Greed Kills Page 2
Craig
It was a typically hot and humid Sydney February day and Craig was sweating so hard he was finding it difficult to hold Brad Jones’s arm in place so that he could get the saw in the right position to cut it off at the elbow. He dropped the arm into the bath for the third time and some blood escaped from the already-severed shoulder, splashing in a crazy pattern on Craig’s T-shirt and also into his right ear. As the warm fluid ran down his neck, he lost it.
“Why couldn’t your stupid bitch of a sister find your policy in winter?” he whined at the necessarily silent Brad. “Stupid cow, this is all her fault!”
Craig fumed and muttered to himself as he completed dismembering Brad’s scrawny (but surprisingly heavy) body in the bath at Brad’s smart flat in Neutral Bay. He had paid thousands of dollars for gym membership to sculpt the lean, strong physique that looked so impressive on a surfboard at the weekends when he went to Bondi for his favourite activity, surfing. As he sawed away he thought that it was really now his second-favourite activity since he had upgraded his drug habit from dope to include cocaine and the occasional puff of heroin, just to keep him mellow. Now he was realising, however, that the exercises he did every morning to improve his appearance on a surfboard didn’t really equip him for cutting up a man’s body, bagging it up and lugging it to his car so he could get rid of the pieces. And he still had no idea how he was going to get the body parts discreetly on to his mate’s tinnie so that he could dump them somewhere out to sea.
But he would work something out. Craig was a very deliberate man who carefully and meticulously planned his exploits, both work and play. He prided himself on understanding the risks that he chose to take, and was always a patient and watchful achiever of his goals. He didn’t work in the insurance industry for nothing.
He was still smarting from the mishap that had upset the highly successful scheme he had been running at work for the past few years. He was now a middle-ranking manager in the Sydney office of a major French multinational insurance company. He had worked there for 15 years in a number of departments, from customer service to underwriting, IT and actuarial and was now a senior claims manager in the life insurance division. He was not stimulated by his job but treated it as a source of funds for his surfing and his drug habit. His fellow workers were either adoring fans of his surfing exploits (as shown on his many YouTube GoPro videos) or willing recipients of his sexual offerings. There was a deep and fertile pool of adoring young women.
All in all, Craig’s life had played out pretty much exactly as he wanted, he thought. The only problem was that his salary, like those of most middle-ranking office drones, was far too small for his many needs. Craig spent his day signing off on life insurance claims that ranged from $50,000 to $990,000, that being the upper limit he was authorised to clear. Anything from a million dollars upwards had to go to the divisional director for her signature before the funds were released. He was getting sick of doling out this money to other people while he took home an amount that just covered his living expenses and leisure activities. It wasn’t fair! He became even more disgruntled every time the local CEO was in the paper bragging about the billions of dollars profit he was making for the company and how he was going to spend his exorbitant multi-million dollar bonus on more diamond knuckle-dusters for his teenage bride.
The unfairness of it all had for years worked its insidious way into Craig’s psyche. Finally, after a particularly long and uncomfortable trip sitting in the back of a plane from Hawaii next to a sweaty, obese 45-year-old mother and her 6-year-old brat, he had resolved to get some of this cash flowing his way.
Craig was a good planner and this skill had served him well in his slow climb up the corporate ladder. He had worked on a number of projects over the years delivering ‘business process improvement’ across the company. This had given him a thorough understanding of how the life insurance process worked from beginning to end, including the potential loopholes or control weaknesses that had so far not been plugged.
Life insurance is not a good way to spend your hard earned money unless you have a terminal illness that nobody knows about but you. Then you have to hoodwink the insurers into accepting the risk. The truth is that most people in countries not in war zones can expect long and healthy lives. A fair number of them work this out and stop paying for totally unnecessary life insurance policies as soon as they can. For instance, such insurance is not a lot of use to the vast majority of young families with large mortgages, due to the incredibly high property prices in Sydney. They often take it out only because the bank insists. The banks, of course, frequently collect a commission from the insurer along the way, assuming that they don’t actually own the insurance company.
