So why DID Kirsty fall 100ft to her death at 8am?
On a hen weekend in Benidorm, she found herself in a top-floor flat with 5 British body-builders who’d been drinking and taking cocaine. Then the unthinkable happened . . .
The apartments where Kirsty Maxwell died are not exactly salubrious. Next door is an establishment called ‘Stardust Cabaret’, where each night ‘Kinky Karen provides a sexy erotic show’, while all around are takeaways and bars promising cheap drinks. At Payma Apartamentos, visitors walk through a tatty reception area, which leads to lifts and stairs serving the ten- storey building in Benidorm, the Spanish resort that became a favourite with the British in the Seventies.
On each floor there are five flats — with small bathrooms and beds for four, with French windows opening onto balconies overlooking the garish bars in an area known as Little england, and the small pool below.
The two-star apartments attract a rowdy crowd renting rooms for less than £50 a night. Location is all: for those keen to avail themselves of 24-hour drinking (not to mention sex and drugs) Little england is perfect. This is where, two weeks ago, a group of young British women arrived for a weekend hen party to celebrate a forthcoming wedding.
The 20-strong group checked in to their apartments on Friday night, planning to stay until Sunday, before flying back to Britain nursing nothing worse than hangovers.
But Kirsty Maxwell, one of this cheerful group, never made it home. Less than 12 hours after checking in, the crumpled body of the 27-yearold — who married only last September — was found beside the swimming pool outside the apartments.
At first, it was assumed she had jumped or fallen from the balcony of one of the apartments, intoxicated with drink, drugs or both.
Certainly, Spanish police seemed to think so.
After examining CCTV footage of the incident taken from the pool area, police sources indicated that, as far as they were concerned, there was nothing suspicious about Kirsty’s death, which was probably a tragic accident after too much alcohol.
She wouldn’t be the first British holidaymaker to plunge to her death from a balcony. Last November a 21-yearold British woman called Danielle hall fell to her death in the early hours at another Benidorm hotel and a 25-yearold bricklayer fell from a balcony on a Spanish holiday last year. he lived, but is expected to take years to recover.
There have been many other balcony falls — all ruled ‘unsuspicious’ by police and with no further action taken.
But the case of Kirsty Maxwell is now very much active, a fortnight on, in circumstances that reveal the sleazy underbelly of this resort.
For Kirsty was not alone when she died. She was in a flat which was not her own, with a group of men — dubbed the ‘ Benidorm Five’ — who had been taking cocaine and drinking heavily.
Like Kirsty, they’d been out in Little england that night, where bars advertise specials such as ten beers for £8. Girls get free alcoholic shots.
All body-builders, the men continued the party at their apartment on the tenth floor after arriving back in the early hours. (When police arrived, there was drink on the table, plus cocaine and an opened packet of Tadalafil pills — tablets to increase sex drive.)
According to statements given to police by her friends, Kirsty had consumed up to ‘ten glasses of alcohol’ as they toured the bars in the area.
At all times, she was with her friends. Around 4am, a group of girls, including Kirsty, walked to their apartment through the chaotic streets, taking some 30 minutes.
At 4.50am, Kirsty was asleep in apartment 9A. We know this because another girl sharing the room took a video of Kirsty on her phone. Fully dressed, but with her shoes off, she is seen snoring on the bed.
But at around 7.50am, Kirsty awoke. Without putting her shoes on, and leaving her mobile behind, she walked up to the tenth floor, where some of her other girlfriends had a room.
But for reasons unclear, she knocked on the door of the Benidorm Five. Joseph Graham, 32, a £49,000-a-year logistics manager with Amazon, opened the door.
Also in the flat were a British champion cage fighter called Ricky Gammon; Anthony holehouse, a 34-year-old convicted fraudster, Callum Northridge, 27, and Daniel Bailey, 32. All five are from the Nottingham area and were on a birthday celebration.
Graham told the Spanish police that the woman walked in without speaking.
She then apparently rushed into the bathroom by the front door and was ‘acting mad, drunk or both’.
Admitting that all the men were also drunk, Graham told police the woman was attempting to climb through a small window in the bathroom, which led to another area of the flat, before giving up and running through the apartment window, jumping over the balcony, plunging to her death below.
Graham allegedly screamed ‘ She’s jumped!’ after she disappeared, even though he claimed he had not seen her go over the balcony. he told police he only spoke to her to ask her to leave.
