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It is a story of ego on the part of a violent serial criminal, bravery from witnesses, determination from prosecuting authorities, and a landmark change in the law.
Yesterday, justice was served after 32 years.
Rickie Tregaskis (53) was sentenced by the Royal Court to a minimum term of 20 years in prison for murdering Barbara Griffin, who was 59 at the time of her death, and the attempted murder of her 84-year-old aunt, Emma Anton, on 2 August 1990 when he was 21 years old.
Tregaskis was found guilty of both charges by a jury in May following an eight-day retrial.
When an individual is sentenced for a crime in Jersey, the Crown must present a 'statement of facts' to the court - a full account of the individual and their offending, including possible motives and pre-meditation. It is this that forms the main substance of the court reports islanders read in the media.
Given the landmark significance of this case, Express has taken the step of sharing it in full - not only to give islanders a glimpse of the justice system in action, but to shine a light on the courage and moral fortitude of the witnesses who eventually came forward and the hard work and perseverance of the prosecuting authorities in finally bringing Tregaskis to justice, closing the book on a case which has haunted the families of Barbara Griffin and Emma Anton for so long.
Some witnesses names have been removed and the account has been split into parts for ease of reading.
Here are the words spoken by Solicitor General Matthew Jowitt in court yesterday:
"The Defendant is to be sentenced for the murder 32 years ago of Barbara Griffin and the attempted murder of her elderly aunt, having been convicted by a jury on 6th May last following an eight-day trial.
The Defendant is 53 years old. He has 139 criminal convictions dating back to 1982, including a previous conviction for murder, and a number of offences of serious violence.
His criminal record indicates that he possesses a propensity for extreme, explosive and lethal violence.
The facts of the instant matters established at trial are these:
Barbara Griffin was 59 years' old when she died. She was killed by a single stab wound through the heart inflicted by this Defendant with a knife after he broke into her home in the early hours of the morning.
Moments before he inflicted that fatal wound on Barbara Griffin, the Defendant had pounced on Barbara's 84 -year-old aunt, Emma Anton, as she lay dozing in her bed.
Miss Anton, who lived in Paris, was visiting her niece at the time. The Defendant's initial attack on Miss Anton was a frenzied one.
He stabbed her at least six times and only desisted when Barbara, in response to her aunt's screams, tried to come to her rescue; an act for which Barbara paid with her life.
In August 1990, when these crimes were committed, Barbara Griffin was a single woman.
A divorcee with three adult children, hers appears to have been a simple and unassuming life. She worked at Les Riches supermarket.
But for occasional visits from family, she lived alone with her cat at Flat 130, a ground floor flat, on the eastern side of the Le Geyt Flats Estate in St Saviour, overlooking Le Geyt Road.
The Defendant at that time also lived on the Le Geyt Flats Estate – on the western side – with his grandmother Violet at Flat 45, a second floor flat.
He sits in a wheelchair now, reduced by chronic illness and the passage of years. But in August 1990, as a 21-year-old, he was lithe, fit and healthy. He was also feckless and lawless.
Unemployed, he and his associates lived lives of petty crime – burglary, theft, joyriding and violence.
As a witness who knew him at that time told the jury: "He wasn't a nice person. You would not muck about with him."
The crimes took place at around 2am on 2nd August 1990.
The previous day, 1st August, at around 2.20pm the Defendant purchased a Hitler Youth Knife from a shop called The Antique Market in Union Street, St. Helier.
He paid £35 for it. He was sufficiently proud of his purchase that he showed it off to a number of people later that day, including to his friend and associate Dean Marie – someone who was to go on to play a pivotal role in this case.
That evening, 1st August, the Defendant went out in town with Dean Marie and a woman called Nuala Accerelli. Nuala, now deceased, also lived on the Le Geyt Flats estate at Flat 70 – a ground floor flat the front windows of which looked out on and directly down the street in which the Defendant and his grandmother lived.
Dean Marie was staying at Nuala's flat at the time.
The three of them went to a bar together. At some point later that evening Nuala and Dean Marie parted company with the Defendant and went home to Nuala's flat.
