Trial set for man accused of murdering mum-of-three in Portsmouth
A 41-year-old Portsmouth man, who was arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender, has been released on conditional bail until 9 September.Two other men, a 32-year-old from Petersfield and a 32-year-old from Havant, who were previously arrested on suspicion of murder, have also been released on conditional bail until 5 September.In a tribute, Ms Murphy's family said: "Sammie-Jo, our bright, smiling soul, radiated joy to everyone she met."She was a devoted mother to her three beautiful children, the bubbly baby sister who brought laughter and light to her siblings, and the fun-loving auntie who adored her nieces and nephews."
You can follow BBC Hampshire & Isle of Wight on Facebook, X, or Instagram.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
2 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Can the Bitcoin Batman save Bedford? He's seen his hometown ravaged by shoplifting, drug abuse and homelessness. Now he's splashing his own cash to make the streets safe
A life-size bronze statue of Bedford's most famous son, John Bunyan, stands at the end of the high street – a stone's throw from the prison where he wrote his best known work, The Pilgrim's Progress. Today, some 360 years after he was banged up for preaching in public, the God-fearing author, whose Christian allegory was set to music in the hymn To Be A Pilgrim, is facing a tough crowd. By 4pm, the nearby park benches have been entirely taken over by alcoholics. 'Come here at the right time and there will be 20 or 30 of them,' says my guide, local businessman Peter McCormack. 'They'll be shouting or fighting or harassing people who walk past.' Another group of undesirables can be found at the bus station, where aggressive begging is the order of the day, while visitors to Bedford's pedestrianised shopping precinct have to negotiate doorways filled with the belongings of rough sleepers. Down an alley next to his town centre coffee shop, McCormack shows me a courtyard where drug addicts gather after dark. It contains small piles of rubbish and the remains of burned mattresses. 'From time to time, people leave used needles here too,' he says. 'This is the centre of town, but there's anti-social behaviour everywhere. Dealers on e-bikes. Crackheads who'll run up and shout in your face. People shooting up in stairwells. Alcoholics in the parks. 'No wonder the shops are all closing and the place looks like a s***hole. People who don't feel safe won't come and spend their money, will they?' On the basis of our tour, McCormack certainly seems to have a point. In theory, the centre of Bedford – a commuter town with 185,000 inhabitants and 20 churches, which lies just 40 minutes from London's St Pancras station, and where suburban executive homes fetch upwards of £1m – ought to be bustling and prosperous. In reality, it's a case study in modern civic decay. Dozens of stores, including an entire arcade, lie empty. Large chain stores, such as Debenhams, are long gone, along with The Body Shop and Marks & Spencer, its former premises now occupied by a B&M discount shop. Graffiti covers shuttered windows. Several bank branches have closed, together with the once-imposing police station, which has been replaced by a comically tiny 'community hub'. The only businesses which seem to be doing a decent trade are vape stores, takeaways and a large Wetherspoons pub, The Pilgrim's Progress, where you can buy a pint of Ruddles Best for the bargain price of £1.79. 'When I was a lad, I used to walk around Bedford and feel totally safe,' says McCormack. 'Now I've got a daughter who's 15 and I won't let her do the same thing. That's a problem. 'There's a plague of addiction and crime, shoplifting is a real problem, and the whole place looks a mess. 'The other day, one of the shopkeepers sent me a message saying, 'There's a guy running round off his face, exposing himself.' Who wants to come shopping in a place like that?' The same could, of course, be said for many of Britain's town centres, which have been in decline for a generation – thanks to the rise of online shopping and out-of-town retail parks and being ravaged by the pandemic, and now having to survive in a world where Chancellor Rachel Reeves is taxing shopkeepers to the hilt. The justice system has also more or less given up on enforcing laws against shoplifting, casual drug use and other petty crime. Yet McCormack, a heavily tattooed 46-year-old, who has made a small fortune in Bitcoin and for years hosted cryptocurrency's most successful podcast, is determined he will not sit back and watch his town go to the dogs. Instead, today – and every Saturday this month – he will pay for ten private security guards to patrol the streets of Bedford, armed with body cameras and radios, to help deter crime, hostile begging, drug-taking, public drunkenness and other anti-social behaviour. The £10,000 initiative, which has seen him dubbed 'Bitcoin's first Batman', is designed to entice shoppers back to the town. He also runs a variety of businesses including the Auction Room bar and Real Coffee, a cafe which doubles up as the club shop of Real Bedford, the local non-league football club which he co-owns with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the American twins who co-founded Facebook and have since made billion-dollar fortunes in crypto. 