‘Some of his friends who were in their rooms thought he was playing some kind of joke,’ a police source told me this week. ‘They came out and saw her at the bottom by the pool. One called the police.’
held for 48 hours in police cells in Benidorm, Graham was released after a brief court appearance and allowed to return home.
‘I have been advised by my Spanish lawyer that despite me not being charged with any wrongdoing, the investigation into this tragic accident is still ongoing,’ he said in a statement. ‘I am unable to say anything at this time other than I am innocent of any wrongdoing.’ None of this cuts much ice with Adam Maxwell, Kirsty’s grieving widower who describes his late wife as ‘my world’. They married last September in Cyprus, had a good life in Livingston, Scotland, and planned to start a family.
MR Maxwell has hired a local lawyer, Luis Miguel Zumaquero, who is spearheading a private prosecution to have the British men recalled to Spain — and taken to the apartment for a reconstruction of that morning’s horrific events.
At a meeting this week in a cafe near the scene of Kirsty’s death, Senor Zumaquero told me Mr Maxwell and Kirsty’s parents are convinced something sinister and untoward took place in apartment 10e.
‘They can smell something is wrong,’ he told me. ‘We need these five men to come into one room and explain exactly where they were and exactly what went on. There are too many inconsistencies.’ Senor Zumaquero has this week submitted a six-page dossier to the Spanish courts, asking for the men to be put under formal investigation.
The documents state: ‘Kirsty was a young, healthy, happy, hard-working girl, with no record of any type of depressive syndrome or medication, or any evidence she intended or had a reason to take her own life. She was at a great moment in her life, recently married to a husband she loved with plans to start a family shortly.’
Then, the court documents add, ‘Kirsty falls from apartment 10e, a room occupied by five young, well-built men who had consumed large amounts of alcohol and drugs, and in whose apartment there were pills to maintain an erection, which someone had taken.
‘These men had never met Kirsty before. The version the men [provide] is that Kirsty called at their door, Joseph Graham opened the door and the young woman entered the bathroom, touched a window opening onto another room and went into the pas-
sageway before throwing herself off the balcony.’
He described their stories as full of contradictions and implausible.
‘These men say . . . Kirsty killed herself by jumping off their balcony, while they watched, stunned by this strange and unexplained action, and were unable to do anything to stop it. Does this not show clearly that what they are trying to do is cover up the truth?’
Theories in the Spanish press include suggestions that Kirsty was sleep-walking, drunk, or tried to get away from the men by jumping out the window, thinking she would land in the pool below.
Graham told police that a ‘disorientated’ Kirsty climbed over the hotel balcony ‘deliberately’ and ‘jumped towards the swimming pool because she misjudged the height’. I went to the apartments and walked to the tenth floor. The pool is a speck far below.
I went back to the pool where she had landed about three metres from the water, and looked up.
Not even the biggest daredevil would try to jump in to the pool from that height.
Although Kirsty’s hen party friends have refused to make any public comment about her tragic death, statements they gave to police admit that she had consumed a large amount of alcohol — but had not taken drugs.
Roberto Sanchez, a Spanish lawyer representing Graham, says his client is innocent. He is pressing for the case to be ‘archived’ — so no further action will be taken.
The defence is also expected to focus on CCTV footage that captured Kirsty’s fall, which reportedly shows that she landed feet first, suggesting she had jumped rather than been pushed.
‘The CCTV does not show her falling — only her landing,’ a police source said. ‘It looks like she was upright and standing when she fell. Her legs were broken.’
The horrific death has focused attention on Benidorm. There is a pleasant side to the resort — families play on the beach, and old folk ride on mobility scooters.
Yet Little England is a magnet for mayhem: gangsters ship girls from West Africa to prostitute themselves, and hard drugs such as cocaine and ecstasy are widely available.
And still the hen and stag parties come. I watched one group on a hen night, in short skirts and cheeky T-shirts, staggering along the street, holding each other up as groups of young British men shouted ribald comments.
Falling out of the bars stupefied, many revellers looked as if they had been lobotomised. Some urinated and vomited on the streets.
I watched one inebriated man dance around, hands up in a boxer’s pose, challenging weary Spanish doormen to a fight.
As I watched, I was offered sex a dozen times by prostitutes.
Why anyone would want to come to Little England is a mystery.
Perhaps it would be better for everyone if the Benidorm Five were to return to apartment 10E and explain exactly what happened that awful Saturday morning.