So I worked with a murderer

A few years ago we used to have someone in our team who I will call Simon and he was, shall we say, a bit of a lad. Not a cheeky and cheerful Artful Dodger kind of lad, though there was a certain amount of that about him, but more of a Essex-boy-with-an-XR3-and-an-attiude sort of lad. He was in fact a genuine Essex lad, rather than just a metaphorical one, and his neighbours described him as “a lovely lad”…. much later… to the Police…

Simon worked in my team for a couple of years but had the habit of going AWOL and it was mostly to his girlfriend’s place in Bristol which meant that he’d have to get up at 4am to get back to London for work and then be useless all day long. I never got to speak to his girlfriend, who I’ll call Lucy, though she seemed quite normal and pleasant from the photos and what he said about her, though quite what a lovely 19-year old could see in a rotund 33-year old who was in the throes of a messy divorce I never did figure. He, however, had worked out that he was onto a good thing but was also given over to a jealous nature so if he was speaking to her on the phone and heard a man’s voice in the background that she couldn’t adequately account for without drawing breathe his response was “I’m coming down” at which point he used to go AWOL and drive down to Bristol.

Obviously this was affecting his performance at work and he was eventually persuaded to seek other opportunities and he was later replaced by someone equally useless but for different reasons.

It was a surprise therefore, some eighteen months later, for someone in our department to receive a phone call from a supplier to say “Didn’t Simon work for you? You need to check the news”. I went to the website of the local newspaper in the area where he’d lived and there was his face splashed all over the front page with the headline being that he’d murdered his girlfriend. Not the girl he’d been going out with when he’d worked with us but another 18-year old that he must have hooked up with later. It transpired that she’d moved in with him but then found him too jealous and possessive and when she said that she was going to move out it turned into an argument, he stabbed her to death and then fled but gave himself up a few days later after being persuaded by his brother. The Police were keen to speak to anyone who knew Simon to build their case so I was torn between wanting to put them in contact with his previous girlfriend, who I knew had had a similar experience, but not wanting to draw attention to where I worked as it wouldn’t be fair on them to get drawn into it.

To be continued…