Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 17, 2018 Features / Columnists, Murder and Mystery
By Michael Jordan
You will find Rachpaul’s Drug Store in a three-storey building at Lot 75 Robb Street, Lacytown. There’s an old restaurant in the middle flat. Rachpaul’s Drug Store is in the bottom flat, and it is there that harmless, 84-year-old Harold Rachpaul had been tending to his customers since the sixties, when you could buy a box of chicken fried rice for a dollar.
Mr. Rachpaul lived alone in an apartment behind the drug store.
At around nine o’clock on the evening of Thursday, August 18, 2011, Mr. Rachpaul’s eldest son, Leonard, paid his dad a visit. But according to the son, just as he was about to enter the compound, he observed a man hurrying towards a yard next door to his father’s property. That yard, he says, is a haven for drug-smoking vagrants.
The man Leonard Rachpaul saw was known as ‘Dahl Belly’. He was a security guard who worked at a popular business place on the opposite side of Robb Street. The guard would sometimes buy cigarettes and other small items at the drug store.
According to Mr. Rachpaul’s son, on seeing him, ‘Dahl Belly’ stopped briefly as if in surprise, then proceeded to enter the yard where the vagrants loitered.
Leonard Rachpaul told me that he put his father’s dinner on the stove. Afterwards, he placed the hot meal by his father’s television set. At the time, the Rachpauls had one large dog and two pups. According to the son, he put the largest animal in a pen.
However, before leaving, his father asked him to release the dog.
At around eight o’clock the following day, Leonard Rachpaul, accompanied by his son, returned to open the premises. According to Leonard Rachpaul, he stopped to speak to someone, while his son went to Mr. Rachpaul’s apartment. Shortly after, his son ran out of the yard and began to scream.
Leonard Rachpaul followed his son into his elderly father’s apartment. On entering, they saw that a vault was open and the contents, including close to $1M in cash and phone cards, were missing. But the most disturbing thing was the body in the bedroom.
Old Harold Rachpaul lay on the floor near the bed. He was gagged and wrapped in a bed-sheet. His hands and feet were bound with the electrical cord from his iron. He had been beaten and strangled.
Leonard Rachpaul said that the dog that he had released before leaving the previous day was now penned. The son tried to revive his motionless father, then ran over to the Police Consumers building for help.
According to the son, he suspected that the killers attacked his elderly father shortly after the drug store owner had placed his dog back in the pen. He surmised that the intruders then took his father back to the apartment, and to pacify them, Mr. Rachpaul opened his safe and handed over his money and other valuables. He was then slain.
Detectives began to question employees and residents in the immediate area. Asked if he had any suspects in mind, Leonard Rachpaul immediately told police about his encounter with ‘Dahl Belly.’
Detectives decided to question the suspect. But the security guard could not be found. Detectives obtained the man’s cell phone number and asked him to come in for questioning. The guard refused. Detectives later learnt that he had left his job.
As luck would have it, I got a cell phone number a few days after the guard disappeared. I dialed it. ‘Dahl Belly’ answered. I asked him about Mr. Rachpaul’s murder. He began to cry and told me that he was innocent. He told me that he had four small children, and yes, there was a time when he had been on the wrong side of the law. He’d been remanded twice for armed robbery but was never convicted. But he’d changed his lifestyle. He’d worked as a guard for over a year at the Robb Street establishment near to Rachpaul’s Drug Store.
“I got to be a madman to be working right there and do something like that. I change. I working. I does draw my box hand, I does work for $15,000 a week, I does draw my leave money…thirty thousand dollars; I content with that,” he told me.
So where was he on the night that Mr. Rachpaul is believed to have been killed?
According to ‘Dahl Belly’, he was on duty outside his employer’s premises on Thursday, August 18, 2011, up to midnight (Friday, August 19, 2011). He said that footage recorded on the security cameras on his former employer’s premises would verify his story. He claimed that shortly after midnight, he went to “take a five” in the yard near Rachpaul’s Drug Store.
After resting, the guard said he returned to his worksite, and his employer’s cook arrived at around five o’clock that morning. He said he later opened the premises and assisted the cook in cutting up some vegetables.
The former guard stated that at around one o’clock that afternoon, he received a call from someone who identified himself as a policeman. The caller requested that ‘Dhal Belly’ submit himself for questioning in connection with a murder.
According to the guard, he told his employer about the development, and asked the businessman to accompany him to the station.
“I tell he to come in with me, that the (security) cameras will pick up everything, and he refuse.”
He said he then told the police that he would only submit himself for questioning if he could hire an attorney.
Police subsequently searched his home and briefly detained his sister. Police ranks began to call his mobile phone and request that he submit himself for questioning.
According to ‘Dahl Belly, he refused to be questioned “because I afraid they would knock (charge) me for something I didn’t do.” He claimed that during one of his previous arrests, police ranks “beat me so bad that I admit to things that I never do.”
