Criminal - Riverwalk

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

In November 2019, nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler went missing. When his parents began looking for him, they discovered that Zac had been living a double life. Patrick Radden Keefe’s book is London Falling. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Fetch, pet insurance can help. Fetch is a complete pet insurance for dogs and cats. You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use Fetch for any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com On November 28, 2019, 19-year-old Zach Brettler was living at home with his parents in London.

He told his mother, Rochelle, he was going to spend the weekend with a friend. Just to chill out, he told her he was a little stressed out and he was going to do a phone detox. He'd told her he was going to be staying in a part of London just a few miles away, in a fancy apartment complex called Riverwalk. And so, as far as Rochelle knew, that was where he would be. journalist Patrick Radden Keith. Zach's friend came to pick him up, and after he left, Rochelle realized

Zach had left his keys and credit cards behind. His mother thought that was really odd. And so she just texted him, and she said, you know, I'm so worried about you, are you okay? If you've gone away for the weekend,

you know, aren't you going to need your keys and your wallet? Is everything going to be all right? And hours later, he texted back, and he just wrote All Good, X. The next morning, Rochelle was at home alone. Her husband Matthew was on a business trip.

Around 9.30 a.m., she heard the doorbell ring. And there was a man that she didn't know standing on the doorstep, a guy who was a kind of middle-aged man, he was black, he was elegantly dressed in a suit and a bright tie. and she thought he looked maybe like a chauffeur, like a driver of some sort, and he was holding a phone, and the phone had somebody on speaker.

And she came to the door, and he said, is Zach home? And she said, no, he's not. Who are you? And he said, who are you? She was a little taken aback. And she said, well, I'm his mom. And at this point,

she heard a voice from the phone in this guy's hand, and she could hear this voice say, that can't be his mom. His mom's in Dubai. And she was totally startled. She'd never been to Dubai. But before she could ask any questions, the guy in the doorstep turned around,

got into a rangerover and drove away. After he left, Rochelle tried to call Zach, but her call went straight to voicemail. Then she called her husband Matthew. They ended up calling the police. They had a kind of premonition that something might be very wrong. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. When Zach Brettler was a little kid, his parents described him as bright and a little quirky.

He was always a bit of a smart aleck. He was a great talker. He was the kid who would put on funny voices. He had a kind of theatricality to him. He would tell jokes. he was always very at ease talking to adults, even when he was a kid. And so he was kind of fun to be around in that respect. You know, he had a sort of slightly jazzy style of conversation.

You know, sometimes you encounter somebody and they're just kind of fun to talk to because you never know quite what they're going to come out with next. And he had a confidence to him, even as a really young kid. His older brother Joe remembers that once at a family party, when Zach was around five, a girl showed something to Zach and asked him, Can you read this? Zach told her, I didn't bring my glasses. He used to memorize the electronic sections from shopping catalogs and loved cars,

especially fancy sports cars. His favorite was a Bugatti. Zach started going to a school called Mill Hill. He became known as a class clown, and he did well. He joined the tennis team and the cricket team. His parents noticed he started to become obsessed with money. Many of his classmates came from very wealthy families. Really wealthy families.

And so a lot of Zach's classmates were the children of oligarchs, the children of foreigners, often from the former Soviet Union, who had huge fortunes, you know, billionaire. who had a second home in London. They made London their home, in part because they wanted to send their kids to school in London. Doc had never really been exposed to those kinds of people when he was growing up, but at 13, he gets to Mill Hill,

and he's suddenly surrounded by these classmates, these kind of international students who had swagger and they had money and they had designer clothes. And on the weekends, they would go to fancy restaurants and they'd party at nice hotels. A lot of the kids were boarding students. And the dormitory was about an eight-minute walk from class. And on cold days, these kids of oligarchs,

they would summon Ubers to bring them to class. Zach started saying how great he thought Vladimir Putin was. His favorite movies were the Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio and war dogs about childhood friends who get rich by becoming arms dealers. As a teenager, where Zach began fighting with his parents. They argued a lot about money.

Rochelle and Matthew were really well off by most standards. They lived in a nice 2,000 square foot apartment and made a veil, which was quite a nice neighborhood in central London. And they were paying to send these two kids to private school. So this was a family that by most standards was really privileged. But Zach felt as though he didn't have enough. And so he started to say to his parents, he would say, you know, why don't we, they drove a Mazda, why don't we drive a Mercedes? Why don't we drive a Bentley?

