Mr Ogundipe narrated the incidents that led to the death of her daughter in an interview with DAYO OYEWO of The Punch newspaper, Nigeria.
Can you tell us a bit about your daughter, Alanis?
Alanis was born in 1997 in the United Kingdom. She finished her A levels in 2016. She went to the University of Manchester where she studied Accounting and Finance. After that, she got a job with Marks Sattin as Finance Consultant and she did that for a year. She got another job with AM Fashion between 2020 and 2021. In 2021, she was hired by KPMG in the UK. She was employed so that she could do her ACA programme. Usually, people do it for three to or five years but she chose the one-year route. And she passed 14 out of 15 exams in 10 months. Everything was going well for her until last year when she met her boyfriend, Ryan Leggets, around June. He was introduced to her by one of her friends. The friend told Ryan that Alanis had access to free money.
How much did you know about your daughter’s relationship with the opposite sex?
I have always advised my daughter that she was able to complete her university because she was not in a serious relationship and I told her to wait until she completed the ACA and became chartered before she allowed a man to come in unless they were going to flop her. So when this guy came on board, it was sudden. She had just finished the 14th exam. She had been for over ten months she had not had any interaction, so she needed that interaction. It was this friend of hers who brought this guy from nowhere. I tried to discourage her but in a very smart way so she wouldn’t run away from me.
At what point did you get to know about their affair?
It was gradual but when I got to fully know was when she said Bryan was offering her a free gift to travel to Italy on her birthday on February 12 and I told her not to go. I told her not to accept a gift from him and that the guy was going to put her at his mercy. But before I knew it, she had actually gone. She now said the guy was paying for everything. This thing was not clear to me until after she had died before I got all the evidence. In less than one month of the relationship, he already said he wanted to marry her and take her to his mother. They met in June and by the first week of August, he had given her herpes. My daughter was ignorant that she thought she would not be able to meet anyone again due to the infection. She actually told her mother that she felt her life was ruined. She was stuck with the guy because of the infection. This is a girl who was a Director of my company in Nigeria, to whom I sent money regularly and who did not need his help for anything. If they wanted to do anything together, he would loan her the money so as to make her do it. He would first tell her it was a gift and then tell her it was a loan.
When did he start to blackmail her?
The whole thing escalated when they came back from Italy as he started asking for her bank statements on May 13. He started shouting at her. After she refused to give it to him, he waited till May 28 after he had found out that she was expecting 100,000 pounds and that her passport was required for this money to be sent. That was how he broke into her phone on May 28 around 10am while she was asleep.
What was the money meant for?
She was the Director of the company and we have been trying to involve her in so many ways. So the money was meant for a particular investment in the UK and we had been communicating about how we were going to send it. So it was possible that the guy knew about it. So after he broke into her phone and copied the information, he kicked her out of his flat violently and he seized the ID required to collect this money. At this point, my daughter did not realise that he had broken into her phone until he started to use the information to blackmail her. So he made her apologize to him and now used the apology to get to her agree in writing that she was going to pay him the coerced debt she owed her.
Since you didn’t know about this on time, was her mother also not aware?
Because Alanis knew that I did not encourage that, she was careful not to tell me anything. It was only her mother that she told about the shouting. She called her mother on May 26 that there was a problem, so the mother quickly drove to Manchester where she witnessed the communication with her boyfriend. The mother saw the damage she was in and kept telling her everything would be okay. At that point, everything was still not really clear to her. Alanis told her she thought the guy had got into her phone. It was after the incident that she realized that the guy had manipulated her to apologise in a written document and made her say she was going to pay.
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