'People tell me they won't come to Bedford because the town centre looks like a s***hole and is dangerous,' he says. 'Every year, we see more crackheads, more aggressive beggars, more shoplifters. Women are being harassed, shops are closing and families no longer feel safe. McCormack, a heavily tattooed 46-year-old, who has made a small fortune in Bitcoin and for years hosted cryptocurrency's most successful podcast, is determined he will not sit back and watch his town go to the dogs 'I've been saying for ages that if the police won't fix it, then I will do it for them. They haven't, so here we are.' McCormack's patrolmen are instructed to act as the equivalent of 'scarecrows', deterring crime by their presence. They will follow known criminals, including shoplifters, report law-breaking to the police and, on occasions where they witness a potentially dangerous incident, have been instructed to intervene. 'I've travelled to a lot of failed states, places like El Salvador or Venezuela, and you get parallel institutions, where people take responsibility for their own security. You see it in South Africa, with gated communities. That's what we are doing here in Bedford. 'I am sick of the decline. I don't think the police can sort it. Too much tape and bureaucracy. So I am going to put my money where my mouth is. 'In a few years' time, Bedford is either going to look like Stoke, or like Bath, and I don't want it to be Stoke.' The project is not without controversy. Some have accused McCormack of talking Bedford down, while the county's police and crime commissioner, John Tizard, has described his project as 'political stunt'. Mr Tizard says anti-social behaviour is 'at a long-term low in Bedford town centre' and he argues that 'keeping our town centres safe is the responsibility of publicly accountable police and local authorities, not private individuals.' McCormack promptly hit back on X, where he boasts nearly 600,000 followers, telling Mr Tizard: 'You are a weak man and you should resign.' His combative way with words will be familiar to listeners of his podcast, which has seen him interview well-known figures and activists from across the political spectrum, including Liz Truss, Ann Widdecombe, George Galloway and the US military whistleblower Chelsea Manning, or those who have followed his topsy-turvy career. As his unusual life story attests, he is quite the disrupter. Raised by a nurse and an aircraft engineer, who 'worked all hours' to send him to Bedford Modern, a local private school, McCormack says that being 'a poor kid among rich kids' forced him to develop an entrepreneurial streak – selling football stickers and marbles at the school gates before setting up a heavy metal music fanzine to get free tickets to gigs. The project is not without controversy. Some have accused McCormack of talking Bedford down, while the county's police and crime commissioner, John Tizard, has described his project as 'political stunt' At Buckinghamshire New University in the late 1990s, he taught himself how to build a website for the publication. Then his landlord, who ran a window company, paid him £450 to create one for their business. A local recruitment business also offered him £2,000 to build its website. Within a few months, he'd abandoned his studies and moved to London, where a dotcom firm had offered him a £1,000-a-week job. In 2007, he started his own agency with a friend, titled McCormack & Morrison. It specialised in web design, social media and marketing and quickly grew to 35 staff, generating a turnover of about £3m a year. But in 2014, McCormack's marriage to the mother of his two children collapsed and following the divorce, his life went spectacularly off the rails. 'I basically got addicted to cocaine,' he says. 'I went hard. To the point where I was taking a gram a day and drinking heavily every night. There's doing the drug at parties or in a bar in London on Friday night, and there's doing it at 11am because your head's gone. And I was the latter.' There followed a 'Jerry Maguire' moment where he sabotaged his successful career. 'I felt like I was constantly trying to sell people shit they didn't need and lying. So I wrote this article headlined 'Online advertising doesn't work', published it and walked out.' Then, having sold the remnants of his business for £180,000, he decided to hit the cocaine even harder, sparking a downward spiral. He was eventually hospitalised, his heart beating at over 200 beats a minute, with a suspected heart attack Luckily, it turned out to be the less serious supraventricular tachycardia, an arrhythmia triggered by drug consumption. But the near-miss persuaded McCormack to clean himself up. Ignoring doctors, who had advised him to take antidepressants, he bought some running shoes, temporarily turned vegan, quit booze and began jogging every day. While pounding the streets of Bedford, McCormack began listening to podcasts by Rich Roll, an American former drug addict- turned ultra-endurance athlete and healthy living influencer. A friendship ensued and, in 2017, he asked Roll for advice on how to start a career in podcasting. 