It was the murder mystery with no body and no weapon - but plenty of motive. Sam Sherwood and Kurt Bayer tell the full story, including how Dave “Ted” Benbow’s wife Jo Green got together with his old friend Mike McGrath soon after she walked out on him.
She had always adored and respected Mike, a kind, good-looking fella who cared about her and her children.
She asked him if he would teach her how to kiss and be touched. They discussed whether getting together would ruin their friendship. Mike said they could be soulmates.
“I fancied you for years
but we never acted on it... You were just so f****** loyal to him,” he told her.
Once she got her own wee rental, Mike would bike round for tea. Sometimes after the kids went to bed. He would park his bike in the kitchen “just in case we got busted”. Nobody knew anything. But they worried Ted was watching.
“I didn’t want to hurt [him]. It was none of his business but he also didn’t need to be hurt by that,” Jo says.
Mike never stayed the night and they didn’t always have sex.
But one day, April 30, one of her daughters saw them kissing. She told her dad. Ted told a mate he was pissed off.
After that moment, Ted’s “world changed”, the Crown alleged. The next day, he called in sick at work. He rang his lawyer, his doctor. Tearful and lonely, he phoned Jo’s sister Toni, one of the few people he ever opened up to, and said he had lost everything.
On May 2, Ted went to see a counsellor. The break-up had left him lost, confused, and lonely. His health was going downhill, he wasn’t sleeping or eating. He told her about their assets, the rents. He felt shafted, a word she underlined in her notes.
Then Ted said one of his mates was starting to see Jo now – Mike.
He wanted to “annihilate” him.
Read their full account below.