The Defendant was later to claim that he went on to a couple of nightclubs before returning to the Le Geyt Flats Estate in the early hours of 2nd August.
The Crown cannot confirm the veracity of that account. But what was clear on the evidence the jury heard was that at around 1.30am-1.40am – so 20 minutes or so before the attacks on Barbara and Emma - the Defendant appeared outside the lounge window of Nuala's flat, at the top of the road where he was living.
It was a very hot summer's night, and Nuala's lounge window was open. Dean Marie and she were in the lounge when the Defendant appeared at the window. The jury heard evidence that the Defendant had a conversation with Dean Marie.
The Defendant told Dean Marie he needed money and asked him if he wanted to join him on a burglary.
Dean Marie, who was employed at the time and felt he was getting his life back on track, declined the invitation. But he agreed to lend the Defendant his scanner – a device for listening in to police radio traffic. The Defendant took the scanner and left.
Parts of that conversation were overhead by a neighbour who lived in the flat two floors above Nuala's flat. Paul Dransfield was trying to sleep. He heard snippets of conversation including a young, male voice with a Jersey accent.
That voice, said the Crown at trial, was the Defendant's voice.
He heard that voice saying: "Whatever I get I'll share with you." He said he heard reference to a scanner too.
The jury heard evidence from another Le Geyt Flats resident who lived in the block of flats opposite the Defendant.
This resident was on the street outside her block at about 12.35am when she looked to her left and, on the pavement outside Nuala's flat, she told the jury she saw the Defendant – whom she knew – walking from right to left as she viewed it, heading north toward a cut-through which led into the centre of the estate and gave access to the blocks of flats on either side of Le Geyt Road – including the block in which Barbara Griffin lived in flat 130.
It was the Crown's case that the Defendant had just left the conversation with Dean Marie and was heading towards the cut-through enroute to the western side of the estate and to Barbara Griffin's flat.
The central part of the estate was poorly lit and mostly in darkness. The Defendant made his way through that area and then across Le Geyt Road. He found his way into the dark yard behind the block where Barbara lived.
Her flat had three rear windows which looked out into that yard. The central of the three windows was the bathroom and toilet window. It seems likely that Barbara had left the transom window of the bathroom open. Sufficiently open for someone to be able to climb up using the soil pipe beneath the window as a step up, and the overflow pipe at the top left of the window as a handle to pull themselves up by. Once on the window ledge a person might simply slide their left arm through the transom window and open the main window from within.
That, the Crown said at trial, was the most likely course which this Defendant took to get into Barbara's flat.
Before climbing through the window, however, the Defendant took steps to minimise the risk that he might leave any evidence – be that fingerprints or shoe prints – which might later incriminate him. He was later to refer to it as 'not leaving any forensics.'
He undressed. In the dark yard at the rear of Barbara's flat he stripped to his underpants and socks. He took a further precaution: he had brought a second pair of socks with him, and these he placed over his hands.
The jury heard evidence from one of his erstwhile criminal associates that in those days – and bear in mind that in 1990 DNA profiling as an investigative tool was still in its infancy – their modus operandi was to use a second pair of socks to cover their hands. The reason they did that rather than wear gloves was that they were so well known to the police that if they had been stopped in summertime with a pair of gloves on their person the likelihood was they would be arrested for going equipped. Thus a second paid of socks was worn over the feet until the time came to place them over their hands.
Having prepared himself in this way, and leaving his clothes outside in the yard, the Defendant climbed into Barbara's flat.
The jury heard what happened next from the witness statement of Emma Anton, who was asleep in the front bedroom, the room immediately next door to the lounge with a window looking out on Le Geyt Road. Miss Anton survived the horrific events of that night and went on to live to the grand age of 102. Her statement was read to the jury.
In that statement she described what happened after she had dozed off in bed in graphic terms:
I was lying on my right side facing the window. At some point I heard what I can only describe as a scuffling sound, to start with I thought it was the cat ... it went on longer than it should and I began to think 'was it the cat or not.'
