Then came the blood, followed by the screams.Īfter shedding the gun, she was on the first flight back to New Zealand. The day of, she put on her assassin's garb and once again made her way to Hampstead. The day before the murder, she turned up at the hospital but got lost looking for Woodhatch, bottled it and walked right back out the door. Te Rangimaria didn’t think the hit would actually go ahead, right until it did. And it wasn’t just murder – they spoke of “eradicating” Woodhatch before he could touch them.Ī problem: neither man had any experience with organising a hit, but Bridges did manage to source a gun, which he handed to Te Rangimaria, wrapped in a towel, with strict instructions: twice in the head, twice in the chest. Their fear became hatred that hatred morphed into a plot to kill. It wasn’t clear what kind of weight Woodhatch’s threats carried, but neither Tubbs nor Bridges wanted to find out. When Tubbs reported his suspicions to the police, Woodhatch threatened to kill a female member of staff at their company. By May of 1992, £50,000 had gone missing from the company accounts. Woodhatch’s rising debts and explosive temper soon spooked his junior partner. By the time the two went into business, he was living far beyond his means, and – according to his brother-in-law – had made plenty of enemies through his business dealings. Woodhatch, as Tubbs quickly realised, wasn’t quite who he’d been presenting to the world. However, the good times barely lasted into 1990. Tubbs and Woodhatch had teamed up at the end of the 1980s, two self-made men on the apparently endless rise. The latter was a roofer of phenomenal success and rumoured riches – the perfect Thatcherite poster-boy, a captain of industry with a big country house and a gleaming Porsche in the driveway. Perhaps none of this would have mattered if Paul Tubbs hadn’t met Graeme Woodhatch. Tubbs was a successful tradesman who wasn’t shy about telling you his origin story – how he’d set out to work at the age of 15 and built a whole life from scratch. After working at the pub with Te Rangimaria, he’d grown close to Paul Tubbs, a north London roofer in his mid-thirties. Born in the UK, he’d also grown up in a middle class family in New Zealand, before moving back to his birth country. At this point, she knew him better than that.īut Bridges wasn’t joking. He and Te Rangimaria had become “like brother and sister”, she’d later say, while working behind the bar and living above The Caernarvon Castle over a two-year stint. The 20-year-old with a buzzcut and boyish face was a builder on the make, whose accomplishments didn’t always match up to his bravado – surely he was joking. When interviewed by police, those who knew her described Te as “bright, bubbly, very personable and good company”. None of her prior achievements had anything to do with crime: she’d represented New Zealand in international surfing competitions, spoke fluent Japanese and held degrees in Chemistry and Physics. Having grown up in a middle class Christian family in a small village on New Zealand’s South Island, Te Rangimaria had come to London in her twenties, after completing her studies. Te Rangimaria Ngarimu was one of the most popular, a ball of effervescent charm befitting the title “Sparky” – a nickname she’d acquired while working at the Castle. There was regular live music and a decent enough jukebox, and the place became known as something of a hub for Kiwi expats. The Caernarvon Castle began serving Camden’s drinkers sometime in the late 19th century, and by the 1990s was hosting everyone from local rabble and lager-hardened mods to baffled American tourists warily sipping their first pint of snakebite.
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