Matthew Steeples salutes those suggesting thrice tried Omar Benguit was framed for murder by Dorset Police and calls for an investigation into whether the sordid serial slaughterer Danilo Restivo could be the true killer of Jong-Ok Shin
On Monday night, BBC One Panorama reporter Bronagh Munro revisited the story of the fatal stabbing of a 26-year-old South Korean named Jong-Ok Shin in Bournemouth in 2002. Munro has been on the story of the 2005 conviction of Omar Benguit for this senseless killing for over eight years yet has never faltered in her quest to expose the flaws of what seems likely the unsafe conviction of a man who was admittedly a very messed-up drug addict on the fateful night in question.
On learning of Benguit’s story some years ago, I immediately became shocked at the way in which Dorset Police mismanaged their definitely questionable investigation in response to “extreme pressure to solve the case from the government of South Korea.” It led to now 53-year-old Benguit being found guilty of murder and imprisoned for life on a minimum term of 20 years after not one but an astonishing three trials with the help of only known liars and deceivers. There truly, genuinely was no other evidence.
Now, with Panorama’s latest discoveries this week, I again find myself returning to the alternative theory that a now also 53-year-old “deeply unattractive oddity” named Danilo Restivo is the monster who actually ought to have stood trial for massacring this poor, innocent young lady. Shin – known to her friends as ‘Oki’ – was attacked from behind in a “surprise attack” with a never recovered single-edged knife at around 2:50am as she walked home from a night out on the tiles with friends. As medics tried to save her, in her final moments, her final words were to describe her attacker as “a man wearing a mask who ran away.”
Whilst no forensic or CCTV evidence has ever been produced that could affirmatively link Benguit to the shocking slaughter of 26-year-old student Shin on 12th July 2002, often balaclava-clad Restivo lived just streets away from the murder scene.
Subsequently in June 2011, this Italian born brute was found guilty of killing a neighbour of his, Heather Barnett, on 12th November 2002 in a similarly shocking fashion in a crime that occurred just four months after the slaughter of Shin in the very same neighbourhood. Restivo was thereafter in absentia convicted of killing another lady, Elisa Claps, on 12th September 1993 in Potenza, Italy. He has been linked to the deaths and disappearances of six other females shockingly also.
Curiously uniting all three specific murders aforementioned – aside from each occurring on the 12th day of their respective months and his tellingly being under police surveillance on 12th May 2004 for stalking other women (who were lucky not to become additional victims) – is the fact that Restivo had a fetish for cutting the hair of those he encountered as well as the women he killed.
The Wikipedia page dedicated to this devotee of hair “feeling” – a misfit nicknamed ‘The Hairdresser of Potenza’ by the press – mentions the word “hair” an astonishing 137 times and references 15 specific incidents in the UK and 9 specific incidents in the Italy of him tampering with the hair of ladies in public places including on buses in Bournemouth. In the case of Shin’s murder, a “small quantity of animal hair combined with uncut human hair” was found near the crime scene; you could not ‘cut’ evidence clearer about this creepy cretin, to put it curtly.
Speaking to The Steeple Times in January 2023, Amie Benguit, the sister of Omar Benguit, summed up other details of what doesn’t fit with the case against her brother perfectly. At the time, she told me in an email:
“I have been fighting all these years on this grave miscarriage of justice. I was running successful businesses, had just got married and was living near Sandbanks with a one-year-old baby. It was a hot summer’s day. I was down on the beach with my gorgeous baby and I received a call from the police that my brother with two others had been arrested for murder.”
“My beautiful world as I knew it crumbled on me. I didn’t go to the first or second trial as I thought surely this is not going to go anywhere. A bunch of drag addicts on hearsay, no DNA and no forensics. A third trial was ordered, the three men became one; my brother only. One was deported back to Jamaica and never stood trial, the other was caught speeding on a camera going home. At the third trial, my brother was convicted and given twenty years in prison.”