The next thing I knew I felt a weight on my bed and on my legs... I knew that the weight was too heavy for the cat. I pulled myself up and saw the figure of a man, he was half on my bed one leg on the bed and one off, he was facing me, I could tell by his physique that it was a man.
I shouted 'Barbara' and at the same time I was trying to push him away, he pushed his left hand across my mouth to stifle my shout and he was on my legs so that I could not move. The force of his hand on my mouth was pushing me back but I was hitting out and pushing him and trying to get away to the side. I could tell he was trying to get his other leg over me and I was struggling to get him off. The force with which he was pushing my face was pushing my teeth into the inside of my mouth. When I managed to get my mouth from his hand I was just screaming 'Barbara Barbara'.
I thought he was trying to get on me and rape me. At one moment I managed to pull my knees up and the next thing I knew I had slipped or moved off the bed. During the struggle on the bed he was holding me with his left hand but he was hitting or punching me on my left arm and left side. He did this several times. My face at this time was hurting more than the side, it was a very violent attack on me and I felt he was trying to silence me but I kept trying to push him away. I was struggling to get him off me by lashing out frantically, because Barbara wasn't coming to my aid. I kept screaming when I could – I was becoming very frantic and in my mind I thought: "He's going to kill me."
Having been pushed or slipping off the bed this man was still hitting or punching me on my left side and arm and in my back, it was done with some force, I do not know how many times he hit me but it was several.
Eventually the Defendant's attack on Miss Anton stopped. The Crown said at trial that it only stopped because Barbara, who had been sleeping in the rear bedroom next to the bathroom, appeared – otherwise the Defendant's murderous purpose to kill his first target, Miss Anton, would have continued. Barbara appeared brandishing what Miss Anton thought looked like a broomstick, but which was more probably a pool cue case which the next day the police found propped up against the hallway wall. Barbara now became the target of the Defendant's murderous violence.
By the time Miss Anton realised that Barbara had finally come to her aid, the fatal stab wound to Barbara must already have been inflicted by the Defendant given what Miss Anton described next:
I found myself on the floor on my hands and knees and pulled myself up using the bed and walked around the bed to the door. I then saw Barbara halfway along the corridor between the kitchen and bathroom facing me, she had on her long white nightdress and she had something in her left hand which looked like a broomstick, she indicated towards the bathroom or kitchen with her right hand and said: "He came through here."
I said: "Call the ambulance and police."
Barbara was really strange, she stood there like a statue, staring at me, she did not move, it was as if she had been shocked, in a trance or daze, she didn't move towards me as I thought she might, she never screamed or said a word. I realised when I got up from the floor that I was bleeding badly. I felt very weak and I felt in some pain and had to lie down – I felt I was going to fall down. I wanted to go to Barbara, because she looked glassy eyed as if she'd had a shock but I felt so weak I just had to lie down.
The last thing I remember hearing was the phone being picked up and Barbara saying a few words very slowly. I don't know what she said. I kept shouting 'Barbara come to me.' 'Barbara come to me.'
She didn't come and I kept thinking she's chasing him, then the ambulance and police arrived. I heard someone knocking on the bedroom window and I said I couldn't let them in. Once they were in I heard them say 'there's another one here.' It was then I realised that Barbara was down. The next thing I remember was the hospital.
Although there was a great deal of blood around the flat, only a limited number of samples were tested. From those it is possible to say that the second to last act Barbara performed, whilst bleeding, was to shut the bathroom window through which the Defendant had most likely entered.
The very last thing she did was to make a 999 call. That call was logged at 2.04am. Barbara was able to say nothing beyond requesting police and ambulance – her address was traced from her phone number and paramedics were dispatched. She never spoke again. When ambulance crews arrived and gained access to the flat they found her slumped on the lounge floor with the phone, off the hook, lying beneath her.
The Crown cannot say with certainty how the Defendant left the flat. It could have been via the bathroom window.
"Still naked but for his underwear and the socks on his feet, he made good his escape"
It could have been through Barbara's front door, out into the communal hallway for that block and then through the back door into the dark yard at the rear. We do not know he got out.
