'Death by hooker' for sacked London banker

A high-flying banker paid two unwitting escorts to help him commit suicide. Colin Birch, 44, hanged himself from a tree days after he lost his job as an assistant vice president at Deutsche Bank in London. The women, Marie Laurent and Alex Sturley, both 35, thought he was playing a kinky sex game and wearing a safety harness.

They hurled abuse him, telling him he "deserved to die", while he stood on a wooden step with a noose around his neck. A police source said: "The girls believe they were used to help kill him without realising what they were doing. It was death by hooker." Ms Laurent and Ms Sturley, from Katie's Lovely Escorts agency, said that Mr Birch had told them to meet him at a wood Dartford Heath, in south-east England, on July 30 and pose as his executioners.



The married father-of-two from South East London had paid them £60 each. The women told the police that they left him for only a moment and that during that time he had killed himself. In the weeks before his death Mr Birch had hired other women from Katie's Lovely Escorts to meet him at the same spot for sado-masochist games.

"A couple of weeks before he died he had five or six girls out in the woods and paid them to abuse him," the police source said. "The girls thought it was a bit of harmless fun and easy money. Then he contacted the agency again and sent a text saying he wanted a couple of girls to meet him up on Dartford Heath. He said in his message, 'I want them to pretend they are executioners who are going to kill me.'"