Nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST, 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Channel's Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
junction of Bishop’s Bridge Road & Porchester Terrace North in Bayswater, W2 (image capture Dec 2022, @Googlemaps)
Welcome to the Murder Mile UK True-Crime Podcast and audio guided walk of London's most infamous and often forgotten murder cases, all set within and beyond the West End.
EPISODE TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX: Saturday 15th of January 1994 at roughly 1am, at the junction of Bishop’s Bridge Road & Porchester Terrace North in Bayswater, W2, 19-year-olds Jamie Petrolini and Richard Elsey stabbed 44- year-old Mohamed Abbas Nassif el-Sayed to death in a fake SAS initiation by two fantasists. But why?
THE LOCATION
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SOURCES: This case was researched using some of the sources below.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE: Welcome to Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on the junction of Bishop’s Bridge Road & Porchester Terrace North in Bayswater, W2; one street east of Barbara Shuttleworth’s shooting, directly opposite the attacks by the Old Lady Killer, and a short walk from the crime spree of the ‘chinless wonder’ - coming soon to Murder Mile. At a little T-Junction off Porchester Terrace North sits a Give Way sign, and usually a long line of truly useless drivers, all eagerly waiting to get snarled up behind the chocking fumes of trucks. Only to first get wedged behind a learner driver struggling to find first gear, a yummy mummy whose talons scratch rainbows on the windscreen every time she turns the steering wheel, or cyclists either taking an age to fix their feet to their stupid clippy-cloppy cleats, or darting from the road to the path shouting “look at me, I’m a vehicle, now I’m a pedestrian, and now I’m a vehicle again, the rules don’t apply to me”… …until – of course - they get strawberry-jammed under the No 27 bus to Baker Street. Good. Life is not a game. But for two boys with an SAS fixation, it was. Saturday 15th of January 1994 at roughly 1am, at this junction, 19-year-olds Jamie Petrolini and Richard Elsey stood dressed in black, like SAS soldiers on a deadly mission. Armed with a combat knife, whereas some boys play cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, being stuck in a bizarre world of fantasy and initiations, their playtime had become a reality, and soon, an innocent man would be butchered. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 256: The Initiation. Far from being driven to kill owing to hardship, both boys came from privilege. Born in 1975, Jamie Petrolini had the kind of upbringing most kids would dream of. Raised in the tiny hamlet of Cromdale in the rugged Spey valley of northeast Scotland, every morning he would open his window to stunning glens, fresh streams and highland cattle. As the only child of Johnny & Wanda, being Polish and Italian post-war immigrants who ran a café and an ice-cream parlour, their long hours had blessed him with a good home, a happy life, and the privileges they had been denied as children. Only Jamie didn’t see it like that, all he saw was “heather and sheep”, claiming “I was on my own a lot. I grew up with nearly no contact with others”, no siblings and no best friends, just his collie dog Jake. Keen for him to do well, his parents sent him to Aberlour, a prestigious £11000-a-year prep’ school, and later being educated at Gordonstoun, the elite Scottish public school as attended by King Charles. For some, it’s seen as the best education that money can buy, but for Jamie, it was just another form of isolation, a boarding school stuffed with pompous little scrotes with no emotion, except arrogance. Bullied and demoralised, although he struggled to fit in, sport became his saving grace, as he busied himself with rugby, canoeing and a parachuting, becoming leader of the running group, captain of the karate team and such an accomplished skier, that he almost made it onto the Scottish national team. Aged 14, growing into a small and silent ‘Action Man’, his dream was to join the Marines, but lacking an attention span and drifting into the realms of fantasy as he sat in desperate solitude, having failed his A’ Levels, his university scholarship bid was futile, and his Army application was rejected. 1990 to 1991 saw the invasion of Kuwait and the war in Iraq, all of which were heavily televised as was the Iranian Embassy siege by the SAS in 1980. With Bravo Two Zero, Andy McNab’s SAS memoir being released in 1993, it was a time of heroes and bravery… only Jamie Petrolini was part of none of it. As a sullen sensitive boy, what he needed was a mentor to guide him… …what he ended up with was a deluded fantasist. Like Jamie, Richard Elsey’s upbringing was the epitome of privileged, Raised in the leafy upper-middle class enclave of Wilton Road in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, his English father and Iranian mother had also sent their only son to Brockhurst prep’ school, Merchant Taylors public school, and later doing his A ‘levels at Dr Challoner’s Grammar in Amersham, with hopes that he’d study at Oxford university. Both were isolated and anxious, but whereas Jamie had sports as an antidote to his insecurity, Richard was described as “quiet and passive”, “a reserved