It was past midnight in Los Cristianos when Michael O'Hara went back to Little Stevie's to lock up. The pub he ran with his girlfriend and business partner, Jackie Ambler, a 31-year-old from Doncaster, was empty. He was never seen alive again. His body was found the next morning. He had been hit with a beer keg and a rag had been forced down his throat.
Witnesses put Ambler at the bar that night with two British bouncers from Pluto's Disco nearby: Stan Stewart, a Scottish bodybuilder, and Gary Holmes. All three were arrested.
Andrew Winder's island
To understand the island they were living on, the film goes back to the late 1980s. John "Goldfinger" Palmer had brought the hard-sell timeshare model from Florida, and a big American timeshare company had set up too, recruiting double-glazing salesmen, students, wide boys and villains.
One of them was Andrew Winder, a powerfully built man from Darlington. The book Blaggers, written under the name Barry Lay by a man who calls himself Winder's one-time enemy and later ally, describes him and his best friend riding the island on motorbikes, keeping the reps in line and having touts who changed sides beaten and thrown off the island.
According to Lay, the American company paid Winder £50,000 plus £1,000 a week for 12 months to walk away. A year later he was back with his own crew, taxing every major timeshare firm for protection. Even Palmer's enforcers, the Clompers, were wary of him. In late 1993 a warning visit to a rival security firm went wrong, and Winder was shot dead.
The trial
At first, Stewart and Holmes both confessed to O'Hara's killing, and their story put the blame on Ambler. They said she had offered them £54,000 to get rid of her partner. Ambler said she was innocent. She said she had been outside and found him already dead. She never changed her story.
When the trial opened in Santa Cruz, Holmes changed his. He said he killed O'Hara in a row over a drug debt and made up the story about Ambler because he feared she would go to the police. He stood up in court and shouted: "These people are innocent. Do what you like to me, but let them go."
The three judges did not believe him. They went with his first statement. Ambler's 13-year-old son was flown in from England to give evidence for his mother, and the court rejected that too. Holmes and Stewart got 29 years. Ambler got 27, the harshest sentence ever given to British nationals on the island. Stewart's and Ambler's families have always said they were innocent. O'Hara's mother called Ambler a black widow.
Kenneth Noye
In May 1996 Kenneth Noye, once convicted of handling the Brink's-Mat gold, fled Britain after stabbing the young kickboxer Stephen Cameron to death on a Kent slip road. Palmer was his first call and flew him out on his private jet. The film tells how Noye clashed with Palmer's enforcer Dennis New after New smashed a bottle into a stranger's face on a night out. Noye did not stay long. He moved on under false names until the net closed on him.
The end of Goldfinger
By the late 1990s Palmer's former right-hand man and his brother had their own timeshare businesses, and the old partnership had become a war. According to court testimony and local reports, Palmer tried more than once to have them killed. In one attempt, two gunmen opened fire on their car. In another, six Clompers armed with baseball bats beat both brothers in their apartment complex, until the police arrived.
Palmer's empire never recovered from the investigations that followed. In June 2015 he was shot dead outside his Essex home. The killing remains unsolved.