Historian’s killer ‘targeted stars including Kate Moss’
AHOST of high-profile figures including Jeffrey Archer and Kate Moss were listed as potential targets for extortion and researched online by a man accused of murdering a respected Oxford historian, a court has heard.
Michael Danaher, 50, compiled a “clinical” spreadsheet list containing high-profile targets for theft, robbery and ransom demands, Oxford Crown Court heard.
He also searched online for the homes of TV presenters Eamonn Holmes and Michael Parkinson, footballer Rio Ferdinand and music mogul Simon Cowell, saving these under a folder with the same name, the court was told.
Danaher, of Hadrians Court, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, is on trial for the murder of Adrian Greenwood on April 6.
The body of the Oxford University-educated academic was discovered with stab wounds by his cleaner in the hall of his four-storey home in Iffley Road, Oxford, the following day.
The 42-year-old’s name was found on a list on the defendant’s laptop and mobile phone.
Also on the spreadsheet list, under the heading “Enterprises”, were high-profile “people with means” from whom he was planning to get money, including novelist Lord Archer and supermodel Kate Moss, prosecutor Oliver Saxby, QC, said.
He described the list as “efficient, and considered and really quite brutal”, and said it read like “an everyday list of people to see, things to do”.
Danaher planned to get this money by either stealing, robbing the targets’ homes or by demanding a ransom by kidnapping an occupant, Mr Saxby said.
Mr Greenwood, a buyer and seller of rare and valuable books, is believed to have been targeted because he owned a £50,000 first edition of The Wind In The Willows, published in 1908, the court heard.
The classic by Kenneth Grahame was worth a “mouthwatering sum” because it came with an original dust cover.
At the time of his death Mr Greenwood had more than 200 items for sale, 17 of which were worth more than £2,000.
These included signed wartime photographs of Winston Churchill and an illustrated first edition of Mary Shelley’s horror novel Frankenstein, and Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, which was put on eBay.
Danaher, who denies murder, sat in the dock as Mr Saxby opened the case against him.
The trial continues.