Campside Media Presents: White Devil
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Hey listeners, this is Aisling Ayers from Texas Monthly. We'd love to tell you about a new true crime podcast from our friends at Campside Media called White Devil. Late at night in May of 2021, a single gunshot shattered the silence along the beach at Belize's luxurious Elia Resort. In White Devil, Josh Dean dives into one of the biggest, splashiest, and most perplexing crime stories you've never heard of,

The shooting death of renowned cop Henry Jamat by a Canadian property developer. In investigating, the craggy depths of Belize are brought to the surface. Its quirks, its corruption, and the all-pervasive influence of several generations of one family in particular. You can binge the rest of White Devil wherever you get podcasts.

Police Superintendent Henry Jamont was a father of five and a law enforcement veteran. His friends and family say they are stunned by his sudden death and equally shocked that a police officer could die this way. Police in this Central American country confirmed Jamont did not die in the line of duty,

But instead, in what they describe as an incident, the details disclosed that Jamant and a woman were drinking alone on the pier and both were fully clothed. Details beyond that are scanned. The exact truth of what happened in Belize on May 28th, 2021, isn't knowable in any objective way. There were two people there alone on an isolated pier and only one survived to talk about it.

There were no witnesses, no cameras. And as the saying goes, a dead man tells no tales. So with that in mind, here's what we know. Sometime around 12:30 a.m., a security guard outside of some luxury condos on Ambergus Cay, the largest island off the coast of Belize, heard a gunshot. These condos are adjacent to a brand new luxury resort called Elia on the outskirts of the town of San Pedro. If you've been to Belize, you've probably stayed in San Pedro.

It's a party town, which fronts the region's largest coral reef. So it's filled with bachelors and bachelorettes, as well as fishermen and scuba divers. It's noisy and can be crowded, as tourists in golf carts buzz around its narrow dirt lanes, dodging Belizeans selling t-shirts and coconuts. But on this night, it was very quiet. This was pandemic times. When the guards who heard that gunshot got to the pier, they found just one person.

A woman they knew well, a young blonde Canadian who lived in the condos they were protecting. She was in a panicked state, covered in blood, and muttering about an accident. Bobbing in the sea just off the pier was the body of a large black man who turned out to be a cop named Henry Gemat. And not just any cop, either. Henry Gemat was a boss, a superintendent, at one time the second-ranking police officer on the island. And there was no doubt about this part: Henry Gemat was dead.

After seven months of being a murder-free island, San Pedro Town was rocked by the news of the death of its former police commander. This morning, just after one, Superintendent Henry Jamut was fatally shot, reportedly with his own weapon. Questions are swirling this morning. A high-ranking police officer dead, a woman connected to a billionaire family alone on the pier when he died. This morning calls for justice.

Police Commissioner Chester Williams, Belize's highest-ranking police officer, spoke to the press a half day later, on the afternoon of May 29, to update the country on his initial findings in this incredible case of the rich white woman and the dead black cop. Upon investigating, police found the female on a pier. She had what appeared to be blood on her arms and on her clothing.

A firearm was also seen on the pier. That firearm has been retrieved, and we have learned that the firearm belonged to the police. And inside the waters right near the pier, police recovered the lifeless body of Mr. Jamot with one apparent gunshot wound behind the right ear. Behind the right ear. It's exactly where you would put a bullet if you were trying to execute a man.

But the only plausible executioner here was a young woman with no criminal record and a very high profile around town. Her name was Jasmine Harton. Jasmine Harton, a socialite accused of killing a police superintendent in Central America, is behind bars tonight. Jasmine Harton was arrested and charged in connection to this deadly shooting. Jasmine Harton was taken into custody and put in a cell.

it looked bad but the way things worked in belize everybody figured that this rich well-connected expat would just buy her way out of it in this case everybody was wrong hello good morning hey it's justine yes good morning i just arrived at work well i'm glad to it's it's nice to meet you so you've been covering the story yeah since it happened um last week's friday

This is Hippolito Novello, a Belizean journalist who works for a local news outfit called Love FM. He covers breaking news for TV, radio, and online. Just to keep tabs on the story, I checked in with Hippolito frequently over those first few weeks, as things unfolded. He explained how it all went down that first day, when news of the shooting broke. Early in the morning, I received a message saying that there was a shooting in San Pedro.

Not, on the surface, a huge thing. Belize is a violent place. Only four countries in the world have higher murder rates. It was ordinary news. I mean, it happens. And then I received another message saying that it was a police officer, one of the commanding officers in the police department.

So I said, "Okay, so a police officer being shot and killed is already huge news for Belize here." — Which makes sense. Shootings are relatively common. Shootings of cops are not. — So as the minutes went by, then we heard that it was a foreigner, a female, a white woman who shot and killed this police officer. And the media, we know Henry Jamaat. — Jamaat was an ambitious and respected, even revered cop, whose career was on the ascent.

Belize is a small place, and people are engaged with the news. Senior public figures tend to be well known. So we knew this was a big deal, it's a big case. Then we got information that this person was the daughter-in-law of Michael Ashcroft, the Michael Ashcroft here in Belize, and everyone in Belize knows of Michael Ashcroft. Jasmine Hardin isn't actually Michael Ashcroft's daughter-in-law, although many people think of her that way. She and Michael's son Andrew never married, but she is the mother of his twins.

So her kid's grandfather is one of the most influential men in Belize. So the story exploded.

Now to that mystery in paradise. The partner of a British billionaire's son charged with killing a top police officer. Her longtime partner, with whom she has two children, Andrew Ashcroft, is the son of British billionaire and political power player Lord Michael Ashcroft. Billionaire Lord Michael Ashcroft. Son of Lord Michael Ashcroft, a British billionaire and the most powerful man in Belize. ♪

That name, Michael Ashcroft, pardon, Lord Michael Ashcroft, may not mean much to an American. I had never heard of this bespectacled 70-something Brit before I stumbled on this story. But he's quite well known to people from the UK. He's a billionaire businessman who has been a very prominent supporter of the Conservative Party.

They call them Tories over there. That's the party of Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron. Tories have led the UK government for the last 12 years, and Ashcroft casts a very large shadow in that crowd. People in Belize definitely know Ashcroft. His net worth of $2.2 billion is larger than the country's entire GDP, and he's a dual citizen, having spent three years of his childhood, and now quite a bit of his adulthood, in Belize.

Ashcroft is heavily involved in politics, business, and banking. He even served as Belize's representative to the United Nations from 1998 to 2000. There is literally no one more famous or powerful in Belize to put at the center of a sensational case like this.

So this is one of the biggest cases I've covered, one of the biggest cases I think has happened in Belize in terms of foreign press attention to the country. It was so much more than a story about a cop killed under mysterious circumstances. Even on that first day, the investigation was raising more questions than answers. Here's Commissioner Chester Williams again, after he's just publicly named Jasmine Harton for the first time.

From when she was detained last night, she was not cooperating. She had requested that she needed to have her attorney present in order for her to say what she needs to say. And it is a part of her rights by virtue of the Constitution. But again, that raises some red flag as to why she would not cooperate. Because if you know that you have not committed a crime, then you should be more than willing to want to cooperate.

This story is wild. The characters are part of a tangled web of relationships, all bringing such different perspectives to what happened to Henry Gemat out on that pier. You can find Campside Media's White Devil and binge the rest anywhere you listen to podcasts. You can also find a link in the show notes.