Guilty verdict in murder retrial

Friday 06 November 2020

A jury has found a construction worker guilty of murdering his ‘secret lover’, then leaving her body in a quiet bay in the middle of the night before abandoning her car on to a beach to make it look like suicide.

At the end of a week-long trial, Jamie Lee Warn (57) was found guilty of one count of murder and two counts of perverting the course of justice, by lying to police investigating 37-year-old Zsuzsanna Besenyei’s disappearance.

The body of the Hungarian national was discovered by a dog walker in the shallow water at Le Pulec, commonly known as ‘Stinky Bay’, in May 2018.

Warn was guilty of all three charges by a jury in March 2019 but that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in July of that year due to “irregularities” with the original proceedings which, for legal reasons, cannot be made public.

Now Warn has been found guilty of murder for the second time. The 12-person jury heard that he had killed Miss Besenyei in his First Tower flat on the evening of Thursday 10 May.

He left the flat to buy hand sanitiser at a nearby shop then collected her Ford Fiesta from a nearby car park. He drove back to his flat, put her body in the boot and returned to the car park, where Miss Besenyei’s body remained for three days.

In the early hours of Monday 14 May, Warn drove the car to Le Pulec in St Ouen, where he dumped the body. He then drove via St Aubin to La Haule slip, and onto the beach. 

He left the car at the water’s edge on a rising tide with the windows open to make it look as though Miss Besenyei had abandoned the car before walking into the sea.

Having kept her phone, he had tried to cover his tracks by sending messages between his phone and hers, giving the impression that she was still alive over the weekend. 

Miss Besenyei’s body was discovered two days later, on 16 May.

With no direct evidence of how, when or where she died, the prosecution relied on circumstantial evidence to piece together what happened.

Using CCTV footage and identifying which mast Warn and his victim’s mobile phones were communicating with, they established their movements and a timeline of events.

Internet searches that Warn made on his phone also gave an indication of what he was thinking. Searches for tide times and ‘how to turn off location services on an iPhone’ gave away his intentions, said the prosecution.

A figure was also caught on various CCTV cameras at key times: buying paycards and putting them in Miss Besenyei’s Ford Fiesta while her body was in the boot; walking into town to buying cleaning products which the Prosecution said was to clean up his flat after her murder; and returning home via Paris Lane in the small hours of Monday 14 May, after he had first dumped her body and then the car.

Some images were grainy but the man often wore a grey hoodie and carried a camouflaged rucksack, which the jury was sure was Warn.

Warn was remanded in custody until Friday 13 November, when a date will be set for sentencing by the Superior Number of the Royal Court.

After the verdict was given this morning, Detective Inspector Craig Jackson, who led the initial investigation said: “From the beginning this was a long and complex investigation. We are pleased that the court has come to this conclusion after reviewing the evidence.

"In our minds there was no question, but we respected the court’s decision to retry this case.  We now hope that Zsuzsanna’s family can move on with their lives and they gain some form of closure from this verdict."