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- [00:02]
Katie Strick
This episode contains explicit language and descriptions of violence, drug use, grief and depression. For most people caught up in the spider web of Alex Morgan's death and its aftermath, his killing by Bennett Von Vertes felt like a freak incident. Two friends, young, rich, in the prime of their lives, a drug fuelled rage, a rare and unfathomably violent attack. It was by all accounts a horrifying set of circumstances that shocked not only Alex's loved ones, but the world. It made headlines because of the astonishing and unique nature of the crime. At least you would think you would hope it was unique.
- [00:58]
Sam Hunter
So I pick up the phone and it's sort of like radio silence. And I'm like, yo, what's up? I'm just waking up. And he's like yo man. And he started like sort of shuddering and I was like, bro, what's up?
- [01:13]
Katie Strick
Tell me that this was a once in a lifetime freak incident. He is certainly a thought that has haunted Sam Hunter, Alex's Aussie friend over the last six years. It was 5:58 on the morning of November 4, 2018, four years since Alex's brutal killing and Sam was living back in Australia on the Northern beaches of Sydney. He was trying to move on with his life and make it as a musician when he received a call that would open the wound Alex's death had left in his life once again.
- [01:54]
Sam Hunter
And my best friend, and he was in our rap group, Ben Goldberg, called me at like, it was like 5:58am in the morning on a Sunday. He goes, yo, one of the Anderson brothers is dead. And I just, fuck it. I just in my mind I was like, fuck, please don't be Liam, please don't be Liam. It's honestly my first train of thought. He had two other brothers. Ben goes, but they can't identify him. And as soon as he said that I was like fuck. Like this is bad, you know, if you can't identify a body. Something malicious has happened.
- [02:33]
Katie Strick
Once again, Sam's worst nightmare became a reality. It was his close friend Liam Anderson who was dead. And by the sounds of it, he had been killed in a horrific and violent attack.
- [02:47]
Sam Hunter
And that day I walked to work and I had a massive out of body experience because immediately I went back to thinking about Alex again.
- [02:57]
Katie Strick
As the days went on and details emerged, the parallels between the two deaths became increasingly chilling.
- [03:06]
Sam Hunter
Hello. First tonight, the son of Australian rock star Gary Angry Anderson has been bashed.
- [03:11]
Katie Strick
To death on Sydney's northern beaches.
- [03:14]
Sam Hunter
26 year old Liam Anderson was attacked at Queen.
- [03:17]
Katie Strick
Liam, the 26 year old son of Australian rock icon Angry Anderson had been killed by a friend of his, Matthew Flame. Unlike Alex, he'd been killed in a seemingly safe, well to do paradise of a place. Just swap the snowboarders for surfers and up the temperature and you have a similar world of breathtaking landscapes, grand lavish homes, everyone knowing everyone, a community feel. The circumstances of the two deaths were freakishly similar. A larger than life music and animal lover killed by a man he considered to be a friend. You have a killing blamed on a drug induced psychosis which led the perpetrator to believe his friend was a demon who wanted to kill him and a grieving parent who felt a part of them died when their child died that night too. The opposite side of the world. A different cocktail of drugs, but the same outcome. A promising young life cut short.
- [04:17]
Sam Hunter
Rock star Gary Angry Anderson spoke of the family's grief at losing his youngest son, 26 year old Liam Anderson. I am condemned to a life of sadness.
- [04:29]
Katie Strick
When he died, part of me died with him. Matthew Flame, Liam's killer had reportedly taken a combination of alcohol, cannabis and mdma, not ketamine like Bennett. But the attack had been equally malicious, equally violent. Nat had supposedly seen Liam as a ghoulish creature trying to attack him and bashed Liam to death so violently that he too was required to have a closed coffin.
- [04:58]
Sam Hunter
And when that came to light, I just couldn't believe it. I still can't believe it to this day that that happened to two of my best friends in the world. It rocked me. It, like I said previously, like tore off the band aid and just opened the wound right back up.
- [05:17]
Katie Strick
Helen, Sam's mum, grew increasingly worried for her son around that time.
- [05:23]
Helen
I was concerned for Sam, actual really concerned for her. And yeah, to have to turn your kids to look out for this and that and don't do certain things because you know, you expose yourself to extreme risk. They're not the conversations you want to have with your 20 something year old children.