We do know he got out into the rear yard, where he picked up his clothes, gathered into a bundle and, still naked but for his underwear and the socks on his feet, he made good his escape.
He was seen by a number of neighbours who lived in the block of flats immediately facing Barbara's block on the other side of Le Gey Road. At the time witness statements were taken from those neighbours, either later that same day or within a few days, none of them claimed to have recognised the man they saw. But all gave very similar descriptions.
It was a hot night. Windows were open and people were struggling to sleep. They heard Miss Anton's blood curdling screams.
One of them heard a voice screaming 'murder, murder.' They went to their windows to see what the commotion was. Within moments, all describe seeing a man, apparently naked or almost naked, emerging from the alleyway immediately to the right, as they saw it, of the block where Barbara lived. The figure appeared briefly in the light from the streetlamp on the corner. He crossed Le Geyt Road, either at a fast walk or a trot, and disappeared into the opposite alleyway immediately to the right of their block.
They described him in similar terms: tall, around six feet or so, slim build, young – early to mid- twenties – brown to light coloured short hair, longer on top. One of them said the hair was flicked over to the left. Those descriptions all matched in general terms this Defendant as he was 32 years ago.
All described as well that the naked figure was carrying a bundle of clothes in the crook of his right arm at around waist to groin height.
The Defendant was heading home, to his grandmother's flat on the opposite side of the estate. He chose his route with some care. He went through the dark heart of the estate where there was next to no street lighting, and back via the cut-through which he had used enroute to Barbara's flat but half an hour earlier.
It was via that cut-through that he returned to his own street, and there he was seen by a tourist, who was visiting the island, who had spent the evening out with a woman who lived in the area. The tourist had just said goodnight to her at the communal door of her block and, as he turned left to head out of the estate, he saw the same almost naked figure running diagonally across the street, heading towards the end of the street.
The street in which the Defendant lived was a cul-de-sac. It ended at a high granite boundary wall topped by a chain-link fence. The only way out was via the narrow alleyway between that boundary wall and the western gable end of the block of flats where the Defendant lived. It was towards that alleyway that the Defendant was running. Avoiding the much more public front door, he was heading to the darkness of the yard behind his own block, and the more private access door at the rear.
The tourist had no idea who Rickie Tregaskis was, but he described the running, naked man in terms closely similar to those witnesses who had seen him appear from the alley at the side of Barbara's block. In addition, he described the bundle of clothes as looking like something was wrapped in it. And he described the man's hair as having a flick at the front. It was, he said, brown hair with streaks – as indeed was the Defendant's hair at that time.
The tourist watched him head almost to the end of the cul-de-sac then turned and went on his way.
Back inside his own flat, the Defendant at some point went to bed.
We do not know for certain what he did with the bladed instrument which he had used to attack the women. We do not know for certain that the weapon he used was the Hitler Youth knife he had bought a little more than 12 hours earlier (although he was later to claim that it was).
What we can say, and with certainty, is that he used a knife on Barbara and Emma, and it was the knife wound to Barbara which killed her. Equally we do not know what became of the knife. The evidence which the jury heard was that the Hitler Youth knife which the Defendant had been showing off the afternoon before was never recovered and has never been seen again. Equally, we do not know what became of the bundle of clothes, whether they were washed or otherwise disposed of. Neither Barbara's flat nor the Defendant's own flat yielded any scientific evidence to link this Defendant to the crimes. It is the case, and to adopt his own later words, that the Defendant achieved his aim: he 'left no forensics.'
As the Defendant slept securely in his own bed, the surgeons at the General Hospital went to work on Miss Anton and Barbara Griffin.
Miss Anton suffered three wounds to her left upper arm, a wound to her shoulder blade, a wound below her left breast and a wound to her elbow. Some of those wounds had the appearance of being typical defensive injuries as she sought to defend herself. She was treated under general anaesthetic. She survived.
Barbara was not so fortunate. The knife which pierced her heart entered the right ventricle. The stab was delivered with moderate to severe force. It caused irreparable damage. She died of her injury on the operating table at 4.40am that same day.