'He basically told me, 'Pick a subject and stick with it,'' McCormack says. 'I had come across Bitcoin in the past because I'd used it to buy cocaine. I thought, 'That'll do.' So I got on a plane and flew to America to interview people in the industry.' Later that year, he launched a podcast called What Bitcoin Did. In the Bitcoin boom which followed, it became the world's most successful crypto podcast, making roughly £10m in advertising revenue and turning McCormack – who invested much of the profits in the online currency – into a very wealthy man indeed. In 2021, he spent a portion of his fortune on Bedford FC, which was languishing in the tenth tier of the non-league pyramid. They were rebranded as Real Bedford, with a skull and crossbow logo, and marketed as the world's first 'Bitcoin club', where fans can pay in crypto and staff and players can take wages in it. Games were streamed online to followers of McCormack's podcast, who spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on merchandise. Consecutive promotions followed and then, in February, the Winklevoss twins came on board. The brothers, who in 2004 sued their Harvard contemporary Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for a social media website (he settled for $65m and actor Armie Hammer starred as the twins in the film The Social Network), have since made billion-dollar fortunes in crypto and had been meeting McCormack to discuss collaborations with his podcast. They were apparently fascinated by the concept – alien to American sport and which revolves around closed shop franchises – that a small local team could potentially be promoted to the Premier League. They agreed to pay £3.6m for a 45 per cent stake. Real Bedford has since been promoted and will start this season in English football's seventh tier. What is less clear, of course, is how deep someone's pockets need to be to sort out a town like Bedford. 'We need people to come to town, buy stuff and mooch around shops,' McCormack says. 'That starts by making them actually feel safe here' McCormack, meanwhile, describes himself as a 'budget Ryan Reynolds' after the Hollywood star who owns Wrexham AFC and whose story is the subject of hit Disney+ series Welcome To Wrexham. 'You can buy pretty much any league, depending on how deep your pockets are,' is how he puts it. What is less clear, of course, is how deep someone's pockets need to be to sort out a town like Bedford. 'We need people to come to town, buy stuff and mooch around shops,' he says. 'That starts by making them actually feel safe here. There are loads of rich people round here but, at the moment, they spend their money in London or Cambridge. 'I have this thing I tell people: that if half the people who live in town spent just a tenner a week more here, that would add up to £50m a year. 'Imagine what that could achieve. A few security guards might not instantly fix Bedford, or any other town for that matter. But it's got to be a start.
Daily Mail
2 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Inside millionaire neighborhood tearing itself apart after American Idol exec was murdered: Illegal parties, naked women and gunfire
American Idol music supervisor Robin Kaye and her husband, Thomas DeLuca, were allegedly tormented by a neighbor's 'illegal' wild parties in the years leading up to their horrific murders, according to a lawsuit seen by the Daily Mail. The latest party occurred 16 days after the gruesome execution-style slayings of Kaye and DeLuca, both 70, that shocked Democrat-run Los Angeles amid rising fear and rancor over violent crime. KCAL News reported a shot was possibly fired during the most recent event directly next to the late couple's mansion in Encino, California, on Saturday evening. Now, the Daily Mail can exclusively report that their next door neighbor has been hit with a civil lawsuit over the notorious 'party house' which allegedly plagues residents in the upscale community located 20 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. In the filing, Ramin Kohanoff, owner of 4777 White Oak Avenue, is accused of creating a 'significant nuisance' with 'illegal parties' on the normally quiet, tree-lined, residential street - the complaint describes them as 'large unruly gatherings'. It alleges Kohanoff has been hosting 'unlawful Party House events within the past five years, regularly attracting over 100 partygoers' who are 'charged admission'. Authorities say Kaye and DeLuca were callously cut down in cold blood by alleged assailant Raymond Boodarian, 22, on July 10 during a violent home invasion when they returned home from a shopping trip. They were both shot multiple times - including in the head - with their own weapon, which investigators revealed