The man who walked into Bournemouth police station that May morning gave every wrong answer before he even sat down. He told the desk officer he’d been away for three days, driving up and down the country. He’d come home and his wife wasn’t there. He said she was supposed to be on duty at Poole Hospital at 7:30 that morning.
“Have you phoned the hospital? ” the officer asked. “What for? ” he replied.
The officer phoned himself, got the answer machine, hung up. He did this three or four times before handing the phone to the man. “Tell them who you are. Tell them you’re concerned.
Ask if she’s there. ”
The man talked into the machine, then made an excuse to step outside for a call. When he came back, he claimed he’d received a message from the hospital saying she wasn’t there. “Are you going to the hospital now?
” the officer asked. “No. I’ve got to go to work. ”
“A police officer is going to have to speak to you about this.
”
“It’s very noisy at my work. I might not hear the phone. ”
The officer let him go, but his mind was already turning over. If this man really cared about his wife, he’d have been at that hospital half an hour before her shift, waiting for her car.
Instead, he went back to the family car lot as if nothing had happened. His name was Pierre Legree. He called himself Alain Baron in certain circles. He was a 61-year-old Frenchman who had come to England to make his fortune, and by most appearances, he had succeeded.
He ran a second-hand car business with his first wife, Irene Smith, and their son Jonathan. He owned properties. He was a man who controlled everything around him through pure force of will. He was also married to another woman.
Her name was Rui Li. She was a conscientious, well-liked nurse at Poole Hospital, 17 years younger than him. She came from a wealthy Chinese family who supported her financially, money that Legree also benefited from. She drove a Porsche Boxster with a personalized number plate.
Her daughter from her first marriage described her as a fantastic mother. In 2007, Legree married her. Legree was already married to Irene. He never divorced her.
He was a bigamist with two wives, two households, and two names. Rui and Legree began living together and entered the “lifestyle” — swinging groups, wife-swapping parties, sex with other couples and other individuals. That underworld formed the backdrop to their life. They also ran a sexual massage service from a second property they owned.
Legree organized everything. He placed the adverts on Gumtree for massages, some of which were sexual. Customers paid to have sex with Rui, and sometimes with Pierre as well. It was difficult to know whether she had entered that life willingly or whether he had coerced her into it.
What was clear was that Legree made money out of Rui. In his mind, that was her purpose. Irene, the first wife, seemed to suspect nothing, or chose to accept that her husband was a man who travelled a lot on business. It was hard to understand how she could not have known that he was living with another woman.
But she remained in contact with him on apparently friendly terms. The truth was that Legree was in desperate financial circumstances. He needed more money. Rui had a life insurance policy worth £300,000.
She owned the second property, free and clear, worth £100,000. That was £400,000 worth of reasons for murder. Rui had also told him she wanted to adopt a child from China. He would not agree to that.
She was tired of the swinging scene. He wanted her to keep doing what she had been doing so successfully for him. At some point, he made a decision in his head. She had to go.
On the evening of May 23rd, 2014, Legree put his plan into action. Rui left work at Poole Hospital at 6:13 p. m. , captured on CCTV in her distinctive sports car.
When she got through the front door, her killer was waiting for her. He hit her over the head with a blunt instrument. Then he hit her again, and again. The blows caved in her skull.
He believed he had killed her outright. He wrapped her in a plastic builder’s sheet. She was still alive when he wrapped her in that sheet. She died eventually from the injuries and suffocation.
Legree cleaned up thoroughly. Then he wrapped his wife’s body in tarpaulin, threw her in the back of his transit van, and spent the rest of the bank holiday weekend with his first family. He and Irene went to a dance competition in Watford together. He had Sunday lunch with her and their son.
All the while, Rui’s body lay in the back of his van. He showed no distress. No panic. He went home and carried on as a carefree person.
Later, Legree moved Rui’s body from the transit van and transferred it to a Fiat Punto that was for sale at the family car dealership. He asked his son Jonathan to move the vehicle for him. Jonathan was 27, a successful young racing driver, a contemporary of Lewis Hamilton, with a promising career ahead of him. He agreed to move the car.
He and his father had always had what people described as a dark, complicated bond. Pierre Legree was an extraordinarily manipulative and persuasive man. He involved his son in the disposal of his second wife’s body, and he dragged his first wife into it as well. Irene gave him a false alibi.
She said he had spent the evening with her watching EastEnders. She also disposed of his clothing and his French passport, hiding them in a storage facility. That spoke to a level of knowledge beyond something you would find out much later. Legree did not mind using his wife and his son as part of the cover-up.
