By 2004, Restivo had risen in stature within the Bournemouth Italian community. And it was now time for him to make a respectable woman of Fiamma if their relationship was to continue, for they had both been brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, the traditional religion of their birthplace. Fiamma had evidently made it clear that she would not continue to live with Restivo indefinitely without the relationship being solemnised in marriage. Hence their wedding in Bournemouth during the summer of that year, the culmination of a romance originally played out over the Internet, in true ‘blind-dating’ fashion, eventually leading to Restivo emigrating to the UK and building a life for himself and Fiamma on the South Coast.
With marriage came a certain respectability and status for Restivo as head of his own family unit. The marriage contract satisfied Fiamma’s desire to live with Danilo Restivo as his wife, and also conferred on the couple the apparent gloss of decent, honest dependability that newlyweds seem to have in abundance. No longer living in sin, they were now legit – and they had a contract to prove it.
Neighbours of the couple described them as ‘reclusive’ and ‘reserved’, not displaying the customary Italian exuberance and flair for animated conversation. This hinted at quite a character reversal for Restivo. One woman said, ‘They had their curtains drawn across the windows day and night, even in brilliant sunshine. They weren’t what you’d call neighbourly. Whenever I heard them talking, it was always in Italian, which made it difficult for them to be a part of the neighbourhood. Of course, there always has been a big turnover of residents around us because so many of the properties are rented. A large percentage of the houses have been converted into flats for students. You can live here for ten years and never get to know your neighbours. A couple of times I said “hello” to them, but I never got an acknowledgment, not even a smile, so I didn’t bother again. He always seemed preoccupied and they were an odd couple, but didn’t cause any trouble. They certainly weren’t a pain in the bum like some. I didn’t see much of them and I don’t think many other people did, either.’
A middle-aged man, who lived nearby, said that he had seen Restivo several times, but did not know his name until seeing it in a newspaper, underneath his photograph.
‘He always seemed to be in a hurry,’ he said. ‘Quite a few times I saw him scurry out of his house in a flustered rush and he had a habit of always holding down his head, as if he didn’t want you to see his face. He’d go to his car, stick a key in the lock of the driver’s door, then glance up and down the road, kind of shiftily, as if to make sure no one was watching him. Of course, it could be that he was just extra safety-conscious and wanted to avoid opening the door into a passing car.
‘Twice I saw him pull up in his car and both times he got out quickly, looked around him furtively as he locked up, and then hurried indoors, head down again. We’re used to rum ones around here. They come and go, just like the tide ebbing and flowing, especially the students. But these were too old to be students. Mind you, we have students in this town who are already drawing their old-age pension. This fellow Restivo looked a bit of a wet to me, but I’m told by others that he was always very civil and was never any bother.
‘The Italians around here have a reputation for being very generous, warm-hearted and family-loving people. Very respectful to women and always fussing over kids. After Mrs Barnett’s murder, the police activity around here was intensive for years. The murder was almost the sole subject of conversation for months – and then around the anniversary of the crime every year. We were never allowed to forget and that was right and proper, I suppose, though unnerving. We all had a theory. There was bags of gossip. Much of it was hearsay stuff that got embellished into fact. The popular belief was that the police feared there was another Jack the Ripper on the loose. As far as I can tell, that was never something even hinted at by the police. It was the fear of the people around here, not a police warning.’
* * *
Some four months before Heather’s murder, there was a crime that years later would be examined again.
In the early hours of 12 July 2002, a female student was jumped upon from behind and stabbed three times in the back. She was walking alone, after an evening with friends, along Malmesbury Park Road, yet another residential thoroughfare running parallel with Capstone Road and Chatsworth Road.
The student, Jong-Ok Shin, was a South Korean. To her friends, she was known affectionately as Oki. Aged 26, she was in the UK to study the English language at a college similar to the one Restivo was attending.
Oki had been to a nightclub with her friends. Bournemouth had become very popular with South Korean students. Many South Korean parents settled in the Bournemouth area purely to get their children into local grammar schools. An English education was considered an enviable status symbol in their country.
CCTV footage showed Oki leaving the nightclub happy and smiling. She had been drinking, but was not drunk. She was still with friends, but they must have soon split up, going their separate ways to their different flats. From various CCTV cameras dotted around the town, the police were able to tell that there was no one obviously following her.
Between midnight and 3.00am in summer, Bournemouth’s centre is busier than most other large towns at midday, and considerably more intimidating. The clubbers are on the march – either in or out. Tourists help to swell the vibrant nightlife; hookers display themselves to passing motorists; and lurking in the shadows, gangs threaten tribal warfare.
Charminster, although on the fringe of the town centre, has its own style of international, vibrant nightlife; more restrained, more congenial, and less gaudy. Malmesbury Park Road, although an integral part of Charminster, would have been relatively quiet at that time of night. There was street lighting, shouts from the occasional drunk, and the sound of the odd squeal of brakes or over-ambitious acceleration. Night owls, like Oki, quietly picked their way home from the bright lights and the incessant thump of the clubs and bars.
