The riddle of the Black and Decker homicide: Brit device firm boss was gunned down outdoors his villa within the South of France… 40 years later his daughters assume they lastly know why

Seeking a motive for the assassination of Kenneth Marston, an upright and much–admired English executive, investigators would explore every imaginable theory – from far–Left terrorism to corporate corruption on a vast scale, and even a secret love affair.          

However, as Friday, April 25, 1986, began there was no hint of the horrific scene Jo was about to witness. Indeed, having moved to Lyon from County Durham two years earlier, the Marston family were living the ex–pat dream.

In those days, the power–tools multinational Black&Decker was synonymous with DIY, with handymen the world over using its inventive equipment.

Having joined the US–owned company as a shop–floor engineer, Mr Marston, 42, had whizzed through the ranks. After a successful stint as boss of a plant in North–East England, in 1984 he had been tasked with turning round its puzzlingly underperforming French operation.

Two years into his posting, which came with a salary of £500,000 at today’s rates, the move appeared to be a roaring success. Apparently liked and respected by colleagues, he had installed his family in a stylish, single–storey villa in an affluent Lyon suburb, and built a pool in the grounds.

Though she was struggling to learn French, Mr Marston’s wife, Mary, 46, who shared his working–class Birmingham background, found her neighbours surprisingly welcoming.

Their older children, Neil, 16, and Andrea, 13, were weekday borders at a British school in Paris, while Jo had settled into a local primary and was already bilingual. Weekends and holidays were often spent skiing in the nearby Alps, they’d rented a yacht on the Med, and that Friday they were due to fly to Barcelona for a spring break. ‘Life was good,’ Jo tells me. ‘There were no plans to go back to the UK.’

Everything changed at 8.11am, according to a neighbour who checked his watch after two booming cracks from a sawn–off boar–hunting rifle echoed across the street.

Mr Marston had intended to drop Jo at school on his way to work, 15 minutes away in Dardilly. Dressed in a crimson jumper and jeans, she was following him as he walked towards the front door.

She remembers retreating down the hallway as he opened it and found himself face to face with a stranger, and how he left the door ajar as they spoke.

Moments later she heard a ‘big bang’ followed by the piercing cries of her mother, who had been watching the scene from a side window as she unfurled the blind.

‘Mum was screaming, so I started screaming, too,’ says Midlands–based Jo, now 50 and working in marketing for a ski company.

‘I didn’t know what she was screaming about, but I thought if she was screaming, I must be scared. So I hid behind the curtains, thinking we were in danger. When I came out, Dad was lying in a pool of blood at the bottom of the front steps.’

The gunman had shot Mr Marston twice in the chest, leaving him to die as he sped off in a car parked near the side gate.

Hearing the shots, neighbour Jacqueline Martin dashed to the villa, where she found a heart–rending scene.

Mr Marston’s body was ‘lying across the doorstep and beside him was his little girl’, she recalled.

‘I was very surprised by her behaviour – very calm – and she said to me, in impeccable French: ‘I want to stay here so I can tell the police that I saw someone running away, in black, wearing a balaclava helmet’.’

Jo’s apparent composure may have been a reaction to shock. However, she drew on it commendably during the ensuing hours and days when – astonishing as it seems today – French police used the ten–year–old girl as their interpreter. ‘There was no counselling back then,’ she says. ‘I was back at school within a week.’

After 40 years, Kenneth Marston’s murder remains unsolved. Until now, Jo and her sister Andrea, 53, a London HR director, have never spoken about it publicly.

However, I first delved into it over 30 years ago, and this week they granted me this interview in the faint hope of stirring the memory – or conscience – of someone who might, even now, identify the hitman and his paymasters.

Under France’s statute of limitations law, the case was closed after 20 years. It can’t be reopened, even if the killer came forward and confessed.

Yet their mother, who moved to Gloucestershire after the older children finished their Paris education (living on a £21,000 annual pension), fought for the truth for the rest of her days.

