Every morning, private eye Barry Trigwell’s colleague John Waight picked him up from his home in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, because Trigwell was banned from driving. When Waight arrived on Wednesday, 8 February 1995 and spotted the kitten mewing on the doorstep, he knew something was wrong. He rang the doorbell. No answer. He dialled Trigwell on his mobile phone. Still no answer.
Waight looked up and down the quiet cul-de-sac of Fowey Close. It was deserted. Then he peered through the lounge window of the modest, three-bedroomed red-brick house and saw bloodstains on the carpet. He called the police.
Inside the house, officers found a trail of blood stretching from the lounge to the bathroom. Trigwell’s battered body, clad only in a pair of trousers, was floating in the half-filled bath. He’d been repeatedly beaten with a blunt object and had suffered severe fractures to his skull, face and body. His blood-soaked shirt was found discarded in the bathroom. It later emerged that the gun used by his attackers had failed to go off so they’d used a poker to batter Trigwell to death.
Police quickly established from neighbours that, at 7pm the previous evening, Barry Trigwell had arrived home after a meal alone at his local Indian restaurant. It looked as if he’d only been back in the house for a few minutes when there was a knock at the door.
Barry Trigwell’s body was just being removed from the house by coroners’ officials when his wife, Anne, rang the couple’s home from South Africa, where she was on a business trip. An officer attending the scene broke the news to her and she said she’d fly home immediately.
Detectives initially set out to trace Trigwell’s client list in the search for clues. He’d first started work as a freelance detective in 1974. Trigwell was so well known he relied on specialist clients and did not even bother listing himself in the professional directories. He also wasn’t a member of the Association of British Investigators, which has a strict code of practice.
There were rumours that Trigwell had been heavily involved in investigating money launderers, a type of crime that could be particularly dangerous when the money was coming from the proceeds of drugs. There were other stories about how he’d been shadowed by Special Branch following a mysterious death in a case he was investigating.
Detectives soon found that assembling a list of suspects wasn’t difficult. As John Clarke, who worked as an investigator with Trigwell at Nationwide Investigations in Birmingham, explained: ‘He was known as “Barry the Bastard” by people he crossed. He really enjoyed snatching children back from abroad after one of the parents had skipped the country. He seemed to live for the adrenaline rushes.’
Colleagues described Trigwell as a short, stocky character who looked more like a Chicago gangster than a Brummie gumshoe. As John Clarke added, ‘He’d been caught up in some heavy stuff. Barry charged a lot of money but he was really good at his job. When some of us may have taken a step back for fear of the consequences, Barry would just go for it. Barry made many enemies in his life.’ But since his latest marriage, Trigwell had turned his back on the more dangerous aspects of his chosen profession and had even been spending increasing amounts of time in his new wife’s home country.
Detectives then discovered from Trigwell’s sister that in the weeks before his death, Trigwell had taken several mysterious calls at home from a South African man who wanted to meet him on a ‘business matter’. Trigwell was immediately suspicious because he never gave his home number to clients and the caller was evasive when he asked the man how he’d obtained it.
Trigwell had even dialled the 1471 BT callback service, taken the number of the caller and given it to his sister Julie Armener, who lived in Eastbourne, Sussex, telling her to hand it to police if anything happened to him. Barry feared that someone was playing games with him. The number turned out to be a hotel where staff immediately remembered two South African men staying around the time the calls were made. They’d been back to stay at the hotel the week of Trigwell’s death.
Back in Fowey Close, neighbours told police that a white Fiat Punto had been parked outside the Trigwells’ house shortly before the killing. It was traced to a hire company in London used by the same two South Africans who’d been staying at the hotel.
Police believed that Trigwell’s two killers had not yet left the UK. They were traced to a hotel near Heathrow Airport but by the time detectives got to the scene the two men had caught a flight to Vienna and then South Africa, which did not have an extradition treaty with the UK.
Investigators then turned their attention towards Anne Trigwell. Friends said that she was well suited to her new husband, since they were both arrogant and shared a taste for gambling, sex and the high life. On the surface, Anne seemed rich and successful, having bought a $400,000 house with a swimming pool outside Johannesburg.
Trigwell, who had a 14-year-old daughter from an earlier marriage, and Anne Brooks had first met when she hired him to protect her. All he was told was that his client was involved in a large cash transaction and needed him to ensure it went without any problems. The minute Trigwell met his slim, good-looking client in her expensive heels he was smitten, and he soon began sending flowers to the Porsche-driving widow every week. Then she’d fly over to visit him at his rented house in the Midlands. Proud Barry even took her to see his hotelier father Leonard and mother Mary at their home in Eastbourne.
‘She started calling us Mum and Dad straight away,’ Mary Trigwell later recalled. ‘She would ask us for a hug and put her arms around us but there was no real feeling.’