You know, we should really buy a house in this neighborhood. And the thing is that a house in that neighborhood, you know, could cost $10 million. And so he started to seem a little strange to them because there was a sense of, you know, how much do you want? But over time, he also just got kind of more sullen. I mean, in a way that anybody who's been an adolescent will relate to that you, you're kind of pulling away from your parents. And I think that Rochelle and Matthew felt that in a painful way, but not in a way that felt like they should sound the alarm.

Zach's friends said he talked about starting his own businesses all the time. He tried to convince them to go in on different ideas with him. He got older friends to buy him cartons of cigarettes and would sell them individually to his classmates. He found a storage room where he was. the school kept things left behind by students and began selling those too. He started wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. After Zach turned 17, his father said Zach changed a lot.

Zach's brother had just graduated school and was taking a gap here, while Zach had recently tried to transfer schools and had gotten rejected. He was angry a lot of the time, and Rochelle remembers that Zach was hard to talk to, They argued even more. One night, Zach and Rochelle were home alone. Zach started in on what was a very familiar argument to them at that point about how the family should have a nicer home. And she said something.

She made some remark about how he sounded like a spoiled brat, and suddenly Zach's hands were around her throat. And it only lasted a second. And he didn't actually physically choke her, but it was that kind of impulse to literally to kind of go for the jugular. And she was terrified. And it was over almost as quickly as it began, but on the other side of that, Rochelle insisted that Zach get into therapy.

Zach went to see a psychiatrist who noted that Zach had a somewhat defiant manner. They talked about school and his family. Zach said he was, quote, focused on being wealthy. The psychiatrist said Zach showed, quote, a potentially dangerous lack of insight and skewed norms of behavior. The psychiatrist recommended therapy, but Zach only went to one appointment.

And Rochelle and Matthew didn't make him keep going. They said after his fight with Rochelle, he seemed to calm down, and they argued thus. In 2018, Zach got an internship with a man who owned a chauffeur company. He told his parents he was doing well and doing real business deals. They were under the impression that he was making money, that he was, you know, he was actually doing deals. He told them about a real estate deal he'd done, where he'd gotten a finder's fee for this luxury apartment that he found, for a woman who worked at Chelsea Football Club.

He increasingly seems as though, He's kind of impatient with school. He's not sure he wants to go to college. He really is in a hurry. He wants to go out and kind of get rich and be out there in the world. Zach told his parents he was going to move out. He said he had met someone who owned multiple apartments

in the Riverwalk complex in central London, right next to the Thames. And he was letting Zach stay in one. But by October, Zach was back home. He said he was low. Only. Rochelle and Matthew said that during this time, there was a lot about Zach's life they didn't know.

Rochelle knew that Zach had been visiting a neighbor, an older Russian woman. She sometimes wondered if they were dating. At one point, Zach showed his father's bank account. It showed he at over 800,000 pounds. They were really worried about his lifestyle. You know, they were worried he might be dealing drugs or using drugs. using drugs, they actually kind of surreptitiously got his doctor to do a blood test. I mean, he had a blood test at a checkup, but they asked the doctor to screen the blood for drugs,

came back negative. At one point, they went away on vacation and they actually installed a hidden camera in the living room of the house just to see who he might have brought home. But all that came up was, you know, there were some guys from the local tennis club who came back and they would watch TV. They'd just watch movies on the television. Zach told his parents about someone he had been doing business with, a man named Akbar Shamji. He told his parents, I've met this guy. He is a really wealthy, really successful, just impressive London businessman. He went to Cambridge University.

He's this kind of good-looking, glamorous guy in his 40s. He has an apartment on Mount Street, and Mount Street in Mayfair. It's just for those who don't know London, Mayfair is one of the fanciest neighborhoods in London, and Mount Street is one of the fanciest streets. He had two kids who were younger than Zach, and he had a wife named Daniela Carnutes, and she was a fashion designer with an atelier in London,

and she designed these very high-end gowns of the sort that you might wear to the Oscars or something for really well-known women, for Princess Kate, for Megan Markle, for Quineff Paltrow, for Michelle Obama. He showed his mother the dresses. That left fashion line is called Safia, the dresses on his iPad. He told his parents that he and Akbar were starting to look at some business deals. And so there was a deal involving cars and a deal involving CBD-infused skin care products.

