On the 10th December my father arrived at Melbourne airport, bought a newspaper and caught a taxi into town. There was an advert in the paper for ‘Executive Apartments to Let’, and he diverted the taxi to check them out. The proprietors, Bob and Joan Wilcocks, were charming, there was a pool, and the small apartment was cheaper than his cheap hotel. Mrs Wilcocks gave him a card and asked his name. ‘Markham,’ he said. Mrs Wilcocks later said: ‘Within the next few days I was aware he had taken a flat on a three-months lease. However, as a result of what my husband told me I subsequently addressed the man as Mr Mildoon.’ He paid the A$150 bond, and a month’s rent, and moved into 411 City Centre Flats at 500 Flinders Street.
On the 11th December there was more crazy banking to do. He went to the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group at 66 Elizabeth Street and, introducing himself as Mr Markham, an export consultant who was going to be married shortly, spoke with Mr Joynt of the Migrant Advisory Centre. Here he opened a current and a deposit account with A$100 each. Also on the 11th, Mr Mildoon went back to the Bank of New Zealand and asked Mr Davenport if he could open a current account. But Mr Rowland had told Mr Mildoon on the 28th November that it couldn’t be done without a passport, and he didn’t have a passport. Mr Davenport referred to Mr Rowland’s notes on the account, written after Mr King’s lunchtime observations, and declined the request because ‘certain comments on our records decided me to treat Mildoon with caution’. Also treating him with caution was Detective Sergeant John Coffey of the Victoria Police who, on this same day, went to the Bank of New South Wales, and the Bank of New Zealand, and then to City Centre Flats at 500 Flinders Street, where he took possession of a tenancy application form.
At 10.15am the next morning DS Coffey was undercover and had taken up position outside the Bank of New South Wales on Collins Street. When he saw my father come out, he followed him around Melbourne. At this early stage the police weren’t sure about what they were watching. They thought he might have committed a fraud, or was about to, or was simply a runaway husband using two names. They followed him for a couple of hours a day to begin with, usually in the morning, so they may not have seen that on the afternoon of Friday the 13th Mr Mildoon opened another bank account, this time at the Commonwealth Banking Corporation at 227 Bourke Street. Here he spoke to Mr West of the Migrant Information Service, telling him that he was an insurance broker, had substantial funds owing to him in Switzerland, and was hoping his fiancée would join him in March 1975. Even without a passport, Mr Mildoon was allowed to open a current account with A$100, plus a deposit account with the same amount. Mr West then took him to the branch next door at 225 Bourke Street, where a temporary cheque book was issued. Now he had seven accounts at four banks: Markham had a current and deposit account at two banks; and Mildoon had a current and deposit account at one, plus an investment savings account at another. He was giving himself options and hedging his identity bets. Mr Mildoon must have felt pleased that he’d managed to acquire a current checking account without a passport for ID, and had a nice place to live. He was getting somewhere. His aim was to ultimately disentangle himself from Mr Markham, who was too close to Stonehouse, and become Mr Mildoon, but he knew he couldn’t entirely break the link with Markham because Mildoon didn’t have a passport and couldn’t risk getting one because he might have to explain what happened to the one issued to the real Mr Mildoon.
Nevertheless, a new, uncluttered, life seemed in reach. But eight police officers were now taking turns to follow him, and they were so intrigued that they went to his apartment when he was out on the 17th or 18th and, without a warrant, searched it. Detective Senior Sergeant Hugh Morris said: ‘We saw nothing during the course of that entry that helped us in any way. I saw a box of matches from the Fontainebleau Hotel.’ The significance of the matches would not become clear until a week or so later, when they realised who he was. Morris confirmed they were taking the enquiry fairly seriously. ‘We thought we might have a big international criminal on our hands. We did not want to lose him. We did not want him committing any offences in Melbourne. At one stage it was thought that it might have been Lord Lucan.’4 He was the other big character the world was looking for at the time. Lucan had gone missing from London on the 8th November after allegedly killing Sandra Rivett, his children’s nanny, in the basement of his wife Veronica’s house in Mayfair, mistaking Sandra for his wife. Lucan has never been found.
