Christopher Borgye was presumed missing for four years until a man confessed to his murder(Image: Handout)

“He looked dishevelled, like he hadn’t had a bath in weeks.

“He said ‘I want to confess to killing my housemate in 2009, we had an argument and I buried him under the shed at the bottom of the garden’.”

This is the moment one of three killers entered a police station and confessed to the murder of a Ryanair steward four years earlier.

Until that point police believed Christophe Borgye had just gone missing from home, the Liverpool Echo reported.

Mr Borgye had a strong desire to travel and had left his native France to work for Ryanair at Liverpool John Lennon Airport. After securing the job, he sofa-surfed until a colleague introduced him to a friend he played football with.

His friend, Dominik Kocher, offered Christophe a room in a house on Hylton Court in Ellesmere Port, along with his cousin Manuel Wagner and childhood friend Sebastian Bendou, whom he knew from when they grew up in Salzburg, Austria.

Kocher, a married father of three, wouldn’t ask for rent but he would take his monthly income to put towards bills and shopping with the promise of all money not spent being returned to him at the end of his tenancy.

But instead, Christophe ended up dead – with his housemates culpable.

This week, the ECHO spoke to Anton Sullivan, a former Inspector at Cheshire Police, who investigated the murder 16 years ago. He said: “Kocher said that the way it works is it’s a family group who looked after each other.

“Kocher said he would do the cooking, the cleaning, do the weekly shop, and Borgye had to pay his wages into this joint account.

Dominik Kocher(Image: Chester Chronicle)

“Christophe was a trusting soul, people might think he was naïve but he wasn’t, he took them on face value and gave everyone the benefit of the doubt. He was happy.

“When people in the area were interviewed they thought Kocher was actually the landlord because he controlled and managed everything in the house.

“It was apparent that Kocher would take all of the residents’ earnings and treat them like children. If they wanted new clothes or anything like that, Kocher would get it for them.

“Looking back on it, Kocher was probably planning that there was going to come a point where there was no money left. Bills were being paid for by Christophe because Kocher and his wife were living well beyond their means.”

In April 2009, Christophe informed him he was being relocated to Brussels. Kocher helped him book his flight to Dublin where he was due to have a meeting with Ryanair to set up his new life in Belgium.

But the trusting Frenchman did not realise his own murder was already being planned.

Mr Sullivan said: “Kocher by this point had been planning for the death. Looking at credit card receipts, he had gone and bought bricks, building materials including cement, and three knives.

“On April 23, the three housemates went out and purchased more equipment.

“The next morning they called the victim downstairs to the kitchen where it had all been set out. The tarpaulin had been laid out, they were wearing gloves, they had overshoes on and each one of them had a knife.

“They told Christophe they were going to do a deep clean of the house. He was asked to start cleaning underneath the sink and that’s when they attack him.

“Bendou admitted that Wagner was the one to bring the hammer which wasn’t part of the original plan.

Manuel Wagner(Image: Chester Chronicle)

“The knives were very ineffective in causing fatal injures. Then they started using the hammer. Those injuries were determined by the pathologist to be what killed him.

“They quickly wrapped him up in the tarpaulin, stuffed him into the grave they pre-prepared in the shed and started preparing the concrete before cleaning up the scene.

“A few hours later, we have receipts that show they all went to Chiquito’s at Cheshire Oaks where they all had lunch and then they just carried on with their lives.”

Christophe was entombed in a cement structure in the garden of the building along with their weapons.

“They got rid of all of Christophe’s property. They sold his car, they sold his records and CD collection.

“We even managed to prove that Kocher had used the victim’s credit card to buy an anniversary card for his wife.

“It became apparent that Kocher was the ringleader who orchestrated this.”

When ‘workaholic’ Christophe, didn’t turn up to work for a week, his colleagues reported it to police.

One of them contacted Christophe’s brother Noel to tell him he was missing and Cheshire Police started a missing-from-home enquiry. But there were no leads.

Bendou told police he had vanished with no mention of where he had gone.

Then, an email landed in the inbox of his family members explaining how he had left to go travelling in China.

Various aspects didn’t ring true with his family, particularly his brother who was due to get married that year, something Christophe had vowed not to miss.

But as years went by, no leads presented themselves. Wagner and Bendou carried on living in the house where they had brutally murdered their flatmate before they moved to Warrington in 2012.

They even told the next tenants of Christopher’s room not to go into the outbuilding, as the landlord used it to store personal property.

Mr Sullivan believes the weight of the murder ate away at Bendou who began showing symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Then one evening in April 2013, Cheshire Police received a call from a French speaking man claiming to have murdered his housemate four years earlier.

He told police from a phone box: “This is too much for my mind”.

Sebastian Bendou(Image: PA)

Bendou travelled to Cheshire where he confessed to the murder, claiming it was self-defence, with Mr Sullivan, an Acting Inspector at the time, called in because he could speak fluent French.

He said: “I sat down with him and we had a brief conversation. He looked dishevelled, like he hadn’t had a bath in weeks, and he just said ‘I want to confess to killing my housemate in 2009, we had an argument and I buried him under the shed at the bottom of the garden’.

“He’d given the name of Christophe and that’s when we realised we had an outstanding missing from home case and he was still missing.

“We made the decision to arrest him. Then 24 hours later my colleague contacted me saying they had found the body but the case is four years old.”

Mr Sullivan was then brought into the loop and never left. He tracked down Christophe’s family before helping lock up the three killers across two separate trials.

During questioning Bendou changed his statement to reveal the full extent of his fellow killers’ involvement. As the picture became more clear to detectives, Kocher and Wagner were arrested on suspicion of murder.

Kocher and Bendou were subsequently charged with murder while Wagner was accused of helping to move the body.

The outbuilding where Christopher Borgye was buried(Image: Liverpool Echo)

Kocher and Wagner stood trial in 2014, when Kocher was found guilty of murder and jailed for life with a minimum of 23 years. German national Wagner was part of the same trial; however, he was not charged with murder, because of insufficient evidence.

He admitted unknowingly helping to move Christophe’s body and was cleared of assisting an offender and preventing a lawful burial.

Bendou had to be treated for his mental illness before he faced a separate trial. He was found guilty of murder and received a 14 year minimum life sentence.

Bendou said while he and Wagner wrapped up Christophe’s body and carried it to the shed, Kocher mixed the cement.

When first arrested, Wagner said he had no idea what happened and thought Christophe was “living happily ever after” in China with a girl.

Wagner later told police he recalled coming home and seeing Bendou, who asked for his help to move a tarpaulin-wrapped “package”.

He tried to convince the jury that he thought this might contain some rubbish, but jurors returned a unanimous verdict that he was guilty of murder, before he was jailed for life with a minimum of 16 years behind bars.