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-Nine, four, six, two, six, five, six.
-It was a unique case.
The end of 1969.
We'd never had a kidnapping in Britain.
They just didn't know what was happening.
We didn't have the scientific progress we've had today.
I mean, it's horrifying.
-Since she disappeared early yesterday evening,
there have been a number of telephone calls
demanding ransom money.
-I opened the door only to find
things scattered on the floor,
which had come from her handbag.
Telephone was lying on the floor.
The, uh, chair was... some disarray.
And then I noticed this machete.
-Mr. McKay came home last night expecting to meet his wife,
who should have been indoors.
The doors were open, wife wasn't there.
We're treating this as an abduction.
-The police did not know what to do.
No police force had ever dealt with a kidnapping case.
Not only was that, but there was no Mrs. McKay.
There was no evidence that she was dead or alive.
-This woman is this is Mrs. McKay.
She was wearing a medium green knitted suit,
just below the knee.
Probably wearing low-heeled shoes.
-To us, a million pounds ransom is just incredible anyway.
My mother hasn't any enemies.
-And I would say this to whoever has got my mother-in-law:
he's not going to crack this family.
We've got plenty of... reserves yet.
-My heart went out to them.
How can you suddenly lose
a mother and a wife just like that?
-We're looking back to a different time.
-My mother, she met my father
when she was still probably a schoolgirl.
They were engaged at 18 and married at 21,
which is what you did in those days, I think.
Then I was born when she was 23.
And my mother won an art scholarship
and somebody must have dissuaded her from that.
You know, "Oh, you don't want to do that.
You're not going to be an artist.
You're going to be a mother, you know,
and have lots of babies."
The Murdochs were from Adelaide,
my father -- first job in newspapers,
was working for Rupert Murdoch's father
with South Australian people,
which tend to think of themselves
as a bit sort of special.
Not the same as the other ones.
Nice memories. We had some lovely times.
-"The Daily Mirror" from London offered my father a big job,
a directorship, and it really uprooted us.
I mean, to take away 16 year old
from all their friends.
But my father just took us all away, that was it.
We were scooped up and dumped in London.
I would have had a very different life
had we stayed there.
My father then moved on to be with Rupert.
-We moved into that house in 1958.
It was a happy place to be.
It was absolute heaven in the summer when the tennis was on.
-The first day of Wimbledon fortnight.
The favorite spot for the fashion parade
is just outside the center court.
-Everybody came and parked, you know, tried.
-...celebrities too -- there's Mrs. Chris Madden,
the wife of the number-four seed.
-They were very Victorian parents.
And they all got married too young
because it was one acceptable way of leaving home.
And that's what happened to me.
We had a nice life, but somebody came along and jumped on that.
-It's 1969.
My parents have been staying with us
for two nights over Christmas.
-Then they'd gone back to London.
My father had work to do.
-...with the market report for farmers.
So until then,
ladies and gentlemen, goodnight to you all.
Good night.
-The phone rang.
That was my father, and he said, "Your mother's gone."
And we froze, and he said, "I don't know,
maybe there's been another burglary."
There had been a burglary a few months earlier
and she was pretty freaked out by that.
-I was the night duty CO of the area.
And when I got there, I saw damage to the inside porch door.
There were also senior members of the Fleet Street press
who were friendly with Mr McKay,
influential men --
fortunately, some of them who had access to
Number 10 Downing Street.
-The drama of the entrance hall with the phone on the floor...
You know, the desk in the hall with the knife,
the big bell hook,
the string, the twine -- all that was all there.
-The uniform chief superintendent
was a little bit skeptical.
He thought that this was a Fleet Street stunt.
Either that or Mrs. McKay had gone of her own free will.
-It was horror! It was a horror scene.
I mean, it was so obvious that something terrible had happened,
it was just obvious.
And then when the police came and they started saying,
"Oh, no, your mother, she's run away with her lover,
she's gone to Aus--" You don't know my mother!
I'm telling you my mother is not --
this is -- something violent has happened!
And the door was broken -- come on, you know?
They were -- I'm sorry, I don't have a lot of respect
for the police.
