Bloke’s sick 27-word confession led to gruesome find of housemate’s concrete tomb

Ryanair steward Christophe Borgye was brutally murdered in 2009 by flatmates he thought of as his ‘family’, who ended up burying him after a frenzied attack

A policeman who probed the murder of Ryanair steward Christophe Borgye has revealed the moment his killers – and former housemates – came forward to confess. This was the shocking moment one of three murderers walked into a police station and admitted to slaying a Ryanair cabin crew member four years previously.

Up until that confession, officers believed Christophe Borgye had simply vanished from his home. Christophe had come to the UK from his homeland of France to become a Ryanair steward. He was eventually introduced to Dominik Kocher through a work pal, who offered Christophe accommodation in a property on Hylton Court in Ellesmere Port, Wirral, sharing with his cousin Manuel Wagner and Sebastian Bendou.

Anton Sullivan, a former Inspector with Cheshire Police who probed Christophe’s killing 16 years ago, spoke to the Liverpool ECHO: “Kocher said to him that the way it works is it’s a family group who looked after each other.

In April 2009, Christophe said he was being relocated to Brussels. Mr Sullivan, a veteran of the police force with 32 years of service, revealed: “Kocher by this point had been planning for the death. Looking at credit card receipts that he had gone and bought bricks, building materials including cement, he had gone to Asda and bought three knives, the knives that were subsequently found.

“On April 23, when Christophe had come back late at night from work, the three of them went out, purchased more equipment and laid out the kitchen and told him they were going to be doing a deep clean of the house.

“The next morning they called the victim downstairs to the kitchen where it had all been set out. The tarpaulin had been laid out, they were wearing gloves, they had overshoes on and each one of them had a knife.

“The victim was asked to start cleaning underneath the sink and that’s when they attack him.”

The trio then launched their brutal assault on the 35 year old. However, after stabbing him twice, they found the knives “weren’t up to the job”.

Wagner then produced a claw hammer and struck Christophe over the head, resulting in his death. Christophe was buried in a concrete tomb in the garden of the property alongside their weapons.

Mr Sullivan believes the burden of the killing gradually consumed Bendou, who began displaying signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Then one evening in April 2013, Cheshire Police received a telephone call from a French-speaking man confessing to murdering his housemate four years prior.

Speaking from a phone box, he told officers: “This is too much for my mind”. Bendou made his way to Cheshire where he admitted to the killing, insisting it was in self-defence, with Mr Sullivan, then an Acting Inspector, brought in due to his fluency in French.

He recalled: “I sat down with him and we had a brief conversation which went along the lines of him telling me in his own language what he was on about. He looked dishevelled, like he hadn’t had a bath in weeks, and he just said ‘I want to confess to killing my housemate in 2009, we had an argument and I buried him under the shed at the bottom of the garden’.

Mr Sullivan was subsequently drawn into the investigation and remained involved throughout. He traced Christophe’s relatives before assisting in securing convictions against the three murderers across two separate trials.