And so they were kind of out-hustling doing. deals. And they didn't meet Akbar at that time. But to his mother and father, it seemed like he'd made friends with this guy who was maybe a mentor and kind of was what Zach wanted to become. So maybe with the help of somebody like Akbar, he could make something of himself. I mean, if I were his parents, I would think I would be thinking, what is a successful 40-year-old businessman doing, hanging around my 18-year-old son. I mean, you know, were they suspicious at all? I think they were.

Yeah. I mean, I think it was a very, very difficult period of time for the Brettlers because Zach has turned 18. And he's already kind of trying to pull away and assert himself as an adult. So, yes, they were anxious and suspicious, and they didn't really know what the story was, but they were worried that if they pushed too hard, they would push him away. The last time Rochelle saw Zach on the day he'd left his keys and wallet behind, Akbar Shamjee was the friend who had picked him up.

Four days passed, the police didn't have any news for Rochelle and Matthew. What's their next step? Rochelle called around to talk to various friends of Zaks, and one of them ended up giving her the phone number. for Akbar Shamji. Akbar Shamji agreed to meet them and tell them about the last time he'd seen Zach. He asked them to come to a hotel called the Meridian.

When they met Akbar, there was something kind of reassuring about him. He's a very elegant, polished guy, and he told them that Zach was a close friend, and he told them that he told them that he was really surprised to meet them because he had understood

that Zach was not named Zach Brettler at all, that his real name was Zach Ismailov. Akbar Shamji said that he thought Zach was a son of a billionaire Russian oligarch. He had believed that Zach was living in the UK to invest his family's money. And so it was this very strange meeting of the two of them because Akbar was saying he was kind of shocked.

to meet these English parents who aren't billionaires and learn that they were Zach's real parents, and Matthew and Rochelle were shocked to learn that their son might have had this secret alter ego. Akbar Shamjee said he had met Zach through a friend named Mark Foley, who managed some real estate for Chelsea Football Club. Which is the famous storied soccer team owned by Roman Abramovich, the most famous Russian oligarch.

And so you can see how if you're Zach and you think that Putin is great and Roman Abramovich is great and you're a little obsessed with the oligarch set in London, you meet a guy like Mark Foley who works for Chelsea Football Club, that's a really appealing contact to have. So Zach initially tells Mark Foley that he is the son of an oligarch. He's the first person, Zach Tricks.

And so Mark Foley arranges a meeting between Zach and Akbar, and that is where their friendship is born. As Akbar talked with Zach's parents, some of what Zach had told Rochelle and Matthew did seem to be true. Akbar said they had sold cars in Romania and Georgia, and had made some money with rare earth mineral mining. Akbar told them that after he had picked up Zach on the day he went missing, they drove around the city before they went to the Riverwalk complex. They met a man named Verinder Sharma there. Verinder was another middle-aged guy, and Akbar was a little ambiguous about what Verinder did for a living.

He said he was kind of semi-retired. Zach's parents pieced together that when Zach had briefly moved out, he'd actually been staying with Varinda Sharma. Akbar said that on the way to Riverwalk, Zach said he needed to tell him something. Zach had confessed to him that Zach was addicted to heroin. As Akbar told Rochelle and Matthew, he took Zach to the Riverwalk complex,

where Zach then confessed about his heroin addiction to Verinda Sharma. Akbar said that the three of them talked for a while. and by the end of the night, they'd all agreed that Zach would go to a rehab clinic in the morning. Akbar said he left Verinder and Zach at the apartment. He said Verinder called him in the morning and said Zach was gone. What did Zach's parents think when they heard about heroin? Did they believe that that could be a possibility?