We expected some sort of telephone call
because telephone disk, with the number on it,
had been removed and was gone.
I sat by that phone all night.
'Course, we didn't have anything to record with.
-We were somewhat unprofessional in those days.
I managed to get the extension
and overheard the initial contact.
This is a transcript of the notes I made.
"This is Mafia Group 3.
We are from America. Mafia M3."
"We tried to get Rupert Murdoch's wife.
We couldn't get her so we took yours instead."
"You will need a million pounds by Wednesday."
-And it was pretty horrific.
And I said, "That man has the accent of a foreigner.
He has an accent of the Caribbean, I think."
-It was really a very extraordinary case.
Which became a major issue publicly.
And it was a case which had an impact
on the relationship of West Indians in London
to other people as well.
Some people saw it as a deliberate attempt
to frame West Indians
for the kidnapping of an Australian white woman.
-Already their coming has caused a national controversy.
But one point must always be borne in mind:
Whatever our feelings, we cannot deny them entry,
for all our British citizens
are entitled to the identical rights
of any member of the Empire.
-We will fight you back with every bone, every nerve,
every feeling, every ounce of blood we've got!
We will have our country back!
-I don't think any Black person
who was prepared for what they found in Britain.
Many of us had been invited,
actively recruited, to come to work here.
-They're nothing but a scourge,
I would deport them tomorrow if I had my way.
-I didn't expect us to be seen as an alien force
that was unwanted in Britain.
-I was amazed they were brothers,
they were so different.
Arthur did what Arthur wanted to do,
and he felt that things revolved round him.
And I had that instinct
that there was something peculiar going on here.
Was a most unusual man -- black mustache, glaring eyes.
Arthur, to my mind, was like a panther ready to pounce.
Nizamodeen was a very retiring young man --
pale, not very strong.
He'd only been in Britain for a few months.
He was totally dependent on his brother, Arthur.
-It was -- it was lovely on the farm.
We had cows, things like that; chickens.
It was nice.
It was big.
It's really nice.
Nizam -- he's my Uncle Nizam -- I love him.
I just love him, and brings back so good memories again,
just hearing his name.
He was lovely.
He played with us, made me laugh.
Nizam, he was lovely.
He's a normal 21 year old guy.
How can he do anything like that?
There are questions all over this case.
-By 1968, his newspaper empire was flourishing
and Rupert Murdoch had emerged as a powerful press baron
now keen to seek new titles in the old world.
After a ferocious takeover battle,
the News of the World was his,
and before long, London began to notice Rupert Murdoch.
-Rupert Murdoch on his way to his office by Rolls-Royce.
He's chubby cheeked and open face,
but underneath, say those who know him,
he's a man of steel.
If he succeeds in gathering the News of the Worldreins
into his hands, it's likely they'll be in
for some pretty aggressive management.
-Was buying into the News of the World
your own idea, or was it suggested from someone else?
-Entirely my own idea. -And what is your motive?
-To expand my own newspaper chain.
-Of course one enjoys the feeling of power,
although...
-Rooks Farm, it was frightening for me
because Arthur was so vicious.
We are to go under the table
and, um,
watch him -- him beat up my mother.
Very lovable, and then,
all of a sudden, he would change into a monster,
and she would get beaten up.
When I was nine years old...
Yeah, that was life at home.
-My mum was in a hairdresser shop in Hackney,
and they met because he was working in the basement
as a tailor.
So consequently, they got together
and she left my dad,
and went with this guy
who we knew nothing about.
And that was it -- didn't see mum for a long time.
-...get your blindfolds on immediately, if you will,
panel, because this will give you some idea...
-As soon as we heard a car come up,
we knew he's coming back again, and we were all scared.
Nizam, he was scared.
He was really scared.
-I got a phone call at 5:30 in the morning,
and tell me to get out of bed
and get down to Arthur Road in Wimbledon.
And very quickly they built up a sort of Fleet Street
sort of siege of people.
-Should have seen the press -- we had vans,
we had television from all over the world.
-The first thing you do when you get involved in this is
find out where the police drink.
