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  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 Andrezej was not an easy child and he was prone to violent fits which he rarely remembered afterwards. He also had a habit of staring at pretty girls in a trance-like way that scared his mother.

  By the age of 13 he was drinking heavily. He rarely attended school and when he did so, he was troublesome, often groping and trying to kiss his fellow pupils, regardless of their gender. After one particularly violent assault outside class, the police were called and he was packed away to a facility for delinquent juveniles where his aggressive sexual urges were allowed to fester.

  Three years later he tried to rape his 16-year-old neighbour and was jailed for three years. He was released in the summer of 1976, but the following year he was jailed for two years for the attempted rape and murder of another young woman as she walked home. However, he was back on the streets of Warsaw in April 1978 whereupon he immediately set about sexually assaulting women and girls. In the remaining months of 1978 alone, he carried out 15 rapes. Often his method was to hide in quiet lanes where he would ambush women and children as they walked home, choking them with rope or threatening them with knives. At other times, disguised in a wig, he would stop his car, wind down the window and call his victims over. As they leant in to hear what he was saying, he quickly wound up the window, trapping them by the neck. Then he would jump out of the car and haul them into woods, often subduing them by hitting them over the head with a spade.

  In 1980 he was nicknamed ‘The Beast’ by Polish newspapers and was jailed for 15 years. He had served 11 years when he was freed as part of an amnesty to prisoners after the collapse of communism. But after a few years of stability, during which he had a daughter, his attacks resumed.

  In 1995 Kunowski preyed on a 10-year-old as she returned home alone from school in Warsaw. He said he was a friend of her father’s and asked if he could wait in the house until her parents returned from work. Once through the door he pounced on the girl, repeatedly raping her while throttling her with a telephone cord.

  He was charged with that rape and with the rape of another schoolgirl but, instead of keeping him behind bars as he awaited trial, the judge made the inexplicable decision to grant him bail to have a hip operation. As police built up a strong case linking him to other rapes in the city, he escaped. It is believed he simply got out of his hospital bed and walked away.

  Kunowski sold his house in Mlava, bought a fake Portuguese passport and made his way to Acton, West London, pretending to be a tourist. Using skills he acquired in prison in Poland, he got a job working as a tailor at a dry-cleaning company and soon blended in among millions of anonymous faces.

  When the Polish authorities realised that he had fled the country, they issued an international warrant through Interpol. His fingerprints and photograph were available via Interpol’s crime database to its 125 members, the UK included, but he was not fingerprinted when he arrived in the UK so he had a clean slate to find new victims in a new country.

  The day after murdering Katerina Konev, Kunowski took a job at a strawberry farm in Ledbury, west of London. Unable to control his genetic propensity to steal, he was sacked for thieving from the office. He was held for the crime and handed over to Immigration. Officials discovered he was an illegal ‘over-stayer’ and he spent two months in a detention camp in Oxfordshire. While there, he applied for citizenship on the grounds of economic hardship in his homeland and, as his application was being considered, he was once again allowed to walk free. His petition was denied in the autumn of 1997 but by then he was back in London, untraceable as neither his fingerprints nor DNA were taken after his arrest.

  Astonishingly, even though he was a hunted killer and illegal immigrant, he was given a life-saving NHS heart bypass in 2001 at a hospital around the corner from where he killed Katerina. That year he stopped a woman in West London and told her: ‘I know where you live. I murdered a young girl in Iffley Road, four years ago.’ In July 2002 he was arrested again for trying to claim benefits using a forged Portuguese passport in the name of Jose Marco Da Dias, but once again the immigration authorities failed to establish his true identity. While under investigation, he disappeared again. A few days later, he was arrested
for the rape of the Korean student at his bedsit.

  The Home Office said: ‘It’s a matter of great concern that a criminal with such a serious history managed to get into this country and that his background was not uncovered when he came to our attention. Our system has been completely over-hauled since then. All asylum-seekers are now electronically fingerprinted. The details are fed into an index which alerts us to crime.’

  Katerina’s father, Trajce, believes his daughter opened the door to Kunowski that day because she thought it was ‘Daddy’ coming home and she couldn’t wait to tell him that she was top of her English class. ‘We found about how well she’d done afterwards – she never got to tell us herself,’ he said.

