Dominik Kocher was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 23 years in 2014 Image supplied by Cheshire police (Image: Chester Chronicle)
“He looked dishevelled, like he hadn’t had a bath in weeks, and he just said ‘I want to confess to killing my housemate in 2009, we had an argument and I buried him under the shed at the bottom of the garden’.” This describes the moment one of three killers walked into a police station and admitted to murdering a Ryanair cabin crew member four years previously.
Up until that point, officers believed Christophe Borgye had simply vanished from his home. Mr Borgye harboured a passionate desire to explore the world and had departed his homeland of France to take up employment with Ryanair at Liverpool John Lennon Airport. After landing his ideal position that allowed him to indulge his wanderlust, he stayed on various sofas until a work colleague put him in touch with a friend from his football team, reports the Liverpool Echo.
This friend, Dominik Kocher, offered Christophe accommodation in a property on Hylton Court in Ellesmere Port, sharing with his cousin Manuel Wagner and childhood companion Sebastian Bendou, both acquaintances from their upbringing in Salzburg, Austria.
Kocher, a wed father of three children, wouldn’t demand rental payments but would collect his monthly wages to cover household expenses and groceries, promising to return any unspent funds when his tenancy concluded. This week the ECHO interviewed Anton Sullivan, a former Inspector with Cheshire Police, who probed the killing 16 years ago.
He revealed: “Kocher said to him that the way it works is it’s a family group who looked after each other. Kocher said he would do the cooking, the cleaning, do the weekly shop, and Borgye had to pay his wages into this joint account. Christophe was a trusting soul, people might think he was naïve but he wasn’t, he took them on face value and gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. He was happy, he got the best room in the house and could travel with work.
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Former Cheshire Police Inspector Anton Sullivan,on Hylton Court where Christophe Borgye was murdered and buried. (Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
“Kocher rented the house directly across the property and when people in the area were interviewed they thought Kocher was actually the landlord because he controlled and managed everything in the house. Bendou and Wagner would go out doing menial labour jobs – pot washing, cleaning, those kind of things.
“It was apparent that Kocher would take all of their earnings and treat them like children. If they wanted new clothes or anything like that, Kocher would get it for them. He would do their cleaning, their cooking, and they were happy to live like this. Christophe carried on with his life with the family not knowing there was anything wrong.
“Looking back on it, Kocher was probably planning that there was going to come a point where there was no money left. It became apparent that the bills were being paid for by Christophe because Kocher and his wife were living well beyond their means.”
In April 2009, Kocher was compelled to act when Christophe informed him that he was being relocated to Brussels, offering him the opportunity to explore more of the world than if he remained in Liverpool. Kocher assisted him in booking his flight to Dublin, where he was scheduled to meet with Ryanair to establish his new life in Belgium.
However, the unsuspecting Frenchman was unaware that plans for his murder were already underway.
Mr Sullivan, a veteran of the police force for 32 years, revealed: “Kocher by this point had been planning for the death. Looking at credit card receipts that he had gone and bought bricks, building materials including cement, he had gone to Asda and bought three knives, the knives that were subsequently found.
“On April 23, when Christophe had come back late at night from work, the three of them went out, purchased more equipment and laid out the kitchen and told him they were going to be doing a deep clean of the house.
“The next morning they called the victim downstairs to the kitchen where it had all been set out. The tarpaulin had been laid out, they were wearing gloves, they had overshoes on and each one of them had a knife.
“The victim was asked to start cleaning underneath the sink and that’s when they attack him.”
The trio launched their brutal assault on the 35 year old, but the knives “weren’t up to the job” after he was stabbed twice. Wagner then produced a claw hammer and struck Christophe over the head, resulting in his death.
The out building on Hylton Court,where Christophe Borgye buried after being murdered.(Pic Andrew Teebay). (Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
Mr Sullivan elaborated: “We didn’t know until the last investigation when Bendou admitted that Wagner was the one to bring the hammer which wasn’t part of the original plan. The knives were very ineffective in causing fatal injures and the victim was in shock. Then they started using the hammer and they’re the injuries that the pathologist determined to be what killed him.
“Once they committed the murder they quickly wrapped him up in the tarpaulin, stuffed him into the grave they pre-prepared in the shed and started preparing the concrete before cleaning up the scene. A few hours later, we have receipts that show they all went to Chiquito’s at Cheshire Oaks where they all had lunch and then they just carried on with their lives.”
Christophe was entombed in a cement structure in the garden of the building along with their weapons.