Because journalists and police lives
revolved around the pub, largely.
Over the months there. I mean, I really got to know
some of them really quite well.
And every evening I'd be in there talking to police.
It emerged quite early on that
when Murdoch had gone off to Australia,
he'd left his car and his chauffeur
for Alick McKay to use.
So we put two and two together and got four quite quickly.
-Well, he was using Rupert's car
because Rupert said to him,
"I'm going to Australia, look after the shop" --
that's how it was, it was that casual.
-The police are the first to admit
it's one of the most baffling mysteries
they've ever experienced...
-...disappeared early yesterday evening
there have been a number of telephone calls
demanding ransom money.
-...more than 150 police are involved in the investigation.
But their night and day efforts have produced nothing.
-They'd never heard anything like that.
They kept saying, "This is not an English crime."
I mean, they suspected my father.
It was so ridiculous.
-There was some amazing competition in Fleet Street
in the '60s,
and news stories --
especially stories about crime, stories about sex --
were the great currency of the time.
You know, you had a rampant Daily Express,
a rampant Daily Mirror,
the Daily Sketch -- long forgotten now;
these popular tabloids
were being taken on
by the Sun --itself an aggressive news gatherer.
So the British press galvanized by the idea that it involved
Rupert Murdoch's deputy,
that it was that close to home.
-You were the intended target for the kidnapers.
-Yes.
-That must be a nightmare.
-It wasn't so bad for us as it was for Alick McKay.
But certainly one has to think about it.
And it colored my time there in Britain after that happened.
-At the time, the Sun was literally
in its second month of being under Rupert Murdoch.
So this was an amazing turn of events to happen
within two months of the newspaper starting.
-Mr. Murdoch, sir?
-My father was in constant touch with Rupert.
Rupert had evidently said, "I'll be on the next plane,"
and and my father said,
"No, you will not, you will not, you will not."
Obviously, Rupert Murdoch was terrified that,
because we thought it was maybe the IRA or the Mafia,
or that they realizing they had got the wrong person
would start reaching out to him where he was,
which is a long way away.
And so he did not come back.
-What about the ransom, the million pounds?
-Somebody doesn't know anything about money, that's all,
it's just -- it's just a sum,
I would think someone had their eye on.
-What about the thought that they might want
to extort it from from the company,
from the News of the World?
-I don't know that the News of the World
even got a million pounds -- it's a lot of money, isn't it?
It was always a million. It was always a million.
"We want a million pounds."
£15-20 million in today's money.
That's a lot of money.
-Hello? -Hello?
-Yeah. -Hello, I don't know who I'm speaking to.
I don't recognize her voice. -I'm M3.
Huh?
-Electric, it was horrific, the stress,
and I think it actually --
it destroyed my emotions, I couldn't feel emotion.
I could never cry. I never cried.
It just was so awful.
It was beyond awful.
-Nine, four, six, two, six, five six.
Who's calling? -Since she disappeared?
There have been a number of telephone calls
demanding ransom money, both to her home
and to the News of the Worldoffices,
where her husband, Mr, Alick McKay,
is on the board of directors.
-We had a whole van load, probably thousands of papers --
this is all News of the Worldpapers --
to try and find out if the press had been
particularly hard on somebody
who was -- who ended up being a crook
and who might have done this to us.
You know, who has been offended by the press?
-I think everybody's trying to find out from nobody else
what really was going on.
It's a hard world to imagine,
but you have to realize that the police had no idea,
I think, how to deal with this crime.
It was such an extraordinary thing.
-We're treating this as an abduction.
-What's the difference between that and kidnapping, in fact?
-Well, abduction is the correct term to use.
Kidnapping is a slang for it.
-It remained very much a Wimbledon cop is looking into
what was a huge story.
At times, there was element of amateur about anything.
The police, they decided for some reason
that they should have an observation van in the road,
full of policemen looking at us, looking at the house,
which was pretty farcical, I can't imagine.
I do remember going out and sort of banging on the door
and laughing and thinking --
I mean, they didn't know who they were looking for
and there were no hostage negotiators.
