The judge said Danai Muhammadi, 24, was fueled by “spite, anger and resentment’’ when he killed Melissa Crook, 20, their 15-month-old son, Noah, and Mrs. Crook’s father, Mark Crook, 49, by setting fire to their home September 10 last year.
Muhammadi was born in Iraq of Iranian parents and reared in Iran before going to Britain as an 18-year-old.
Muhammadi and his friend, bouncer Farhad Mahmud, 35, squirted gasoline through the letter slot of the Crook house using a garden sprayer. That fed a fire at the base of the stairs, trapping the family on the second floor.
Mahmud was also found guilty of three counts of murder.
Muhammadi’s new girlfriend, Emma Smith, 21, was accused in the trial of goading Muhammadi to kill his wife. She was cleared of the murder charges but convicted of three counts of manslaughter after the six-week trial. The jury reached their verdicts after deliberating 13 1/2 hours.
Muhammadi and Mahmud showed no emotion as they learned of the verdicts flanked by security guards and interpreters.
In the public gallery, survivors Amanda and Bohdan Crook, Muhammadi’s mother-in-law and brother-in-law, shook visibly and hugged each other as the jury foreman read out the verdicts.
Justice Sweeney said Muhammadi and Mahmud faced life behind bars. As he said that, a family member shouted “good.” Britain no longer has the death penalty.
The judge told the jury: “There can be very few criminal cases which are as taxing for a jury than this one must have been. I don’t suppose any of us are going to forget some aspects of the evidence we have heard about the fire.’’
Prosecutors said the arson was a “wicked attack’’ which had been well planned following the breakdown of the marriage between Muhammadi and Crook.
Six months earlier, she decided to move out of their home in Coventry with their son and return to her parents’ home 125 miles away after Muhammadi slapped her around the face when she refused to have sex with him one night.
In the months following their split, Muhammadi started a relationship with Smith, who became resentful of her new partner’s efforts to patch up his marriage with Crook, jurors were told.
A series of angry text messages were exchanged between Smith and Crook in the weeks leading up to the arson, in which Smith taunted her love rival.
Smith mocked Crook about her size, for being “boring” in the bedroom and added: “Enjoy your life with no husband, no house…no money, you gold-digger.’’
Against this background of bitterness and jealousy, Muhammadi finally decided he could not repair his marriage and shifted to plotting his wife’s murder.
Muhammadi traveled from his home in Coventry to his wife’s family home in Kent late on September 9. First, he loaded the spray container in the trunk of his car and picked up Mahmud.
The keys to their convictions were images caught on security cameras, cellphone records and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology that tracked their movements over the next 45 minutes.
At 2:03 a.m., the car was videotaped at a Texaco station where gasoline was poured into two containers, including the garden sprayer. Investigators were initially surprised that the fire was focused at the base of the stairs and not at the front door itself. The discovery of the sprayer cleared up that mystery. When the sprayer was located, it still had traces of gasoline.
Minutes later, the fire was set. The position of the fire left no reasonable means of escape for Mrs. Crook, her mother Amanda, brother Bohdan, father Mark and her 15-month-old son by Muhammadi, Noah.
Mahmud telephoned Smith to tell her the deed was done. Seconds after that call finished, she dialed 999—the British emergency number—from a pre-paid mobile phone reporting that she had spotted a house on fire.
Moments after she ended that call, she telephoned Muhammadi for 23 seconds, long enough to tell him that she had done what she had been asked to do, prosecutors surmised.
As the fire ripped through the building, Bohdan jumped out of a second-story bedroom window, causing fractures to his feet and hands. He then tried to brave the flames and reach his mother inside but she eventually managed to escape on her own out a second-story window.
Mrs. Crook collapsed in an upstairs bedroom and was found dead by firefighters lying with her young son who was wrapped in a quilt.
Her heavily built father tried to escape through an upstairs window on to a flat roof outside. He was caught by the blast of a fireball that blew out the windows and died in the hospital six days later.
His widow told the court: “I stood and watched him burn. I saw the windows melt. As Mark came through the window, there was a fireball which blew the windows out and engulfed him. I was screaming at someone to ‘Get the children out, get the children out.’
“It seemed like time had stopped, like time had stood still.’’ She said the heat was so intense she could hear her hair singe.
Around 11 the next morning, Muhammadi texted his now-dead wife, saying: “Hi me!, hope you both well. Can I book the hotel for 22 September. Let me know please. Love you, mate. Give Noah [a] hug and kiss from me. X.”
Prosecutor Mark Dennis described that as a “cynical and breathtaking attempt’’ to protect himself from suspicion.
Kent county on the English Channel drove to Coventry, 125 miles away, to tell Muhammadi’s of his wife’s tragic death. But suspicion very quickly fell on Muhammadi when the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) results emerged showing Muhammadi’s car had entered Kent county shortly before the fire started and departed soon afterward.
Muhammadi initially said he was at home in Coventry at the time of the fire. After being presented with the evidence showing his car in Kent, he admitted he was there and claimed he was to meet some mystery men who had tried to blackmail him.
He said he had received an anonymous hand-written letter threatening his son with kidnap and the burning down of their home or car unless 5,000 pounds was paid. Muhammadi said the letter-writer told him to take the cash to a rendezvous point that night, but that he did not hand any money over.
Muhammadi’s version of events was dismissed by prosecutor Dennis as “absolute tosh,” British slang for rubbish.
The court was told Muham-madi had exhibited thoughts of extreme violence. About three months before the fire, he told one workmate he wanted to harm his estranged wife, saying he was going to throw acid in her face to “f*** up her life.”
He also spoke about setting fire to her house about three weeks before the fatal blaze, but the colleague did not take him seriously.
Jurors were told that after spending his childhood in Iran, Muhammadi arrived in the UK in 2005 aged 18 and at first worked in a cucumber factory and a chicken processing plant.
Two years later, he met Mrs. Crook when she was 16. They married in September 2009.
Detective Chief Inspector David Chewter, from the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate, said: “The use of data communication technology in the shape of ANPR, CCTV [closed circuit television] and mobile phone information was key to us being able to quickly arrest him for this terrible crime.”
