Muriel Freda McKay, née Searcy, aged fifty-five, was the epitome of a wealthy middle-class woman, with a large comfortable house in Wimbledon, many social and charitable interests, three fond married children, and a successful, loving husband, Alexander Benson McKay, who was known as Alick. they were both Australians.
Born in Adelaide on 4 February 1914, Muriel Searcy met and fell in love with Alick McKay at a Sunday school when she was thirteen and he was eighteen. they married in June 1935. It was through her brother that Alick became involved in the newspaper business, in the management of Sir Keith Murdoch’s News Ltd. Eventually, in 1957, he came to London as the advertisement director of Daily Mirror Newspapers. The family settled in a red-brick, mock-Georgian mansion, St Mary House, 20 Arthur Road, Wimbledon.
Alick McKay continued to prosper, becoming advertisement director of the newly formed IPC in 1963 and acquiring many powerful friends in politics and the newspaper world. two years later, he was awarded the CBE. He was all set to retire in August 1969 after two heart attacks – he was now sixty – when Rupert Murdoch, son of Alick’s first newspaper employer, offered him a job.
Murdoch’s company, News Ltd, had gained control in January 1969 of the world’s best-selling Sunday paper, the News of the World (circulation: six million). Its success was based on the public’s appetite for sensational stories about sex, crime, scandal and murder. In June, Murdoch became the paper’s chairman, and then bought an ailing daily paper, The Sun, from IPC, relaunching it in November. The previous month Alick McKay had retired from the IPC with a golden handshake said to amount to £40,000. Instead of returning to Australia as his wife had hoped and his colleagues expected, he accepted Murdoch’s offer of a job as deputy chairman of the News of the World, becoming temporary chairman when Murdoch decided to return to Australia with his attractive young wife for a six-week holiday. Alick McKay was left in charge on 19 December and given the use of the company car, a dark-blue Rolls-Royce.
The car had already caught the eyes of two Indian Muslim brothers from Trinidad who wanted to know where Rupert Murdoch lived. They had scanned the London telephone directory, tried directory enquiries, consulted a library copy of Kelly’s Street Directory – all without success. They then drove to the News of the World offices in Bouverie Street, where some chance sighting or snippet of information led them to identify the blue Rolls-Royce as the chairman’s car. who else but he would have such a car at his disposal?
They noted its number, and on Friday, 19 December, the very day that Rupert Murdoch flew with his wife to Australia, the younger Trinidadian brother, Nizamodeen Hosein, called at the offices of the GLC at County Hall and, using a false name, said he was anxious to trace the owner of ULO 18F with which, he said, he had been involved in a slight accident. A girl in the vehicle registration department could only tell him that the Rolls was owned by the News of the World. This merely seemed to confirm what the brothers already suspected.
They now surmised that the simplest way of finding out where the chairman lived was to follow the car from Fleet Street to its destination. This they did just before Christmas, oblivious of the fact that the identity of its passenger had changed a few days before. They followed the Rolls across London. It led them to 20 Arthur Road, Wimbledon, to the kind of up-market house a wealthy executive was likely to inhabit. They went home to plan the kidnapping (as they thought) of Mrs Anna Murdoch, for whom they intended to ask a ransom of £1 million.
Home for the Hosein brothers of Railway Road, Dow Village, Trinidad, was now a run-down seventeenth-century farmhouse set in 11 acres of Hertfordshire, 40 miles north of London. Rooks Farm, by the hamlet of Stocking Pelham, had been bought by the older brother, Arthur Hosein, on a mortgage in 1967.
Arthur Hosein was a vain and natty little man – ‘like an advert for Babycham’, said a publican – about 5 ft 4 in, moustached, ever-talking, volatile, jokey, ambitious, boastful, and determined to make good in England, to make money – lots of it – to make and be worth a million. He had emigrated to England in September 1955, hoping to become a student. He became a ledger-clerk instead, earning £7 a week. He was then called up for National Service. Army life had little appeal for him and he often absconded, finally being court-martialled for desertion in 1960. ‘Immeasurably the worst soldier it has been my misfortune to have under me,’ said one officer, and Private Hosein of the Royal Pioneer Corps was sentenced to six months in Aldershot military prison and discharged.
