A VERY murky MURDER in PARADISE
It’s yet another British killing in St Lucia: a Cambridge graduate found in bed in a pool of blood near the celebrity marina he developed — leaving behind the young bride he seduced as a schoolgirl, and not one but TWO alleged young lovers...
LIttLE wonder St Lucia is regularly voted one of the world’s great romantic getaways. the view of the Pitons, two imposing volcanic spires that rise out of an azure blue Caribbean with waves crashing at their base, is reckoned to be worth the airfare alone.
Arrayed around them, for the magnificent backdrop they provide, are a cluster of fivestar hotels such as the Jade Mountain resort, whose suites cost up to £3,000.
Last weekend, the well-heeled guests would have just been sitting down to lunch when, at the other end of the island, police were called to the home of a British expat. they were greeted by a sight that was certainly not intended for tourist eyes.
According to officers, Bob Hathaway, 66, was lying in a pool of blood on his bed. the businessman and yacht designer, a well-known figure in St Lucia’s sailing and hotel worlds, had been stabbed to death in his hillside house in Piat in the north of the island.
Such violence would have horrified St Lucia’s rich visitors, but will have come as no surprise to those who live there. Away from the spotless beaches and infinity pools, the island is gripped by a violent crime epidemic rooted in drugs and gang culture. In 2017, 60 people were killed [and 43 last year], which on an island of less than 180,000 people, gives it a murder rate 16 times higher than the UK. the night after Mr Hathaway’s murder, a 20-year-old man was shot dead in a gang-related killing.
However, Mr Hathaway’s death has particularly rattled the leaders of a Commonwealth country smaller than Anglesey. Its economy relies almost entirely on tourism and violence has, in recent years, claimed the lives of a string of British people, both tourists and expats, denting St Lucia’s image. they included Norwich yachtsman Roger Pratt, murdered on his boat in 2014 in an apparent botched robbery. In the same year, Ollie Gobat, 38, a former Surrey juniors cricket player from a wealthy family in Esher, was found murdered in his Range Rover. the hotel developer had been shot twice in the head before the vehicle was set on fire.
this week, following Mr Hathaway’s death, St Lucia prime minister Allen Chastanet admitted police were demoralised and had a ‘long way to go in providing the basics’. Other senior politicians fretted publicly of the damage to the island’s image and economic viability. Ernest Hilaire, St Lucia’s former High Commissioner in London, said the death toll of British people on the island had been a ‘sore point’ with the UK government.
Many of the island’s leaders knew Mr Hathaway personally. He had been a generally well-liked personality on the island.
Originally from the village of Codford St Peter in Wiltshire, he went to boarding school in Surrey then to Cambridge University, where he studied engineering and hydrodynamics. He spent the next 16 years working for Haringey Council in North London. Aged 37, he spent a sabbatical year sailing in the Mediterranean before switching careers to yacht building, working first at a yard near Southampton.
He sailed to Saint Lucia in 2001 with his first wife, whom he married in 1990, and they bought a home in Marigot Bay on the west coast, hoping to retire. Instead, he designed and built the Caribbean’s first solarpowered catamaran ferry. In 2006, he helped set up and run a marina and resort at Marigot Bay.
It has become a popular destination for superyachts, its relative discreetness and remoteness attracting the likes of Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta- Jones and Eddie Murphy.
AS tHE resort and marina’s general manager, Mr Hathaway mingled with millionaires bringing in their superyachts and visiting celebrities. It was, in short, a life of sunkissed glamour.
Expat killings in poorer countries often boil down to money, but this looks not to have been the case with Mr Hathaway. Friends say that despite the rarefied circles in which he moved, he was a man of modest means. However, it is widely believed by friends and neighbours his private life — particularly his infatuation with younger local women — holds the key to his killing.
A police spokeswoman this week confirmed: ‘We are looking at every possibility, and Mr Hathaway’s relationships with local women is something we are investigating as a possible motive.’
St Lucia is a tight-knit island and some locals believe it may be relevant that some of Mr Hathaway’s women friends had boyfriends with criminal records.
One of his yachting friends told us this week: ‘Bob was targeted, without doubt. this was no robbery or house invasion. None of us believes this was in any way random.’
Friends said Mr Hathaway’s infidelity was the reason his first wife, who was wealthier than him, left him shortly after they moved to St Lucia from the UK. they sold their home on the island and she kept the proceeds, eventually moving back to the Southampton area.
At the time of his death, he was estranged from his second wife, Marquena James, with whom he had begun a relationship when he was 61 and she was only 17 and still at school in Marigot. Mr Hathaway had a reputation for promiscuity, and several people who knew him believe he was sharing his home with not one but two young women when he was murdered.
Close friend and retired St Lucia diplomat Keats Compton said this week: ‘ Bob had definitely turned native and moved away from his former life with yachtie types to a more local crowd.
