Husband Hires Hitmen to Do the Unthinkable

“When a murder is discovered, it was a female who had her head and her hands removed, and she had been found in what could be… was like a duffel bag, and she had her her wrist and her ankles bound. It doesn’t just destroy one life. I don’t think he’s capable of loving people cuz how do you kill your own children? That was the last thing those children saw was their dad killing them. How do you do that?”

“It tears communities apart. When her body was located, she was nude. She was deceased. She had some ligature marks on her neck. It’s up to the police to not only solve the mystery… I then went round the house looking for anything that might obviously be stolen… and tracked down the killer, but bring them to justice. There’s two bodies found. Your first thought is, ‘Oh my goodness me, is there a serial killer?’”

“In this episode, a wife and mother is brutally murdered. She was hacked to death. The injuries were, in my opinion, consistent with someone that was taking some sort of vengeance out on it. Meet the murder detectives. All murders are very sad. That’s part and parcel of the job. Someone has to deal with them, and if it’s the police’s job, we deal with it. Who reveal how they caught the killer. This is a… a truly chilling and shocking story in which you begin to question what is the role of humanity and those people living around you.”

On the 16th of March 2002, Detective Sergeant Andy Nickel heard a radio call that a body had been discovered in woodland in Kent, in the south of England.

“I was with a colleague of mine. We heard, um, a call come over the radio, uh, from a colleague who, um, was saying that they’d found the body of a woman who was deceased. The first thing I did was pick up the radio, spoke to the officer and said to confirm what she just said. And I told her to immediately lock the scene down, retreat from the body, and, uh, tape it off.”

Dave Gutsel was detective chief inspector on the case.

“When I first learned about this case, I was told that obviously I needed to get to the scene. The report was that a female, um, had been found with horrendous injuries.”

Wasting no time, the team mobilized and made their way to the location of the body.

“Yeah, the scene was in a small copse in Dean Park near Shipbourne, on the outskirts of Tonbridge. It’s a park that’s used a lot by dog walkers and people out exercising. And this body was found by a man actually out walking his dog. He found the body laid down, clearly deceased, and then rang the police. Whilst on the phone to the police, still talking to the operator, he had carried on walking and he come to the car park. And as luck would have it, at that moment in time, uh, a uniform patrol from Tonbridge Police Station were actually just patrolling, had driven into the car park, and he managed to wave them down at the same time. When a body is found in the woods, there are potential significant problems that we can face, particularly due to the environment that the body is found in. And depending on that, that can seriously affect decomposition rates, which in turn affects our ability to identify that individual. Well, how we go about tackling the early stages of a crime investigation… obviously scene preservation is one of the most important. Um, when we go to the scene, it has to be preserved. We have to formulate a common, um, approach path so we don’t tread on evidence as we’re going in. Once, uh, myself and my colleagues had come back up the path, we got to the common approach path and we went in. And, and the body was some 20, 30 feet inside the undergrowth, and it was absolutely abundantly clear there had been no effort made to conceal this body. The body had horrific injuries to the head and face. It was a female wearing a black puffer jacket, and she was bound hand and feet with gaffer tape. Having secured as much evidence that we can at the time, there would have been some very, very fast, uh, actions, you know, to find out whether there’s any identification, anything that we could would help us identify that body, uh, immediately. Because, uh, in any circumstance, there’s a family out there, and the last thing you want, uh, to happen is for a family to find out that their loved one, uh, is deceased from the radio or the television. There’s no signs of, uh, identification at all. So the… the lady’s head, neck, and face were badly mutilated. We looked at her and we thought she was perhaps of mixed race or perhaps North African descent. She had a, um, a distinctive tattoo on her shoulder of a North American native woman. Um, but other than that, there was no identification at all.”

With an unidentified victim, identification does become increasingly more difficult.

“A biological profile really is just that. It’s not putting a name necessarily to a face. During the course of the examination of remains by a forensic anthropologist, they’d start with trying to estimate the age of the individual at death. They’d look at the sex of the individual, perhaps look at the stature and ancestry of that person, and begin to really build that picture of what that individual might have been, who they were in life.”

With nothing to go on to identify their victim, the police launched a murder inquiry.

“Her injuries are catastrophic, so, and clearly would have bled quite profusely. I look at the scene initially, and it is absolutely apparent that this is not the murder site. It’s clearly a dump site. Uh, there was no blood around, which you would have expected if she’d been killed here. And, uh, there was no attempt to cover her up. There was absolutely nothing like that. It was just almost a panicked dump site. Um, want to get rid of the body, let’s get rid of it. And it was just left in the undergrowth, and as though the… the people who had done that just wanted to dump it and go.”

