Ancell Marshall had to bow his head to dodge a barrage of stones pelted at him as a police escort rushed him through a baying mob and into a waiting car outside the Old Bailey.
Scenes of such fury are usually reserved for the suspects of the most repugnant violent crimes, but Mr Marshall was neither. In fact, he was a victim.
The happily married driving instructor had been in Britain’s highest criminal court for the sentencing of Rene Sampat, a woman he would later describe as ‘evil’ and the ‘devil’.
Sampat had become infatuated with Mr Marshall and, after he spurned her advances, she recruited her teenage son Roy Aziz to carry out a Fatal Attraction-style murder of his wife Janet.
The mother-of-four, 36, was stabbed 15 times, battered and strangled at home in north London by Aziz, then 16, the eldest of Sampat’s five children from her first marriage.
Both mother and son were eventually jailed over the murder, with Sampat screaming: ‘I am not guilty of murder, I am guilty of love,’ as guards led her away to begin a life sentence.
But not before Mr Marshall had been wrongly charged with her brutal murder and held in custody for two months, the trauma of which would haunt him until the day he died 35 years later aged 69.
Tragically some twisted individuals, such as the mob outside the Old Bailey in 1994, still believe Mr Marshall was the true murderer of Sunday school teacher Janet.
But now, The Crime Desk can reveal disturbing allegations about the botched Scotland Yard investigation that saw Mr Marshall wrongfully arrested.
Pictured: Rene Sampat and her son Roy Aziz who jailed for the Fatal Attraction-style murder of Janet Marshall in April 1991
Pictured: Aziz outside the Old Bailey in 1994 where he was jailed over the murder of Ms Marshall
Pictured: Ancell Marshall, Janet’s husband, was wrongly accused of the murder and lived with the trauma of the ordeal his whole life
Mr Marshall’s murder trial was over before it began. In February 1992, Judge Bruce Laughland dismissed the case, ruling there was ‘not a scrap of evidence’ against him and ordering an inquiry.
Gavin Robertson, then a high-flying Metropolitan Police detective superintendent, had been handpicked to re-investigate Janet’s death and soon uncovered the dark truth – ‘evil and manipulative’ Sampat was hiding in plain sight.
Mr Robertson suggests his predecessor ‘jumped the gun’ charging Mr Marshall in order to maintain a 100 per cent record of solving murders before retiring.
‘When I read the case papers, there just wasn’t any evidence,’ he said. ‘It clearly wasn’t Ancell and the blame lay elsewhere.
Hi, I’m Alex Matthews, Editor of The Crime Desk.
In 2014, we revealed the bombshell evidence identifying Aaron Kosminski as the fabled Jack the Ripper. Now, we can reveal his astonishing connection to the Freemasons and claims this motivated his killings and protected him from life in prison.
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‘The guy I replaced, they used to call him “Mr Murder.” He liked to say there was no murder he’d never solved. He was given the job to investigate before I got there and before he retired. I think he jumped the gun and charged Ancell with murder. It was his last one before retiring.’
Responding to Mr Robertson’s claims, Mr Marshall’s second wife Delphine has urged Scotland Yard, the CPS and the police watchdog to investigate further, adding: ‘I cannot stand injustice.
‘It’s sad and painful that a human being would use another person’s life to achieve their goal. Some people don’t mind who they trample on to get somewhere. No matter how you mask the truth, it always comes out.’
Mr Marshall, then 35, had two businesses – a driving school and a Caribbean takeaway food shop – and was a home missionary at his Seventh Day Baptist church. On April 29, 1991 he arrived home from the takeaway to discover his wife of 17 years dead, slumped on their sofa in their home on St Loys Road in Tottenham, north London.
The attack had been so ferocious that one of the two knives used had cleaved as it was repeatedly plunged into her body. Janet’s hands were cut to ribbons as she raised them to protect herself.
Mr Marshall noticed a television was blaring loudly in an attempt to muffle the noise from their daughters who were asleep upstairs.
Detectives wrongly arrested the grieving widower. While in custody Mr Marshall was refused permission to attend Janet’s funeral because of the ‘security risk’.
Following Mr Marshall’s acquittal, detectives began looking closer into Sampat, who had been a prosecution witness in the first trial. Since 1985 she had been unsuccessfully trying to win Mr Marshall’s affections after enrolling for lessons with his driving school in Stoke Newington.
