Unmaking a murderer: After 16 years in prison, could Omar Benguit clear his name?

Omar Benguit was a drug addict with a criminal record that included serious assault. And he had no alibi. But does that make him a murderer?

This article contains material that some readers may find upsetting

Omar Benguit was a dangerous man. By his early twenties, he had racked up 60 convictions, including stabbing a man in the chest and threatening another with a syringe.

In 1994, a judge warned during a trial for a serious assault charge that one day he would kill someone. Just over a decade later, Omar was convicted of the murder of a young woman in Bournemouth, a Korean student called Jong-Ok Shin, known as Oki. For the last 16 years, he has maintained this was a crime he did not commit.

His parole hearing is just four years away, but he still refuses to confess, even though that means he is likely to remain behind bars. “I'd rather die in jail and be carried out in a box saying I didn't do it, than say I did do it and go home today,” Omar told me in an emotional call from a high-security prison in West Yorkshire.

Now, new evidence has emerged that he hopes may help clear his name. Two witnesses have come forward to retract evidence they presented during Omar’s three trials, in 2003, 2004 and 2005, about what happened on the night of Oki’s murder.

It’s also come out that police had serious concerns about the credibility of their main witness - concerns that were never shared with the jury at Omar’s trials.

My investigation of his case is the subject of BBC Three’s new documentary series, Unsolved: The Man With No Alibi.

By the time it was over I’d been drawn into not one but three murders, and investigated a potential serial killer.

I’ve spent a lot of my career interviewing criminals: terrorists, paedophiles, and murderers.

But this case was different.

I was asked to help a convicted criminal, who had seriously hurt people. Omar might say he didn’t kill Oki, but that doesn’t make it true. Normally, my work helps put people behind bars. This time I was being asked to help free someone who was clearly a danger to society.

A squad of murder detectives, a jury, and the Court of Appeal believed they had the right man - who was I to question their judgement? And what if something I did helped to free a murderer?

But I also couldn’t ignore the lack of forensic evidence, the inconsistencies in the witness statements, and the discovery that a potential serial killer was nearby when Oki was murdered.

At least 12 of the witnesses who testified against Omar were self-confessed drug addicts. Since Omar’s conviction, some of them have admitted they lied to the police and during his trial. Some say they felt pressured into it; others claim they were offered incentives by the police.

Over a decade after his conviction, Omar’s sister, Amie Benguit, is still determined to prove his innocence. “I know he didn’t do it,” she says. “I believe in justice and it will prevail.”

About a month after Oki’s murder in July 2002, Dorset police were struggling to make any headway. Then a witness came forward with dramatic new evidence.

This witness - a former sex worker and heroin addict known as BB - became the mainstay of the case against Omar. She claimed that testifying had put her life at risk, so police put her in witness protection.

According to BB, Omar and two other heroin addicts were involved in the murder of 26-year-old Oki. The student was walking home alone after a night out. BB claimed the men approached Oki and that she was stabbed, after refusing Omar’s advances.

BB claimed the three men, whom she already knew, had forced her to drive them to what became the murder scene that night. She told police she’d taken them to a crack house to clean up afterwards, after which the three men violently gang raped her in the getaway vehicle.

Her evidence was littered with inconsistencies. There was also no forensic or CCTV evidence supporting any of her story. No murder weapon was ever found.

It took three trials to convict Omar, with two juries failing to reach a verdict. A jury member from the third trial, which resulted in Omar’s murder conviction, agreed to speak to me. “Looking at Omar in court, I was frightened of him," she told me. “But I did have serious concerns about their main witness. I felt at times she was unfit to give evidence as she appeared heavily intoxicated.”

I discovered that the police knew BB had a history of making false allegations, such as accusing a neighbour of being a paedophile. But they still put her forward as a credible witness in Omar’s trial.

I was starting to have doubts about the safety of Omar’s conviction, when the case took an unexpected and deeply troubling turn.

Natalie Stanton was a close friend of Omar’s. There were rumours they were romantically involved in the past, which she says was not the case.

She gave a statement in August 2002, which painted a picture of Omar as a violent man with a history of aggression towards women. “At one point,” she told the police, “he raised his clenched fist towards me and I thought he was going to hit me, but he didn’t.”

Now, Natalie claims the police suggested she might risk losing custody of her two kids if she carried on hanging around with “people like Omar”, and that she was led into saying “nasty and untruthful things” about him. She told me Omar is a man she trusted to be alone with her kids, and still does.

Dorset police have said they fully support the officers involved in this case. They have also pointed out that no allegations of wrongdoing were made during Omar’s appeals in 2005 and 2014.

It was clear to me that Natalie was extremely vulnerable, and susceptible to saying what she felt others wanted her to say. I soon came across more evidence of this.

In 2005, after Omar was convicted, Natalie signed another completely different statement, claiming that he had been with her on the night of the murder. Yet she admitted to me this was not true.

She says her behaviour back then was born of desperation. She was addicted to drugs, and thought Omar’s family would support her if she told them what they wanted to hear.

