Murderer of “secret lover” sentenced to life for third time

Monday 21 March 2022

A 58-year-old man who murdered his “secret lover” in 2018, disposed of her body in a remote inlet and then left her car in St. Aubin’s Bay to make it look like a suicide has been sentenced to life imprisonment.

Jamie Lee Warn killed 37-year-old Hungarian national Zsuzsanna Besenyei in May 2018 and kept her body in the boot of her car for three days.

He then disposed of her body at Stinky Bay in St. Ouen and drove her car on to the beach at Le Haule, knowing that the tide was rising. 

Today’s sentencing was the third time Warn has been given a life sentence, which followed a third trial and the third time that a jury had convicted him of murder.

Warn is appealing his latest conviction, which will be heard in May.

The two previous convictions had been quashed by the Court of Appeal.

Setting out the facts of the case in the Royal Court on Monday, Crown Advocate Simon Thomas said that following murdering Ms Besenyei, Warn had engaged in an “elaborate cover-up” to cover his tracks, which included sending text messages from her phone to his, and vice versa, to purport that she was alive.

Without direct evidence of how or where Miss Besenyei died, the prosecution case relied on circumstantial evidence, including signal data which identificated which masts mobile phones were communicating with around the island.

Defending Warn, Advocate James Bell said that his client maintained his innocence.

This had been made clear in a letter sent by Warn to the Court on Monday, he said, which raised a number of rhetorical questions which remained unanswered.

He argued that the only aggravating feature put forward by the Crown to increase the sentence - the fact that Warn had attempted to conceal Ms Besenyei’s body - did not warrant a significant addition to the minimum sentence of 15 years, which both the Crown and Defence agreed was the appropriate one.

He also argued that there was a lack of premeditation, evidenced by the Prosecution’s being unable to establish exactly how Ms Besenyei died. 

Further, Advocate Bell said that the delay between Warn’s arrest in May 2018 and his sentencing this week - three years and 10 months - was not his fault and was due to his previous convictions being quashed twice by the Court of Appeal.

“The Court should take this delay into account as a mitigating factor and should allow for further reduction in the minimum period served,” said the lawyer.

Passing sentence, judge Commissioner Sir Michael Birt said that it had always been accepted that it was not known how, where or why Warn killed Miss Besenyei. However, three juries had been sure that he had murdered her.

He said that the Court had heard Advocate Bell’s submissions and read Warn’s letter but could not agree with the lawyer’s call for a lower minimum sentence. 

The Court therefore adopted the same minimum sentence that had been set after Warn’s second conviction: 17 years, minus the time that he has spent on remand since his arrest.

Sir Michael was sitting with Jurats Collette Crill, Pam Pitman, Robert Christensen, Kim Averty and Karen Le Cornu.