Businessman jailed for 20 years appeals murder conviction
A BUSINESSMAN jailed for bludgeoning his millionairess girlfriend to death has had his sentence reduced by six years.
Ian Griffin was sentenced to 20 years behind bars in 2014 for the murder of Kinga Legg at a £1,000-a-night Paris hotel.
Griffin was found after a week-long manhunt sleeping in a tent in woods at Farmwood Pool, Chelford in 2009. He was arrested and finally extradited to France in 2011 to face trial.
But his sentence has now been reduced to 14 years following an appeal, French newspaper Le Parisien reported.
Last week, on the first day of his appeal hearing at a court in the southern Paris suburb of Evry, 47-year-old Griffin said he did not intend to kill Ms Legg.
And he said he was “incredibly sorry” for her death, blaming a drug addiction for his actions.
He argued in his original trial and the appeal he could not remember attacking her.
In the first trial, in 2014, he said the couple argued over dinner at a French restaurant after she would not give him anti-depression pills to which he had become addicted.
Stifling sobs in court yesterday, he said: “She was perfect and now she’s gone. All because of those damn drugs.”
Griffin used a wheelchair in court after developing a severe neurological disease in jail and risked his sentence being extended to 30 years by appealing. Ms Legg’s battered body was found in a bath in 2009 at the fivestar Le Bristol hotel after Griffin had fled back to England in his Porsche 911. The couple were travelling to Monaco and intending to marry, but Griffin was also seeing an entrepreneur with whom he now has a child.
Ms Legg, 36, ran a business exporting more than 300 million tomatoes a year from Poland to supermarkets, and Griffin was slammed as a “gigolo” who lived off wealthy girlfriends in his original trial.
Griffin, who ran tanning salons and gadget shops across northwest England but was declared bankrupt in 2006, went into hiding after fleeing Paris.
As reported in the Express in 2009, Griffin was found in a secluded beauty spot by Dingle Bank Quarry, by the Lower Withington border.
Police surrounded Griffin in dense woodland, carrying out a pincer movement to track him using a helicopter to guide officers.
He was originally sentenced in December 2014 after living on bail for more than a year.