by John Preston
The captain, Gus Rankin, gave this idea short shrift. ‘I would say not possible, because even if there isn’t someone on the aft deck, we do have equipment for detecting other boats . . . The instructions to the crew were: any vessel that comes within five miles of this boat I am to be called. I, the Captain, am to be called. Nobody called me.’
Although there was no evidence of this second ship’s existence, this did nothing to quell the speculation. Or perhaps some, even all, of the crew had been responsible? As Betty wrote, they were all strangers to her and this in itself was inclined to make her suspicious: ‘We had certainly never had a completely new team like this before.’
Then, out of left field, came an entirely new possibility. Could the body that had been pulled from the ocean not have been Maxwell at all? It was a theory that the Guardian was willing to entertain, albeit cautiously: ‘In none of the documents they prepared do either the Civil Guard doctor or the autopsy doctors commit themselves to saying that the body they examined was that of Robert Maxwell. The Civil Guard report describes the cadaver as that of a “white male, with athletic build and prominent belly, chestnut hair – possibly dyed – with a slight widow’s peak, 1 metre and 90 centimetres tall and weighing 130–40 kilos.” The forensic experts use similar wording.
‘Mr Maxwell’s hair, though, was black. Most of his friends and associates suspected it was dyed and it may be that the action of the sea turned it light brown. However, according to an official in the Canaries whose job has led him to see numerous bodies pulled out of the water, the long-term effect of salt water on hair dye is usually to “burn” the hair, but not change its colour.’
The Guardian’s correspondent wasn’t the only one entertaining the possibility that Maxwell might have faked his own death. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, a former MI6 officer called James Rusbridger compared the case with an ingenious Second World War plan to fool German Intelligence: the corpse of a 45-year-old Welsh tramp dressed in Royal Marine uniform and clutching a briefcase full of bogus Allied invasion plans had been secretly planted off the Spanish coast.
Rusbridger had even gone so far as to contact the eminent pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury to discuss his theory. Spilsbury, he claimed, had told him that substituting a dummy corpse was perfectly possible: ‘You have nothing to fear from a Spanish post-mortem; to detect this man had not drowned at sea would need a pathologist of my experience, and there aren’t any in Spain.’
If Maxwell had faked his own death, this might have been the answer to some of his – or his family’s – problems; at least they would be able to collect his £20,000,000 life insurance policy. According to a former stewardess on the Lady Ghislaine called Madeleine Hult, it was an idea that Maxwell himself had entertained. Hult came forward to tell the New York Post that a year earlier she had overheard him planning his disappearance with his son Kevin. ‘I heard him say he had some problems with money, with some loans, and that he had just bought a very secret house in South America. He said he would just disappear, make it look like he had died, and have another body found.’
Support for the idea that Maxwell had hidden away in some remote corner of the globe came from an unlikely source. According to Nick Davies, Maxwell had often talked to Andrea Martin about ‘doing a Stonehouse’. John Stonehouse was a Labour MP who faked his own death in 1974. After leaving a pile of clothes on a Florida beach to suggest that he had drowned, Stonehouse travelled to Australia to start a new life, using a passport he had obtained in the name of a dead constituent. In a particularly cruel twist of fate, he was only caught because the Australian police suspected he was the missing peer, Lord Lucan.
‘I have thought it would be a wonderful way of ending one’s life,’ Maxwell had apparently told Andrea. ‘Living in a lovely house with a swimming pool in the middle of nowhere with not a worry, not a thought for all the problems. I would have plenty of money and the telephone would never ring again. I would be at peace then and happy . . .’
37.
The Second Autopsy
Shortly before three in the morning on Friday, 8 November 1991, a hearse drove slowly on to the floodlit runway at Las Palmas airport in Gran Canaria. From the back of the hearse, six pallbearers took the largest coffin Betty Maxwell had ever seen. Later she would learn that her husband’s remains had been encased in two coffins. There was an inner one made of lead, hermetically sealed with a glass lid to permit identification of the body by the Spanish authorities, and an outer one made of mahogany with silver handles, which Betty suspected was the most expensive model the funeral parlour had in stock.