She died without closure six years ago, aged 80, and her children have taken up the baton in her honour.

‘Dad was the love of her life, and she never gave up, though she was diagnosed with early–onset Parkinson’s disease a few months after the murder,’ says Jo, adding that doctors believed the illness might have been hastened by grief. Though the ruthless murder of a high–powered executive briefly made headlines in Britain, France and the US, it was soon forgotten, for the following day a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded.

As Jo and Andrea told me, the Lyon investigators also seemed frustratingly – and strangely – uninterested in the case, and when Mary Marston sought to discover what leads they were following she was stonewalled.

‘That seems to be true of a lot of French investigations,’ says Jo. ‘If you look at the number of unsolved foreign cases, it’s unbelievable. It wasn’t just the language or cultural barrier. It was the whole system.’

At first, police believed Mr Marston had been killed either by Arab or French far–Left terrorists. It was an understandable assumption. Then, as now, the US was embroiled in a conflict with an Arab nation, but the arch–enemy was Libya. On April 5, 1986, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had ordered the bombing of a Berlin disco frequented by American servicemen, killing three and injuring 229. In retaliation, ten days later, the US rained missiles on Gaddafi’s desert compound.

Soon after Mr Marston’s murder, an anonymous caller with a Middle Eastern accent phoned news agencies in Paris and London, claiming responsibility for the killing and for blowing up the Amex building in Lyon 20 hours later.

The Amex bombers daubed a wall with the slogan ‘Black and Decker, American Express, Control Data – US Go Home.’

The militant far–Left cell Action Directe also fell under suspicion. In a raid on their Lyon lair, police found a list of prominent foreigners they intended to target, together with their movements.

It is unclear whether Mr Marston was named. However, the spectre of terrorism sparked chaos and pandemonium.

The US sent CIA agents to comb the villa for clues and mingle with the many mourners at Mr Marston’s funeral.

The family were hidden in a hotel, bodyguards escorted them wherever they went, and Jo was told to remove her name from her school bag to avoid being identified. ‘I remember walking around a shopping centre with these guys dressed all in black. It felt like we were in a bad movie,’ she says.

As time passed, however, the terrorism theory began to unravel. For one thing, they had never been known to kill with boar–hunting rifles. Also, there wasn’t a strand of evidence to back the anonymous caller’s claim of responsibility, which was dismissed as a publicity–seeking hoax.

When Georges Fenech, an ambitious young investigating judge in Lyon, took over the case, he explored other avenues, among them the possibility that Mr Marston had taken a lover, like many powerful men in France.

As the retired judge told the Mail this week, the Black&Decker chief travelled widely and had ample opportunity to stray.

Yet after examining his bank and phone records, and his hotel bills, Mr Fenech was sure ‘he had no mistress’, and was ‘very attached to his family, and to his wife, Mary, a truly distinguished and very classy English woman’. He was also ‘scrupulously honest’.

As theory after theory fell away, Mr Fenech delved deeper into Mr Marston’s business affairs. It was through these inquiries that he formed the shocking view he still holds today: that the murder was orchestrated by enemies within Black&Decker.

Many of the reasons are contained in a previously unseen dossier he received from a Lyon police chief in 1991. This highly revealing report is contained in the Marstons’ case file, which they allowed me to examine.

Fifteen months before the murder, two Lyonnaise men – notorious underworld boss Jean Schnaebele and scrap dealer Gilbert Zini – were jailed for fencing 15,800 items valued at £500,000, stolen from the Black&Decker factory.

Their vast stash – drills, lawnmowers, water pumps and power saws – was piled 20ft high in Zini’s scrapyard. He was so proud of the booty mountain he videoed it. But as these shady characters told me when I tracked them down in 1993 – and as the police dossier confirms – they were relatively minor players in a far greater scam whose ringleaders held senior posts inside the company.