They didn't know whether she was alive or dead for certainly.
-I just cannot understand
why those holding Muriel have not contacted me recently.
I appeal to you to contact me
by telephone, letter, or telegram.
-Should never have gone to the press,
is all I thought by.
Getting the press involved and the publicity,
it would make her too hot to handle
to let her go.
-Bill Smith, who was a good cop that was going places,
but they were out of their depth.
This is still a time of the Wild West in Fleet Street,
and reporters trespassed, they bugged, they...
they did all sorts of things
that would later become to be outlawed.
-We had the house phone, which was the original number
which we had to keep open for the criminals,
'cause they had that number.
But unfortunately, everyone else in the world
had that number, too, after about 24 hours.
-It would not have been a strange thing to have done
at the time, and I'm sure that the Sun
were outraged that the Daily Mirrordid it
for two reasons -- one, because it was an intrusion into privacy
of their man, but secondly,
because they hadn't done it themselves.
That they had been beaten, as it were.
-Nine, four, six, two, six, five six.
-We've got one day to contact, another telephone call,
then nothing at all for almost a fortnight --
no doubt due to the publicity
that was given to the case in every paper
and every television news broadcast.
And I think this delayed the kidnapers from coming forward
on probably delayed this case up to 14 days.
-Information was coming out, it was coming from the police.
The police leaked like a sieve.
-Some some people would drink
quite a lot of my father's whiskey.
The police were very good at that.
I can remember my father going to fetch another crate
of Black Label -- not a bottle, but another crate,
from where he kept them all.
-Nine four six two six five six.
-Yes.
-And the family trying to trace the missing woman
have been turning to other methods, including spiritualism.
Mrs. McKay's son-in-law, Mr. David Dyer, explained.
-We have a very open mind -- if we get something
that says that it's just something that you say,
well, maybe.
-We were not a family of spiritualist at all,
but suddenly we thought,
"Well, maybe there's something in that.
Maybe someone can help us,
because they're not helping us --
the police aren't doing anything."
I mean, I remember one man and he came
and he actually said, "I keep getting this name,
this name," and he'd say, "Elsa, Elsa."
This is really spine chilling stuff.
-He first wants to see if the woman was alive or dead.
-Uh, "through my opinion, she is still alive."
-You'll try anything.
And he was fascinating.
He described the farmhouse and the pond.
So what do you make of that?
-Nine, four, six, two, six, five, six.
Good morning.
-You know who's speaking, don't ya?
-M3, M3
-Nine, four, six --
Nine, four, six, two, six, five, six.
-Uh...
-Just one sec. -Hello?
-My father, you know, was a complete mess.
Um...
-One morning, he was rather depressed,
so low, so low,
just very depressing, had to get this over to him.
I said, "Now, one must expect it to be published,
and assume it will again.
Can you sort of accept this?"
And he -- he cried. He did.
Eventually cried, so, to see a man cry,
it's a terrible thing...
A man of his stature.
And in order to --
pretty sure he said, now,
he didn't think so, but he couldn't accept this.
He had to keep hoping, keep his hopes raised,
and I said, well, hope for the best,
but one must expect the worst.
-Okay, I will --
-For me, as a child, Arthur was a monster,
and I don't like calling him dad
because he never was a dad to me in my eyes.
I can imagine he's -- he's, uh,
capable of doing bad things.
Yeah. I mean, seeing the way he was treating my mum...
-Is that the M3? -Yeah, yes.
Well, I'm -- I'm now on my way to a meeting.
This is being handled by --
-That does sound like him.
It does sound like him, like Arthur.
-You know this morning.
And, uh... -Just don't know what to say.
-My part, the instructions I gave you,
they were all carried out fully.
-That's Arthur.
That's Arthur.
'Cause he always used to --
to talk and catch breath --
Yeah. As a kid, I still remember this.
-I went to Arthur's home,
met his wife and met the children.
He had done fairly well as a tailor.
He got a decent house near Bishop's Stortford
in south Hertfordshire, had a wife and children.
He seemed to be managing as a tailor,
and he felt he could now be a kind of English squire.
