An acclaimed crime writer believes he has shed new light on the notorious kidnap and murder of Muriel McKay after 53 years.
Bishop’s Stortford played a pivotal role in the perplexing mystery of what exactly happened to the woman mistaken for newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s then-wife Anna.
The body of the 55-year-old mother of three was never found, but brothers Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein were nevertheless convicted of her abduction and murder.
The search for her remains resumed to no avail earlier this year at Rooks Farm near Stocking Pelham after younger sibling Nizamodeen suggested Mrs McKay had suffered a heart attack after she was snatched and he buried her at their rural home.
Simon Farquhar, the author of A Desperate Business: The Murder of Muriel McKay interviewed Nizamodeen, now free and living in the Caribbean, as part of his meticulous research for the book and believes the vital clue to Muriel’s fate lies with his older brother Arthur.
The pair, Indian Muslims, were born in Trinidad and moved to East Herts in 1968. Their 17th-century farm, set in 11 acres, was run down and unlikely to generate the riches they craved.
The arrival in the UK of Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of the Sun and News of the World newspapers, apparently provided a solution.
Tailor Arthur, then 34, and his younger brother hatched a plot to kidnap the Australian tycoon’s wife and demand a £1 million ransom.
Following Murdoch’s Rolls-Royce to a house in Wimbledon, they were unaware that he had returned Down Under for Christmas and had loaned the luxury car to his friend and colleague, Alick McKay.
On Monday December 29, 1969, the executive arrived home to find his wife, Muriel, had vanished, never to be seen again.
Writer and broadcaster Simon Farquhar has an impeccable investigation pedigree. He previously penned A Dangerous Place, an account of the crimes of the Railway Killers John Duffy and David Mulcahy. It also chronicles the role his father, Scotland Yard detective Charles Farquhar, played in bringing the rapists and killers to justice in the 1980s after the biggest criminal manhunt since the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry.
Simon said: “I wrote A Dangerous Place as a tribute to my late father. It was quite successful, and so I was invited to write another true crime piece and immediately volunteered for the McKay case.
“Strangely enough, it was also a story that had come to me by my father. When I was a teenager, he secured a conviction for murder without a body being found, which although not unique was – and still is – unusual. It evoked memories of the McKay case, which I then asked him about.”
He spent three years delving into dusty files and interviewing key figures in the case, including one of the killers.
Arthur Hosein died in Ashworth secure hospital in 2009, but his brother was deported back to Trinidad after 20 years behind bars.
Simon said: “I knew that the book would never be complete without me putting my questions to Nizamodeen Hosein, the surviving one of the two murderers.
“The McKay family had located him sometime earlier and he had seemingly made a kind of confession, that Muriel had died of a heart attack and that he had buried her at Rooks Farm. Naturally, they wanted this acted upon, but, after a week of searching in February 2022, the police found nothing.
“In the book, I make a point of detailing all the reasons why Nizam’s account could not be true – quite apart from the fact that he is incapable of telling the truth and always has been.
“It depressed me that his account, in which he was a blameless onlooker, had become the official narrative of the story – that he was still managing to manipulate and deceive people.
“My interview with him was a vivid experience, and inevitably chilling. In previous media appearances, he has given a performance as something of an innocent, but he didn’t attempt that with me, he was surly and unfeeling, and clearly cares nothing for the continued pain he puts that family through.”
Simon’s research also included collaborating with Muriel’s family. “They were extremely supportive and cooperative,” he said. “It was a long time before I actually reached out to them because I didn’t want to pester them with my questions unless I could offer some answers to theirs.
“What was particularly valuable was to record their own memories of Muriel, and offer some previously unseen photographs. I was determined to make this a story about her life as much as about her death.”
The book also conjures up images of a very different East Herts landscape and a lost era.
He said: “You have to go and trudge around these places, get the feel of them, understand where things happened. Although it’s now obviously a very different sort of area from the agricultural community it mainly was…the local people then and now who contributed to the book were so helpful and insightful. I think it’s the portrait of that community at that time that built up during the research that I found the most enjoyable part.
“The story has a fascinating backdrop, a changing Britain, the rise of the Murdoch empire, a police force struggling with an unknown crime, and a new type of press, but most of all it is the mystery and the tragedy that compels, a tragedy made even more so by the fact that it took place over Christmas.