Craig knew all this, and he also knew that the policies at his company held by people who each year let them lapse was in the thousands. There was a half-hearted sales process in place that had been started just after a business process improvement project to address ‘revenue leakages’. After an initial burst of enthusiasm from the telesales team who were to call these people within 90 days of the last paid monthly premium and offer to reinstate them, it was discovered that the company only paid a bonus on the missed premiums. So the telesales people stopped doing this and only chased new business. By the time that Craig was hatching his plan, pretty much every lapsing policy had been allowed to die a natural death.
The chances of these people trying to make a claim on the lapsed policy was almost zero, especially when Craig was careful about his selection of those to back up his personal plan. The clever idea was that he produced a monthly report which picked up the lapsing policies and would select one that looked likely just before the 90-day grace period expired. He would then change the contact details on the paperwork to a mailbox that he rented in a newsagent at Kings Cross, update the premiums and then continue to pay them at post offices in cash, every month for at least a year. After that, he then ‘killed’ the policyholder.
He had decided that given the hundreds of people who died on the roads each year, traffic accidents were a useful cause of death and would not raise any questions among the team who processed the falsified documents. As long as the policy was under a million dollars, the final approval came from Craig. He was home free.
Even if the policyholders did die, the only evidence relatives would find in the deceased’s personal papers was an insurance policy that had expired over a year before. The chance of their making a claim was slim to none.
After six months of meticulous planning, going over the details of his plan time and time again, Craig decided he was ready to give it a go. He had found a great candidate. Brad Jones was a 28-year-old accountant living in a flat he had bought in trendy North Shore Neutral Bay. Since Brad Jones had a very large mortgage, the bank had insisted on a mortgage insurance policy.
Brad was unmarried and had named his sister Alice, his only living relative, as the beneficiary of the policy. She would also inherit the flat with the idea that she could use the payout to settle the mortgage.
Brad had held on to the policy for three years, but had recently stopped paying the premiums. After a Facebook search, Craig discovered that he was about to be posted to the London office of Price Waterhouse Coopers and was looking for tenants for his flat. Perfect!
Craig was excited and nervous. He stayed back late at work one Friday, three days short of the mandatory lapse date and logged on to the system using one of his team’s user ID. Maddissynn was an airhead who always used the name of her cat with the current month as her password.
He was surprised to find himself shaking and had to try three times to change the contact details before he got it right. “Take a deep breath—you can do this,” he muttered nervously to himself after his second attempt was rejected. “Please note that you have one more attempt remaining before your account is locked and you will need to contact IT support to have your access reinstated”, was the helpful message on the screen.
&n
bsp; Craig carefully retyped each character: M e o w l y c y r u s 0 4
He took a long deep breath.
Welcome Maddissynn
Slowly exhaling, Craig made the necessary changes, logged off and went home. Luckily he had just restocked with some excellent buds from a mate of his who lived in the bush. Tonight he was going to celebrate.
He waited for nearly two years before psyching himself up to make the ‘claim’. He fabricated a death certificate for Brad stating death was due to ‘rupture of aorta, following road traffic accident’, filled in the claim form in the name of Alice Jones and placed it in the mail.
Everything worked like a dream. Craig collected a cheque for $350,000 from the post office box he had entered on the claim form and paid it into his special overseas account after ‘Alice’ had endorsed it over to the fictitious name on the account.
Then he set about identifying his next targets. Over the next four years Craig ‘killed’ another ten people and amassed nearly $8 million in his retirement fund. Following his careful selection of Brad Jones, he found a number of young, outwardly healthy people with no dependants and large mortgages, who lived in places spread around Australia. As each person’s policy lapsed, he carefully changed their contact address, paid their arrears and kept it up to date for a couple of years before faking their death.
But now he was starting to get bored. He was now in his early 40s with no obligations and his retirement fund was beckoning. The young women at work were less inclined to succumb to his advances, and his occasional ‘puff’ of heroin had turned into a regular intravenous bender every weekend. He was going to have to get his hands on the money he had stashed away overseas to begin his fully funded retirement.
But just after returning from his regular Christmas surfing trip, his carefully planned future started to disintegrate. He was having lunch at the crowded, noisy food court underneath the company building when his peace was shattered by the piercing voice of the blonde and vacuous office receptionist at the next table. She was regaling her friends at the top of her voice about an incident that had happened that morning.
“Oh My God!” she began. “You won’t believe what happened to me this morning!”
