Before Nazis, Revolutionary France Made Leather From Human Skin

Harvard University has decided to remove the leather cover of a French book in its library because it had been made from ‘unethically sourced’ human skin. But history shows ethics and ‘human leather’ have never been on the same page... 

Sometime in the 1860s, a poor woman died unloved at a psychiatric hospital in the French city of Metz. Ludovic Bouland was a young medical student there, and he did what would be criminal and unthinkable today. He stole the skin off her back. 

Young Bouland was also an amateur tanner and he turned the woman’s skin into leather with the extract of a plant called sumac. He was so proud of his handiwork that years later he wrote, “by looking carefully you easily distinguish the pores of the skin”.  

Where did Bouland write this note? Inside a copy of Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul) that the book’s author and his close friend Arsène Houssaye had gifted him. But before writing the note, he tenderly bound the book in that same old skin he had been saving for years. “A book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering,” he reasoned.

There was at least one other book that Bouland wrapped in a piece of the unfortunate woman’s skin, a compilation of essays on gynaecology, published in Amsterdam in 1663. “This curious little book on virginity and the female generative functions seemed to me to merit a binding congruent to the subject,” he wrote in it.

Embarrassment For Harvard

Dr Bouland’s ‘reasoned’ choice of a cover for Des Destinées de l’Ame recently caused much embarrassment to Harvard University, which had housed his copy of the human leather-covered book in its Houghton Library since 1934. Last week, Harvard announced it had removed the cover because of “the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history”.

That’s ironic because the nature of the cover material was never a secret. As Bouland declared in the book: “I had kept this piece of human skin taken from the back of a woman”. And 10 years ago, a new technique called peptide mass fingerprinting had confirmed the leather’s human origin (tanning destroys DNA, so that technique was not used). Back then, the university had described it as “good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs and cannibals alike”.

To make amends, Harvard is now trying to find out who the mystery woman was and “consulting with appropriate authorities at the University and in France to determine a final respectful disposition of these human remains”. 

Better Late Than Never

These memorial services for centuries-old victims of abuse are important because what’s a leather cover or lab skeleton to you is almost certainly somebody else’s kin or ancestor. As antiquarian bookseller Tim Bryars told The Guardian in 2014: “It is a sensitive issue, there are sometimes surviving descendants to consider…”

That’s what happened on April 13, 2011, the 190th anniversary of the public hanging of 18-year-old murder accused John Horwood. John’s father Thomas was a sailor whose last voyage had been to India in 1786. Young Horwood loved a girl named Eliza Balsum. Eliza went out with another boy on Jan 26, 1821. John got angry and flung a stone at her that hit her on the temple, and she died three weeks later, on Feb 15, resulting in John’s hanging on April 13.

But then, John was denied a decent burial. His body was used for dissection at Bristol Royal Infirmary, and his skin was tanned and turned into a cover for a ledger “containing the account of the murder he carried out, the trial and his execution,” a BBC article says. John’s skeleton stood in a lab cupboard for almost two centuries until it was found by Mary Halliwell, his brother’s great-great-great granddaughter who arranged the 2011 funeral.

Revolutionary Excess

Mostly, though, men and women whose skins were turned into leather have been denied all dignity. Revolutionary France was perhaps the first to make human leather on an ‘industrial scale’ while the guillotine worked overtime. In fact, a copy of the Republic’s 1794 Constitution, bound in human skin, was auctioned in Paris in 1872.

There’s a story about a tanner who made a proposal to the ‘Committee of Public Safety’ – equivalent to the home ministry – to let him use the castle of Meudon as a tannery for human skins. “In return for the concession, the members of the Committee were privileged to be among the first to wear top boots made of human skin,” an article in the July-Dec 1894 issue of ‘Current Literature’ magazine says.

Another book published in 1808 says, “as Paris supplied the (French) armies with shoes, it is possible that more than one defender of their country may have worn shoes made of the skin of his friends and relations”.

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, a leading light of the Revolution and notorious as ‘archangel of terror’, allegedly “caused a young and beautiful girl, who had refused his advances, to be arrested and sent to the scaffold. After the execution he obtained possession of the body, flayed it himself, and had the skin tanned and made into a waistcoat which he wore till the day of his death.”

Mrs Koch’s Grim Appetite

But nobody desecrated the human body quite like the Nazis, who turned human bones into fertiliser, fat into soap, and skin, of course, into leather.

Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp, was among the worst offenders when it came to sourcing human leather. And she seemingly had a thing for tattooed skins. At her war crimes trial, the prosecution said: “A witness testified that accused No 15 (Ilse)... had a photo album, a briefcase and a pair of gloves made from tattooed human skin.”

In the summer of 1940, a man with “very excellent tattoos from the head to the toes, including a coloured cobra winding all the way up his left arm and an exceptionally cleanly tattooed sailboat with four masts on his chest” arrived at the camp. Ilse allegedly saw him working shirtless. “This inmate was called to the gate at evening formation. He was not seen again but about six months later a skin with the same sailboat was seen in the pathological department. In the summer of 1941 the same skin was seen on a photo album belonging to accused No 15.”

The pathological department was the hub of leather-making: “camp personnel worked on tattooed human skins… The skins were cleaned, dried and stretched on frames… They were shown in the course of inspections and exhibitions.”

Dr Kurt Sitte, a detenu at Buchenwald who started working in the department in 1942, also reported seeing “skins tanned in such a way that they could be used for lampshades, and similar things”. In other words, the skins had been processed to let light pass. Sitte said guards came to him and asked for tattooed skins to use as “a book cover, or for a knife sheath or purse – for all kinds of ‘souvenirs’.”

Dr Franz Blaha, a Czech national who survived the Dachau concentration camp, testified that “soft human skin was so prized for leather and bindings that victims would be shot in the back of the neck or knocked in the head so that the surface would be unmarred”.

These horrors seem unreal today, but ‘civilised’ Europe would have also considered itself incapable of such barbarity in the 1930s and 40s. Let’s hope human leather’s history won’t repeat itself. 

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Brig Gen John Nicholson's statue left India in 1958, but it's still listed as a protected monument!

John Nicholson's statue in Delhi, in 1911

On Sep 13, 1958*, a large wooden crate arrived in Dungannon, a town in Northern Ireland. Inside it was a 10-foot-tall, 2-tonne bronze statue that had stood in Delhi for 51 years. John Nicholson, who lives in the village of Loughgall, 17km outside the town, was a student at Royal School Dungannon (RSD) at the time. He remembers the crate lay in the school grounds “for a couple of years before the statue was erected”.

For weeks, the people of Dungannon didn’t know the statue was of RSD’s most famous pupil, Brigadier General John Nicholson who also happened to be young John Nicholson’s distant ancestor. “We belong to the same family of Nicholsons that the General was descended from,” says John, who’s touching 80.

The statue had been moved out of Delhi under a veil of secrecy, but in the half-century it spent on a pedestal outside Kashmere Gate, it had been a ‘protected monument’, like Taj Mahal and Ellora Caves. Travel Guides like ‘Delhi in Two Days’ recommended it to visitors. 

Now placed 7,000km away as the crow flies, the statue in the crate was still on India’s list of protected monuments. Surely, someone in the culture ministry would have noticed the mistake and struck it off the list in the weeks afterwards? 

No, 66 years have gone by but ‘Nicholson statue and its platform and the surrounding garden paths and enclosure wall’ are item 358 on Archaeological Survey of India’s list. Nicholson Garden, where the statue stood, has been renamed Maharaja Agrasen Park and a statue of the Maharaja presides over it, but someone has updated the missing Nicholson statue’s address to ‘Kashmere Gate, near Metro station’. Which is very odd because the metro came to Delhi only 20 years ago. 

Nicholson, Alias Nikal Seyn

Gen Nicholson’s statue was installed and then removed from Delhi for the same reason: he was a British colonial hero who saved the Raj in its biggest crisis. A 6’2” tall, bearded administrator and soldier, he orchestrated the British recapture of Delhi in 1857. As soon as Kashmere Gate blew up on Sep 14, 1857, he led his troops into the city through the breach and was shot in street fighting.

On the Indian side, he was understandably less popular, and these days even White writers have started calling him ‘sadistic’. William Dalrymple labelled him “great imperial psychopath” in The White Mughal. Modern historians are especially horrified by Nicholson’s decision to hang his regimental cooks, without trial, for poisoning the officers’ soup on the march to Delhi in 1857.

Yet, Nicholson’s gruff reputation had won him many local admirers in the newly annexed Punjab while he lived. Some even worshipped him as Nikal Seyn, a god, and called themselves Nikalsenis. Kipling mentions them in Kim: “wail by long-drawn wail he unfolded the story of Nikal Seyn – the song that men sing in the Punjab to this day”.