- [05:48]
Katie Strick
Helen began to wonder whether the deaths of Alex and Liam spoke to a wider problem. A problem of young men and substance abuse and how wealth, peer pressure and a sense of invincibility can trigger a chain of events with the most horrifying of consequences. Because in the years after Alex's death, Liam's killing was not the last tragic loss amongst this particular group of privileged young men. I'm Katie Strick and this is Injustice Killer Privilege from the London Standard and message heard. Episode 5 Bull Pockets.
- [06:35]
Sasha Battiani
It took me quite a while to get in Touch with these, let's call them rich kids.
- [06:40]
Katie Strick
Here's Sasha Battiani, the Swiss journalist we heard from earlier in this series. When he first started to look into Bennett von Vertes, he had trouble infiltrating the elite of Zurich's Gold Coast.
- [06:53]
Sasha Battiani
And then after a while, after maybe the third or fourth meeting we had, one of the guys was mentioning that psychology of money thing.
- [07:04]
Katie Strick
Let us take you back to Switzerland for this next part. A place of multi million euro ski chalets, exclusive rehab centers and courses designed to help those born into dazzling, unimaginable wealth. It's mostly young men in their 20s and 30s attending this particular course. It's a self help seminar, a kind of how to workshop. Except it's not personal finances, interest rates or credit ratings these men are here to learn about. It's a very specific kind of self help course, a first of its kind, as far as I'm aware, on the psychology of wealth. When you're born into a lot of.
- [07:46]
Sasha Battiani
It, you know, young people from all over the world come together for two days to share their worries, you know, and anyone with a fortune of $100 million is admitted. And it's not only people from Switzerland, it's people from Brazil, people from India.
- [08:08]
Katie Strick
The course is run by Swiss leadership coach Wolfgang Janewein, and according to him, there's a lot to unpack when it comes to the children of the super rich.
- [08:19]
Sasha Battiani
They have a fear of having false friends. Not knowing if you just want to be friends because you're so rich or because of other reasons. So there's all these issues of fake relations. And then there is something he called golden cage syndrome. Living in all this wealth, living in big houses and kind of losing their contact to real world, real life, real issues. That's what they would tell him, that's what they would suffer from.
- [08:54]
Katie Strick
Sasha was first made aware of this course in 2023, more than eight years after Alex's death, five years after Liam's, and just months after a third death, that of Philipp Schule Voigt, the 38 year old son of the billionaire Robert Schulevoigt, who was at one time one of Germany's wealthiest businessmen. Sasha spent time speaking to attendees of these courses and Mr. Yanawein himself. He wanted to learn more about the psychology of these young people who were born into such great sums of wealth, yet often seemed to be squandering it and self destructing or destructing or destroying others. In some cases, young people like Bennett von Vertes, who just so happened to be a good friend of Philip Schuler voigt. It was January 2023 when Sasha heard the news of Philip's death. Eight years since, Alex's killing has sent shockwaves through his social circle across Europe.
- [09:59]
Sasha Battiani
At the beginning, it was, you know, text messages. Have you heard about the second case?
- [10:06]
Katie Strick
Most of that Zurich set were in their 30s by this point. Some married and settled down, others single and globetrotting. But the rumors rippled through WhatsApp groups like it was 2014 all over again.
- [10:19]
Sasha Battiani
That's how they told me that if this thing would be whatever Hollywood movie, you would see dozens of smartphones ringing smartphones, you know, in London, in Zurich, in Munich, and everyone would ask, have you heard the news? Do you know what happened?
- [10:46]
Katie Strick
Within days, the rumours were confirmed. Philipp, the heir to a German industrial dynasty, had been found dead by an employee in a luxury hotel in Zurich on Tuesday 10 January. The employee had unlocked the room because he'd not answered the phone and there was a sweet, acrid smell coming out of it. According to what appeared to be oddly few reports about the death, acquaintances say Philip, previously a keen drug user, had been clean for two years before checking into the hotel the previous month. They also allege that Bennett had visited him at some point while he was staying there. Before we explore this story any further, it's important to make one thing clear. Bennett has never been linked with Philip's death. There are rumours he died of a suspected overdose, but nothing has been confirmed. And reports say Philip died of a heart attack. What did link the two men, Philip and Bennett, however, were their backgrounds and the drugs that had consumed their lives. They're linked because they were two young, wealthy elites running in the same environment, the same milieu. Sasha says that's why he became interested in the Psychology of Wealth seminars. He wanted to get inside this world of money and reckless youth.
