Marina Koppel: Bloody footprint links accused to 1994 killing, court told

A bloody footprint and hair stuck to a ring were used to identify a man accused of killing a woman almost 30 years ago, a court has been told.

Marina Koppel, 39, was found dead by her husband David in August 1994, after being stabbed more than 140 times in a flat in Marylebone, central London.

Sandip Patel, 51, was charged with Mrs Koppel's murder - which he denies - after his footprint matched one left at the scene, the Old Bailey was told.

He became a confirmed suspect in 2022.

The jury heard that his DNA was eventually found to be a match to a hair found by a scientist in 2008 on a ring that had been on Mrs Koppel's finger.

Prosecution barrister William Emlyn Jones KC told court: "Marina Koppel was brutally murdered.

"It has taken a terribly long time to solve it, but we now have evidence that she had this defendant's hair stuck to the ring she was wearing when she was attacked and killed; and his bare foot was pressed against the skirting board next to her.

"And that, the prosecution say, can only be because it was him who killed her all those years ago."

Mrs Koppel, who had two children in her native Colombia, rented the flat in London because she worked as a masseuse and a sex worker, the court heard.

Her husband, who lived in Northampton, "did not necessarily approve" of her work but "accepted it", jurors were told.

Mr Koppel drove to the capital because his wife was not answering her telephone, finding her body shortly before 23:30 on the floor of a bedroom where she took clients.

Jurors heard there was blood "everywhere".

An unmarked plastic carrier bag found by police in Mrs Koppel's kitchen had fingerprints belonging to Mr Patel, then a 21-year-old student, whose father ran a nearby shop, the court was told.

However, officers believed the evidence was not strong enough, as Mr Patel's prints could have been on the plastic bag because he had handled it in his father's shop, and it was possibly brought into the flat by Mrs Koppel.

Despite the discovery of the hair during a review of the unsolved case in 2008, technology was not advanced enough for scientists to get a DNA profile, so it was bagged and preserved until 2022, when it was looked at again.

The bloody footprint was found at the scene in 1994 and matched to Mr Patel after he was made a suspect in 2022, the court heard.

Mr Emlyn Jones went on: "You may have little trouble concluding that if those footprints were made in Marina's wet blood, then that can only be because they were left by her killer - someone who was in that room, barefoot, at the time of her blood being on the skirting board.

"All these years later, they have been identified - they are the defendant's prints - they were made by the sole of his left foot."

Mr Koppel died in 2005, never having discovered who murdered his wife.

The trial continues.