A dead man, a forged will, a £10m inheritance, and a ruined reputation

Is the case of Alexandre Despallières and Peter Ikin a tragic and short-lived love story or something more sinister? Chris Hutchins investigates

1/4

Christ Hutchins

10 August 2012

A two-bed flat on Cheyne Place is a fairly unremarkable block of redbrick real estate by Chelsea standards. With a £1.8 million valuation, it’s at the lower end of the SW3 price range. Unsuspecting buyers may, however, be interested to hear how a few years ago it acquired a reputation as one of the most talked-about addresses in London when it became the temporary home of the charming and handsome 44-year-old Frenchman Alexandre Despallières.

The flat was previously owned by the Australian music mogul Peter Ikin, a close friend of Sir Elton John, Madonna and Rod Stewart, who called it his home on occasional visits to London from his ritzy apartment overlooking Sydney Harbour. In October 2008 Despallières entered into a civil partnership with Ikin, more than 20 years his senior, at Kensington & Chelsea Register Office. A month later, Ikin — who always stayed five-star — was found dead in an inexpensive Paris hotel room. ‘I am not responsible for what happened to Peter. I would have given my life for him,’ Despallières told me last week in an email. He was arrested twice, spent some months in prison on remand and was released last year. According to a French documentary aired in June, the police have no new evidence, and it is assumed that the investigation will not be reopened by the judge in Paris.

‘All I know is that nobody killed my Peter. I went to jail, they took me from my home, they took everything away from me, but everything was already taken away when I lost my Peter,’ he has told me on a previous occasion.

Despallières has been accused by Ikin’s friends of duping the former Warner music boss of Australia and the South Pacific into believing he had his own great fortune (as a French pop singer turned dotcom billionaire). Despallières calls the accusations ‘hurting and unpleasant and defamatory’ and denies ever having had a fortune of this size. ‘I don’t know why my beloved Peter told everybody I was fabulously wealthy,’ he tells me. ‘It was probably so that they would not think I was after him for his money, which I was not.’

I have spent the past three years investigating this sprawling story, and Despallières has spent some of that time in a Paris prison, suspected by the French police of Ikin’s murder and of forging his will. On a few occasions I have met up with this tall, slim and extremely polite man, once in a splendid Paris apartment he was sharing with an elderly couple on the upmarket rue Ampère, to conduct a series of interviews, and with his consent I am writing a book about the highs and lows of his life, from flying first class to languishing in a Paris jail. In person, Despallières is kindly and utterly charming. It is hard to believe the accusations against him. Our first meeting, when I travelled to Paris to begin interviewing him, was in the presence of Despallières’ recently acquired French girlfriend Clarisse Debout (I am told he has no interest in physical sex, excusing himself on the basis that he is HIV-positive), the photographer daughter of famous French actress Chantal Goya and musician Jean-Jacques Debout. They are no longer together.

Despallières has chosen to open up to me despite the fact that Elton John’s and Rod Stewart’s former managers, John Reid and Billy Gaff, are also two of my friends and were the ones who asked me to look into the death of a man they loved dearly, suspicious of the circumstances in which he died.

Following Ikin’s cremation, Despallières and two of his closest friends returned to Cheyne Place. He inherited Ikin’s £10 million estate, which included the flat, and soon after bought three Porsches — one for each of them, even though Despallières didn’t drive. He also hosted a number of dinner parties, many of them prepared by Gaff who was at that time a close friend and temporary resident at the Cheyne Place flat. Visitors were regularly escorted into what had been Ikin’s bedroom to be shown the urn containing his ashes and beside which Despallières kept a vase of white flowers that he refreshed twice weekly. The actress Britt Ekland was present at more than one and, like Gaff, was charmed by the handsome Frenchman, although she has since changed her tune and in a recent email to me she describes him as ‘a low-life scumbag [who] hurt a close friend of mine’.

A year later the flat, the cars and the rest of the estate were handed back when the ‘will’ was proved to be a forgery and the genuine Australian heirs, who included relatives, friends and some charities, inherited most of the estate.

‘I did not forge the will,’ Despallières insists when I ask him what happened. ‘Somebody told me it had turned up and probate was granted by a court in Brighton where the solicitor I was using at the time was based. I just said, “Oh, that’s very kind of Peter.” But I wasn’t interested in his money. I loved him with all my heart.’

According to the detailed emails in my possession, which Ikin sent on a daily basis to his friends around the world, the romance turned serious when Despallières had turned up on his Sydney doorstep in 2008. They had first met at a Warner music convention in San Francisco in 1988 and had enjoyed a romantic relationship for a couple of years, hampered (according to Despallières) by Ikin’s incessant travelling as a tax exile. It petered out and they had not seen each other until his arrival in Sydney where, according to more emails from Ikin, Despallières informed him that since they had last met he had become a billionaire through his IT business and, secondly, that he was ill with AIDS and had only months to live. He did not want his two ‘evil’ brothers to inherit his fortune, he wanted Ikin to have it all, but first Ikin had to agree to marry him.

