In the midst of a state of alarm for coronavirus, the police went to a home in search of the last person who had seen Bennylyn and her two-year-old daughter, who had disappeared days before. On the other side, a man named Andrew Innes prevented him from entering, claiming to be a risk population. However, his attitude and the explanations given by him did not convince the agents, and even less when they saw a minor in front of the television.
One of the officers asked the girl who she was and what she was doing there. And, to her surprise, this she claimed to have been kidnapped weeks ago. Immediately afterwards, several officers broke into the house and, upon verifying that the kitchen floor was under construction, they questioned the suspect. “She’s under the kitchen floor,” he confessed. And her daughter with her. They had just caught a dangerous murderer and pedophile they weren’t even looking for.
Our protagonist was born in June 1970 on a British military base in Hannover (Germany). His real name is Andrew O’Hara, although the family changed the last name from O’Hara to Innes years later. The reason is unknown. What we do know is that Andrew spent part of his childhood in German territory, although he also had a strong link with the English Church Gresley, in Derbyshire.
At the age of 11, the little boy fell in love with computers and started a hobby that would become his profession. “I quickly became addicted to it, partly because I grew up in the mountains, where there is not much else to do,” he came to confess. This caused him to develop a somewhat reclusive and introverted personality, where everything revolved around his computer.
After finishing systems engineering at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, Andrew worked on such well-known video games as FIFA Soccer, All Points Bulletin and Tamarin, created the Grand Theft Auto series in 1987, which is now known as Rockstar Games and, in Within a few years, he was one of the most important programmers in his industry.
One of his greatest achievements: Nintendo’s cult classic Uniracers, in which the player races a unicycle around a track doing tricks to go faster. Andrew was part of the design team that created it in 1994 after moving to Dundee. This gave him the chance to travel to Japan, a country he fell in love with. His dream was to live there one day.
In 2009, Andrew established himself as a software engineer for the game company RealTime Worlds, creators of the famous Crackdown, and met his wife Ryoko Nagashima, a couple of years his junior, whom he married on August 31, 2002. They had three children, although there is information that suggests that they were only the parents of a girl.
After a few years in Dundee, in 2013, Andrew finally saw his dream of living in Japan come true: he had been signed to Unity Technologies. That gave him the chance to blend in with the environment to the point of creating a mobile application called Japanese Kanji Tree, designed to teach writing in Japanese.
After his Japanese adventure ended, he spent three years in California and in 2019, he returned to Scotland. Her return coincided with an impending divorce. Ryoko was not happy with her and Andrew did not live up to her life expectancy. Once the relationship ended, the engineer began dating other women and running bondage and sadomasochism clubs.
In addition, to earn a little more money, our protagonist rented one of the rooms in his house to a tenant, Christopher Smith, who he kicked out as soon as the state of alarm was enacted and the covid-19 restrictions began. Smith came to describe the owner as a person full of oddities, quirky, obsessed with cleanliness and order, who spent hours glued to the computer without moving.
During this forced isolation, Andrew alleviated his loneliness on the Internet and opened up to 34 different profiles on dating applications to meet women. So she created a spreadsheet where he classified the chosen ones according to their age, height, weight and children. Next to each entry was a ranking: the “best scores” were always those women between 20 and 30 years old with small children.
According to the researchers, this choice makes sense: Andrew had developed a series of paraphilias that had to do with contact with minors. For this reason, his candidates had small children. It was his way of having easy access to them.
In early February 2021, 25-year-old Bennylyn Burke, mother of 2-year-old Jellica, created a profile for herself on the Filipino Cupid app: she just wanted to find a good man after leaving her husband for mistreatment. The young woman was Asian, dark haired, with no apparent family network and with a little girl. The perfect victim for Andrew.
So when the engineer ran into Bennylyn, he didn’t hesitate to start courting and use his tricks to trick her. He appeared to be a well-educated and charming man, with a good job and economic position, and an acceptable physique.
After a few days chatting and gaining her trust, the killer offered her to move from Bristol to Dundee to work for him. But she kindly declined the offer citing the restrictions on movement due to the coronavirus.
So, Andrew decided to go a step further: he took the car and traveled 700 kilometers to visit his victim. It was February 18. Once in Bristol, they had coffee, then a picnic, and finally, he convinced Bennylyn to accompany him and her daughter back to Dundee that day. His intention was to show them around the city and enjoy more time together. That sounded good and the young woman accepted without suspecting.
During the trip, the Filipina chatted animatedly with her sister via video call, telling her about the fun plans that awaited her, and even showing her Andrew’s face while driving. Hours later, Bennylyn and Jellica disappeared without a trace.
After spending the night in Dundee, the next morning Andrew, Bennylyn and Jellica toured the city like any other tourists: it seemed that the complicity between them was growing. Hence, that same night, mother and daughter agreed to return to sleep at the engineer’s house. They were comfortable in the man’s company.
But on Saturday, Andrew had other, more macabre plans. He went to a store to buy a large hammer and cement and, upon returning home, he tackled Bennylyn from behind, who tried to get away as best he could. However, the ferocity of the attack gave him no reason to defend himself.