Her friends noisily encouraged her to reveal all.
“This total drug-fucked junkie whore just walked in waving a bit of grubby paper and shoved it under my nose, screaming at me to give her the money. I was really, really pissed off. Think of what I could of caught if I touched it!”
“Ooh yuck,” and other expressions of sympathy emanated from her cheer squad.
”She thought that she could just give me the paper and I would pay her money! The stupid fucking bi-atch didn’t even understand that it was a life policy and not a savings account.”
“How can you not know that? Stupid cow!” chimed in the friends.
“I told her to fuck off.”
“Really? In reception? Did anyone hear you?”
”Actually I said to her: “Madam, this is not a policy you can cash in. The only way you can collect is if the policyholder dies, and then only if the policy is paid up to date.”
Her friends rallied, asking what happened next.
”She sure didn’t like that! She told me her brother was an accountant who had been living in London and was coming back to Sydney. He had asked her to cash in the policy since he needed the money. I ask you! She was a fucking lunatic. I told her that her brother could be God Almighty and would still have to die to get the money. Then she started to yell and scream at me, saying that her brother Brad would be there tomorrow and he would sort me right out. I called Security. That was when I told her to fuck off.”
“Then what?”
“She threw the scungy bit of paper at me and ran out. Fucking useless fat Leb security guard turns up once she’s a hundred metres down the street.”
“Shut up! Don’t you know Shazza’s dating Rafiq? Don’t be such a racist!”
After this, the conversation turned to the interesting matter of whether Shazza was going to convert to “Muslimism” and what colour the babies would be.
Craig was paralysed with shock. This had to be Brad Jones the accountant. What was he going to do? Where had he gone wrong? He had to get back to the office straight away and get hold of that piece of paper the ‘junkie whore’ had thrown at the receptionist. Then he needed to calm down and make a new plan.
He quickly gathered up the remainder of his chicken-and-rocket wholemeal wrap and raced upstairs.
Rafiq was loafing around in the reception area and was only too happy to hand the offending piece of paper to the important manager. Craig took it and went back to his office. Yes, it was the same Brad Jones that Craig had ‘killed’ in the random accident four years before.
But who on earth was the ‘junkie whore’? Suddenly he remembered the sister, Alice. Craig thought fast. He didn’t want any traces of his research on the company computers, so he feigned a gastro attack, apologised to his team and headed home to do some serious searching for Brad and Alice.
Brad was still living his life large on Facebook. It announced that he was coming back to Australia and would be looking for a job. 756 of his Facebook Friends had welcomed his impending return with dozens of invitations to drinks and parties. One of them was Alice Jones. Brad followed the links to find a hard-partying, skanky-looking woman who was apparently 24 years old, even if she looked at least 50. According to her version of her life, her arsehole brother was about to return from overseas and was kicking her out of his flat. She was quite outraged that Brad had wanted her to pay rent. Several of her Facebook friends agreed that this was indeed quite unreasonable.
At this point, since Craig had the policy document, it looked as though the situation could be contained. There was probably no need to worry, even though Alice was clearly a drug addict and so quite unpredictable. He would, however, be extra-vigilant should she decide to take the matter further.
Unfortunately for him, this is exactly what Alice did.
The amount in dispute, $350,000, is a large amount of money to most people, and Alice, who had already worked out how to spend it, saw the insurance company as snatching it away from her. She was so furious after her encounter with the receptionist that she ran all the way down George Street and straight into the front door of the police station near Town Hall. The young constable on duty at the front desk was not inclined to believe a word that was coming out of Alice’s mouth, due to his already extensive experience of dealing with junkies and also because she didn’t have any paperwork to back up her incoherent screeching.
However, policemen are bureaucrats and there are always forms to fill in for any situation. The constable patiently filled in a form so that Alice could lodge a complaint of fraud against the insurance company. He told the slightly mollified woman that he would give the form to the Fraud Squad and they would be sure to follow this up for her.
Alice then went back to Brad’s flat and continued to ‘tidy up’, hoping to find more valuables that she could steal from her brother before he returned.
It was a bit of a miracle that the complaint form made it out of the front office at the police station, but within a couple of weeks it reached the Fraud Squad where it was read by a clerk looking to get home to feed his cats. He rated its priority F and filed it at the back of the queue. After a few more weeks, an equally bored Fraud Squad detective was given the file, whereupon he called the insurance company and after some delay was put through to Maddissynn in the claims department.