Barry Trigwell was soon sending thousands of pounds each month to pay Anne’s mortgage on her South African mansion and to fund a host of ill-conceived business ideas. ‘At first Anne turned down Barry’s marriage proposals,’ his mother Mary later recalled. ‘Still he kept supporting her and went to South Africa to re-mortgage her house in his name. Then on a visit to us they announced they were to marry.’
The couple’s wedding was held at Birmingham Register Office in 1994. Barry Trigwell was earning in excess of £3,000 a week by this stage and must have seemed a good catch to Anne. She even rented out her South African home to a local businessman and the newlyweds set up home together in Sutton Coldfield.
Then, in January 1995, police in South Africa were tipped off about a murder plot in which the businessman was overheard by his attractive wife talking about a planned hit. The businessman was said to have offered another South African £8,750 to kill someone. He in turn was alleged to have been offered more than £175,000 to arrange the killing. His wife agreed to help South African police organise a sting operation to arrest him but it failed and she disappeared in fear of her life. Detectives still had no idea who was the intended target.
In fact, the businessman had hired those same two men who’d turned up in the Midlands around the time of Barry Trigwell’s murder. On 14 January 1995, they’d also made a reconnaissance trip to the UK. During that five-day visit they’d called Barry Trigwell’s home requesting a business meeting. The pair then returned to the UK early in February to fulfil the contract. Between those two visits, Trigwell’s wife had left a sealed envelope containing £300 in ‘expenses money’ and a Yale front door key at the hotel where they stayed.
The envelope proved to be 42-year-old Anne Trigwell’s downfall. Hotel staff, suspecting that it contained drugs, opened it, inspected the contents, re-sealed it and then, having no reason not to, duly passed it on to the two South Africans.
It was only after hearing about Trigwell’s murder and the fact he had a dark-haired South African wife that the hotel recalled the similar woman with a ‘funny’ accent. That sparked the police investigation into Mrs Trigwell. Ten days after Barry Trigwell’s slaying, his wife Anne was charged with plotting to kill him. She was remanded in custody by magistrates in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands.
But being incarcerated wasn’t going to stop temptress Anne Trigwell. Within a couple of months of her arrest, she’d begun a clandestine relationship with a prison officer called John Burns who was separated from his wife and young daughter. For the first six weeks of her incarceration they’d been the model of an upstanding warder–prisoner relationship. He’d lock her up in her second floor cell at Risely Prison, near Warrington. She would obey his barked orders.
Then fate intervened. On the way back from a magistrates’ hearing in June 1995, Burns found himself sitting in the prison van next to Trigwell. The van braked sharply and their lives were never the same again. Burns later explained: ‘We literally fell into each other’s arms. We made eye contact and I felt immediate and immense attraction as I looked into her brown eyes. I can’t explain it. It was just there.’
Their first proper embrace occurred when Burns was escorting Trigwell late at night along a deserted corridor in Risley’s Windsor House section. They stopped and kissed passionately. As three-times-married Trigwell pulled him closer into the embrace she told him: ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long.’
Burns was so smitten that he couldn’t get Anne Trigwell out of his mind. Later, many would ask how he could throw away a 17-year career for a woman whose speciality was to kiss and kill the men in her life. But Burns just didn’t look at it that way. He explained: ‘From the moment when I weakened and kissed her, I knew my career in the prison service was as good as over.’
Soon they were exchanging love notes and speaking of travelling to Trigwell’s beloved South Africa, to which she dreamed of returning. Burns slipped scribbled messages under her cell door; she would discreetly hand him notes as he unlocked her cell each morning. Love trysts were held in the prison library. ‘It was the only place where we could be together,’ Burns later recalled. ‘It was difficult, but somehow we were never caught. We wanted each other so much.’
One note written by Anne Trigwell read: ‘Darling John. How it hurts to see you go, but this will soon end. Then we will be together forever. Please know one thing; that I love you, oh so very much it really hurts. You really are the one I trust and will give my love, life and heart to!’ Another read: ‘Your hands caress my every curve, sending sensations through every nerve.’ They were almost word for word the same as the letters she’d written to Barry Trigwell.
Burns explains: ‘I read and re-read these letters nearly every day. Often I’d stand in her cell and we would just hold each other. I think I needed her as much as she needed me.’
In the middle of all this, Burns went to the prison authorities after Anne Trigwell offered him £50,000 to help her escape from jail. The authorities were never told that the two were having a relationship. It was only in November 1995 that love letters between Trigwell and Burns were found by other staff in her cell. Burns was reinterviewed by police and confirmed the relationship but was released because he hadn’t broken any laws. He was suspended on full pay. Worried prison officials then transferred Trigwell to the maximum-security wing at Durham Jail, where other inmates have included IRA terrorists, Rose West and Myra Hindley.
However, Trigwell continued writing to Burns, whose letters back to Trigwell were never intercepted by the prison screening system. Burns claimed he had no regrets. ‘Working in a prison can be a soul-destroying job,’ he said. ‘People don’t understand that. That’s why people can’t understand that meeting Anne has been a good thing for me.’
