Man killed partner then himself

A man killed his partner in a planned attack then spent a week on board a river cruiser on the Norfolk Broads with her daughter before drowning himself, an inquest has heard.

The body of Annette Creegan, 49, who worked as a community nurse at the Trinity Hospice charity in Clapham Common, south-west London, was found naked, strangled and weighted down in the River Bure last September following a major police search.

The body of her partner, John Didier, 41, was found nearby and evidence suggests he drowned himself by tying dumbbells to his limbs and jumping overboard, the inquest at Norwich Coroner's Court heard.

A search was launched after a river worker alerted police on September 1 to the discovery of Ms Creegan's 13-year-old daughter alone on a boat moored near isolated Salhouse Broad. When she was interviewed, the girl said they had arrived for a holiday on the Broads on August 25 and the following day she woke to find her mother was not there.

Detective Constable Christina Stone told the inquest: "They had moored the boat at about 5.30pm on the Friday. The following day she woke up and Mr Didier told her that Annette had left.

"She had no access to a mobile telephone and no means of getting off the boat so stayed there over the following days. Six days later she woke up and there was no sign of Mr Didier and she was rescued by a passing Broads ranger."

The inquest heard Mr Didier's body was found later on September 1. He had drowned and was found immersed in water, weighted down with two 17.5kg dumbbells tied to his feet and two 15kg weights tied to his wrists, pathologist Ben Swift said.

Ms Creegan's body was found in the water nearby the following afternoon. Mr Swift said she was naked and her hands had been tied behind her knees with cable ties. She was weighted down with a 30kg dumbbell and had been strangled. The decomposed state of the body suggested she had been in the water for about a week. Bruises to her fists suggested she had tried to fight off Mr Didier but there was no evidence of sexual abuse.

Detective Inspector Gary Bloomfield said a thorough investigation was carried out. Outside the inquest, he added that officers had found no evidence of any tension in the relationship and Mr Didier's motive remained unclear.

Never mind that there isn’t a road. His father, the previous khan, spent his life lobbying for a road. The new khan does the same. A road, he argues, would permit doctors, and their medicines, to easily reach them. Then maybe all the dying would stop. Teachers too could get to them. Also traders. There could be vegetables. And then his people—the Kyrgyz nomads of remote Afghanistan—might have a legitimate chance to thrive. A road is the khan’s work. A car is his dream.

But for now, with no car and no road, the reality is a yak. The khan is holding one by a rope strung through its nose. Other yaks are standing by. It’s moving day; everything the khan owns needs to be tied to the back of a yak. This includes a dozen teapots, a cast-iron stove, a car battery, two solar panels, a yurt, and 43 blankets. His younger brother and a few others are helping. The yaks buck and kick and snort; loading them is as much wrestling as packing.

Moving is what nomads do. For the Kyrgyz of Afghanistan, it’s from two to four times a year, depending on the weather and the availability of grass for the animals. They call their homeland Bam-e Dunya, which means “roof of the world.” This might sound poetic and beautiful—it is undeniably beautiful—but it’s also an environment at the very cusp of human survivability. Their land consists of two long, glacier-carved valleys, called pamirs, stashed deep within the great mountains of Central Asia. Much of it is above 14,000 feet. The wind is furious; crops are impossible to grow. The temperature can drop below freezing 340 days a year. Many Kyrgyz have never seen a tree.

The valleys are located in a strange, pincer-shaped appendage of land jutting from the northeast corner of Afghanistan. This strip, often referred to as the Wakhan corridor, was a result of the 19th century’s so-called Great Game, when the British and Russian Empires fought for influence in Central Asia. The two powers created it, through a series of treaties between 1873 and 1895, as a buffer zone—a sort of geographical shock absorber—preventing tsarist Russia from touching British India. In previous centuries the area was part of the Silk Road connecting China and points west, the route of armies and explorers and missionaries. Marco Polo passed through in the late 1200s.

But communist revolutions—Russia in 1917, China in 1949—eventually sealed the borders. What was once a conduit became a cul-de-sac. Now, in the postcolonial age, the corridor is bordered by Tajikistan to the north, Pakistan to the south, and China to the east. Mainland Afghanistan, to the west, can seem so far away—the corridor is about 200 miles long—that some Kyrgyz refer to it as a foreign country. They feel locked in a distant outpost, encaged by a spiked fence of snowy peaks, lost in the swirl of history and politics and conflict.