-It's a very rare ambition, right?
We don't have many Black -- Black farmers in Britain.
The ambition that Arthur had to join the local hunt
showed that he had the very poor understanding of Britain.
He -- he was, you know, massively naive to think
that he had a place amongst those people.
-In the past six days, police have had only one positive lead:
the letter posted from North London
at 6:45 last Tuesday evening,
which arrived here at the family house on Wednesday morning.
-I remember being taken to give a television interview.
Please just let my mother come back.
And she heard that, because she wrote that letter
and she said, "I heard you on the television."
Sick, isn't it? Really sick.
"Darling, Alick,
I'm deteriorating in health and spirit.
Please cooperate.
I'm blindfolded and cold."
The earlier you get the money, the quicker I may come home."
It was so horrible to receive those letters,
where your mother's saying, "It's so cold,
please tell Daddy to cooperate, the M--"
Oh, it's so horrible. It was so painful.
-All the letters, I think, were written at one stage,
and they're all written about the same time
because one letter came telling us
to keep the police out of this.
And you'll know who these people are
because they'll use the term "M3."
Now, we'd been using the bloody term M3 for weeks!
She wouldn't have sent that.
I mean, that was obviously one of the first ones
we should have said, "Well, they sent them
out of order."
-There is the point when something occurred,
which seemed to be very much a milestone.
My memory says it was around the middle of the day,
at lunchtime,
and a call came through,
and it was a woman's shrieking hysterically,
saying, "She's dead, she's dead!
Mrs. McKay is dead."
And there was noise in the background.
It was as though it was Sunday lunchtime
and there were people in the pub, you know?
And there was a telephone on the wall,
which is what happened in those days.
It sounded as though somebody really had to
say something to get it off their chest,
and it was just terrible.
I don't know who it was,
but we fancied that it was perhaps the girlfriend
and perhaps somebody who was associated.
And we really believed that she had died at that time.
Sorry, it's hard to talk about.
-This M3, did you receive the letter?
-Yes, we have. Yesterday morning, first thing,
but there's no proof in the letter
that she is alive and well.
There's noth--
-Well, look, quite frankly, this letter could have been
written weeks ago -- we want to know she's alive.
We've got the money --
Well, why the hell should we give you money
unless we know she's alive?
-Yes, of course we recognized her writing, but --
but we don't know, she might have written that
three weeks ago; she might be dead now.
We don't know -- where was nothing to say that --
that gave us any indication that she's still alive.
That could have been written weeks ago,
and you may have killed her, we don't know.
We can't part with a lot of money --
-There was a lot of play acting on these telephone calls,
but this was very necessary, we were out to --
to catch these -- these people.
-They're slightly weird, those calls, aren't they?
He had been coached, if you like,
by the police to do it in a certain way.
And it -- and that was what he was...
He was supposed to get angry with them, I think,
and it -- I don't think it necessarily worked very well.
-Well, the reason for repeating myself was that we believe
that M3 was using a script, and we were using a script,
and both of us were trying to keep to our script.
And therefore, I was trying to get some points over,
and this point I was trying to get over,
was always this point of proof -- we wanted proof.
Obviously, if you're going to leave a large amount
of ransom money, you must have proof.
And it was important that we kept up this...
this willingness to pay, and that we shouldn't be
too willing to pay or we might possibly lose them.
-The kidnapers asked that Ian McKay delivered the ransom.
But rather than put him in danger,
senior investigating officer told me
that I was to be Ian McKay
and to go off in the Rolls-Royce
with a suitcase purporting to contain
£1 million in used £5 notes.
-They asked for £5 and 10 notes.
What they didn't realize was
you couldn't have a million pounds
in two suitcases, for instance.
The weight was enormous.
-They told us that we were to go to particular telephone boxes
and wait for the phone to ring,
and then tell us to go to another telephone box
where there would be a message.
A government laboratory specifically made
a tracking device to put on the case with the money
and on the car.
Never worked.
It never worked -- the thing was absolutely useless.
-The contact I had told me that it's one of the biggest farces
that he'd heard of -- they were being followed
by something like 63 different cars.
