My parents were brutally murdered after night out in Tenerife – cops bungled investigation but I know the real motive
THEY left Britain for a better life in Tenerife, where they built a successful timeshare business selling the expat dream to holidaymakers.
But 15 years after moving to the sun-kissed Canary Island, Billy and Flo Robinson were brutally murdered close to their luxury £1.5million villa after enjoying a meal with friends.
Flo, 55, was found horrifically mutilated in a pool of blood beside her silver Mercedes.
Husband Billy, 58, was discovered on the back seat of his gunmetal-grey Porsche Cayenne, a few kilometres away, bludgeoned to death with multiple stab wounds.
Robbery was ruled out as a motive because Billy’s £100,000 gold watch was still on his wrist, and Flo was still wearing her diamond earrings.
Police drew a blank and mystery still surrounds their gangland-style killings today.
Now the couple’s son Liam has accused cops of bungling the investigation – and claims he knows the real motive for their sickening executions.
Liam tells the BBC podcast Gangster: The Story of John Palmer: “No one had a reason to do that.
“But there was only the shortlist of people that my dad might have pissed off. But it was to do with timeshare, it’s not a drug cartel or major organised crime, it’s timeshare.”
Originally from south London, the Robinsons had, for a time, worked for timeshare conman John Palmer, before they were killed in January 2006.
The couple, who lived in San Miguel de Abona, had been out for a meal with an employee and his wife at their favourite restaurant in the resort of Playa de las Americas.
They left around 10.30pm, in separate cars, but were ambushed before they reached their luxury villa and dragged from their cars.
Flo was killed in front of her husband, who was tortured before his throat was slit.
Recalling that fateful evening, Liam said: “I’d been up all night and I was asleep on the sofa.
“I heard banging and banging and banging on the patio door and I’m ignoring him, going ‘f*** off, whoever you are, f*** off I’m going to sleep’.
“Bang, bang, and in the end I thought for f***’s sake it must be something. And I’ve opened the door, and he’s gone, ‘Liam, I don’t know what to say to you or how to say it to you, your mum and dad have been shot.”
I let out an uncontrollable scream because as I’ve pulled up at the police station, they had my dad’s car with forensics round it and all I could see was the blood splatter on the bumper and what looked like someone had been shot in the head
Liam Robinson
Liam immediately jumped in his car and raced over to his parent’s villa – and in a panic drove at speed at members of the press that had already begun to gather outside.
He said: “I finally got to their turn off on the motorway, down the dirt track and through the banana plantations… it was in the middle of nowhere. All there is, is five houses there, no street lights.
“I’ve just seen a group of people in cars at the end of their road and I actually thought, ‘that’s a roadblock from the police and they’re not letting no one through’.
“So I was like, well, you’re not going to stop letting me through and I literally got to the bottom of the dirt track, turned left and floored it. And all I can remember is everyone basically diving for their lives and from that point onwards, it was like everything around me wasn’t there, wasn’t real.”
“So I’ve jumped over the neighbour’s fence and said to them: ‘What’s going on?’ He was like I don’t know Liam but…’
“I found out later that it was his wife who had found my mum. She was walking the dogs about 1am and found my mum next to my dad’s car.
“When Mum was found, the police were looking for Dad, thinking that my dad had killed my mum. They then found my dad a couple of miles up the road. Things had been done to him that I don’t want to say.”
Liam was taken to a nearby police station where he was confronted by the horrific crime scene.
He said: “I let out an uncontrollable scream because as I’ve pulled up at the police station, they had my dad’s car with forensics round it and all I could see was the blood splatter on the bumper and what looked like someone had been shot in the head.
“But it had turned out they had been beaten.”
Liam added: “I said to the police, ‘what on earth are people doing walking all over the crime scene less than 12 hours later?’ [They said] ‘Oh we did everything we needed to in the night. We have everything we need.’
“Well I know for a fact they never, because one night when I wasn’t sleeping I went out there with a torch wandering around and I found the back of one of my mum’s earrings which could have had DNA or whatever on.”
The investigation was shelved by the authorities in 2010, and the horrific double murder remains unsolved.
A family friend said there was anger that the case was closed with so many loose ends, adding: “They thought at the time there was a great deal more to be done – and that’s what they still think.”
One theory is that the Robinsons were killed by hitmen hired by rival operators.
During the 90s, the couple worked for timeshare conman John “Goldfinger” Palmer who got his nickname after he was implicated in the Brink’s Mat robbery in 1983 – the subject of new BBC drama The Gold.
Palmer was acquitted of helping to dispose of £26m of gold bullion stolen from Heathrow airport.
Flo worked as his personal secretary for a time, then later a manger, while Billy was also involved in the business.
Liam, who also worked for Palmer, paying taxi drivers for bringing potential timeshare customers to the resort, said: “In the early days, he was a very likeable man.
“I mean, he always flirted with my mum, always. But John was what you’d call a good bloke.
“I don’t care how dodgy anyone is, you know how they make their money, but the personality you got and the character you’ve got, says the kind of person you are, and he was a good bloke.”
When the net closed in on Palmer’s Tenerife timeshare racket, he asked Flo to be a character witness for him at his trial in a bid to get off the hook.
Liam said: “He wanted my mum to be one of his star witnesses, to point the finger at people and basically perjure herself.
“Obviously my dad and my mum were close to John. [But] my dad wouldn’t agree to my mum perjuring herself at the Old Bailey… you’re lying at the highest court in the land.”
He continued: “It might have been a perjury charge or if she had and gone and lied about it, they might have then involved her in the whole scam and brought more serious charges on her.”
Liam said this led to a fall out between Palmer and his parents.
Timeshare ‘turf wars’
When Palmer was jailed in 2001 for a £30m timeshare fraud involving homes in Tenerife, the couple struck out on their own and set up Global World Travel, where customers bought into a whole-lifetime holiday package rather than the old timeshare.
This is said to have created rivalries within the island’s expat community and they may have found themselves in the tangled web of timeshare turf wars.
In recent times Russian and eastern European gangs have muscled in on the lucrative industry, which involves hapless British tourists accosted by touts and often persuaded to part with money they can’t afford.
Liam is said to have received death threats prior to his parent’s killings.
Their luxurious villa, which featured a pool and a landscaped lagoon filled with Koi carp, was heavily fortified, ringed by steel fences.
One former worker said at the time of their killings: “It’s a closed world.
“They work together, socialise together, even the sons and daughters marry into other timeshare families.
It’s a closed world… tread on the wrong man’s patch or s*** the wrong man’s wife and you’ll know about it. You’ll be threatened, beaten, ordered to leave the island
Former timeshare worker
“But tread on the wrong man’s patch or s*** the wrong man’s wife and you’ll know about it. You’ll be threatened, beaten, ordered to leave the island.”
Spanish police suspect an eastern European crime gang looking to move in on the business was behind the murder.
And an investigation by the Mirror in 2015 claimed a Romanian gangster living in London could be a key suspect.
Cops in the UK suspect him of running a multimillion-pound cocaine smuggling business.
Police believe their murders could also be linked to the killing of their former employer Palmer, once believed to be richer than the Queen with an estimated worth of £300million, who was released from prison in 2005.
He was shot multiple times in a professional hit at his home on Essex in June 2015 in the only part of his garden not covered by CCTV, leading police to believe that he was murdered by a professional hit man. Both cases remain unsolved.
Gangster: The story of John Palmer is available as a boxset on BBC Sounds.