Once day dawned on 2nd August, news of the incident spread around the Le Geyt Flats Estate. It was the talk of the place, and people quickly came to know about it.
Dean Marie, who had lent the Defendant his scanner the night before, heard about it on the radio whilst he was at work. He met the Defendant later that same day. It was during that meeting that the Defendant first confessed to what he had done the night before.
Dean Marie asked him: "Did you do it?" The Defendant replied: "Yes."
He told his friend that he had got into the flat through a back window. A woman had screamed, he said, so he stabbed her. Dean Marie asked him what he had used to stab the woman. The Defendant replied that he had 'disposed of it', that he had 'taken care of it.'
Dean Marie himself was arrested briefly in connection with the police investigation which followed. He made a series of witness statements to the police, until eventually he disclosed the Defendant's confession in one of them.
He was to become, for the prosecuting authority, a key witness for the Crown in the trial which was to follow.
And there was a trial, as the jury in this second trial heard. The trial took place in late September and early October 1991.
The evidence which that jury heard included the evidence from Mr Dransfield about the conversation he overheard at the window – talk of a burglary and a scanner. That jury heard evidence from the woman living on the estate, who had been out with the tourist, about the Defendant walking towards the cut through at around 1.35am. They heard evidence from Miss Anton and the Defendant's grandmother, Violet. They heard evidence about the naked man, his description, the bundle of clothes, and that man's appearance described by the tourist a few moments later in the cul-de-sac outside the Defendant's flat.
But they never heard Dean Marie's evidence that the Defendant had confessed to him.
Whether it was out of fear for himself if he gave that evidence against his friend, or whether he was himself seeking to avoid being arrested by the police for other offences unrelated to the murder, for which he was wanted at the time, or both, Dean Marie failed to give evidence at that trial. On the eve of trial he ran away to Scotland, where he was later arrested after the trial was over and received a six-month prison sentence for his contempt of court in failing to give evidence.
In Dean Marie's absence, the Crown's case was reduced to little more than the circumstantial, and the Defendant was, in short order, acquitted of both the murder of Barbara Griffin and the attempted murder of Emma Anton.
He walked from court a free man.
Until recently, the rule against double jeopardy held good in Jersey law. The rule meant that a person, once acquitted, was always acquitted. A person having been found not guilty could never be tried again for the same crime.
And that fact was not lost on this Defendant, whose criminal experience and knowledge of the criminal justice system was by 1991 already significant. His acquittals meant at that time that he was untouchable as a matter of law.
That fact emboldened him in the months and years that followed not only to confess again to what he had done that night, but at times even to boast about it and, more chillingly still, to admit that he had enjoyed killing Barbara.
It took two things to change for the Defendant to face justice a second time for murdering Barbara and attempting to murder her aunt.
The first was that certain and once-close criminal associates of Rickie Tregaskis needed to have a change of heart about testifying against him. The second was that the law needed to change to enable the Court of Appeal to order a retrial for specified serious offences where new evidence comes to light following the acquittals.
The second of those changes was brought about by the States of Jersey in 2018 when the States enacted the new Criminal Procedure (Jersey) Law 2018.
On 3rd November last year the Crown sought, and the Court of Appeal granted, orders quashing both acquittals and ordering the Defendant to be retried for the same crimes on the bases that new evidence had emerged.
The second of those changes came about when two former associates, including Dean Marie, decided that the time had come to do the right thing and tell the police what they knew. They were not the only witnesses to provide new evidence – there were others too, including the Defendant's own sister.
But the catalyst for Dean Marie to do the right thing, and for a second man to whom the Defendant had confessed shortly after he was charged with the murder and attempted murder, was in part another act of lethal violence committed by this Defendant.
In 1994 the Defendant and his criminal associate Darren Hare both received lengthy prison sentences from this Court for, amongst a great many other offences, stabbing a nightclub doorman.
In early 1997, the Defendant was paroled. It was a condition of his parole that he went to live with his father in Cornwall.
