Collymore before court again, accused of conspiring to murder girlfriend
KINGSTON, Jamaica—Barbadian businessman Omar Collymore, who is serving a double life sentence for masterminding the January 2018 murder of his then-wife, Simone Campbell-Collymore, and cab driver Winston Walters, will on Wednesday be engulfed in a fresh trial.
This time, to answer charges that he conspired to murder another woman with whom he was in a relationship.
Details of the alleged plot will be unveiled on Wednesday when the Crown lays out its case against Collymore, who, alongside his co-accused Carey Jonas, Dwayne Pink, Michael Adams and Shaquille Edwards, is all facing charges of illegal possession of a firearm, shooting with intent and conspiracy to murder.
Three of the four — Pink, Adams and Edwards — are currently serving time alongside Collymore for their involvement in the murders of Campbell-Collymore and Walters. Jonas is being indicted for the first time alongside Collymore and was not involved in the 2018 murders.
Wade Blackwood, one of the shooters in the 2018 incident, after pleading guilty in 2021 and agreeing to testify against the others, had been handed two life sentences for the two counts of murder and eight-and-a-half years for illegal possession of a firearm during a separate trial. He will be eligible for parole after serving 35 years.
At the end of the substantive trial in 2024, Collymore, in being slapped with the two life sentences, was also sentenced to one year and six months for conspiracy and ordered to serve 46 years and six months before becoming eligible for parole. Adams and Pink were also handed life sentences for those murders by Supreme Court Judge Justice Leighton Pusey.
Adams will become eligible for parole after 42 years and six months, while Pink must serve at least 32 years and six months before he gains eligibility. Both men also received sentences of two years and six months and one year and six months, respectively, for conspiracy to murder. All the sentences were concurrent.
Their co-accused, Shaquille Edwards, who was found guilty of conspiracy to murder but was not on the scene, had been sentenced to one year in prison.
In the highly publicised and shocking incident, Campbell-Collymore and Walters were ambushed on January 2, 2018 and shot dead by gunmen on motorbikes outside the Forest Ridge apartment complex in Red Hills, St Andrew, where she lived with her then husband and children.
Campbell-Collymore was shot 19 times, and Walters five times. The Crown at the close of their case established that Collymore ordered the hit to claim his wife’s multimillion, Jamaican-dollar life insurance policies from which their two children were entitled to 15 per cent each, while Collymore was entitled to 70 per cent of the benefits.
He was also listed as trustee for the children and their portion. Those policies were taken out by the couple of three months before her murder. He was captured by cops at the Norman Manley International Airport while attempting to flee the island a day before his wife’s funeral.
— Alicia Dunkley-Willis