“To me, more than anything else, this has always been a frightening story and a heartbreaking one. And even though it played out so long ago, and so much of that world has vanished – the pubs that feature in the case and so on – I am glad I’ve had a chance to set it down now, while some of the people are still alive.”
What was already known was that after Muriel was kidnapped, a man calling himself M3 made a series of telephone calls, demanding cash and threatening to kill her.
After one botched attempt to deliver the ransom, M3 demanded that £500,000 in two suitcases be taken to a telephone box in Edmonton on Friday February 6.
The money was being carried by a policeman and woman disguised as Alick McKay and his daughter Diane, who were then directed to another box in Bethnal Green Road.
Next, they were sent to Epping and then onto Bishop’s Stortford where they were told to leave the cases by a van on Gates garage forecourt, then at the intersection of South Road and London Road.
The Met police had not warned Hertfordshire Constabulary about the operation, however, and Joan Abbott, latterly one of Bishop’s Stortford’s best-loved and most steadfast charity volunteers, and her husband Peter spotted the suspicious bags and notified the police.
The operation was abandoned, but not before a detective keeping watch had spotted a blue Volvo cruising past the pick-up and noted its registration.
The trail then led to Rooks Farm where officers found evidence linking the brothers to the kidnap, but no trace of Muriel.
During their trial at the Old Bailey in September and October 1970, the brothers blamed each other – but neither confessed. They were charged with kidnapping, murder and blackmail and found guilty on all counts.
Simon said: “Most of the official files on the case were closed in 1971, which is standard procedure in murder cases, to protect surviving witnesses and the families of victims – and the families of the guilty, too.
“I managed to gain access to a substantial number of them, and immediately I realised that there were vast areas of the story that had never been made public before and helped to build up a picture of exactly how this dreadful and bizarre crime came about.
“In particular, there was a huge amount of information about Arthur Hosein, the elder of the two brothers convicted of the crime.
“He has been portrayed down the years as something of a ludicrous figure, a hard-working tailor who suddenly and inexplicably tried to pull off Britain’s first-ever kidnapping-for-ransom.
“However, a very different picture of Arthur built up when I went through the hundreds of pages of witness statements from those who lived in south Hertfordshire at the time.
“When you embark on a project like this, you have a fantasy that you are going to find that missing clue, that piece of paper that slipped through the cracks and that turns out to contain the answer. And yet, incredibly, that just might have happened.
“I started out with a view that every piece of paper available to me was potentially valuable. After I had exhausted all the police files, the Home Office files and the Director of Public Prosecutions files, and collated everything, along with all the interviews I conducted with living witnesses, I was amazed, once they were all put together, at how many potential answers there were beginning to emerge. Yet none of them came close to answering the most bewildering question: where was Muriel McKay buried?”
It seemed like a dead end, but Simon ploughed on: “It then just occurred to me that although this looked to be everything I was ever going to be able to lay my hands on, might there not also be a paper trail at the Court of Appeal?
“Both brothers had appealed their sentences at the time, to no avail. Sure enough, there was a box of paper there, which at first appeared to contain nothing very exciting.
“And then, there towards the bottom of the last box, was a clutch of papers, dating from November 1972, so two years into the brothers’ life sentences. And in a letter from Arthur’s solicitor to the Court of Appeal, he reveals that Arthur has told him where Muriel is buried, and names the location.
“It is the only piece of paper, amidst thousands of pieces of paper, in which Arthur Hosein has ever said anything about the crime.
“So my job was to try to discover where the information came from, and also, crucially, where it went to. And that meant tracing prison visitors’ books, trying to locate the papers of the solicitors’ office, and so on.
“And after doing my very best to disprove the information, when I truly felt that this was information worth taking very seriously, sitting down with the McKay family and talking them through it.”
Readers of his book can judge the revelation for themselves. Simon summed up: “I have tried to offer plausible, evidence-based explanations for every unanswered question, including mysteries such as how the Hoseins got into the house to kidnap Muriel, when and how she died, and why.
“But as for where her body is, all I can say is that I firmly believe that this is the most likely explanation.
“One thing that constantly nagged at me was the extraordinary confidence that the brothers always had that she would not be found. Arthur even said during the search of Rooks Farm, to a cellmate, that the police were ‘looking in the wrong place’. This location would explain a great deal about why she has remained unfound.”
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