The station desk officer didn’t think much of the man at first. A middle-aged Frenchman walked into Bournemouth police station on the morning of May 27, 2014, and said he’d been away for three days, driving up and down the country, and had come home to find his wife missing. He gave his name as Pierre Legree. His wife, he said, was Rui Li, a nurse at Poole Hospital.
But as the desk officer took down the details, something began to feel wrong. “Is she your wife or your girlfriend? ” the officer asked. The man turned vague and obstructive.
He refused to answer even when pressed. Then, when the officer suggested he call the hospital himself, Legree muttered something about needing to get to work. He wasn’t going to the hospital. He wasn’t going to wait for a detective.
He just wanted to leave. The officer watched him go and thought to himself: if this man truly cared about his wife, he’d be at that hospital waiting for her car to arrive. Instead, Legree went back to his car lot as if nothing had happened. —
Pierre Legree was 61, a French national who had come to England to make his fortune.
On the surface, he was a successful businessman running a second-hand car dealership with his family. He owned properties. He dressed well. He had charm.
He also had two wives. His first wife, Irene Smith, was five years older than him. They had a son together, Jonathan, a promising 27-year-old racing driver. Legree had married Irene in 1987, and he never divorced her.
They still lived in Bournemouth, and they still spent time together as a family. But in 2007, Legree married again. His second wife was Rui Li, a Chinese nurse 17 years younger than him, who worked at Poole General Hospital and was well-liked by her colleagues. She came from a wealthy Chinese family who supported her financially.
And Legree, it seems, benefited from that income too. What Rui didn’t know, or perhaps chose not to know, was that her husband was already married. The couple lived a complicated life. They ran a sexual massage service from their home in Bournemouth, advertising on Gumtree, with some customers paying for sex with Rui, or with Pierre himself.
They dabbled in swinging and wife-swapping groups. In that world, Legree called himself Alain Baron. But behind the scenes, money was the real story. Legree was milking Rui for everything she had.
He was developing their house. He was buying second-hand cars. He was controlling her finances and her behavior. Rui had a life insurance policy worth £300,000, and she owned a second property, free and clear, worth £100,000.
Four hundred thousand reasons for murder, the police would later say. Rui had begun to tire of the lifestyle. She told Legree she wanted to adopt a child from China. She was also worried about her own safety.
She confided in her daughter from her first marriage, saying she feared that when she and Legree went on walks, she might never come back. She even asked her daughter to hold a copy of her will. —
On the evening of May 23, 2014, Rui left work at Poole Hospital at 6:13 p. m.
Her distinctive Porsche Boxster was captured on CCTV leaving the car park. When she walked through her front door, her killer was waiting for her. Legree struck her over the head with a blunt instrument, not once, but two or three times, hard enough to cave in her skull. Believing she was dead, he wrapped her in a plastic builder’s sheet.
But Rui was still alive when he wrapped her. She suffocated inside the plastic. He threw her body into the back of his transit van. Then he cleaned up the house.
And then he did something that tells you everything about the kind of man he was. He spent the rest of the bank holiday weekend with his first wife and his son. He and Irene went to a dance competition together in Watford. He had a family Sunday lunch with her and Jonathan.
All the while, Rui’s body lay in the back of his van. —
After the weekend, Legree returned to Bournemouth to dispose of the body. He moved Rui from the transit van into a Fiat Punto that was for sale at the family car dealership. Then he asked his son Jonathan to move the vehicle for him.
Jonathan agreed. He drove the car, with Rui’s body wrapped in plastic in the boot, to a residential street in a quiet retirement area of Bournemouth and parked it there. CCTV later showed him getting out and walking away. Why would a young man with a promising racing career risk everything for his father’s murderous scheme?
The only explanation, investigators believed, was that Pierre Legree was an extraordinarily manipulative man who used his son’s loyalty as a tool. Irene, meanwhile, gave him a false alibi. She told police that Legree had spent the evening of Rui’s disappearance with her, watching EastEnders. She also disposed of his clothing and his French passport, hiding them in a storage facility.
—
On May 27, 2014, the day he reported Rui missing, Legree walked into Bournemouth police station and gave his report. He was calm. He was evasive. He gave all the wrong answers.
The desk officer flagged it to the sergeant: “We just had a guy come in reporting his wife missing. He’s given all the wrong answers. ”
By the afternoon, plainclothes officers started appearing in the inquiry office. When the desk officer asked one of them if he was there about the nurse, the man said no, but there were a couple of guys upstairs.
The desk officer swung around in his chair, pointed at him, and said, “Tell them to come and see me. He’s done her in. I know he has. ”
—
The police searched the couple’s home.
The crime scene was spotless. Someone had scrubbed it thoroughly, removing all traces of a killing. But Rui’s daughter told officers about her mother’s fears, about Legree’s controlling behavior, about how he tried to divide mother and daughter. Then they brought Jonathan Legree in for questioning.
He gave the police crucial information about moving cars for his father. Officers were sent to look at a Fiat Punto parked in a residential area of Bournemouth. A detective and a forensic officer opened the boot. Rui’s body was wrapped in plastic inside.
There was the odor of death, the odor that stays with you forever. The postmortem revealed she had been hit with a blunt instrument, her skull caved in by two or three blows. But the injuries might not have killed her outright. She had suffocated inside the plastic sheeting while her husband carried on with his weekend.
—
After her body was found, Legree changed his story. He told police that he had come home from work that Friday and found her dead on the floor. He panicked, he said. He wrapped her up and put her in the van.
It was a ridiculous claim. If he had panicked on Friday, why had he spent the weekend enjoying himself with his first family? Why had he waited until Tuesday morning to report his wife missing, knowing she was already dead? He also tried to deflect blame, suggesting Rui might have been killed by one of her clients from the massage service or the swinging clubs.
But the massage business wasn’t even conducted from the house where she was killed. It was operated from the second property. —
At the beginning of 2015, Pierre Legree, Irene Smith, and Jonathan Legree all stood trial. Legree admitted to bigamy.
He refused to admit to murder. Irene Smith was convicted of assisting an offender and perverting the course of justice by offering him a false alibi. Jonathan Legree was convicted of assisting an offender. Irene was sentenced to three years in prison.
Jonathan received two years. Pierre Legree was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 25 years. In a statement released after the trial, Rui’s 18-year-old daughter called her mother a wonderful person and a great teacher. “She will always be in my heart,” she said, “and will always be missed.
”
The same could not be said for Pierre Legree, a greedy, controlling, manipulative man who took the life of an innocent woman for money, and who dragged his own wife and son into the aftermath of his crime without a moment’s hesitation.