Meanwhile, police in South Africa pulled in the nightclub boss plus the two other South Africans for questioning. They were eventually bailed by a court because there was no concrete evidence linking them to Barry Trigwell’s murder.
Then, in June 1996, British detectives once again tracked down the businessman’s estranged wife and she agreed to help investigators. Fearing for her life, she’d been travelling Europe and even had a bodyguard at her hideout in Italy. Police believed a hitman had been contracted to track her down and kill her. As one investigator explained: ‘She undoubtedly put herself at enormous risk. There is no doubt in my mind that threats were made against her by the criminal underworld.’
The following month, Anne Trigwell’s trial got under way at Birmingham Crown Court. She emphatically denied the murder. The jury heard that she had a secret boyfriend in South Africa and stood to gain £380,000 from bonds and insurance policies on the death of her husband. In other words, he was worth a lot more dead to her than alive. Timothy Raggatt QC, for the prosecution, said, ‘He [Trigwell] was killed to order as a result of a plan. His death had been paid for. It was cold-blooded and very, very carefully planned.’ Mr Raggatt told the court that the Trigwells’ marriage was ‘a disaster from the start’. He also said that if Mrs Trigwell had hired the hitmen ‘she is as guilty of his murder as if she had beaten him to death herself’.
The court then heard that the three men involved with the killing were still at large in South Africa and Anne Trigwell had an alibi of ‘enormous proportions’ as she was 6,000 miles away at the time of her husband’s death.
The court was told that in December 1994, Anne Trigwell flew to South Africa to spend Christmas with her family and that was when she asked the nightclub boss if he’d organise a hit on her husband. He then hired the two assassins. Prime prosecution witness, the businessman’s estranged wife, told the court she’d overheard the contract being discussed. She remained in hiding because of real fears for her personal safety.
Further evidence in court came from Barry Trigwell’s sister Julie Armener who told how, at a dinner party two months before Trigwell’s murder, her brother had become suspicious that his wife was having an affair and suggested he might accompany her on her next visit to South Africa. She leaned across the table and grabbed him by the jumper and said, ‘If you come to South Africa I will have you shot and I know at least two people who will do it.’
Anne Trigwell then admitted in court that on the night before Barry Trigwell’s murder she’d even paid for a celebration dinner with her lover, a 43-year-old game hunter called Jan Burger, and that they’d spent that night together. Prosecutors claimed she’d only flown back to Britain to pick up the death certificate so that she could cash in the insurance policies. But her sister-in-law had already been to the police and told them about those threats made by Anne as well as the phone number of the hotel traced by Barry Trigwell.
Anne Trigwell – dressed in a dark-blue jacket and tartan trousers – showed no emotion when the jury returned their guilty verdict. Mr Justice Nelson said that she’d been found guilty of conspiring in and planning the ‘cold, calculated and chilling murder from afar and had actively ensured that the killers were able to perform their gruesome and vicious task’.
Her mother, Pat Bullock, and the victim’s mother, Mary, who was sitting four rows in front of her, both burst into tears when the jury returned their verdict. Trigwell’s prison officer lover John Burns sat throughout her trial with her relatives in the public gallery. Trigwell frequently glanced at Burns and he – along with her mother, teenage daughter Nicollette and sister Susan – were allowed a few minutes with her in the court cells before she was taken off to prison at the end of her case.
John Burns was shattered by the guilty verdict against Anne Trigwell and her subsequent life sentence. He resigned from the prison service 24 hours afterwards. ‘Now both our lives are in a mess,’ he admitted after the case. ‘But I don’t really regret sacrificing my career for her. I will wait as long as it takes. With luck she will be out in 12 years and we will both begin our new life in South Africa. We talked all the time of living there, going on safari and sleeping under the stars.’
Outside the court, Barry Trigwell’s father Leonard described his daughter-in-law as ‘an evil woman’. Mr Trigwell told reporters he felt as if he and his wife Mary had witnessed ‘something out of James Bond’. Mr Trigwell continued, ‘I thank the police for bringing this evil woman to justice. She coldly manipulated this crime. No one could ever have suspected that she would have done this. I am convinced that she only married our son to get hold of his money. She was clever and devious and lied to try to cover her tracks. I hope she rots in prison.’
It then emerged that Anne Trigwell’s stepson by a previous marriage, Craig Paton, had died of head wounds caused by a gun registered in her name. Mr Paton had earlier inherited a substantial sum of money yet his death was deemed to be suicide. His father also died around the same time and senior investigating officer Detective Superintendent Kenneth Evans said he was planning to look more closely into the circumstances surrounding the death.
After the case, Anne Trigwell’s second husband, Ray Brooks, 58, said he was convinced Craig would not have committed suicide. He also said he believed that if he’d been a richer man he would also be dead today. ‘She was vivacious, she knew she could get men and money, and went after it.’