside by Jacqui Ambler, who allegedly persuaded them to go back inside and finish him off. Seconds later, Jacqui lured O’Hara out by pretending his attackers had fled. As he emerged he was hit several times over the head with a metal container –
a beer barrel or gas bottle – before Holmes set about trying to strangle him with his own medallion chain.

But still O’Hara refused to go quietly, so Holmes stuffed a bar towel into his mouth and even up his nostrils to try suffocating him instead. That eventually did the trick. But by the time Holmes and Stewart were finished, their victim and his bar were smothered with blood.

Just a few hours later, Holmes and Stewart were both arrested and confessed to the murder. But what Holmes didn’t realise was that there would be no going back on that first statement. Spain’s legal system reserves its stiffest penalties for those about whose guilt there is no dispute and it is as harsh on premeditation as it is lenient on those driven by some spontaneous, momentary, uncontrollable passion.

Jacqui Ambler frequently broke down in floods of tears during her trial at the Palace of Justice in Tenerife’s capital, Santa Cruz. She always maintained her innocence, constantly denying that she had plotted the killing and promised to pay the two men to kill O’Hara. However, Holmes and Stewart both made detailed statements shortly after they were arrested in which they described the events that led up to the killing.

But when the trial started, 30 months after their arrest, they changed their stories and Holmes claimed that he alone was responsible for O’Hara’s murder. He insisted he’d killed the bar owner in a vicious fight over a drugs debt. Holmes said he’d made up the story about Jacqui Ambler hiring him and Stewart because he thought she had told police about his drugs trafficking.

Neither the court or the police made any attempt to check this new version and the question of drugs was not even mentioned throughout the trial. ‘It has been shown that there was something more than a mere relation of acquaintanceship between Gary and Jacqueline,’ remarked Judge Juan Manuel Fernandez del Toro Alonso.

But the big question was, when did their affair begin? If it was after the murder then it is not relevant, but if they were lovers before the killing, it would put a whole new light on the case. And the defendants’ legal counsels were not permitted to challenge the prosecution’s evidence in cross-examination.

One witness who didn’t show up at the trial, a waiter called Clemente Alvarez Lopez, originally told police he’d seen Holmes in the bar with a Scotsman and a woman he did not recognise. Shown photos of Ambler by the police, he was unable to identify her as the woman, yet subsequently he picked her out twice in identity parades.

Another key witness was the owner of the bar next door to Stevie’s Bar. Francisco Pacheco told police he’d seen two men talking to Ambler outside the bar at 4am, after the murder. He claimed to have seen the men earlier that evening. Yet he failed to identify either Holmes or Stewart in identity parades.

At one stage during the trial, Holmes even leapt to his feet and shouted at the Spanish judges: ‘These people are innocent. I have put my friend and this woman behind bars for nearly three years already. You can do what you like to me but please let them go.’ Stewart told the court he’d gone along with Holmes’ claims because he was scared of him and ‘of the men he worked for’.

Holmes told the court that Stewart’s only involvement had been to try and break up the fight between himself and O’Hara. But the judges rejected the new versions and decided the original statements made to police and, under oath, to an investigating judge told what really happened.

In May 1998, Holmes and Stewart – both bouncers at another bar in Playa de las Americas – began what are thought to be the biggest sentences handed out to British subjects in Spain since the end of Franco’s dictatorship: 29 years, just one year short of the maximum allowable under Spanish law. Jacqui Ambler’s was given 27 years, 8 months and a day.

Back home in Rossington, Jacqui’s father John, 61, said, ‘There was no evidence against my daughter. Those first statements were made under duress. Twenty-seven years – I can’t believe it. I never thought of anything but a “not guilty” verdict. We expected her to be freed and hadn’t made plans for this. We can’t understand how she could have been convicted. None of the prosecution’s seven witnesses turned up and it just doesn’t seem real.’

It is not clear how long the three defendants expect to remain behind bars. They had been held in the island’s prison since their arrests almost immediately after the killing. In another case in the early Nineties, a Briton living on the Costa del Sol was jailed for 25 years for the murder of his wife but released after five. Meanwhile others have had to serve at least two-thirds of their sentence, meaning Ambler, Holmes and Stewart could end up serving at least 20 years each.

