Paid To Kill

Well worth a read. The book explores a range of different contract killer stories from around the Anglophone world. It does not usually pay that well to be a contract killer, Jones shows, so it helps to have a pathological disregard for human life and a propensity for violence. If your ego or sense of machismo outweighs your ability to carry out the job, so much the better.

| By: Oliver Daddow | Published: May 01, 2026

In this book, crime writer Frank Jones explores the murky world of contract killing, about which there is a relative dearth of knowledge, certainly compared to other true crime sub-genres such as serial killing. Our grasp of the contract kill as a form of murder, or medium of retribution, is weakened by justice systems not keeping specific statistics on ‘hits’ as a form of homicide. This is as true today as when Jones published his book in the mid-1990s (p2). Neither the UK Ministry of Justice nor the US Federal Bureau of Investigation publish the numbers, which is a surprise given how comprehensive statistical breakdowns of homicide by category generally are. The most reliable figure we have is from the Australian Institute of Criminality, which in 2016 estimated that 2-4% of Australian murders were perpetrated by hired killers. It is a small but not insignificant proportion, especially if you are on the receiving end as a victim, or family of a victim. This is where Jones’s book comes into its own, qualitatively advancing our understanding of the various ways in which contract killings arise, along with an account of the type of characters who hire them, and what type of people may become them. The 12 cases Jones explores show, on the one hand, the perils of generalising about the characters involved, yet, on the other, that some form of theory about hitmen and their recruiters is indeed out there waiting to be written. 

Jones opens with some brief remarks on why people hire killers to carry out their evil designs. I found those bones of a ‘hitman theory’ potentially the most interesting, but also the most problematic part of the book. For Jones speculates that the rise in contract killings could be a ‘side effect’ of the women’s liberation movement (p3), because women are the instigators of many such hits, ‘perhaps the majority’ (p3). The fact is, though, that we cannot know this because, as Jones indicates on the previous page, we do not have the statistics to hand – not to mention his problematic characterisation of the women’s liberation movement itself. Females instigated the majority of the hits Jones writes about, but that is pure chance and a statistically insignificant sample of the overall data, not to mention that these crimes are committed for all sorts of reasons, by all kinds of people. Without the data we are not in a position to judge which gender is more at fault. Jones is on safer ground when charting the motives involved in hiring a hitman – the contractor usually plans a murder out of greed or some other form of personal gain, but does not want to dirty their own hands by carrying out the act themselves. Removing the gender lens, Jones is spot on to say that a contract killer, quite simply, is hired as ‘someone to tidy up the inconvenient details of [the contractor’s] lives’ (p3). 

As someone whose father was shot by a hitman, hired by his then wife, Jean Daddow, to gain access to his supposed fortune, I was naturally drawn to the book’s chapter on the case with which I have lived since I was 17 years old. I will not go over the detail of Terry Daddow's murder here (pp91-115), beyond saying that Jones provides a standard account of the motives behind the killing, the characters involved, and the twisty-turny police investigation that ultimately brought the conspirators and the hitman to justice. That particular contract killer, Robert Bell, became ensnared in Jean Daddow’s world of lies and deception via a marijuana habit that led him to owe several thousand pounds in drug money to Jean’s low-life, low-level criminal son, Roger Blackman (about whom there is a lot more to be said in my book). 

Unfortunately for Daddow and her son, Bell was about the most bungling character they could have leaned on to carry out a quick, clean and efficient kill - it was the reverse of the classic professional hit portrayed on the small screen. As in many of the stories in Jones’s book, the plans were only half thought through. They were also indiscreet, the levels of amateurishness involved shooting more holes in them ‘than a rusty piss-pot’ (p291). Bell’s runaway self-image as a wannabe ex-Army ‘hardman’ belied that he was no more than a spineless charlatan with a James Bond complex (p104). He agreed, and then backed out of, around ten different plans to murder my father in the early months of 1991. The trio could not even pull off the classic ‘hit by poison’, successfully deployed so many Black Widows through the ages. Bell was, however, terrified of Blackman, who later looked into having Bell murdered in Lewes prison, while they were on remand awaiting trial, to silence Blackman's famously wagging tongue. It was little wonder Blackman refused to take the witness stand at the trial: his guilt was established when a former cellmate, ‘Mr X’, revealed Blackman’s plan to a visibly shocked courtroom. One thing you have to remember when confronted with characters such as these, however, is that although they might be inept and bungling, they are still capable of pulling triggers that end lives, extremely messily. When threatened by Blackman with violence about his own person, Bell finally pulled the shotgun trigger on my father at point-blank range at10.30pm on the night of 26 November 1991. Terry Daddow’s life cost around £7,000 (just under £20,000 at 2026 prices).  

The prime lesson I took from this book is that if you put your faith in someone of such bad character to commit a murder or violent retribution for you, you better be damned sure they will not drop you in it, if (or more likely when) their deeds get discovered. Like many of the stories Jones discusses, the hitman who killed my father squealed (‘bubbled’, to use the police terminology) as soon the authorities started closing in on him. Having gone on the run immediately after the murder (see also p301), and after multiple attempts by Sussex police, made via Bell’s solicitor, to persuade him to return home, Bell called a Sun crime reporter from Florida to confess, more or less, to the crime (p102). At the same time, he tried to hide the trail connecting him to Jean Daddow and her son, by connecting Terry Daddow’s murder to a previous unsolved murder in the same county, where international drug gangs were allegedly involved (that case has never been solved). 

