It was their last night. Ben Mullany — a physiotherapy student — and his new wife Dr. Catherine Mullany, both 31, had spent two blissful weeks honeymooning in Antigua after their wedding in Wales. One more night in their chalet at the Cocos Hotel, and they’d be flying home to start married life. They never made the flight.
On July 27, 2008, intruders broke into the couple’s chalet. Both were shot. Catherine died instantly. Ben survived the initial attack but died a week later in a Welsh hospital, after being flown home in a desperate bid to save him. A honeymoon that began with vows ended with two funerals.
The killers were caught. Kaniel Martin and Avie Howell were convicted in 2011 and sentenced to life. They weren’t targeting the Mullanys specifically — this was robbery, brutal and indiscriminate. Days later, the same men killed a local shopkeeper, Woneta Anderson. The honeymooners were simply in the wrong chalet on the wrong night, in the path of men who had already decided human life was cheap.
This case sits slightly apart from the other honeymoon murders in the file, and honesty requires saying so: there was no romance gone wrong here, no spouse with a secret. Ben and Catherine’s marriage was, by every account, a happy one. Their killer wasn’t love — it was luck, the worst kind.
But it belongs in the honeymoon-horrors series for exactly that reason. The other cases are about trusting the wrong person. This one is about the illusion that a honeymoon destination is a bubble — that paradise resorts exist outside the crime statistics of the country around them. Antigua is beautiful. It also had, at the time, a violent crime problem that the brochures didn’t mention.
The Mullanys’ families have spent the years since campaigning for better security awareness for travelers — not to frighten honeymooners, but to puncture the bubble. A chalet door is a chalet door, whether it costs $50 a night or $500. Paradise doesn’t have a separate legal system. And “it was their last night” is a sentence no family should ever have to say about a honeymoon.
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