‘He certainly liked to surround himself with attractive young local women. He had a fair number of local and much younger lady friends. I last saw him in the main town of Castries a couple of months ago. He didn’t look well and was walking with a stick but he had a very attractive young woman with him who was helping him get around. I’d guess she was in her 20s.’
When asked if Mr Hathaway was living on his own when murdered, Mr Compton said: ‘I don’t think so. I believe there may have been at least one if not two women in his life.
‘He did have peccadillos, and that may have been a contributing factor to this horrible murder. But no matter how you live your life, he did not deserve this kind of death. Nobody does.’
Another close friend, a local policeman, said: ‘Bob was infatuated with young local girls, he loved them.
‘I think they brought him a lot of joy and comfort. It was just what he was into. they weren’t underage or anything, mostly in their early 20s. But that was his thing.’
However, at least one of them admits she was still in her teens when she started a relationship with the expat. Marquena, a slim, glamorous ex-youth athletics champion and self-confessed ‘party girl’, told a local tV news programme in 2017 that islanders were so taken aback by their 44-year age gap they assumed she was a prostitute.
However, she claimed Mr Hathaway had been so supportive and inspiring to her that she was ‘definitely not going to date a black guy again’ after meeting him.
‘People say I’m with Bob because of his money, but that’s a myth,’ she told her interviewer. ‘I love Bob for who he is and what he’s done for me.’ Friends say Mr Hathaway helped Ms James continue at school and get the grades she needed to go to a community college.
THEy married in 2017 — by then she was 21 and he was 65 — in a lavish ceremony at a resort on the island. Claudius Francis, former president of the St Lucia Senate, was best man.
‘It was a wonderful wedding. Bob had a job [managing a marina] in the Grenadines and Marquena stayed behind in St Lucia, occasionally visiting him,’ Mr Francis told the Mail.
‘It was during that time that she got pregnant by another man. At first, Bob was furious and that lasted for about a month. But then he said he forgave her and said he would always support her.’
He added: ‘ Marquena moved to Martinique and Bob regularly sent over money for her. Indirectly, he was also supporting the child. they were not divorced, but eventually they both agreed the marriage could not continue and they were going through a legal separation when he was murdered.’ Speaking from
Martinique — a neighbouring island — where she lives with her son’s father, Marquena James told the Mail: ‘Bob was kind and supportive and opened my horizons on the world 100 per cent. We met while I was at school and he helped with my further education, he did everything for me.
‘I am distraught and disgusted by what has happened to him. The killer or killers are not people, they are pigs and they must be found.’
Ms James said Mr Hathaway ‘ broke down crying’ when she admitted she was pregnant by another man. ‘He could not give me a child for various reasons. He was very upset, but then accepted what had happened and supported me totally,’ she said.
He even paid for her flight when, in February last year, she moved to Martinique. ‘That was the last time I actually saw him, standing at the airport in St Lucia,’ she said. ‘But we were in constant contact, the last time was Friday last week. Earlier that week he told me I looked stunning.
‘He said he would have loved to be like a father to my child Aiden, but he never actually met the baby. I was trying to arrange something.’
Ms James said she learned of his death on Facebook. ‘ I was stunned, I didn’t believe it,’ she said. ‘My mouth went dry and blood drained from me.
‘I rang Bob’s phone but there was no answer, so I kept trying and trying, but nothing. It was then I realised it could be true. I got through to friends and they said a body had been found at his house.’
She wants to return to St Lucia for the funeral, adding: ‘I want to bury my husband.’
Mr Hathaway — who set up his own tourism consultancy five years ago — had no family on the island and his sister, Angela, lives in Hatfield in the UK.
Best man Claudius Francis says he has been asked to organise his friend’s funeral. ‘As a former president of the island I am trying to use what influence I have,’ he said. ‘I have told the police I want no stone unturned until the person who committed this terrible crime is brought to justice.’
He may have to turn over every stone in the Caribbean. St Lucia’s over- stretched, under- equipped police force and court system have a wretched record of incompetent murder investigations and snailpaced prosecutions.
Georgina Mortimer, a Norfolk doctor who was raped while holidaying on the island in 2016, has predicted her attacker will never be caught due to the ‘woeful’ response from local police who didn’t even obtain DNA evidence.
Five years after the killing of Roger Pratt, four accused men who confessed to it within days remain in custody awaiting trial. Mr Pratt’s friends have dubbed St Lucia a ‘gangsters’ paradise’.
Theo Gobat, who believes son Ollie was killed in an organised crime ‘hit’, said this week ‘not a great deal’ had happened in the five years since he died. Nobody has been charged. British police offered to help but were never taken up on it, says Mr Gobat, who owns a resort on the island.
St Lucia’s tourism chiefs may be fretting over the brutal killing of Bob Hathaway, but sadly his killer may not be nearly so worried.