Little is known of Edward Johnston, the man who allegedly stabbed his ex-partner, Nicolette Ghirxi to death in the early hours of Monday morning but videos posted on his social media profiles give a glimpse into his life and thoughts in the weeks leading up to the tragic events.

Videos posted to Johnston’s YouTube channel portray him as an enigmatic figure, leading a spartan life in a modest two-bedroom St Julian’s apartment (“a luxury apartment in a prime location,” he says), while boasting about buying a Jaguar, a Rolex watch and a yacht.

Several day-in-the-life videos posted by Johnston – who adopted the name Edwardo Sambora for his online persona – show him waking up to cook himself a breakfast of fried eggs, before settling down for a day’s work in his “office”, a bare desk and plastic picnic chair in his apartment’s second bedroom.

This is from where he would run the Sambora Trading Academy, an online academy for prospective traders. Students would reportedly pay hundreds of euros to learn Johnston’s trading tricks and hear him “deliver analysis on futures and stock trading on the London and New York stock exchanges”.

Johnston claimed to have as many as 600 students in his academy but its online presence is as inscrutable as Johnston himself.

The academy’s website is no longer online and there is no sign of it ever having any formal recognition of any sort. Prospective students were directed to write to Johnston’s Yahoo e-mail address to sign up for the course.

‘Don’t fall into his honey pot as you’ll get stung’

In any case, not all of his students were satisfied.

One anonymous former student, who claims to have paid €300 to take Johnston’s course, set up an entire YouTube channel last year, posting several videos calling him a fraud and conman.

“Edward Sambora is a fraud, don’t fall into his honey pot as you’ll get stung,” the former student warns in one video.

Johnston didn’t take kindly to suggestions that retail trading is a scam. In one video he describes people who say this as “quitters or losers, the same people who diet for the first two weeks of January and then give up”.

These people live in “losersville”, he says in one video, seated at the kitchen table where he shot most of his videos throughout his time in Malta.

A ‘winner’ who ‘escaped the slavery’

The videos show Johnston to be a man consumed by the twin idea of success and failure. He frequently described himself as a “winner”, able to emancipate himself from the drudgery of employment.

He said that discovering financial trading in 2019 helped him “escape the slavery of the day job” and turn his life around.

He said he quit his day job in logistics and distribution after almost two decades (although other reports suggest that he fell victim to COVID-19 redundancies), telling his 4,500 YouTube subscribers that he could “retire at 48” thanks to his new-found riches earned through trading stocks.

But Johnston said he maintained a strict routine, rising at 6am, working for “maybe two hours” throughout the day and running or practising combat sports in his free time.

“It’s all about discipline, having a routine and taking control,” he told his followers.

Yachts, cash and tax havens

But Johnston was no stranger to bombast.

One YouTube video, titled ‘I Am Buying A Yacht’, shows Johnston standing at the Portomaso yacht marina discussing swing trading as several yachts behind him are rocked gently by the tide. Johnston doesn’t mention the yacht at all in the video.

Other videos adopt the hyperbolic tone typical of many suspect financial traders (‘How to make 1.4k in 3 seconds’, one title proclaims) while, in one TikTok clip, he pulls a large wad of cash out of his jacket pocket and proudly displays it to the camera.

He frequently tagged his videos with the hashtag #billionarelifestyle, attempting to portray a life of luxury.

Other videos are more instructional.

In one video posted last year, he walks people through the process of opening a company in a South American or Caribbean tax haven (“there’s nothing dodgy about it, it’s not illegal, in fact it’s very, very clever,” he says), adding that he registered his company – Sambora Trading Limited – in the UK “purely to funnel revenue that I make from my trading community”.

Meanwhile, earlier videos shot in Scotland show Johnston together with his teenage son, who appears to have happily followed his father’s footsteps in the world of financial trading.

Move to Malta, a new relationship

Johnston’s own travels are well documented in his YouTube channel, from short trips to Naples and the Amalfi coast, to longer sojourns in Mallorca, where he lived for several months in late 2021, just before he moved to Malta.

Johnston uploaded footage of himself landing in Malta for the first time in January 2022, initially moving into an apartment in an unnamed “small town” before eventually relocating to St Julian’s.

It is likely that he and Ghirxi began a relationship, which the police say lasted for almost two years, shortly after his move to Malta.

Early last April, Johnston abruptly posted a video titled ‘I Am Moving to Palermo Sicily’. He didn’t explain to his followers why he was leaving Malta, and Ghirxi is believed to have been just as taken aback to find that he suddenly left the island without any notice.

Later videos suggest that his Sicilian sojourn was short-lived. A video posted in late June shows him in Glasgow “to start a new journey”.

A fortnight later he was back to preaching discipline and rigour in a video titled ‘This is Why You Are A F****** Loser’.

His very last video, uploaded on July 20, takes a darker turn.

Shot in a stylised monochrome, Johnston warned viewers that things had become “real, real serious” with global elites working to oppress “the common man” and saying that the few public figures “who are trying to be honest with the world and telling the people how this world is run”, including Andrew Tate, Russell Brand and Donald Trump, are being “taken out” by false allegations.

“Don’t you find it funny that the most heinous of allegations is any kind of sexual allegation,” Johnston, who reportedly created fake social media accounts to make accusations about Ghirxi’s sex life, asked.