Just before the plane took off, a Spanish official approached Ken Lennox and asked if he could have a discreet word. ‘He said, “Mr Lennox, I’m afraid there’s a problem.”’
It seemed the coffin was too large even to fit into the specially adapted plane. The only way to get it in was to wedge it at a 45-degree angle. Mrs Maxwell had told him she was all right with that, but how did he feel? The coffin was blocking the emergency exit and if the plane crashed on take-off it might not be possible for either of them to escape. It was fine with him too, Lennox confirmed.
When at last the plane was airborne, Betty asked him to turn out the lights. ‘That’s when she had a little weep – the first time I’d seen her cry. Afterwards she asked if I would get her a whisky. So I got her a whisky and put the lights back on.’ The two of them sat in silence gazing out of the window with Maxwell’s enormous coffin wedged behind them. Having finished her whisky, Betty turned around and stared at the coffin for a while. Then she asked Lennox an unexpected question:
‘Ken, do you think Bob is standing on his head, or his feet?’ Taken by surprise, Lennox said the first thing that came into his head.
‘“Well, Betty,” I told her, “he always landed on his feet before, so I guess that’s how he is now.”’
Just before the sun went down, their plane entered Israeli airspace. As soon as they did so, Betty Maxwell and Ken Lennox saw two Israeli aircraft appear, one on either side of their plane. At first, the pilot thought they were trying to force him to land, but it turned out there was another explanation: the Israeli government had sent a guard of honour to escort Maxwell to his final resting place.
‘At 10.15 p.m. on Saturday 9th November 1991 at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, I performed a second post-mortem examination on the body of Robert Maxwell, aged 68 years,’ wrote Iain West in his official account.
In fact, West didn’t perform the second post-mortem himself. As it was conducted in Israel, a team of Israeli pathologists was in charge. They were, however, happy for him and his wife, Vesna Djurovic, also a pathologist, to be present. ‘Effectively, the tasks were shared out. An effort was made to ensure that everybody saw it all.’ West was there to try to determine the physical cause of Maxwell’s death – whether he’d fallen overboard, possibly as the result of a heart attack, or had jumped, or been pushed.
Walking into the mortuary room, he saw Maxwell’s corpse laid out on a table encased in a coarse muslin body bag. ‘Maxwell R’ had been scrawled in magic marker on the material. While his head was exposed, the rest of the body was wrapped in ropes that had been tied around the ankles, thighs and chest. It was, West recalled, ‘an extremely unpleasant autopsy’. When the ropes were undone, they turned out to be holding the body together. Several organs and tissues were missing, as well as most of the heart. Anything left had just been tipped back into Maxwell’s chest cavity.
To make matters worse, neat formalin had been used as the embalming fluid and the fumes made it difficult to breathe. The pathologists could only work for a few minutes at a time before going out for some fresh air. When they examined his skull, they quickly found what appeared to be signs of a brain haemorrhage – a pool of clotted blood known as an ‘extradural’. Hitherto there had been no suggestion that Maxwell might have died of a brain haemorrhage.
‘We looked at it and said, “They couldn’t have missed an extradural
of that size, surely?”’ Then they realized that the embalmer must have poured so much formalin into his skull that any blood there had solidified. ‘Because of gravity it had hardened into a layer which made it look like a haemorrhage.’
Although the body was covered with bruises and abrasions, these could all have come from his being immersed in the sea. It was when they examined Maxwell’s left shoulder that they found the first evidence the Spanish pathologists had missed: ‘Dissection of the skin of the back showed an extensive 5 by 2 inches haemorrhage along the line of the left infraspinatous muscle. Some of the fibres were torn and the haemorrhage involved most of the muscle. There was a 5 by 0.5 inch extensive haemorrhage into the paraspinal muscle on the left side extending from the twelfth thoracic vertebra to the level of the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae. There was a small area of haemorrhage inside the right psoas muscle.’