So all of this, you can imagine, was a lot coming at Matthew and Rochelle. and there was an interesting thing where when they heard that he had been pretending that he was the son of a Russian holtark arc, it was completely shocking. But they believed it. They could sort of see some version of their son who could find his way to telling that kind of story. When they heard from Akbar that Zach was addicted to heroin, neither of them believed it for a second. and you know it wasn't that they had some kind of parental fantasy that their kid couldn't take drugs it's just that heroin didn't seem to be Zach's kind of thing they thought if anything it would be cocaine and you know Zach had been living with them they thought it would have been difficult for him to kind of

carry on a heroin addiction and be living with them and they would never pick up on any of the signs this was a kid who got up in the morning and took long runs along the thames it just didn't seem right Now, they did believe that Zach might have told Akbar that he was addicted to heroin. But they thought that if he said something like that, it was probably because he was scared or he wanted pity. You know, Zach was always the kid in school who would feign a migraine on the day of the exam. He often would come up with stories that he would tell in order to kind of get out of doing something or get somebody to feel bad for him. So they believed that Zach might have lied and said this to Akbar, but they didn't believe the heroin story. story for a minute.

And what do they think about Akbar? I mean, he's more their peer than Zach's peer. I mean, you know, age-wise. They recorded that first conversation. They actually recorded it on an iPhone. And eventually, they let me listen to the recording. And I think they were so reassured by Akbar. They were so grateful to him for his help.

In that moment, they thought, this is a guy who actually kind of got burned. by our son. He's like a real serious grown-up with a professional life and a lot of money, clearly, and our son sort of wheedled his way into this guy's life, pretending to be something he wasn't. And Akbar has just learned that Zach was lying about all that.

And yet he seems very kind, and he keeps saying the most important thing is we've got to get Zach home. We've got to get him back safe. Akbar Shamjee introduced the bretlers to Verinder Sharma over the phone. Verinder also thought Zach was billionaire. Zach had told him that he wasn't speaking to his mother because of a problem with his

inheritance. He had said his mother and the rest of his family were all in Dubai. Verinder said, I didn't think someone could lie to that extent. Rochelle and Matthew apologized to both men for Zach's lies. Verinder said the only thing that mattered was getting Zach back. They all agreed to stay in touch. The next day, two police officers came to the Brettler's home. They said a body had been found in the Thames. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

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Take your daily ritual with you. Go to cachava.com and use code criminal for 15% off your first order. That's Cachava, K-A-V-A-V-com, code criminal. On November 29, 2019, police were called to the Thames. They had received a report that there was a body on the riverbank, in front of the Riverwalk complex. This initially is a John Doe investigation. The body had no ID, no tattoos.

There was no suggestion of who this person was. He had no shirt on or shoes, just sweatpants and socks. The police assumed that he had jumped off a bridge somewhere else and that the body had drifted downriver through the night. About 30 people are found every year in the Thames. Most of them are people who died by suicide. The body was taken to the police station, and then the mortuary.

Police began trying to ID him. If you imagine how big London is and how big the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard, is you have this kind of bizarre situation where there's this body, they don't know who it is, and in another part of the city, there's a missing person's investigation that starts where they're looking for this missing kid, Zach Brettler, and the left hand on the right hand aren't talking for about four or five days. And finally, the police put it together.

They realized that the body found out in front of the building was the same kid who went missing. On December 5, 2019, police arrested Varinder Sharma on suspicion of murder. Zach had told his parents, Varinder Sharma was a rubber tycoon. But police knew that Varinder Sharma had a long criminal record. He was also known as Indian Dave. Police had investigated him for drug smuggling and potential involvement in a homicide

from a drive-by shooting with an AK-47. At one point, he faked his death when he was charged with blackmail, but he'd actually gone into hiding in Monaco. There were accounts that he would hold people over the sides of buildings, so they would pay back their loans. When he was questioned about the night that Zach died, Varinder Sharma said he believed that Zach had killed himself. He said he had fallen asleep after midnight.

He'd been drinking whiskey and had taken a sleeping pill, so he didn't remember much about the night. He said Zach had been crying and was upset about his heroin addiction, but that by the end of the night they had hugged. He said, I would like to state for the record that I was not responsible for Zach's death in any way. When officers asked him more questions, he answered no comment. Which is the English equivalent of pleading the fifth.

You know, this is a guy who was a very seasoned, hardcore English gangster who'd been in prison and had been investigated for murder. And he did what those kinds of hard men tend to do in these situations, which is he totally clamped up. Police had also arrested Akbar Shur. He told them he thought that Zach was, quote, kind of slightly schizophrenic. Akbar Shamjee told police that on the night of November 28th, he went home, and his wife had been

angry with him for staying out so late, so he'd slept in his car. But the police officers had evidence that he was lying. They had footage from CCTV cameras from the night that Zach died. When they looked at the CCTV footage, he was there, and then he laughed. and he drove away, and then Akbar didn't drive home. He actually just kind of drove around the area, as if he was sort of hanging out just in case, and it was late at night.