- [12:10]
Sasha Battiani
They provide an insight into the heads and souls and the psychology of these children, of these wealthy parents. And that's what I found interesting. It gives you a broader picture of the lives they live.
- [12:24]
Katie Strick
Sasha began digging, interested to learn more about Bennett and the company he kept before he brought Alex back to his parents villa that night. And after months spent asking around, he was finally able to speak to some of Bennett and Philip's friends.
- [12:42]
Sasha Battiani
I learned that before Bennett's imprisonment, the two spent, you know, vacations in Ibiza and met up at parties and both couldn't keep their hands off coke and ketamine from the outside, you know, they both lived a Glamorous kind of, kind of Instagram life. They were young, they were good looking, both, you know, in their white shirts and, you know, they squandered their parents money.
- [13:11]
Katie Strick
You'll remember Sasha describing the whole thing as some kind of bad Netflix series. These good looking, globe trotting young men living their lives almost like 1930s aristocrats. St. Moritz for the winter, Cote d' Azur for summer, Milan for shopping, and Zurich as a safe hub somewhere in the middle.
- [13:31]
Sasha Battiani
The thing I had to laugh was when one of Bennett's friends told me it was like the aristocracy in the old days.
- [13:40]
Katie Strick
But behind the dazzling drug fuelled Instagram lifestyles, there were comedowns, mood swings, psychotic breaks. Although Philip was described as a nice guy, a lost soul, he did have several convictions for bodily harm and violating narcotics laws. According to reports, a drug fueled violent streak he shared with Bennett. And in fact, during the course of his reporting, Sasha saw several graphic photographs taken by Bennett in 2014. Philip was in a few of them, his hand bandaged. Here's Sasha rifling through his notes.
- [14:20]
Sasha Battiani
So I remember seeing pictures of blood. There was a table and then there were some drops of blood, fingerprints of blood all around the floor and on the table. So there must have been some kind of fighting, something.
- [14:39]
Katie Strick
We'll be right back. It was as Sasha was learning more and more about Philip that he first got in contact with Wolfgang Janewine, who ran the Psychology of money course. Mr. Jenowine told him tears are often shed in his workshops as attendees talked about the struggles and pressures of being born into such successful families.
- [15:02]
Sasha Battiani
Very often they have feelings of guilt about having all this money without even having lifted a finger for it. That's especially true for children of so called nouveau riche families in particular because obviously there is no tradition of dealing with this amount of money.
- [15:25]
Katie Strick
So what you're probably thinking, these kids struggle to deal with being rich. Pass us the violin. But Sasha said something about the conversations he had with Mr. Yanawine that I did find interesting.
- [15:37]
Sasha Battiani
They have full pockets, but empty lives.
- [15:43]
Katie Strick
Full pockets and empty lives. This seems to be a defining theme that links young men like Bennett and Philip. And it's sobering, especially when you begin to think about what it is exactly that so many of these young men tend to fill those empty lives with. Bennett was spending about a thousand francs a month on drugs by the time of Alex's killing. We know this already. He started with cannabis in school, and then he started to take cocaine and then ketamine. Here's Christine Brandt, the Court reporter we featured in earlier episodes. The thing is that he never had any troubles with the money. He just could pay it because he got so much money from his family. He just took more and more and more. It's like the normal career of a drug. Ahead of his first trial in 2017, Bennett told a psychiatric examiner that he often entered a dream state while high on drugs. He had visions and developed so called superpowers. When he was under drugs, he lost control, he fell from the chairs, he started fighting with other people in the clubs. Those drug fueled so called superpowers gave Bennett an illusion of invincibility, it seemed, and only added to a sense of entitlement and recklessness that runs through many of the characters we've heard about in this story. And it was an illusion that was quickly shattered for so many of these young men after Alex and Liam were killed. Here's Sam Hunter again.
- [17:16]
Sam Hunter
He's like, wow, this is life. This is the reality. We're not invincible. We're not made of concrete. You can't just do what you want, you know, it's not a fucking game of gta, you know.
