One Divan From Murder

One Divan (duh-van) A divan is a term used for a style of bed, overseas, which typically we would describe as a bed frame like my son’s who has under bed storage drawers instead of a box spring. Since the word comes up some and I figured it wouldn’t be a hot word that we’d be aching to use on more episodes, I found it very fitting for this one and you’ll see why. Since we traveled to Holland in the last episode I wrote, I decided why not stay in Europe and head to London, England. Specifically, London on August 10 of 2011. It’s late afternoon and staff at the Radisson Edwardian Hotel are concerned when three of their fellow staffers are over an hour late for their shift. They had been trying all of their cell phones, but not one of the trio is picking up. It’s out of character for any one of these employees and certainly for all three at once to not show for a shift. Police are notified and they soon arrive to look into this odd missing persons case. Two of the missing employees live in staff housing behind the Radisson hotel. These apartments are pretty exclusive and are only offered to the cream of the crop of employees. Police make their way to the apartment unit enter into a horrific, bloody scene. As in, IMMEDIATELY, as soon as they swing the door into the apartment, blood is visible all over. Directly in the living room, they see the body of a woman, fully clothed, laying on the floor on her side and stabbed 22 times. Her face was covered by a pillow. Past the woman’s body, a trail of blood led into a back bedroom. Following the blood trail into the back bedroom, they discover the body of a man. He’s nude and lying on his back on a bed with his knees bent. He had also been stabbed, only twice, but both stab wounds were directly into his heart. The two bodies were identified as 20 year old Alice Adams and 20 year old Tibor Vass. These were two of the missing employees. The scene was brutal and the deaths were very violent, so police felt the killings were very personal. There was no sign of forced entry and it didn’t look like the place was ransacked like would happen in a burglary. It was also apparent there had been a party the night before at the apartment. Alcohol and drugs were found around the place along with empty bottles and glasses around, so they knew there was some sort of celebration going on. Because of the pillow covering Alice’s face and the frenzy of stab wounds covering her body, police felt she was the focus of the attack. Someone was very angry with her and possibly covered her face after killing her because of guilt or not wanting to see the victim staring back at them. As for Tibor, his killing isn’t any less disturbing. Because of the lack of blood pooling around the divan bed, it was apparent he hadn’t been killed there. There was significant blood on the couch out in the living room, so police determine that to be where he had been attacked. Marks along the lower part of his back showed that he had been dragged across an abrasive surface like carpeting. They also noticed the blood that was on Tibor was actually diluted a bit, indicating his body had actually been cleaned off, maybe even bathed. Then, he was placed on the bed and posed. Weirder still was that though the victims had been viciously attacked, there weren’t defensive marks on them. Police wonder, were they too intoxicated or were the attacks to sudden to react? Several bloody knives were found in the apartment so they had the weapons and kept those to test for DNA. When police are studying the scene, they’re taken with a kind of revelation. With so much blood all over the apartment, as in pools of it you couldn’t help but walk through; how did the killer exit the apartment without so much as a speck of blood tracking outside of the apartment door? Stumped by the scene, police look into who would want to kill these two and why. Tibor, the male that was found dead on the bed, had been raised in Hungary with rather humble beginnings, but with big dreams for a successful future where he could help his family. He was an accomplished musician who was especially great at piano. When he was just 15, his life was drastically altered when his father died unexpectedly. Suddenly, Tibor was thrown into the position of being the man of the house and his mother struggled to make ends meet. He was willing to do whatever it took to improve life for his struggling family. In 2008, when he was 17 or 18, he applied to attend the university of Budapest but was turned down. Not one to give up, Tibor made plans to reapply the next year and in the meantime, he went to London to find more lucrative work than was available in Hungary. That’s when he got a job at the Radisson Edwardian Hotel which is really close to Heathrow airport, so it’s a bustling environment. Tibor was a natural for his position as a receptionist and host at the hotel and he really loved the job. He was friendly and outgoing so he made friends there quickly and everyone who met him liked him. One of those friends was the other victim, Alice Adams. Alice was a local who had grown up in a nearby town. Alice was also a receptionist/host at the Radisson and had only been working there a few weeks. As soon as she started working there, she hit it off with Tibor. She was also a musician and because of this, she and Tibor had bonded over their love for music. Alice was known for her great sense of humor. She was friendly and guests as well as staff adored her. She was working at the hotel to save up money for an upcoming family trip to Hawaii. The pair had something to