“Bradley Jones?” Maddissynn repeated. “Just let me look him up on the system.”
She found the policy but was confused. “Hang on a sec, Detective, I’ll need to talk to my manager about this. It looks as if it’s been paid out already.”
Maddissynn put the detective on hold and went into Craig”s office. “Craig, do you have a minute?” she enquired sweetly.
“Sure, what’s the problem?”
“I’ve got
a detective on the phone asking about a closed policy. It’s a bit strange, apparently they’ve had a complaint we won’t pay. But I’ve looked it up and we paid the claim in full two years ago.”
Craig went very still. “What name is on the policy?”
“Bradley Jones.”
Making sure he appeared outwardly calm, Craig told her to put the call through to him. He would clear it up.
“Detective, Craig Sellars here. How can I help?”
“Well, Mr Sellars, I’ve been given a complaint to look into. An Alice Jones states that she visited your offices and was refused a payout. Your girl told her that her brother had to die first.”
“Well, Detective, Alice would appear to be a little confused. Her brother did indeed have a policy with our company, but it lapsed over four years ago. In any case, as she was told, the policy is a life policy and only payable on the death of the insured.”
That would get rid of him.
“Thanks, Mr Sellars, but can you clarify for me why your staff member said just now that the money had already been paid? Alice Jones was quite clear that her brother was in London, not dead.”
Craig found his hand shaking. The detective wasn’t sounding particularly concerned, but at the same time he was clearly not an idiot and had been paying attention to the story he had been told. It didn’t seem to Craig as though this matter was going to be dispensed with through bland assurances over the phone.
“I’m sure she just made a mistake. I’ll make some enquiries and get back to you. Can you please give me a contact number?”
The detective gave Craig his number and hung up. Craig was in a lather of sweat. What was he going to do now? He had to think calmly and rationally. There was no way he was going to be caught for this. He had his retirement fund primed and ready in a safe location overseas, and at some point very soon would repatriate the money, head to the Gold Coast and spend the rest of his life surfing and having sex with chicks desperate to fuck the new rich bloke. That was the plan and he was sticking to it.
He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but the only way it was going to go away was if Alice were to go away too. And given that the records on Bradley showed him as already dead, he would have to follow that up in real life.
It wasn’t looking good for Craig. He had managed over the past six years to become totally comfortable with being a criminal, but this was something else. Was he prepared to take the risk of murdering someone? On the other hand, did he have the guts to spend years in jail being beaten and raped by thugs and real murderers, not to mention having to hand over his hard earned retirement funds?
When he put it to himself like that, it was really quite an easy decision. Alice and Brad were both toast.
The first question he needed to answer was how long he had to do the deed. Given the pace of progress so far by the Police, he reckoned there was at least a week before anything was going to happen. After all, they were just looking at a possible $350,000 insurance fraud and that had to be pretty low down their priority list, given the millions that the papers were all talking about involving politicians, gas companies and developers all giving each other large brown paper bags in dodgy pubs.
According to Facebook, Brad was landing in Sydney the following Wednesday. That gave Craig five days to work out a plan and kill him before he settled in and was harder to get to without being spotted. Brad was landing on an early flight and had told his Facebook followers that he just wanted to get home, dump his gear and have a shower before meeting up with mates at the pub. This gave Craig enough time to act.
Alice would be a bit harder to pin down, but he would work on her later.
The next question was how to kill Brad. Craig wasn’t a particularly violent man, but given the time constraints and his need to ensure that nobody found him out, he was going to have to resort to simple methods.
The previous summer he had been surfing at Tamarama just down the coast from Bondi when a surfer next to him had been wiped out in spectacular fashion by an enormous wave. The board and surfer had parted company, but as the leash reached the end of its length, the board snapped back and caught the unfortunate man smack on the side of the head, killing him instantly.
Craig had been shocked at the time to see such a violent death occurring just metres away, but had also been fascinated by the sight of the man’s skull coming apart as the board tip buried itself in his temple and blood and brains were washed into the surf leaving a pink trail delineating one of the rips for which Tamarama is famous.
