Palmer earned his nickname after being cleared of helping to dispose of the loot from the £26m Brink’s-Mat robbery at London’s Heathrow airport in 1983 by smelting it down in the garden of his West Country mansion. He was a friend of the dead couple.
Billy Robinson, 55, was found tortured with his throat slit on the back seat of his grey Porsche Cayenne car parked on an industrial estate on Friday morning.
The body of his wife Florence, also 55, had been found hours earlier a mile away lying in a pool of blood next to her battered £90,000 Mercedes. She had been bludgeoned to death.
The Robinsons once worked for Palmer’s timeshare empire and still operated from an office that he once used. Police believe the couple may have told Palmer, 55, of threats against them.
Palmer is living in Britain after being released early from an eight-year prison sentence for a £30m fraud in which bogus timeshares were sold to 16,000 victims. When he was jailed in 2001, he ranked 105th in The Sunday Times Rich List with a fortune of £300m. There was no reply yesterday from the Essex mansion where Palmer lives with a girlfriend and keeps a £100,000 Bentley.
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Spanish detectives believe the Robinsons may have been murdered by east European gangsters trying to muscle in on the profits to be made from selling annual short stays in holiday apartments, or by north African hitmen hired to kill them.
The Robinsons are thought to have fled in their cars when a gang ambushed them outside their brown-walled villa in San Miguel de Abona, near Playa de las Americas, a resort popular with British holidaymakers.
Their cars were rammed from behind as they tried to flee on country lanes across scrubland.
Police believe Florence Robinson was beaten to death with a rock after getting out of the car. Her husband may have been forced to witness the murder before he, too, was killed. His car was found abandoned with his body inside it.
The news of the murders was broken to the couple’s son Liam by photographers gathered at the scene of Florence Robinson’s murder on a lane 300 metres from their villa.
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Esteban Perez, one of the photographers, said: “We were at the spot where Mrs Robinson was killed. Suddenly a man drove by very fast in a black Porsche Cayenne towards the house. He came back and asked, ‘What happened, what happened? Where are the people from the house?’
“I told him they were dead. I did not realise at the time that it was their son. But when he drove away, I saw his face reflected in the wing mirror of his car. It was white with shock and full of anguish.”
The body of Billy Robinson was still wearing his £100,000 watch, which police see as an indication that the motive was not robbery, but may be linked to the lucrative timeshare business.
Captain Gonzalez Amador of the Guardia Civil in Tenerife said: “This is a complex case. Eastern European crime gangs usually rob and kill people for their luxury cars or belongings and this did not happen here. Both the Robinsons’ Porsche and Mercedes were left there, as was Mr Robinson’s valuable watch.”
The couple, who also had a daughter Billie, who lives in London, ran a timeshare company called Global World Travel. They recently applied to the Tenerife council to move away from the property industry and into tourism.
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According to one source, Billy Robinson was beaten up two years ago by a family of British gangsters trying to muscle in on the timeshare business. He did not make a formal complaint to the police.
The source said the Robinsons worked for Palmer for several years and were on good terms with him at the time of their murders.
One Spanish detective said: “We are not ruling out anything, but the main theory at the moment is that this murder was a settling of scores by others in the same area of business as the Robinsons.”
Additional reporting: Graham Keeley, Barcelona