Mother gets murdered man’s watch

Press, 13 April 1984, Page 11

Mother gets murdered man’s watch

NZPA staff correspondent London

The mother of the murdered New Zealand drug dealer, Christopher Martin Johnstone, has won a legal battle to get the expensive gold watch her son was wearing when he was killed in 1979.

The Magistrates’ Court in Chorley, Lancashire, ordered that the watch, said to be worth $3OOO, be returned to Mrs Aileen Johnstone, of Orewa, Auckland. The Lancashire police had applied for an order for its disposal under the Police Property Act. They had recovered the white gold Patek Philippe Swiss watch from an antique dealer in Scotland after Johnstone’s murder.

His handless, naked corpse was found by divers in a flooded Lancashire quarry in October, 1979. He had been killed on the

orders of his former friend and partner, Alexander Sinclair, who died in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight last year while serving a life sentence for Johnstone’s murder.

The police were told that Johnstone bought the watch in Singapore. It was taken from his body and sold after he had been shot and his body mutilated. Alexander McAuley, aged 49, an antique dealer, of Airdrie, Scotland, told the court yesterday that he had bought the watch in good faith from Kingsley Fagan, one of the defendants in the “Mr Asia” trial, and another man.

Fagan, a former Scots Guardsman, of Airdrie, was acquitted on drugs conspiracy charges at the end of the 121-day trial in 1981.

Mr McAuley asked the court for an order that the watch was legally his, or for

compensation for the £2OO (SNZ44O) he paid for it. Court officials told Mr McAuley he could seek legal advice about trying to get compensation for the watch elsewhere. Two letters from Mrs Johnstone pleading for the return of the watch were handed in to the court. They were not read out but she is believed to have said that her son would have wanted her to have it.

Mr Granville Rooley, solicitor for the Lancashire police, said he believed Mrs Johnstone was in “poor circumstances.”

Detective Chief Inspector Tony McClure, one of the officers who investigated Johnstone’s murder, said the watch had been identified by his English lover, Julie Hue, and Barbara Pilkington, girlfriends of Andrew Maher, who shot Johnstone at point-blank range.