They're also being pursued by three Hells Angels on motorbikes
who are actually policemen pretending to be Hells Angels.
-The note that we found in one of the telephone kiosks
told us to go to a very rural location
where there would be some white flowers on a bank
where we were to put the money and go.
Which we did.
But it wasn't sophisticated.
The money was dropped and, um...
nobody approached,
nobody came across land, nobody went past in a vehicle.
The money was there for hours.
Well, we were all very disappointed.
-And I can remember standing in the windows upstairs,
waiting to see, um...
Rupert Murdoch's car come back
with Bill Smith in it,
and wondering who else was in it.
-And we'd all be hopeful, and we'd be at home thinking,
"Oh, my God, this is the one, this is the one," you know?
You can imagine pinning all your --
pin all your emotional hopes on that one evening,
and came to nothing -- nothing.
-Nine, four, six, two, six, five six.
-Nine, four, six, two, six, five, six.
-Hello. -Hello.
-Yeah? -Yeah.
-she wasn't allowed to go.
And so I said, well, if you won't let her go, I'll go.
"No, no, no, you can't go, and it's got to be a policeman."
-The apparel included a pair of ladies boots,
high length, knee length boots.
I won -- won the job,
because I was the only one who could get my feet
into the boots.
-And I can clearly remember my sister and I in the kitchen,
sitting perched on stools with makeup
and a towel around his neck trying to make him --
and I'm, you know, regardless of how tragic
and how terrible the whole thing is,
we were laughing -- it was --it was -- it was --
it was a moment of clowning, you know?
-It was hilarious, I have to say.
I mean, I feel guilty about the laughter,
but it was hilarious.
And of course, he didn't, in the end --
they sent a police woman.
-I had a coat, because my mother would recognize that coat.
And it was a sort of pink mohair coat.
And I mean, I thought,
well, she'll realize that we're trying to help her.
-This only happens in England.
They put the suitcases there,
and the police all hidden round,
and then a local well-wisher saw the two suitcases --
a local resident -- said, "Oh, gosh,
this is a time when bombs go off and so forth --
I better get the local police in,"
and our police force hiding all round the place
threw up their hands in despair
that their best laid plans went awry.
But they did capture the registration of the Volvo
because it was going round and round,
and that led them to Arthur and his farm.
That's the only thing that led them to Arthur and his farm,
despite four weeks of efforts of trying to find the truth.
-There's now little doubt that the police,
after weeks of frustration in their search for Mrs. McKay,
are searching in the right place.
Rooks End farm at .
-Sleepy hollow was woken up
early on this bitterly cold morning
by a full scale police invasion.
-I had a phone call to say, "Is that your mum's farm?"
And, um, sure enough, I rang her and it was.
-At first light this morning,
120 policemen from this special mobile unit
begin an inch by inch search of the property.
-First of all, she thought it was all a big mistake,
absolutely massive mistake.
-Then firemen began draining three ponds and a well.
-And obviously, mum was just beside herself.
She didn't really know what was going on.
Mum went to Germany for Christmas with the children.
She came back in January,
and that's when everything happened.
-More than 100 men from the Metropolitan Police
special squads and the Essex Constabulary
were soon at work searching the 3.5-acre...
-...and tomorrow, more than 100 policemen will be drafted in
to begin an even more intense search of the farm buildings
and surrounding fields.
-We've had reports there are fingerprints found
in the farmhouse, which you've connected to Mrs. McKay.
Is there anything in this, detective?
-No, I'm not able to comment on this.
-There was a report too that a shallow grave had been found.
Can you comment on that?
-No shallow grave has been found.
-Do the police still feel that Mrs. McKay is still alive?
-Well, we're hoping so, yeah.
-Have you any evidence that suggests she --
-We have no evidence otherwise, no evidence at all.
-I was in my room and I stayed upstairs
because I was a bit frightened.
There were so many.
Taking fingerprints everywhere.
All I remember is mum running around,
hosting all the people.
But I cannot remember seeing Arthur or Nizam.
-They arrived here about a quarter to seven this evening.
