Freed From Behind The Paywall: A Real Life Murder Story - Part Three of Four
About Ozzy.
Uthman, the third Caliph.
Continued from last Thursday.
Ozzy's real name was Usman Durrani. He was born on 5 July 1983 and had been named after Uthman, the third Caliph. He lived in Forest Gate, in east London, with his mother, Khalida, two older brothers, Ali and Khurram, and a sister, Sadia. Two other sisters lived away from home, one in Surrey and the other in the US. His father, Mahmoud, had died some years previously.
Usman was the youngest, after his sister Sadia, by eight years. Forest Gate is a poor and run-down area with large and long-settled immigrant communities from Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Durrani family was well known there. They were respected, traditional and devout Muslims. Before his death in 1999, Usman's father had been a wholesaler in the rag trade, dealing in leather and sheepskin. The family lived in a double-fronted house in a pleasant tree-lined street with rose bushes and a small patch of grass at the front, and a concrete drive to park the car. The front door was flanked by decorative coach lamps. The impression was not of the impoverished inner city but of prosperous suburbia.
Usman, the last, late baby, was adored by the whole family, particularly his mother. They saw him as a gift from Allah. He was overindulged, spoiled, a mummy's boy. As he grew up he seemed less clever or able than any of his brothers or sisters. His father, who had ambitions for all his children, was disappointed in him. At primary school Usman was generous and kind, always giving out presents. He often brought friends home. He was well behaved and hated lying. He even disliked jokes, claiming that they were just another form of lying.
At the age of 11 he failed to get into either of the first-rate schools to which his successful brothers had been admitted. Instead, he went to a state comprehensive in the neighbouring borough of Redbridge, where he found it difficult to make friends. In all the years he was there, he didn't bring a single friend home.
As lonely boys often are, Usman was bullied. At one point, another boy tried to push him out of an upper-floor window. He never told his family. They found out what had happened only when the school contacted them. Soon afterwards, he started to become distant and closed off. He began to lie and steal - not only at school, from which he was frequently a truant, but at home.
In the summer of 1996, when Usman was 13, his father was diagnosed with cancer and soon afterwards his grandmother was seriously injured in a car crash. A series of burglaries at the house resulted in the family receiving death threats, apparently from the intruders. It was around this time that Usman began to steal money from members of both his close and his extended family. Sometimes he stole small change, sometimes hundreds of pounds.
No one could understand what was happening to Usman. He couldn't explain why he stole. On one occasion he showed his sister Sadia a very long list of all he'd taken and who or where from. He knew that one day he had to return what was stolen and said that he intended to do so. It was part of the Islamic religion that if you took something from someone you must give it back. The whole family tried to talk to Usman about his behaviour, but he felt he was being persecuted and just became silent. At one point, he was cautioned by the police for stealing from a supermarket. Again, he wouldn't talk to the family about why he did it.
He was particularly fond of stealing sweets, or money for sweets. It appeared this was a way of trying to make himself more popular with the other children at school. He would also bring home sweets for his family. He even got a nickname - 'Mr Tuck', or sometimes 'Abu Hamwa', which Usman told Sadia means 'Father of Sweets' in Arabic. Much later, when advertising on the internet for sexual partners, he used the name 'Sweetsmaster'.
In his mid-teens, Usman made a suicide attempt by taking an overdose of tablets. He was hospitalised and referred to psychiatric services for a brief period.The stealing and the lying and truanting and self-harm continued. He made several bomb threats against the Canary Wharf Tower from his home phone number. He was quickly caught, but was let off with a caution because of his age and immaturity.
His family were uncomfortable about the idea of bringing in outsiders to help with their problems. But some time during 1997 or 1998, a social worker in Camden named Rajah Khan, who Sadia knew from her work as a schoolteacher, started to meet and talk to Usman informally. It did not help: Usman's behaviour continued to deteriorate. He no longer trusted the family. He had decided - perhaps because of the sexual abuse he later claimed to have suffered by an older, male relative in Pakistan - that the family was against him.
