One, known as Irish Key, recalled their love for their two Jack Russell dogs, Sid and Nancy, and remembers them jumping into the pool at the Robinsons’ villa to catch dragonflies.Another man, who said he knew the couple since 1990, commented: “Flo was a lovely lady She looked like a young Elizabeth Taylor. The couple regularly returned to London where their daughter, Billie, lives.Some of their friends and acquaintances talk fondly of them. But, as in many of the suspected turf war incidents, he did not make a formal complaint to the police.The Robinsons moved to Tenerife about 16 years ago where they lived a lifestyle of flash cars, expensive clothes and luxury villas, with their son, Liam, running a business called Global World Travel. He was badly beaten up about two years ago by gangsters apparently trying to muscle in on the timeshare business. Local reports suggest that the Robinsons were still in touch with Palmer and had visited him in Britain to discuss the timeshare business.This was not the first time that Mr Robinson had been attacked.
Another possibility is that the killings were the work of one of the expanding eastern European gangs that are now operating in the Canary Islands and the Spanish mainland.The Robinsons had been working for the notorious timeshare conman John “Goldfinger” Palmer and still operated from an office that he used.Palmer – who earned his nickname after being cleared of helping to dispose of gold from the £26m Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow airport in 1983 – is living in Essex after being released last year halfway through an eight-year prison sentence for a £30m fraud in which bogus timeshares were sold to 16,000 victims. The murders shocked the couple’s friends and employees, but many were not surprised.Spanish police believe the most likely explanation is that the couple, who ran a highly lucrative timeshare business, were murdered by hitmen hired by rival operators. Her body was discovered in a pool of blood just before midnight.Her husband, also 55, was driven in his grey Porsche Cayenne to an industrial estate about a mile away, where police believe he was tortured. He was found in the morning in the car with his throat cut.Nothing appears to have been stolen and Mr Robinson’s £100,000 watch was left on his wrist.Welcome to the brutal world of the Tenerife timeshare business. Nine days ago was no exception and the British couple drove their Porsche and £90,000 Mercedes into the nearby Playa de las Americas resort area.
But that night, as they ate their tapas, they were being watched, and, as they drove home, they were followed.A powerful vehicle rammed the back of both of their cars and forced them off the road as they approached their home in San Miguel de Abona.Mrs Robinson, 55, appears to have been beaten to death with a rock after getting out of her Mercedes coupe. Every Thursday evening Billy and Florence Robinson used to enjoy a meal out at one of the Spanish restaurants close to their villa on the island of Tenerife. She has been seen in public only once a year, when she pays her respects at Tito’s grave on the anniversary of his death..
His successors put her under virtual house arrest and confiscated all her belongings.Later, as Tito’s personality cult crumbled and his once glorified role in the country’s history came under scrutiny, she was regarded more as a victim but mostly remained in seclusion. “Those surrounding Tito were afraid of things she might tell him, which were contrary to their ideas.”Mrs Broz’s ordeal worsened in 1980, when Tito died at the age of 88. Rumours spread that she had been plotting a coup against her husband; some even suggested she had been planning to poison him.The more likely reason for her removal from public office, however, was that Tito’s aides saw his wife as an obstacle.”She was the person closest to Tito, he trusted her the most,” said Mrs Broz’s lawyer, Mr Fila. The new Mrs Broz was on good terms with the two sons from Tito’s previous marriages and, during the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, she basked in the glory of the personality cult around her husband.But those years came to an abrupt halt when, in 1977, the then first lady of Yugoslavia was thrown out of Tito’s residence in the middle of the night, wearing just a nightgown and a coat Mrs Broz then disappeared from public life. “We could at least close the hole in the living room ceiling.”The dismal surroundings of Mrs Broz’s later life, surviving on the meagre state pension, are a far-cry from the glorious years she spent as Tito’s companion.Jovanka Budisavljevic was 28 years old – and 32 years Tito’s junior – when she married the founder of the Yugoslav state in a secret ceremony in 1952.Despite rumours that his third wife had been chosen by political aides for her impeccable anti-fascist background, the couple seemed to get along well. “No one, let alone the widow of a former president, should live like this,” he said. She lives in a large house, the so-called Guest Villa, of which she uses only two rooms because the rest are uninhabitable.”Mr Ljajic said the state, which owns the large villa in the plush Dedinje district, would next week begin repairs of the premises.
Jovanka Broz, now 81, is spending her twilight years in a bleak Belgrade villa where temperatures can plunge below freezing and a gaping hole in the living room ceiling allows rain to pour through.
“I am shocked at the conditions in which the wife of the former president … is living,” the human rights minister, Rasim Ljajic, told a local newspaper after visiting to check reports that the house had broken plumbing and no heating.”It’s almost unbelievable. More than a quarter of a century after the death of the former Yugoslav dictator, Josip Broz Tito, his octogenarian widow is living in dilapidated state-owned housing with a leaking roof and no central heating. However, regional officials say that over the past century the volume of water carried by the Rhine has increased as a result of overall increases in rainfall during the period..