By the 19th December, the police were still confused about who their suspect was. At the trial, Coffey said: ‘At that stage we were not certain which was his true identity, Markham or Mildoon. We were concerned that two persons had allegedly been booked into a hotel in St Kilda but only one had been seen.’ Coffey believed ‘he was contemplating something. I suspected he was up to no good. I did not know the how, the why or the when.’ He didn’t have a lot to go on: ‘As far as I could tell Mr Stonehouse led a very modest life during the time I observed him. The flesh spots of St Kilda held no attraction for him. As far as I was able to see he was not living it up. He was living comfortably, he was never in the company of any other person. Apart from his bank accounts, I am not aware of any other attempt to establish any other operation in Melbourne. Apart from the bank accounts he never sought to establish any commercial roots in Melbourne. He had spoken to others but he had taken no steps towards it. He was never without his dark glasses and never without his hat. He was watching television with his hat and his glasses on inside which made me suspicious.’5 This conflicts with what DSS Morris said at the trial: ‘Certain photographs were taken of Mr Stonehouse before he was arrested. In those photographs he quite often appears not wearing a hat. From my observations of him quite often he did not wear a hat.’6 He also wasn’t trying to be incognito at the apartments where he was staying. One of the owners, Bob Wilcocks, said: ‘He spent a lot of time in his room and I remember he was very fond of classical music. He used to play a lot of Beethoven on a cassette recorder. He had a set of photographs in his room. I didn’t look at them closely, but I suppose they were his wife and daughter. He mixed very easily with other guests and was always most polite and friendly. He did not seem at all a man who was hiding out. He was always very natural.’7
Mr Mildoon joined the Victorian Jazz Club where he met some friendly people who invited him to barbecues at their homes, and on some evenings he went to the Melbourne Chess Club in Elizabeth Street. He applied for a driving licence, and started looking for a job. He walked everywhere, exhausting the police who were following him. DS Coffey reported on his routine: ‘The first thing he did was to go and buy a copy of The Times and sit in the sun and read it.’8 My father was still trying to find out what was going on back in the UK. Then the Australian newspapers picked up on the UK Daily Mirror interview with Frolik on the 17th, saying he was an StB spy. My father wrote it was the ‘horror of horrors’9 when he saw that one of the Australian newspapers had a large photo of him. On the radio news he heard that Harold Wilson was going to make a statement in the House of Commons, and was later relieved to hear he had been publicly exonerated.
On the 19th December, Mr Davenport at the Bank of New Zealand informed the police that a letter had arrived for Mr Mildoon. This was the first of four letters that Sheila would send. DS Coffey and DS Thomas went to the bank to collect it and Coffey steamed the letter open. He said, ‘I took it to the forensic science laboratory, opened it myself, caused the contents to be photostatted and returned it to Mr Davenport personally.’10 Mr Davenport objected to there being no search warrant, but that wouldn’t stop him handing over a further three letters. ‘At the time I obtained the letters I didn’t have sufficient information to go before a magistrate for anything,’11 Coffey said in court. Sheila wrote the letters in Chippenham where she’d gone to avoid the press who, by this time, were keen to talk to her. She wrote in a code of her own making, in case a bank teller would read it; it wasn’t a prearranged code between her and my father when they’d met in Copenhagen. ‘The rags are hounding,�
� she wrote, by which she meant ‘the newspapers won’t leave me alone’, and ‘My boyfriend is away at the moment and I have heard the most dreadful things about him from his former wife.’ Sheila is referring here to the meeting she’d had with my mother on the Tuesday following her return from Copenhagen about the press stories of the ‘brunette’ who lived at Vandon Court. My mother had told Sheila that he’d had affairs, but that he always returned to her. This spooked Sheila and at the trial she said she was very upset and felt lonely and isolated. She was the only one who knew he was alive and what she’d heard challenged the whole basis of their relationship. The letter said: ‘At the moment, (saw her yesterday) she is questioned re self-service project. He lied about insurances to me. There’s been a Mafia type murder in some place and they’re tracing blood groups etc. They suspect B. of murder because of insurances. S. has had to promise to retrieve if she’s accused.’ Sheila later explained to Detective Chief Superintendent Kenneth Etheridge of Scotland Yard what all this was meant to convey. She said the ‘self-service project’ referred to ‘secret service enquiries’. On the insurances she said, ‘I mention that Mrs Stonehouse was being suspected of murder because of the insurances, and this had all arisen because of the stupidity of taking out so many policies.’ When asked by the police what she meant by ‘S. has had to promise to retrieve if she’s accused’, Sheila said: ‘I would like to say that that is a misleading sentence. What I meant to say is that I had to promise myself to do something about that, in other words, knowing that he was alive, I would have to disclose it if there was a possibility of Mrs Stonehouse becoming implicated.’12
Detective Sergeant John Coffey of the Victoria Police said: ‘We thought he might have been Lord Lucan only because of the first letter’ – with its talk of ‘murder’. At this point, everyone was confused, including Sheila. In this first letter, she’d written, ‘I do not recognise him as the same man at all. Two entirely different personalities, and I’m frightened to death. Like a szchitsophrenic (can’t spell that).’ She later explained to Etheridge what this meant: ‘In view of his behaviour, I did not recognise it as that of the conduct of John Stonehouse. The John Stonehouse I knew was a man of positive and brilliant thinking with a first-class brain, but the man I now heard about was a completely different man, totally unlike the man I know. I really believed at that time that something had happened to him mentally. He had turned from a totally rational politician and businessman into an irrational, illogical man.’13
On the 20th December Coffey picked up the second letter from the bank, written by Sheila on the 13th. In this, she’d written, ‘My biggest problem apart from Industry – like flies – is insurance. The only one the female persisted about was the first, – subsequents were forced by male who was never terribly intelligent, and this is front rag stuff now.’ Sheila told Etheridge it meant: ‘The insurances were still the problem and really that is all I mean by that. My reference to “Industry” does in fact refer to the Department of Trade and Industry which was now becoming actively involved in the investigation.’14 In relation to the insurances, Sheila’s problem was that all she had to go on was what she read in the newspapers, and they had the facts wrong.
In the third letter, dated 17th December and collected from the bank and copied by Coffey on the 23rd, Sheila wrote: ‘There’s a defect in the material I had. George has joined the co-operation India Association’ – by which she meant he’d been accused of being a spy for the CIA. She reassures him that his Markham cover is not blown by saying ‘the projects on the ports thing is still OK’, and lets him know that Scotland Yard are no closer to finding him, with ‘the Scottish thing is still at it, barking up all the wrong trees’. She also made it clear that she was prepared to join him, with ‘I long to go to work in Africa, or anywhere else for that matter.’ This letter was written on the day Harold Wilson spoke in the House of Commons about the Frolik spy allegation that had been front-page news that day: ‘Uncle Harry is speaking about this to his big family this afternoon,’ and reports later in the letter ‘marvellous news, is standing by George completely.’ ‘George’ was her code name for my father. She then drops a bombshell: ‘He told me and all of us everywhere that G’s mother had had a heart attack and he blamed the R’s entirely for that.’ ‘R’s’ meant rags or newspapers. Sheila continues, ‘I am so upset over his mother. She was getting on OK until Friday when all this broke re the insurance project, so without wishing to be cruel, you can guess who is responsible. I cry all the time about her but cannot get in touch. George must not do anything as she is very elderly and it has to come anyway. She is in hospital and is being well taken care of. I pray for her every night so I will tell him (George) not to worry. Those bloody insurances.’ Sheila told Etheridge, ‘I blamed the press comments on the insurances for his mother’s earlier heart attack. It looked so bad. I am also telling him not to come back, because she is so old.’15
