The frantic father ran out of the flat, where he saw a strange man climbing out of his living room window, clutching a bag. ‘We came face to face,’ he said. ‘I noticed one small drop of blood on the left of his face. He was staring at me. I asked him, “What are you doing in my house?” He was just so calm; he didn’t say anything: he just looked at me. He had a knife and I thought he was going to kill me. I turned a little and he managed to escape. He ran off down the street and I followed him.’
Trajce sprinted after the intruder through a few streets and across a building site but just as he caught up with him, the stranger yelled for help, claiming he was about to be assaulted. Two workmen intervened and told Trajce to leave the man alone and so he escaped his grasp.
The assailant ran into the road and tried to hijack the car of a 42-year-old woman whose son, aged four, was sat in the passenger seat. ‘I saw two men, one on either side of my car,’ she said. ‘One had blood on the side of his face as if he had been punched. He tried to get into the car through the open window. I wound it up and sped away; I was terrified for my son. One of the men was shouting, “Call the police!”’
The stranger then tried to commandeer a lorry in Hammersmith Grove but was forced out by the driver. Next, he jumped in front of a Fiat Uno. The driver, Christina Kearney, later said that he shouted, ‘Help me, help me – call the police!’ But his act was short-lived and, once the car was stationary, he brandished a knife and ordered her out. He sped off in the car to Hammersmith Bus Station, where he disappeared aboard the number 220 bus to Hammersmith Broadway.
Meanwhile, Trajce decided against explaining himself in broken English to the duped workmen and sprinted back home. He was back inside the house at 4.50pm and managed to kick open the living room door that had been propped shut from the inside with a chair. Lying on the floor was his daughter, barefoot and unconscious, wearing a cardigan, white T-shirt and elasticated tracksuit bottoms. She had been garrotted with a piece of cord cut from a Virgin Atlantic flight bag that she used to carry her schoolbooks. The garrotte, which had been tightened round her neck with a pen, was so taut he couldn’t release it with his hands and so he used a knife to cut it off. He said: ‘I started to cry and shout her name – Katerina! Katerina!’
Moments later, the police burst in. ‘I was bending over her, crying, when they arrived. I remember one of the officers telling me to help him to resuscitate her,’ he said. ‘He showed me where to push her chest, but I just couldn’t do it – I was just so shocked. I felt weak and hopeless. I didn’t want to touch her in case I hurt her.’ Katerina was dead.
In the absence of an assailant, Katerina’s father became the initial suspect in her murder. Police doubted his story of finding a stranger at the flat and he was taken to a nearby police station. Trajce recalled: ‘My wife and son were brought to the station to see me. I was wearing a white forensic suit. My wife Zakalina just started shouting, “What have you done?” She was kicking me and screaming at me. All I wanted to do was hug my wife and cry with my family. I had lost my little girl, but my wife was attacking me and my six-year-old son was looking up at me with hate in his eyes. I remember just banging my head from wall to wall in my cell; they must have thought I was a madman. They thought I had killed my Katerina.’ However, within hours Trajce was released when eyewitness accounts and CCTV footage backed up his story. Police also found fingerprints throughout the flat that did not match those of any member of the family.
At a press conference held days later, Trajce said: ‘I put Katerina on a bus to school on the morning of her murder. It was just a usual morning; she just smiled. When you saw her face, you didn’t need to listen to words from an angel. She was the best. At everything, she was the best – maths, music, sport, she was perfect. She worked so hard. All her friends loved her. For her, the world was there to love.’
Of her killer, he said: ‘This is not a man; it’s a monster without feelings. Animals don’t kill like that, without reason. At the first chance, tell the police. We don’t know how many more children he could kill.’
Katerina’s murder was linked to two earlier incidents in Hammersmith involving a man fitting the suspect’s description. The previous February, a balding man of Mediterranean or Arabic appearance followed a girl home from school, tried the door and rang the bell before running off. And just 30 minutes before Katerina was killed, a similar-looking man had tailed another 12-year-old to her home near Iffley Road and watched the property for several minutes before leaving.
‘Although he did not attempt sex, we believe that Katerina’s murder was sexually motivated,’ said Detective Chief Inspector Hamish Campbell as he appealed for information about the crime. ‘We suspect that strangling her gave him a kick. He is a sexual predator who stalks young girls because they are less likely to put up a struggle. It is very rare, thankfully, that a stranger kills a girl in her own home, but he obviously spent some time targeting Katerina.’
Despite CCTV footage and forensic evidence placing a stranger at the scene of Katerina’s death, it was to be six years before her killer was finally caught.
In September 2002, Kunowski tied up and repeatedly raped a foreign student after tricking her into viewing his bedsit. He approached the girl at London’s Ealing Broadway tube station while she waited for a friend. Noticing that she was looking at adverts for rooms to rent, he claimed there was a vacant bedsit at his nearby flat.
He led her into his grubby ground-floor bedroom and locked the door behind him. The girl, who had only weeks earlier arrived from her native Korea, said she wanted to go back to meet her friend, but he ignored her pleas and pushed her onto the bed. She tried to fight him with a ballpoint pen, but he overpowered her and then tied her hands together with rope and repeatedly raped her for three hours. She was only allowed to leave the flat after promising to phone him the next day.
When he was tried at the Old Bailey the following May, Kunowski claimed the young woman had consented to sex, that it was a ‘thank you’ for helping her find somewhere to stay. But the jury didn’t believe him and he was jailed for nine years.
While he was in prison, detectives checked his DNA and found it was a match with a hair on Katerina Konev’s cardigan. His fingerprints also matched those found on a window at her home. Kunowski denied the murder and in March 2004, once again he underwent trial at the Old Bailey. The overwhelming evidence against him, coupled with his weak defence of mistaken identity, meant the jury took just two-and-a-half hours to find him guilty of murder. Kunowski showed no emotion as Judge Peter Beaumont told him: ‘I would be failing in my duty if I did not ensure you spend the rest of your life in prison. You took the life of a child who was just beginning to enjoy what this country had to offer her and her family as refugees from hardship abroad. It was a life of great promise. You ended it in circumstances of great violence and terror.’ As he was led to the cells, Kunowski applauded himself.
Afterwards, Katerina’s mother wept: ‘I hope her evil killer burns in hell. I hope he suffers every minute of the rest of his life.’
Following his trial it emerged that Kunowski fled to Britain as prosecutors in his native country prepared to charge him for the latest in a string of sex attacks that stretched back three decades. Born Andrezej Kembert into a working-class family in 1957 he was sent to an orphanage at the age of two because his mother, father and grandmother had been jailed for theft. His grandfather was locked up in a state psychiatric hospital for unspecified sex offences. When his mother Elzbieta was released, she reclaimed her son and married a bricklayer called Stephan Kunowski and her son took his stepfather’s name. They moved to Mlava, a bleak rural town 80 miles from Warsaw. The young