The muscles on the back of Maxwell’s left shoulder were badly torn. In addition, there was a lot of bruising on the left-hand side of his spine. West thought it highly unlikely that these injuries could have been caused by him flailing around in the water. Instead, they appeared to support the theory that he’d fallen from the boat, and then hung on to the side of the Lady Ghislaine for as long as he could – until what would have been excruciating pain forced him to let go.
In her report, Vesna Djurovic wrote, ‘The pattern of tearing in these muscles suggests that the deceased had at some point been hanging on to an object with his left hand and with his weight being carried by that hand. This could occur, for instance, in a person who is hanging vertically from a rail with his body freely suspended. There are a number of possible scenarios where these injuries might have been received:
(a) If he was hanging on to the rail of the boat and trying to prevent himself from falling into the water, it is possible that in such a large and unfit man the muscular effort involved in trying to hoist his body back on to the boat could cause the damage seen here.
(b) If he overbalanced and fell over the railings but managed to grab the rail as he fell, it is possible that he would have torn these muscles. One must look at this, of course, in the context of a man of his age, size and state of health being able to carry out this type of action. One must also consider the ways in which an individual could accidentally fall from this boat. It is, we think, difficult to see from the available evidence how such an accident could have occurred on a smooth sea unless the deceased had been leaning well over the rail. The arrangement of the railings suggests that if he had tripped or slipped on the deck then it is improbable that he would have fallen overboard.
(c) These injuries would not be seen if an individual allowed himself deliberately to topple over the side of the boat. If, however, the deceased had climbed over the railing so that he stood on the protrusion of the outer hull at deck level, then it is possible that he could have slipped from this while still holding on to the railing with his left hand. This could well account for him hanging for a short while by that hand and for the injuries that were found.
There was another possibility, of course – that Maxwell had been murdered. If this was the case, the most likely scenario was that he had been injected with a poison, with the elbow and the back of the ear reputedly the spots favoured by professional assassins.
West checked for any evidence of puncture marks, but found nothing: ‘I never saw an injection mark either in his arm or behind his ear, though a combination of decomposition and embalming might have obliterated any evidence of such marks.’
By the time the pathologists finished the second autopsy, it was five in the morning. Dawn was already breaking. In seven hours’ time, Maxwell’s funeral was due to start. Thirty-five miles away in the presidential suite at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Betty Maxwell woke up determined that, whatever happened, she would stay as composed and dignified as possible. A hairdresser came to do her hair, while a maid pressed the black cashmere suit she was going to wear.
Various people stopped by to pay their respects. Everything seemed to be going as smoothly as it could. But when Betty caught sight of her reflection in the mirror, she could hardly believe what she was seeing. All the colour, all the signs of life, had drained from her face.
‘A ghost stared back at me.’
38.
The Four Horsemen
At midday on 10 November 1991, a convoy of limousines flanked by armed motorcycle outriders left the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and drove to the Hall of the Nation two miles away. As she stepped out of her car, Betty was taken aback both by the degree of ceremony and the number of dignitaries present. ‘I must admit I was astounded when I discovered that Bob was being given a hero’s send-off and what amounted to a state funeral.’
After Maxwell’s body – wrapped in an Israeli flag – had lain in state for an hour, the family joined 400 mourners for the funeral service. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Coggan, was there, along with the most prominent members of the Israeli parliament – President Chaim Herzog, the Leader of the Opposition, Shimon Peres, and Ariel Sharon, the former Minister of Defence – as well as a group of Chernobyl schoolchildren whom Maxwell had arranged to be flown to Israel for medical treatment.
President Herzog was the first to speak. When it came to lauding Maxwell’s achievements, he did not hold back. ‘He scaled the heights,’ Herzog declared. ‘Kings and barons besieged his doorstep. He was a figure of almost mythological stature. Few are the persons who stride across the stage of human experience and leave their mark, Robert Maxwell was one of them . . .’