“He has finished his sentence, but still rots away for something that he did not do and refuses to say he did do; he would rather be ‘carried out in a box’ (his words). All this time, lurking a few streets away was a serial killer Danilo Restivo, an Italian national, who the jury did not get to hear about because he had public immunity. The victim’s last dying words were: ‘A man wearing a mask stabbed me from behind and ran off.’ Dorset Police knew about him as soon as ‘Oki’ was murdered as they received a telegram from the Italian police.”
As the new evidence revealed by Panorma on Monday further highlighted, Amie Benguit’s suggestions three years ago remain bang-on-the-nail today. Dorset Police have many questions to answer and just as the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) continue far too slowly reviewing what I believe to be the wrongful conviction of Omar Benguit, I now ask them:
- Why did this police force proceed with a case against Omar Benguit when there was no CCTV or forensic evidence linking him to the murder of Jong-Ok Shin?
- What happened to the 135 CCTV tapes that the CCRC have discovered to have gone missing from the original trial?
- Why did they pressure 13 witnesses, most of whom were known drug addicts, into embellishing their statements and why did they encourage several of them to lie to the court and give false evidence?
- Why did they build their case on the word of a proven liar, a drug addict known as ‘BB’ when they knew CCTV evidence contradicted her story and when they were aware that she had a history of making false allegations?
- Given ‘BB’ alleged that Benguit leapt out of her car along with two other men, Delroy Woolry and Nicholas Gbadamosi, to accost Shin, why did the police not question how this account differed from the victim only referencing one man having attacked her in her final words to medics before she died?
- Why did they believe ‘BB’ when she changed her version of which of the three men fatally stabbed Shin from one to another in two statements and then to finally just Benguit in her third?
- Why did they bury the very phone records that gave Benguit an alibi, specifically one concerning a call made from a BT phone phone box just 25 minutes after the murder when ‘BB’ clearly falsely alleged Benguit was some considerable distance away in a crack house and covered in ‘claret-like’ blood?
- Why was there no forensic evidence of Benguit or the other two men found in the crack house that ‘BB’ alleged she drove them to in order to get cleaned up – especially if they were covered in blood?
- Why did they fail to heed warnings from Italian police who had alerted them about the “cold, depraved, calculated killer… of inhuman depravity” Danilo Restivo – at the time already a suspect for the murder of a 16-year-old in Italy – given he lived just a few streets from where Shin was killed?
- Why did they trust the word of Restivo’s clearly biased girlfriend and later wife Fiamma Marsango – a warped woman who had met him in an Internet chatroom and who gave him decidedly suspect alibis in the killings of both Barnett and Shin?
- Why did they not look further into Restivo following his conviction for sadistically slaughtering and brutalising the body of his neighbour Heather Barnett just four months after the murder of Shin?
- Given there was a clump of hair found near Shin’s body, why did they not examine the clearly likely link between the known “hair fetishist” Restivo – proven to be associated with at least 15 cases of hair cutting in Bournemouth and at least 9 in Italy – and that clearly important piece of evidence more thoroughly?
- What are Dorset Police doing in relation to fresh evidence discovered by BBC Panorama of a grainy CCTV image that potentially shows Restivo on a bike around the corner from the murder scene that was recorded just 10 minutes before Shin was killed?
- Finally, as Bronagh Munro suggests in a BBC News article to accompany the premiere of the programme, could the force’s motive for framing Omar Benguit be because of they wanted to coverup their failure to stop at-the-time suspected murderer Danilo Restivo from killing again?
Watch Panorama: Framed for Murder? on BBC iPlayer by clicking here.
Follow the campaign to support Omar Benguit on X at @FreeOmarBenguit. Find more information about the case by clicking here and follow reporter Bronagh Munro at @munro_bronagh.
Follow Matthew Steeples on X at @M_Steeples and The Steeple Times at @SteepleTimes.
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