The brother and business partner of a fashion tycoon gunned down on New Year’s Day has a tough decision to make on this the thirty-ninth anniversary of the still unsolved murder.
Does he continue the fight for justice he has led since January 1985. Or should he accept that the prime suspect will never stand trial and use the time he has left aged seventy-five to heal a family torn apart by suspicion?
The suspicion being that his brother’s wife is the murderer.
Greek Cypriot brothers Aristos and Achilleas Constantinou began their riches-from-rags rise in Carnaby Street during the Swinging Sixties.
By 1977 they were buying houses next to each other on The Bishop’s Avenue in Hampstead, also known as Millionaire’s Row.
There, in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 40-year-old Aristos was killed after returning from a party with his 27-year-old wife, Elena, a raven-haired beauty.
At the funeral two weeks later, she presented as every bit the grieving widow in black with three young sons, the eldest seven, the youngest three, by her side.
But if looks could kill, the ones coming from Aristos's mother and younger brother, Achilleas, soon thereafter told a different story.
“Elena knows much more than she’s letting on,” they whispered to each other.
Elena told the police that she and Aristos had interrupted a robbery at their home. Masked intruders had locked her in the upstairs bathroom, she said, when Aristos was shot dead.
Elena further explained that she had escaped through the small bathroom window, shimmied down the drainpipe and raised the alarm.
However, nine months later, by now remarried and living in the US, she dramatically changed her story.
Elena claimed that she knew one of the intruders, but had said nothing at the time because her children’s lives had been threatened.
There have been three investigations by the Metropolitan police. The first, even by the standards of the day, was woeful and has a whiff about it. The others were thorough.
But with no murder weapon, no great forensics, no witnesses and no confession this was always going to be a difficult case to solve.
However, in 2021, detectives building on a previous investigation concluded that Elena should be charged with murdering her husband. What was more, a senior homicide prosecutor agreed.
Then something odd occurred. Higher ups in the Crown Prosecution Service over-ruled the decision to charge Elena, arguing that in their opinion the evidence was not just circumstantial but insufficient.
The murder detectives and the prosecutor who backed them took the unusual step of appealing, but after an internal review the CPS’s decision not to prosecute Elena remains.
Achilleas thinks the CPS is “usurping” the role of the jury and may also be acting out of some institutional protectionism.
Though minted, he also feels he should not have to spend more money asking the High Court to intervene by way of judicial review of the CPS decision or bring his own private prosecution of Elena.
The burden to solve the case is rightly on the state. And there is a chance the CPS might reconsider its decision in the face of fresh evidence.
A confession by Elena, now 66 and living back in Cyprus, is unlikely. She very much continues to deny murdering Aristos, either alone or with help.
What might tip the balance is if her alibi is shown to be highly implausible or better still impossible.
This, plus all the circumstantial evidence from witnesses who worked for or were friendly with the couple, just might persuade the CPS to authorise an international arrest warrant to put Elena before an Old Bailey jury.
That at least is Achilleas’s hope. His last one. The alternative is walking away and trying to heal the rift with his dead brother’s three sons, who have sided with their mother.
Another option is to feed the pain parasites behind ‘true crime’ TV and sanction a ‘trial by Netflix’.
Production companies have been circling for a while and recently landed on Achilleas’s lawn to claim his brother’s corpse, its mourners and their memories.
For now, he is holding the TV vultures at bay, while he lobbies Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley about the legacy case.
Achilleas wants him to authorise an expert reconstruction of the widow’s escape through the window.
“All we are seeking after 39 years is closure. We thought we had closure last year when the police and the senior CPS homicide counsel recommended a prosecution. We just need the truth exposed, so we can move on. This window test will expose the truth one way or the other.”