Published: 23 December, 2013
by ALICE HUTTON

THERE was no body, no murder weapon and no witnesses, but millionaire property dealer Robert Ekaireb’s attempt to cover up his missing wife’s murder came to an end on Thursday.

With a unanimous verdict, an Old Bailey jury convicted him of killing his wife Lihua Cao, who was pregnant, at their Hampstead home. The 27-year-old has not been seen since 2006.

Members of an emotionally drained jury could be seen weeping at the trial’s conclusion and the end of a complex police investigation.
The passage of time had erased many lines of enquiry: phone records had been deleted, some of the

witnesses had died, a notebook filled with Ekaireb’s first interview was lost by the police.

Ms Cao grew up in Dalian in northern China, moving abroad when she was 21, landing in Ireland in 2002 where she worked as a waitress and studied English.

Throughout the trial much was made of the fact that when she met Ekaireb, in Cork in November 2005, she was working as a lap-dancer, charging him £270 for private sessions.

“Gold-digger”, suggested the defence counsel, a woman who saw her husband as a “cash-cow”.

But after years of gathering statements and travelling to China to meet her devastated family, the police pieced together a portrait of an independent woman who felt a deep responsibility to support her family and longed for a way out of the only menial, low-wage jobs available to her.

Within seven months of meeting Ekaireb, they married in China in July 2006, by which time she was already pregnant. Her family urged her to “slow down”. They moved back to London, but by then the problems in their relationship had been evident for a while.

The trial heard how Ekaireb developed into an angry, jealous and violent man who was obsessed with her former job as a lap-dancer and kept her on a strict leash, banning her from being friends with “any Asians” or working, cutting off her access to money and, on one occasion, assaulting her. He was later convicted of possessing a flick-knife.

In the weeks leading up to her disappearance the expectant mother left him at least four times.

Each time, her phone was flooded with dozens of text messages – up to 64 on one occasion – from her husband saying he loved her and that he would kill himself if she didn’t return.

What the jury wasn’t told was that Ekaireb had visited a psychiatrist where he spoke about fantasising about killing his wife, whilst maintaining at the same time that he would never do so.

Four weeks later Lihua spoke to her brother, who lived in Denmark, for the last time on the phone and said she was unhappy and wanted to leave her husband.

That evening, the prosecution claimed, they argued and Ekaireb lashed out and killed her.

Prosecutors said that when Ekaireb visited a West End nightclub on the evening of her disappearance, it wasn’t to “drown his sorrows that his wife had left him” but to use his alleged “underworld connections” to arrange to have her body removed.

A porter later claimed he saw Ekaireb carrying a carpet out to his car late at night.

Within weeks the carpet had been replaced, the flat industrially cleaned, repainted and let out.

The owner of 85 luxury properties around London and across the UK, as well as a jewellery business in Hatton Gardens, Ekaireb moved into a rented flat in Hendon.

Described by police as “self-obsessed”, an iPod found at his address was engraved with the words: “I am Robert Ekaireb, the one and only”. A phone on his bedside table was a cartoon sports car with Mickey Mouse.

Its number plate read, “Robert Ekaireb”. He owns a teddy bear collection worth £3million and designer clothing that he leaves unwrapped due to his OCD.

Lihua was reported missing in February 2007 by her brother, four months after their last phone call, but

Ekaireb wasn’t charged until June last year, despite a missing person’s case being opened in 2009.

Detective Sergeant Martin Sloan, who helped lead the investigation, told the New Journal that Ekaireb saw Lihua as a “pretty, Chinese doll” who he could do what he liked with – and no one would care.

“But we have seen evidence that he more than met his match in her,” he said.

“She was a fire dragon and knew her own mind. It was no secret from the start that he got what he wanted out of that marriage, a beautiful woman, and she got what she wanted, a wealthy man. And there is no getting away from that. However, what has always been a thread through Lihua’s life is, and it is very traditional in China, they know that their whole life is to support their families. But what I find saddest is, despite that, I think she wanted to be a good wife for him, and she would have been.”

He added: “When we went to Dalian to meet her family they broke down. It wasn’t until our arrival in China that they had to realise that she was dead. They always hoped more than believed that she would come back alive. To this day they have never told her grandparents, because they are in their 90s and quite old, but they have to then put up with them slagging Lihua off, saying, ‘What a bad daughter she is’. And they have made a decision to let that continue because if they said, ‘Well this is actually what has happened and your granddaughter has been murdered’, if they showed the extent of their grief, they worry that could just kill them. As an example of a close family, I have never seen love like that.”

Ekaireb will be sentenced next month,