Asked about possible suspects, he suggested that police look at three other people who might have information about the murder. He said that two of the individuals were ‘junkies’ who slept at night in a yard near Mr. Rachpaul’s home.
A few days later, I dialed ‘Dahl Belly’s’ phone number. The calls went to voicemail.
In October 2011, Police issued a wanted bulletin for ‘Dhal Belly’, in connection with Harold Rachpaul’s murder. They subsequently arrested him but cleared him as a suspect, and we eventually met.
The trail went cold for almost three years.
FINGERPRINTS
In late February 2014, police announced that they had gotten a break in the unsolved murder. Fingerprints found on the open money-safe at Rachpaul’s Drug Store had checked against others stored in the Force’s recently acquired Automated Fingerprinting Identification System (AFIS).
According to the police, the prints had ‘points of similarity’ to those of a young minibus conductor. He was Orin Kevin Roberts of ‘C’ Field Sophia, Greater Georgetown.
Roberts was charged with murder on March 4, 2014. His High Court trial began in 2015.
GRILLED
The question of whether the fingerprints at the murder scene matched those of the accused was hotly contested by both prosecution and defence.
Detective Salish Roopnarine recalled obtaining and processing fingerprints from the accused. A fingerprint sheet was also presented as part of the evidence in the trial.
However, under cross-examination by the defence, the detective admitted that he was not attached to the Fingerprint Branch of the Guyana Police Force (GPF).
The defence also pointed out to the policeman that there were double markings and distortions with the fingerprints on the document. In addition, it was noted that the prints on the sheets appeared much larger than the fingers of the accused.
Through a series of demonstrations, the defence challenged the likelihood of the giant prints belonging to his client.
“It appears so” and “yes sir” were the only words uttered by the policeman, in response to the questions.
And during cross cross-examination by the State Counsel, the detective still could not give an explanation for the distorted (double) prints. The policeman however noted that in process of taking the prints and rolling the finger on the sheet from side to side, it would appear larger that a person’s actual finger.
EXPERT TESTIFIES
Testifying for the prosecution, Assistant Superintendent of Police, Raffeik Ali said that based on the analysis he conducted, the fingerprint impressions taken at the murder scene matched the prints that police took from Roberts.
He said that the prints had undergone computer analysis as well as manual examination. The policeman also stated that the computer identifies possibilities of a fingerprint match, while the manual examination, can confirm the match.
Like his colleague, Detective Ali was faced with a series of questions by the defence regarding the precision and accuracy of his analysis. The policeman insisted that the prints belonged to Roberts.
As to the accused, he insisted to the court that the fingerprints could not be his.
He stated that his prints were taken by two different police ranks, who were acting on instructions from Detective Caesar.
“I was so confused and foolish at the time, I allow them to take another set of fingerprints from me, the same day,”
Roberts said that a policeman subsequently told him that his prints had matched the ones found at the crime scene at Robb Street.
“I tell he that he got to be lying, because I ain’t know nothing about Robb Street.”
In summing up for the jury, the defence pointed to the fact that there were no signs of forced entry to the building in which the elderly businessman was murdered.
The attorney noted too, that the only persons with access to the premises were the elderly man, his son and grandson. It was pointed out that the son and grandson were never considered suspects to the crime nor were they questioned by the police regarding their whereabouts on the night of the murder.
The defence also noted that the victim’s son, Leonard Rachpaul and grandson Vincent, had testified that a Transport (Deed of Title) was among the items stolen from the Robb Street premises.
But in her arguments, State Prosecutor Narissa Leander said that the fingerprints found at the scene could not have belonged to anyone other than the accused. She said that the fact that Roberts’ fingerprints matched the ones found on the inside of a safe at the crime scene, indisputably linked him to the murder. She had urged the jury to use their commonsense and good judgment, when reviewing evidence of the case.
FREED…AND THE MYSTERY REMAINS
On October 29, 2015, after some hours of deliberation, a mixed jury found Orin Kevin Roberts not guilty of murder.
Roberts immediately thanked the judge and jurors, and also expressed his gratitude to his attorney.
But who exactly is the Robb Street strangler? Some apparently have other theories. Leonard Rachpaul himself told me that there are some who have suggested that the killer is in fact someone who was close to his father. He refuted this suggestion.
“You hear (people say) that is an ‘inside job’. But I tell you from the bottom of my heart that these things (his father’s assets) are not left for me.” The slain man’s wife and other children are overseas.
After the murder, Leonard Rachpaul continued to run his father’s drug store. He told me that he purchased more dogs and raised the concrete fence that he believes that the intruders scaled before attacking his father. And he said he continued to live in dread that the men who snuffed out his father’s life may return.
If you have any information about this or any other unusual case, please contact Kaieteur News by letter or telephone at our Lot 24 Saffon Street, Charlestown offices. Our numbers are 22-58465, 22-58473 and 22-58458. You need not disclose your identity.
You can also contact Michael Jordan at his email address [email protected], or [email protected]
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