It meant they had invested in the crime, and they were less likely to turn him in. Jonathan dumped the Fiat Punto, with Rui’s body in it, on a respectable suburban crescent in a retirement area of Bournemouth. Ironically, he parked it directly outside the one property on that long street that had CCTV coverage pointing out onto the road. The plan was already falling apart.
Legree had bought bags of cement, leading to suspicions that he had intended to bury Rui under the concrete during building work at the house he shared with her. But he never went through with it. Instead, on May 27th, he walked into Bournemouth police station and reported Rui missing. The desk officer noted something else.
When Legree first spoke, he described Rui as his wife. Later, he referred to her as his girlfriend. The officer challenged him. “Is she your wife or is she your girlfriend?
”
Legree became vague and obstructive and refused to answer. He left, went back to work, and did not seem concerned at all. The officer thought to himself that Legree was just coming in to “tick the box” so he could say he had reported someone missing. He sent a message to the sergeant.
“We just had a guy come in reporting his wife missing. He’s given all the wrong answers. ”
Soon, detectives were making house-to-house inquiries in the street where the couple lived. No one had seen Rui for days.
Then the police learned something important. Rui’s daughter from her first marriage had real fears about Pierre Legree. The daughter described Legree as a controlling man who tried to divide mother and daughter, to prize them apart. She said Rui had been worried for her own safety.
When she and Legree went on walks, Rui feared she might be murdered. Rui had even asked her daughter to hold a copy of her will, telling her she felt in danger from him. She knew he was capable of killing her. The police became convinced Legree had murdered Rui.
But where was her body? They searched the couple’s home. The injuries to Rui would have produced a great deal of blood. But the crime scene was very clean.
Someone had taken great care to scrub away all evidence of the killing. Jonathan Legree was brought in for questioning. He gave the police crucial information. He said he had moved cars around for his father, dropping them off in several locations.
It was a garage business, after all. The police went to check the cars. The first had an empty boot. Then they were redirected to look at a Fiat Punto in another area of Bournemouth.
They found it parked in a residential street. They opened the boot of the car. Rui’s body was wrapped in plastic. There was an odor, the unmistakable odor of death.
The forensic officer arrived five minutes later. They did not unwrap the plastic there and then. They did not need to. They knew.
After the body was found and the postmortem was done, it revealed Rui had been hit with a blunt instrument very hard, two or three blows that caved in her head. But there was evidence that the blows had not been sufficient to kill her outright. She had been alive when he wrapped her in that sheet. Once her body was found, Legree changed his story.
He told police, “I came home from work that Friday and found her dead on the floor. I panicked. I wrapped her up and put her in the back of my van. ”
The change of story was revealing.
If he had panicked on Friday, why had he spent a pleasant family weekend and then, three days later on Tuesday morning, deliberately come to the police to report her missing when he knew she was already dead? He also had the audacity to claim that Rui could have been killed by one of her partners from the massage service or the swinging clubs. It was a pathetic diversion. The massage business was not even conducted from the house where Rui was killed.
It had been operated from the second home. The claim was unlikely in the extreme. In the search for Rui’s body, the CCTV footage confirmed that Jonathan had been the driver when the Fiat Punto was abandoned. The father had enlisted his son, and his son had complied.
At the beginning of 2015, Pierre Legree, Irene Smith, and Jonathan Legree all stood trial. Legree admitted bigamy. He absolutely refused to admit that he had taken Rui’s life. Irene, the first and only legal wife, had unquestionably assisted him.
She always said she did not know about the killing before it happened, but she had helped him afterwards. She gave him a bogus alibi. She disposed of his clothing and his passport. The only explanation was that Legree, a controlling, dominant man, had persuaded her somehow.
He had forced his will on her, portrayed her involvement as minor, told her she did not want to be dragged into the papers. At the end of February 2015, Pierre Legree was found guilty of the murder of Rui Li. Irene and Jonathan were not convicted as accessories to murder, but they were convicted of assisting an offender. Irene was also convicted of perverting the course of justice by offering him an alibi.
Jonathan was sentenced to two years in jail. Irene received three years. Pierre Legree received a life sentence with a minimum term of 25 years. After the trial, Rui’s 18-year-old daughter remembered her mother as a wonderful person, a great teacher.
She said her mother would always be in her heart and always be missed. Pierre Legree was a clumsy, arrogant, foolish, evil man who, without a moment’s compunction, took the life of an entirely innocent woman. She had done nothing more than help people as a nurse. He had ruined not only her life and her family’s life, but also the lives of his first wife and his son.
There is so much about Pierre Legree that remains hidden. He had another name, an alias. We still do not know how he came to be in Bournemouth, this sleepy middle-class seaside town.
So much about him and his family remains hidden despite the peek we have had behind the curtains.
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