Police Say Trainer-Stuntman Concealed Past As A Hitman

LOS ANGELES - He had a winning personality and movie-star looks. But police say popular weight trainer and aspiring movie stuntman Graham Miller used an upscale, suburban health club to hide out from a past as a contract killer.

The seven-year search for the murderer of wealthy British businessman Simon Law ended last month when Neville Vandermerwe - Miller's real name - was arrested in the parking lot of the San Fernando Valley health club.

The 28-year-old South African immediately confessed to his double life, police say, and is being held without bail pending an extradition hearing.

In a town that thrives on images, Vandermerwe worked hard to stand out, even as he masked a dark past.

"Everyone liked him," said Rodie Morales, general manager of World Gym in Woodland Hills, where Vandermerwe worked. "He was a popular guy."

Friends, colleagues and neighbors expressed disbelief that the breezy, confident young man was wanted by police in three countries.

"He carried himself with confidence and authority," said neighbor Porter Jordan. "He could have been an actor."

In fact, Vandermerwe's entire life was something of an act.

He lived in a small apartment with his beautiful American wife, Christine Miller, a few miles east of the gym in a humdrum section of Tarzana.

Despite his middle-class existence, Vandermerwe dressed sharply and commuted in a BMW to the exclusive health club, where patrons pay personal trainers $75 an hour.

He told colleagues he was a veteran of the South African Army and had worked Hollywood stunt jobs. The Screen Actors Guild confirmed he was registered with the union but had no record that he ever held a movie job or even had an agent.

Vandermerwe's photogenic appearance apparently did bring him offers to work as a model, but he told friends he turned the jobs down.

Christine Miller could not be reached for comment, but a close friend, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that Ms. Miller had not known of her husband's past. "She is floored," the friend said.

Both Vandermerwe and his lawyer refused to comment.

A crime of the past

Vandermerwe was 20 in April 1991 when he and friend Glen Chait traveled to Great Britain from their homes in a well-to-do Johannesburg suburb.

The two young men stood out as they drove through rural England in the stylish red Vauxhall Astra they had borrowed from South African friends in London.

In the small town of Elmsted, the pair asked several people for directions to the fashionable home of Simon Law, an accountant and violinist.

A suspicious neighbor jotted down the car's license plate when it pulled into Law's driveway. About the time Law was reported missing when he failed to appear at church choir practice, Vandermerwe and Chait were seen washing down the red coupe.

But they missed a few drops of blood on the rubber seal of the trunk. Police noted the spots and used DNA testing to establish the blood was Law's. A witness also overheard the men discuss how they would split a large sum of money.

But Vandermerwe and Chait had already slipped out of the country and gone back to South Africa.

Vandermerwe's father later recounted that his son returned home distraught. The elder Vandermerwe knew something terrible had happened but got few details from his nervous and evasive son.

"You will find out soon enough," Vandermerwe told his father, according to court documents. "Someone is missing and I am going to get the blame for it," he said. "And I've got no alibi. I will be traced here so easily I've got to leave the country."

Vandermerwe fled to America.

Law's body was never found. His fiancee, Tarn Phillips, kept up a determined campaign to keep the case open, and in 1996, her struggle was rewarded when South African police found and arrested Chait.

Chait committed suicide in jail shortly after a South African judge ordered him extradited to Britain to face trial. But the search for Vandermerwe went cold when he escaped to the United States in 1991.

Building a new life

Cautiously slipping in and out of aliases, the body builder slowly developed a new life for himself, first in New York, then on the glitzy fringes of Hollywood.

Vandermerwe married Christine in December, but his new life was on the verge of unraveling. His brother Graham Vandermerwe had joined him in Los Angeles and registered a car in his own name, unwittingly rekindling the search for his fugitive brother. Within a few months, an undercover policeman was knocking on Graham's door.

The officer spotted Neville in the apartment.

There is still one loose end: There are no plans to prosecute Peter Jenkins, the South African businessman who authorities suspect hired Vandermerwe and Chait to kill Law over a business dispute.

The case against Jenkins was dropped because of a lack of evidence to connect the businessman with the accused killers.