Man thought he'd joined 'family' until they buried him in concrete garden tomb

An investigator who helped solve a murderhas shared the moment a man confessed to killing his housemate, alongside two other tenants.

Frenchman Christophe Borgye, 35, stepped into his kitchen to find his three flatmates all holding knivesin Merseyside in May 2009. The travel enthusiast subsequently went missing, with his case remaining unsolved for four years.

Christophe, who worked as a Ryanair flight steward, was murdered, buried and cemented in the outbuilding of the house he shared with Manuel Wagner, from Germany, and Sebastian Bendou and Dominik Kocher, also from France.

Christophe met the trio after his work colleague introduced him to a friend he played football with. His friend, Kocher, offered Christophe a room in a house on Hylton Court in Ellesmere Port. Kocher, a married father of three, wouldn't ask for rent but he would take his monthly income to put towards bills and shopping with the promise of all money not spent being returned to him at the end of his tenancy.

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Anton Sullivan, a former Inspector at Cheshire Police who investigated the murder 16 years ago, said: "Kocher said to him that the way it works is it's a family group who looked after each other.

"Kocher said he would do the cooking, the cleaning, do the weekly shop, and Borgye had to pay his wages into this joint account. Christophe was a trusting soul, people might think he was naïve but he wasn't, he took them on face value and gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. He was happy, he got the best room in the house and could travel with work.

"Bendou and Wagner would go out doing menial labour jobs - pot washing, cleaning, those kind of things. It was apparent that Kocher would take all of their earnings and treat them like children. If they wanted new clothes or anything like that, Kocher would get it for them. He would do their cleaning, their cooking, and they were happy to live like this.

"Looking back on it, Kocher was probably planning that there was going to come a point where there was no money left. It became apparent that the bills were being paid for by Christophe because Kocher and his wife were living well beyond their means."

However, Kocher's hand was forced when Christophe informed him he was being relocated to Brussels. Kocher helped him book his flight to Dublin where he was due to have a meeting with Ryanair to set up his new life in Belgium, but the trusting Frenchman did not realise his own murder was already being planned, reports Liverpool Echo.

Mr Sullivan said: "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 began their vicious attack on the 35-year-old but the knives "weren't up to the job" after he was stabbed twice, with Wagner producing a claw hammer and hitting Christophe over the head, killing him. Mr Sullivan continued: "We didn't know until the last investigation when Bendou admitted that Wagner was the one to bring the hammer which wasn't part of the original plan. The knives were very ineffective in causing fatal injures and the victim was in shock. Then they started using the hammer and they're the injuries that the pathologist determined to be what killed him.

"Once they committed the murder they quickly wrapped him up in the tarpaulin, stuffed him into the grave they pre-prepared in the shed and started preparing the concrete before cleaning up the scene. A few hours later, we have receipts that show they all went to Chiquito's at Cheshire Oaks where they all had lunch and then they just carried on with their lives."

Christophe was entombed in a cement structure in the garden of the building along with the weapons. Mr Sullivan added: "They sold his car, they sold his records and CD collection to Music Magpie, we even managed to prove that Kocher had used the victim's credit card to buy an anniversary card for his wife. It became apparent that Kocher was the ringleader who orchestrated this."

When 'workaholic' Christophe didn't turn up to work for a week, his colleagues became suspicious and soon reported it to police after visiting Ellesmere Port but getting no answers. One of them contacted Christophe's brother Noel to tell him he was missing and Cheshire Police started a missing from home enquiry. But there were no leads.

Bendou told police he had vanished with no mention of where he had gone and enquiries continued. Then, an email landed in the inbox of his family members explaining how he had upped and left to go travelling in China with a woman he had met.

Various aspects didn't ring true with his family, particularly Noel who was due to get married that year, something Christophe had vowed not to miss. Wagner and Bendou carried on living in the house where they had brutally murdered their flatmate before they moved to Warrington along with Kocher and his family in 2012. They then moved to rural Scotland, where they set up camp in the town of Dumfries.

Mr Sullivan believes the weight of the murder ate away at Bendou who began showing symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Then one evening in April 2013, Cheshire Police received a call from a French speaking man claiming to have murdered his housemate four years earlier. He told police from a phone box: "This is too much for my mind".

Bendou travelled to Cheshire where he confessed to the murder, claiming it was self-defence, with Mr Sullivan, an Acting Inspector at the time, being called in because he could speak fluent French. He said: "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'.

"Clearly, not what I was expecting, but I decided to take down some notes and conferred with a colleague. He'd given the name of Christophe and that's when we realised we had an outstanding missing from home case and he was still missing. We made the decision to lock him up, arrest him on suspicion of murder, and at that point I wrote down the details of what he said in French. I asked him to read it and sign it, and at that point he asked to speak to a solicitor."

Mr Sullivan tracked down Christophe's family before helping lock up the three killers across two separate trials. During questioning, Bendou changed his statement to reveal the full extent of his fellow killers' involvement. As the picture became more clear to detectives, Kocher and Wagner were arrested on suspicion of murder. Kocher and Bendou were subsequently charged with murder while Wagner was accused of helping to move the body.

Kocher and Wagner stood trial in 2014, when Kocher was found guilty of murder and jailed for life with a minimum of 23 years. German national Wagner was part of the same trial; however, he was not charged with murder, because of insufficient evidence. He admitted unknowingly helping to move Christophe's body and was cleared of assisting an offender and preventing a lawful burial.

Bendou had to be treated for his mental illness before he faced a separate trial. He was found guilty of murder and received a 14 year minimum life sentence. Police were intent on Wagner being convicted for his role in the murder with Bendou becoming a key witness in the murder trial that took place in 2017. Bendou said while he and Wagner wrapped up Christophe's body and carried it to the shed, Kocher mixed the cement.

When first arrested, Wagner said he had no idea what happened and thought Christophe was “living happily ever after” in China with a girl. He told officers: “I didn’t play any part in disposing of his body. I was shocked and shaking.

“I couldn’t believe it. Christophe and I lived together for a long time. I considered him more of a friend than a housemate.”

Wagner later told police he recalled coming home and seeing Bendou, who asked for his help to move a tarpaulin-wrapped “package”. He tried to convince the jury that he thought this might contain some rubbish, adding: “I don’t know if it was the body or not.”

But jurors saw through his lies and returned a unanimous verdict that he was guilty of murder, before he was jailed for life with a minimum of 16 years behind bars.