However, while a British soldier stationed at Colchester, he met Else Fischer, a married woman ten years his senior. She and Arthur married after she got a divorce from her soldier husband. She had a ladies hairdresser’s in Mare Street, Hackney, and it was there that Arthur began a tailoring business that won him a solid reputation as a very good trouser-maker and craftsman. He was also a keen gambler and owned two greyhounds, which he raced at various tracks around London. The East Enders called him ‘nutty Arthur’, and he might have stayed among them and prospered – he was now earning up to £150 a week, of which £65 a month was sent to his parents in Trinidad – but for his ambition to become a country gentleman and realise some of his fantasies. This led him to abandon his ‘business in town’ and acquire an ‘estate in the country’: Rooks Farm.
He moved there in May 1968 and relied mainly on hire-purchase to furnish the house to his taste: there was a gilt cocktail bar in the lounge. One of the outhouses became a tailor’s workshop, where he cut his famous trousers, taking them into the East End to be finished. He had two cars, a dark-blue Volvo saloon and a Morris Minor. at night he liked cutting a dash in local pubs, buying lavish rounds of drinks for village worthies – whisky was his favourite tipple – and talking grandly of the money he had made and planned to make, of influential friends and contacts. He also liked making up calypsos mocking the Labour government; Arthur was a Liberal. He saw himself as an English squire – some villagers called him ‘King Hosein’ – and when an altercation with Captain Barclay, Master of the Puckeridge Hounds (they had cut across Arthur’s land), involved the police and legal correspondence and the actual social acquaintance of a real country gentleman, Arthur must have felt he had made his mark. He applied to Captain Barclay to become a member of the Puckeridge Hunt.
None of this appealed to Nizam, who was an awkward youth, introverted and emotional. He came to England, lured by Arthur’s fantasies, in May 1969, a year after he had wounded his father in a fight. He was twenty-one and worked as a labourer on the farm in return for pocket -money and his keep. But little pleased him and he was disparaging about Arthur’s illusions and exaggerations. where was the wealth, the affluent and socially successful life that Arthur had bragged about in Trinidad, and which he had promised his parents should they come to visit England? The discrepancy between Arthur’s heady aspirations and cold reality had to be faced. the solution was obvious – get rich quick. But how? How could Arthur, now thirty-four, realise the ultimate fantasy of making a million, which would in turn make fact of all his dreams?
The answer was provided by a television show. On 30 October, the brothers were watching David Frost interviewing Rupert Murdoch about the ethics of reprinting Christine Keeler’s memoirs. But what was of greater interest to the brothers was the huge amount of money mentioned in connection with the take-over of the News of the World. Clearly, Mr Murdoch was a millionaire many times over. they heard he also had a young, attractive wife. Obviously, he would part with one of his millions to ransom her if she were kidnapped …
The brothers probably made some preliminary enquiries in November, but did not go into action until after 13 December, when Arthur’s German wife, their two children and his thirteen-year-old sister left England on a Christmas visit to Else’s parents in Germany. They would return on 3 January, soon after which Nizam’s visitor’s permit was due to expire. The brothers had three weeks in which to make a million.
It took them a week to find out where – as they thought – Mrs Murdoch lived. Then there was the Ch
ristmas break, a long one as Christmas Day fell on a Thursday. Nobody would be back at work until Monday, 29 December.
The McKays spent a pleasant family Christmas at Lingfield in Sussex with their daughter, Diane, who was married to David Dyer, a business executive with the Wilkinson razor-blade company. The Hosein brothers were on their own in Rooks Farm, although they were joined on Boxing Day by a Trinidadian nurse called Liley, who was Nizam’s girlfriend. She was twenty-nine and had left her husband and three children. Her presence excited Arthur, who thought all women found him irresistible, and there was a punch-up between the brothers in which Nizam was worsted and was so distraught that he reported Arthur to the police. But when Liley departed on the following day, fraternal harmony was restored.