was recovered at Boodarian's rented Reseda townhome where he lived with his mother and sister. It took four days for LAPD officers to find the victims' bodies in separate rooms inside their $4.5 million property. The Daily Mail previously reported that their deaths occurred just hours after they attended a meeting on July 9 with LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell to discuss neighborhood safety amid surging crime in the area. Neighborhoods First, a non-profit punching back against the parties, filed the 'complaint for public nuisance' with LA Superior Court on July 18 - just eight days after the shocking deaths. Sources tell the Daily Mail that partygoers have to purchase tickets to attend. According to the suit, the parties continue until after midnight and include 'loud music and noise' with illegal parking, leading to 'significant garbage including food, liquor and beer bottles and cans… left on the street and on neighbors' properties.' It alleges Kohanoff ignored a cease and desist letter sent in December 2021 which requested he limit noise to before 10pm. Another letter was sent in May 2024 two days after another party that caused 'significant impacts on the surrounding neighbors,' per the filing, which was also ignored, per the filing. Separately, court records show the 52-year-old businessman previously pled no contest to a felony stalking charge. The nuisance suit, obtained by the Daily Mail, claims that LAPD officers 'shut down' a party on June 7 and 'ordered partygoers to leave'. Despite being cited by the LAPD, the complaint says 'Defendants have disregarded such citations and demands to cease and desist. 'The egregious wrongful and illegal uses of the Property for Party House events were done with a conscious disregard for the surrounding neighbors' rights to the reasonable peaceful enjoyment of their residential properties as well as the extended residential neighborhood.' Property records show that Kohanoff purchased the six-bedroom, six-bathroom, 7,400-square-foot home for $3,495,000 in 2018. Neighborhoods First is asking the court to have the parties curtailed and is seeking unspecified costs and attorneys' fees. The suit is signed by Richard Mirisch, secretary of the California non-profit and a Hollywood producer with films including The Matrix, Gothika, Black Mass and The Flash on his list of credits. The savage murders have rattled residents of Encino where celebrities such as Machine Gun Kelly, Michael B. Jordan and Matt LeBlanc have homes. Actor Josh Duhamel also owns a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom, 8,000 -square-foot mansion a short drive from the party house which he purchased for $6 million in 2023, according to public records. The new suit was filed by lawyers who work with attorney Rob Glushon, who is also president of the Encino Property Owners Association. He told the Daily Mail that partygoers often urinate on lawns along the same street, and that up to roughly 100 homes in the immediate area are impacted by the noise and disturbance. Over the years Glushon 'discussed strategies' with Kaye for dealing with the parties. 'She was obviously upset,' Glushon recalled. 'She had it worse because she was the most directly impacted.' He previously told the Daily Mail of the murders: 'We just couldn't be more saddened and shocked at what has occurred in the neighborhood.' He honored Kaye's efforts to help promote neighborhood safety, and described her as 'someone who wasn't just complaining about things, but was trying to do something about it.' She was a 'good neighbor' who 'believed in the mantra, if you see something, say something'. Neighbor Naomi Sadoun, 69, lives on the other side of the so-called party house. She told the Daily Mail her bedroom overlooks its back yard and she can see naked women cavorting during the parties. She described Kaye and DeLuca as 'lovely people. It's terrible what has happened to them. They didn't deserve this.' Kaye with Singer La'Porsha Renae (left) and producer Randy Jackson (center) in 2017 Kaye worked as the music supervisor for singing competition American Idol for the last 15 seasons - nearly 300 episodes - per her IMDB page. Over the years, she won several Guild of Music Supervisors Awards for her work on the show. She also worked on Lip Sync Battle, Hollywood Game Night and Worn Stories, among other shows. 'We know that [Kohanoff] ignores the city LAPD citations,' Glushon told the Daily Mail. 'He's been cited at least three times and fined. He doesn't respond to our letters and he doesn't care about the neighbors.' Glushon, who lives close to the party house, declared the organization had been forced to file the lawsuits due to the gravity of the parties and because 'the city doesn't do anything'. He rebuked local law enforcement for not doing more to combat crime in the area and insisted such lawlessness 'would never be tolerated' in other cities within LA County. He argued that LA, run by Democrat mayor Karen Bass, is 'systemically dysfunctional' and said, 'Why do we have homeless on the streets when it's illegal?' Bass, Glushon said, had been 'responsive since the murders' and has directed additional police officers to be deployed in Encino, although he believes the beefed up resources are merely a stopgap. 