Andrew struck the young woman’s head several times with the hammer and, to finish her off, he took a samurai sword and pierced her chest. As her body did not stop convulsing, he then hit her again with the handle of the saber and also with her hammer.
According to Andrew, the murder took place after ingesting steroids that led him to have a series of delusions: suddenly, Bennylyn was a mixture of his ex-wife, who had left him, and an ex-lover, who had also left him, and the Filipina represented everything he hated the most. The engineer was confused. “He was apocalyptically angry”, he came to justify himself.
After the crime had been carried out, Andrew dragged the body into the bathtub and began to remove the tiles in the kitchen. His goal: dig a ditch to dispose of the body. When finished, he wrapped the corpse in a blanket, then in a large garbage bag and introduced it into that makeshift grave. Three days later, he did the same to Jellica and buried her next to her mother.
In the absence of news from Bennylyn, her family began to worry, especially when Andrew assured them that the young woman had left voluntarily for Glasgow to find another date. She did not believe him and filed a complaint at the police station. It was March 1st.
The police launched the relevant investigation and on March 5 they located the image of Andrew’s vehicle on his way to and from Dundee to Bristol thanks to traffic cameras. After identifying the individual, a patrol proceeded to visit the individual to find out the whereabouts of the young Filipina. Once there, the engineer was not very cooperative. In fact, the presence of a child under the age of seven made the agents suspicious.
About this little girl, named A., nothing is known to protect her identity, the investigations hid this information. What did come out is that, that day, one of the police officers asked the minor why she was there and she claimed to have been kidnapped. Everything pointed to her being sexually abused.
The police were then able to enter the home and discover some work in the kitchen. Andrew, who no longer had a possible escape, chose to confess that the mother and daughter they were looking for were buried under the ground.
During the interrogation, the detainee showed no remorse for the acts committed and did nothing more than wallow in self-pity. In addition, he offered different versions of the facts: self-defense after a fight, drug poisoning that had clouded his mind… Nothing matched reality, since, according to the evidence collected, the crimes were planned and perpetrated with great cold blood. .
The agents found Internet searches about the use of chloroform, they also discovered his obsession with everything related to little girls and Asian women, in addition to the aforementioned Excel sheet with comments from all his candidates.
Meanwhile, the excavation to remove the corpses from the pit was a true “trauma” for all those who participated in that “unique” crime scene. This was stated by Detective Chief Inspector Graham Smith, of Police Scotland’s Main Investigation Team: “The depravity he has shown is unimaginable, it is absolutely horrific. We will never forget him”.
“But how do you go from having a family in Japan to all these things happening in Scotland?” Asked those close to the murderer. Nobody could imagine that, under that appearance of a calm and respectable family man, a sadistic and cruel murderer was hiding.
The trial against Andrew Innes was held on February 6, 2023 at the Edinburgh court and lasted five days. During the sessions, the defendant admitted the deaths, but not having carried them out, and declared a string of atrocities that shocked those present. “I dug a respectable grave. I gave them a Christian burial and then I changed the floor. It’s all I did,” he stated.
Besides, he also spoke of hallucinations, self-castration and a surreal conflict with his wife over hair color. The strategy was to confuse the jury. And his lawyers also contributed to this with a defense based on the diminished responsibility of his sponsor and, therefore, on the lack of criminal responsibility due to a medication that produced an induced psychosis.
The prosecution dismissed such arguments with evidence: those of the security cameras of the store where hours before Andrew had bought the hammer. To which the defendant refuted the argument of premeditation with: “If this had been premeditated in some way, it would have been much cleaner.”
Another crucial piece of evidence was the testimony of the underage witness, A., who was in the apartment at the time of the murderer’s arrest. Her little girl testified that, after her abduction, Andrew had handcuffed and blindfolded her, and had raped her numerous times. Likewise, she confirmed the murders of Bennylyn and Jellica, in addition to the sexual assault on the two-year-old girl before killing her.
The defendant denied the facts narrated by A., but the evidence was irrefutable. Forensics found the victims’ DNA on the handcuffs, on some items of clothing and objects used by the murderer, as well as on some condoms that were in the trash. The engineer had no way out.
The jury found Andrew Innes guilty of the murders of Bennylyn and Jellica and also of the assaults and sexual abuse committed against little A. As Judge Lord Beckett described during the reading of the verdict, this case is one of the most “ difficult and horrendous” that have passed through the court. “You murdered an innocent woman and her two-year-old daughter in a situation where they had trusted you and traveled with you from Bristol to your home in Dundee,” the magistrate said, addressing the killer directly.
After the sentence, the relatives of the victims issued a heartbreaking statement: “We will be forever haunted by what happened to them in a place so far from us and we will never have the chance to see our beloved Jellica grow up.” And, about little A., they also had some words of encouragement: “We pray that she can overcome the trauma of what she experienced. Women and girls should be protected from predators like Innes.”
For Chief Inspector Smith, the strength shown by the Burke family was commendable and “I just hope this sentence brings them some closure,” he told the assembled media after the trial.
However, the investigators of this case consider that these were not the only victims of the computer genius, that this modus operandi was developed for a long time and that, it is possible, that he put it into practice more times and with other women and girls . Although, to date, there is no other evidence against this murderer and pedophile from Dundee.