On the morning of Sunday, 28 December 1969, two policemen visited Rooks Farm, making enquiries about an assault on an old farmer the previous Sunday. Both Hoseins denied being involved in this case of grievous bodily harm and the detectives withdrew. That night, about 9.30 pm, the brothers appeared in a pub, the Plough, at Great Munden. Arthur was full of beans. He said he had been invited to a dinner party at Mr Rupert Murdoch’s house, but had had to refuse. The following Monday morning, about 11 am, PC Felton called at the farm in connection with Nizam’s complaint against his brother. Nizam said he didn’t wish to prefer any charges. Of Arthur and the Volvo there was no sign.
Later that day, at 8 pm and again at 10.30 pm, Liley telephoned the farm to talk to Nizam. No one answered the first call. The second was answered by Arthur, who said Nizam was out.
That Monday morning Alick McKay had set off for work at half-past nine in the dark-blue Rolls-Royce, driven by his chauffeur Bill. Mrs McKay waved goodbye at the door of St Mary House. It was very cold: the ground was still white with frost, but some Christmas roses flourished.
Not long afterwards, Mrs McKay got into her Ford Capri and drove to Haydon’s Road to collect the household help, Mrs Nightingale. Back at the house, after dealing with various tasks including the preparation of two steaks for the evening meal, Mrs McKay went shopping on foot, visiting a cobbler’s, a bank, and a smart dress-shop where she bought a silk dress and matching coat for £60. She lunched in the kitchen with Mrs Nightingale and then visited her dentist in Wimpole Street for a routine check-up, returning home about 5 pm, when she drove Mrs Nightingale home, stopping to buy the evening papers. She must have been back in St Mary House about 5.40 pm, when she made herself a cup of tea and settled down to read the papers in the snug at the rear of the lounge, with a log fire blazing in the grate and her dachshund, Carl, at her feet.
She turned on the television to watch the news but, as was her wont, kept the volume down until news-time arrived. The front door was locked, with a chain across it. Mrs McKay had become wary of strangers ever since the house had been burgled three months before: silver, jewellery, a television set and a record player being taken.
At about ten to six, the doorbell rang.
At six o’clock a neighbour, Mrs Lydiatt, walked by the house and noticed a dark car parked in the drive. She also saw that the light above the front door was on.
Alick McKay returned from work at 7.45 pm. After dismissing the chauffeur-driven Rolls, he rang the doorbell in a pre-arranged code (three shorts and a long) to let his wife know who it was. There was no response. He tried the door – it was neither locked nor chained. He went into the house.
The scene in the hall, as DS Birch described it later, was ‘as if it had been set up for an amateur production of an Agatha Christie thriller’. The telephone lay on the floor, its lead ripped from the wall, as well as Mrs McKay’s reading glasses. The contents of her handbag were scattered on the stairs, and littering various pieces of furniture were a tin of Elastoplast, a ball of string and a wooden-handled billhook. Everything else was in order, and Carl the dachshund lay dozing in front of the fire in the snug.
At 8 pm, Alick McKay telephoned the police from a neighbour’s house. within five hours, the house was besieged by the press and garrisoned by CID and uniformed policemen. Mrs McKay’s two married daughters moved in with their husbands, and several influential newspaper friends arrived, including the editor of The Sun and the chairman of IPC.
The disappearance of Mrs McKay was potentially just the kind of story that would be blasted across the front page of The Sun and the News of the World – as, in fact, it was – and the police, headed by DCS Bill Smith and DI John Minors from Wimbledon, were at first suspicious about everyone’s motives and about everything to do with the case. Initially, they thought that Mrs McKay’s disappearance might be part of some publicity stunt – the News of the World had a regular item dealing with missing persons, as it happened – that Alick McKay, who seemed strangely calm, might be in some way involved; that Mrs McKay had run off on her own accord, possibly with another man; that there had been a family row; or that she had had some kind of breakdown. In any event, they felt that ‘the whole thing smelt’ and that her disappearance had been stage-managed.