The second lesson I took from the book concerns the dangerous interaction between greed and narcissism in the characters of those involved in conspiracies to kill (I have written about narcissism and murder elsewhere on this website). A narcissist will believe that their interests are superior to those of the target, which in their mind justifies the attempts to intimidate, maim or kill. They clearly believe inside that what they did was, in some manner, ‘just’. Their sense of victimhood is then rehearsed to the police, paraded in the media (p183), and capped off when they take to the witness stand, should they plead innocence and the case goes to trial. In enacting their ‘victim’ role, some perpetrators like to practice their lines at great length. We saw above how Bell devised his script while on the run in North America; Bob Black, who famously, through the pages of America’s Soldier of Fortune magazine, hired John Wayne Hearn to murder his wife in the 1980s, could trot out his alibi for the murder as if he’d rote-learned it (p299); likewise, Debbie Banister who used the same hitman, who she contacted through the same magazine (p294). 

Some of the perpetrators like to extemporise on their plight, and thereby evade responsibility, in lengthy pieces of writing that become their trial defences. In this category, Jones tells of Sheila Stroud, who tried to murder her former common-law husband, Ivor Stokle. Stroud indulged in a verbose, self-pitying ‘suicide’ note that she felt explained exactly why she was ‘driven’ to commit her crime. Then there was Jean Daddow, who, hearing of her impending arrest, sent a lengthy letter to the then Guardian journalist Jay Rayner, in which she explained in minute detail how she felt targeted by the police and former acquaintances who dared question her good name. Helmuth Buxbaum, jailed for the roadside murder of his wife Hanna in 1984, would send ‘self-serving’ letters proclaiming his innocence, signed ‘I.M. Innocent’ (p332). Overlaying the narcissistic premise that they are never wrong, the victim-act seems to become hardwired into the perpetrator’s worldview to such a degree that, in effect, it becomes their lived reality. Their public attempts to appear innocent act cannot even be destabilised by a safe conviction against them. That perpetrators sometimes seek leave to appeal against a jury’s guilty verdict (p58), or the length of their sentences, or in Jean Daddow’s case both (March and November 1995), only prolongs the trauma for the victims’ families. 

My third take-home from the book was that conspirators behind a contract killing have an inflated sense of their intellectual ability to trick everyone into believing the various deceptions they indulge in to cover their tracks. As in the case of Sandra Wignall, who arranged for her husband Bob to be beaten and stabbed to death in some woods, by her lover and his friend in 1993, perpetrators are prone to spreading stories and half-truths to throw investigators off the scent. Bell tried it with the wheeze about my father’s death being connected to the Bolney torso murder (see above). Jean Daddow spent the first days of my father’s murder investigation pointing the police to all sorts of innocent parties who she thought could have done it, including my mother, about the least likely murderer there could possibly be. All Jean Daddow’s finger-pointing was to no avail, however, because everyone she identified had cast iron alibis, and the police did not take long to start looking closer to her own home for the guilty party. 

However much thought and effort perpetrators put into masking their tracks or fabricating ‘the perfect alibi’, then, it is never quite enough (pp247-71; p295). Thankfully, police Murder Investigation Teams are usually thorough in exhausting all lines of inquiry. They are trained to be alert to the potential enactment of, what might seem to the perpetrator, clever diversionary tactics. One such means of smoking out possible suspects is via the public appeal. To help evade justice, perpetrators like to divert attention away from their role in a crime by acting the part of ‘grieving partners’, which in their eyes helps support their ‘innocent’ self-presentation. Jean Daddow and Noeleen Hendley’s 1991 television and press appeals are classics of the genre. They do not realise that their performances for the cameras get forensically picked over by the police for minute clues as to what was really going on ‘backstage’, behind the grieving widow's veil of innocence. Hendley always wore black to show how she mourned the loss of her husband. Jean Daddow’s act did not go that far, although a necklace with a large cross on it was always prominent in her attire. Her performance was otherwise flawless, except for one tiny detail – she held a handkerchief to her eyes for the rolling cameras, but closer scrutiny of the footage shows she did not shed a tear. Such criminals, this book painstakingly shows, are never too clever for their own good: quite the reverse. However much they rehearse, the amateurish nature of their crimes always leves them open to a slip that blows their cover. Loose ends are always dangling because of the inherent messiness of an amateur contract kill.  

Ultimately, Jones’s book demonstrates that people who take the decision to hire contract killers have passed an ethical ‘point of no return’ from which there is, in all probability, no coming back. Once on, the switch to kill cannot be flicked back off. To use the academic terminology, murders of this nature become ‘path-dependent’. It might be thought that an unsuccessful attempt to kill the victim would lead contractors to pause, reflect, and reassess whether they really want to give the say-so for the plan to proceed. But self-awareness, a capacity for reflection, or empathy for others, are not characteristics that trouble these people. However many times they fail in having a target done away with, whatever scrapes they get into, or whatever practical setbacks they encounter (pp105-08; pp191-94), like Wile E. Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons they never back down in the face of adversity. Perhaps due to the number of people who eventually become invested in a hit succeeding for financial gains of their own (pp319-24), once that point of no return has been transgressed, the momentum behind an arranged killing is, simply, irresistible.

In summary, the history of contract kills is, in many ways, the story of what happens when narcissistic personalities become consumed by greed or the desire for retribution. On the contract killer side, it is the story of flawed characters mired in violence, substance abuse and a casual disregard for human life. Mixed together, the greed and selfish arrogance of the contractor gets whipped together with the sadism and cruel violence of the perpetrator to create a perfect storm. Welcome to the world of modern contract killings. Hitmen exploits, Jones rightly  finds, should never be glorified, and the people who hire them should never receive our sympathy, despite their best Oscar-winning performances to the contrary.

As usual, I welcome your reflections on this book and my review of it. If you have memories of my father’s case, please do not hesitate to contact me through this website.  

Photos: author’s own.