Almost 50-Year Wait For Statue

When Kipling wrote Kim in 1901, there was no Nicholson statue in Delhi. Some of the veterans of 1857 had been thinking about installing one, and in 1902 Viceroy Lord Curzon allowed them to set up a fund for it. 

The Daily Sun, an American newspaper, reported on Sep 6, 1902: “A fund has been started in England for the purpose of erecting a monument to one of the great heroes of the Indian mutiny… It is now proposed that a bronze statue of Nicholson shall be erected in the Nicholson Garden at Delhi.”

When the contributions added up to Rs 47,000, London’s famous sculptor Thomas Brock was commissioned to make the statue. Brock is known for his Queen Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace, and the Victoria statue inside Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial. As he had no portrait from Nicholson’s final years, he relied on a marble bust that had been sculpted soon after Nicholson’s death on Sep 23, 1857. 

The Builder magazine of June 18, 1904 assessed the statue’s plaster cast: “Nicholson is represented as holding his sword in one hand and the sheath with the other; the head is fine but perhaps rather too gentle in expression for one who was such a determined fighter…” Brock was able to recreate the General’s khaki coat and sword more realistically as the originals had been preserved by a Mr J Angelo and Lord Magheramorne, respectively.

The statue was finally inaugurated opposite Kashmere Gate on Friday, April 6, 1906, “at the spot where Nicholson had stood on Sept 14, 1857,” waiting for a bugle call that would have signalled the gate had been blown in.

At the unveiling ceremony, Viceroy Lord Minto said, “British and Indian troops stand here together as they have stood side by side on many a hard-fought field to do honour to the memory not only of a British officer of the Indian Army, the John Nicholson of his British comrades, but to the memory of the beloved and worshipped Nikal Seyn Sahib, the revered leader of Pathan and Punjabi warriors.”

This event was reported far and wide. “The unveiling of an heroic statue of John Nicholson before the Cashmere Gate of Delhi is a worthy, though belated, tribute to one of the world’s most gallant soldiers and to one of the greatest figures of the Mutiny,” New York Daily Tribune of April 20, 1906 wrote.

A year later, in December 1907, a ‘miscreant’ snuck up to the statue and defaced it.

Time To Pack Up And Leave

Despite occasional displays of local animus, the Nicholson statue stood relatively unmolested in Delhi for the next 50 years. Chester Bowles, US ambassador to India during 1951-53 remarked in his memoir that while newly independent Indonesians were busy toppling Dutch colonial statues, Indians were cool with British statues and streets named after viceroys and generals.

“I have never heard an Indian suggest that they (the names of streets) be changed… Even a statue of Nicholson, who led the British against Indians during the ‘Mutiny’, still stands, sword in hand,” Bowles wrote.

But the mood in India was already changing. As the centenary of the 1857 Uprising neared, a clamour arose for removing all British statues. Nicholson’s statue was at the top of the hit list, and word reached Ireland through Mrs Edith Wilson, a missionary in India. Her nephew, Major TCH Dickson, was on the board of RSD, where Nicholson had studied from 1834 to 1838. So the school’s old boys started a campaign to rescue the statue.

From Pedestal To Crate

The centenary of the Uprising started on May 10, 1957, and Nicholson’s statue was the first to be toppled in Delhi, followed by that of his comrade Alexander Taylor near Mori Gate in the first week of June. Six months later, they were still “lying crated in the exhibition grounds here, pending a decision on their fate,” Reuters reported in December.

Meanwhile, backroom negotiations were on to get them out. A 1998 article in Chowkidar, magazine of British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA), says permission to transfer the Nicholson statue was obtained through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, “and it left Delhi on 17 July 1958”. A housing ministry note of July 16, 1958 confirms that Central Public Works Department had moved the statue to the British High Commission “only recently”.

Old Boy Comes Home

The crate reached Dungannon in September but the press didn’t know about it for almost a month, until “pupils got hold of the secret and soon the whole town knew about it”. Glasgow Herald wrote about it on Oct 8. Belfast Telegraph did a bigger report, saying the statue “had been rescued from certain destruction”.

As RSD was being expanded at the time, the statue lay in its crate for two more years before it was installed on a pedestal and unveiled by India’s last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, on April 13, 1960.