You know, this is one, two, in the morning. And Zach was alone in the apartment with Sharma for about 20 or 30 minutes. And then at a certain point, Indy and Dave called him. We know that from the phone records. The phone record showed that around 2 a.m., Verinder called. Al-Aqbar. And as soon as Akbar got that call, he turned his car around and he started speeding back to Riverwalk. He heard something on that call that made him desperate to get back there. And he pulls up in front of the building and gets out of the car and goes in and starts heading

up. And just at the moment he pulls up in front of the building, the footage shows Zach walking out onto the balcony and walking over to one end and seeming to kind of look over. over the side and then walking over to the other and then walking to the center and jumping. So moments after Zach goes up the balcony, Akbar goes into the apartment. He's in there for about 15 minutes. We don't know what happens when he's inside because he wouldn't tell the police and neither would Sharma. But afterwards, Akbar goes downstairs and you think he's going to go home again. Instead, he walks around the building to the other side, which is where the river is.

and he walks right over to the river, and there's a river wall there, and he walks right over to exactly the point where Zach had just gone into the river, and the cameras capture Akbar Shamji, leaning over and looking down into the river at just the point where Zach's just gone into it. Then he straightens up, walks back around the building, gets into his car, and drives home. Police asked why Akbar Shamji had gone to look in the river. He said, it's a nice bit of the river. One police officer said it seemed like too much of a coincidence.

But Akbar said that he would have called the police if he had seen Zach. One week after Zach's death, Rochelle and Matthew met with the lead detective, a man named Rory Wilkinson. He explained that Zach had several injuries, most of them related to his fall, but the police said he had a broken jaw that they couldn't explain. Detective Wilkinson said police had video showing Zach alone on the fifth floor balcony.

But he said, if someone is so scared that they jump, even if it's of their own volition, that still is obviously a criminal offense, possibly murder. Police officers had also searched Verinder Sharma's apartment, and found Zach's phone broken in two. It wasn't his main phone that he used to text with his parents. It was a burner phone with special encryption. But police didn't have enough evidence to hold Akbar Shamji or Virinder Sharma. Both men were released on bail.

How do Zach's parents feel the investigation is going? I mean, you know, when the police start, are they happy with? with the information they're getting? Initially, the police were very reassuring, and they said, listen, this is Scotland Yard. It's one of the biggest, most well-resourced police departments in the world. We will leave no stone unturned. The Breitlers basically took it for granted

that the police would do what they said that they would do. And so initially, they, I think, felt as though it was in good hands. But then the COVID pandemic kicks in and things kind of slow down. And they're not sure how much of the non-responsiveness of the cops is a function of COVID and how much of it is that they seem to have sort of lost the thread on the investigation. And over time, they become more and more uneasy. And so Rochelle and Matthew, rather than be passive, feel as though they owe it to their son to get to the bottom of what happened to him.

Matthew and Rochelle had also hired a private investigator after Zach had gone missing. They started calling Zach's friends to find out for themselves what the last few weeks of his life had been like. One friend said that a few days before he died, he'd noticed Zach kept checking his surroundings. Zach said he was thinking of going to the police

because he was being threatened. But his friends were, weren't always sure if what Zach said was real. He claimed that his father was an arms dealer. Later, Rochelle found out that when Zach was 13, during his first year at Mill Hill, he told his classmates that his mother had died. She learned that the neighbor she thought Zach had been dating, a woman named Zamira, had believed Zach was from Kazakhstan. She was from Russia, and they had become friends. She sometimes made Zach food, and had once invited him to celebrate New Year's with her family.

Sometimes when they talked Zach threw in a word of Russian. Rochelle learned that her full name was Zemirah Ismailova. Zach had used her last name for his fake identity, with Akbar Shamji and Virinder Sharma.

Rochelle and Matthew began to worry that the two men had been trying to extort money from Zach. They eventually start learning more about the gangster past of Verinder Sharma, And Akbar, it turns out, has a very checkered history in terms of his business and his life. And in fact, in the months before he meets Zach Brettler, Akbar has actually declared bankruptcy.