- [17:27]
Katie Strick
Sam and his friends were in their early 20s at the time of Alex's death. A formative age to have that illusion shattered.
- [17:35]
Sam Hunter
It seems like a lifetime ago because I'm 32 now, but yeah, it definitely rocked the boat, so to speak, and derailed me. And I know a lot of us from what we were doing at the time, it's been an absolute ride. And if you don't find as a human something to focus on that's positive, or you're not doing something for yourself that you love, you can get lost very easily on this planet in this experience of life. Although it's beautiful, it can be, you know, the, the total opposite.
- [18:12]
Katie Strick
Sam didn't lose his way forever. Mercifully, he made it out of that vicious cycle with the help of friends, family and music. And he says the two deaths opened his eyes to living his life. But he did find himself using drugs as a coping mechanism in the immediate aftermath of those two deaths.
- [18:33]
Sam Hunter
And yeah, I should have handled myself better, but I didn't. And honestly, there's a lot of, a lot of time in the timeline from 2014 to 2020 that I don't remember and it scares me sometimes. But, you know, that's what happened.
- [18:56]
Katie Strick
It's worth remembering that Sam doesn't drive a Porsche and isn't the heir to an incredible fortune. He would not qualify for that psychology of money. Course we've Talked about. But drugs aren't solely a pastime for mega rich kids. They're rife among the middle classes too, especially 20 somethings, university students and even teenagers, one in ten of whom in the UK have tried hard drugs such as ketamine and cocaine, according to a recent study.
- [19:25]
Sam Hunter
Now we have social media, apparently, allegedly you have dealers on Snapchat and like even on Instagram you get fake accounts adding you going like, this is where you get your pills and you can get this and that and it's, it's just fucking crazy. If I look back, I wish that, that I didn't sort of fall into peer pressure and I didn't abuse, abuse myself for so long, you know, but you can't take that back. And I think my saving grace is I never, I never went out and hurt other people or used my suffering or my escapism or abuse of drugs and alcohol to, you know, put that out there into society.
- [20:12]
Katie Strick
Some of Sasha and Sam's words here remind me of an interview I read in a British newspaper recently with the criminologist and heir to One of the UK's biggest fortunes, Lady Edwina Louise Grosvenor. She talks about how her father, the sixth Duke of Westminster, sent her to a drug rehabilitation center center, growing up to spend time with two heroin addicts. As one of the richest men in Britain, he knew the risks of being born into a privileged family such as his. So he wanted to educate his children about the dangers of substance abuse from an early age. It was such an impactful hour, Lady Edwina told the newspaper. I grew up understanding why people take drugs. They were trying to medicate themselves and find, forget about the trauma they'd suffered. I never saw it as glamorous or something to do recreationally because my parents had got there before me. I found myself wondering, could Bennett have benefited from an experience like this or a course like Mr. Yanawine's? This brought me back to my conversation with Sasha and something else that Mr. Yanawine said, which resonated about successful fathers and sons of successful fathers.
- [21:26]
Sasha Battiani
They always came back to their fathers because obviously their fathers, they had in most cases a tremendous success. Because we're not talking here about, you know, having money as maybe a doctor's family have money. It's a lot of money. And to earn this amount of money in maybe 30 years, that's something, I mean, for their sons, they stand in the shadow of their fathers. And of course it comes with a price because normally to earn that much, you work like hell. So you're never home and you're absent, and that's how you grow up.
- [22:08]
Katie Strick
This idea of absent parents was something that came up again and again when I spoke to friends of Alex and Bennett's about their upbringings in London, Sydney and Switzerland. Sam said the same about the teens he met growing up.
- [22:23]
Sam Hunter
And I was like, I've never met your parents. Like, where are your parents? And it's a strange thing when the parents aren't there. And time and time again you go over and you're like, so you can just do what you want here. And, like, you don't have any repercussions. And, like, I don't need to go and, you know, clean up after myself because you've got maids and the maids live here, like, blew my mind.
- [22:49]
Katie Strick
Sam's mother, Helen, remembers this too. The arrogance of some of those boys Sam and Alex found themselves hanging out with. How entitled some of them were, even at the age of 10.
