Gale Benson

Gale Ann Benson (born November 4, 1944 as Gale Ann Plugge in London , † January 2, 1972 in Trinidad ) was a British model and the daughter of the Conservative House of Commons Leonard Plugge. She was buried alive and murdered by Black Power activist Michael X and members of a group he led .

Life

Gale Benson was born in London to Leonard and Ann Plugge. She had a twin brother, Greville, who died in a car accident in Morocco the year after Gale, and an older brother, Leonard Frank (* 1937), and grew up in an upper-class family. After attending the Lycée Français in London, she began working as a model and DJ for a French radio show.

At the age of 20 she married the film director Jonathan Benson. However, the marriage turned out to be unhappy, and Gale Benson left for Argentina in 1967 at the age of 22 . She later returned to the UK and began a relationship with black power activist Hakim Jamal, a companion of Michael X. Jamal was from Boston , USA . The relationship was described as very one-sided and dominated by Jamal. Gale Benson changed her name to "Hale Kimga", an anagram of her and Jamal's first name.

In 1971 Jamal and Benson first moved to Guyana and then that same year to a commune led by Michael X in Trinidad . Michael X had used a bail release to avoid extortion charges in the UK .

assassination

According to a participant who later made himself available as a key witness , a group of mostly local men led by Michael X and Benson left the commune for a walk on the morning of January 2, 1972. They came to a small hole, which they dug until it was about 1 - 1.5 m deep. One turned to Benson and asked what she thought it was. When Benson just shrugged, the man said, "This is a fresh hole for rotting corpses." They pushed her into the hole, and two men hacked with machetes to her. She was badly injured in the chest and neck area in the fruitless struggle for her life, but was still alive when the men filled the hole over her and trampled the earth over her. The autopsy later showed that she eventually choked on inhaled soil.

Her severely decomposed body was found seven weeks later. Benson's dentist had to be flown in for identification. In a lengthy trial in Trinidad, two men, Stanley Abbott and Edward Chadee, were convicted of murder and executed. The most likely motive for the murder is that at least the leader Michael X was tired of her and felt annoyed by her.

The body of a local barber, Joseph Skerritt, who had also been murdered, was also found in Gale Benson's involuntary grave. Michael X was sentenced to death for this murder on August 21, 1972 and hanged in May 1975 in Port of Spain prison. The charges against him for the murder of Gale Benson never came back to trial.

The role of Gale Benson's lover, Hakim Jamal, remained unresolved in the murder case. In an interview after the discovery of the death, he said that Gale Benson had become more and more clingy and had started to annoy him. In 1973, just over a year after Benson, Jamal also died. He was murdered in the USA.

media

The writer VS Naipaul researched the murders on his home island Trinidad and, in an article published in 1980, The Return of Eva Peron: With the Killings in Trinidad, also paints the picture of a woman who became a nuisance to those around her. He described Benson as "a fake among fakes" (dt. Imitation under imitations ), explained their slavish dependence on Jamal, criticized her for a White unusual behavior, to wear African clothing, sharply and said "she had a way of putting people off “(Eng. She had an angry way to people ).

In Diana Athill's autobiography of her friendship with Gale's lover, Hakim Jamal, Make Believe: A True Story , Gale Benson is a main character.

In the film Bank Job (2008) it is described that Michael X kept compromising pictures of Princess Margaret in a locker and used them for blackmail. The character of Gale Benson tried to find out in the film as a spy whether Michael X could possibly have additional footage. Gale Benson's brother Frank thinks that the idea that his sister was actually a spy is "ludicrous".

Footnotes

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Victoria Moore: Buried alive: The model, socialite and daughter of a Tory MP who fell for a charismatic black civil rights leader . Daily Mail . February 16, 2008. Retrieved February 5, 2016.
2. ↑ Two Will Hang for Burial Murder . In: The Age . July 18, 1973. Retrieved July 22, 2011.
3. ↑ Reuters: Michael X 'Doomed in Trinidad Murder . New York Times . August 22, 1972. Retrieved December 20, 2008.
4. ↑ Athill, Diana, Make Believe: A True Story , Sinclair Stevenson, 1993,