Erkin Guney

Real Crash, Fake Death

In April 2009, Erkin Guney went on trial for soliciting the murder of his late father's lover, Diane Holliday.

Diane Holliday! Yes, the very same woman who claimed intimate links with Dodi Fayed, the boyfriend of Diana, Princess of Wales. Holliday made headlines after claiming that the father of her young daughter was Dodi.

Erkin was accused of hiring a hitman to kill Holliday to prevent her from benefitting from his father's estate. Holliday was involved in a serious, in fact, fatal car accident - or so it seemed.

Erkin was one of six children of Ramadan and his wife Suyehla Guney. She died in 1992.

Ramadan, the millionaire owner of Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, later had a child with Diane Holliday.

A whole lotta actin' goin' on

The hitman allegedly hired by Erkin was actually an undercover cop. Holliday's supposed car crash was a ruse concocted by the police. She was not actually involved in an accident.

Erkin's defence was that he knew all along about the undercover plot and was playing along with it. He was acquitted in May 2009.

So Holliday was not murdered after all? But what about her late husband.

There had also been suspicions of foul play concerning Ramadan, whose death in 2006 at the age of 74 was attributed at the time to a heart attack. His body was later exhumed but no charges were ever brought.

Erkin himself had been convicted of drug and firearms charges in 1996 and was given a 14-year prison sentence. However, in 2003 the Court of Appeal ordered him released and the conviction quashed because of police corruption.

The 560-acre Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, Surrey was founded in the 1850s to ease overcrowding in London. Many of the capital's dead made their final journey to Brookwood, accompanied by mourners, by train. They were accommodated in a small terminal built in 1854 next to Waterloo Station, and transported in funerary rail carriages.

The station was rebuilt in a new location nearby in 1902 and continued in operation until it was destroyed in a bombing raid during the Second World War. By then, much of the transportation between London and Brookwood had switched to roads, and the station was not rebuilt.

Brookwood contains nearly 250,000 graves, and includes British and American military cemeteries. Dodi Fayed, boyfriend of Princess Diana, was originally buried in Brookwood and then moved to a plot at his father's estate.