Shortly after the case, O’Hara’s mother Doreen Emerson was astonished to receive a £2,500 bill by the court which
had jailed her son’s killers. Spanish law officers said the bill was for ‘court work’ connected to the case.

Doreen said, ‘I have lost a son who meant the world to me and have had nothing but expense. The court demand is outrageous.’

The court bill came following disclosures about how Holmes and Ambler had been allowed sex sessions in their Tenerife jail for good behaviour.

R
ichardson, Texas. A quiet, middle-class suburb of Dallas. It is the early hours of the morning of 4 October 1983. Inside the bedroom of a house on Loganwood Drive lies a critically wounded young woman. She is naked, her wrists are tied to the bed and she is face down with two bullet wounds in the back of her head. Yet somehow she’s still alive.

Just then, her four-year-old son walks into the bedroom. He looks down at his mother and tries to ‘wake her up’. The child then rushes to the phone and calls his father: ‘Momma is sick. I can’t wake her up.’ The father immediately calls the emergency services before rushing over to the house. Within minutes, the wailing sirens and blue-and-red lights of the emergency services flash in the distance as police units and paramedics swamp the area.

The size of the entry wounds to her head show that she’s been shot with a small-calibre gun. Bloodstains cover the
sheets, and a pillow punctured by two bullet-holes lies on the bedroom floor. Tissue paper is also spread across the floor. Rope is tied from her wrists to three of the bedposts. Another piece of rope lies on the carpet at the foot of the bed, next to a puddle of vomit. The brunette victim is unshackled by paramedics and rushed to a nearby hospital.

Outside, the victim’s four-year-old son is crying hysterically in the garden as he’s comforted by his father, who tells the police that the gunned-down woman is his 33-year-old wife, Rozanne Gailiunas, a registered nurse.

The boy’s father told officers from nearby Richardson that he’d been estranged from the child’s mother for the past few weeks. Investigators then immediately began knocking on houses in Loganwood Drive for possible witnesses. Not long afterwards, another man walked into the victim’s front yard asking what had happened. Richard Finley explained he was a friend of Rozanne Gailiunas and said he’d last spoken to her by phone earlier the previous morning.

There were no signs of a forced entry to the house nor anything to indicate there’d been a burglary. Apart from on the bed, there were not even any signs of a struggle. Had the victim known her attacker and let him in the house? Or was she the victim of a random assailant who persuaded her to let him or her in?

Rozanne’s young son told police that he and his mother had eaten at a fast food restaurant the previous lunchtime before she took him to a local ice rink. When they returned home later that day, Rozanne told her son to take a nap. When he woke up – probably because of the sound of the shots – he went to the living room to watch a film on the VHS machine
but was unable to start it. The toddler then went to his mother’s bedroom for help, found her tied to the bed and phoned his father.

Over at the Dallas hospital, Rozanne Gailiunas underwent life-saving surgery. Doctors warned detectives she might not live through the night and she died a few hours later without ever recovering consciousness. Police then began the painstaking process of piecing together Rozanne’s life story.

Rozanne had met and married her doctor husband in their native state of Massachusetts before moving to Texas in 1972, when he took a job on the faculty of a Dallas medical school. She worked as a nurse in a local hospital and their son was born in 1979. Rozanne quit her nursing job to take better care of the boy. Plans were discussed to construct a brand new $500,000 home in an exclusive Dallas suburb. And by the beginning of 1983 the building was starting to take shape.

The couple’s marriage started crumbling when Rozanne announced she ‘wanted some space’ to sort her life out and even proposed a return to nursing. In fact, she’d begun a passionate romance with a handsome building contractor who was working on their new home. Richard Finley was separated from his wife at the time and was the man who mysteriously arrived at the crime scene on the night of Rozanne’s murder.

Investigators quickly checked out the alibis of Finley and the victim’s husband. Both were able to account for their movements. Perhaps it was a random crime after all? At that time, serial killers were getting vast press coverage and the
finger of suspicion was pointing in the direction of such a psychopath. Maybe he’d killed before?

Detectives contacted the FBI who submitted all the details of the Gailiunas killing to the VICAP – Violent Criminal Apprehension Program – specifically set up to track down such random acts by making computerised comparisons to other similar crimes across the United States. But there were no matches.