He did so. And not long after he had arrived in Cornwall, in Mevagissey on 12th March 1997, he attacked and killed a man called Michael Josey because, it would seem, he thought Mr Josey had looked at him in the wrong way in a Chinese takeaway.
He kicked Mr Josey to the floor outside the takeaway, and then repeatedly kicked him to the head as Mr Josey's head was hard up against a stone wall. He murdered him.
In late 1997 he came back to Jersey and then went to Guernsey with his associate Darren Hare to visit his sister, Diane Harvey.
It was whilst in Guernsey on this occasion that the Defendant confessed openly to his sister that he had murdered Michael Josey. Darren Hare witnessed at least some of that confession.
He was sufficiently disturbed by it, it seems, that he did not stay but left to return to Jersey after two days.
And what did the Defendant tell his sister about killing Mr Josey? He said it felt good and satisfying to kill someone with his bare hands. It 'made him feel good.'
Diane Harvey went to the police eventually. She made a statement.
In part on the strength of her evidence the Defendant was tried at Truro Crown Court for murdering Mr Josey.
On 23rd July 1999, the Defendant was convicted of murder. He received a life sentence.
It was in part that fact which eventually worked on the consciences of Dean Marie and Darren Hare and brought them eventually to speak openly to Jersey police about what they knew.
"...perhaps Rickie Tregaskis would not have been free to kill for a second time"
Why?
Because as they were to tell the jury in the second trial, if they had said what they knew back in 1991 at the first trial perhaps Rickie Tregaskis would not have been free to kill for a second time.
And what they knew was yet more confessions by the Defendant, including some details of what he had done and how he had done it.
Mr Hare finally made a witness statement to the police in May 2020. He told them that he was in HMP La Moye serving a prison sentence when Barbara Griffin was killed.
A few days later the Defendant was remanded into custody for her murder. Mr Hare had a job as a reception orderly at the prison, helping to process new arrivals. He was able to have a brief chat with his friend the Defendant – they were, in those days, like brothers he told the second jury, and they had no secrets from each other. He told the jury that he asked the Defendant: "Did you do it – did you murder Mrs Griffin?" The Defendant replied: "Yeah."
He said he told the Defendant he was an idiot and would get 'lifed off' – meaning he would receive a life sentence.
Mr Hare met the Defendant in La Moye a second time in 1991. This time both of them were on the remand wing. Mr Hare was on remand awaiting trial for other matters, and the Defendant was still on remand awaiting trial for the murder and attempted murder.
A number of discussions took place between them about the murder of Barbara Griffin. Mr Hare told the jury that the Defendant said during these discussions that he had broken into her flat through a back bedroom window. He had taken his clothes off first and put socks on his hands and feet. (Mr Hare mentioned that they had been in the habit of using socks on their hands when committing burglaries to 'avoid forensics').
The Defendant had thought the woman in the front bedroom was Barbara Griffin but then when Barbara appeared because of the screaming he realised that this second woman was in fact Barbara, and so he had stabbed her as well. He had said, Mr Hare thought, that he had used a Hitler Youth dagger, and that he had got out the way he came in – through a rear window. He told Mr Hare that he returned to his nan's across Le Geyt Road, and through the back of the blocks through the sheds, where it was dark. That he had disposed of the knife in one of the external bins, had washed in the sink at his nan's and had gone to bed.
At some point before the trip to Guernsey in late 1997 to visit the Defendant's sister, and after the Defendant had killed Mr Josey, Mr Hare told the jury he had been with the Defendant in a bar in St. Helier when the Defendant invited him outside where he confided in him: "I've done it again." This was a confession not only to the murder of Mr Josey but, indirectly, to the earlier killing of Barbara Griffin. Mr Hare told the jury he did not want to know what the Defendant was trying to tell him and did not press him on the comment.
Dean Marie also came forward.
This time he was prepared to give evidence about the first confession made later the same day. But he had further evidence he was now able to give to the police of a second encounter with the Defendant in the days after his acquittal.