chap” and “not a natural mixer”. As a shy boy who many said “when he left the room, he left no trace that he’d been there”, keen to join the Army, but knowing he lacked the confidence and the physical frame being too slightly built, he tried to rebel. It was all a bit pathetic; he took up smoking, he sometimes lied, he collected knives, and he stole a travel card from a friend, only to pretend it was an SAS identity card, which it looked nothing like. But lies can also bely a much darker side, having agonised that “the real me is hiding from my pretend self”, as fanciful as it may seem, he’d claim he was a 2nd lieutenant in the Paras having been seconded to the SAS (Britain’s elite military unit) stating he was on secret missions, and he spoke of his grief seeing his sister killed, writing “blood was everywhere, on my clothes, on the car, on the road, on my soul, the soul that is now In hell… it seems as though my sister, my one true source of love, has been lost since the beginning of time”. Only there was one problem, Richard had always been an only child. As a morose lonely boy, what he needed was a friend… …but what he wanted someone to dominate, someone like Jamie. In September 1993, by chance, both were sent to Modes in Oxford to re-sit their A’ levels. Described by the principal Dr Stephen Moore as “young and immature… they behaved strangely, as if they were plotting something”, and although neither were happy, together they had met their soul mate. They would be friends for just four months. Neither had a history of violence, cruelty, drugs or drink; and they had suffered no trauma, no accidents and no bullying beyond what is seen as the norm’, they were just two privileged middle-class misfits who found solace in a shared fantasy of being soldiers. All children are daydreamers who learn life lessons by role-playing and who know it’s time to cease when someone’s bored, hurt or it’s time for tea. Their problem was not knowing when to say ‘stop’. It all started harmlessly enough. In October 1993, as that month’s best-selling book, Richard purchased Andy McNab’s Brave Two Zero, the (partially) true story of an SAS patrol stuck behind enemy lines in Iraq, which became his obsession. Devouring every code word, such as ‘SOP’ for the standard operating procedures, ‘E & E’ for escape & evasion and being littered with comical and racially insensitive terms like officers being ‘Ruperts’ and Arabs are ‘rag heads’, its words became his mantra. Recording his favourite phrases onto tape to learn them verbatim, being tired became ‘on your chinstrap’, beaten up became ‘filled in’, and with slotting meaning to kill, he’d repeat “you never kill – you slot the little rag heads if they get in your way”. Every teen has a dark obsession, but it wasn’t anything to worry about, as Richard was also so timid. Sharing the book with Jamie who loved it as much as Richard did, Richard’s mantra became Jamie’s as he mentored this special forces fledgling into the ways of the SAS. From now on, they’d state “there is no failure, you just follow the SOP”. “Fear? There is no fear because there is no feeling”. For every mission, they spoke as Andy McNab did, shouting “just fucking let’s do it”, and rejecting any family or feeling because “if you’re worried about people getting hurt and killed, you’d spend your life on anti-depressants. They’re only people; ‘slime’ or ‘dickheads’ or ‘wankers’. Here today, rat-shit tomorrow”. Ditching their college uniforms, by the winter of 1993, the boys were dressed in black like a baby-faced battalion, wearing leather jackets, Army boots, caps and sunglasses. Again, it was just harmless fun, a fashion fad, and (like most teens) they wanted to be unique but dressed identical to feel connected. Again, along with the grief he’d shed for his dead sister who never existed, Richard told Jamie that he was 2nd lieutenant in the Paras and offered to train him – based on his experience - as an SAS recruit. It was all a lie, everyone else knew that, except Jamie. So whether he believed it, or wanted to believe it is unknown. But having also expressed some homosexual longings, was this a friendship or love? Jamie would later state: “He was my best friend. Why should he lie? He lectured me about good and evil, glory and pride. And still wanting to join to Marines, I became a clone of him, arrogant and brash”. By day, Richard had him marching through the streets of Oxford. By night, he had him blacked-up and crawling on his belly through the undergrowth as if he was hunting an enemy sniper. And sometimes, as ordered by Richard’s (fictional) Commanding Officer to test Jamie’s metal, they went on ‘missions’. Akin to kids dressing up in an older siblings’ clothes, adopting a deep voice and drawing on stubble so they’d look old enough to buy cigarettes and alcohol, their ‘real world missions’ were silly little games. In November 1993, posing as Captain T G Walker and Lieutenant Chris Winter, they claimed they took a room at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington and arranged for the bill to be sent to the Army (which seems unlikely), they said they walked into a wedding reception and stole a bottle of vodka, and celebrated a successful mission by swapping the breakfast orders hanging from the hotel’s doorknobs. It was hardly the epitome of an SAS mission, and it’s uncertain if any part of it was even true. That month, they walked