It was a classic case of murder by mistake when Karen Reed, 33, was shot dead on the doorstep of her Woking, Surrey, home, on Saturday, April 30th, 1994. For the killers had intended to assassinate her sister.
Two years earier, when two Chechen nationals named Ruslan and Nazerbeck Outsiev came to England, the Armenian secret service had informed the British secret service that the two men were terrorists. When subsequently neither was arrested, the Armenians decided to take the law into their own hands.
Two Armenians, Mkritchj Martirossian and Gagic Ter-Ogrannsyan, were planted on the two Chechens to help them in England. The Chechen brothers bought a flat in London for £1 million in cash and indulged themselves with drugs and prostitutes. Then, in February, 1993, they vanished.
The two Armenians called in removal men to take some of the flats furniture to Harrow. Alerted by the nauseating smell coming from the furniture, the removal men called the police. Inside one furniture box was the body of Ruslan Outsiev. The body of Nazerbeck was discovered inside the flat. Both had been shot dead, clinically assassinated, through the head.
When the Armenians returned to the flat they were arrested. In June,1993, Martirossian hanged himself in Belmarsh Prison while on remand. Four months later Ter-Ogrannsyan was convicted at the Old Bailey of the double murder and sentenced to life.
Ter-Ogrannsyan was married to an English woman living in Chiswick, west London. In Chechnya someone decided that she too must have been involved in the murders. Aware that her life was in danger, she left her home in Chiswick and moved into her sisters house in Willow Way, on the Barnesbury Farm Estate in Woking. But the Chechens soon found out where she lived.
When they arrived at her door her sister Karen Reed answered the bell. Karen was shot four times, and died instantly.