CONVICTED hitman Wade Blackwood, who was sentenced to life after confessing to being the triggerman in the 2018 murder of 32-year-old businesswoman Simone Campbell-Collymore, is appealing his sentence.

The then 24-year-old was subcontracted to kill Campbell-Collymore in a $2-million murder-for-hire-plot hatched by her then husband Omar “Best” Collymore. Thirty-six-year-old taxi driver Winston Walters was also killed during the incident which took place outside Campbell-Collymore’s Forest Ridge apartment in Red Hills, St Andrew, on January 2, 2018. The two men involved in the shooting that day were identified by the police, from closed-circuit television footage in the vicinity, as Blackwood and a now-deceased Corporate Area don who went by the name Jim.

According to Blackwood, Jim had fired into the driver’s side of the vehicle while he fired from the passenger side. Campbell-Collymore was shot 19 times and Walters five times. Jim was killed during a confrontation with members of the security forces while Blackwood was captured by the police.

Blackwood, who had been held by cops in April 2018, had pleaded guilty in January 2021 to two counts of murder and one count of illegal possession of firearm before the Home Circuit Court in downtown Kingston. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the murders, ahead of the other individuals involved in the plot, with 35 years on each count of murder before eligibility for parole, and eight years and six months for illegal possession of firearm. Those sentences, however, were to run concurrently, making it so that he would serve 35 years before applying for parole.

In February of 2024, Blackwood, who testified against his co-accused following a deal with prosecutors, claimed he was pressured into committing the act by Jim, who was supposedly the ‘don’ for a gang his brother had been involved with. Blackwood claimed that Jim, in levelling death threats at him and his family, told him that he had to carry out the killing to repay his brother’s debt for a firearm that had been seized by the police. Blackwood, in negotiating with the prosecution, had 15 years shaved off his sentence, which now makes him eligible for parole after 20 years. He is now appealing his sentences for those two offences.

At the end of the substantive trial, Collymore, who was slapped with 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. His co-conspirators Dwayne Pink, Michael Adams, and Shaquille Edwards were also handed life sentences.

In the highly publicised and shocking incident, Campbell-Collymore and Walters were ambushed and shot dead outside the apartment complex where she lived with her then husband and children. The Crown, at the close of their case, established that Collymore ordered the hit to claim his wife’s multimillion-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 three months before the murders.

Collymore was collared by cops at the Norman Manley International Airport while attempting to flee the island a day before his wife’s funeral.

Earlier this month, Collymore, alongside his co-accused Pink, Adams and Edwards, appeared before the Home Circuit Court again where they are all facing charges of illegal possession of firearm, shooting with intent, and conspiracy to murder with respect to an unnamed woman the businessman was seeing at the same time he orchestrated his wife’s death. A new individual, Carey Jonas, is also named on the indictment with respect to the new matter.

— Alicia Dunkley-Willis