John Nicholson of Loughgall village was present in the grounds along with some 200 other people that day. “The inauguration ceremony seemed to be a rather reserved and low-key event, probably for security reasons, I suspect,” he told TOI. “None of the other pupils were involved in any form of celebration. I think that at the time there was little awareness of the historical significance of the whole event.”

A few years after John left RSD, the school added a fourth house: Nicholson House. Ivor Edgar, who taught history at the school 1969 onwards, says Nicholson House was added in 1967: “I am not sure if there was a campaign to commemorate Nicholson in this way, or whether growing school numbers necessitated the addition of a fourth house, and Nicholson was seen as a suitable name, but I suspect the latter version to be the more likely.”

But Nicholson didn’t become a topic of discussion or teaching at the school. “Nicholson never featured on the history syllabus. Nor, I imagine, is he much remembered, let alone commemorated, in the town, except as another distinguished Old Boy and soldier,” says Edgar.

Prof Noel Purdy, RSD pupil from 1983 to 1990 and director of research & scholarship at Belfast’s Stranmillis University College now, says, “There was little or no mention of Nicholson and his career in India” at school. “I walked past the statue every day for seven days, on my way in and out of school. It is right in front of the headmaster’s house (and out of bounds for playing).”

Edgar, who was Purdy’s history teacher, agrees: “The Dungannon statue’s main use in recent years is as a picturesque backdrop for photographs, set as it is among sweet chestnut trees.”

But Purdy thinks it’s a mistake for the school to brush Nicholson’s “distinguished military career in India” under the carpet. “While his career would undoubtedly be judged very differently by today’s standards, nonetheless I believe that there is enormous potential in using his story as a stimulus for discussion and debate among today’s pupils,” he says.

Edgar recalls that even before he joined RSD as a teacher, pupils had started treating Nicholson’s statue with some irreverence: “I learned that it had become something of an annual tradition to festoon Nicholson in an RSD scarf and a silly hat, or something similar. This took place, probably, on the last day of the school year or some other significant date. On occasion, the sword was removed as well. It was always returned though.”

The sword, yes, what became of it? In all recent photos, the General is bereft of it. Edgar says, “I am glad to report that it is safe and well, and securely locked away. In this day and age the school, fearful of losing the sword altogether, and given the ease with which it can be removed, decided to keep it safe from future pranks. I am sure that, if the occasion demanded, it could be replaced on a temporary basis.”

In 1998, the then RSD headmaster, PD Hewitt, had also told BACSA: “Nicholson’s ceremonial sword has occasionally been stolen, so is now only put up for major school events.”

Will It Stay At RSD? 

John, his wife Jane, and some cousins visited Delhi in 2007 to commemorate the General’s 150th death anniversary. John told TOI: “We visited his tomb in the British graveyard (Nicholson Cemetery) which had all been beautifully restored and cared for by the Indian authorities. It was a very special and historic visit for us.”

But while India has put the statue and its controversy behind, Jane, who helped in writing this article by sharing old news clippings from her mother-in-law’s scrapbook, seemed concerned about its future at RSD. While it has a high heritage status (B+) in Northern Island, in an age of revisionist histories, how secure is it on its pedestal? 

“We’re waiting for the day when the statue is removed. A sad state of affairs…” Jane let slip in one email, but quickly added: “Please don’t be alarmed! We have had absolutely no inkling of any impending removal.” Nonetheless, her concern stems from “liberals in the UK who have been tearing down/removing statues/renaming schoolhouses”. 

Well, it isn’t a good time to be an icon from the past. Forget Clive and Rhodes, even Mahatma Gandhi was labelled a racist and his statue removed from University of Ghana in 2018. Will it be a crate again for Nicholson? Time will tell.

*Reported in Belfast Telegraph in Oct 1958. BACSA article from 1998 gives Sep 5 as date of arrival

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A Young Poet’s Prophecy

In 1930, WF Marshall was an RSD student with a flair for writing, and like all bright schoolboys of the pre-digital era, he aspired to be published in the school magazine. He wrote a piece in which a boy dreams he’s visiting RSD in 1960, and “The buildings were still, in the main, as of old, but near the entrance there was a life-size statue on a rough granite pedestal… ‘The Brigadier!’ he said to himself. And going nearer he read on the bronze plate: ‘Brigadier-General John Nicholson…’”

In 1930, the Raj was still strong and the Nicholson statue in Delhi was only 24 years old. Nobody could have imagined it would be moved to RSD one day. Nobody but the child poet Marshall, who “became a distinguished churchman and writer of Tyrone dialect verses, which are still popular,” says Ivor Edgar, who taught history at RSD 1969 onwards, adding, “Astonishingly, he even gets the date right!”

