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Aug 25, 2013 Features / Columnists, Murder and Mystery
By Michael Jordan
My colleagues sometimes tease me about my underworld connections. Let’s say upfront that those ‘connections’ don’t exist. But I do have a knack for contacting murder suspects and other desperate fugitives. And they talk. You can’t survive in this profession if you can’t get people to talk to you.
‘Frenchie’, the obsessive seaman who murdered his girl in Herstelling, confessed his crime to me. I can still hear the rage in his voice as he spoke about repeatedly stabbing the woman he felt had jilted him.
I spoke to the chap that some still believe killed his rival in a shack at Land-of-Canaan a few months ago, and with a former friend who may have murdered a schoolgirl when we were all young men.
I’ve spoken by telephone with the Cummings Lodge husband who almost killed his reputed wife last Tuesday (August 20).
And tomorrow (August 26) it will be exactly two years since I spoke to the man that police think strangled old Mr. Rachpaul. He cried. He told me he was framed. Then he disappeared.
Rachpaul’s Drug Store is located in a three-storey building at Lot 75 Robb Street, Lacytown. There’s an old restaurant at the middle flat. The restaurant proprietors live in the top flat. Rachpaul’s Drug Store is in the bottom flat, and it is there that harmless, 84-year-old Harold Rachpaul had been tending to his customers since the sixties, when you could buy chicken fried rice for a dollar. Mr. Rachpaul lived alone in an apartment behind the drug store.
At around nine o’clock on the evening of Thursday, August 18, 2011, Mr. Rachpaul’s eldest son, Leonard, paid his dad a visit. But according to the son, just as he was about to enter the compound, he observed a man hurrying towards a yard next door to his father’s property. That yard, he says, is a haven for drug-smoking vagrants.
The man Leonard Rachpaul saw was Ryan Kissoon, called ‘Dahl Belly’ a security guard who worked at a popular business place on the opposite side of Robb Street. Kissoon would sometimes buy cigarettes and other small items at the drug store. According to Mr. Rachpaul’s son, on seeing him, Kissoon stopped briefly as if in surprise, then proceeded to enter the yard where the vagrants loitered.
Leonard Rachpaul told me that he put his father’s dinner on the stove. Afterwards, he placed the hot meal by his father’s television set. At the time, the Rachpauls had one large dog and two pups. According to the son, he put the largest animal in a pen. However, before leaving, his father asked him to release the dog.
At around eight o’clock the following day, Leonard Rachpaul, accompanied by his son, returned to open the premises. According to Leonard Rachpaul, he stopped to speak to someone, while his son went to Mr. Rachpaul’s apartment. Shortly after, his son ran out of the yard and began to scream.
Leonard Rachpaul followed his son into his elderly father’s apartment. On entering, they saw that a vault was open and the contents, including close to $1M in cash and phone cards, were missing. But the most disturbing thing was the body in the bedroom.
Old Harold Rachpaul lay on the floor near bed. He was wrapped in a bed-sheet. His hands and feet were bound with the electrical cord from his iron. He had been gagged and strangled.
Leonard Rachpaul said that the dog that he had released before leaving the previous day was now penned. The son tried to revive his motionless father, then ran over to the Police Consumers building for help.
According to the son, he suspected that the killers attacked his elderly father shortly after the drug store owner had placed his dog back in the pen. He surmised that the intruders then took his father back to the apartment, and to pacify them, Mr. Rachpaul opened his safe and handed over his money and other valuables. He was then slain.
Detectives began to question employees and residents in the immediate area. Asked if he had any suspects in mind, Leonard Rachpaul immediately told police about security guard Ryan Kissoon’s strange behavior. His suspicion was that Kissoon, possibly with the help of addicts from the nearby premises, had scaled the fence and attacked his father as soon as the elderly man had penned his dog.
They decided to question Kissoon. But the security guard could not be found. Detectives obtained Kissoon’s cell phone number and asked him to come in for questioning. The guard refused. Detectives later learn that the guard had left his job.
As luck would have it, I got a cell phone number a few days after Kissoon disappeared. I dialed it. Ryan Kissoon answered. I asked him about Mr. Rachpaul’s murder. He cried and told me that he was innocent. He told me that he had four small children, and yes, there was a time when he had been on the wrong side of the law. He’d been remanded twice for armed robbery but was never convicted.
But he’d changed his lifestyle. He’d worked as a guard for over a year at the Robb Street establishment near to Rachpaul’s Drug Store.
“I got to be a madman to be working right there and do something like that. I change. I working. I does draw my box hand, I does work for fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000) a week, I does draw my leave money…thirty thousand dollars ($30,000); I content with that,” he told me.
So where was he on the night that Mr. Rachpaul is believed to have been killed?
According to Kissoon, he was on duty outside his employer’s premises on Thursday, August 18, 2011, up to midnight (Friday, August 19, 2011). He said that footage recorded on the security cameras on his former employer’s premises would verify his story. He claimed that shortly after midnight, he went to “take a five” in the yard near Rachpaul’s Drug Store. After resting, Kissoon said he returned to his worksite, and his employer’s cook arrived at around five o’clock that morning. He said he later opened the premises and assisted the cook in cutting up some vegetables.
The former guard stated that at around one o’clock that afternoon, he received a call from someone who identified himself as a policeman. The caller requested that ‘Dhal Belly’ submit himself for questioning in connection with a murder.
According to Kissoon, he told his employer about the development, and asked the businessman to accompany him to the station.
“I tell he to come in with me, that the (security) cameras will pick up everything, and he refuse.”
The suspect said that he then told the police that he would only submit himself for questioning if he could hire an attorney.
Police subsequently searched his home and briefly detained his sister. Police ranks began to call his mobile phone and request that he submit himself for questioning.
According to Kissoon, he refused to be questioned “because I afraid they would knock (charge) me for something I didn’t do.” The suspect claimed that during one of his previous arrests, police ranks “beat me so bad that I admit to things that I never do.”
Asked about possible suspects, he suggested that police look at three other people who might have information about the murder. He said that two of the individuals were ‘junkies’ who slept at night in a yard near Mr. Rachpaul’s home.
A few days later, I dialed Kissoon’s phone number. The calls went to voicemail, and that’s the way it’s been since then.
In October 2011, Police issued a wanted bulletin for Ryan Kissoon, called ‘Dhal Belly’, in connection with Harold Rachpaul’s murder. He’s still to be located.
According to the bulletin, Kissoon is of East Indian ancestry, is 171 cm in height and his last known address is Tucville Squatting Area, Georgetown.
The police have asked persons with information that may lead to Kissoon’s arrest to contact them on telephone numbers: 225-2227, 225-8196, 226-7065, 227-1149, 225-6411, 911 or the nearest police station.
But is Ryan Kissoon really the Robb Street strangler? Some apparently have other theories. Leonard Kissoon himself told me that there are some who have suggested that the killer is in fact
someone who was close to his father. He refutes this suggestion.
“You hear (people say) that is an ‘inside job’. But I tell you from the bottom of my heart that these things (his father’s assets) are not left for me.” The slain man’s wife and other children are overseas.
Meanwhile, Leonard Kissoon runs his father’s drug store. He’s purchased more dogs and raised the concrete fence that he believes that the intruders scaled before attacking his father.
Yet, he says that he still lives in dread that the men who snuffed out his father’s life may return.
If you have any information about this or any other unusual case, please contact Kaieteur News by letter or telephone at our Lot 24 Saffon Street, Charlestown offices. Our numbers are 22-58465, 22-58473 and 22-58458. You need not disclose your identity.
You can also contact Michael Jordan at his email address [email protected]
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