A university student has been found guilty of murdering his uncle in what prosecutors portrayed as the violent end point of a bitter family feud.
Demesio Frederick, 29, was unanimously convicted at the end of a three-and-a-half-week Grand Court trial on Friday, 27 March.
The jury accepted the prosecution’s case that Frederick strangled his uncle Christopher Johnson, known to family and friends as ‘Bolo’, at the grounds of the George Town waste management business where the victim worked and lived, in the early hours of New Year’s Eve 2024.
Johnson, 56, was found dead by a colleague shortly after 7am. Two pathologists later confirmed he had been strangled.
The prosecution case was that the killing was revenge for a burglary, the latest flashpoint in a years-long family feud over a property opposite the yard where Johnson was living at the time of his death.
Johnson was alleged to have broken into Frederick’s family home stealing jewellery and cash worth more than $20,000 belonging to his mother – the victim’s sister. The stolen items were found in Johnson’s vehicle on the morning he was killed.
Prosecuting counsel Barnaby Jameson KC told the jury the feud had soured relations between two sides of the Johnson family for years, erupting periodically into violence.
“Hatred, regrettably, runs through this case like a poison river,” he said in remarks to the jury, adding that the final outcome had all the “hallmarks of a revenge tragedy”.
Jameson described Frederick as the family enforcer. By killing his uncle, he was “disposing of a long-standing obstacle in a way that was all too familiar”, the prosecutor said.
The phrase was a reference to a WhatsApp message sent by Frederick in 2021 in which he described nearly choking his grandfather to death during a separate family dispute. His grandfather survived.
The prosecution’s case rested on CCTV footage deleted from the property’s system within 48 hours of the killing but later forensically recovered, which showed a masked man leaving the waste management yard twice in the early hours of 31 December.
Frederick’s DNA was found at seven locations on Johnson’s body and clothing, including under the fingernails of both hands. A single hair recovered from Johnson’s hand produced a DNA match to Frederick.
Frederick denied the allegations. Testifying in his own defence, he claimed a physical altercation with his uncle two days before the killing explained the DNA evidence, and told the jury there were other suspects in the case that had been overlooked. His lawyers challenged the integrity of the investigation, arguing shortcomings in scene security and evidence collection could have led to forensic contamination.
The jury of seven women and five men returned a guilty verdict shortly after 2.30pm on Friday.
Frederick, a mechanical engineering student who had been studying in the United Kingdom, was described by prosecutors as an aspiring businessman who by his own evidence owned property, ran his own company and prided himself on his financial ambition. He had returned to the Cayman Islands for the Christmas period at the time of the killing.
Frederick was remanded in custody to await sentencing on 7 July.
Murder carries a life sentence in the Cayman Islands with a standard minimum tariff of 30 years before release can be considered.
Related Videos