They rather doubted she had been abducted at all, it seemed. There was, after all, no ransom note, and middle-aged women who went missing were a regular occurrence in London, numbering about fifty a week. Earlier that year, another Wimbledon housewife, thirty-seven-year-old Mrs Dawn Jones, had vanished in similar circumstances, her body being eventually found in a hut in Morayshire, Scotland. What aggravated the police most was the involvement and the presence of the press. A Sun reporter and photographer were the first journalists at the scene, and a statement was sent by The Sun’s editor to the Press Association in time to catch the morning papers.
That night, at 1 am, Mrs McKay’s disappearance was announced in very vague terms by BBC radio. Fifteen minutes later, the McKays’ telephone, which had been busy all night after being reconnected, rang.
David Dyer, the McKays’ more aggressive son-in-law, answered it. The operator said he was putting a call through from a call box at Bell Common, Epping. A voice said: ‘Tell Mr McKay it is M3, the Mafia.’ The house fell silent as the family and the policemen who were there looked at Mr McKay.
He took the receiver from Dyer. DS White picked up an extension in the kitchen. The voice, evidently disguised and later described by the operator as ‘an American or coloured voice’ continued: ‘We are from America – Mafia. M3. We have your wife … You will need a million pounds by Wednesday …’ ‘This is ridiculous!’ cried Mr McKay. ‘I haven’t got a million!’ ‘You had better get it,’ said the voice. ‘You have friends. Get it from them. we tried to get Rupert Murdoch’s wife. We couldn’t get her – so we took yours instead … You have a million by Wednesday night. Or we will kill her.’ ‘What do I have to do?’ demanded Mr McKay. The voice said: ‘All you have to do is wait for the contact … Have the money or you won’t have a wife.’
The family were both relieved and horrified: Mrs McKay was apparently alive but in the hands of a lunatic gangster. The police found it hard to believe that any kidnapper would make a ransom demand from a public call box – and ‘Mafia M3’! It was most unlikely and surely must be a hoax.
The Sun’s front-page headline on the morning of Tuesday, 30 December was ‘MYSTERY OF PRESS CHIEF’S MISSING WIFE’. Mr McKay felt that the maximum publicity could only help in his wife’s return. But the police were far from sure about this, as were some members of his own family.
From the police point of view, Mr McKay was still the most obvious suspect. The house, the attic and the garden of 20 Arthur Road were carefully searched. Frictions developed between the family and the police, who they thought should be pursuing their enquiries elsewhere. This was indeed being done, and a press conference revealing details of the £1 million ransom demand was held that morning.
At the same time, a description of Mrs McKay – ‘5 ft 9 in, medium build, dark complexion, dark brown hair, straight nose, green eyes, oval face’ – was circulated, and a crime index was set up at Wimbledon police station. The index was a filing system, heavily cross-referenced, d
ealing with all the sightings, statements and other information that began to come in as the police made enquiries about cars and people seen in the area. They questioned friends and neighbours of the McKays and investigated the activities of local cranks and crooks. A tape-recorder was provided by a detective working on the case – it would have taken over two months to obtain one through official channels – and was fixed to the telephone in the snug, which had been taken over by the police. The McKays’ number was soon jammed by hoaxers and reporters, but there was not a word from M3. This tended to confirm police suspicions that the Mafia call was probably a hoax.
But at 4.56 pm, M3 finally got through. Again, he was ringing from a callbox; David Dyer, who took the call, heard the pips. The voice said: ‘Your wife has just posted a letter to you. Do cooperate … for heaven’s sake. For her sake, don’t call the police … You have been followed. Did you get the message? … Did you get the money?’
Again, no instructions were given as to where or how the money was to be delivered. The family’s fears increased, and that night Diane Dyer appeared on the 8.50 BBC TV News – much to the vexation of the police and with a corresponding increase in nuisance calls.
On Wednesday morning a letter, postmarked ‘6.45 pm. Tottenham. N17’, arrived. On lined blue paper was a feeble, unaligned scrawl from Mrs McKay: ‘Please do something to get me home. I am blindfolded and cold. Only blankets. Please cooperate for I cannot keep going … I think of you constantly … What have I done to deserve this treatment? … Love Muriel.’
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 56