By the time of the second trial Dean Marie had undergone a gender change and now goes by the name Marie Dean.
Miss Dean told the jury not only about the first confession but of a meeting behind what was then the Odeon Cinema after the first trial. In that meeting the Defendant confessed again. He thanked Dean Marie for not turning up at court to give evidence. His demeanour as he said this was cheerful.
He exhibited a lot of new confidence and asked Dean Marie if he wanted to see the knife. Dean Marie said no. The Defendant said he had enjoyed killing Barbara – an admission which chimes chillingly with the same sentiment he later expressed to his sister about killing Michael Josey. Miss Dean said the Defendant said he wanted to kill again, (which he in fact went on to do in Cornwall a few years later).
He said he fancied being an assassin. Miss Dean told the jury: "He was talking as if it was perfectly normal – a new career option for him."
Of the murder of Michael Josey, Miss Dean told the jury: "It heightened my guilt. If I'd given evidence that man would still be alive."
And it was not just to the murder of Michael Josey that the Defendant confessed to his sister. Soon after his acquittal at the first trial the Defendant went to visit Mrs Harvey in Guernsey. The two shared the same mother but were half-siblings and had only recently become aware of each other's existence.
It was during this first meeting – some six years before the murder in Cornwall – that the Defendant confessed he had killed Barbara and knifed Miss Anton. He told his sister that he had stabbed Barbara once in the heart and Miss Anton repeatedly. He told her the Jersey police were "stupid and they thought it was a burglary gone wrong because that's what he'd made it look like."
He told her he had got in through the toilet window and was wearing white sports socks on his hands and feet. He told her: "there'd be no forensic evidence."
He was, she told the jury, "cocky because he'd got away with murder. He did not show remorse or sorrow." He told her: "They had no forensics. The pigs were thick."
When asked in cross-examination why she had not gone to the police in 1991, she replied: "I didn't go to the police because he (the Defendant) said they couldn't do anything about it as you couldn't be tried for the same crime twice."
Safe as he undoubtedly felt he was the Defendant could not, it seems, resist the temptation to talk, even boast, about his murderous exploits and about getting away with it. At some point around 1997 to 1998, whilst he was in Jersey, he boasted to a man called Terence Chapman during a night of drug-taking that he had killed Barbara Griffin, telling him: "She came at me with a bat, so I stabbed her."
One other witness had a change of heart. None of the neighbours across the road from Barbara's flat who saw the naked man knew who he was.
One witness, however, was not entirely truthful in that regard.
he later made a further statement to the police that she thought she had in fact recognised the naked man but had been too anxious to admit it. In the second trial she told the jury she had immediately thought to herself of the naked man "it was Rickie Tregaskis", but that she was not sure.
She suggested she became more sure as time went by, but that she was worried to say it was him if it was not, lest it cause trouble for her. Her evidence on its own enjoyed little weight but seen in the context of the evidence as a whole, including the confession evidence, it perhaps assumed a greater probative significance.
The jury heard the Defendant's account in his police interview conducted in 1990 in the days after the killing. He admitted purchasing the Hitler Youth knife. He said he had mislaid it at some point before the night of the 1st-2nd August and had not found it since. He said he had gone home at the end of his night out and had gone to bed at some point around 1.30am.
Whoever had entered Barbara's flat and attacked the women, it could not have been him.
He gave evidence in his defence at the second trial. He maintained this basic factual case.
He dismissed the various confession witnesses as either liars, fantasists or otherwise deluded. He suggested possible motives for them doing so, including suggesting that Marie Dean was the real killer and was trying to frame him, that Darren Hare bore a grudge about serving a longer prison sentence than the Defendant had for the same offence, that Mr Chapman was pursuing a vendetta over £20 worth of substandard drugs which the Defendant had supplied to him 25 years earlier, and that his sister was either bitter because she had not been raised by their natural mother as he had been, but had instead been put up for adoption, or because he had rebuffed her sexual advances, or possibly both.
In short, and by their verdicts, the jury must have concluded that all these explanations and the Defendant's evidence in general on any point of relevance were lies.