She would touch his leg and hand as they drove along. On one occasion the car almost lost control as a result. Mr Marshall arranged for Sampat to have another instructor after it became clear she was attracted to him.
Sampat showered gifts on Mr Marshall’s children, decorated the family’s home, organised a birthday celebration for Janet and became a trusted babysitter.
Unable to lure him into an affair, Sampat converted from Islam to Christianity to join the missionary’s church. Having got nowhere, she claimed three times that she had been raped so the home missionary would counsel her.
The second time, Mr Marshall arrived at Sampat’s terraced house in nearby Seaford Road to find her half-dressed. She kissed him on the lips and begged him to make love to her. He refused.
Another incident saw police called when Sampat claimed she’d been raped at knifepoint by a mystery intruder who climbed through a window and tied her up.
When an officer warned her children could be taken away, she broke down in tears and attempted to stab herself with a kitchen knife claiming ‘nobody believed her story.’ Sampat lied to friends she had aborted Mr Marshall’s baby.
Pictured: Sunday school teacher Janet Marshall who was murderd by Rene Sampat and her son Roy Aziz
Aziz, pictured after the murder, told The Crime Desk that he did not murder Mrs Marshall but was there at the time
What happened next could have been a scene from Fatal Attraction, the 1987 psychosexual thriller, where Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) cooks a pet rabbit on a stove that belonged to her ex-lover Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) when he refuses to leave his wife.
Prosecutor Sir Nigel Sweeney told jurors Sampat resorted to a poison pen letter campaign designed to split the Marshalls up before plotting murder by proxy ‘so that Ancell could be hers’.
One cruel handwritten note informed Mr Marshall his wife was ‘the most ugly thing on St Loys Road from top to bottom’. Another claimed Janet was pregnant by a man named Erek, with whom she had been having an affair and he’d left a condom in their toilet.
A box of dead roses was delivered to the Marshalls’ home and a second parcel contained a doll with its arms and legs ripped off. The church they all attended was daubed with graffiti about Janet.
A third letter said Janet preferred her lover to Mr Marshall, adding: ‘When you touch her body she say [sic] it feels like a snake. Your breath stink. You cannot kiss good.’
Chillingly, a fourth suggested Janet would die on the first birthday of the couple’s youngest daughter in May 1991. That prophecy was brutally fulfilled just a few days before.
In police interviews, Sampat claimed Mr Marshall killed his wife while Aziz pointed the finger at an older friend. Both were convicted of murder in February 1994. Sampat, 37, was sentenced to life imprisonment and her son, then 18, detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
After the verdicts, Mr Marshall continued to work in his local community and at foodbanks, dedicating a total 50 years’ service, until the stress of church life became too much, said his widow Delphine, a former teacher who now lives in Hackney, east London.
She met him while teaching his daughters in the Nineties. Delphine ignored what she’d heard about his past. They fell in love and had two girls of their own during 29 years of marriage until he passed away suddenly from lymphoma, a rare and aggressive blood cancer, in November.
‘He was a fantastic husband and father,’ adds Delphine who said he never forgot Janet, whom he wed when they were teenagers. ‘He was the most selfless person, always doing things for other people and God. ‘Everybody’s problem was his.’
Delphine, 60, said: ‘I don’t know what to do other than cry. [The murder] affected Ancell the totality of his life.
‘At his church, there was this guy saying, “He’s a murderer, he killed his wife”. Other people said things but Ancell knew his conscience was clear.
‘He was a very strong man. However, there were times when he’d break down and pray. Faith gave Ancell the courage to carry on.’
After her release, Sampat moved to Spain where she keeps a low profile, according to Aziz when approached by The Crime Desk.
The now 51-year-old understandably disowned his mother. He now runs a successful mobile phone screen repair business from a shed in the back garden of his detached new-build home in a quiet cul-de-sac near Diss, Norfolk.
Speaking at his workshop, Aziz said: ‘I don’t mind telling people what happened, but at the end of the day there was an innocent lady that died.
Pictured: Mr Marshall’s second wife Delphine described him as a ‘fantastic husband and father’
‘So, it’s not right to try and bring all that back up because the person who actually did it is still out there.
‘That doesn’t mean to say I’m not guilty. I was there, I was present, but I didn’t do it. But I didn’t open me gob and say, ‘He did it.’ Because, as a boy, you don’t grass on your mates.’ Of Sampat he added: ‘I don’t talk to her. I don’t have nothing to do with her.’