The lasting memory for Craig had been how quick and easy it had been for the vibrant young surfer to become a floppy, broken corpse.
Okay, sharp blow to the head it would have to be for Brad, he thought. Craig had been impressed with the effect that the tip of the surfboard had delivered, so he considered weapons that could achieve the same effect. He would prefer to kill with a single blow rather than having to keep battering Brad until he succumbed. He also had to get it to Brad’s flat, the best location for the kill, so a large axe might not work. He would certainly attract attention carrying something like that along a suburban street.
Sporting goods are less conspicuous to transport, and after a bit of research, Craig settled on a golf club. Even though he didn’t own any, it was easy to buy second-hand clubs at pawnshops across the city. He was careful to buy for cash and picked up an old heavy steel-shafted set of irons in a pawnshop in Bankstown, a place that Craig had never before visited. After this trip, he was not keen to return.
Initially it all went quite smoothly. Craig knocked on the door and Brad answered. In a blitzkrieg approach, as soon as the door opened Craig swung the six-iron at Brad’s head with all his strength, connecting with his left temple.
Brad dropped instantly to the floor. Craig pushed him inside and noticed that there was very little blood spattering the corridor, then quickly closed the door. He checked for a pulse. Luck was with him. Brad was dead.
“How easy was that?” Craig realised he had just said out loud. He paused, checked his own pulse and found it to be a steady 80 beats per minute, rapidly slowing towards his normal resting rate of 58. Clearly he was made for this type of work.
Now for the clean up. There was no time to waste. He partly lifted and partly dragged Brad into the bathroom. All the movies showed that this was the best place to cut up a body, and who was Craig to reinvent the wheel? After dumping the body, he crept down to the car and retrieved his tools.
Back in the flat, he plugged in the angle grinder and turned it on. The noise was ear- splitting! Quickly he turned it off. The building had parking underneath and seemed to be inhabited entirely by working professionals, none of whom were currently home. But even if they were all at work, people in the next suburbs would hear this racket.
Bugger! Hand tools only then.
Craig found himself sweating and swearing over the partially-dismembered corpse of his young victim on a hot February morning that was getting hotter and more uncomfortable by the minute. Apart from his initial panic about the noisy angle grinder, the heat, and the way the blood made the body slippery and difficult to handle, it was a relatively straightforward job.
After cleaning up the bathroom and the rest of the blood spatter, he enjoyed a long cool shower aided by a quick puff on a joint he had brought along with him. He started to relax. He casually drove his car into the garage and carried the pieces of Brad downstairs, neatly wrapped in strong orange garbage bags. He manhandled them into the boot beside some heavy grey concrete bricks he had purloined from a building site in Waterloo, and fastened them with gaffer tape.
His good mate Gazza was a keen fisherman who kept his tinnie in a shed at the back of his house up in the Northern Beaches suburb of Avalon. Gazza was currently up north on a surfing holiday and wasn’t due back for a couple of weeks. He had given Craig his keys so that he could clear the mail while he was away and had offered the use of his boat in return.
Now all he had to do
was drive up to Gazza’s place where he would put all the pieces of Brad in the boat before he went ‘fishing’ at dawn off Avalon the following morning. He would have preferred to get everything done that evening, but nobody goes fishing in a small tinnie off Avalon at night. He would have attracted unwanted attention had he gone straight out that evening.
As he drove his car north through leafy beachside suburbs, Craig congratulated himself on a job well done. It had all gone very smoothly, and as long as nobody spotted him loading up the tinnie in Gazza’s shed that evening, he was home and hosed.
The following morning as the sun rose over the mirror-like ocean, Craig cleared the boat ramp, pointed the tinnie at Auckland and after half an hour, every two minutes or so he dropped a bit of Brad over the side.
Job done. That had been sweet. Now for Alice.
Back home Craig half-watched the midday news through a smoky haze as the newsreader started droning on about how sad the escalating drug problem was among today’s youth. Only last night, he continued, police had discovered the body of a young prostitute and drug addict behind a strip club in Kings Cross. They were looking for anyone who knew the recent movements of the woman whose picture was now up on the screen.
Staring sullenly at him from his TV screen was a dirty and wasted Alice Jones. Craig was not sure whether to be delighted or disappointed.