Despallières disagrees with Ikin’s version of events. He maintains that the music mogul had implored him to travel to Australia and proposed marriage to him over dinner while celebrating the 20th anniversary of their first meeting. Following the Chelsea ‘wedding’, the party returned to the flat for a champagne-fuelled celebration.

Three weeks later, Despallières left for Paris to see his friend of ten years, Olivier Metzner, a leading French criminal defence lawyer who has represented high-profile individuals from the L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt’s daughter to the former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin. Ikin took the opportunity to travel to Brussels to visit Australian friends holidaying in Europe. According to emails, Ikin received a call from Despallières informing him that he had fallen out with Metzner at his country home Orcemont and was now staying at the Abba Hotel Montparnasse on Paris’ Left Bank, now the Hotel Le M.

Ikin caught the Eurostar to Paris on 6 November and joined Despallières at the hotel. When Ikin asked why his civil partner had not checked into one of Paris’ top hotels, Despallières informed him that Metzner part-owned it so he was staying there as a favour. According to the friends he had been visiting in the Belgian capital, Ikin, then 62, was in the rudest of health. But four days later he was found dead.

On two occasions in Paris, Despallières took Ikin from the hotel to the hospital after Ikin complained of a cold and then fell down on the hotel steps. Despallières told doctors that Ikin had a history of using cocaine. In the past Ikin had taken the drug but according to his friends, not for a number of years and even then his desire for it was so modest he could make a gram last a fortnight. Despallières tells me Ikin behaved in an ‘insane’ way in the hospital, abusing the staff, tearing out a drip attached to his arm and demanding to be returned to the hotel.

Police were eventually summoned to the hotel when one of Despallières’ friends, who was also residing in the hotel, called to say Ikin had died. Prior to his partner’s death, Despallières had already moved to another room, explaining to me two years later that he could not take any more of Ikin’s ‘insane behaviour’. A French coroner recorded the cause of death as heart failure and hepatitis, and his body was cremated.

Back in London, Billy Gaff did what he could to comfort his late friend’s partner on his return. Gaff has told me Despallières was complaining of a lack of readily accessible funds and he began to lend him money. Eventually, Despallières and Gaff fell out over living arrangements at the Cheyne Place flat. Gaff was staying in the spare room at the time and Despallières had a friend he wanted to move in, thought to be a young French journalist called Vincent Bray, whose signature appears on the forged will.

Once he inherited, one visitor recalls a visit in the spring of the following year: ‘I went round to [the flat] one day and Alex was studying the brochure for a lovely house in Chelsea. The price was £8 million and he said it would cost another £10 million to get it like he wanted it to be. I said, “Alex, it’s huge, why do you want to buy a house so big?” And his reply was “Because I can afford it.” ’

Meanwhile, Gaff was growing suspicious about the alleged fortune and invited me to visit him at his country home later that year to tell me he thought he had been ‘made a fool of’. On his dining room table we went through his bank statements. I was shocked to discover that he had parted with over £300,000 to the partner Ikin had assured him was a man of substantial independent means. All Despallières will say on this is ‘he was very kind to me’.

By now Gaff was not the only friend of Ikin’s to question the charming Frenchman’s intentions: Elton John’s former manager, the impresario John Reid (who staged the London and Broadway productions of The Graduate), also an occasional visitor to the flat, decided to run checks on Despallières’ IT business.

Far from having offices and homes scattered around the world as Ikin had suggested, including a $30 million apartment in one of New York’s most fashionable blocks, a château in France and a mansion in Beverly Hills, none of these existed. There was only a modest flat in West Hollywood, but Despallières maintains Peter invented this property portfolio himself for reasons already stated.

Reid discovered that in the case of suspicious deaths in France certain organs are kept for up to a year. With just days to spare before they were destroyed, he obtained Ikin’s. The resulting forensic evidence was to prove that his death had been caused by a massive overdose of Solpadeine, tablets containing paracetamol.

Presented with Reid’s evidence, an investigation began. Despallières was arrested and was held on remand on suspicion of murder and forgery of the will in June 2010, then released on bail in March 2011 because the investigation had uncovered no new evidence.

He was then rearrested and jailed in September 2011 for not respecting his bail conditions. In February 2012, his lawyer Thierry Herzog (also former president Sarkozy’s lawyer) successfully argued in court that Despallières had been unable to obey his bail conditions because he was suffering from depression, and he was released on bail a second time.

Despallières is currently living modestly in a small village, which he has asked me not to name, while the new police investigation, led by a judge at a Paris court, is under way. However, there have been no legal developments of late, and a new court appearance date will only be set should the judge believe he has enough evidence for a prosecution.

Despallières continues to keep in touch with me on a regular basis. He has no fears about the publication of our correspondence as he states that he is totally innocent of all accusations, whether they are of murder, swindling or false love. Indeed, he welcomes the prospect of having his story told in my book and quite possibly as a film. One thing you couldn’t ever accuse him of is modesty. ES

Chris Hutchins is writing a book provisionally titled Dancing with Demons: The Mysterious Death of Peter Ikin

A dead man, a forged will, a £10m inheritance, and a ruined reputation

Read More