- [23:02]
Helen
I remember walking in one evening late after work, in my stilettos and power suits, as I used to typically wear. Walked into the house, there's 10 kids sitting on the couch, and one of the boys flicks his fingers at me. I'm on the phone to my boss, we're talking about the 2005 budget. And I said, just a moment, Terry, just hang on a tick. And I turned around, said, I beg your pardon. He said, cheese and tomato sandwich. Thanks.
- [23:45]
Katie Strick
Helen put this boy in his place. At the time, she was famously the strictest parent in the group. But the comment stuck with her. It revealed so much about how these kids were being raised.
- [23:57]
Helen
They were very privileged children. They were what we call latchkey kids, but they spent more time at my house than they did at their own. They didn't have mothers or parents that I could see. I met them, I think, once or twice, but they were just lived somewhere else. They were either living in Geneva or Paris or wherever. They just left their kids alone to fend for themselves.
- [24:28]
Katie Strick
Extraordinary absenteeism when the boys were young wasn't the only problem. It was the success of some of these parents, too, that seemed to shape many of these young men's mentalities. Sam's father had been a professional football player. Philip's dad ran a successful German industrial business. Liam's was a famous singer.
- [24:51]
Sam Hunter
We both are people that had sort of big shoes to fill.
- [24:56]
Katie Strick
And this was true for Alex, too. We don't know much about Alex's relationship with his father, who never got back to me. And as far as we know, anyway, has Never given an interview with the media since his son's killing. But what we do know is that he was a successful financier and that Alex had spoken to friends about his father's absence in his life. As for Bennett, well, the truth is equally mysterious. But we do know that his parents were separated, that he'd attempted to follow his incredibly successful father into the art industry and that his father had chosen, for whatever reason, not to attend Bennett's trial. Here's what Bennett's friends told Sasha.
- [25:40]
Sasha Battiani
That's also something they would explain. He was suffering because of the success his father had in the, in the art dealing world.
- [25:54]
Katie Strick
Andre, one of Alex's friends from Zurich, believes Bennett's parents may have been enablers. It's a duty to, you know, pass on values and opinions and whatnot. So, you know, there's a lot of good parents and some parents that are maybe a bit overwhelmed with whatever they have and then, you know, they just provide, provide, provide. And so you lose kind of essentials growing up, having so much around you from, you know, physical thingies. Maybe then like the whole mental or loving aspect kind of goes down the drain. Privilege, drugs, a sense of invincibility and living in the shadow of successful, often absent fathers. They're themes that are run throughout the heart of this story and they paint a cautionary tale. It's important to be careful when talking about wealth in this way. Of course, people don't just go and commit violent, drug fuelled murders because they have a lot of money. Of course they don't. But money can have an impact on their character. This is my opinion on money. I don't think money in itself causes people to behave worse or better than they are. I think it reveals you for who you are. Here's Katya. But the thing is that money actually does give you power and so you can distort the reality around you and you can change the path of people's lives if you so wish, for good or bad. Helen, Sam's mum, sees it in more explicit terms.
- [27:45]
Helen
It just makes you a bigger asshole.
- [27:50]
Katie Strick
In episode six, we'll bring our series to a close by delving into some of the disturbing rumors surrounding Bennett's whereabouts today.
- [27:58]
Sasha Battiani
And then he claimed to be fresh out of prison because he had murdered someone. And I just thought, well, that's not a good line for first dates if you ask me.
- [28:14]
Katie Strick
We'll speak to Team A about where they're at with their grief journeys. Ten years on, something like this happens and then reality kicks in and yeah, the past 10 years. You know, you go through life and you definitely know whatever you do, there's consequences. And Katya leaves us with her key learnings from the whole thing about loss, about life, and about why she believes Bennett might really have killed Alex that night. One of the advantages and disadvantages of being online is that people can find me. And I'm forever grateful and surprised by the trickle of information I get regarding Alex's killer injustice. Killer Privilege is a London standard and message heard production. I'm your host, Katie Strick. This episode was Produced by Sophie McNulty. Ari Stott is our senior producer and James Cox is our our production coordinator. Sandra Ferrari, Anna Van Praag and Jake Warren are the executive producers. Sound editing by Lizzie Andrews and Alan Lear and music composition by Tom Biddle.