Ruthless crook John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer’s wife’s demands his killer is caught after ‘jaw-dropping blunders’ in murder probe
'Goldfinger's' estranged wife Marnie has written the amazing story of her life with Britain’s No1 crook
UNDERWORLD kingpin John “Goldfinger” Palmer went from market trader to multi-millionaire via fraud, racketeering and money laundering – most notoriously from melting down gold bars from the £26million Brink’s-Mat robbery in 1983.
But his life of violence and crime ended three years ago when he was shot dead in his garden in South Weald, Essex, by a mystery assassin who has never been found.
Now Palmer’s estranged wife Marnie, who lives in the West Country, has written the amazing story of her life with Britain’s No1 crook.
In an exclusive extract she tells of her fury at the bungled police investigation into her husband’s murder.
DETECTIVES refer to it as the “golden hour” — the time immediately after the discovery of a body in a murder investigation when they are most likely to find the best clues.
In my husband’s case they didn’t just lose an hour, they lost a week.
It was one of the most hopeless starts to a murder investigation in police history.
I’m no expert in detective work and I’m certainly no authority on forensics, but you would imagine any call to HQ that started: “Body believed to be John Palmer found at Sandpit Lane, South Weald” would arouse at least a flicker of interest from any officer.
Police had been monitoring the place for more than a decade. And for 30 years John had been a top target after he was cleared of melting down gold bars from the Brink’s-Mat robbery when he said he didn’t know they were stolen.
Yet the Essex Police officers who eventually arrived were all too willing to assume there was nothing suspicious about this most notorious criminal lying dead in a pool of blood.
Given that he had had a recent keyhole op, they were happy to conclude the wounds had reopened and he’d had a heart attack. The attitude that day in June 2015 was: “Stick him on the mortuary slab and get the kettle on. Accidental death. Case closed. Home for EastEnders.”
GOLD FLOWS DOWN THE M4
IT was months after the November 1983 Brink’s-Mat heist that John got involved, writes Marnie.
The robbers had turned to crime boss Kenneth Noye and his right-hand man Brian Reader – later jailed for the 2015 Hatton Garden raid – to fence the loot.
It was via their Hatton Garden contacts that our little gold smelting business in the West Country was identified.
Noye and Reader knew the Brink’s-Mat gold ingots had to be melted down to get rid of their traceable serial numbers, and that selling pure gold afterwards would be just as suspicious. Only a different grade of bullion would put investigators off the trail. Noye started off sending a few ingots, before steadily increasing the amounts over a matter of weeks.
Soon it was coming down the M4 thick and fast. Reader was also at one point said to have taken briefcases full of gold bars on the train from London to Bristol.
It may sound naive, but I genuinely believe John didn’t initially realise he was handling Brink’s-Mat gold. By the time he twigged, it was too late to pull out.
Like everything else, the gold was just put in with all the scrap – unwanted rings, broken gold teeth, damaged necklaces.
John just carried on doing what he always had done – mixing everything together with the unwanted jewellery.
After the gold left our property, I really have no idea where it went. As much as 70 per cent of the haul has never been traced and is still said to be sloshing around London’s criminal underworld and property market today.
John and I had been married since 1975 but he was now living full-time with his lover Christina Ketley and their son James, 21. Our relationship had deteriorated to the point where I was hopeful of divorce by Christmas.
The news reached me and my older daughter, Janie, in Bath at 6.30pm, an hour after his body was found.
But it was five agonising days before Essex Police showed up. They apologised because they had failed to realise that I was John’s widow.
The detective said John may have died because of complications after his gallbladder surgery, which left four holes in his stomach from the keyhole operation.
The medical staff were told of the recent op when they arrived and had apparently concluded he had suffered heart failure. But the following weekend another police officer visited and announced: “I’m sorry to tell you, John was murdered. He was shot.”
After several days with their feet up, it seemed that somebody at Essex Police had decided it might be worth chasing up the cause of death.
John’s body had been left in a hospital morgue over the weekend for a duty pathologist to inspect it. Of course, the post-mortem established what had really happened in seconds.
Further inspection showed John had been shot six times at close range, probably by a professional assassin, using an 8mm .32 calibre pistol fitted with a silencer. The gunman had been hiding behind a 6ft wooden fence, monitoring John’s movements through a spy hole that had been drilled into one of the slats.
The jaw-dropping blunders kept coming. Paramedics had warned police at the scene they had spotted “small wounds in various stages of coagulation” on John’s body.
Two officers on the scene had neglected to examine the body, and failed to call an inspector to the scene or check John’s past on the police national computer.
I couldn’t take it in. This catalogue of mistakes would have made the Keystone Cops blush. The murder investigation was now a week behind schedule, leaving forensic teams with a near impossible task.
It sparked the biggest breakdown of my life. I suddenly felt so alone in the world. John had turned my two girls against me just months earlier and now he was dead.
I loved him, yet I hated him. I walked out of the front door in a nightdress and ran towards the busy B-road at rush hour.
There was no plan until I started staggering towards the oncoming traffic. “Kill me, kill me,” I shouted as the headlights bore down on me.
The next hour or two is a haze. I remember sitting on a grass verge and being attended to by paramedics.
John and I were together for four decades and I knew him better than anyone. He came from nothing and was a passionate and loving man.
THOUSANDS OF SUSPECTS
SO who killed John Palmer? Among the many theories are his Hatton Garden raid links. Palmer knew Hatton crook Brian Reader and was killed two months after the raid. Palmer also told friends he wanted to expose police corruption and he was said to be under surveillance.
Russian gangsters were also said to be moving in on Palmer’s Canary Isles timeshare scam – with which he had already created a potential 17,000 enemies who had been ripped off.
Palmer was thought to be preparing to turn supergrass against former associates. A member of his team had close links with the Lebanese underworld.
But I had also seen him at his absolute worst. He could be violent, paranoid, ruthless and cruel, as well as a womaniser and a drug abuser. There were two versions of the John Palmer story. The first, he hated — Goldfinger, the most ruthless criminal of his era, a tale of dirty money, racketeering and violence.
But he revelled in the second version, the poor, working-class lad who grew richer than the Queen and went from selling scrap to buying Learjets.
We both came from deprived homes. Knowing how it feels to be really poor — that genuine fear of going hungry — never leaves you. It drove John to achieve all he did.
By 1983 we were doing well because of John’s business melting down gold from legitimate jewellers in a home-made smelter at the bottom of the garden.
But the Brink’s-Mat raid changed everything for John and me. I’ve heard it said that if you have bought a gold necklace made since then, the chances are that a significant percentage of it comes from that raid, and was melted down in our back garden. I’m not proud of that.
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What destroyed us was his drug-taking, violence and womanising. I now know he was having affairs until the day he died.
I have given up hope that the case will be solved. So much of what I have been told by Essex Police is hogwash. Will they find John’s assassin? There’s more chance of Lord Lucan showing up.
©Marnie Palmer. Extracted from Gold- finger And Me: Bullets, Bullion And Betrayal, by Marnie Palmer and Tom Morgan (History Press, £9.99). Also on Kindle.
Adapted by MIKE RIDLEY
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