into the Golden Horseshoe Casino in Bayswater, pretending to be CID officers assigned to root out gangsters. But with these baby-faced teens having no ID and no idea, they were booted out by the manager and the bouncer. They had chosen that casino at random, and that was also their only prior link to their victim – that they’d been in the same room, but not at the same time. Jamie & Richard were two stupid little boys who were as incompetent as they were cowardly… …and yet, a few weeks later, they’d brutally murder a stranger for an SAS initiation which didn’t exist. But why? (Cliffhanger) At college, their attendance was bad, their course work was shambolic, and having found each other, they had become even more isolated. Their fantasy had become their reality, with Richard believing he was recruiting Jamie as a member of the Special Forces, and that soon, Jamie would fulfil his dream. Jamie said “I was an automaton… Richard was the murderer, and I was just the knife”, or so he’d say. Day and night, they talked of killing, quoting Andy McNab: “be a sniper… head shots only. If you’re not good enough, don’t bother. Be a man, be a killing machine”. But that’s all it was, talk. They never acted on those words or were cruel to a stranger. It was just the bluff and bluster of two bored, lonely kids. In what they’d describe as the murder book, Richard had Jamie copy down all the ways Richard said he should kill, with one being “from behind, hand over mouth, stab the heart once, hold until dead. Insert knife at top of vertebrae, sever spinal cord and brain, wrench to the left, sever jugular, note lots of spray”, and although some may call this killing, “Andy McNab called it ‘giving them the good news’”. With Jamie’s basic and plagiarised training coming to an end after just two months, Richard set him his final assignment – the ultimate SAS initiation. Agreeing to do it on his birthday - Friday 14th January 1994 – having bought a Fairburn Sykes commando knife, Jamie was now planning his ‘first blood’. That morning, both boys caught the bus from Oxford to London Victoria. In their minds, the mission was simple; as Richard told Jamie, “we’re going to kill someone. It’s an SAS test for you, ordered by my boss. There is no good or evil, only tasks to be done quickly and efficiently… we’ll go to Kings Cross… wear rough clothes or we’ll stick out like the balls on a bulldog… wear gloves and carry a bag for blood-stained clothes. You think of everything. Then you act, you fucking do it”. Who they killed was irrelevant, “so we decided to slot a pimp or a drug pusher, not a real person”. That was the plan… but when it actually came to doing the dirty deed, rather than bragging about it, they cacked it. On the doorstep of The Flying Scotsman on Caledonian Road, Jamie asked the female bouncer, ”I’m sorry to ask, I don’t want to be rude but do you know where we could find some pimps?” Heading to the Malt & Hops pub a few doors down, in the toilets, both boys got dressed like a budget ninjas going apple-picking - wearing army boots, sunglasses, black woollen hats and black gloves, which was deeply suspicious especially in an era when IRA bombings still prevalent in London - but with the barman growing suspicious as they had hogged the loos for too long, he asked them to leave. In King’s Cross, which is a hotbed of sex and drugs, they said they couldn’t find a pimp or drug dealer. They’d failed before they’d even begun, not because of a lack of targets but owing to their cowardice. For months, they’d bragged so much, with Richard as the mentor and Jamie as his student, only now they both felt a deep sense of shame and betrayal at their failure. But as Andy McNab would state “There is no failure. You just follow the SOP. Fear? There is no fear because there is no feeling”. So, with this decision being as random as a roll of the dice, they took the Central Line tube to Queensway. Their victim, they had never met; they didn’t know his name and they didn’t care. 44-year-old Mohamed Abbas Nassif el-Sayed was born in Cairo, Egypt. Having trained as a chemistry teacher, he came to London in 1976 to continue his education. Four years later, at the Empire Ballroom in Leicester Square he fell in love. His wife Susan would state “I looked at him and he saw me and we danced together all night. Somehow, I knew we would be together forever”. Married in Hackney in 1981, that night, “he cried because he was so happy at finding me”, said Susan, “I just hugged him”. Described as a gentle giant, as a hard-working husband with two young sons, Sharif aged 7 and Tarek aged 3, by day Mohamed supported his family by working as a chef, as by night, he let off a little steam at the Golden Horseshoe Casino in Queensway. For Mohamed, it had been an unremarkable day. At 6pm, he had dinner with his family, never knowing that it would be his last. At 7pm, he kissed his boys goodbye as he tucked them into bed, unaware that he would never see their faces again. At 7:30pm, having picked up his friend Yasser Hamouds in his silver blue Audi, they headed to the casino. Always smartly dressed, polite and wearing thick tinted glasses owing to an eye condition, Mohamed was said to be “a sweetie” who was no bother to anyone. After midnight, he dropped his friend home, and although he was happy to be heading back to his family, he was a little sad having lost £300… …only his night was about to get