Unsolved TV - R v Benguit online article
Omar [Benguit] regularly calls from prison where he is serving a life sentence for murdering a young woman in 2002. Unsolved I II: The Man With No Alibi, BBC 2018
‘Convicted on no evidence. Not one piece of evidence can they prove that I done it. Because I didn’t do it. I wasn’t there.’ ibid. Omar
There’s no forensic evidence linking this man to the crime. And it took three trials to get a conviction. ibid.
‘There’s 17 witnesses who came forward.’ ibid. Brian the rozzer
Omar’s sister claimed the police framed him by pushing other drug addicts into backing up parts of BB’s story. ibid.
John’s story shows the police were prepared to put forward unreliable witnesses who changed their accounts. ibid.
Most of the prosecution witnesses were crack and heroin addicts. ibid.
Less than three months after he [Restivo – convicted killer] moves in, Oki is killed here three streets away … Exactly four months to the day after Oki is murdered, there is another murder nearby and we know for sure he [Restivo] did this one. ibid.
The trials were a travesty of justice which allowed the real perpetrator of the crime Danilo Restivo free to kill only a few streets and months away from where Oki Shin had been slain. Heather Barnett paid with her life for the incompetence of Dorset police, while the Court of Appeal declared Mr Benguit’s conviction to be ‘safe’, based wholly on the obvious lies and conflicting testimony of crack addicts.
Danilo Restivo settled in Bournemouth in March 2002 having moved there from Italy. His presence was notified to Dorset police by a telex from the Italian police on 29th August 2002, warning that Restivo was a ‘grave danger to women’ and advising that, ‘he should be investigated for the Oki murder’. Dorset police replied to their Italian counterparts in September 2002 informing them that they need not worry about Restivo, as they had apprehended Benguit.
In November 2002 Heather Barnett was murdered in her own house opposite to where Restivo lived and a few streets away from where Oki-Shin had been slain, but this did not ring any alarm bells with the police or indeed with the CPS even though Restivo was at the scene of the crime offering sympathy to the victim’s children.
The third and final trial of Omar Benguit took place in January 2005 while Danilo Restivo was being kept under 24 hour surveillance and when he had already been cautioned in May 2004 for having in his possession a knife identical in size and shape to the murder weapon used against Jong Ok-Shin and a balaclava (ie ‘mask’).
A fresh clump of human hair was found at the very spot where Oki-Shin was stabbed. Dorset police have attributed this hair as belonging to a local resident, Ms Donna Welstead, from whom the police took a statement only two weeks before Mr Benguit’s appeal. Ms Welstead also had a phenomenal memory: she could recall hiring a mobile hair dresser twelve years earlier in or around 2002, who may have deposited the clump of hair in the street after leaving her home. There is no evidence to suggest however that Ms Welstead ever lived in Malmesbury Park Road and no forensic report has been disclosed which links the hair to her or to anyone else. R v Benguit online article, COA judgment 9th April 2014