Wife reveals sordid secret life of control freak who murdered his children

Nov 23 2008 By Marion Scott

A SHATTERED mum has revealed how the father who butchered their two sons transformed from loving husband into a twisted control freak.

Giselle Ross split from Ashok Kalyanjee after three years of married hell.

She gave the Sunday Mail her only remaining picture of Kalyanjee - showing him as a happy groom at their wedding.

Giselle, 41, spoke for the first time after Kalyanjee admitted last week that he had killed Paul, six, and Jay, two after picking them up to play football.

Giselle revealed how Kalyanjee:

Humiliated her by making her take a DNA test to prove he was the father after Jay's birth.

Was so obsessed with his own mum they spent their honeymoon night in her flat.

Phoned her to say the boys were fine before delivering the chilling last words: "You'll regret what you did to me in this life."

Kalyanjee, 46, took the boys to the Campsie Fells, north of Glasgow, in his car, stabbed them and slashed their throats.

He then poured petrol on them and the car's interior, before trying to set fire to it.

Last week the call centre manager admitted stabbing his two sons to death despite not making a formal guilty plea.

Lawyers told the High Court in Glasgow a plea would be entered on Wednesday once his mental state was established.

Giselle, 41, of Royston, Glasgow, was tricked into driving her ex-husband to the beauty spot near Lennoxtown a week before he embarked on the double killing.

Giselle said: "It haunts me he must have been planning what he was going to do to my beautiful babies every inch of the way.

"Ash sat in the back of the car with the boys. If he was so unhappy, why didn't he just reach forward and stab me to death instead of the boys. He's as good as killed me anyway because I don't want to carry on without my babies."

Kalyanjee returned a week later to commit one of Scotland's most shocking killings.

Giselle and her sister Katie spent a frantic six hours begging police to look for Kalyanjee when he failed to return with the boys, unaware they were already dead.

But she was told by officers she would have to wait 24 hours before they could be considered officially "missing". Late that afternoon, Kalyanjee and his sons were found.

Even experienced ambulancemen needed trauma counselling after dealing with the carnage.

Giselle has revealed for the first time the misery she hid from her family during her three-year marriage.

She said: "I've spent years hiding things frommy family because I didn't want to hurt or worry them. They wouldn't have understood why Ash refused to live like an ordinary family man, with me and his sons.

Giselle suspected her oddball husband hid the true extent of his gambling and alcohol problem.

She said: "He was always moaning about money but later I discovered he'd been going to casinos and gambling thousands of pounds at a time."

"One day there was a television programme on gambling while he was with me and the boys, and he turned and toldme that he'd been to a casino and won thousands. When I questioned him about it, he tried to make a joke and said he'd gambled it all back."

"I really didn't believe him. Now I think the story was true.

"I knew he was drinking but I didn't know how much or how often. It's only recently I began to realise he had a serious problem.

"I put up with his strange behaviour for the sake ofmy babies and because I didn't want my family upset.

"But the truth is that he wanted me to live with his mum and become her skivvy, and I simply refused to do that because I wanted what every woman wants, a house and family of her own.

"I'd never been out with a man before Imet Ash. I was 34 and had just left home."

Ash repeatedly asked Giselle to marry him, and despite her reservations, she relented.

She said: "He kept asking me. He'd promise we'd get a house and raise a family if only I agreed to be his wife. But then he would insist his mother Maya came too.

"I didn't want to start married life like that."

Kalyanjee lived with Maya, 70, in a flat in Cowcaddens, Glasgow.

Giselle said: "Despite having lived in the UK for more than 20 years, she refused to speak anything but Punjabi, so I couldn't even speak to her.

"She called Ash incessantly, and whenever shewanted something, he'd drop everything and run to her."

Giselle and Kalyanjee wed on March 28, 2001 at Glasgow registry office.

But she said: "Deep down I felt there was something not right and I wish I'd trusted my intuition and not gone ahead.

We spent our wedding night at the flat he shared with his mum. The next day I went back to my flat alone, with a feeling of despair at being let down.

"Ash refused to eat my food and went home every night to his mum's cooking instead.

"He took all his washing to her and every single night she'd phone him, and he'd go running back."

When Giselle became pregnant with their first son, Paul, she was overjoyed but after three years of bizarre marriage, they divorced in July, 2004.

They continued to have a sexual relationship but when Giselle became pregnant with Jay, Kalyanjee was furious.

Giselle said: "He refused to accept we were having another baby. I was almost out of hospital by the time Ash came to see us. He brought flowers but refused to pick up Jay or hold him. I was terribly hurt.

When Jay was just months old, Kalyanjee delivered a cruel ultimatum.

Giselle said: "He started demanding a DNA test, insisting he had to be sure Jay was his son.

"I was absolutely horrified he could ask such a thing. He knew I'd never been with anyone else, before or after him.

"But he wore me down so much, I finally agreed to the blood tests.

"I was mortified sitting in front of doctors who must have thought I was some kind of trollop, while he sat there denying his own son.

"I knew what the results were going to be and I told him I hoped he was proud of himself."

Giselle feared he would snatch the kids and take them to India. She said: "I was tortured by that fear, and that's why I never stopped him seeing the boys, or gave him a hard time.

"I had my babies and that was all I wanted or needed."

On the day he killed them, Kalyanjee arranged to take the boys, so Giselle dressed them and saw them off.

It was the last time she saw them alive. She said: "There was no sign anything was wrong that Saturday.

"If there had been, I never would've allowed the boys to go with him that day.

"I got a phone call from him around 1pm that day and I asked him if the children wanted to come home.

"He simply said: 'Your babies are fine, your babies are fine'.

"But there was a terrible silence and I couldn't hear them at all.

"Then he said, 'You'll regret what you did to me in this life' and hung up.

"I went cold and almost dropped the phone. I tried and tried to get back through to his phone but I couldn't because he'd switched it off."

"I must have tried more than a hundred times. That's when I knew I had to go and get help from the police.

"I went to a police station near where his mother lives and begged them to start searching for the children.

"But officers told me I had to wait 24 hours for them to be considered officially missing, so my sister Katie and I began searching everywhere we could think of."

The sisters spent six frantic hours searching the streets for Kalyanjee and the children, unaware they were dead.

Giselle buried her sons together in the cemetery at Riddrie, Glasgow, with her mother Jean's ashes beside them.

She visits their black marble teddy bear headstones.

Giselle said: "The boys are buried in the same coffin, with their arms around each other.

"I visit their grave every day and as I stand there, looking at their headstones, I can see the turrets of Barlinnie Prison where their father goes to sleep at night, not knowing or caring where they are.

"Hell is too good a place for him."

'If he was so unhappy why didn't he stab me instead'

'He said I would regret what I'd done to him'

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