A takeaway chef asked a friend how he would dispose of a body before making a dramatic confession that he’d killed somebody.
Nikola Zhulev admitted that he had bludgeoned Perthshire jeweller Alan Gardner on the head with a frying pan, a jury heard yesterday.
Zhulev revealed to his pal that he’d carried out the killing because Mr Gardner had threatened to call the police and tell them the heroin addict had stolen GBP50 from him.
Kostadin Velev, 30, told a jury at the High Court in Livingston that he’d been friends with the accused since they were teenagers together in their native Bulgaria and had housed him when he moved to Scotland in 2012.
The day before 49-year-old Mr. Gardner’s body was found wrapped ‘cocoon-like’ in a duvet at his home in Balbeggie, Mr Velev said he met Zhulev in a car park during his lunch break from college.
He said the accused had asked him what he would do with the body if he killed someone. “It was from the blue,” he told the jury. “It was an odd question to ask. I didn’t expect that question.
“I was stunned why would he ask me that question. I asked him: ‘Why would you ask me something like this?’ He just said: ‘No reason. I’m just asking.’
During a second meeting after college that day Mr Velev said Zhulev had told him that he had “messed up” and that he had done “something terrible”.
Advocate depute Jane Farquharson asked him: “Did he tell you what he had done?”
Mr Velev replied: “Yes, that he hit Alan and Alan died. I think he told me he hit him with a pan over the head.
“He said that he killed him. He had a concerned look on his face. I just asked him to stop joking: ‘Why would you joke with something like this?’ I didn’t know what to believe him or not. I just didn’t.
“He’s really not very trustworthy. That’s the truth. I didn’t believe him.”
Mr Velev said he had not told anyone about the bizarre confession until he was interviewed by the police a month later.
He said: “I met him the following morning. He was telling me that the police were looking for him and he would go to the police to see why they were looking for him. I’d been lied to by him for so many times so…”
He said Zhulev had told him that he had hit Alan over the head with the pan in his house in Balbeggie, but not when it had happened.
“He said that he stole £50 from Alan. Alan found out about it and wanted to call to the police and in the panic he did what he told me that he did.
“The question I was asked before what I would do with a body. I was surprised and amazed by the question. That’s an, odd question to ask anyone.
“You think you know someone but I would never be expected to be asked this by anyone. He said he would try to do something with the body, to bury it somewhere.”
Zhulev, 30, is charged with murdering Mr. Gardner and concealing his body and digging a grave for him in the woods with the intention of defeating the ends of justice.
He denies the charges and the trial continues.