“They got rid of all of Christophe’s property. They sold his car, they sold his records and CD collection to Music Magpie, we even managed to prove that Kocher had used the victim’s credit card to buy an anniversary card for his wife. It became apparent that Kocher was the ringleader who orchestrated this.”
When ‘workaholic’ Christophe, didn’t turn up to work for a week, his colleagues became suspicious, and they soon reported it to police after visiting Ellesmere Port but getting no answers.
One of them reached out to Christophe’s brother Noel, informing him that Christophe was missing, which led Cheshire Police to initiate a missing person investigation. However, no leads were found.
Bendou informed the police that he had disappeared without any indication of his whereabouts, and the investigation continued with Kocher, who stuck to the story. Then, an email arrived in the family members’ inbox, explaining that he had suddenly decided to travel to China with a woman he had met.
Several aspects didn’t sit right with his family, especially Noel, who was due to get married that year, an event Christophe had promised not to miss.
However, as the years passed, no leads emerged and life went on. Wagner and Bendou continued living in the house where they had brutally murdered their flatmate before moving to Warrington with Kocher and his family in 2012, and then relocating to rural Scotland, setting up home in the town of Dumfries.
They even instructed the new tenants, to whom they sublet Christophe’s room at the house, not to enter the outbuilding, claiming it was used by the landlord for personal storage.
Mr Sullivan believes that the burden of the murder began to affect Bendou, who started showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Then, one evening in April 2013, Cheshire Police received a call from a French-speaking man confessing to murdering his housemate four years prior.
From a phone box, he told the police: “This is too much for my mind”.
Bendou travelled to Cheshire where he confessed to the murder, claiming it was self-defence, with Mr Sullivan, an Acting Inspector at the time, being called in because he could speak fluent French.
He said: “I sat down with him and we had a brief conversation which went along the lines of him telling me in his own language what he was on about. He looked dishevelled, like he hadn’t had a bath in weeks, and he just said ‘I want to confess to killing my housemate in 2009, we had an argument and I buried him under the shed at the bottom of the garden’.
“Obviously, not what I was expecting, but I decided to take down some notes and conferred with a colleague. He’d given the name of Christophe and that’s when we realised we had an outstanding missing from home case and he was still missing.
“We made the decision to lock him up, arrest him on suspicion of murder, and at that point I wrote down the details of what he said in French. I asked him to read it and sign it, and at that point he asked to speak to a solicitor.
“Then 24 hours later my colleague contacted me saying they had found the body but the case is four years old and we need to track down the next of kin.”
Mr Sullivan was then brought into the investigation and never departed.
He traced Christophe’s family before helping secure convictions for the three killers across two separate trials. During interrogation Bendou altered his account to disclose the complete scope of his accomplices’ participation.
As the situation became clearer to investigators Kocher and Wagner were detained on murder charges. Kocher and Bendou were later formally accused of murder whilst Wagner faced allegations of assisting with relocating the corpse.
The house on Hylton Court where the murder of Christophe Borgye took place.(Pic Andrew Teebay). (Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
Kocher and Wagner appeared in court in 2014, when Kocher was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 23 years. German citizen Wagner was part of the identical proceedings; nevertheless, he escaped murder charges due to inadequate evidence.
He confessed to unknowingly assisting in moving Christophe’s remains and was acquitted of aiding an offender and preventing lawful burial.
Bendou required treatment for his psychiatric condition before facing a separate hearing. He was convicted of murder and handed a life sentence with a 14-year minimum term.
Officers were determined to secure Wagner’s conviction for his involvement in the killing, with Bendou, who had implicated him, serving as a crucial witness in the murder case that occurred in 2017. Bendou testified that whilst he and Wagner wrapped Christophe’s remains and transported them to the shed, Kocher prepared the concrete.
Upon initial arrest, Wagner claimed he was unaware of events and believed Christophe was “living happily ever after” in China with a girlfriend. He informed officers: “I didn’t play any part in disposing of his body. I was shocked and shaking.
“I couldn’t believe it. Christophe and I lived together for a long time. I considered him more of a friend than a housemate.”
Wagner later informed the police that he remembered returning home to find Bendou, who requested his assistance in moving a tarpaulin-wrapped “package”. He attempted to persuade the jury that he believed this might contain some rubbish, adding: “I don’t know if it was the body or not.”
However, the jury saw through his deceit and unanimously found him guilty of murder, before he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 16 years.
Following his retirement from Cheshire Police, Anton Sullivan collaborated with Woodhouse Productions to create the Murder in Concrete documentary, which delves into the murder case. The documentary is available to stream on Prime Video from August 31.