On February 12, 2003, millionaire Amarjit Chohan told employees at his fruit import and export company near Heathrow that he was leaving early to attend a business meeting two hours away near Stonehenge.
Chohan had made no secret about the fact he wanted to sell his company and move to India with his young family, so his staff thought nothing of it, even if the iconic heritage site did not seem like the most obvious place to discuss the sale.
But tragically, it would be the last time he was seen alive.
Two days later, his wife, two baby boys – aged just 18 months and eight weeks old – and mother-in-law would also vanish without a trace from their three-bedroom detached bungalow in Hounslow, west London.
Their breakfast was left half-made, the children’s Thomas the Tank engine toys left scattered across the floor and wet clothes still in the washing machine.
Police were only alerted when Onkar Verma grew concerned that he had not heard from his beloved sister Nancy, Chohan’s wife, in days. Despite living on different continents – Verma was based in New Zealand – the siblings would not go a day without speaking.
By the time local police were aware of the disappearance, employees at CIBA Freight, Chohan’s company, had already received letters signed by him which handed over the company to his trusted friend Kenneth Regan.
It was only when, three months later, Chohan’s tortured body emerged floating in the waters by Bournemouth pier, his face gagged with packing tape, that the reality of the case dawned on detectives.
Amarjit Chohan (centre), his wife Nancy (right), their two baby sons and Charanjit Kaur (left) disappeared in February 2003
What was, until then, treated as a missing persons investigation turned into a murder probe involving three generations of the same family.
Speaking to The Crime Desk’s On the Case podcast, former Detective Inspector Tony Bishop said: ‘Suddenly it was all hands to the pump.
‘That’s when we realised “this is obviously a murder, Regan has been lying”.
‘Until then Regan had got his story together, it seemed to be quite a well-rehearsed story.
‘Then suddenly Chohan’s body turned up on Bournemouth pier and he’d clearly been murdered, there was tape around his head, to try and gag him, and he had a number of injuries.
‘Quite clearly, he hadn’t left and was now living in India, neither was he in Newport.’
Just 24 hours before Chohan’s body washed ashore in Bournemouth, Regan had gone back on his initial tale that the Chohan family had fled abroad, and instead told police that the millionaire and his family were alive and well in Newport, Wales.
Why he came up with this distraction, we will discover later.
Regan, who had been working for CIBA Freight as a driver at the time of Chohan’s disappearance, had an extensive criminal history and had done several stints in prison for his roles in drug smuggling, money laundering and counterfeit passport operations.
In fact, the only reason he was out of jail at the time of the murders was because he had a 20-year sentence reduced to eight years for informing on his criminal associates.
It was in jail that Regan and Chohan started an unlikely friendship after the businessman was jailed for four years for fraud, after manipulating his tax bill.
Chohan’s tortured body washed up at Bournemouth pier two months after he went missing
Kenneth Regan had posed as Chohan’s friend and loyal employee, but all the while had plotted to lure Chohan and his family to their death before taking over his company
The farm estate where the bodies were buried by Regan and his accomplices before being exhumed and dumped at sea
When Regan came out of jail, Chohan offered him work as a van driver. Within a year, he would carry out his plot to take over the company.
Regan had no exceptional interest in heading a fruit import company. What he did have interest in was turning it into a drug smuggling operation.
‘Regan was just the sort of person that was so greedy that having met Chohan and understood his business, thought it was the perfect front for an international drugs dealer,’ says Det Insp Bishop.
The business meeting in Stonehenge was entirely fabricated by Regan, who told Chohan he had found a Dutch company interested in buying the firm.
He would lure Chohan to a car park near Stonehenge with his associate William Horncy – one of his previous criminal friends that he informed on – and have fellow criminal Peter Rees pose as a Dutch buyer.
The trio would kidnap him, take him to Regan’s father’s home near Salisbury, Wiltshire, and torture him into signing empty sheets of paper which they would then use to forge documents.
They would even force Chohan into recording a voicemail telling his wife that all was well – which set off alarm bells for Nancy, who told her brother Verma that the couple only spoke to each other in their native Punjabi. The voicenote was in English.
While Chohan was tortured in Wiltshire, Regan and Horncy drove to the Chohan family home in Hounslow, where they would kidnap and kill Nancy, Chohan’s mother-in-law Charanjit Kaur, as well as baby sons Ravinder and Devinder.
In a rather surprising twist in the case, Regan would then contact an old friend Belinda Brewin, who was entirely unaware of the murders and bring her in to become a director at the firm.
All along, he knew of her large estate in Tiverton, Devon, with expansive fields – the perfect burial ground for his horrific crimes.
While Brewin was away in London, the gang used a digger to dig a mass grave for the five bodies.
Brewin would later tell officers of how she had returned home earlier than planned to her Tiverton home and seen the trio digging – which they explained away by saying they were fixing a drainage problem she had previously mentioned to Regan.
Two months later, when it became clear the police were not going to naively accept his cover story that Chohan had disappeared, Regan felt the net closing in.
He realised they would eventually find the bodies, and created a distraction.
He sent police on a wild goose chase in Newport, convincing them that Chohan and his family were staying there until they had passports arranged for them, and that if officers went to the said meeting point in the Welsh town, they would see that Chohan was alive and well.
Onkar Verma, Nancy’s brother, had consistently pushed for police to escalate the case, convinced that the disappearances were suspicious
William Horncy, an old associate of Regan’s, was also involved in the murders and received a whole-life tariff
Having successfully sent the police off to Newport, Regan then returned to Brewin’s estate with Horncy and Rees, dug up the graves, transported them in a hired van and later a dinghy-styled boat, and dumped them off the south coast.
Around a day later when Chohan’s body washed up at Bournemouth was when officers realised they were dealing with a murder case.
Det Insp Bishop was among two officers who were then sent to Brewin’s address to investigate further.
It was after local forensic officers were called in to examine the dug up land that fragments of Indian jewellery, poppers from baby clothing and strands of hair were discovered.
The bodies had been exhumed. Regan and Horncy had already gone on the run via ferry to France.
It would not be until three months later that Nancy’s body would be spotted by fishermen at Poole Bay in Dorset.
Her skull had been smashed with a hammer.
In September, seven months after disappearing, the remains of Charanjit’s body washed up on the Isle of Wight.
A drop of blood outside Regan’s home, and mobile phone data which revealed their locations gave officers the evidence they needed to prosecute the case.
Det Insp Bishop stood at the port at Calais as Horncy, fed up with his life on the run, returned via ferry to be arrested.
While Regan and Horncy were handed whole-life tariffs for the murders, Rees was handed a 23-year sentence.
More than two decades later, the bodies of Devinder and Ravinder, two innocent babies caught up in a murderous plot driven by ‘pure greed’, have still never been found.
But the baby poppers found in the exhumed grave in Tiverton can only suggest they suffered the same tragic fate as their parents.
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