So successful was he that he amassed sufficient savings to buy a piece of land in Jamaica, close to the sandy beaches of St Ann’s where he used to play as a child. When he returned from the fields, he used to call the kids and give them food. How can they kill the goose that laid the golden egg?”She recalled a man who came to Britain in 1950 with a sense of hope and adventure, setting up a shop in Birmingham which sold Caribbean produce to a clientele which came from as far afield as Cardiff and Manchester. It is very sad,” he says.Such advice comes too late for Alfred Morris, and back in Birmingham his relatives are left to grieve for the gentle man they knew as “Sabboo”.

His former wife, Dorothy Morris, 56, says: “Sabboo has never done anything to anyone He was actively involved with the community. “The fact that you are a returnee means that you would not know many people, so there are no gunmen or police to protect you and the criminals see you as an easy target. A returnee himself, who used to live in Birmingham, he says: “I don’t know if it is because they have big houses or they talk too much about what they have, but they are definitely being singled out.”I am not saying people can’t have big houses and expensive cars, but when you have these things people get jealous, especially in a place like Jamaica, which has high levels of poverty Some returnees give themselves away. They are making themselves enticing to criminals.”Luke Douglas, the municipal reporter on the Jamaican Gleaner newspaper, says returnees would be best advised to move into affluent areas where they can get better protection, rather than live in the rural communities where they originally came from. Of the 29 returnee murders in Jamaica over the past six years, nine have been committed since the beginning of last year.Percy LaTouche, founder of the Association for the Resettlement of Returning Residents, strongly believes that returnees are being targeted. Most are from the group of people who came to England in the Fifties and Sixties, on board or following the SS Empire Windrush, to work mainly on the buses, in hospitals and in factories Others are returning from Canada and the US. And with few friends and relatives in an environment which they left two generations earlier, they are isolated and vulnerable.Many of the 40,000 people who have returned to Jamaica over the past five years are pensioners who still receive benefits from England and contribute about pounds 15m to the island’s economy each year.

But the village life that they had abandoned 40 years or more ago has changed beyond recognition.By choosing to return to the villages of their childhood they eschew the high security and armed guards which patrol the homes of the Jamaican elite in uptown Kingston. In almost all cases they had been born in Jamaica and were realising dreams of returning home to what they nostalgically remembered as an island paradise of rural peace and clear blue skies. At the beginning of this year the senate, Jamaica’s upper house of parliament, passed a resolution calling on the government to provide better advice to returnees on investment opportunities and personal security.Most of the victims have been British or American. In the past six years, 29 people who left Jamaica to make a life for themselves in England and the Americas have been brutally murdered on retiring here. The vehicle was found abandoned in sugar-cane fields near the Caymanas Park racecourse, and the Grahams are feared to be dead.It is a disturbing pattern that is causing great concern to the Jamaican authorities. The couple, who were living in the capital, Kingston, have not been seen since they went to meet a prospective buyer for a van they had advertised for sale.