In Jean Ritchie’s 1994 book Stalkers, Mr Marshall describes his nemesis as ‘the woman from hell’ who ‘by hook or by crook was going to try to possess me’.
‘She was obsessed, but I believe she was something else besides: she was evil,’ he said. ‘The woman is wicked, she was taken in by the devil.’
Ironically, in later life Mr Marshall’s favourite TV show became the BBC crime series Death in Paradise because he liked to see justice prevail, Delphine says.
It was something Mr Robertson, who joined the Met in 1966, achieved many times during his near 32-year career.
After more than a decade in uniform, he transferred to the criminal investigation department, fraud and regional crime squads and went on to become staff officer to the then deputy assistant commissioner at a time, Mr Robertson says, when the force was ‘synonymous with policing excellence around the world’.
In 1997, he put Charlie Kray, elder brother of gangland twins Reggie and Ronnie, behind bars for 12 years after an undercover sting caught him conspiring to smuggle £39million worth of cocaine into the country. In another notable success from 1990, former Met detective sergeant Rodney Whitchelo got 17 years for blackmail after spiking jars of Heinz baby food.
Despite seeing the very worst of human nature, Mr Robertson, 79, lies awake in bed thinking of the real possibility of Mr Marshall languishing in jail for a murder he didn’t commit.
He remembers local newspapers ‘quite rightly’ sparking public debate about Mr Marshall’s rough justice. ‘It’s so awful it doesn’t bear thinking about,’ he told us.
‘I was really proud to have done the reinvestigation – it righted a wrong. It’s not very often you get the chance to do that.’ He admits: ‘I didn’t think we’d have a hope in hell of convicting Sampat.
‘But from the start of my investigation, the whole thing about her was weird and unexplained. Something was off and didn’t fit. It was like a copper’s gut feeling and we pursued it. Pursuing Sampat was the answer.
‘It was well-known she was after Ancell and had made advances for some unknown and twisted reason. He’d rebuffed that.’
Mr Robertson said ‘you didn’t need to be a brain surgeon’ to realise Sampat was the prime suspect because, as he quickly concluded, ‘all of sudden, the thing that stood in her way, the wife, was conveniently off the scene.
‘What sort of woman could manipulate her own teenage son to go and kill another woman purely and simply because she wanted the husband?’ asks Mr Robertson.
‘The power and influence she had – that’s frightening. She was not going to take no for an answer, so she killed the wife. Janet’s family were really devastated. It was a good marriage. Ancell had done nothing wrong.
‘He really was a lovely guy. The tragedy was he was locked up and couldn’t even attend his own wife’s funeral.’
He concluded: ‘I remember saying to Ancell before the trial of Sampat: ‘I can’t guarantee anything, but we’ll give it our best shot’.
‘When I met him after her conviction, he quoted those words back to me and stated: “I’m really pleased you did.”‘
Mr Robertson now runs Mr Robertson & Co, an Essex-based fraud investigation, claims handling and surveillance firm.
But says of his previous role: ‘There’s nothing distinguished about a job you enjoy. I’ve had a great life. The Met Police were really good to me.’
In court Graham Boal, defending Sampat, told Judge Richard Lowry: ‘You may well agree that all the indications point to a woman who was obsessed to a point which can properly be described as mentally abnormal.’
He added: ‘You may think that you are not dealing with a normal person. In particular, you may think that this has been realistically described as a fatal attraction and you may think it could also be described as a fatal obsession.’
Jonathan Goldberg, defending Aziz, told the court he was ‘sucked in by a manipulative mother to a quarrel which was not of his making’.
Judge Lowry, concurred with Mr Marshall’s trial judge Mr Laughland, and wrote to the authorities demanding a further investigation ‘into the first inquiry which led to an innocent man being charged with the murder of his wife’.
‘I think criticism is to be made of certain persons in that regard,’ he said.
Journalist Guy Toyn, co-owner of news agency Court News UK, has covered the Old Bailey for more than three decades.
‘In all my career, I’ve never known a case where it was such a shambles,’ he says. ‘Not only had police initially got the wrong person, but the real killer was there before their eyes, in the same room.
‘Ancell Marshall had been a mild-mannered, hardworking, churchgoing driving instructor and family man. Of all those I’ve seen in dock, you looked at him and wondered what on earth he was doing there.’
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