“I assumed they'd look after me financially. When you're in a drug state, you just think, ‘If I can get some money, I can buy drugs.' You don’t think of the consequences.

“In the past, if I didn't have any money I’d go and see Omar's brother at his kebab shop and he'd hand over 20 or 40 quid for me, so I thought his family would look out for me if I helped them out.”

The claim that Omar’s family could have offered Natalie something in exchange for an alibi was unsettling.

I decided the only way to get answers was to confront Omar’s sister, Amie. I wasn’t looking forward to it - she’d suffered enough already. But she was one of the only people who could shed some light on this new twist.

We came face to face on a windswept Bournemouth beach. Amie was clear and definite that it was a misunderstanding on Natalie’s part.

Amie told me: “I went to speak to Natalie first because of Omar. He said, 'Speak to Natalie, I might have been [with her].' When I first met her she was too scared to talk. She was afraid they were gonna take her kids away, and I did say that I would help with lawyers.

“I have not spent the last 15 years fighting, trying to find some answers to this case, by spoiling it by giving someone money.”

The prosecution case against Omar hinged on the account provided by their star witness, BB. Her story was backed up by the other drug users, who claimed they were in the crack house on the night of the murder.

I decided to track down some of these people.

A former friend of Omar’s, Leanne Mayers, who is now serving 12 years for robbery, wrote back to me from prison. She is now clean and says she wants to make amends for her past.

During Omar’s final trial, she told the jury that he was seen carrying a knife with a six-inch blade, similar to that used to kill Oki.

Now, she claims police encouraged her to say that the knife she saw Omar carrying fitted the description of the murder weapon.

“I was young, dumb, and easily manipulated,” she wrote. “Omar would never have hurt anyone, he wasn’t capable of murder. I didn’t tell the truth in court.”

Although her words were compelling, I was conscious they came from a career criminal with a history of telling lies. But then I found another witness making similar claims.

Joan Sheridan ran the crack house Omar allegedly visited straight after the murder. In court, she had testified that Omar was there on the night of the murder, covered in blood and looking for a change of clothes.

Today, she is in the early stages of dementia, but her family said she was fit to be interviewed and gave me permission to speak to her.

Joan now says she never saw Omar that night, and claims that the police put the words in her mouth.

“I feel disgusted in myself," Joan said. "Someone should not be locked up for something they never done. I’ve regretted the day I ever stood up in that court. And told lies.

“I didn’t know nothing about it until the police turned up on my door. They was like, ‘He definitely done it, come on Joan, you’re a mother, you’ve got daughters. Imagine what her mother and father are feeling like.'"

Dorset police reject any allegations of wrongdoing. Detective Chief Superintendent Mark Callaghan of Dorset Police said: “We fully support all the officers who were involved in this case, and thank them for their professionalism and diligence in helping to bring a safe conviction against Omar Benguit.”

As serious questions about the safety of Omar’s conviction emerged, I considered who else might have killed Oki.

What I discovered raised even more doubts.

A suspected murderer, Danilo Restivo, was living close to the crime scene at the time of Oki’s murder. He was already a suspect in the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl in Italy, Elisa Claps, but the authorities had not charged him with her killing.

A few weeks after Oki’s murder, a local woman reported Restivo to the police. She was concerned about comments he had made to her about the depth of Oki’s stab wounds and the type of knife used in the attack. None of that information was in the public domain - so how did Restivo know?

Then, just four months after Oki’s death, on 12 November 2002, Restivo bludgeoned his neighbour, Heather Barnett, to death, and cut off her breasts. It was a brutal and sadistic murder. A clump of hair was placed in her hand. Restivo was a hair fetishist and this was his calling card.

Omar’s family believe it’s significant that a clump of hair was also found near Oki’s body.

And there are other striking similarities in the three murders of Heather Barnett, Elisa Claps, and Oki.

All three women were killed on the 12th of the month.

All three women were small and dark-haired.

All three women were attacked from behind and a bladed instrument used.

All three victims lived locally to Restivo.

Amie also claims a man similar to Restivo’s build was caught on CCTV near the murder scene that night.

However, Dorset police say they discounted Restivo as a suspect early in the investigation into Oki’s death. And they point to the Court of Appeal’s judgement in 2014 that only circumstantial evidence links Restivo to Oki’s murder – insufficient evidence to overturn Omar’s conviction.

Any criminal conviction must be, in the words of the law, "beyond reasonable doubt".

I’ve spent nearly a year investigating this case, and I now have serious doubts about the safety of the conviction.

If it were my brother convicted on the words of the addicts I’ve spoken to, I would be devastated and disillusioned with the justice system.

Omar’s family plan to launch a fresh appeal, and are hoping to include the new evidence uncovered by my investigation. But they have never lost sight of the victim of this crime.

“At the end of the day, an innocent woman was murdered. Let’s not forget about that,” said Bash, Omar’s brother.

“Her family, they must be far more devastated than us. But to take an innocent man’s life for it? That doesn’t make it right.”

Unsolved: The Man With No Alibi is available now on iPlayer

Originally published 25 March 2018