  After the verdict, Katerina’s mother said: ‘I find it impossible to understand how he was allowed into the UK to commit this crime. I am aware that he had serious criminal convictions and impending prosecutions in Poland. Something must be done to ensure such a thing does not happen again. I do not feel that justice has been done.’

  Detective Chief Inspector David Little, the senior detective investigating Katerina’s murder, was asked if Kunowski was likely to have committed offences during the time when his whereabouts was unknown. He said: ‘When he wasn’t incarcerated he was committing offences. I would suggest he is probably the most dangerous sex offender I have ever come across. Certainly, he is the most prolific.’ DCI Little admitted that the 1997 murder investigation had been exceptionally thorough and had thrown up everything the police needed to secure a conviction but, because he was an illegal immigrant, Kunowski had been forensically invisible. He said: ‘If the person doesn’t exist, you can’t bring him to justice.’

  Polish lawyer Waldemar Smarzewski prosecuted the 1979 trial, following which Kunowski was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. Mr Smarzewski, who is now Warsaw’s Chief Prosecutor, said: ‘When he appeared in court there were about 70 charges, made up of rapes, attempted rapes, lechery with children, endangering a child’s life and attempted murder. I wanted to get him 25 years, but there was no evidence for the attempted murder.

  ‘This was a very important and dangerous case because of the number of victims and what he did to them. I wanted to put him away for longer because he was very dangerous. I was sure that if he left prison he would go back to rape and maybe even kill.’ Of Kunowski’s crimes in Britain, Smarzewski said: ‘This is no surprise to me. I knew he would strike again. I think he should remain behind bars for the rest of his life. I am sorry this psychopath ever came to Britain.’

  Meanwhile, Kunowski is impressed with life at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in Wakefield Prison. In letters, he tells his mother that the food is ‘good, with lots of vegetables’ and he is happy to admit that for him, incarceration on UK soil is better than liberty in Poland.

  ‘CAPTAIN CASH’

  ‘The cold-blooded murder of an eight-week-old baby, an 18 month-old toddler, not to mention the murders of their mother, father and grandmother, provide a chilling insight into the utterly perverted standards by which you have lived your lives.’

  Trial judge Sir Stephen Mitchell

  Names: Kenneth Regan and William Horncy

  Crime: Mass murder

  Date of Conviction: 1 July 2005

  Ages at Conviction: 56 and 53 respectively

  For at least a decade, Kenneth Regan, nicknamed ‘Captain Cash’, was a very successful gangster who smuggled drugs, laundered money and sold fake passports on a huge scale. In 1996 business was so good that he had a submarine custom-built so that he could smuggle 15 tonnes of cannabis, worth £40 million, into the UK, but he had to abandon his plans at the last minute. He then muscled in on London insurance firm Serez International, using it as a front to launder upwards of £10 million of drugs money between 1996 and 1998. Working with fellow career criminal William Horncy, he made a fortune supplying more than 1,000 passports to drug traffickers and other international criminals.

  But Regan’s life of fast cars and Monte Carlo holidays came to a sudden end in June 1998, when armed police pounced during a massive heroin smuggling deal in North London. He tried to escape in his car, knocking over and injuring a policewoman in the process. Detectives found 25kg of the drug in the boot of his Mercedes and he was charged with heroin smuggling and assaulting the officer. Faced with 20 years in jail, the unscrupulous crook turned supergrass to secure a lighter sentence.

  In the following few months he was interviewed 15 times by detectives from the National Criminal Investigation Squad and gave information about a £100 million cocaine smuggling ring, which led to the conviction of a dozen top-level criminals and the confiscation of millions of pounds of drugs money. Regan knew about the ring because he was the one who sold the dodgy passports. Investigators estimate that between 1996 and 1998, the gang smuggled cocaine into Britain with an estimated street value of £2 billion. The information provided by Regan led to a total of 15 convictions in a case involving five separate trials.

  His co-defendants in the heroin-smuggling case for which he was busted pleaded not guilty when it came to trial. But thanks to Regan’s evidence, they all received lengthy prison sentences. The judge told him: ‘As a result of your co-operation you will never again be trusted by your former colleagues, so you can’t go back and the enmity of those will make your future life precarious… Those who turn against former associates should receive a very great reduction in their sentence.’ Regan was given eight years, but he was a free man three years later, in 2002.