Although the press and prosecution would find Sheila’s letters so damning, indicative of a great conspiracy, they were utterly perplexing to the police and, more importantly, to my father. The unarranged ‘code’ Sheila decided to use was confusing and made the information in the letters open to interpretation. She didn’t have any insight into what was really going on and could only relay press reports, which were invariably factually incorrect. Also, she was sending mixed messages about what she wanted from him: in one letter she told him not to come back to the UK even though his mother was ill, and in another she says she needs him back. A couple of months after the end of the trial, Sheila wrote: ‘I’ll confess that in my letters I rather emphasised that there was a baby and I did this deliberately. I know this was rather cruel but I thought that if he thought everything at home was hunky-dory he needn’t come home, but could go on in his make-believe world for ever. But if he realised I was in dreadful trouble, as indeed I was, and desperately needed his help, then he might do something about it. In fact, I deliberately suggested that I was considering an abortion. I knew this would get him, and he would think, “Oh no, she’s not going to get rid of my baby,” and come rushing home.’16
By the time the Melbourne police had the third letter in their hands, they’d already contacted Interpol to ask them what they knew about Mr Markham and on the 21st December they heard back that Interpol weren’t looking for a Mr Markham but they did want to know the whereabouts of John Stonehouse. The Melbourne police messaged Interpol for a full description, and received a photograph back. This was the first inkling they had that they’d been following the runaway MP. Two policemen moved into the flat facing my father’s at the City Centre Flats at 500 Flinders Street and, with the aid of walkie-talkies, followed his every move. The proprietors had been told and continued being friendly with my father, introducing him to fellow residents at an opening celebration cocktail party. To my father, all seemed well, but by the 23rd he was under 24-hour surveillance.
That same day, back in the UK, Sheila was being interviewed at the offices in Dover Street by Detective Chief Inspector Barbara Tilley and Detective Sergeant Crock of New Scotland Yard. Sheila told them that although a very good swimmer, Mr Stonehouse had got a bit ‘paunchy’ recently and ‘on one occasion she had found him lying down resting and this was something he never did in the ordinary way. He also complained of pain in his right arm.’ Both police officers were struck by Sheila’s unprompted remark that ‘he was dead’, and Tilley noted, ‘Throughout the interview she did not appear to be upset or distressed at the apparent death of Mr Stonehouse.’17 What Sheila didn’t tell the police was that three days earlier she’d posted her fourth letter to Mr Mildoon, tucked inside a Christmas card; and what the police didn’t tell Sheila was that Interpol and the Melbourne police were already closing in on Mr Stonehouse.
On the morning of the 24th December, my father went to a bank to collect a new cheque book, and then to the Regal Hotel in St Kilda to see if any post had been forwarded there. Meanwhile, police officers Coffey, Morris and Clarkson were
preparing to make the arrest. They’d be armed. Coffey said: ‘Officers of the Fraud Squad don’t usually carry guns but this was an unusual enquiry.’18 At 10.40am my father headed for the station where he bought a ticket and ran to catch the waiting train. Once on the train he was approached by three men. He didn’t at first know who they were. Morris was the first to grab him and showed him his warrant card. The three quickly ushered him off the train, which was about to depart. In the deserted booking hall they searched him and asked: ‘Are you Mr Markham?’ He said nothing. They sat him on a bench. He was in shock. They cautioned him. The three policemen stood over him, holding back his arms. One of them said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all over.’
In the car on the way to the police station the police said they suspected he was an illegal immigrant. He said nothing. DSS Morris lifted his trouser leg, looking for a scar. They’d had a telex from London about a scar on Lord Lucan’s leg. As Coffey said, ‘We were still rather confused about his identity until he admitted his identity 51 minutes later.’19 At the police station they started interviewing him and half-way through told him it was being recorded. He said he didn’t mind. Morris reported that, ‘He told us of tensions and pressures which caused him to do what he did. We listened to him sympathetically and encouraged him to talk.’20 He mentioned blackmail, and general disillusionment and about the Sunday Times article that had started all the problems. At 1pm Coffey went to the apartment in Flinders Street and collected up all my father’s possessions, which he handed over to acting Superintendent Gillespie of the Commonwealth Police – the Federal branch of the Australian police – who now took over. They went with my father to their own offices where Detective Inspector Sullivan questioned him all over again, cautioned him again, and suggested a couple of lawyers. By luck my father chose a man who would become a great ally, Jim Patterson. Then he phoned my mother at Faulkners Down House and asked her to come to Melbourne, and to bring Sheila with her.
John Stonehouse, My Father Page 11