MoS tracks down convicted killer to his French hideaway as outraged family of victim ask... He beat our girl to death and left her in hotel bath ...so why is he free after just 2 years?
A BRITISH businessman jailed for 20 years for murdering his fiancee in a luxury Paris hotel has been secretly freed from prison after just 22 months.
Ian Griffin, 47, bludgeoned multimillionaire Kinga Legg, 36, to death in their £800-a-night room at the five-star Bristol and left her naked body in the bath. A coroner said she received ‘around 100 blows’.
But in a decision that has infuriated Miss Legg’s family, a French judge ordered Griffin’s release at a closed hearing in October. The entrepreneur has since been living quietly in the Alsace region, three hours east of Paris.
No explanation for his new-found freedom has been given and, astonishingly, it appears the family of Miss Legg, a Polishborn international businesswoman, knew nothing about it until contacted by The Mail on Sunday yesterday.
Her cousin, Eva, said: ‘Oh my God! How can this be? I thought that life meant life – you take a life and you pay for it by forfeiting your own freedom.
‘We all thought he was in jail and that was where he was staying. How could they let him out?’
She said if Miss Legg’s mother Halina and brother Marek had known about the release they would have told her. ‘They will be devastated,’ she added.
Over the past few weeks Griffin has posted photos on Facebook, including one in which he frolics in the snow with Tracy Baker, a former Dragon’s Den contestant, and their two-year-old son.
Answering the door at his home, Griffin, who suffers from a neurological condition, said he was unable to discuss the case because of a confidentiality order. ‘I can’t talk about the conditions of my release or the deal – it was a closed hearing,’ he said.
But displaying notably little contrition, he went on to speak enthusiastically about business opportunities.
‘I’m very busy with business, it’s pretty exciting stuff,’ he said. ‘We’re rolling out things in France and I’ve got a lot of things in America.’
He also talked self-pityingly about how the murder case had ‘ruined my life, my reputation, my work’.
He added: ‘Something terrible has happened and I have to live with that. It’s extremely hard sometimes and I’ve learnt to deal with it in certain ways, but it’s very difficult.
‘Every night I go to bed and I think, “Why me?” I have to put my mind somewhere else. It’s a terrible thing that happened to me.’
Asked how he thought Miss Legg’s family would react to his release, he said: ‘I don’t know if they know… Nothing in the world would make me feel better than to make Kinga’s parents feel better. But I can’t.’
Miss Legg’s father, a former mayor of the small Polish town of Opatowek, where his family live, died aged 67 on Easter Sunday 2015 – four months after Griffin was jailed.
Local trader Zygmunt Borek said: ‘I don’t know what he died of and I know the doctor can’t put broken heart on the death certificate, but he was never the same after the death of Kinga. He adored his daughter.’ During the five-day trial
‘Oh my God! I thought that life meant life’
in December 2014, Griffin, who once ran a chain of tanning salons and gadget shops, admitted being addicted to alcohol and anti-depressants at the time of the killing in May 2009.
But his lawyer’s claim that Griffin’s memory had ‘disappeared into a black hole’ was rubbished by prosecutor Philippe Courroye.
‘It is impossible to believe this state of amnesia, this savage aggression,’ Mr Courroye said.
And he pointed out in court that in an interview with The Mail on Sunday in May 2013, Griffin said: ‘She fired a stun gun disguised as a stick of lipstick at me and then punched me in the face, catching me with a ring.
‘I tried to defend myself and she fell over and banged her head on a coffee table.’
But Mr Courroye said he did not believe any of Griffin’s versions of events, saying the case was a classic one of ‘violence against women’. He added that Griffin
was a ‘kind of gigolo’ whose business ventures had turned sour and who relied on his wealthy parents for money.
After killing Miss Legg, Griffin tried to clean the hotel room and phoned reception staff twice to say the couple would be extending their stay. Before fleeing to the UK in his Porsche 911, he placed a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and told staff his wife was sleeping.
A manhunt was launched and Griffin, who boasted he owned a Lamborghini supercar which once belonged to Eric Clapton, was found sleeping rough in a tent in a wood in Cheshire a week later. He was extradited to France. A psychologist told the court Griffin was a ‘fragile, depressive’ individual prone to ‘suicidal tendencies’ and with ‘major psychological problems’, but also as someone who had always refused professional help.
He displayed, she said, an ‘infantile attitude to women’, was ‘dependent’ on them, and needed to be ‘mothered at all costs’.
Griffin began his relationship with Miss Legg in 2008, when she ran a flourishing tomato export company, which supplied McDonald’s and supermarkets including Tesco. Her company, Vegex, had a UK base in Oxshott, Surrey, where she and Griffin rented a £3million home.
Their relationship was turbulent and the month before she was killed, Miss Legg sent a text message to a friend saying: ‘Just in case I die, you’ll have proof with the copy of this text. He made me take so many sleeping pills I don’t know if I’ll ever wake up.’
Another message, sent a few minutes later, said: ‘He beat me – he beat my head against the ground.’
On the night she died the couple were on their way to Monaco where they planned to marry, though Miss Legg’s parents said they believed Griffin was drawn to their daughter because of her fortune.
At the time Griffin was already in a relationship with Miss Baker, which endured throughout his time with Miss Legg.
Miss Baker had a child with Griffin after he was controversially released on bail in 2013.
At an appeal hearing in April last year, Griffin’s murder conviction was upheld, but his sentence was reduced to 14 years after judges took into account his decision to accept responsibility for what happened, along with his good behaviour while in prison. Griffin’s last words in court were: ‘It was my job to be the protector, the one who dealt with our needs. I almost did. I’m incredibly sorry now.’
In France it is normal for those convicted of murder to serve at least two-thirds of their sentence.
A legal source said: ‘Sentences for murder are relatively low here, so the guidelines are for the majority of a sentence to be served.’
Griffin’s lawyers did not respond to requests to comment.
‘He beat my head against the ground’
Additional reporting: Allan Hall