Five time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
Paizan's shipping container on Everett Road, NW10 @Googlemaps2026 Aug2016
EP335: PAIZAN: THE JIGSAW KILLER: On Sunday 9th of May 2021 at 11:47am, 20-year-old Agnes Akom entered a shipping container on Everett Road in Powergate Business Park with 64-year-old Neculai Paizan, a cement mixer driver she had known for 18 months. CCTV cameras caught her walking in. but she never came out. So where did her body go? This episode explores the investigation by the Police which began as a missing persons, and ended in a brutal homicide.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: How do you prove a murder when the body is missing, and in pieces? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on North Acton Road in Park Royal, NW10; five roads west of Patrick MacKay’s birth place, four roads south of the Grey Man’s final victim, a short walk from the suitcase of Marta Ligman’s body, and three streets north of the last gasp of the big teaser - coming soon to Murder Mile. At 63 North Acton Road is Lennox Autos, a car showroom on the Powergate Business Park. On the forecourt stands a line of gleaming cars waxed to a mirror shine, valeted so not a dust speck exists and with stickers hailing their great prices and low milage, its mostly male customers pretend they know what they’re doing by kicking the tyres, tutting at the exhaust and revving the engine and exclaiming “that’s fine” as if they’re sampling a fine wine, when all they want to know is “will it get me laid?”. Just to the side sits an alley, well it’s more of a dead-end, and lined with second hand cars, industrial units, piles of scrap metal, and a battered old shipping container converted into a makeshift flat which the defendant, Neculai Paizan called home. On Sunday the 9th of May 2021, just shy of noon, his friend, Agnes Akom arrived with him, she willingly walked into the shipping container, and never walked out. It was a disappearance without a witness, a killing without a motive, and a murder initially without a body. Agnes could have vanished forever, never to be found. Yet, in what began as a missing person’s case, the investigation would unravel a spider’s web of deceit and lies until the killer was caught. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 335: Paizan: The Jigsaw Killer. On Wednesday 6th of July 2022 in Court 8 of the Old Bailey, 64-year-old Neculai Paizan pleaded ‘not guilty’ to murdering 20-year-old Agnes Akom, but admitted to the lesser charge of moving her body. Before the jury and Judge Richard Marks QC, his words were translated by a Romanian interpreter. Paizan stated that as Agnes sat on his bed: "she was doing something on her phone. I started to feel a bit unwell, my mouth was dry, and I was not feeling right. I realised that I had been poisoned, drugged. I believe it was from the iced coffee, she drank some of it and then she handed it to me and said 'you drink it, I've had enough'". Feeling ‘a wave of darkness’ sweep over him, and plagued by amnesia, he collapsed, and when he regained consciousness, he said “Agnes was pushing something into my mouth, and because of the pain, instinctively I pushed her away and two of my front teeth broke". He would claim that Agnes had drugged him, that she had tried to kill him, that the violence he used against her was in self-defence, and that her attack on him had caused his memory loss so he couldn’t recall her death. Admitting to her unlawful burial, he stated "I realised there was no life left in her, the poor little thing. I was in such a state of panic. I didn’t know what to do ", so rather than call the Police because “they would not believe me… I tried to take her to the park, and put her in a good place”. Agnes was dead, Paizan said he had Amnesia, and with no-one to independently verify what happened inside of the shipping container, the only witness to Agnes Akom’s murder was the evidence itself. But how could a murder be proven? Agnes Akom, who her friends knew as ‘Dora’ was born in 2001 in Hungary, being raised by her mother, Agnes, who she was named after. Little was reported of her early life; her family, her education, her hopes and dreams, but with Hungary having joined the European Union in 2004, as many of her fellow countrymen and women did, in 2018 when she was just 17, she came to Britain seeking “a better life”. It was the last time she saw her mother, as well as almost everyone she had ever loved or cared for. Like many, she imagined that the streets of London would be paved with golden opportunities, but as she and her partner, Peter Lenart would learn, life in this new world would be a real struggle, as being teenagers themselves in one of Europe’s most expensive cities; it was hard to earn a good wage and impossible to pay for the basics, especially as they were still youngsters who together had baby son. Facing so many hardships, even though Agnes earned a living as a coffin-maker, a valuable trade she had learned in her