The police investigation into the slaying of Rozanne Gailiunas was eventually wound down as detectives ran out of leads. It was not until three years later – on the afternoon of 14 June 1986 – that an incident occurred which immediately re-ignited the inquiry.

Rozanne’s lover Richard Finley reported to police that he’d been shot at while driving to his ranch with a friend. Numerous bullets had shattered his car’s windscreen. Fortunately, Finley only suffered minor cuts from the broken glass although his friend was wounded in the wrist. All they could tell the local Kaufman County Sheriff was that they’d caught a glimpse of a man with a raised gun, but could not identify him.

Detectives still hunting the killer of Rozanne contacted the Kaufman County authorities to see if there was a link between the two crimes. The local sheriff was convinced that Finley and his friend had stumbled upon a drug deal or some poachers who’d turned their gun on the two men.

So once again the investigation into the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas fizzled out.

Cut to two more years later – in March 1988. Detectives get
a call from a very frightened woman asking for a meeting to discuss the case. She tells police that Richard Finley’s former wife, Joy Aylor, planned the Rozanne murder. The tipster – one of Aylor’s relatives called Marilyn Andrews – also claimed that Aylor was behind the gun attack on her former husband in 1986. During her interview with detectives, Andrews claims she delivered the money which paid for the Rozanne slaying to a man she now feared was about to kill her because she knew too much.

Andrews explained how she’d taken the money to a designated spot where it had later been picked up. But afterwards she got a call from the man who was supposed to have taken the envelope saying he’d been keeping an eye on her and because she was so pretty he wanted to date her. Within days a romance had developed between Andrews and the hired gun who’d shot and killed Rozanne Gailiunas.

Andrews named the hitman as Robert Cheshire, who’d even bragged to his beautiful young lover about the numerous other people he’d been hired to ‘rub out’. Detectives promised Andrews round-the-clock police protection and devised a plan to trap the killer. She would meet him with a concealed microphone to record their entire conversation.

The first encounter in a restaurant was a disaster because background noise drowned out the recorded conversation. Then they agreed to meet in a motel room. Just a few yards away, investigators hid in a van with tape recorders and video cameras running. Soon they’d gathered enough evidence to show that Aylor had taken out contracts on both Rozanne and
her own husband Richard Finley. So-called hitman Cheshire was arrested, but insisted he didn’t carry out the actual hit and pointed the finger at a number of other middlemen involved in the crime.

Detectives then tape-recorded phone calls between Marilyn Andrews and Aylor. At one stage Andrews says, ‘I got one thing that still bothers me.’

‘What?’

‘Why didn’t you get rid of Richard Finley first?’

‘I don’t know,’ Aylor responded. ‘Stupid, wasn’t it? I thought about that, too. It would have been a lot better.’

In another comment on tape, Aylor told Andrews: ‘I paid for it. Really, I have paid for it, not only monetarily but mentally, I’ve paid for this.’

Joy Aylor was then picked up for questioning by investigators and taken to a local police station. At first the pretty blonde Aylor shrugged off the accusations by claiming Marilyn Andrews was mentally disturbed. Without a full confession from Aylor, the detectives were left with no choice but to release her because she had never actually said on tape that she’d had Rozanne killed.

Months of cat-and-mouse games between detectives and Aylor followed. The murder team tried to confirm the identity of the hitman through a chain of sleazy middlemen, each of whom blamed the next one for the actual hit. But eventually, police established that the last man to receive cash, along with a photo and the address of Rozanne, for the contract hit was an insurance appraiser called Andy Hopper. He had no major criminal record, but was heavily involved in trafficking marijuana. Hopper still retained his full-time job as
an appraiser although police suspected it was nothing more than a ‘front job’.

Naturally, Andy Hopper denied all knowledge of the Gailiunas killing when approached at his home. He then excused himself to take a phone call and promptly ran out the back door. Over the following few weeks, detectives tracked Hopper through the Midwest and West of America but he always managed to stay one step ahead of them.

Back in Dallas, detectives believed they still had enough evidence to prosecute Aylor, Marilyn Andrews and four of the alleged middlemen involved in setting up the hit. So on 19 September 1988, all six were indicted to face criminal proceedings. Aylor was charged with capital murder and conspiracy to commit capital murder in the death of Rozanne Gailiunas plus solicitation to commit capital murder on the life of her ex-husband, Richard Finley. The other suspects were indicted on conspiracy charges, two of them – brothers Gary and Buster Matthews – were charged in connection with the 1986 attempted shooting of Finley. Joy Aylor was arrested and taken to Richardson police station but later released on bail having maintained her complete silence.

