The murder of John 'Goldfinger' Palmer in Essex still unsolved

BBC News

6 hours ago

In June 2015, John "Goldfinger" Palmer was shot six times in the garden of his secluded woodland mansion in Essex. But due to an oversight in the police response, the 65-year-old's death was put down to natural causes - until a murder investigation was eventually launched six days later. Ten years on, detectives are still hunting whoever killed the man once described as Britain's richest criminal.
Palmer earned his nickname following the audacious 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery.Armed men disguised in security uniforms stumbled upon £26m worth of gold, diamonds and cash in a warehouse just outside London Heathrow Airport.Jewellery dealer Palmer was accused of melting down the gold in a shed in the garden of his mansion near Bath.Thirty-two years later, on 24 June 2015, he was gunned down as he was burning documents in the garden of his home in South Weald near Brentwood.Spanish prosecutors had charged him a month earlier with fraud, firearms possession and money laundering.
At about 17:30 BST, a suspect believed to be a contract killer scaled his garden fence having seemingly watched him through a carved-out spyhole.Palmer was killed in the only part of the garden not covered by cameras.He was found unconscious by his son's girlfriend. Two police officers attended at about 19:20 and had assessed his death as "non-suspicious" on account of an operation wound from recent gall bladder surgery. A week later, a post-mortem examination revealed he was, in fact, shot in the chest, abdomen, arm, elbow, back and kidneys.
"It's definitely not something I'm going to hide behind; we did make mistakes," said Det Supt Stephen Jennings of Essex Police, speaking to the BBC's Gangster podcast series in 2022."We didn't do enough background checks on John."Had we done that, the officers would have realised he had quite a substantial criminal background."They didn't really check the body well enough to discount any third-party involvement."
Roy Ramm, former commander of specialist operations at New Scotland Yard, said it was a "very serious error"."You talk about the golden hour in investigations - that was lost, the day was lost, several days were lost - and I do not envy the senior investigating officer who picked up the case and tried to make progress with it," he told the BBC. "It was nigh on impossible."The two young police officers later faced disciplinary action.
Humble beginnings
Born in Solihull near Birmingham, Palmer was one of seven children raised in a poor single-parent household.He was a serial truant and left school at 15 without learning to read or write.The teenager worked in roofing but moved on to street trading, which included selling paraffin off the back of a lorry.Palmer moved to Bedminster in Bristol and made his first £100,000 (£2m in today's money) from a jewellery business.He set up Scadlynn, a company trading precious scrap metals.His business partner Gareth Chappell was later jailed for 10 years for conspiring to handle stolen goods in connection with the Brink's-Mat raid.
The gold
When Palmer was identified as a Brink's-Mat suspect, he accused the Met Police of "overreacting"."I'm completely innocent of anything to do with this so-called 'Mats-Brink' bullion raid," he said, sitting beside a hotel pool in Tenerife in 1985, after being tracked down by BBC war reporter Kate Adie.He continued to deliberately - or mistakenly - confuse the Brink's-Mat name when he stood trial at the Old Bailey in 1987, and it worked.Palmer blew kisses to jurors after they found him not guilty of conspiring to handle stolen gold bullion.The Brink's-Mat heist, and the cat-and-mouse chases that followed, have been dramatised in BBC One TV series The Gold.In the final episode, which aired earlier this month, the fictional detective, played by Hugh Bonneville, signs off with: "It's Brink's-Mat - it's never over."Palmer seemed unable to shake off the spectre of the 1983 raid.
Timeshare empire
Instead of going to ground, Palmer became one of the biggest landowners in Tenerife.Mr Ramm, who oversaw investigations into Palmer and the laundering of the Brink's-Mat gold in the 1990s, said his team was "convinced" he invested earnings from the robbery into the island.He amassed an estimated fortune of £300m which he used to buy a West Country mansion, a French chateau with its own golf course, a jet, turboprop-powered helicopters, a £750,000 yacht, and a classic car collection including Porsches and Ferraris.He and Elizabeth II were jointly ranked 105th in the Sunday Times Rich List.But prosecutors accused him of masterminding a timeshare fraud which involved 16,000 victims who were scammed out of more than £45m.Jurors found him guilty of conspiracy to defraud at the Old Bailey and he was jailed for eight years in 2001.