homeland, being barely able to stay afloat, Social Services had taken their son into foster care, and that at the time she would disappear, Peter & Agnes were half way through writing a letter to their son, so that when he was old enough to read it, he could understand that he hadn’t been abandoned. But as Peter would state, "how am I supposed to finish that letter without her?". With many friends who tried to help her, she stayed within the safety of other Eastern Europeans; one of whom she was close to, was a man she had known for just 18 months having met in Christmas 2020. They seemed like an odd pairing. Agnes was a 20-year-old woman with girlish ways, and typical of many ‘Gen Z’ or ‘Zoomers’, being obsessed with social media, she posted selfies of herself living a fake version of “her best life” for a wealth of strangers to ‘like’, her clothes were deliberately stylish (last seen wearing a white fake fur coat, blue ripped jeans and pink trainers), and being petite, 5 foot 5 and 8 and a ½ stone with bleached platinum blonde hair, she stood out next to 64-year-old Neculai Paizan. Paizan was large, fat and bald, like Uncle Fester in the Addam’s Family. After decades working in the construction trade, he always dressed practically, he lived cheaply being a father-of-four, and although his crown of white hair and short white beard gave him a grandfatherly quality, he had the rough callused hands of a manual labourer, and the hard scowl of someone who may have had a dark past, yet, the only crimes he was convicted of in the UK was benefit fraud, speeding and carrying a knife. One notably odd detail about Paizan’s life was where he lived. As a qualified cement mixer driver who was known on almost every industrial estate in West London, he earned around £30,000 a year, and owned a £700,000 former mansion flat at Campden House on Peel Street in Holland Park, a well-to-do area. But he didn’t live there, instead he rented it out, and since at least 2008, he had lived off-grid. Back then, his ‘home’ was The Cabin, a storage facility on the Harp View Business Park, surrounded by skips, industrial units and waste disposal sights, just off the busy A406 North Circular Road and the Brent Reservoir. It’s a place where no-one would willingly live, unless they were homeless, yet he did. 13 years later, in 2021, he was living in a battered old shipping container on the Powergate Business Park next door to Lennox Autos. Surrounded by a scrap metal and second hand cars, anyone passing would assume it was a place to store tools, not a home, as made of a durable weathering steel, this gloomy grey box was just 20 foot long by 8 foot wide and 8 and a 1/2 foot high but modified to live in. It had a small bed with dirty pink sheets, an oil-filled radiator for warmth, a gas powered hob, and a sink, but with no running water he used the tap at the showroom. It was cramped, grimy, the shelves were held up by wooden joists, bare electrics hung from the ceiling with some secured by electrical tape, and with no window, the only fresh air was provided when the padlocked steel door was opened. So, why did Paizan invite Agnes there, and why did she willingly enter? Their relationship was odd, and one that only they know the truth of. In court, Paizan claimed he met her having found her begging for change in a supermarket car park, but this cannot be proven. He said she regularly harassed him for money for drugs in return for sex, which Peter refuted: “Paizan said Agnes slept with 15 or 20 people a day… she did not do these things. He preyed on her vulnerabilities and knew it”, but having met 54 times over the last 12 months, photos taken by Paizan proved that she regularly danced semi-naked for him, in a relationship he said was ‘intimate’. He said he called her "princess”, “little angel” and “sparrow", and loving her “like a daughter, she also called him "grandpa". That was their secret world which occurred in the private confines of the shipping container. Sunday 9th of May 2021 was Agnes’ last day alive, and like many, it seemed unremarkable. At 10:40am, her partner, Peter confirmed she left their Cricklewood bedsit, she kissed him goodbye and said she was heading to her job as a coffin maker. Only she didn’t. Across this 8 minute walk, being easy to spot in her white fake fur coat, blue jeans and pink shoes, she entered Costa Coffee at 173 Cricklewood Broadway and used her bank card to order an iced latte - the one he claimed was used to poison him. CCTV captured this at 10:48am, and as she sat by the window, she waited and messaged two men; one was Attila Molna-Feri, her boss who (the Daily Record states) was an in an "intimate relationship” with and she ordered an Uber to go to his home in Wembley. The other was Paizan, who she messaged between 10:18am and 10:52am, and with him owing her £20, she fatefully cancelled the Uber when Paizan arrived in his silver Dacia Sandero. There they sat, chatted, and at 11:30am, she left with him. They didn’t argue or fight, they drove the 3.8 