Meanwhile the hunt for hitman Andy Hopper intensified and, in December 1988, detectives and FBI agents nabbed the alleged triggerman when he returned to the Dallas area to meet a girlfriend. Hopper denied the killing, just like all the other ‘go-betweens’. He claimed he’d paid yet another man – a drug dealer from Houston whom he only knew as ‘Renfro’ – $1,500 to do the job.

Hopper told detectives he’d met Renfro at a drugs an
sex party held at a friend’s apartment in Dallas, and later Renfro confirmed to him that the hit on Rozanne had been carried out. Police didn’t believe Hopper’s story, but the only way they could disprove it was to find Renfro. A woman who was present when Hopper claimed he met Renfro recalled that he’d been busted for drugs in the Highland Park area of Dallas.

Investigators then dug up a mugshot of Renfro Stevenson and showed it to Hopper who immediately cracked and confessed to carrying out the hit himself. In a video-taped statement, Hopper revealed all the details of that night seven years earlier when he’d murdered Rozanne Gailiunas. He even said he’d stolen a .25 automatic from a friend’s apartment and then purchased rope, surgical gloves and a potted plant before driving to Rozanne’s house.

Hopper then rang the doorbell and gained entry by producing that potted plant and pretending to be a florist. Hopper pulled out the .25 and ordered Rozanne to disrobe and lie face down on the bed, where he tied her up with the rope. When Rozanne began sobbing, Hopper grabbed some tissues from the bedside table and rammed them down her throat. Then he found a belt, placed it around her neck and started strangling her. But Rozanne thrashed around so violently that she managed to free one arm. Hopper shoved a pillow over her head and fired two shots point-blank through the pillow.

Hopper had no idea that Rozanne’s four-year-old son was fast asleep in the next room. Hopper also insisted in his statement that he didn’t know who ordered the hit. He was jailed without bond on a charge of capital murder.

On 7 May 1990, Joy Aylor failed to turn up at a pre-trial hearing set in order to choose a jury for her coming trial. It then emerged she’d been collecting vast amounts of cash through withdrawals from her bank and selling stocks and other holdings. Investigators also discovered that Aylor and 45-year-old Dallas attorney Ted Bakersfield – arrested on a federal narcotics charge the previous March – had been seen together after they met when she was looking to hire a new attorney to defend her.

Bakersfield recommended that Aylor stick to her original lawyer but the two began a romance. Now associates said they were convinced the couple had fled to Mexico. One friend then admitted dropping off the couple at a car dealership in the nearby town of Cheyenne where Bakersfield splashed out $7,800 on a second-hand jeep, using his real name in the transaction. Authorities began tracking the two fugitives across several western states. In Montana, the pair registered their jeep and picked up local licence plates. It seemed as if they were now heading north for Canada and eventually emerged near Vancouver, British Columbia, where they booked into a remote motel under the name of ‘Mr and Mrs John Storms’.

Bakersfield checked out of the motel alone on 11 June and even claimed a partial refund because he’d paid until 14 June. Aylor had already left. The following day a motel clerk contacted local police after seeing an item about the couple on local TV. Later that same day, Bakersfield phoned the motel to see if he’d had any calls. The clerk pretended that an unnamed woman had called for him. Bakersfield presumed Aylor had been in touch. He was so pleased he left the name
and phone number of the hotel he’d checked into in rural Osoyoos, British Columbia.

Less than an hour later, eight armed police officers surrounded the premises and burst into Bakersfield’s room. He surrendered without a struggle and agreed to return to the United States voluntarily. He was immediately transferred to Spokane, Washington, and then flown to Dallas in the custody of a US marshal.

But there was still no sign of Aylor. Bakersfield claimed she’d walked out on him after an argument. He said he’d even considered suicide before being arrested and blamed all his troubles on his cocaine addiction. He also professed his undying love for Joy Aylor and insisted he was only trying to protect her. FBI agents ran a check of airline flights out of Vacouver Airport and discovered that Aylor had taken a flight to Mexico City on 7 June. Investigators immediately headed south of the border.