CONTENTS
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
1 SO YOU’VE COME TO SHOOT ME?
2 THE DENTIST OF DEATH
3 CROCODILE TEARS
4 PAID FOR HIS OWN DEATH
5 LE LORD DISPARU
6 ‘MOM, YOU’RE THE EMBODIMENT OF EVIL!’
7 BODY IN THE BOOT
8 HORROR IN THE MIRROR
9 ‘I’LL FEED YOU TO THE PIGS’
10 ‘OUR KIDS WILL BE ORPHANS’
11 MURDER IN THE LAND OF SMILES
12 FATHER OF THE YEAR
Copyright
Few things decimate a person quite like divorce. The oft-quoted statistic that divorce is the second most traumatic life event after the death of a member of one’s family is misleading, for with death comes its own inevitable closure. Divorce, which can feel like the slow, tortuous disembowelling of a marriage, has no such finality. Though you might grieve for the life you had, for the person you lost, there is no body to bury ritualistically and no gravestone at which to unleash your feelings and weep. Instead the once-loved partner who has carved up your finances, your family life, your sense of self-worth, your very heart is still walking and breathing and a daily testament to the failure of your dreams.
Two out of five marriages currently end in divorce but it would be dangerous to allow the commonplaceness of divorce to negate its terrifying power and impact. It’s a battlefield in which the three most primordial human obsessions – love, sex and money – become inextricably and dangerously intertwined. The stakes are high and the spoils of war deeply symbolic: children sometimes, not to mention status and home.
The truth is that divorce cuts to the very bone of a relationship exposing the ugly, bleeding flesh we normally try so hard to cover up. Marital homes purchased with hope and optimism become pressure cookers of building tension as accusations fly and barely formed emotions are ripped from deep within us in all their raw, howling intensity.
A recent poll by insidedivorce.com found that nearly one in five British couples admit to being on the brink of splitting up. That’s a huge percentage of people riding the emotional rollercoaster of marital breakdown. When you factor in the discovery that infidelity, with its poisonous legacy of betrayal and bitterness, is the biggest single trigger for divorce, you start to build up some understanding of the extent of the devastation currently taking place behind closed doors.
Divorce tears at the very fabric of who we are and how – sometimes even why – we live. It’s like a giant shredder from which our past life emerges in tatters; it pits lover against lover, parent against parent in a battle in which there are no rules, no protective clothing, no referees and no real winners. Recent years have seen some acrimonious and very public celebrity break-ups from Sir Paul and Heather McCartney to Britney Spears and Kevin Federline. These high-profile divorce cases merely prove fame is no protection against the vitriol released when a marriage is in meltdown. Divorce is, if nothing else, a great leveller.
With emotions running high, it’s not surprising that the breakdown of a marriage can result in violence and sometimes even in death. Crimes of passion may no longer be recognised in law but would certainly be understood by many people who have undergone a traumatic split. Less easy to identify with are crimes that are planned out meticulously and methodically over the time it takes for a relationship to unravel. Do these count as temporary insanity or cold-blooded execution?
‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’ Oscar Wilde tellingly wrote. Certainly most of the crimes detailed in this book bear testament to that most poignant of sentiments. Love isn’t always selfless or benign. It can be violent, possessive, exclusive and even predatory – and when it is threatened, it can also be deadly.
Some days Rena Salmon could not believe her luck. Some days she would gaze around her £400,000 home in the affluent Berkshire village of Great Shefford, listening to her son and daughter laughing with their school friends in a different part of the house, and she’d wonder yet again how on earth she’d managed to end up there.
Great Shefford is prime commuter belt territory; near to Reading and Newbury, and not too far from London itself. Its picturesque cottages, good schools and country air make it a magnet for stockbrokers, solicitors and anyone else who dreams of a rural-style life with all city amenities close by – oh, and who can afford the hefty price-tag that property there commands. Luckily money wasn’t a problem for Rena because her husband Paul made a fortune as an IT consultant. Rena got to swan around in a fancy Merc and to take holidays at their seaside home in Dorset with its own private section of beach. Not bad for a woman who’d run away from home at the age of 13 and had spent most of her teenage years in Care. No wonder she sometimes had to give herself a good hard pinch to make sure this was actually real.
Born in Birmingham on 20 February 1960, Rena Beyum Uddin had not had the easiest of starts. Depending on who you talked to, you’d get a slightly different version of what childhood was like in the Uddin household, but let’s just say none of the accounts would put you in mind of the Waltons. The story Rena and her sister Sabeya told was that their mother had been a prostitute; first in Birmingham and then Burnley. Growing up, they said, the house had been full of dirty old men, all clients of their mother’s. Both Rena and Sabeya had dark skin, apparently a legacy of their different Asian fathers. This physical characteristic was a constant source of irritation to their mother, claimed the women, and she’d regularly scrub them roughly with a mixture of bleach and scouring powder to lighten their skin and referred to them as ‘black bastards’.
Imagine what such a childhood would do to an impressionable young girl. Consider the daily beatings your ego and sense of self would sustain. Think how you’d shrivel inside and start hating your reflection in the mirror; imagine how you’d come to believe that no one would ever love you, that you’d never be worthy of respect or affection. Picture how little hope you’d hold out of ever getting away from that situation, of ever being allowed anything ‘better’.
Living in a series of foster homes and children’s homes from the age of 13 hadn’t done much either for Rena’s fragile self-esteem. What message does that background send to a girl whose faith in people is already so tarnished? That nothing is permanent, what appears to be security can be whisked away at a moment’s notice, that it’s a cruel world and you have to hang onto what’s yours because there’s always someone else behind you waiting to snatch it away, leaving you with nothing.
But Rena’s luck – or rather the lack of it – changed when she joined the Army. Here finally was her opportunity to belong to a group; almost a ‘family’ that would always take care of her in the way her real family had failed to do. After so many years of feeling like she didn’t have the right clothes, of always sensing she was second best, Rena was proud to put on smart uniform everyday, finally to fit in.
She trained as a Data Telecoms Operator and in 1980 was posted to Northern Ireland. For many servicemen and women being sent to a place where hostility and tension seemed to hang heavy in the grey skies overhead would have constituted a nightmare posting, but for Rena it was the start of a dream life because it was here that she first met Paul Salmon. Paul was a technician with the Royal Signals. With his clear, sparkling eyes, curly brown hair and easy