miles to Park Royal, and as Prosecutor Jacob Hallam told the jury “at 11:47am, the defendant (Neculai Paizan) and Miss Akom got out of the car, and walked around to the service yard at the side of Lennox Autos”. As seen on several CCTV cameras, she was chatting, drinking her iced latte, and as Paizan unlocked the steel door to the shipping container, “they both went in and closed the door. That was at 11.49am. This was the last sighting of Agnes Akom”. Only they know what happened within, and one of them is dead. Not being home by 7pm, Peter grew concerned as her phone was off, she wasn’t answering any texts or posts, and spending the next day calling her friends, her boss confirmed she hadn’t been to work. On Tuesday 11th of May, she was reported missing, and with the CID unable to trace her, on Saturday 16th, Agnes was elevated to a ‘high-risk missing person’ under the Met's Specialist Crime Command. Detective Chief Inspector Neil John who led the investigation stated “there does come a point when a decision needs to be made as to whether or not a murder investigation team takes primacy. Selecting missing persons where there may be a homicide is very difficult, particularly in this case, where there was no body found and no early evidence or indication of foul play”. 100s of people go missing in the UK every day, most run away for personal reasons and many are found, but very few are murdered. An appeal was made, but it drew no confirmed sightings. As DCI John stated “we start with proof of life enquiries… social media, family, friends, bank details. In this case, there were none… we were increasingly concerned for the safety of Agnes”, as with her phone having been switched off at about noon on the day she vanished, “this was completely out of character”. But a tiny clue shined through. The last transaction she made was at Costa Coffee at 10:48am. CCTV showed her getting onto a silver Dacia Sandero, and using ANPR and traffic cameras, they tracked it to an address it was registered at; an old battered shipping container beside Lennox Autos on the Powergate Business Park in Park Royal. Tuesday 18th of May 2021, 9 days after her disappearance, officers arrived at the shipping container. It was a start, an introduction to Neculai Paizan, Agnes’ friend who was possibly the last person to see her alive, and with nothing suspicious in his past, the detectives were only there to question him. They knocked on the steel door, but he wasn’t there as neither was his car. With heavy duty padlocks securing it, the Fire Brigade forcibly gained entry. Inside… was nothing; no Agnes, no Paizan, no body, no obvious blood, and none of her clothes. It was a mess, but there was no hint that she’d been here. With this still a serious missing persons case and not a murder investigation, fortuitously for the Police, seeing the fire trucks surrounding the shipping container and believing it was on fire, Paizan arrived. That day, yet to be a suspect, he was questioned at Wembley Police Station aided by an interpreter. He claimed that she went with him to the container for sex, they stayed a short while, he then dropped her off at a cash machine at the ASDA in Park Royal, and he hadn’t seen or heard from her since. But as Detective Constable Mike Davidson said “he gave an account, but we knew it was untruthful”, and worse still, he kept referring to her in the past tense even though no-one had suggested she was dead. While he was interviewed over the next three days, detectives corroborated his account with the facts. Several CCTV cameras confirmed that on Sunday 9th of May 2021 at 11:47am, Paizan & Agnes entered the shipping container. Watching every angle of the footage, 24-hours a day across the 9 days until detectives gained entry, they confirmed that Agnes went in, but never came out. So, where was she? His alibi in court was that she had poisoned him with an iced latte, but CCTV showed no signs of him collapsing, staggering, or looking drugged. He was asked about this discrepancy, but he had no reply. At 12:22pm, 35 minutes later, cameras showed Paizan, and only Paizan, leaving the shipping container alone, he was holding his left arm awkwardly, on his forearm were several red marks which detectives believed to be her blood, and at the showroom’s tap, he washed his hands and his face. DCI John also recalled "there is a chilling image of him looking up at the camera. It will remain with me forever”. When questioned further, Paizan replied “maybe she’s still alive?”, but by then, as the detectives told him “she’s not alive”, as even without a body, the evidence against him was mounting up. DCI John recalled "we took the container apart; the floors came up, the walls came out, the ceiling came down". The inside was filthy, yet forensics confirmed that with the bed stained with bleach "vigorous attempts had been made to clean it up”, and with faint traces of blood proven to be Agnes’, with her having been attacked violently, a speck of blood was found on the spine of a Bible