celebrate. Alice’s upcoming trip AND, Tibor had reapplied to the University in Hungary and had been accepted. He was due to leave for school on August 30, of 2011. Instead, just 3 weeks before his planned departure and just before Alice was also scheduled to go on her Hawaii trip, the friends were killed. Police talk to their co-workers and find out that there was indeed a party at the apartment that they had been killed at and that many of the other staff had been there as well. The party was to celebrate Tibor’s accomplishment of getting into college. Everyone had been drinking, Alice played the guitar and there was some singing involved. They claimed everyone was having a great evening and nothing was amiss when they left. The only ones left at the apartment were Tibor, Alice and Tibor’s 31-year old roommate, Atilla Ban. Atilla is the manager at the hotel they all work at and he’s also the other missing employee. The search is on for the missing man, but there has been no sign of him. No one had seen him and calls to his cell phone went unanswered. Police were able to get pings off of his phone, seeing that it was still on. It was near the hotel, but they couldn’t locate it or Atilla. Co-workers described Atilla as a friendly, likeable guy that they all got along with. He was from Hungary, like Tibor, but his home life hadn’t provided much love. He had been terribly abused and was raised by his grandparents. His decision to leave Hungary was due mainly to him being gay and that was not as accepted there. Atilla traveled initially to the states and he did fairly well here, gaining invaluable experience in the hospitality line of work. He was accepted and not treated poorly for being gay, so that was a relief and his life was going well. He decided to move to London after a visit there and he loved it. He got a job at the Radisson and he was so good at it, that he climbed the work ladder quickly. Since he was such a model employee, the hotel gave him one of the coveted and exclusive staff apartments to live in. These were rarely offered up, so being given these accommodations was a huge win. When Tibor came on staff and began working for Atilla, the two quickly became friends due in part to their Hungarian roots. Atilla took Tibor under his wing and taught him all the in-and-outs of the hotel industry. Tibor had been living in kind of bleak pad, and Atilla liked Tibor a lot, so he offered him a room in his apartment. Atilla had shown Alice the ropes when she started working at the Radisson as well and the trio became great friends, always hanging around with one another. Since co-workers had placed Atilla at the crime scene, and because he wasn’t around now, police wonder if he could have anything to do with the deaths of the other two, but they needed to dig for any clue of what his motive would have been. BREAK With Atilla still missing, and police unsure of where to find him, they decided to focus on other information they could dig up. They pull Alice’s cell phone records as they think she may have been the original target with how brutally she was killed. There, they discover a series of texts that had taken place in the wee hours on the morning after the party. The texts were between her and her former boyfriend. Alice and Tad (this ex-boyfriend) had been together for a good amount of time but had only recently broken up. He had moved away to go to college and even though they had broken up, they were still in the early stages of the break up and seemed to still be considering getting back together. Alice had texted that she was in bed with her manager and that Tibor was in the bathroom throwing up. They think that, well, this ex-boyfriend probably isn’t going to be so thrilled to hear about Alice sleeping with another man, albeit, a gay one. They wonder if Alice is trying to make him jealous and it resulted in Tad driving down there to confront them. In fact, when they do labs from samples taken off of Alice’s body, it did show DNA from both men all over her. Police are convinced the 3 of them had gotten randy and were having a threesome. They track down Tad to see if he has an alibi and he is able to provide one. Still not convinced, they get a search warrant and search his home, his clothes and his shoes for any blood evidence since the killer could not have escaped the apartment without having gotten bloody. However, they didn’t find even a hint of blood on any of Tad’s belongings. Then they catch up to another co-worker who gives them something to look into. They show police a facebook post from Atilla Ban that had been posted at about 7:30 the morning after the murders. The post said, “I’d like to wake up from this nightmare.” Staff who knew him well said this was totally out of his usual upbeat character. He wasn’t the type to post that personal or negative sort of posts. They’re also told about a rumor circulating at the hotel that Atilla had a crush on Tibor. Tibor wasn’t gay and Atilla was very aware of this, but that didn’t seem to dash his hopes of striking up some romance with him. Co-workers go on to say that actually, Atilla seemed to be pretty obsessed with Tibor. They say that in fact, in the time leading up to the attack, the men’s friendship had become strained. Atilla felt like Tibor and Alice were getting so close that they were starting to leave him out of their activities. There was one day that Tibor had planned a staff photo and didn’t tell Atilla, so when Atilla saw it later, he was really hurt. As Alice and Tibor grew closer and started leaving him out, Atilla became more and more jealous and