The very strange case of ’the unluckiest man in the world’
The phrase ‘ wrong place at the wrong time’, could have been coined with Ashwin Desai in mind. his tragic story was the subject of the first episode in the fifth series of 24 Hours In Police Custody (Channel 4).
An IT engineer, and father to a seven-year-old daughter, Mr Desai was set upon and repeatedly beaten over the head in a hotel lift in Luton and left for dead. his assailant was Reinis Pupolins, a 21year-old from Latvia who had only entered the country a week earlier. ‘ It’s been a crazy week,’ said Pupolins to his arresting officer without a hint of irony or remorse.
Ashwin, a Canadian resident, was visiting friends in the UK and was due to fly home the next day.
CCTV showed a clearly volatile Pupolins prowling the hotel, looking for trouble. earlier in the day he had racially abused another Asian man at a separate hotel.
Mr Desai checked in, got water from a cooler and 30 seconds later was savagely beaten around the head with a fire extinguisher. Mr Desai was left in a coma and died three months later.
Detectives investigating the case were convinced there must have been a link between the men as stranger murder is so rare. Were drugs a motive? Money? Women?
As it turned out, the pair had never met. Pupolins, for reasons he was never able to explain, just decided to snuff out the life of a man with whom he’d never exchanged a word.
Immediately after the attack the killer turned himself in.
Once in custody Pupolins was calm, polite and positively enthusiastic about the ready-meal lasagne he was given to eat.
On the advice of solicitors Pupolins declared himself to be temporarily insane, making the police’s job even harder. Not only did they have to charge or release him within 24 hours, they also had to get him assessed by a mental health team first.
With so much CCTV footage the evidence was overwhelming and even Pupolins seemed relieved to be charged and denied bail.
Detective Inspector Jerry Waite couldn’t have put things better when he said: ‘Ashwin was the unluckiest man in the world.’
This programme has become one of the most watchable fly-on-thewall formats since it first aired three years ago.
Last night’s question was whether the killer — who pleaded guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility — was ‘mad or bad’. evidently, he was both.
Someone for whom one should feel enormous sympathy is Lady Lucan. But in Lord Lucan: My Husband, The Truth ( ITV) she didn’t make it very easy for the viewer.
She is back in the public eye to promote her memoir (serialised in the Mail) and more than half of last night’s documentary was dedicated to the early part of her life. The horrific murder of the family nanny and Lucan’s subsequent disappearance were dealt with much later on.
And it was the right move as interviewer Michael Waldman was able to build a detailed — and not always flattering — picture of Lady Lucan.
Whether on a yacht in Italy or a beach in St Tropez, one home movie after another showed an unsmiling, awkward- looking woman looking lost among her glamorous companions.
In this age of tearful TV confessions it was a refreshing change to encounter a feisty woman who didn’t blub for the camera.
In the end, the re-telling of the murder was actually the least interesting part of what was a compelling encounter with a woman for whom life has provided little happiness.