on one of Paizan’s shelves. She had died here, they knew it, but how did she die, and why? Changing his story, Paizan, who when interviewed had both forearms in plaster-of-Paris casts, claimed that having washed his face and hands and suffering an attack of amnesia, he returned to find Agnes dead, “curled up in a ball… I got scared ". In his second alibi, he would claim that either her injuries were self-inflicted, or someone had attacked her when his back was turned, unseen by any camera. Knowing the Police wouldn’t believe this fanciful tale about a mystery man who can walk through steel walls, he didn’t call an ambulance, instead “I tried to take her to the park, put her in a good place”. And although he said he loved her “like a daughter”, his actions were proven to be selfish and callous. At just after 3:30pm, he dragged several items from the container and reversing his car up to the door, he loaded them into his boot; her white fur coat, her blue jeans and her pink trainers, anything which could identify her, and save her loved one’s from the pain and grief of never knowing where she was. Cameras also spotted him loading into the boot a rolled-up carpet and heavy object in a stained pillow case. So why did no-one see this as suspicious? It’s an industrial estate, he was one of hundred of men that day, wearing orange hi-viz overalls and loading bulky items into a car, and being known at every waste disposal site in West London, no-one batted at eye when he dumped them into several skips. An hour prior, he dragged a large white builder’s merchant’s bag, likely containing her body, to an unit he had rented next door. The space was empty, only he had access to it, and on a sheet of plastic, he cut up her body into pieces using an electric jigsaw; severing both legs, arms, the torso and her head. Anywhere else it would have drawn attention, but with every unit on the estate filled with the sound of hammers and angle grinders, the dismembering of her body was passed off as something innocent. At around 5:30pm, unmanned cameras caught Paizan dragging the bag from the unit, loading it into his car, and again nobody noticed, as why would they? And even as he dispersed every piece of proof in the killing of Agnes Akom into several skips across the city, it looked as if he was renovating a house, and as he parked his car up outside of his flat on Peel Street, nobody knew that inside lay a dead body. Paizan had committed an unseen murder and disposed of the body in plain sight… …but, as we know, one witness was always watching him - the cameras. DCI John recalled “there was one part in the timeline where we had no sightings of (Paizan’s) car”, so slowly and methodically, “the suspect's car was tracked across north-west London by officers moving from road to road and watching at each junction”. It took weeks of trawling these grainy images with many blind spots, but eventually, traffic cameras spotted the car entering a familiar industrial estate. At about 8am on Monday the 10th of May 2021, the day after the murder, Paizan’s car pulled into the Harp View Business Park, just off the A406 North Circular Road, and a few doors down from The Cabin, the old storage facility at the back of Neasden Recreational Ground, where he’d lived a decade before. As before, he had bagged up in a black plastic bag and callously tossed Agnes’ fake white fur coat into a skip. No-one would have known it was key to a murder, as to the casual observer, it was just junk. Next, he dumped something heavy, and although it was wrapped in a bloodstained pillow case, no-one suspected it was blood as almost everything in the skip was spattered with red paint and creosote. And even if they had opened it up and spotted the bloodied electric jigsaw inside, as he had tried and failed to wash it, it took forensic specialists to identify the blood and hair attached the blade as Agnes’. Police had found bloodstains in the shipping container, his car and his unit, with proof of him disposing of her clothes, lying to the police, and the jigsaw he had used to dismember her body. With so many inconsistencies in his statement, on the 24th of May 2021 at Wembley Police Station, just six days after he was questioned, Paizan was arrested on suspicion of false imprisonment and murder. Detectives could prove that Agnes had come to harm at the hands of Paizan, yet without a body, as he shifted his alibi from finding her dead to self-defence having been poisoned and attacked by a woman half his size, this gap in the evidence could mean that he may get away with the lesser charge of manslaughter. Again, it was a faint and distant image on an unmanned camera which provided a hint of a clue. At just after 8am, wearing his non-descript orange hi-vis overalls, Paizan was spotted exiting the Harp View Business Park and carrying a spade. At 9:13am, the same camera caught him pushing a big blue wheelie-bin in the same direction, and clearly being heavy, he struggled to lift it up a kerb. Heading right, there is