Self-centred manipulator and a serial cheat who left a trail of misery and debt
THOSE who sat through David Harris’s two-week trial at the Old Bailey could have been forgiven for wondering if they’d stumbled on to the set of the TV crime drama on which he once worked.
Harris, 68, spent nearly two decades working as a location manager on the hit ITV series, The Bill, but the colourful tale of infidelity, greed and contract killing which unfolded in courtroom number nine over the past fortnight has been more gripping than anything ever seen on the police drama.
Twice-married Harris tried to hire not one, but four potential hitmen in several bungled bids to bump off his wealthy partner Hazel allinson, herself a script supervisor on The Bill, after falling in love with a 28-year- old lithuanian he met in a brothel in Worthing in West Sussex.
Various schemes to get rid of Mrs allinson and inherit her £1million home in the idyllic South Downs village of amberley, included kidnapping, car-jacking and poisoning. as a last resort, he suggested to one of the men, she could be pushed off a cliff on the nearby south coast.
after being caught by police, quite literally, with his pants down – Harris was arrested last November while in bed with Ugne Cekaviciute in a South london B&B – he tried to pass off his crimes as ‘innocent’ research for a thriller he was planning to write.
‘I am not a murderer and neither would I ever consider murdering Hazel,’ he insisted in the witness box.
But while Harris came across in court as a bumbling, pathetic buffoon – a man who, in his own cringe-worthy words, had a ‘frightened feeling in my tummy’ as he schemed to bump off the woman who stood by him and supported him for nearly 30 years – there was little doubt that his real motives were far more sinister.
The true story, as a Mail investigation can now reveal, is of a greedy, ruthless megalomaniac who once enjoyed life in the fast lane, lost his fortune and then exploited others to maintain the lifestyle he thought he deserved.
Speaking exclusively to this newspaper, his two ex-wives, one of whom left him barely a month after they married in 1969, paint a portrait of a selfcentred manipulator and serial cheat who left a trail of misery and debt long before he met Hazel on the set of The Bill in 1989.
Hazel,who worked for the BBC as a director’s assistant in the 1970s on TV shows such as Poldark and Doctor Who and, later, on the Rowan atkinson comedy, The Thin Blue line, supported Harris financially, even paying for the clothes he wore and the Saab car with personalised plates he drove, and providing him with a £300-amonth allowance.
But their outwardly respectable relationship in amberley in West Sussex where she was a parish councillor and sang in the church choir, was a sham.
Harris ran up thousands of pounds of debts – and borrowed huge sums from wealthy neighbours in a bid to cover his tracks – as he squandered £50,000 of Hazel’s money on jewellery, underwear and hotel stays with his pretty young mistress.
He even persuaded 6ft1ins former professional basketball player Ugne to pose naked on a bed at the house Hazel owned with the couple’s three spaniels.
‘He wanted both the younger woman and the older woman’s money,’ said prosecutor William Boyce QC. ‘ Hazel allinson had the money, he didn’t.’ His second wife, a former make-up artist who asked not to be named, said: ‘ Women were always his downfall.’ She married Harris in 1972 when he was an assistant film director working for Studio lambert in Soho and driving around the West end in his lotus elan.
She left him in 1979 after enduring years of physical abuse and affairs and hasn’t seen him since their divorce in 1985. He never contributed to the upbringing of their daughter Prudence who cut ties with him in 1988.
‘When he was young he was very good looking, very charming. He was a womaniser,’ she said. ‘He would use them, abuse them and then move on.
‘Marrying him was the worst mistake of my life. His attitude was – what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine. The only good thing to come out of it was my daughter.’
Harris’s humble beginnings were a far cry from his brief highflying days in the film industry and the luxurious existence he came to enjoy as Hazel’s partner. Born in 1949, the eldest son of post office worker and parttime taxi driver Geoff and Mavis, a dinner lady, he was raised in a flat in Paddington and later a small bungalow in Northwood in north-west london where he attended Potter Street Secondary Modern School.
It was there, aged 15, that he met his first wife Jacqui Giles. Now a retired podiatrist living in Shoreham, West Sussex, she says: ‘His parents weren’t nice people. Both used to drink. They used to have the most frightful rows. David dreamt of escaping.’That escape came in the form of a career in the film industry. Harris left school at 15 to work as a trainee at Studio lambert, a small advertising, media and film company in the West end.