Herzog was followed by Maxwell’s oldest son, Philip. Before he began his speech, Philip thanked everyone for attending. ‘Sadly, the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, couldn’t come,’ he noted.
At this point a hand shot up in the crowd and Shamir – just five foot tall – called out, ‘I’m here!’
Earlier that morning, Betty, determined that her children should remain as self-composed as she intended to be, had wondered if Philip would be able to get through his speech without bursting into tears. ‘We, his family, were willing him with all our hearts not to break down under the strain. Mercifully, he did not.’
‘Dear Dad,’ Philip concluded, ‘Soldier, Publisher and Patriot, Warrior and Globetrotter; father of nine children and grandfather of eight; newspaper proprietor and football club owner; speaker of nine languages; we salute you; we love you, we need you, we miss you, we cry for your presence and our very great loss.’
Outside the Hall of the Nation, the Chief Rabbi of Haifa gave a brief address – by tradition the rabbi was not allowed to enter a building containing a corpse. After he had finished, events took an unforeseen turn: a fight broke out among the clerics. Two rabbis from the Lubavitch movement began scuffling, with each of them trying to climb on to the rostrum to speak to the crowd. As the Maxwell family looked on, one of the rabbis made it to the microphone, only for his words to be drowned out by cries of protest – and what Betty later referred to as ‘more jostling amongst the younger rabbis’.
Once peace had been restored, Maxwell’s body was carried into a hearse to be taken to its final resting place on the Mount of Olives. As the sun began to sink behind the gold roof of the Dome of the Rock, the Minister of Health, Ehoud Olmert, delivered the final eulogy: ‘He once said to me, “After all, I have not done so badly for a young Jewish boy from the shtetl. Indeed, Bob Maxwell, you have not done badly at all. May your soul rest in peace in this ancient ground which finally became yours.”’
Olmert had barely finished speaking when the gravediggers, anxious to complete the burial before sunset, brought a stretcher bearing Maxwell’s body to the opening of the tomb. Among the onlookers was the photographer Roger Allen, who had been sent out from London to cover the story for the Mirror:
‘One of the rabbis dispensed with his black Homburg hat and jacket and jumped in the hole, waiting to receive the body. The other rabbis were lining up the stretcher at one end of the grave, ready to ti
p it up and send Maxwell down the chute, a bit like a burial at sea . . . Four rabbis heaved one end of the stretcher up to shoulder-height hoping that, as planned, the body would slide down into the waiting arms of the rabbi in the hole. But Maxwell wouldn’t shift – he still lay under the shroud, refusing to budge.
‘The rabbis pushed harder and suddenly his body, with the force of gravity, slid quickly forward. The rabbi below looked like a goalkeeper waiting for the ball. Maxwell’s body rushed towards him. It got to a certain point in its journey and then sat upright, nutting the rabbi. The poor man eventually managed to push it down to the bottom of the grave. Having freed himself of Maxwell, the rabbi leaned against the grave wall, breathing very hard. Slowly he regained his composure and then went about his duties, dressing the body in the white and blue shroud. Moments later, in near darkness, he hopped out, grabbed a shovel and started to fill the hole.’
Richard Stott was in his office at the Mirror late at night on Sunday, 1 December 1991, when he received a mysterious phone call. ‘The four horsemen are in the Vanway,’ he was told, before the line went dead – the Vanway was where the Mirror vans lined up to collect their copies of the paper. As far as Stott was concerned, the message was clear: ‘The agents of destruction, war, pestilence and famine were upon us.’
Two weeks earlier, on Sunday, 17 November, the Independent on Sunday had reported that the Serious Fraud Squad was investigating MCC’s failure to repay Swiss Bank the £57,000,000 it was owed. The next day MCC shares opened at 46 pence – a fall of 17 pence from the previous Friday. Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that morning, Kevin Maxwell insisted that ‘the public companies’ finances are robust’.