'Right now, it's kind of hard to drive around Encino without seeing a black line, which is good,' he added, 'but we know that that's not going to last.' He previously told the Daily Mail 'a majority of people do not feel safe. Compared with other cities and populations, we have the fewest number of police officers per capita. 'We are so deficient compared to Chicago, New York and other cities.' Murder suspect Boodarian has a history of mental illness, court records show. He has been charged with two counts of murder as well as other offenses in relation to the deaths. He is currently being held without bail at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown LA and is expected to enter a plea during a scheduled court appearance on August 20. An LAPD spokesperson told the Daily Mail of Saturday's party that 'officers responded to radio calls of a loud party, as well as one call for shots fired, on the 4700 block of White Oak Avenue.' 'There was no evidence of shots fired or an assault with a deadly weapon. Officers shut down the large party and a citation was issued.' Officers were on scene atn5:45pm and left after two hours and 40 minutes. When contacted by the Daily Mail, Kohanoff said he was unaware of the lawsuit. He added that he had told an LAPD officer on Saturday that he would stop hosting the parties. 'I told them I'm not going to do it anymore,' he said, adding that 'someone else' had organized the Saturday event. He declined to comment about the murders of his neighbors other than to say 'I was in Vegas' when they occurred.
Daily Mail
2 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Was a hitman hired to kill Dordogne expat? Days before Karen Carter's brutal stabbing a mysterious man was seen outside her house. Now locals believe her murder could be the work of an assassin
Two days before her murder, on her 65th birthday, Karen Carter posed for what is believed to be her last ever photograph while out for lunch with friends. Smiling at the camera and cuddling her new puppy, Haku, the mother-of-four was on the brink of a new life having decided to divorce her South African husband and set up home permanently in this charming corner of south-west France. As we now know, the Gallic idyll she longed for was tragically never to be. Karen was stabbed to death on April 29 in a frenzied attack outside the 250-year-old holiday property she owned with her estranged husband. The former teacher had just arrived home from a wine-tasting event at the hilltop farmhouse of a 'charming' Frenchman to whom she had grown close as she negotiated her divorce. Her attacker, who police say was lying in wait, struck so fast as she got out of her Dacia Duster car that her handbag, and Haku, were still inside. In an area of the Dordogne where crime is virtually unheard of, Karen's friends in the village of Tremolat hoped this terrible crime would quickly be solved. But three months on, and with British tourists now arriving in droves to spend their summer holiday in the region, the killer is still at large. Amid news that French police have now summoned a group of villagers for DNA tests, I returned to Tremolat this week to speak to those involved in the case. Shockingly, I can reveal that Karen's friends in the village are now convinced that her murder was not a 'crime of passion', as was previously speculated, but a cold-blooded professional hit –what is known in France as a 'meurtre commandite '. If the idea of a contract killer operating in this tranquil and bucolic corner of rural France seems outlandish, then it is a theory being given credence by French detectives, not least because of the sighting of a suspicious man spotted by Karen's home just three days before she was killed. The Daily Mail is the first newspaper to be told of this potential suspect, who was reported to police in the immediate aftermath of Karen's death but has never been traced. One of Karen's French neighbours, the eyewitness who saw him, spoke exclusively to the Mail this week out of frustration at the apparent lack of progress being made on the case. 'We made eye contact and he looked away very quickly and didn't say 'Bonjour' which is very unusual around here,' he recalled, noting that the man, who he says was black and someone he had never seen in the village, was walking along the road at the front of Karen's house but had no bag with him, or anything that might have suggested he was a hiker wandering through the area. 'He was a bit taller than me and thin and muscular with sculpted arms,' added the neighbour, who says he has now spoken to police four times about the sighting. 