Thousands of goods were being removed from the production line, certified as obsolete or ‘not up to French standards’, then sold off cheaply on the black market in France, Holland, Belgium and North Africa. Investigators also heard this story from many well–placed sources. And when police quizzed Schnaebele over the murder, he told them straight: ‘Mr Marston was assassinated because he discovered the ones who were responsible for the trafficking for many years.’

The gangster claimed he could identify those involved, the police report says, but refused to do so.

Further evidence of the fraud came from Mr Marston’s secretary, Maryvonne Corsin, who told police of suspicious occurrences preceding and following the murder. Just before Mr Marston arrived in Lyon, a senior former colleague had seized and destroyed confidential company documents. Then, after the Briton’s death, his diary went missing.

However, Maryvonne’s most disturbing claim was that the wife of a senior British former Black&Decker executive had told her – in a phone call in 1988 – that she, too, knew ‘the names of the people responsible’.

She had declined to repeat them over the phone. At Mr Fenech’s request, Berkshire police interviewed the wife – who is named in the police dossier – but she denied making the remark.

All this prompted Mr Fenech to launch a second investigation into corruption at Black&Decker. It resulted in three senior staff being charged with ‘abuse of company assets.’ Frustratingly, however, he was never able to link them, or anyone else involved, with the murder.

Mr Marston’s daughters also believe the answers lie within Black&Decker. Their file contains an email from its former chief executive, declining their mother’s request for funding for a private detective, and after a few years, they say, the company wanted to draw a veil over the affair.

‘It was just, please go away and stop rocking the boat,’ says Andrea. ‘It could have been because they didn’t want the stock price to go down, but we feel something was being hidden relating to the murder.’

If a private eye had been enlisted, the sisters say, he could have probed many mysteries.

Why, for example, did their father – a punctual man – go missing for 85 minutes on the day before his death? He left the office at 1.30pm but arrived late for a French language lesson at 2.55pm, vaguely explaining that he’d been ‘unavoidably delayed’.

Then there was the mysterious ‘special meeting’ of senior executives that Mr Marston had called on the day he was shot. What was its purpose? Was it true, as I was told all those years ago, that he intended to out the thieves?

In 1993, with Mr Fenech about to close the investigation, Mary Marston made a last roll of the dice, persuading Black&Decker to put up a reward of one million francs (£115,000) for information leading to a conviction.

Mr Fenech agreed to publicise this with one of France’s first Crimewatch–style TV appeals. The two–hour show, which included a reconstruction of the murder, attracted 10 million viewers – 223 of whom phoned in with supposed new leads.

The callers provided no crucial evidence. Five years later, though, a former French Foreign Legionnaire convicted of a car–bomb murder, claimed he could identify Mr Marston’s killers.

Mary Marston’s lawyer visited him in prison, and his knowledge of unpublished details, such as the type of weapon used, the layout of the villa, and the make of the suspected getaway car, were highly convincing. But he would not go on the record until the reward was paid into his foreign bank. Black&Decker declined. And when the Mail tracked him down, he claimed to have been acting for another prisoner who was lying to get the reward money.

Today, Mr Fenech remains certain of this story’s genesis. An Englishman of the highest integrity stumbles into a cesspool of corporate corruption, determines to blow the whistle, and pays the ultimate price.

The truth behind this perplexing crime ‘lies within the company’, he says, adding: ‘This case was a huge failure. I still think about it and how much suffering it must have caused his family.’

It has, but it hasn’t ‘destroyed’ them – the fear Mary Marston harboured when I met her in 1993. Her resilient daughters are successful career women and mothers with no time for self–pity, and their brother has also fared well.

Understandably, though, the family still wants the truth.

‘Life goes on but it comes back in fits and starts,’ Jo says.

When she least expects it, a memory will suddenly surface, and she is back on the doorstep. The little girl in the crimson jumper, waiting by her daddy’s body so she can tell the police about the man in the balaclava.

Anyone with information about Mr Marston’s murder should email david.jones@dailymail.co.uk in confidence