Andrea Downer, Gleaner Writer
Clement Lloyd Beckford, the Jamaican who spent 25 years in a Bahamian prison and who is still in that country trying to get back home. - CONTRIBUTED
ON MONDAY, May 21, 1979, Evelyn McKinney was murdered and her body dumped in a ditch at the end of a road in the Bahamas. Stones and bushes were thrown on her body in an attempt to conceal it.
For two weeks she was listed as missing until her badly decomposed body was discovered and a positive identification made. Within four weeks of her death, two other women in the Bahamas were also murdered in similar circumstances; the police were baffled. For another two weeks after McKinney's body was discovered, they searched for clues, trying to determine who could have killed the three women.
BECKFORD SUSPECT
After reviewing the cases, they turned their spotlight on Clement Beckford, a man with whom McKinney had lived and shared a relationship before her death. Beckford had reported to the police that McKinney had gone missing; however, when her body was found and he was called to identify the body, he denied that it was she.
The police's suspicion was aroused when McKinney's family members identified the body as hers, which by that time was so decomposed that they were only able to identify her by the black spike-heeled shoes that were still on the almost skeletal remains of her feet.
Beckford, who later confessed to killing his girlfriend, had made his first mistake. He had denied that the body that the police had found was McKinney's.
In a seven-page confession which he signed in the presence of the Bahamas police two months after the murder, in which he gave chilling details of how he killed her and tried to cover up the crime, he admitted that "... I knew it was her, but I had to make plans to deny it because I knew what I had done ... I was afraid and terrified, also frightened ...."
That first lie might have been what helped the police to unravel the mystery surrounding McKinney's death, but it would be the first in a series of lies and denials which would leave the police, prison officials, members of the Bahamian press and even Beckford's family members confused about who he was, his nationality and whether or not it was he who committed the crimes.
In fact, Beckford became so adept at doctoring facts and bending the truth that he lied himself into a corner and ended up spending 11 additional years in prison after he had served his prison term of 14 years.
TWO OTHER MURDERS
On July 14, 1979, when the police brought Beckford in for questioning in connection with McKinney's murder, he was also charged with the murder of two other Bahamian women, Matilda Simmons and Irene Fitzgerald. According to Bahamian police records, Simmons was killed between June 1 and June 25, 1979, and Fitzgerald was killed some time between June 11 and June 23, 1979. The records gave no other information about those two women's death. However, as far as The Sunday Gleaner could determine, Beckford was only convicted for the murder of his girlfriend, McKinney.
Tomorrow: The making of a murderer