'I thought it was odd at the time but I was in a hurry and so I didn't think any more about it. I wish now that I'd challenged him. After Karen was murdered, I told the police straight away.' French detectives are notoriously tight-lipped about ongoing cases, but this week an investigating source agreed that 'the circumstances of the murder certainly point to a targeted assassination'. The source added: 'He lay in wait, carried out the attack out of sight of anyone else and then made sure the victim was dead before escaping.' No murder weapon has ever been found and beyond the sighting of the suspicious man outside Karen's home, there are few leads for detectives to go on. There is no CCTV in Tremolat. Residents, who in the past thought nothing of leaving their doors unlocked, have never seen the need for doorbell cameras in an area often referred to as Dordogneshire because of its popularity with Brits who love its old-fashioned rural charm. Police initially focused their attention on tyre tracks left by a car parked at the edge of a wood, a six-minute walk from the murder scene through walnut groves and a barley field – but for now, that trail also appears to have gone cold. Reports last month of an attack on another woman initially sparked fears that the killer had struck again. The 28-year-old woman was said to have been 'stalked from behind and knocked unconscious' while out walking her dog in the village on May 26. But according to a source in the prosecutor's office in Bergerac, 'no connection has been established between the two crimes'. The discovery of a 31-year-old woman's body in a village five miles away appears to be yet another red herring. That death is said to have been a suicide. This week, French gendarmes were seen returning to Karen's home on the outskirts of Tremolat, with their attention focused on the outside of the honey-coloured property, which is still cordoned off with yellow police tape. The once pristine home is a sorrowful sight. Weeds have sprung up across the gravel driveway. A cellophane-wrapped dead bunch of flowers lies on the verge outside. The gendarmes' visit comes three weeks after senior investigating judge Clara Verger, who has been placed in charge of the case, ordered the DNA testing of 15 villagers who came into contact with Karen in the hours before her killing. The appointment of Ms Verger may yet be further evidence that police are leaning towards the possibility that the killing was the work of an outsider rather than a local. As president of the tribunal judiciaire in the nearby town of Perigueux, she has powers to liaise with overseas authorities. Those asked to give mouth swabs at the gendarmerie in the nearby town of Lalinde include a small group of friends as well as around a dozen guests who attended the wine-tasting with Karen on the evening of her murder. Among them was Tremolat's 61-year-old mayor, Eric Chassagne, who said this week that Karen was 'beaming' and 'radiant' on the night she died. 'I think everyone who may have met Karen during the day and evening of April 29 was sampled,' said Mr Chassagne, adding that he had been told the exercise was a 'process of elimination'. 'They want to close certain lines of inquiry,' he said. 'From what I understand, they would like to compare the DNA with that found in the victim's vehicle.' Another woman, who was also asked to provide a mouth swab, said she had been told police wanted to eliminate anyone who might have come into contact with Karen's car. She added: 'I was happy to go to Lalinde and give DNA,' she said. 'I'd do anything if I thought it would help get justice for Karen.' Still overwhelmed by the unthinkable horror of her death, Karen's friends in Tremolat endlessly go over the terrible events that led up to it, trying to work out how her killer knew she would be returning home alone that Tuesday night and how on earth he managed to strike and then flee without being caught. Karen had spent the evening at a wine-tasting hosted by Jean-Francois Guerrier, a former managing director of Fujitsu who lived for several years in Camberley in Surrey. One guest who was there has reportedly claimed that he felt they were 'being watched'. Karen left the event at around 10pm, telling fellow guests she needed to take her puppy home to settle him. She set off by car back to Les Chouettes, the holiday home she bought 15 years ago with her husband Alan, a ten-minute drive away. Her killer would easily have been hidden from view among the dense greenery that surrounds her property on the outskirts of the village. Her assailant lunged at her as she got out of her car, stabbing her eight times in her chest, groin, arm and leg and severing her aorta. In yet another tragic twist to this brutal crime, she was found in a pool of her own blood by Guerrier who, after waving off the last of his guests, had driven to join Karen at her home before stumbling across a scene of almost unimaginable horror. A friend told the Daily Mail this week that while it was clear that she was beyond saving, Guerrier tried to resuscitate her after summoning the emergency services. 'He doesn't talk about it much but it was very traumatic for him,' said the friend. 