On the evidence it does not appear to the Crown that this was a burglary gone wrong, but that there was a degree of premeditation.
The frenzy with which the Defendant first attacked Miss Anton, and the even more targeted and clinical aggression with which he despatched Barbara Griffin, are not consistent with a burglary gone wrong. Had he genuinely disturbed Miss Anton from sleep whilst seeking merely to steal he would have been able in the darkness to make a quick escape with comparative ease.
Miss Anton's evidence, to the contrary, was that he was on top of her before she had barely stirred from her sleep, much less sat up and challenged him. That is consistent with a desire formed from an earlier point to kill the occupant of that front bedroom, even as she slept. And by their guilty verdict the jury were sure that he did indeed intend to kill her.
Moreover, he had armed himself with a knife – a burglar does not need to arm himself with a lethal weapon to break into premises and steal. Even if the murder weapon was not the Hitler Youth knife, he must have at the very least intentionally and purposefully taken a knife from Barbara's kitchen prior to entering the front bedroom where Miss Anton lay sleeping. If it was the Hitler Youth knife, as he later admitted, then he had made a conscious decision to take it with him to Barbara's flat from an earlier stage still.
In addition, he later confessed to his sister that he had 'made it look like a burglary gone wrong,' which indicates a degree of pre-planning. If it was meant only to wear the appearance of a burglary gone wrong, then the Defendant was necessarily admitting that that was a cover for his true intention. The inference to draw was that the true intention which he sought to disguise was an intention to attack the occupant of Flat 130.
Furthermore, he was to admit to Dean Marie that he had enjoyed the killing, in the same way that he admitted to his sister that he had enjoyed killing Michael Josey. That expression of enjoyment suggests that he had known for some time beforehand what he was going to do and gained satisfaction from doing it. That again is evidence of a degree of premeditation.
The attacks on the women in Jersey and the attack on Michael Josey in Cornwall – the latter plainly premeditated – share similar characteristics of extreme and explosive violence. All of these factors taken together indicate that, whatever the length of time beforehand over which the Defendant had considered what he proposed to do once inside Flat 130, his actions were premeditated and did not arise on the spur of a moment of panic.
Finally, the Defendant's conviction for grave and criminal assault of a nightclub doorman in 1994 involved him responding to a rebuff by the doorman by going home and arming himself with a knife, returning to the nightclub and stabbing the doorman in the abdomen.
His conviction in England for wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm in 2004 involved him creating a weapon using a razor blade and a bar of soap and slashing a fellow prison inmate's face open with it.
These offences indicate a propensity on the Defendant's part to engage in premeditated, extreme violence.
The Court of Appeal by order made on 3rd November 2021 quashed the original verdicts returned by the jury in October 1991 and directed that the Defendant be retried on the same counts.
The very next day the Defendant was indicted directly in the Royal Court. He entered not guilty pleas to both counts at that first appearance. A number of interlocutory hearings followed.
The assize trial commenced on 26th April last. The jury returned majority verdicts of guilty on both counts on 6th May last.
The Defendant was remanded into custody on these offences at his first appearance in the Royal Court on 4th November 2021 and has been in custody for them ever since. He has throughout that same period been a serving prisoner pursuant to the life sentence imposed at Truro Crown Court in 1999 for the murder of Michael Josey. A twenty-year tariff was imposed for that offence by the UK Home Secretary.
The Defendant upon the expiration of that 20-year period had not, prior to being indicted for these offences, been granted parole. On this indictment he has thus since remand spent a period of 237 days in custody."
On Thursday 11 August, the Royal Court sentenced Rickie Tregaskis to life imprisonment. He will have to serve a minimum of 20 years before he can be released.
Commissioner Sir John Saunders was sitting with Jurats Jerry Ramsden, Pamela Pitman, Robert Christensen, Elizabeth Anne Dulake, Steven Austin-Vautier, Kim Averty, Gareth Hughes and David Le Heuzé.
Express sat down with Senior Investigator Lee Turner to discuss what made Rickie Tregaskis's eventual conviction possible...
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