A witness for a British businessman seeking to overturn his conviction for a double murder in Miami nearly 30 years ago told a court on Wednesday that he encountered a different man near the crime scene with blood all over his clothes.
Prince Ellis identified that other man as Neville Butler, whom he said he saw among a group of men who went up to a 12th-floor room at the city’s Dupont Plaza hotel where Derrick Moo Young, a Jamaican-Asian money launderer, and his son Duane were found shot dead on 16 October 1986.
A jury found Kris Maharaj, 75, guilty in 1987 of killing the Moo Youngs after hearing of a business dispute, and the Briton spent 15 years on death row before his sentence was commuted to life in 2002.
But Maharaj was framed in a plot to mask the real killers, the infamous Medellín drug cartel on the orders of cocaine king Pablo Escobar, his lawyers are insisting at an evidentiary hearing in Miami this week.
Instead, they claim, it is Butler’s cartel links that make him the likely killer alongside another man named Eddie Dames allegedly seen with him at the hotel on the day.
“Eddie said to me that he was going to take these folks up to the room. I stayed in the lobby until he came down,” Ellis told the court on Wednesday, recalling a meeting he said he had in the lobby of the Dupont Plaza with Dames, who was his friend and business associate.
He said he and Dames were subsequently questioned by police and released, and that Butler was present in the car on their drive back to the hotel.
“When I got in the car I noticed that Neville was kind of slumped back in the car seat and his shirt was all torn. It had blood on it and his watch was broken,” Ellis said.
“I became a little frightened when I got into the car. I wanted to know what was going on. Neville said Eddie just went crazy [in the hotel room] and they started shooting and there was bullets all over the place.”
Earlier in the hearing, a former pilot who smuggled tons of cocaine into the US for the Medellín cartel, testified that he had directly heard Escobar confess to having ordered the execution of Moo Young, whom he believed had double-crossed him by siphoning money from billions of dollars of drug proceeds he was entrusted to launder.
“They had stolen from him and he had them killed. He didn’t do it personally,” the pilot, identified only by the pseudonym “John Brown”, told the court.
“[Escobar] was discussing people that had stolen from him that he had whacked. He said something about los chinos [the Chinese]. He said one Chino had stolen from him. He said he had killed him across from the hotel I was in. There were several hotels there but the major hotel was the Dupont Plaza.”
Another witness called on Wednesday by Maharaj’s lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, of the human rights group Reprieve, was Michael Flynn, a Miami police officer at the time of the murders, now serving a 25-year sentence for possession of cocaine and domestic violence.
Flynn testified that corrupt former colleagues knew the cartel was behind the crime but that he was told Maharaj – at the time a self-made millionaire businessman with a fondness for Rolls-Royce cars and racehorses – “was going to get hooked up for this”.
He said: “There were certain elements of the officers that were involved with the cartel and with drugs dealers. A lot of the dealers had a bit of an influence with others in the Miami police department.”
The hearing is expected to conclude on Thursday with state attorneys maintaining that Maharaj, whose fingerprints were found in the hotel room, is guilty and killed the Moo Youngs because they owed him $400,000 from a failed real estate deal.
Circuit court judge William Thomas has indicated he will issue his written ruling before Christmas. He has the power to throw out the conviction and release Maharaj, order a new trial or send him back to jail.
Stafford Smith, who was successful in having his client’s death sentence overturned when it emerged that it was predetermined by the trial judge and state prosecutors, said the conviction was an “epic” miscarriage of justice.
The hearing, he said, represented the last chance of freedom for Maharaj, who is in poor health and appeared frail walking into court this week with the aid of a frame.