  With contracts on his life and very few remaining friends in the criminal world, Regan was desperate to be rich again. He had been stripped of all his cash and assets when he was jailed for heroin smuggling and he longed for the trappings afforded by organised crime, so he devised a plan that would leave a shipping tycoon, his wife, her mother and their two infant children murdered in the course of what was later described as ‘a crime utterly beyond the comprehension of decent society.’

  Amarjit Chohan ran CIBA Freight, a fruit import and export business near Heathrow airport. The multi-millionaire, who started out selling fruit and veg from a shed, was known to be something of a chancer with a fast-and-loose attitude to business. He served a prison sentence for tax evasion and his business, though lucrative, was run chaotically, with staff wages often paid in a combination of cash and cheques. Later, he was referred to in court as ‘a charming, but rather feckless boss’.

  Kenneth Regan had experience working in the freight industry and was introduced to Mr Chohan – known as Anil – through a friend who worked at CIBA. Towards the end of 2002, Regan began frequenting Mr Chohan’s offices, at all times quietly plotting to steal the company and use it to import hard drugs.

  Mr Chohan made no secret of wanting to sell his business and one day Regan came to the CIBA offices with the news that he had found a Dutch company who would buy it for £3 million. Following this, Mr Chohan was lured to a meeting near Stonehenge, Salisbury, on 13 February 2003, to discuss a deal. At the meeting, Mr Chohan and Regan were joined by two others: Regan’s former passport dealing partner William Horncy and their underworld acquaintance Peter Rees, who posed as the potential purchaser. Amarjit Chohan, 45, was never seen alive again.

  After the meeting, Mr Chohan was kidnapped and taken to Regan’s home in Salisbury, which he shared with his senile father. Once there, he was tied up, gagged and tortured until he signed over his firm. He was also made to sign several sheets of blank paper on which his captors later typed fake letters from him, informing his staff that Regan was their new boss.

  Regan’s plan was to kill Mr Chohan, after making it look like he was fleeing England. But Regan and Horncy knew the businessman’s disappearance would not have seemed credible if it looked like he had left behind the family he adored. So his wife Nancy, 25, their sons Devinder, aged 18 months, and Ravinder, eight weeks, plus his wife’s 52-year-old mother, Charanjit Kaur – who was visiting from India – would all have to be killed too.

  The following day, 14 February
, Nancy rang her brother, Onkar Verma, in a frantic state after hearing from CIBA staff that her husband had flown to Holland on business. She knew something was wrong because his passport was at the Home Office for a residency application. She also had a phone message from her husband, in which he spoke in English rather than Punjabi (the couple always spoke Punjabi on the phone). His mobile, which he always diligently answered, was switched off.

  On Saturday, 15 February, while Rees guarded Mr Chohan, Regan and Horncy drove to their captive’s family home in Hounslow, West London, where they tricked Mrs Chohan into letting them in. Once inside, they killed her, her sons and her mother before driving the bodies to Regan’s Salisbury home. That night, Mr Chohan was forced to leave several phone messages saying he was leaving England. He was then murdered.

  Two days later, Kenneth Regan arrived at CIBA Freight, with a handwritten letter from Mr Chohan and a signed document giving him Power of Attorney to take over the running of the company. Employees recalled the letter, which later disappeared, as saying something like: ‘Greed has got the better of me. As you are aware, I’ve been doing some exports to the USA described as magazines, but in fact this was khat [a drug], which is illegal in the USA. I’ve got myself in serious trouble. Some people are after me and I have to escape. I fear for the safety of my family.’ CIBA staff believed the story and Regan assumed his new role as boss. Everything was going to plan for the man willing to do anything to restore his once-lavish lifestyle.

  On 19 February, the five bodies were loaded into a hired van and driven to a farm near Tiverton, Devon, owned by Belinda Brewin, an innocent friend of Regan’s, who was away. When Ms Brewin returned unexpectedly to her 50-acre estate and saw a trench and men with a digger, she ‘went ballistic’. Regan – who had for years been trying to romantically woo Ms Brewin – said he was fixing a long-standing drainage problem as a ‘gift’ to her. In fact, they were making a thorough job of burying the Chohan family. Two days later, Regan took Mr Chohan’s car to a criminal friend in Southampton, who disposed of it.