worse. The two tragic teens had failed their misguided mission to slaughter a stranger on the supposed orders of a fictional SAS chief. With his chest puffed out, Richard strutted and barked like a cut-price Rambo, as Jamie his deluded subordinate who would do anything never be lonely, skulked in the cold darkness. By about 1am, the junction of Bishop's Bridge Road and Porchester Terrace North was deathly quiet, as a low fog rolled in along the tree-lined street. In the half an hour they’d stood by the Give Way sign, ten cars had passed by, ten potential victims, all of which they’d rejected for one reason or another. Another failure was looming, and the boys knew it… …but as a silver-blue Audi approached, chosen at random, it was now or never. Richard barked “Him!”, and that was it. Jamie dived into the passenger’s seat, with Richard in the back, and slipping the razor-sharp combat knife to Mohamed’s throat, Jamie ordered “drive round here”, as at a creeping 10 miles per hour, the car rolled up the well-lit street towards Paddington Station. It was a pointless move by two inexperienced idiots, having gone from a dark secluded side street to a much busier bus route, and having travelled no more than 70 metres, Jamie spat “pull in here”. The Audi was parked on Bishop’s Bridge Road outside of several unlit houses on Gloucester Gardens. With the engine off and the interior in darkness, Jamie turned to Richard and said “Rich?”, as if he was awaiting his orders. Only Richard said nothing, he simply froze, as now the fantasy had become reality. As planned in their Murder Book, Jamie would brag “I struck him under the Adam’s apple, just to the left of the neck and severed a vein”. As expected, there was a lot of blood. What they didn’t expect was Mohammed to fight back, as he grabbed the knife’s blade with his bare hands and tried to flee. Jamie also boasted (as if he was recounting his own SAS memoir of bullshit) “Richard was holding him from the back seat. After a couple of seconds, I changed the target… it was a direct stab to his heart. The knife went in all the way up to the hilt. I left it in there for four or five seconds and pulled it out. I turned to Richard and said ‘Jesus, there is a lot of blood’”. And within minutes Mohammed was dead. Pointlessly stealing the car keys and his glasses for no reason other than as a cruel souvenir, these two deluded losers saluted each other on a mission well done and fled into the night, leaving a hat behind. Callously admitting to a psychiatrist, Jamie said “I walked off as if nothing had happened… I enjoyed the killing”, and on the bus back to Oxford, Jamie opened his birthday cards and Richard fell asleep. Eight hours later, at 9:20am, a traffic warden found Mohammed slumped in his seat, a crime scene was established, but with no fingerprints, no witnesses and no motive, the culprits were a mystery. It was a baffling crime with no real chance of a conviction… …but not being real soldiers, these two pathetic boys couldn’t help but gloat. Said to be a “private joke”, at a Burger King, Jamie put on the glasses, donned the blood-stained gloves, bit into a ketchup sachet and let it pour it down his chin to mock the dead man’s last moments alive. Having bragged about “doing some slotting as a regular thing”, not realising that he wasn’t living in a fantasy world, Jamie boasted about the murder to two friends, his flat mate and even his father. With the school principal informed, the CID were called, and both boys were arrested. (End) Tried at the Old Bailey in autumn 1994, both boys blamed each other for the murder. Described as “emotionless and callous”, it is said they were ‘lifestyle psychopaths’ obsessed with being SAS soldiers. Examined by psychiatrists, although no signs of psychopathy were found in Richard, Jamie’s lawyers posited the defence that he was suffering from early-stage schizophrenia at the time of the crime, but a plea of manslaughter by diminished responsibility was rejected by the prosecution and the jury. The jury deliberated for five hours. Returning with a 10-2 majority verdict on Mohamed’s 45th birthday, on the 8th of November 1994, Jamie Petrolini & Richard Elsey were both sentenced to life in prison. Summing up, Judge Neil Denison QC stated “you were both playing out your fantasies. It started with harmless pranks and progressed to the brutal and senseless slaughter of a complete stranger”. Mohamed’s widow Susan said “I'll never forgive them. They are evil. They should never be freed”, also stating of them, “my two boys may never have the wealth or opportunities that they have had, but we are a far better class of people than those two. My life is a misery and I am fighting to keep afloat. But at least I can hold my head up high and say I am a civilised citizen, unlike those animals”. On 14th of June 2012, following a legal fight by his family, with the Court of Appeal having recognised “that Jamie’s responsibility for the killing was significantly impaired by his mental illness”, his murder conviction was quashed, and he was committed to a Hospital Order. Having served 18 years of his life sentence in prison, aged 36, Richard Elsey was released in February 2012. And even though it was his SAS fantasy which drove them both to kill, he was never diagnosed as ‘mentally unwell’. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. 
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