nothing but a stretch of the A406, Brent Reservoir and Neasden Recreational Ground. Teams of specialists swarmed the waste transfer site sifting 60 tonnes of rubbish, divers plumbed the depths of the reservoir, and ground penetrating radar examined every patch of grass, but nothing was found… until Monday 14th June 2021, 36 days after she had disappeared, a cadaver dog caught a scent. At the north-eastern end of Neasden Rec’, near the jagged fence which borders the industrial estate, the severely decomposed body of Agnes Akom was found. Buried in a shallow grave and covered by logs and branches, she was lying in a foetal position, a cord round her neck, and her decapitated head wrapped in a black plastic bag. DNA proved it was her, and for DCI John, her discovery proved to be poignant: “Each day, I would drive into work along the North Circular Road thinking about where she could be… her resting place was less than 100 metres from where I was driving twice a day every day”. In court, Judge Richard Marks QC stated: “what truly happened there and why you did what you did is something that we can only surmise. Tragically, she never lived to tell the tale, so the court and the jury only had your account, which I am certain was demonstrably untrue and which the jury rejected”. That morning, Agnes willingly walked into Paizan’s shipping container, a place she had been to many times before, to receive a £20 note that he owed her. The Judge continued: “for reasons only known to yourself, you launched into a vicious attack, hitting her over the head at least 20 times with an electric jigsaw”, it was a sustained attack on a vulnerable lone woman which came out of no where. The pathologist said “she had no defensive wounds, and having caught her unaware, she was rendered incapable of even raising her arms in an attempt to defend herself”, as he bludgeoned her, again and again. But why? Nothing caught on any camera gave a hint at the brutal violence he would unleash? Agnes was the girl he said he loved “like a daughter”, and he was the man she called “Grandpa”, but when he finally stopped lying about her poisoning him with a drugged latte, he admitted “she said don't touch me, she didn't feel like it, she wasn't in a mood, she told me to leave her alone", and as a man who had preyed on her vulnerabilities to abuse her, her rejection would lead him to murder her. It was an odd sexual relationship for no clear reason, except he says, she pestered him for money. But there was no remorse in this man, no regret for the life he had ended for entirely selfish reasons. As DCI John recalled “the level of violence Paizan used in his attack on Agnes is truly horrific. What she suffered inside the container does not bear thinking about… and his attempts to hide his crime show a calculated effort to ensure that not only was Agnes never found, but that he would not be caught”. Especially as, in the days after the murder, Paizan had visited Neasden Rec’ five times. (End) On the 19th of July 2022, in Court 8 of the Old Bailey, the jury retired to deliberate. Having admitted to moving the body but denying murdering her, Paizan rejected his initial alibis, and “in an attempt to paint Agnes in a bad light" he falsely claimed that she was a sex worker, which prosecutor Jake Hallam QC said was a pack of lies. Having deliberated the evidence, the jury returned after just one hour. Found guilty of all charges, 64-year-old Neculai Paizan was given a life sentence with a minimum term of 22 years, and given his age and alleged ill-health, it’s unlikely he will ever see freedom ever again. Outside court, DCI Neil John said “what we know about Agnes tells us that whilst she was vulnerable, he has clearly lied about her background and personal situation in an attempt to sway the jury”. In her own statement, Agnes’ mother said “he dragged her through the mud in life, and her name through the mud after her death… he presented himself as a victim… but he is the one who is a liar”. And with her partner, Peter traumatised, stating “she was my love, the mother of my son, partner, and best friend, and took her away from me in the worst way possible”, there is one more victim in this tragedy. Her baby son, who - while currently in foster care – will one day learn about how his mother died. After Paizan’s arrest, Agnes was cremated and her ashes were flown back to Hungary. Not that Paizan cared. After his conviction, he appealed; he stated that the sentence was excessive, that the judge had failed to consider his age and health, that Agnes’ prior convictions were not taken into account, and he even complained that one of the jurors smelled of cannabis. But with it clear he was a liar, as it was proven that he didn’t need a Romanian interpreter, and this was just a tactic to delay the investigation, his appeal was rejected. Paizan remains behind bars, and so far, he’s been beaten up three times. 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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