Ex-Playboy bunny purchased non-public island with household – and it practically led to homicide

A former Playboy bunny’s dream of owning a private island turned into a living nightmare after her entire family nearly died.

Jayne Gaskin lived a happily family life in the south of England, but it soon unravelled after moving to the Caribbean.

In a new podcast, mental health expert Dr Todd Grande explained that while she was comfortably well off, Jayne craved glamour and excitement and thought she could find it by taking a leap into the unknown.

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“Jayne was a former Playboy bunny who lived in a four-bedroom house in Stockbridge England – about 20 miles north of Southampton,” he said. “She and her partner Phil were raising three children ranging in age from 8 to 13 Phil was an interior decorator who had his own business. Jayne described herself as ‘A housewife who was tired of the rat race’.”

Jayne was thrilled when in the winter of 2000 she saw an advertisement, offering the 9½-acre island for sale at the tempting price of for £170,000 (equivalent to roughly £311k today).

She talked Phil into downsizing and selling off most of their possessions in order to buy the island, which she planned to rename “Jaynique”. But when they came to the end of their arduous 5,500-mile journey, they found an island with just one tumbledown building that had no electricity of fresh running water.

Their plan to build a scuba-diving resort was doomed from the outset, with neither Jayne or Phil having the necessary skills to build cabins for the guests, and ensure all the infrastructure that holidaymakers would expect.

Instead, they turned to local handyman named Teodoro Tinoco, who had brought them to the island on his boat. The former Sandinista revolutionary told them he knew people that could help fulfil their dream.

But it wasn’t long before Jayne, bored and frustrated by the lack of progress on her holiday resort dream, began an affair with the Nicaraguan.

A Channel 4 documentary team was following the English couple’s progress, Dr Grande explains, and Jayne’s infidelity was caught on camera when she was filmed chatting to the handyman.

Jayne eventually sacked the “dead-eyed” handyman, who boasted of extensive military training in Cuba, after finding out that he was also having an affair with her cook.

She sacked him in front of the Channel 4 cameras, saying: “If you don’t like me any more that’s fine, but you don’t work here and sleep with the cook in front of me.”

The family thought that was the last they’d see of the tough Nicaraguan who told of “hunting tigers and drinking their blood,” but sadly, they were very wrong.

Dr Grande explains: “On September 23 2001, Teodoro and four other perpetrators landed on Lime Cay armed with AK-47 rifles.

“They confronted the family members, and two of their workers and placed them in the family’s boat, declaring that they were being kidnapped for ransom. The price was $1 million. Apparently Teodoro believed that the family had this kind of money – but this assumption was inaccurate.

“The family members recognised the voice of Teodoro. Phil didn’t say anything because he feared that it would guarantee his own murder.”

But when Teodoro’s gang clumsily steered the boat onto a sandbank, Phil saw his chance.

He grabbed a can of gasoline and sloshed it over one of the kidnappers. He then threw a match at the hapless gunman, setting him on fire. The flames quickly spread to one of the other members of the gang, and Phil’s arm was also set alight.

In the confusion, Jayne and her children threw themselves overboard and hid in a swamp until the attackers gave up the search.

Reunited with Phil, the family reported the incident to the authorities. But although Teodoro and his gang were arrested, to the family’s horror Nicaraguan police dismissed the kidnap attempt as “an employment dispute” and freed them soon afterward.

Sadly, soon after the attack, Phil’s health started going dramatically downhill. Smoke inhalation during the boat incident had left him with severe lung damage and just a few months later, he died from a massive asthma attack.

A caption explaining his death was added to the Channel 4 documentary, which aired a few weeks later.

Jayne stubbornly stuck to her dream of life on a tropical island, starting a relationship with a local snake breeder before Phil’s funeral. The Channel 4 documentary showed the former Playboy bunny, clad in a bright pink corset, standing over her dead partner’s coffin and vowing never to give up.

Jayne eventually sold Lime Cay to another British woman named Alex Appleby for an undisclosed sum. According to a 2014 interview with Buzzfeed, she had by then moved back to London.

“I think you have to be a certain kind of person to buy an island,” Jayne she said. “They don’t sell every day. People want to buy one, but not everyone has the gumption.”

Dr Grande’s final verdict is damning, saying: “Jayne and Phil were truly clueless as to what was required to live on an island, much less to build and manage a resort.

“They left most of the comforts of the modern world behind, and embarked on a construction project in an area with hostile locals, a monsoon season, armed gang members, excessive quantities of insects and a corrupt government which jeopardised their ownership of the island and did not prosecute the people who kidnapped them and the workers.

“Jayne and Phil jeopardised their own safety, and the safety of their children in a ludicrous attempt to chase their dreams. Instead of traditional school, Jayne was the children’s tutor. Instead of traditional recreation the children resorted to racing hermit crabs – it must have been a miserable existence.

“The probability of success that Jayne and Phil had from the beginning was just about zero. The best they could hope for was to get out alive, which unfortunately one of them was not able to do.”

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