Now, you wouldn't know it. He's still living a very luxe lifestyle with the apartment on Mount Street, and he meets people at these various private clubs that he's a member of. But he's actually in some financial trouble at the point where this young kid, who says that he is the son. of a billionaire oligarch, suddenly wanders into his life. And where did Zach fall in this threesome?

Zach was adopted by them, basically, as a kind of friend and protege. He would spend time with their families, with Akbar's kids, with Indian Dave's kids. And so he really kind of, in that sort of classic way with Zach, he went from not knowing people at all to ingratiating himself with them,

quickly. I think they were amused by him. I think they absolutely were enticed by the idea that he might have access to hundreds of millions of dollars that he could help them out with, or he could channel some of that money in. The problem was he kept telling all these stories about how he was going to come through with money and investments, and the money itself never materialized. Rochelle and Matthew checked Zach's bank account. They had saved checks from his grandparents over the years and money he'd gotten from his bar mitzvah and put it in a savings account. They'd given it all to him after he turned 18.

It was about 18,000 pounds. He had kind of blown through that money, it turns out, pretending that he was the son of an oligarch, you know, paying for meals, doing this and that kind of here and there to seem credibly like a rich person. And in the days before he died, Zach, in his bank account, had only four pounds. he was close to empty. They tried to contact some of the people Zach had said he was doing business with,

but they said they didn't know anything that could help them. Zach's father, Matthew, spoke with the owner of a cafe in one of the Riverwalk's buildings. He'd been there, the morning Zach's body had been found by the Thames. He helped them get in touch with some of the doorman from Riverwalk. And then, at the end of 20, In 2020, the lead detective on Zach's case called with news. Virinder Sharma had been found dead.

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counting. You can go to bombus.com slash criminal and use code criminal for 20% off your first purchase. That's BOMBAS.com slash criminal. Code criminal at checkout. Hi, I'm Maria Sharpova, host of the Pretty Tough podcast. Each episode, I sit down with high achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week, model sports Illustrated Cover Girl, an entrepreneur, Ashley Graham, talks about the time she almost quit. I called my mom and I said, Mom, I just, I'm not going to do this anymore. And she told me, no, you are going to stick this out. Your body is going to change someone's life. Every decade, you're going to go through something different. So be really happy with who you are right now,

because things change. Check out Pretty Tough, new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app. In December of 2020, Varinder Sharma had been found dead in his apartment. Police believed he had died from a drug overdose. This is a year after Zach's death, almost to the week. But the officer who told them about it was a little ambiguous. He said it might have been a suicide. It might have been an overdose.

He didn't really know the details. And he said he wasn't able to learn the details. He said we're being kind of kept sterile from that part of the investigation. And they were confused by this. If you're leading a murder investigation and your lead suspect dies, why it is that if you were that cop, you would be kept sterile from knowing the circumstances of that death. A year later, Detective Wilkinson asked to meet with Rochelle and Matthew.

He had an update on the investigation. He told him that he wouldn't be able to give them a copy of the case files, but he would read everything aloud. and they could record it. Rochelle and Matthew were told about text messages on Varinder Sharma's phone, that in the days leading up to his death, Akbar and Varinder no longer trusted Zach. Varinder Sharma had written to Akbar trying to find out how much money Zach had,

and texted that they should take Zach to an ATM. He also texted, I want 5% of that 205 million. Akbar sent a voice memo back and said, I'm highly skeptical about this 205 million. Verinder responded, saying that they were owed 50% of everything, Zach owned. The night Zach died,

Akbar had texted another man that he had been, quote, heating up the knives and clearing up blood. Matthew and Rochelle asked if the police had interviewed that man. They said no. They also learned the police had not interviewed the chauffeur, who knocked on the door and told Rochelle that she couldn't be Zach's mother. It had been two years since Zach died. The cops really had very few answers and basically kept sort of suggesting, well, you know, maybe he just committed suicide.

