Cocaine parties and a Picasso — the tragic path to a Mayfair murder

Mystery surrounds the sudden death of Robert Troyan, flamboyant interior designer and part of the first couple in London to enter into a civil partnership.
p32 p33 GV of 101 Mount Street, Mayfair where a man was bludgeoned to death inside Flat 6. Next to the Mount Street Deli. PICTURE BY: NIGEL HOWARD Email: nigelhowardmedia@gmail.com
NIGEL HOWARD
15 March 2013

Robert Troyan and Anthony Feldman threw wonderful parties. At their exquisitely decorated flat in Hertford Street, Mayfair, the champagne “was always chilled and ready to open”. Feldman played Gershwin on the Bechstein piano and made canapés while Troyan entertained glamorous guests with tales told in his Bostonian twang. Everyone who visited admired the couple’s collection of antiques and art. Among the many pictures on the pale grey walls were a painting of a horse by Picasso that Troyan had picked up at an auction for his interior designer boyfriend, and a photo of Feldman with Princess Anne. “In their day they knew everyone,” said former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken this week.

Last Friday at about 4pm, Troyan, 63, was found dead, in a pool of blood and with a gash to his head, by his Filipino housemaid in the kitchen of the £2 million rented Mount Street flat he had moved to. The flowers he had bought that week were still on the table but his home had become a mess, with a Ming vase worth £100,000 being used as an ashtray.

“I haven’t been able to sleep since that day,” the housemaid, Lindola Aganon, 42, told me. She called an ambulance and police straight away but Troyan was pronounced dead at the scene. A post-mortem examination gave the cause of death as head injuries and police are investigating what happened to a man described by friends as extremely generous, funny and sociable.

In 2005, Feldman and Troyan were the first couple in London to enter into a civil partnership. Registrar Alison Cathcart united them on December 10 in their flat, in front of friends and four bridesmaids. The ceremony had been brought forward because Feldman was ill. Eight days later he died of pancreatic cancer aged 52. “It was sudden,” a close friend who did not want to be named told me this week. “He got sick in October and we thought it was just usual designer’s bad back, so we brought him cushions when he was working. But his health deteriorated quickly.”

Troyan was late to the memorial service at Grosvenor Chapel and was so devastated that he could barely stand. That was the last time many of their friends saw him. “The society parties stopped. We drifted apart and he started taking cocaine. I think he fell in with some bad people, who were after his money,” said the friend.

Troyan was born in Italy to a wealthy family who moved to Boston when he was young. But it was his lifelong, romantic love of England that brought him over to London after he graduated from art school in 1983.

Following Feldman’s death, one of his inner circle was a man called Sean McGuigan, 46, who met him in 2006 at a pub in Earl’s Court where McGuigan says people go to get cocaine. The bereaved Bostonian interior decorator and McGuigan, who had been jailed in May 2008 for 30 months for attempting to blackmail a member of the royal family, were unlikely friends.

This week, McGuigan told me: “Despite living in England since 1983, Robert still had a Boston accent. He had Italian and American nationality and used to quote lines from Goodfellas. Whenever I teased him about being well-off he joked that when he was a baby he wore a cashmere diaper.”

His father, Bob, had been in the US army and then worked in shipping, and his mother, Marie, was a housewife. Troyan called her “Marmee” and they spoke nearly every day. He has a sister, Rosalie, who still lives in Maryland, and a niece and nephew, whom he adored. Recently, his father had fallen ill and Troyan was planning a trip to Boston to see him.

McGuigan, who called his friend “Pinky” because “he was always handing out £50 notes”, said Troyan and Feldman met through interior design work and “were devoted to each other”.

“Robert said he wouldn’t live anywhere but Mayfair, with its old buildings. He felt safe in Mayfair. But sadly that wasn’t the case. They also had a fisherman’s cottage in Kekova, Turkey, and cooked shellfish from the cove,” said McGuigan.

Troyan used to point out which houses he and Feldman worked on to McGuigan whenever they drove past in a taxi. Jonathan Aitken and Princess Michael of Kent were among their clients. Feldman and Troyan also gave a lot to charities, including the Turkish earthquake relief fund and marine conservation. Trudie Styler enlisted them for her and Sting’s campaign for Tibet, and recently Troyan had spoken about setting up a charity to help homeless people.

His housemaid, Aganon, was fond of him and saw him nearly every day. She said: “He bought me driving lessons. When I failed he told me, ‘Go on, my girl, I know you can do it’. Every Christmas time he told me to bring an extra bag to work because he bought me so many presents — a pearl necklace, a beret, boots, gloves, ballerina shoes.”

“In the end I think he was too trusting,” said McGuigan. “He’d have these long, five-day parties at his flat where he’d play songs by Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra. I’d teach him cockney rhyming slang, which he loved.”

By the time McGuigan was released from jail in 2010, Troyan was ill. “He always had asthma but then he got a flesh-eating skin disease and had to take steroids, which made him put on weight. He took a lot of cocaine, which he thought should be legalised.

“But he still took pride in his appearance, getting his hair coloured every 20 days at John Frieda and buying all his clothes from Ralph Lauren. He tried to buy me a shirt from there but I thought it was too flashy. Robert got lots of takeout and ate at Scott’s in Mayfair and La Poule au Pot in Pimlico — Anthony had done most of the cooking and looked after him. He was vulnerable, I had to go to the shops and bank for him. He got out £250 a day.”

Aganon paints a picture of a warm, charismatic man who had been absolutely devastated by the loss of his partner.

“Robert was charming to everyone, telling women they looked like Jackie  O,” she said. “If someone put ash on one of his antiques he’d make a joke out of it. But you could tell he was lonely. He spoke about Anthony all the time and said there was no one like him. Robert ended up with a group of people who weren’t good for him.

“There was radical drinking, arguments. I didn’t like what I saw. The house was upside down. There were people I didn’t like and I told him not to let them in but he said, ‘What am I meant to do? Get a parrot to talk to?’ ”

McGuigan said: “I stopped talking to him in December because he wouldn’t stop seeing these people who I think stole from him. If I’d been there to protect him this wouldn’t have happened.”

As police urged anyone who saw anything suspicious in Mount Street last Friday to come forward, Troyan’s 83-year-old mother spoke from her Boston home. She remembered “a good boy who appreciated the finer things and used to send me flowers and bulbs”.

“There was no one like Roberto. The main thing is to find out who did this horrible thing.”

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