By the time 20-year-old Harris and Jacqui married in 1969, he
was earning good money as an assistant director on television commercials – including the Beanz Meanz Heinz campaign. The couple moved into a penthouse flat in an Edwardian house in Harrow.
Not long before the wedding, there were rumours of an affair with a model named Debbie Moore – who later became the owner of Pineapple Dance Studios.
He denied the claims, admitting only to be ‘infatuated’ by Miss Moore, now 70. Nevertheless, the marriage only lasted only six weeks before she walked out. ‘Once he’d escaped his overbearing parents he just wanted to be a teenager,’ she said. ‘We quickly realised we’d made a massive mistake.’
Harris’s second wife also describes his family as dysfunctional. When they met at Studio Lambert where she also worked, she quickly fell in love with darkeyed, dark-haired Harris.
‘I just thought he was so young and beautiful. He was very bright. Very clever. It blinded me,’ she said. Despite warnings from her mother and best friend, she married Harris in December 1972 and they moved to a swanky apartment in Hyde Park Mansions in Old Marylebone, but she soon regretted it.
Harris’s head, she says, was turned by the glamour and extravagance of the film world and he spent huge amounts to keep up his image. He also physically abused her and on one occasion, when the pair returned home after the Studio Lambert Christmas party in 1977, she claimed: ‘He just beat me up. It was so bad that time I just had to call the police.’
She was taken to nearby Paddington Green police station and advised to leave him. She added: ‘The law wasn’t really on the side of women in the 1970s.’
There were also affairs – a relationship with a divorced motherof-three, another with a female Israeli army captain.
Bythe time she left in 1979 they owed thousands of pounds. She was able to work her way out of debt but by his own admission, the years that followed were not good ones for Harris. Forced out of work by his excessive drinking, living off the women in his life, a friend finally got him a job scouting locations for The Bill in 1989.
Divorcee Hazel Allinson, meanwhile, had enjoyed a successful TV career working both for the BBC and ITV. The privately- educated daughter of a company director from Purley in Surrey, she bought all the homes that she and Harris lived in across South London and carried on working while he retired in 2006 because of a bad back, depression and stress.
By the time they sold their last in Wandsworth in 2010 when The Bill came to an end, it was worth £1mil- lion, more than enough to fund their retirement in rural Sussex.
By then, Harris had already been unfaithful to Hazel. In court, he admitted having an affair with a nurse as well as visiting prostitutes.
‘Hazel has never been very sexually orientated,’ he told the court. ‘I, on the other hand, have quite a large sexual appetite.’
Harris met Ugne Cekaviciute in October 2011 in a brothel in Worthing. While he became besotted with her and claimed to have rescued her, her mother in Lithuania told this newspaper that her daughter had been trafficked into the UK and accepted Harris’s offer of help out of desperation.
Hazel found out about the relationship with Ugne as early as 2014 when she discovered a bank statement in Harris’s pocket revealing the tens of thousands he had spent. She forgave his infidelity, Harris said in court, because ‘what we had was too important. The bond was too great for us just to separate after 27 years’.
But, while Hazel immersed herself in life in Amberley, Harris spent nights in London with Ugne.
Desperate to keep his spiralling financial crisis from Hazel, who was battling breast cancer at the time, Harris turned to friends and wealthy neighbours – many of whom refused him. Desperation led to Harris’s amateurish attempts to hire a hitman.
The hero of his imaginary book – he never wrote a word – was Tom Noble, a middle-aged lawyer more attractive, more successful and much younger than he was.
‘The storyline was based on my life – a guy meets young girl, falls in love, can’t be with young girl because he can’t afford to be, but knows he could inherit if something happened to his partner,’ said Harris.
Perhaps the biggest insult of all was Harris’s claim that he was writing the book to make money for Hazel. Prosecution barrister William Boyce had his own suggestion for a title. ‘May I suggest The Good, The Bad and The Ugne?’ he said.
Like him, the Old Bailey jury who listened to Harris’s nonsense didn’t believe a word of it.
Additional reporting: Jaya Narain and Jim Norton