'He said what he saw was just gore.' Guerrier was quizzed by police but swiftly eliminated from inquiries. A second arrest followed, that of 69-year-old divorcee Marie-Laure Autefort who lived nearby and had made no secret of her own love for Guerrier. She was held in custody for 48 hours amid suspicions that she might have had a grudge against the couple but was also released after providing a concrete alibi. Karen's close friend told me that she was 'very discreet' about her relationship with her 'confidant' Guerrier but it is clear that the pair had become close in recent months. In a poignant text message sent to a friend after the murder, he wrote: 'We were happy being happy. This has left a big black hole.' A month before her death, Guerrier accompanied Karen on an overseas trip to South Africa with a local women's over-50s football team, Les Reines du Foot, in which she played. Karen's husband Alan, who visited Tremolat a week after her murder, has spoken of 'a feeling of complete betrayal' upon hearing that his wife had formed this new relationship. He organised his wife's funeral, which took place in the nearby town of Bergerac early last month before returning to South Africa. The Daily Mail understands that Karen told 65-year-old Alan, a keen surfer who runs his own environmental agency, that she wanted a divorce in January this year. She had already consulted a family lawyer in South Africa asking for assistance in separating their assets. The couple have four adult children who live in Australia, Britain and the US. A source has told me she didn't want her husband to retain a share in their French holiday property because of her fears that things would get messy if he ever remarried. In return for 'Les Chouettes' she was prepared to hand over her financial interest in their marital home, 7,000 miles away, in the coastal city of East London in South Africa. She was also in the process of buying a one-bedroom cottage in Tremolat, planning to live there while earning a rental income from Les Chouettes. 'She saw her future in France not South Africa,' says the source who spoke to the Daily Mail. 'Karen wanted a fresh start.' Speaking on the phone from South Africa this week, Alan Carter said that while the slow progress of the case was frustrating, French police had assured him they were 'vigorously pursuing' Karen's killer. 'It's such a small village, you think someone would know something,' he said. He said that although there was talk of a divorce, it 'wasn't definite'. 'I still hoped that we would find a way to save our marriage. I didn't want it to end in divorce,' he told me. 'We were still talking.' The last time he saw Karen was in South Africa in May after she finished her tour with the French women's football team and came to East London. 'I've learned since that this other man accompanied her on the tour but she said nothing about it when she came to stay with me and the family. 'I have to accept that she had some kind of relationship with this chap but she said nothing to me or her friends here to suggest that something was going on.' He said that he and his family and Karen's friends in South Africa were still grieving for her. 'We are still hurting,' he said. Compounding the family's agony, he said that Karen's Lancashire-born mother, who was left devastated by her daughter's brutal death, passed away three weeks ago. There is no doubt the murder is still the talk of Tremolat, above all at Cafe Village, a community-run social club in Tremolat popular with expats, where Karen and Guerrier both volunteered behind the bar. The cafe was 'shut indefinitely' in the wake of Karen's murder but reopened on May 28. As well as music events, it hosts French conversation classes, quiz nights and knitting sessions. Membership costs just €15 a year. A week earlier, an invitation-only memorial service was held at the cafe, with photographs of Karen displayed alongside bouquets of flowers and the performance of a song written for the occasion by one of the club's regular musicians called 'We'll remember you well' which left those gathered in tears. On Wednesday evening, the cafe was bustling with locals and visiting tourists who filled the outdoor trestle tables, drinking local wine and eating food from the visiting 'Dordogne Chippy' fish and chip van while listening to live music including covers of songs by The Police and The Beach Boys. It was exactly the kind of evening that Karen loved. Among those present was Jean-Francois Guerrier who is now caring for Karen's cross-breed puppy. He has declined to speak about Karen's murder, saying only that she was 'a lovely lady'. 'He doesn't talk about what happened. He's just trying to keep busy,' said a source at the cafe. 'We all miss Karen terribly but life has to go on.' The birthday photograph taken of Karen two days before her murder now hangs on the wall by the bar in her memory. She spent that happy day having lunch with girlfriends and visiting a flower market in the nearby town of Le Bugue. 'Karen wanted to put the past behind her,' her close friend said this week. 'She was excited about the future and turning over a new leaf. She thought she was embarking on a new chapter of her life,never realising what was lying in wait for her.'
