Bloody footprint that helped solve Baker Street murder after 30 years... in a case worthy of Sherlock
A HISTORIC murder near the home of Sherlock Holmes has been solved thanks to a single hair and a bloody footprint left behind by the killer.
Sandip Patel stabbed Marina Koppel more than 140 times in her rented flat near the fictional detective’s Baker Street home on August 8, 1994.
Yesterday he was finally convicted of the attack and today he faces life in prison when he is due to be sentenced.
Patel, a 21-year-old student in 1994, ran errands for his father’s newsagent Sherlock Holmes News and though his fingerprints were found at the scene on a carrier bag from the store, his job meant he was not treated as a suspect at the time.
In a mystery that could have been lifted from one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, the only other clues left following the frenzied attack was a strand of hair stuck to Mrs Koppel’s ring and a bloody footprint on a skirting board.
DNA advances meant Patel, now 51, was linked to the hair almost three decades later and he was charged with Mrs Koppel’s
‘Used a bank card stolen from her flat’
murder last year. Patel denied the charge but refused to give evidence in his defence and it took an Old Bailey jury just three hours and ten minutes to convict him yesterday.
Colombian- born Mrs Koppel, who was 39 when she was killed, met her husband David while working as a hotel chambermaid but later became a masseuse who offered sexual services to about 100 well-off clients.
According to her late husband, who died in 2005, her customers included businessmen, a doctor and even a politician – but he ‘accepted’ her work and the pair were happily married.
However, her unconventional lifestyle sometimes caused tension in the marriage and the couple argued on July 31, 1994, prompting Mrs Koppel to travel from their Northampton house to their London home alone, Patel’s trial heard.
The mother-of-two’s last known sighting was a visit to Midland Bank on Baker Street at 1.42pm on August 8, 1994.
Mr Koppel found his wife’s bloodstained body that evening.
She was wearing lacy lingerie that suggested she had been expecting a client, jurors were told.
Bill Emlyn Jones, prosecuting, said she had been stabbed more than 140 times during the ‘ sustained and savage attack’. He said: ‘It has taken a terribly long time to solve it, but we now have evidence that she had this defendant’s hair stuck to the ring she was wearing when she was attacked and killed; and his bare foot was pressed against the skirting board next to her.
‘And that, the prosecution say, can only be because it was him who killed her all those years ago.’
Patel only became a confirmed suspect in 2022 after his DNA was matched to the hair found by a scientist on the ring in 2008.
Although technology was still not advanced enough then to get a DNA profile, the hair was preserved until 2022 and re- examined. The bloody footprint was found at the scene in 1994 and matched to Patel after he was made a confirmed suspect, the prosecutor said.
After his arrest, Patel said he had no knowledge of Mrs Koppel, but jurors were convinced of his guilt from the forensic evidence and found that he had used a bank card stolen from her flat near his home shortly after the murder.
He now faces life in prison when he is sentenced today.
In a joint statement, Mrs Koppel’s brother and sister in law, Martin and Mary, described her as a highly intelligent person who saw the good in everyone she met.
‘Her family and friends would have been in a much better place because of her abundance of energy for life had she not died.
‘We have all suffered these many, many years because we lost Marina so early in life.’
Scotland Yard’s lead for cold case homicide investigations, Dan Chester, said unsolved murders can be among the most complex and challenging cases to solve.
‘However, today’s result provides an example where forensic science, newer technologies and collaborative working practices have had a positive impact in bringing a brutal killer to justice,’ he added.