Photo shared by Ivor Edgar

More photos: 

Nicholson Cemetery in Delhi

John Nicholson's grave at Nicholson Cemetery

Indian government file from 1858

Glasgow Herald, Oct 8, 1958

Marina Koppel: How man who stabbed her 140 times was caught after 30 years

When it was found on the victim’s ring in 2008, DNA technology wasn’t good enough to extract a profile, but London police didn’t give up. They saved the hair for 14 more years till the tech improved. Then, they nailed Sandip Patel, the culprit in 1994’s Marina Koppel murder case

Marina Koppel in May 1994

August 7, 1994 was a Sunday, and Marina Koppel went out in the evening. Just 5 feet tall, she was still very attractive at 39, with a firm jaw and a head of blonde-streaked curls. She also liked designer things, like her black Moschino shoulder bag.

Marina’s first stop was a poker tournament at London’s famous Victoria Sporting Club casino, about a kilometre from home. Then she saw a client at a hotel in Heathrow, and returned late to her flat on posh Chiltern Street. 

The two-bedroom flat, set two blocks behind Sherlock Holmes’ Baker Street, had been newly repainted and redecorated for Marina, who had moved into it less than a fortnight earlier, on July 26. 

Alone In A Big City

Although she was married, Marina lived alone in London through the week. She visited her husband David Koppel at his Northampton home, about 110km to the north, every weekend. This particular Sunday she had stayed back because of a “trivial” argument with David last time. They had been married 11 years and were still very much in love, but there was one recurring source of tension between them: the nature of her work.

When she had arrived in Britain from Colombia, Luz-Marina Gomez de Rubio had found a cleaning job in a hotel. She was a hotel chambermaid when she and David met at a casino and married in 1983. But later, Marina had started working as a masseuse, and then as an upmarket prostitute.

Working without an intermediary, she sometimes used the pseudonym Luz-Marina Angarita and had a regular clientele of about 100, including “successful people, businessmen, a doctor, and even a politician”. 

Bear in mind that Marina had two children and other family members back in Colombia to whom she regularly sent money. And while David “did not necessarily approve” of her work, he had “accepted” it.

Monday, Her Last Day

Although David and Marina had parted in a huff on July 31, they had made up over the phone and kept in touch through the week. On August 8, Monday, they again spoke several times, “mainly about television programmes”, before 1pm.

Then Marina went out with the Moschino bag on her shoulder. She visited Midland Bank on Baker Street, where she was seen on camera at 1.42pm. It was her last recorded movement outside home.

David called her again in the afternoon but she didn’t reply. He tried her mobile too, again and again through the evening. By 9pm, he was extremely worried, and decided to drive down to London. He reached Chiltern Street “shortly before 11.30 that night”, entered the flat and without turning on a light went to the second bedroom that Marina kept for clients.

“I pushed the door open and I could see by the ambient light something was wrong. The mattress was askew and there was a dark stain on the carpet and the mattress,” he told police in 1994.

It was Marina’s blood. Floor, bedclothes, furniture and walls were all bloody. Marina’s body, clad only in “black lacy lingerie”, was on the floor. The killer had thrown a cover over it. 

“I pulled back the cover and I could immediately see Marina’s head and shoulder, with her lying on her right side facing the bed,” David said. Her body was stiff, her face “was in a tight, fixed grimace and I believe her eyes were shut”. Investigators placed the time of Marina’s death between 5pm and 10.30pm.

Brutal, Vicious, Merciless

While sentencing Marina’s murderer Sandip Patel on Feb 16 this year, Justice Cavanagh described the killing as “brutal, vicious and merciless”.

Sandip Patel in 1994

Patel stabbed Marina 140 times with a “single-sided blade”, probably a kitchen knife. To drive the knife harder, he pressed his left foot against the skirting board of the room and stabbed her on her face, neck, chest and back, rupturing her subclavian artery and almost severing her left jugular vein.

“The blows on Ms Koppel’s neck, on their own, would almost certainly have been sufficient to kill her,” Justice Cavanagh said.

Although Marina tried to defend herself – her hands and arms had stab wounds – she was dead before Patel’s frenzy ebbed. “You continued to inflict blows on Ms Koppel even after her heart had stopped beating,” Justice Cavanagh said.