By 1999, Usman's father, Mahmoud, was in hospital in west London, and close to death. The family often stayed with him overnight in the same room. Usman was at the hospital when Mahmoud died on the night of 28 July, but he was in the bathroom having a shower as his father took his last breath. Afterwards, he felt guilty that he was there and yet not there. But he reacted differently from the rest of the family, never once talking about his father's death. He never cried. He seemed unable to grieve.
Shortly after his father's death, Usman signed on at Newham College for a course in business studies. Once there, his lies became even more fantastical. On one occasion he told the family that he worked as a bodyguard for Michael Douglas and Nicole Kidman and had taken them to see Buckingham Palace. In fact, he was struggling with his studies and, on several occasions, was told to leave, only to be reinstated. His exclusions from college had occurred after he had made outlandish claims against staff, saying that he was being victimised.
In what appeared to be an attempt to get both attention and sympathy, he forged a letter from St Bartholomew's Hospital explaining that he was suffering from terminal brain cancer. The deception was exposed when the letterhead, on inspection, read not 'St Bartholomew's Hospital' but 'St Bartholomew's Canoe Club' (it had been downloaded from the internet). Usman had by this time become an enthusiastic user of the web.
Sadia began to worry that her brother was spending too much time online and that it was becoming an obsession. She searched his cookies and temporary internet files and found a picture of a young white man in a suggestive pose. She said nothing to Usman, but told her eldest brother, Ali. Ali spoke to Usman about the picture, and was satisfied that it was merely 'research'. It was never made clear what it was research for.
The L-shaped apartment Rod Hall had bought was part of a converted Victorian primary school in Southwark, southeast London, called the Tabard Centre, designed in the early Nineties by the architects Julian de Metz and Amit Green. To enter his part of the building, you had to go through a steel door with an inscription carved above it that read BOYS. The body of the flat was two former classrooms knocked into one room which made 1,500sqft of floorspace under a high vaulted ceiling that incorporated the original Victorian timber trusses.
The flat had cathedral-like windows, around 12ft high, and at its highest point, about 20ft up, a small bathroom had been installed in the original bell tower with windows looking out on three sides over the city. The oval bath was panelled with cedar and had a single tap that curved from the floor.
Once you reached the tower, via a spiral staircase, you could continue climbing, up, up, another 20ft through the timbered beams which crisscrossed the tower, right into the crow's nest, a tiny rooftop area from which you could see the entire vista of London.
De Metz had this to say about it in Lofts, a style book: You can survey the city, and feel part of it, and yet always feel secure. It is an escapist fantasy made manifest, a fairy-tale gothic structure.
The main room comprised the long part of the 'L' shape. A kitchen area had been installed which incorporated a work surface of stainless steel standing 3ft away from, and parallel to, the main wall. Around the corner, in the short part of the 'L', was a snug or library room, which led into a wet room, lined in limestone. Suspended above the snug was a mezzanine-level bed platform, which was reached by a shorter, spiral staircase. Susan Culligan, the young banker who had originally commissioned the loft, saw the platform, on which she slept in a four-poster bed, as part of the fairy-tale fantasy that she wanted to evoke. But Rod slept there on a simple super-king-sized Scandinavian bed, elegantly minimalist, as always. There was nothing else in the room
In the living area of the flat, Rod had a Sixties-style sofa upholstered in soft, sage-green leather. There was a large wooden dining table that he had handmade for him by Charles Rutherford, to celebrate when the movie Billy Elliot was nominated for three Oscars. Around it were eight chairs, designed by Bellini, in ox-blood leather. There was a Twenties Scandinavian-style oak desk, a Jacobean inlaid drum table and a corner chair of the same period. There were oil paintings, notably by Terry Frost and Maurice Cockerill. There was, too, a slightly twee watercolour that perhaps reminded Rod of the family farm.
