Hitmen (7 page)

Anne Trigwell then admitted in court that on the night before Barry Trigwell’s murder she’d even paid for a celebration dinner with her lover, a 43-year-old game hunter called Jan Burger, and that they’d spent that night together. Prosecutors claimed she’d only flown back to Britain to pick up the death certificate so that she could cash in the insurance policies. But her sister-in-law had already been to the police and told them about those threats made by Anne as well as the phone number of the hotel traced by Barry Trigwell.

Anne Trigwell – dressed in a dark-blue jacket and tartan trousers – showed no emotion when the jury returned their guilty verdict. Mr Justice Nelson said that she’d been found guilty of conspiring in and planning the ‘cold, calculated and chilling murder from afar and had actively ensured that the killers were able to perform their gruesome and vicious task’.

Her mother, Pat Bullock, and the victim’s mother, Mary, who was sitting four rows in front of her, both burst into tears when the jury returned their verdict. Trigwell’s prison officer lover John Burns sat throughout her trial with her relatives in the public gallery. Trigwell frequently glanced at Burns and he – along with her mother, teenage daughter Nicollette and sister Susan – were allowed a few minutes
with her in the court cells before she was taken off to prison at the end of her case.

John Burns was shattered by the guilty verdict against Anne Trigwell and her subsequent life sentence. He resigned from the prison service 24 hours afterwards. ‘Now both our lives are in a mess,’ he admitted after the case. ‘But I don’t really regret sacrificing my career for her. I will wait as long as it takes. With luck she will be out in 12 years and we will both begin our new life in South Africa. We talked all the time of living there, going on safari and sleeping under the stars.’

Outside the court, Barry Trigwell’s father Leonard described his daughter-in-law as ‘an evil woman’. Mr Trigwell told reporters he felt as if he and his wife Mary had witnessed ‘something out of James Bond’. Mr Trigwell continued, ‘I thank the police for bringing this evil woman to justice. She coldly manipulated this crime. No one could ever have suspected that she would have done this. I am convinced that she only married our son to get hold of his money. She was clever and devious and lied to try to cover her tracks. I hope she rots in prison.’

It then emerged that Anne Trigwell’s stepson by a previous marriage, Craig Paton, had died of head wounds caused by a gun registered in her name. Mr Paton had earlier inherited a substantial sum of money yet his death was deemed to be suicide. His father also died around the same time and senior investigating officer Detective Superintendent Kenneth Evans said he was planning to look more closely into the circumstances surrounding the death.

After the case, Anne Trigwell’s second husband, Ray
Brooks, 58, said he was convinced Craig would not have committed suicide. He also said he believed that if he’d been a richer man he would also be dead today. ‘She was vivacious, she knew she could get men and money, and went after it.’

N
o book about hitmen would be complete without a chapter on the most infamous, notorious and deadly triggerman of all – Carlos the Jackal. For more than 20 years he outwitted the forces of international intelligence. He was the world’s most ruthless killer and kept his pursuers at bay thanks to the help of unscrupulous governments and by constantly changing his appearance.

Carlos was a master of disguise, altering his weight, hair and even his eye colouring. Travelling under a series of names ranging from Ahmed Adil Fawaz to Hector Dupont, and from Adolf Bernal to Flik Ramirez. He even employed doubles to lay a trail of confusion for his hunters. By the time he was finally apprehended in August 1994, Carlos the Jackal was held responsible for 83 murders across the globe.

Born Illich Ramirez Sanchez in Caracas, Venezuela, in
October 1949, Carlos was the son of a millionaire doctor of law who was a Stalinist left-winger. He gave his three sons the three names of Lenin – Illich, Vladimir and Lenin. Each of the brothers were given the best possible education. Illich’s heroes were Che Guevara and Fidel Castro and he eventually learned to speak seven different languages fluently.

Illich travelled extensively from an early age and in 1966 lived for several months in central London, first in the King’s Road and then in Wimpole Street, with his mother and brother Vladimir, before being sent by his father to the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow: the world’s most notorious finishing school for terrorists.