David Farrer KC, the lead prosecution counsel, described Palmer as the "biggest shark" in the timeshare waters - a quote that was rekindled for the final episode of The Gold.Because Palmer defended himself, Mr Farrer spent hours liaising with his opposite number in private."He could be quite pleasant and charming," said the retired barrister."That was invariably when he thought the case was going well for him. I've no doubt whatever of his potential violence. "If I had been anything other than prosecuting counsel he would have clouted me a few times."Mr Farrer recalled how during the trial, Palmer wore body armour and was shadowed by Special Branch officers because they were concerned a north London gang had put a contract out on him because he owed them money.Palmer served half his sentence, and in 2009, he moved in with partner Christina Ketley and their son at South Weald.
Contract killer
Speaking to the BBC's Crimewatch in 2016, Det Supt Jennings said the Spanish fraud prosecution - announced at the end of May 2015 - was the most likely motive for his murder.This was complicated when considering his links to the men behind the Hatton Garden heist of April 2015, the detective said, and because of recent "law enforcement intervention with organised crime families"."It was an opportunity for any one of those individuals at any subsequent trial to blame John for what took place and obviously he would not be in a position to answer that or refute it," said Det Supt Jennings.
On the evening Essex Police revealed Palmer was murdered, Mr Farrer received an unexpected call from a Scotland Yard detective he had worked with more than 13 years earlier."I asked him, was it the Russians who did it?" Mr Farrer recalled."He said they thought it was much more likely this gang in north London, the Adams, and they certainly didn't think that it was directly anything to do with timeshare - in other words, the same people that caused Palmer to wear body armour during his trial."The Mail on Sunday singled out the Adams crime family as the brains behind the killing in a 2016 article.Patrick "Patsy" Adams, of Finsbury, north London, was jailed later that year for shooting an associate, and other members of the syndicate have received prison time in recent years.Robert McCunn is more open-minded.The veteran lawyer led civil action against Palmer in the mid-1990s on behalf of insurers acting for the Brink's-Mat business."It could be linked to any number of activities he was known to be involved with," he told the BBC.
'Very dangerous people'
A £100,000 reward was put up by Palmer's family and charity Crimestoppers in 2018 for information leading to a conviction - but that reward has expired.Mr Ramm said: "It is particularly important that this murder continues to be investigated because of who Palmer was, the role he played in the network of serious and organised criminals in the UK, in Spain - internationally."He offended and upset some very, very, dangerous people, and we need to know who they were."
Palmer always maintained he did not know he had melted Brink's-Mat gold.Ms Ketley was due to stand trial in Madrid in 2019 in connection with the timeshare fraud, but the case against her was dropped. Other individuals were found guilty."Without doubt [Palmer] has made mistakes in his life; I believe he has paid for those mistakes," Ms Ketley told BBC Crimewatch."I was incredibly proud of the way he adjusted to a very normal life."She still owns the gated woodland property where Palmer was murdered. She did not respond to the BBC's approach for comment.
A 43-year-old man from Rugby, Warwickshire, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder in 2015, but was released without charge.In February 2017, detectives said a 50-year-old man from Tyneside, who lived in southern Spain, was questioned on suspicion of murder in what was a voluntary interview. He faced no further action.Essex Police says it has taken hundreds of witness statements, pursued hundreds of lines of inquiries and examined thousands of pieces of evidence.Regarding the failures on the day Palmer was murdered, a force spokesperson said on Friday: "It is always best to secure and preserve crime scenes as soon as possible to achieve the best forensic evidence and regrettably that was not the case in this incident."However, outdoor crime scenes by their very nature have less forensic opportunities."We believe this murder was a professional contract killing and our experiences of similar cases such as this are that these types of murderers are forensically aware, limiting our opportunity to secure evidence."
Mr Ramm thinks detectives will need an organised criminal to hand over key information as "leverage"."I think that's probably the only way it's going to be solved - someone on the inside becomes an informer."
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