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.”

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Plastic bag found in Marina's flat

Patel's footprint on the skirting board

Sandip Patel at age 51