Maybe that's what this is. And at that point, the brothers were a little bit more aggressive because they had really done more homework than the police had. And the lead detective kind of defensively says, you know, I feel like I'm the criminal. here and you guys are interviewing me. You know, you're interrogating me. In February of 2022, prosecutors in London said they would not file charges against Akbar Shamji in connection with Zach Brettler's death. Ten months later, about three years after Zach had died, the coroner's office held a public inquest about his death. Anytime there's a death in the UK that is unnatural or kind of unclear,

ambiguous. There's what's called an inquest. And it's an interesting procedure. It looks a little bit like a judicial inquiry. There's a coroner who acts essentially like a judge. You have evidence presented. It's a somewhat adversarial situation in the sense that the Brettlers in this case had a lawyer who was able to cross-examine witnesses. And so this was kind of their last bite at the apple in terms of an opportunity to really try and get to the bottom of what had happened to Zach. In some ways it was very dramatic in the sense that they were able to kind of confront face-to-face some of these people who clearly knew more than they were saying about the circumstances of Zach's death. The coroner said at the beginning of the inquest, we're here simply to find the answers to four questions. Who the deceased was, where he died, when he died, and how he came by his death.

Akbar Shamji testified over video call. He had left London and was now working at a cryptocurrency company. He spoke for several hours. Matthew and Rochelle's lawyer asked Akbar about the text Varinder had sent him, saying he wanted 5% of that 205 million. Akbar said that Zach was always promising huge sums of money. I pretty clearly told Sharma, I don't think there's any golden pot at the end of that rainbow.

The Brentler's lawyer also asked about some of the texts Akbar had sent before Zach died, including the one where he said he was heating up knives and cleaning up blood. Akbar said he was, quote, a little bit drunk. He said he hadn't meant literal blood. He said that blood is, quote, a more earthy, streety way of saying bro. The lawyer asked about the nine-minute call between Virinder and Akbar at around 2 a.m.

That ended just a few minutes before Zach had jumped from the balcony. Akbar said he didn't remember what they had talked about. The lawyer asked of Verinder Sharma had seemed angry. Akbar said everything was fine. The coroner asked Akbar if he had ever talked with Varinder about what happened that night. Akbar said, I never pushed too hard. I'm not sure what kind of hornet. its nest I would have been kicking. When his testimony was done, the coroner allowed Akbar

Shamji to continue listening to the rest of the inquest over video call. Most of the time, he kept his camera off. But at one point, he accidentally turned it on, and the courtroom realized he'd taken his computer to the bathroom, where he was taking a shower. The inquest took two days. At the end, the coroner's official finding was that the cause of the... of Zach's death was inconclusive. The coroner says, could have been suicide, could have been something more sinister, I'm not in a position to say. And so the Bretlers come out of that really kind of shimmering with fury because they feel as though this was the last opportunity when the authorities, the British authorities could help them find answers about the death of their son. and they were let down once again.

What do Rochelle and Matthew think happened to Zach? The brothers believe, and I think they're right, that Zach thought that if he stayed in that apartment, he was going to die. And so he went out onto the balcony and he did a swan dive. He thought the only chance I have is of making it to the river. And it was a fifth floor balcony, and the worst part of this is that had he made it clean into the river. He might actually have survived. He probably would have been quite badly hurt

jumping into the river from that height, but he might have survived. But on his way down, his hip clipped the embankment wall. And so he died in the water. Patrick Radden Keefe wrote a book about Zach Brettler. After he finished it, Rochelle invited him to visit. It was last September, and Rochelle wrote to me and said, we're going to have a little ceremony at our home to mark what would have been his 25th birthday and it was about 30 or 40 people friends and family, people who knew

Zach and loved him and it was the most extraordinary thing it was actually kind of a joyous event it was a celebration of his life I think that Rochelle and Matthew and Joe, Zach's brother they think a lot about Zach and they try and

honor his memory but in kind of a strange way through this process of kind of trying to solve his death. They've come to see him in a way that is more full and complete than they were ever able to when he was alive and as flawed and complex as he turns out to be, to love him in that complexity. Richella said Zach always stretched the truth a little. He should have been an actor. He should have been a writer.

Zach's brother, Joe, told Patrick that he sometimes has dreams about his. his brother. He said they were usually happy dreams of Zach when he was younger. In January of 2025, the Brettlers met with two senior officers with the Metropolitan Police. One of the officers said that he still talked with the lead detective from the investigation, Rory Wilkinson, about Zach almost every week. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer, Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, and Lena Silison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Cedarborg.

Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for a newsletter at this iscriminal.com slash newsletter. Patrick Radden-Keefe's book is called London Falling. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal This Is Love and Phoebe Reads Mystery

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