Stuart arrived at the flat with Andy on the evening of Sunday 23 May. The blinds were drawn and the lights were on low. Rod's car, a black Saab convertible, was in the car park. When they had made their way through the two CCTV-monitored security doors and up five or six flights of stairs, to the rough steel front door of Rod's flat, it was just before nine. There was a wired glass panel in the door at head height, through which the identity of visitors could be checked. The deadlock at the bottom of the door was open. That meant Rod was certainly in the apartment. Rod never left the front door unlocked when he went out.
Andy and Stuart let themselves in. It was very warm and stuffy. The lighting in the flat was low. There was a whirring sound - the extractor fan in the downstairs wet room, off to the right, in the short part of the 'L', underneath the bed platform. Stuart was conscious of a loud, unsettling noise. He saw that Poppy, Rod's Siamese cat, was alone in the middle of the cathedral-like room. Her head was thrown back. She was screaming.
Stuart ignored Poppy, and followed the sound of the whirring fan round the corner to the right and into the snug. The door to the wet room, where the sound was coming from, was ajar, and there was a shaft of light beaming from it. It seemed to Stuart that this path of light was premeditated and theatrical, designed to lead him into the room.
He went in. The light was on, which was why the fan was running. Immediately, he saw that there were lacy footprints, in blood, in the shower, and a flannel with some blood on it. There were patterns of blood on the floor, on the bidet and toilet seat. The blood didn't amount to very much, and Stuart thought Rod might have cut himself shaving.
The cat had calmed down. Leaving the wet room and returning to the snug, Stuart now decided to take a look at the mezzanine bed platform, which was suspended above his head. He made his way up the short spiral staircase very slowly. By now, he was frightened. In the back of his mind was the thought that Rod had committed suicide. He felt sure that Rod had been suffering emotionally for some time. Behind him, Andy was saying, Be careful, just be careful. They were both whispering. They didn't know why.
Stuart arrived at the top of the staircase. Nothing was out of place except a pair of black socks on the floor. He walked up to the bed and pulled the bedclothes back. The bed was empty. He retreated slowly back down the spiral staircase, and returned to the snug. There was a sense of absolute stillness, no noise from either inside or outside the flat.
He made his way back into the main room. He peered at the stainless-steel kitchen unit through the gloom, this awful murky light. It was so terribly hot. The huge windows had darkened with the dusk.
Stuart looked up at the high spiral staircase that led to a white sliding door and into the second bathroom. Rod always kept it open, but it was closed. As he walked past the kitchen island, towards the staircase, Stuart noticed that there was a cafetiere half full of coffee. The sink was full of dirty, greasy plates. Stuart thought, Roddy wouldn't leave it like this.
He looked up at the closed door at the top of the staircase. He knew he was going to have to walk up it. He had to do it. It was diabolic, he thought, like the set of a horror film. Everything had been designed. He was being led. It was like it had been arranged, just for him, and the downstairs bathroom had simply been a teaser.
Stuart began, slowly, to walk up the staircase. Twenty steps in all, round and round in tight circles. Andy stayed close behind. They reached the platform at the top. In front of them was a white bath towel, spread out on the floor. It was covered with brown stains. Stuart thought it was covered with shit. It didn't occur to him that it might be dried blood.
Stuart stepped over the bath towel. The sliding door ran from right to left. He pushed it open, slowly. He walked into the bathroom inside the bell tower. Stuart noticed a pool of black on the floor to his right. He couldn't work out what it might be. Then he noticed a number of tea-light holders, which he remembered buying in Heal's on Tottenham Court Road years ago. They were arranged in an arrow shape, pointing away from the bath towards the east.
Stuart looked in the direction of the bath. Rod's feet were protruding from it. They were black and spattered. He saw that there were white objects scattered on the floor, like pebbles, and his eyes travelled up beyond Rod's feet, up his legs.
Rod's body had been ripped from his neck to his navel.
If Andy hadn't been behind him, he would have fallen back over the spiral staircase to the ground. Stuart started screaming. We've got to get out, we've got to get out. It will come and get us.
They ran down the spiral staircase and out of the flat. They hammered on the door of the next apartment on the landing. Stuart was shaking and screaming, They've murdered him.
End of Part Three