Was EastEnders Sian murdered because she was set to leave her brutal lover?
NUMBER 54, Pembroke Road is a dilapidated, half-timbered bungalow perched above a scruffy garden whose steep slope and thick shrubbery partially obscure it from the street below. For a long time this unloved little hideaway in the London-Kent suburbs was occupied by a reclusive widow, but five years ago, after she sold it for £180,000, locals thought their new neighbours were ‘the perfect family’. With her cut-glass English accent and self-assured air, the 43-yearold mother, Sian Blake — who always had a smile and a friendly word — appeared vaguely familiar to some nearby residents.
Though she was middle-aged and dressed rather dowdily, a Google check would have revealed that she once played a devious femmefatale in the TV soap EastEnders. Yet she presented herself as a jobbing sign-language teacher, and no one knew of her past fame.
If her partner, Arthur Simpson-Kent, 48, seemed a little withdrawn and eccentric — wearing a cream robe and navy woollen hat, never going to work, and acting defensively whenever anyone called at the house (even the Tesco delivery man was not allowed beyond the porch) — he was affable enough.
And both parents seemed devoted to their sons, Zachary, eight, and Amon, four, who were neatly turnedout, and would wave to passers-by as they played in the garden.
When the older boy stopped attending his private school earlier this year, and his brother was not enrolled, it was widely assumed that Miss Blake — recently diagnosed with the terminal illness Motor Neurone Disease — had opted to teach them at home because she couldn’t bear to be parted from them.
All of which makes the macabre events that unfolded at Number 54 shortly before Christmas — but were uncovered only this week thanks to an apparent catalogue of blunders by the Metropolitan Police — the more shocking and incomprehensible.
Miss Blake and her sons were last seen on a family visit to her mother’s house in Leyton, East London, on December 13.
Three days later, the house was visited by police officers. We now know they had been alerted by the NSPCC, who had, in turn, been contacted by Miss Blake’s family, desperately worried that she and her boys were being abused by their father.
A woman who lives opposite told me how she watched from her kitchen as Simpson-Kent stalled the police on the doorstep for ten minutes before reluctantly allowing them inside. Even then, they failed to search the property and the trio were simply assumed by the police to be ‘missing’.
Gazing again from her window at about 6am the following morning, December 17, this same neighbour says she noticed Simpson-Kent emerging from the couple’s beige Renault Scenic.
Another neighbour has reported seeing him loading black bin-bags into the car as early as December 14, the day after the last confirmed sighting of Sian Blake.
On December 18, police broke into the property. Given the fears reported by Miss Blake’s family, one might think they should then have been seeking to arrest her expartner as a matter of urgency.
It was not until last Sunday, January 3, the day that the Renault (which, say neighbours, Miss Blake could no longer drive because her arms were virtually paralysed owing to her illness) was found abandoned in Bethnal Green, East London, that the Met’s murder squad finally took charge of the investigation.
Within 24 hours, forensics officers were digging up the back garden: a standard task that ought to have been carried out three weeks earlier, in the view of former homicide officers who spoke out this week.
This scrubby patch of grass is conveniently secluded from the overlooking flats and houses by tall conifers and fences. In the furthermost corner, beneath a semi-transparent green awning, a shallow trench has been dug in the mud, beside which lies a child’s toy helicopter. The border has also been excavated. In one or both of these trenches, the bodies of Miss Blake and her sons were found. Post-mortem tests show that all died from injuries to the head and neck.
Meanwhile, Simpson-Kent — who surely ought to have been prevented from leaving the country at the outset of the inquiry — had ample time to prepare his departure.
After apparently sending fake texts from Miss Blake’s phone,
informing her family she was ‘going away for a few weeks’, he travelled via Glasgow and Amsterdam to his native Ghana, where airport cameras in the capital Accra captured his arrival on December 19.
This begs yet another question: why did the Met only prompt a hunt for him in Ghana in the latter part of this week?
It also raises concerns over the photograph of Simpson-Kent, which police released when they first appealed for information on his whereabouts.
With his gaunt features, greyflecked beard and short hair, the man pictured arriving in Ghana is, as one incredulous neighbour remarked, unrecognisable as the full-faced, long-haired man in the old family picture.
It emerged yesterday that British detectives were finally flying out to Africa last night — three weeks after Simpson-Kent left the UK. A senior Ghanaian police official said they had only just received official confirmation about Simpson-Kent’s possible whereabouts from Interpol.
Officers from Scotland Yard’s murder squad are due to meet police in Ghana today to help the search — beginning in the city of Cape Coast, where some of his relatives live.
Miss Blake’s family said they feared a golden opportunity to trace Simpson-Kent had been missed. Her aunt, Joeine Fearon, wrote on Facebook: ‘So what have you been doing, Mr Policeman???
SHE and other relatives have launched their own appeal using social media, calling on Ghanaians to join the search. As serious questions continue to emerge over the force’s handling of this tragedy — with one former senior officer even suggesting the search might have been delayed to avoid paying officers Christmas holiday overtime — the Met has referred itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commissions.
Matters worsened this week when Simpson-Kent’s dedicated family man image was exposed as a myth.
He was portrayed as a violent cocaine user and dealer, who has sired at least seven children by six women, most of them impressionable beauties captivated by his looks and charm.
His ex-wife Dominique Deblieux, 42, a Moroccan-French former bellydancer whom he met in a West End nightclub 20 years ago, says she became pregnant with their now 18year-old daughter, Isis, unaware that one of his many lovers was pregnant at the same time.
She also claims he hit Isis when she was a child, and once ended up putting his hands around her own throat during a violent row.