Forensic pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton, who gave evidence at Patel’s trial, said, “It would have taken well over two minutes to inflict all of the injuries on Ms Koppel.” 

Cold Case For 28 Years

After painting the room with blood, Patel slipped out of Marina’s flat unnoticed and went scot-free for years. At his trial, it was said that a neighbour “had heard screams at about the time that the murder took place”, which makes his escape even more remarkable.

Born on August 26, 1972, Patel was almost 22 years old on the day of the crime. He worked at his father’s newsagency, Sherlock Holmes News, on Baker Street. As he didn’t have an income, it’s unlikely he could have afforded Marina’s “£80” fee – a substantial amount in 1994. So, why was he at her flat, and why did he butcher her? More importantly, why wasn’t he caught sooner?

Patel’s fingerprints were in fact found on a plastic bag in Marina’s kitchen during the initial investigation, but they weren’t considered “significant evidence” because the bag had come from his father’s shop and could have passed through his hands.

Besides, as his lawyer David Sheridan told court, DNA from “84 individuals” was identified in Marina’s flat. “That flat is full of evidence of the attendance of unknown males whether that is marks, fingerprints, DNA, semen, condoms.” A plastic bag from a nearby shop was possibly the least suspicious article on police’s inventory.

A Costly Mistake

Fourteen years went by, and in 2008 London police reexamined the case evidence. That’s when a police scientist found a small hair on the ring that Marina had been wearing. DNA technology at that time was not sensitive enough to get a reliable profile from a single hair, so the ring and the hair were “bagged and preserved” again.

Even with a hair DNA profile, police couldn’t have caught Patel because his DNA was not on their record. But five years later he made a mistake which would cost him dear. On Sep 14, 2013, Patel punched his girlfriend, causing cuts and bruising. Police were called, he was convicted of causing bodily harm, and his DNA became part of their database.

In 2022, the Marina Koppel file was reviewed again, and this time DNA techniques were sharp enough to extract a profile from a single hair. Luckily, as London police’s media and communications manager Rebecca Lowson told TOI, the hair attached to Marina’s ring had its root on it, which is crucial for DNA analysis.

Police now had a profile, and when they tallied it with their database, they got a suspect – Sandip Patel. It seems that Marina had grabbed Patel’s hair while defending herself. It didn’t save her life but ensured he was brought to justice eventually.

Patel was arrested on Jan 19, 2023 as a suspect. The DNA match was a starter but police needed more evidence to seal the case. They took his footprints, and sure enough, the mark on the skirting board of Marina’s room had been made by his left foot.

It seemed like a watertight case after that. As prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones told the jury: “If those footprints were made in Marina’s wet blood, then that can only be because they were left by her killer – someone who was in that room, barefoot, at the time of her blood being on the skirting board.”

Why Did He Kill Her?

After the hearings, the jury spent more than three hours to arrive at a verdict, and it held Patel guilty unanimously. But as London police’s detective superintendent Katherine Goodwin later said, “we may never know the reasons for his actions on that day”.

The first question is, if Patel couldn’t afford Marina’s services, why was he at her flat? Was he there to rob her? The possibility arises because, a day after the murder, Marina’s ATM card was used to withdraw altogether £100 from two machines, one of them near Patel’s Finchley Road home. But why would he murder her for an ATM card, and so brutally at that?

Justice Cavanagh concluded that Patel must have come for sex. “This is the obvious inference from the fact that you were barefoot in her bedroom at the time of the murder. I have no doubt that you had taken your clothes off in the bedroom…Also, when she was found, Ms Koppel was wearing lace underwear and stockings and nothing else.”

But while pronouncing a sentence of at least 19 years, he said Patel had not initially planned to kill Marina. Rather, something happened in the room to stoke his fury. Justice Cavanagh said he had “a strong suspicion” that Patel killed Marina because he could not perform sexually: “There was no evidence of sexual activity having taken place between you, even though that is what you went there to do…after booking an appointment with a sex worker, you found yourself unable to perform sexually and in your humiliation and embarrassment you lost your temper and killed Ms Koppel.”

But nobody knows for sure because Patel refuses to speak. He told police he had no recollection of Marina, her address or the murder: “I have no idea how my fingerprint came to be on this carrier bag or how a hair of mine was present.”

*****

Plastic bag found in Marina's flat

Patel's footprint on the skirting board

Sandip Patel at age 51