Tony Lavell

Tony Lavell was battered to death in a warehouse on Wednesday 4 October 1995.

The warehouse manager was tried for his murder but acquitted.

Tony Lavell ran a newspaper distribution company, Martin Lavell Ltd, and was beaten to death at its main warehouse, Newspaper House, in Kings Bench Street, Blackfriars. He was said to have turned up for work early on the morning he was murdered, around 1am, as usual, to sort out paperwork before the rest of the staff arrived.

He was seen to go into the premises, and within a few minutes, shouts, believed to be from Tony Lavell, were heard coming from inside. At around 2.30am, staff began to arrive at the factory and were surprised not to find Tony Lavell there, but it wasn't until 6am that they became concerned and contacted his family to see if he was at home. His wife then called the police and reported him missing.

Tony Lavell was found later that morning at 11am behind a locked door by the warehouse manager. He had been hit around the head and face several times.

The police said:

Tony Lavell had lived with his wife and two sons on a 500 acre stud, Old Park Farm, Slaugham Lane in Warninglid, West Sussex and had been a millionaire. He was also described as a well-known cattle exhibitor and owner of the award-winning Warninglid Charolais herd of cattle for a number of years.

The police said that they were keen to speak to a white man that was seen to come out of a factory in nearby Rushworth Street at about 1am, it being thought that he might have heard shouts or noises coming from the scene which might have drawn his attention.

The police said that they were also interested in speaking to two men who were seen standing near the ICS building near The Abbey pub in Webber Street, between 1.10am and 1.30am.

They also wanted to trace the movements of Tony Lavell's Mercedes car, which was dumped in Surrey Row, facing towards Blackfriars Road.

A 30-year-old warehouse manager at the company was tried for his murder but acquitted. He had denied any knowledge of the murder until his fingerprints were found in Tony Lavell’s car in Tony Lavell‘s blood. He then claimed that he had been attacked and forced to help the killers or else they would harm his family.

He was described as an ambitious executive and it was submitted that he had murdered Tony Lavell because he had wanted to take over his business empire.

He was quoted as once having bragged:

The man said that he had arrived at the warehouse for work and had been confronted by two men in boiler suits who had forced him to help them clean up the murder scene which was how his finger prints ended up in Tony Lavell's blood in Tony Lavell's Mercedes car.

He said that the two masked men confronted him when he arrived for work, noting that he had no idea how they entered the locked premises or turned off the burglar alarms.

He said that what made it all the more terrifying was that they appeared to know his name and all about his family, adding that they threatened his family if he didn't help the men put papers and a dark-stained jacket into two green bin liners and into the boot of Tony Lavell's Mercedes car which was parked outside. He said that they then ordered him to drive the car a short distance from the warehouse and to then get out, and that he did so as he was scared of them, and didn't report them to the police.

It was him who, later in the day, searched the warehouse and found Tony Lavell's body behind the locked door at about 11am. He said that he must have stood in the blood without realising it.

The prosecution said that the manager had been caught stealing from the company for a second time and that Tony Lavell was going to fire him.

The prosecution said that the murder was part of the managers deluded ambitions to make a name for himself in the lucrative business. It was said that prior to the killing that he had begun to take on the 'trappings of success', and had bought himself a house on a mortgage and a £37,000 Toyota Land Cruiser. The police also discovered that he had planned to buy a £2,000 powerboat.

The jury at the Old Bailey was told that the case was a real 'who-dun-it', just like you see in the films.

When the judge summed up, he said that the beating was so severe that there was no room for manslaughter, and that it was either murder, or nothing. He also warned the jury, stating that they had to be sure beyond all reasonable doubt that the manager had committed the murder, or had been part of a plot, a joint enterprise, to kill him. He noted that the prosecution didn't have to prove the motive, but said that the stronger the motive, the more likely it was a defendant carried out the killing.

He stated that there was no dispute that the manager had lied to the police, but added that if they were satisfied that he had lied through fear, panic or for another legitimate reason, that they were not to hold his dishonesty in that regard against him. He said that they could only use his false story to support a guilty verdict if they were sure he was lying to cover his part in the killing.

When the jury acquitted the warehouse manager at the trial at the Old Bailey on Friday 13 December 1996, there was uproar in the court and relatives and friends of Tony Lavell shouted out, 'You have got it all wrong. You are letting a killer go. I feel sorry for you'.

Following the acquittal, the police said they had closed the file on Tony Lavell's murder, but would reopen it if any new evidence came to light.

It was noted that Tony Lavell was his wife's second husband to die under tragic circumstances, her first husband being killed in a motorbike accident ten years earlier.

Tony Lavell had had two young sons.

The warehouse manager was later found to run a company called Homebased Promotions which was part of Homeworkers Monthly Ltd that was sending out letters to people stating that if they invested £10 with his company, they would receive a guaranteed £2,615 over the next five years. A person who wrote for the Financial Mail looked into that and stated that they found that the address of the company was on the seventh floor at 456 The Strand in London, but said that he found that that building didn't have a seventh floor and found that it was instead the address of Mailboxes Etc who took mail in for people. When the man from the Financial Mail spoke to the man, he said that he told him that the £2,615 would come from the other investors. He said that the man told him that half of each £5 would go into his business. But when the man from the Financial Mail pointed out that to do that he would need 523 people to provide your £2,615, and that to then pay the 523 he would need 273,529 more investors which he pointed out was a get-rich-quick scheme that was commonly known as a  'money circulation game', and that is was illegal. The man from the Financial Mail said that when he pointed that out to the man that had been tried for the murder of Tony Lavell, the man added that they had stopped the scheme two weeks earlier after finding that it was not ethical and that they had ceased trading. However, the man from the Financial Mail noted that the man had been telling Financial Mail readers as recently as 11 February that it worked and that they were sending out letters, claiming that the company had been doing it for three years. However, the man from the Financial Mail noted that in fact the company had been set up just four months earlier. The man from the Financial Mail concluded by saying, 'If Homebased Promotions really has got cold feet, that's fine. It's one less scam to worry about. But surely the impossible arithmetic was clear from the start. In which case, why did he offer investors something that he could never hope to deliver?'. In his article, the man from the Financial Mail also pointed out to his readers that the man running the scheme had previously been acquitted of a suspicious murder.

Newspaper House in Kings Bench Street was demolished between June 2012 and Jul 2014 and the site redeveloped.