And she says he owes her thousands of euros in unpaid maintenance, 13 years after they separated.
‘Arthur behaves like your King Henry VIII,’ she told me from her Riviera home. ‘He has no morals. For him, women are just there to be used. To provide him with an easy living.
‘Knowing how he operates, I believe this dreadful thing has happened because Miss Blake had seen through him and was going to throw him out.’
Her grim hypothesis gained credence when Miss Blake’s sister, Ava, 51, revealed at Scotland Yard on Thursday how the actress had planned to leave Simpson-Kent over Christmas and sell the bungalow.
‘She said she didn’t want to throw him out on the street,’ said a tearful Ava, who made it plain that she believes him a triple murderer, and demanded he be returned to Britain to face justice.
The residents of Pembroke Road, in Erith, Kent, feel similarly angry. ‘It sickens me to think that he waved and smiled at me a couple of weeks ago,’ shuddered the young mother who lives opposite.
So how did Sian Blake, an admirable woman, fall into the clutches of this despicable man? The youngest of three children of Cornell Lloyd Blake and his wife Lindell, Jamaican immigrants who met working in the same London factory, she was a genuine EastEnder.
Raised in a tower-block, she had an innate talent for drama, and pursued her ambition to become a leading actress, encouraged by her mother, who got divorced from her father when she was six.
Despite being ostracised and bullied at school — because she worked hard and improved her accent through elocution — she earned a place at Guildford School of Acting and, aged 23, got her break.
Invited to audition for a walk-on part in EastEnders, she impressed the producers so much she was offered the starring role of Frankie Pierre, a scheming, sexuallycharged vixen on a mission to lure every man in Albert Square.
This was in 1996, when the soap commanded a vast audience. The role brought Sian Blake fame and comparative wealth.
In a newspaper interview she artlessly revealed she had behaved like her screen character in real life by having an affair, candour she may have come to regret. She was already receiving hate-mail and deaththreats from viewers who believed home-wrecker Frankie was real.
By early 1997, EastEnders bosses were so alarmed at viewers’ hatred they wrote her out. Though she won small stage and TV roles in shows such as Casualty, her career never hit the heights again. She was last employed doing a voice-over for a video game, and taught sign language to make ends meet.
Simpson-Kent’s early years were more difficult, but he was blessed with good looks and charisma, and a modicum of talent.
The result of an affair between Ghanaian beauty Selina BenGeorge and Donald Simpson-Kent, a white Englishman who ventured to West Africa first as a seaman, and later in the diamond industry, he was brought up by his maternal grandmother in Cape Coast, notorious as an 18th-century slaving port.
His mother — who has several other children and, now in her late 70s, lives quietly in Carmarthenshire — came to Britain to work as a nurse. In 1975, when he was eight, he was sent to live with her.
LITTLE is known about his education; on his Facebook page, he describes himself as ‘homeschooled’. By all accounts, however, he worked as a model as a young man and also trained as a hair-stylist — his website lists a string of prestigious clients.
His old friends can’t believe him capable of murder.
Donovan Nelson, 56, a close friend since 1989 and one of two witnesses at his wedding to Dominique Deblieux, says he was an innocuous, mild-mannered man, ‘so laid-back he was boring’.
‘None of his friends can believe this is happening,’ he told me. ‘It doesn’t sound like him. I have never known him to be involved in any scuffle or fight. He was never violent.’
He was, however, undoubtedly a feckless user of women.
The Mail has traced a string of former lovers, among them Elizabeth Danzie, a stunning model when they met in the mid-Eighties on the London fashion circuit. She is thought to have borne his first child, a daughter who will be 30 this year.
When Dominique became pregnant, in 1998, he confessed that he had three other children, including a son now 25 and also a model.
At that time his own career was beginning to falter; he was boneidle, his French former wife says, and snorting too much cocaine.
When he was not peddling the drug, she says, he would lie on the sofa, watching TV and demanding to be fed or otherwise entertained.
Soon after they met, Dominique helped him trace his father, and he and the ageing ex-colonial adventurer seemed to get along famously. Yet for reasons she cannot fathom, her husband abruptly stopped seeing him and began to resent white people, with such passion that he joined a black supremacist cult and spoke of making a new life in Ghana.
So how did Simpson-Kent meet Miss Blake? The details are yet to emerge, yet he was clearly at pains to conceal their relationship. Not even his old pal Donovon knew they were living in Erith with two sons.
And though he maintained contact with daughter Isis until two years ago (when they fell out because he refused to pay for her to travel from France to see him) Dominique says she, too, was unaware of his latest domestic arrangement.
Was there some dark reason for his secrecy? Why did he always refuse to allow visitors into his home by saying either that ‘building work’ was going on, or the children were ‘napping’?
These might be lines of inquiry that the police are — very belatedly — pursuing.
Meanwhile, the residents of Pembroke Road raise disturbing questions of their own. Was Miss Blake’s incurable disease, diagnosed last autumn, according to one source, an important factor in the murders?
Why did Zachary, ‘usually such a lively lad’, look so forlorn as he stood at the bungalow door beside his frail mother in early October, when a neighbour called?
Why were the boys kept off school so long? And why, two months ago, did their father dump their mattress on the porch, where it remains?
Perhaps the long-overdue garden dig has already provided some answers. The rest might well lie somewhere in West Africa.
For Sian Blake’s grieving and angry family, the one mercy is that Britain and Ghana have an extradition treaty.
But Arthur Simpson-Kent’s homeland is a thickly forested equatorial country the size of Britain, with porous borders. Its police are hardly renowned for the quality of their detective work.
How the Met must regret allowing the only suspect in this deeply distressing murder case such an easy passage. Additional reporting: