When news broke that Formula 1 heiress Tamara Ecclestone's home was burgled and £25 million stolen, it was one of the most high profile robberies of recent years, in the same vein as Kim Kardashian's Parisian ordeal, or the theft of the golden loo at Blenheim Palace. Now, a BBC documentary has revealed how the case was cracked - via a naked selfie, of all things.
Who Stole Tamara Ecclestone's Diamonds?, which aired last night, explained that one of the gang, 24-year-old Jugoslav Jovanovic, had sent the unsolicited photograph to an out-of-hours number at the budget hotel he was staying at while carrying out the raid. When the police questioned the local hotel staff if they had seen or heard anything suspicious during the time of the robbery, the worker came forward with the image and phone number, which she had saved as ‘Weirdo’. They were then able to see Jovanovic's passport - scanned at reception when he had checked in - and therefore track him and some of his associates down, Alessandro Maltese, 44, and Alessandro Donati, 45. All three were jailed in 2021.
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The robbery took place while Ecclestone and her husband, the art gallery owner Jay Rutland, were in Lapland with their daughter, Sophia. In an echo of the Kim Kardashian case, Ecclestone had posted photographs on social media of her trip, so that the robbers knew that they could enter her 22,000-square foot mansion in Kensington uninterrupted (Kardashian had shared pictures of her jewellery on Instagram hours before she was targeted).
Speaking on the documentary, Ecclestone said: 'They are disgusting. Now I have seen their faces, it is kind of haunting in a way. Knowing that kind of person has been roaming around your house and helping themselves to my most treasured valuable possessions is just a horrible feeling.
‘I feel like I can’t get those faces now out of my mind. Our lives will never be the same because there is always worry about the one thing I never used to worry about — being safe in this house. I worried about so many other scenarios and situations. I know there’s still one of them out there and that is probably one of the things that is really hard to deal with.’