co-workers knew he was worried that the pair were striking up a romance. But, there’s still no trace of Atilla. On hotel and apartment surveillance video, there’s no sightings of him leaving after the party. Police theorized that he’d jumped out the window to a fire escape or that maybe he’d stashed a clean pair of shoes outside of the apartment so that he wouldn’t track blood outside the door, but that wouldn’t explain how he avoided cameras or being sighted. They looked for a crawl space in the ceiling of the apartment or floorboards but didn’t find anything. It had been 2 days and there was still no sign of him. Forensics teams are called to return to the apartment to have another look around for more evidence that may have been overlooked. When they return, they immediately know something is different. A bottle of alcohol had been moved and some medications were also in a different spot than when they had left. They’re worried that some asshat had broken in and messed with the crime scene after hearing about the incident. Then they see that the door to the back bedroom was closed. They knew they had left it open, following their usual procedure. They attempt to open the door, but something heavy is blocking it from opening. They eventually force it open and find a bed had been pushed up against the door. They get in and find a nude man lying face down on the bed Tibor had died on. It’s Atilla. They check him, assuming that somehow he is another victim, but he’s alive. He’s either drunk or drugged and unconscious. He’s caked in blood with cuts to his wrists and neck. He also has an exacto knife stuck in his arm and another stuck in a butt cheek. He’s taken to the hospital and treated and the police are baffled as to how he could have made his way back into the apartment with the swarms of cops, detectives and looky-loos around since the killings. At the apartment, police go through it with a fine-toothed comb and this time find an important but tiny detail they had missed before. Underneath the bloody sheets on the divan bed, they notice a thin cut along the side of the divan bed base. They pull it open to find a space big enough for a person to fit and they realize Atilla had been there all along. This is the same bed Tibor’s body had been discovered on. Atilla had cut tiny peepholes out to watch the investigation. He’d collected a little survival kit of sorts to keep himself comfortable in his hiding place. He had water bottles, a knife and his phone with him in the divan. After he’s treated, he’s arrested and questioned. He refuses to utter a word and police are unsure if he’s being a dick or if his mental state is causing his muteness. Did he have a complete mental break and kill his friends and now his mind is in some far away, locked down region of his brain? He keeps his silence for several weeks but then he opens the floodgates and tells police everything. He says the celebration party for Tibor was his chance to try to convince Tibor to be with him. He said that he had brought the poppers out for the party in hopes of loosening up their inhibitions. Poppers I read, are commonly used in sexual trysts as it helps to create euphoria and enhance sexuality. He said they did engage in a threesome, but that he remembered nothing else. He claimed he had woken up the next morning to the bloody scene and realized what he must have done but he swears to have no memory of it. He told how he had run a bath, planning to kill himself by slitting his wrists. He had brought Tibor’s body into the bath with him because he didn’t want to die alone. When his attempts to cut his wrists failed, he tried plugging in a hairdryer, turning it on and dropping it into the bath with him, but the hairdryer just continued to work underwater. He then cleaned up Tibor’s body, placed him on the bed and got into the bottom of the divan bed. After the police and forensics units left the apartment, he crawled out and tried to slit his throat and stabbing himself with xacto knives. Atilla was charged with murder, but he wanted only to plead guilty to manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility saying that he had accepted that he killed them but that he had no memory of it, so he wanted to claim some break in his sanity that caused him to actually kill them. On July 9 of 2012, Atilla stand trial for muder. Prosecutors say that he was obsessed with Tibor and when the drinking and drug-fueled party didn’t lead to Tibor having a life-changing sexual encounter with him, Atilla snapped. Jealousy and anger at the potential of a blossoming romance between Tibor and Alice threw Atilla into a frenzied rage killing. His defense argued that he had suffered a mental breakdown and they even had Atilla take the stand in his own defense. He wound up bursting into tears, telling the jury that there was no way he would do something like this to his best friends had he been in his right mind. However, his testimony came off more like an over-the-top theatrical performance and just wasn’t believable. The prosecution argued that since he had the presence of mind to create a bunker in divan, it showed he had the awareness to make a plan to hide until he could figure out how to get away. On July 18th of 2012, after 5 hours of deliberation, Atilla was found guilty of the murders of Alice and Tibor and was sentenced to a minimum of 26 years in jail. He’ll be considered for release when he’s 57 years old. SOURCES: BBC.COM, independent.co.uk, crimeandinvestigation.co.uk, the guardian.com, dailymail (uk), TV show: Vengeance, killer co-workers: monster under the bed