Officially, Illich was expelled in 1970 for ‘riotous and dilettante behaviour’, although many believe this may have been a line fed by the university in order to confuse the West about Illich’s progress. In 1972, he enrolled at the London School of Economics.

However, within months, Illich joined the most feared terrorist group at that time, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which eventually established close links to the Japanese Red Army and the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, who later provided Illich with a
round-the-clock
bodyguard. Other ‘incorporated’ groups included the Organisation for the Armed Arab Struggle and the Turkish Popular Liberation Front.

Illich used his superb expertise with firearms in order to convince these terrorist groups he could became their own one-man secret weapon. Soon Illich was boasting that his favourite method of killing was a bullet between the eyes. Illich clearly had a thorough indifference to human life, not to
mention a talent for manipulating pretty young women. But more of that later.

One of Illich’s earliest high-profile killings occurred in Paris in the summer of 1975, when he cold-bloodedly shot dead two French intelligence agents who’d gone to his Paris flat after a tip-off from Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. Illich also gunned down the police informer who’d betrayed him and left a message declaring war on ‘Zionist and imperialist targets in all parts of the world’.

Five days later in London, Illich had his closest shave with authorities. Three glasses of Bacardi and Coke were found half-empty when Scotland Yard detectives arrived in the smoke-filled downstairs bar of Angelo’s Club in Bayswater. The man known to bar staff as a Peruvian economist called Carlos, and two pretty South American women who regularly accompanied him, had all vanished minutes before the detectives’ arrival.

Scotland Yard swooped simultaneously on a network of west London flats used by the man known as Carlos – all rented by women on his behalf. Investigators uncovered a huge cache of arms, hand grenades and explosives. They also found a hit list of 500 Jewish businessmen and personalities in Britain, including politician Sir Keith Joseph, playwright John Osborne and violinist Sir Yehudi Menuhin.

But the man then known as Carlos Martinez had vanished off the face of the earth. Carlos the Jackal actually got his nickname from the fictional assassin sent to kill President de Gaulle in Frederick Forsyth’s novel
The Day of the Jackal
– a copy of which was found in Carlos’ Bayswater flat. Even by 1975 his file – held by British, French and German police –
was extensive. It included links to the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

Carlos was also suspected of involvement in the wounding of British millionaire Edward Seiff – of the Marks and Spencer family – the following year. Then there was the seizing of the French Embassy in the Hague in 1974, the bombing of an Israeli bank in London the same year and a grenade attack on a crowded Paris café. Carlos was also sought in connection with a bazooka attack on an El Al Boeing at Paris’s Orly Airport in January 1975. Carlos had a reputation for only carrying out spectaclar attacks and prided himself on his meticulous planning and uncanny ability to slip through any security net.

In December 1975, with security services throughout Europe hunting for him, Carlos managed to pull off his most spectacular coup when he masterminded an attack on the headquarters of Opec – the organisation of oil-producing states – in Vienna. Three people, including an Austrian policeman, were killed as his guerrillas took control of the offices and kidnapped 11 ministers.

Calling themselves ‘the Arm of the Arab Revolution’, the terrorists demanded a bus to take them and the hostages to a fuelled plane at the airport, a condition the Austrians eventually agreed to. The aircraft first flew to Algiers, where most of the hostages were freed, then on to the Libyan capital, Tripoli, before returning to Algiers where the guerrillas gave themselves up. They were freed within a couple of days.

One of the first real insights into Carlos’s character came from a kidnapped oil minister he held at gunpoint. Asked
what he was like, the minister explained: ‘Quite charming, the kind of man that if he came home with your daughter you would be delighted.’

But behind that charm lay a ruthless, cold individual who thought nothing of throwing a grenade into a crowded restaurant or bar. At the beginning, his killings seemed rooted in idealism, but Carlos eventually became nothing more than a hired gun. Together with another legendary Middle East terrorist, Abu Nidal, he became known as the most efficient killing machine available to terrorist groups across the globe: the Ultimate Hitman.