Oki was almost home when she was ambushed from behind. Although she was alone, there were other people about, other students returning from a similar night out in town, who were soon to turn into the road where Oki was left gasping for breath, with her lifeblood draining away. More importantly, there was an apparent eyewitness.
The attacker did not have time to try to conceal the body. He took off and Oki was quickly discovered by passers-by. When the paramedics arrived, Oki was still alive – just. But before dying in Poole Hospital, she was able to tell detectives that her assailant had been wearing a mask.
This case, in its own way, was as strange as the Heather Barnett crime. The major difference between the two murders was that, in the case of the South Korean student, there was a quick arrest.
Omar Benguit, who lived in Winton, a northern suburb of the town, about half a mile from the crime scene, was ‘fingered’ by the alleged eyewitness, who happened to be a prostitute and drug-addict, well known to the police, frequently being arrested on street corners and cautioned.
Nevertheless, Benguit was charged with Oki’s murder. Two juries failed to reach a verdict. Normally, that would have been sufficient for the case to be dropped. Quite extraordinarily, the prosecution decided to have a third attempt at securing a guilty verdict, subjecting Benguit to yet another trial. Nearly all the prosecution witnesses were drug-addicts, who were expected to recall events of almost three years earlier. However, at the third attempt, the prosecution achieved a guilty verdict and Benguit was sentenced to life in prison, with the judge stipulating that he should serve at least 20 years before being considered for parole.
This case was almost immediately seized upon by the Miscarriage of Justice Organisation (MOJO), branding it ‘one of the most serious examples ever of injustice’.
The murder weapon was never discovered; there was no forensic evidence, DNA or otherwise, to associate the accused with the crime; and the police were unable to offer a motive at any of the three trials. The chief prosecution witness, who was a prostitute, changed her version of events at each of the trials and admitted to having lied in her first two statements. She even placed the stabbing on the wrong side of the road. Her reason for lying in her statements was that she said she had been afraid for her life, yet she had visited Benguit of her own volition after the murder and before his arrest. Her story included claims that she had been in a pub with Benguit when he talked in ‘crude’ language of fancying Korean women, which was contradicted by another witness.
Residents of Malmesbury Park Road had heard ‘piercing screams’. But the Crown’s drug-addict witness did not hear a sound from the dying woman, although ‘much closer’ to the stabbing than any of the people in nearby houses. She even took police to a river into which, she said, the murder weapon and bloody clothing had been thrown. Neither was ever recovered, despite dredging of the entire stretch of water and underwater searches by police frogmen.
Another of her accusations was that Benguit always carried a knife, something she did not think of until the third trial. She actually saw him sharpening one, she told the final jury. Naturally, she was asked for a description of the knife. The blade she described was totally different from the one that had cut into Oki, the medical evidence established.
Benguit lost his appeal. That was in 2005. Two years later, legal expert Barry Loveday, who was a reader of criminal justice studies at Portsmouth University, said, ‘The case against Omar is simply not credible and is not backed by any forensic evidence. Shortly before Oki died, she stated that her attacker was wearing a mask, but the key witness made no mention of a mask. In my view, the wrong man was arrested and convicted, leaving the real killer still at large and a danger to the public. The chief prosecution witness gave a number of different versions and her accounts conflicted with those of independent witnesses.
In 2010, after Benguit had been languishing in gaol for eight years – two-and-a-half of them on remand between the murder and the third courtroom saga – his plight was taken up by international celebrity lawyer Giovanni di Stefano.
Hopeless cases were di Stefano’s speciality and he scoured the world looking for them. Nicknamed ‘The Devil’s Advocate’, he had always been unlike any other lawyer. He was a showman for whom the courtroom was a theatre. So often, though, his cue for an entrance on stage did not come until after the final curtain, as in the Benguit farce.
Di Stefano’s love for lost causes had led him to some very high-profile cases – he defended such ‘indefensibles’ as warlord Slobadan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, ‘Chemical Ali’ (Ali Hassan al-Majid), disgraced pop star Gary Glitter, Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs, Tariq Aziz, Charles Bronson … and Moors mass murderer Ian Brady. And while Benguit was most certainly not in the same premier league of celebrity defendants, the miscarriage of justice element caught the maverick defence counsel’s attention.
By April 2010, then, di Stefano was officially representing Benguit and announced on 26 April, via the Austrian Times, that he would be requesting a formal investigation by the CCRC, another UK public organisation with the remit of reviewing cases in which there may have been a miscarriage of justice.
‘The Devil’s Advocate’ was in no doubt that the murders of Oki and Heather Barnett were inextricably connected. He reasoned that they were linked by the absence of any forensic clues; they were linked by location; and most compelling of all, they were linked, he claimed, by a lock of hair clasped in Oki’s hand, something that had never been mentioned in the trials by the police or the prosecution, nor in any news coverage.
The showman subsequently stepped into the limelight yet again.