Forensically, this crime was particularly complicated.

“We knew that there was a disposal site, a murder site, and that the body had been moved, which complicated things. In addition, the injuries that the victim sustained meant that we couldn’t use information like dental records because of the extent of the damage to her face, and there was no DNA evidence available, and there was no fingerprint evidence available either.”

The injuries the victim sustained were horrific. But what detectives discovered next shocked even the most experienced investigators.

“So other than the injuries, uh, and the fact that the… of the clothing, the black puffer jacket, and the fact that the victim was clearly bound hands and feet, it was clearly apparent that she was very heavily pregnant. Well, at the postmortem investigation, um, and I would say being of a, you know, a youngish lady carrying an almost full-term baby was probably one of the saddest things I’d ever experienced in my career as a police officer. Something that’s really upsetting about this case is that an unborn child died, a child that could have lived. It was 34 weeks gestation, so we know that that child likely would have lived if it had been born. So, in my experience, um, all murders are… are horrendous. The one thing that stood out for me in this was you look at this poor woman, uh, who has been treated, you know, horrendously, bound and, and, and, and battered…”

“…with conspiracy to murder instead of murder, and this led to believe that, uh, uh, we were slightly concerned. Did this mean that because the police were unable to prove which one of them had inflicted the wounds, uh, that this might damage the case? I think the motive… I’ve given it a lot of thought and my view was that, uh, Cullinan was… was very angry. His wife was clearly pregnant by another man. Um, he claimed he hadn’t slept with her for over a year. We proved, in fact, that he wasn’t the father through forensic science. Uh, and we never established who he was, but, um, he was angry at that and he wanted rid of her. And the only way he could do that, um, was obviously to get somebody else to do it for him. He didn’t want to do the dirty work himself.”

This unusual court case began to make national headlines, and it led to what prosecution loves to see, and that is the three main defendants blaming each other.

“It’s known as a cutthroat defense, in which, uh, they go into… they they tell the police, ‘It wasn’t me, it was him.’ And each one of them managed to blame the other one, which is great to watch, uh, if you’re a prosecutor. And from the jury’s point of view, they are presented with a case of the defense trying to say, ‘Well, my man’s telling the truth,’ um, and the others are lying. And the upshot in many, many cases is that they’re all lying, and the jury sees straight through it straight away.”

The jury found David Cullinan, Gordon Hoppy, and Michael Stapley guilty of conspiracy to murder, and found Hoppy and Stapley guilty of obstructing the coroner. On the 6th of March 2003, they were sentenced to life imprisonment. Cullinan and Hoppy received a tariff of 34 years, and Stapley of 32, and, uh, they were sent to jail.

“Well, obviously after an 11-month investigation, the whole inquiry team were absolutely delighted.”

Despite Hoppy’s allegations against Stapley, detectives never really proved exactly what happened to Samira Cullinan. It was never made clear who had cast the fatal blow.

“It was one of those occasions when it would… it was a joint enterprise, and that was the prosecution’s case. They were all in it together. In my opinion, David Cullinan was a ruthless individual, um, who had no… showed no regard at all for the mother of his young son or the nearly full-term baby that she was carrying. I mean, the… the injuries inflicted to Samira, whether it be by David Cullinan, or Gordon Hoppy, or Michael Stapley, I mean, the way that girl would have suffered is absolutely horrendous. It was a day’s work for them, and that’s how they see human life. And then when we know that actually they went on to murder a woman who was pregnant, it shows that they are even more animal-like and psychopathic in their behavior because they can look at a woman who’s pregnant and kill her in cold blood. The fact that Cullinan planned such an awful murder of his wife, his wife who was carrying a child, says to me that he is incredibly callous and incredibly devious. The fact that he could go home and look into the eyes of his son, knowing that he had murdered his mother and what would have been his brother, is just horrific to consider. Cullinan was… was a cold-hearted individual to do that. Uh, yeah, the… the child wasn’t his, but that was, uh, that’s irrelevant. You know, it’s an innocent life he’s taken from the mother and her unborn child for no reason at all other than jealousy and spite. That’s my view. Uh, and, um, Hoppy and Stapley, why did they do it? What was their motive? It’s got to be greed. Can only be greed. ‘I’m going to be paid, uh, a lot of money in the… a lot of money nowadays as well, you know, um, to take this risk and I’m going to take it.’”