Those who’ve encountered him over the past 35 years say he is an opportunist rather than a true fanatic. He is not a communist and is now even said to despise the Arabs. But his ability to seduce beautiful young women and convert them to the cause meant that at one stage in the mid-Seventies, more than a dozen different women were being interviewed by police in various parts of Europe about their links with him.

Not surprisingly, a lot of myths have grown around the so-called legend of Carlos the Jackal. He has been credited with numerous terrorist attacks he played no part in. But security services have definitely connected him to the 1976 hijacking of a French airliner to Entebbe, in Uganda, a drama which ended with an Israeli airborne commando raid to free the hostages.

Shortly after that operation, Carlos went to ground, living behind the Iron Curtain in both Hungary and East Germany as well as in the Middle East. There were unconfirmed sightings of him in London in 1978, and the following year he gave an interview to the Paris-based Arabic magazine,
al-Watan
-al-Arabi
,
in which he challenged authorities to try and catch him.

Then Carlos’s fingerprints were found on a letter sent to French Interior Minister Gaston Defferre in March 1982, threatening reprisals if his then girlfriend Magdalena Kopp and another activist, Bruno Breguet, were not released. On the day Kopp and Breguet were sentenced by a French court to five and four years respectively for arms and explosives offensives, a car bomb went off in Paris killing one person and wounding 60. Carlos did not claim responsibility for that bombing, although it carried all his hallmarks. However, he did admit to bombing a French cultural centre in West Berlin in August 1983.

A few months later, on New Year’s Eve, fifty people were hurt when bombs exploded both in Marseille’s main railway station and on board a high-speed train. Two letters claiming responsibility for the blasts on behalf of the Arab Armed Struggle were traced to Carlos, one through handwriting and the other through fingerprints, which had been on file since the killing of those two French security agents in Paris in 1975. A French court eventually sentenced him in his absence to life imprisonment for these killings.

But even before the collapse of communism, Carlos’ terrorist paymasters were growing tired of his antics. His small, highly trained group of killers had taken to heavy drinking and hiring prostitutes, and one of their favourite party tricks was shooting up the ceilings of hotels.

Yet both the Soviet Union and Hungary still offered Carlos a safe haven. When Hungary’s Communists fell, the new leaders found a ‘thank you’ note from Carlos to former president Janos Kadar. 

Then Carlos turned for protection to the Middle East – to Baghdad (where he is said to be a personal friend of Saddam and to have carried out a number of attacks on his behalf) and then to Damascus where he lived for some time with his German terrorist lover Magdalena Kopp and their two children, after her release from a French jail.

Then, in 1991, with new alliances built up during the Gulf War, Carlos was told he had to leave Baghdad. He went to Libya but was turned away and then surfaced in Yemen. Security services throughout the world were shadowing his movements and he was running out of places to hide. When civil war broke out in Yemen, Carlos fled again, this time to Sudan, entering Khartoum on a false diplomatic passport. Within weeks he was being linked with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement, which was behind a number of bombings on Israeli targets in London at the time. They were rumours that Carlos had come out of self-imposed ‘retirement’ to plan some even more outrageous terrorist attacks. The world held its breath.

Then on Sunday, 14 August 1994, the luck and cunning that had helped Carlos evade capture for so long finally ran out. Carlos was hauled out of his rented Khartoum apartment and arrested by a joint taskforce of French and Sudanese agents. He was immediately flown overnight by armed guards to La Sante Prison in Paris.

The Sudanese happily helped the French because they believed Carlos had arrived in Khartoum to plan assaults on foreign targets in the country. Agents had him under surveillance even before the French requested his arrest.
Several other people were also arrested during the raid on Carlos’s modest apartment.

Today, Carlos’ home is a drab, grey 127-year-old prison, overlooking a tree-lined Parisian boulevard. Until Carlos’s arrival, its most famous inmate had been former Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier, who was jailed for life in April 1994 over the 1944 execution of seven Jewish hostages. Carlos lives in complete isolation, so he does not mingle with any of the other 1,600 inmates.