Justice Severed

Defense investigator Ron Petrillo, who got to know Geddes in the run-up to the trial, offers a different take. "A few weeks before the trial, [Geddes] disappeared," Petrillo recalls. "My first reaction was that something had happened to him. Then he called me late one night at my office, and I could tell by the crackling on the line that he was overseas.

"He said 'I'm afraid,' and I told him I could arrange protection for him. The next time I saw him was as a witness for the prosecution."

Geddes laughs at the notion that he was threatened. "That's a lot of rubbish," he says.

But Geddes concedes that he was facing criminal charges at the time of Maharaj's trial for illegally bringing ammunition into Jamaica from the United States. The two Florida attorneys who led the prosecution against Maharaj flew to Jamaica and testified on his behalf to help him escape a jail sentence that might have resulted in his being incarcerated at the time of Maharaj's trial.

"I imagine they felt obliged; they realized with my evidence, they had their man," he says. Geddes also says that the attorneys helped him overcome a DUI charge and that while the prosecuting attorneys were in Jamaica, they accompanied their star witness to a lap-dancing bar.

Despite Geddes' damning U-turn, alibi witnesses swore Maharaj was in Fort Lauderdale when the Moo Youngs were shot. How did the prosecution convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that these witnesses were all lying? They didn't need to. Maharaj's original defense lawyer, Eric Hendon — now a Miami-Dade County Court judge — never called them to testify. (In the 20 years since the murders, these witnesses have either died, moved away, or could not be located.)

"When Eric stood up to begin the defense portion of the trial," says Petrillo, who was seated next to Maharaj at the time, "he simply says, 'The defense rests.' The prosecutor's jaw dropped, their mouths fell open, and their eyes got as big as saucers. I thought they were going to fall off their chairs. Kris was holding my arm so tight, I thought he was going to draw blood."

Petrillo claims that Hendon may have been under pressure.

"A few weeks before the trial, Hendon calls me early one morning," Petrillo recalls. "He told me someone had called him at home and threatened him." Hendon offered no greater detail at the time, and though he declined an interview with New Times, he told an appeals court that the witnesses had retracted their statements.

The assertion made Petrillo laugh. "They didn't retract their statements, no way."

During Maharaj's trial, the prosecution presented the Moo Youngs as honest and hard-working. Their tax returns showed an annual income of $20,000. Yet documents found in their briefcase the day they were shot dead suggest that the Jamaicans were not what they appeared.

The contents of the Moo Youngs' briefcase — which were mysteriously not available during the trial — included $1 million in life insurance policies underwritten just three weeks before the murders and $1.5 billion in loans. A senior manager from Ernst & Young later studied the documents and concluded that it "was difficult to rationalize how the Moo Youngs could have become involved in legitimate business dealing of this magnitude." They were, she deduced, either selling drugs or laundering money.

"It is a shame to have to speak ill of the dead, but unfortunately, there were a large number of people who had a motive to kill them," Maharaj's defense team told an appeals court two years ago. They then drew particular attention to another Trinidadian native who was living in South Florida at the time of the killings, Adam Hosein.

Hosein — who is believed to be residing in his homeland but could not be located for an interview — owned a garage in Broward County. He also knew Maharaj from England and bore such a striking resemblance to the Londoner that he reportedly assumed Maharaj's identity to get into horse races. Hosein was also a business associate of the Moo Youngs and allegedly owed them a substantial amount of money.

"I have a sworn statement from a George Abchal in Fort Lauderdale, who used to work at Hosein's garage," Petrillo says. "It was notarized, signed, and tape-recorded. He said Hosein kept a gun and a silencer in the drawer of the desk, and on the morning of the murder, he said Hosein took the gun and left." The gun, Abchal claimed, was a Smith & Wesson, identical to the weapon used to kill the Moo Youngs.

Says Petrillo: "Ask yourself, 'Why is it that nobody heard anything?' "

Abchal also said that days before the Moo Youngs were killed, Hosein had tried to buy six kilograms of cocaine from them on credit. They declined because he allegedly owed them too much money. Court documents show that Hosein also had power of attorney over one of the Moo Youngs' two Panamanian corporations and that Hosein had placed a call to room 1215 the day of the murders. But police never investigated Hosein in connection with the Moo Youngs.