A businessman who was jailed for murdering his girlfriend at a luxury Paris hotel is now back in prison for attacking his father and damaging property belonging to a neighbour.
Ian Griffin, 56, has admitted wounding Bernard Griffin, 84, at his home in Cheshire on May 1 last year.
He also pleaded guilty to threatening to damage or destroy property belonging to his father’s neighbour James Hart, 39, and his partner Catherine Brown, a day earlier on April 30, by threatening to burn down their home.
Griffin was jailed for 20 years by a French court for the murder of his Polish-born millionaire partner Kinga Legg but later had his sentence cut to 14 years and was then unexpectedly released in 2017 after serving just over two years.
He entered his pleas for the incidents involving his father and Mr Hart at Liverpool Crown Court last month and has been remanded in custody. He faces a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment.
At the most recent hearing, he was in a wheelchair and appeared via videolink from Altcourse prison, Merseyside. Full details of the incident have not yet been revealed in court.
Other charges – making threats to kill his father, two counts of criminal damage at Mr Griffin senior’s home and sending malicious, offensive or obscene electronic messages – were ordered to lie on file.
Neither Mr Griffin senior nor Mr Hart wanted to comment ahead of the sentencing hearing.
Ian Griffin outside court in Paris before he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in jail
Griffin’s most recent ex-partner, Tracy Baker, 45, with whom he has three children, is understood to be out of the country but her family were aware of Griffin’s latest prosecution.
A family source said ‘it is a horrible story’, adding: ‘It is awful and I don’t really want to talk about it.’
But the source added: ‘He’s been inside (on remand) for the last year already so whether he does anymore (time), it won’t be much.
‘It hurts for us. We don’t want the kids involved. The oldest boy she has told him a certain amount he doesn’t need to know anymore.’
Griffin was in a relationship with Ms Baker, a former Dragon’s Den contestant, while he was engaged to Ms Legg.
The pair rented a £3million home in Oxshott, Surrey, having met in 2008, while Griffin was running tanning salons and gadget shops and Ms Legg had a flourishing tomato export company, which supplied the likes of McDonald’s and Tesco.
Griffin and Ms Legg’s relationship was turbulent and the month before she was killed, she sent a text message to a friend saying: ‘Just in case I die, you’ll have proof with the copy of this text. He made me take so many sleeping pills I don’t know if I’ll ever wake up.’
Another message, sent a few minutes later, said: ‘He beat me – he beat my head against the ground.’
He bludgeoned Ms Legg, 36, to death in their suite at the five-star Bristol Hotel in Paris in May 2009 and was found guilty of murder in December 2014.
But a judge ordered his release in October 2017 after a closed hearing and Griffin moved to the Alsace region of north-east France.
It is not known when he returned to Britain but before his arrest for his latest crimes, he was living in Wilmslow, Cheshire.
Kinga Legg, 36, who was found dead in the bath in a Paris hotel suite in 2009
Griffin pictured with Tracy Baker, the mother of his three children, from whom he has since split
His murder trial heard Ms Legg’s battered and naked body was found in the blood-stained hotel suite in a three-quarters-filled bath.
She was found to have suffered 100 injuries, including 17 to the head and 33 to the thorax, in a ‘frenzied’ attack – after which Griffin, addicted to alcohol and anti-depressants at the time, attempted to clean the £1,000-a-night room.
He called reception twice to say the couple would be extending their stay and put a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the bedroom door – before fleeing the scene in his Porsche 911 car ahead of hotel staff discovering the body.
Griffin, who reportedly developed a severe neurological disease in jail, was later found sleeping rough in a tent in woodland back in Cheshire after a police manhunt and extradited to France in 2011, initially held on remand but later granted bail.
Griffin claims to have once spent a decade working in the US film industry and said in a rambling 2018 blog post that ‘the biggest production companies on the planet’ wanted to buy his story.
Despite the murder conviction, he claimed he had never ‘raised his voice’ or been ‘aggressive’ in toward a woman in his life and cites his relationship with his first fiancée, a woman called Dianne Wilkinson, as proof.
He maintained his innocence over Ms Legg’s murder conviction, saying: ‘There is just too much to even start to explain. All my friends and family know I’m innocent and have never questioned that.’
Griffin added: ‘I genuinely loved Kinga very much. We had just got engaged. She was honestly pretty amazing in many ways.’
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He even claimed to have bought an expensive watch from Take That star Gary Barlow and said: ‘Even the value of my watch was used as if I conned it off a lady or something. I had bought it off Gary Barlow but I was told to shut up and sit down.’
In 2014, Dragons’ Den star and businessman Duncan Bannatyne dropped out of a £60,000 deal with Ms Baker after her then relationship with Griffin – at that point on bail awaiting trial – was revealed.
Bannatyne had pledged the sizeable investment to Ms Baker on the television show in return for a 35 per cent stake in her franchise of UM!Brands tech business – a stick and peel glue-type product to help mount household items.
However, on finding out about she was Griffin’s girlfriend, the entrepreneur decided he wanted ‘nothing more to do with it’.
Ms Baker was already in a relationship with Griffin when he murdered Kinga Legg – and she had her first child with him in 2013 after he was controversially released on bail.
They had two other children – twin girls – in around 2018.
At a French court hearing, the prosecution alleged Griffin was a ‘kind of gigolo’ whose business ventures had turned sour and who relied on ‘his wealthy parents for money’.
But Griffin vehemently denied his father funded his lifestyle on his 2018 blog.
Griffin will be sentenced on May 21.
