It’s 32 years since UK Cypriot Aristos Constantine was murdered on New years day morning and the murder has not been solved.
With the murder of Yianoulla Yianni in 1982 solved 35 years later last year there is still a chance that the Aristos murderer can still be found.
On New Year’s Day in 1985, police were called to a north London mansion, where the body of a millionaire fashion tycoon lay in a pool of blood as his wife sobbed hysterically nearby.
When it later emerged that Aristos Constantinou, the 40-year-old head of his family’s clothing empire, had been shot with seven silver-coloured bullets from a rare, Italian-made pocket-sized pistol, one of Britain’s most notorious murder mysteries was born.
The killer has never been identified, despite a succession of police investigations that divided the Cypriot family, turned Constantinou’s wife, Elena, into a suspect, and ended up pitting his sons against one another.
Thirty-two years later, after a Sunday Times investigation and the emergence of new evidence, a police team led by Britain’s most senior murder detective is re-examining a case that the victim’s brother, Achilleas Constantinou, has been battling to keep in the public eye ever since his sister telephoned to tell him: “Our brother. He’s dead.”
At first, it had seemed a simple case of a burglary gone wrong. Police found that a safe in the mansion in The Bishops Avenue, near Hampstead Heath, had been opened. Elena, who was 14 years younger than her husband, said up to £50,000 was missing. The glass in the back door had been smashed, a possible point of entry for intruders.
Yet there were details at the crime scene that raised questions. Forensic scientists believed that the back door might already have been open when a glass pane was smashed. There were old unidentified fingerprints in the house, but no fresh ones, and no smudge marks from gloves found by police.
The next surprise came from the pathologist, who established that the bullets that killed Aristos were from an Italian Fiocchi pistol that went out of production in 1961. The gun itself was less than 4in long — an uncommon weapon for London burglars.
As the investigation unfolded, inconsistencies arose in Elena’s account of her actions that evening, and the media dubbed her a “merry widow” when she married a Florida lifeguard less than eight months after her husband’s death. Yet the superintendent leading the investigation told an inquest in February 1986 that he had ruled out Elena as a suspect. She has always denied involvement in the murder.
The case went quiet until 1992, when a second police investigation was launched, casting doubt on previous conclusions.
The new investigation found a growing number of family and friends who claimed to have seen Aristos and Elena with a small pistol similar to the murder weapon — though Elena has always denied any knowledge of the gun.
Maureen Franklin, a friend of Aristos and Elena, said that one night she and her husband were at dinner with the couple, when Aristos took out a small pistol he described as a “ladies’ gun”. A former housekeeper, Karyn Niven, told police she had seen the gun in a safe in the couple’s bedroom.
Detectives suspected that the couple’s relationship had been under severe strain. Several witnesses claimed Elena was having an affair with an employee of Aristos, which the lover allegedly admitted to police.
Aristos had allegedly told a family member that he knew about the affair, had gathered evidence and was planning to change his will, although no will was found after his death. Elena is said to have told friends she feared Aristos would take their children away from her.
Detectives investigated the allegations as a potential motive for murder. In 1997 they recommended Elena be prosecuted, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was not enough evidence.
As the years passed and the case remained unsolved, family divisions widened. Achilleas, his sister and his mother campaigned for the Met to reinvestigate the case, insisting that Elena still had questions to answer.
Speaking from New York last week, the couple’s eldest son, Aristos Jr, described continuing investigations as an “obsessive witch-hunt against my mother, which is based almost exclusively on hearsay evidence and questionable witness statements”.
Aristos Jr said the allegations of an affair were “baseless and slanderous . . . contrary to what some far-removed third parties may have said, I can tell you that there was no tension or ugliness between my parents”.
The couple’s three sons have been estranged from their father’s family since 1985, apart from a brief reconciliation in 2013, when the youngest, Anthony, moved back to the UK.
There he made a startling confession. Anthony claimed, in a signed affidavit seen by The Sunday Times, that he and his siblings were in the house with Elena’s parents during the murder, not at Elena’s parents’ home, as the family previously said. “I heard my father shouting and my mother screeching at him . . . I then distinctly remember hearing several bangs, which I now believe were gunshots,” Anthony wrote.
Elena and Aristos Jr insist the account is false. “As the eldest, I can verify that both my brothers and myself were not in the house that night,” Aristos Jr said. “Given that he was three years old at the time, any statement to the contrary made by Anthony cannot be given any credence.”
Further doubt was cast on Anthony’s testimony when he was jailed last month for a sexual assault at his London financial firm, after destroying his briefly rebuilt relationship with his father’s family two years earlier. However, police have received statements from new witnesses who claim to have seen Aristos Sr and Elena with a small gun: 14 witnesses have now provided evidence of the weapon.
“The Metropolitan police service remains committed to solving the murder of Aristos Constantinou,” a Met spokesman said. “With this passage of time and advances in scientific evidential techniques, we remain committed to securing justice for the family of Aristos Constantinou and bringing those involved to account.”
Times
Additional reporting: Richard Osho