In the first car, the elder brother was
crouched on the floor of the back seat.
And in the second car, the younger Hosein was sitting
between two detectives in the back seat
with a coat over his head.
-I think what surprised us
when we saw the brothers and spoke to them,
they were unusual.
It became evident that they were not --
certainly not -- professional criminals.
-The two men have stayed here
at Kingston police headquarters since 6:30 yesterday evening,
according to the police,
and their questioning has been surrounded
by an aura of unusual secrecy.
So far, I understand those inquiries have not been
very productive, and apart from giving their names
and some personal background details,
the two men have not been able to help very much.
-Well, Bill Smith did the interrogation himself
with Joe Minus.
It's totally...
Unimaginable.
I wouldn't give it any credence whatsoever.
-I used to say, "Let me get to them," when they had them.
"I'll make them tell where my mother is."
"Oh, we do everything," they'd say, "we do everything,
but nothing that shows."
That's what the police would say, Smith and Minus.
-What did they say?
-"We do," otherwise they were saying, "Yes, we torture them,
but mustn't show."
"Get them by the balls," I said,
"You let -- I'll do it."
I mean, I really said that to them!
And they would say, "We do; we we've done everything,
but they won't speak."
-I spent a lot of time with the brothers.
I took them back and forth to court from Brixton Prison,
more than probably anybody else.
The van stopped in -- in the yard
at Brixton Prison.
The only time I'd seen any of them snap.
And Nizam went for me and Arthur.
I think Nizamodeen was against Arthur as much as anything else.
-The two men were charged after being in company
with the police and Kingston police headquarters
for about 72 hours.
Charge was that, between the 29th of December
and the 6th of January,
they murdered Mrs. Muriel McKay,
and further charged
that they demanded by menaces £1 million from Mr. Alick McKay
for the return of his wife.
-The common view in the community,
as I knew it, was,
people thought it was -- it was utterly incredible,
and that it was more than likely that other people,
white seasoned criminals, might have been involved,
and those two were taking the rap for that.
So it seemed to me such a kamikaze thing.
And the idea that you could pull off something --
a heist as massive as that --
seemed to us to be totally airy-fairy, really.
-When the brothers were arrested,
a lot of thinking was,
"Well, they must be more than them."
And they were members of the family living in London --
of the Hosein brothers.
One of them was a brother
who was really investigated
for some time.
Adam Hosein.
But, um, his alibi stood up.
-I went down there,
it was really a very extraordinary meeting,
extraordinary situation,
because the police could get nothing out of the two men,
and Smith said to me,
it's as if they pulled shutters down on their mind.
And I decided to act for the younger brother, Nizamodeen.
-Mum said that she looked even where police hadn't looked.
She was looking.
Hollow tree underneath the dog's bed,
but there was nothing, nothing at all that gave her any inkling
that they had actually killed her.
-100 police officers searched and searched and found nothing.
Mrs. McKay could not be found.
-I had just read a trashy American whodunit
in which the murder victim was fed to the pigs.
So I said to one of the policemen there
about this story, et cetera.
So the next day and there were people sifting with sticks,
whatever, through the pile of slurry.
And, "Had she been fed to the pigs?" started.
And just a throwaway remark for me
has sort of went down in history.
-What happened with the body, we don't know.
-M3... M3.
-This is M3 speaking again.
-This is the M3, we've contacted you last week.
-Hey, who am I talking to?
-I wanted to get to the truth; I wanted to hear the tapes,
and they were happy to play the tapes to me.
I'm just trying to find the truth.
-Nine, four, six, two, six, five, six?
-You are aware, as a popular newspaper editor and journalist,
of what the audience thinks and wants, and its prejudices.
You play to them, but not always consciously,
very often unconsciously.
Their views are your views.
You would know that the fact that two Caribbean men
have been responsible for kidnapping and murdering
a white woman --
you'd know exactly
the likely response from your audience.
-It was so un-British.
Did they come into the country to do this?
-The judiciary also thought it was
an un-British kind of crime,
and certainly the prosecution made a lot of that too.
The great deal was going to depend really on
the extent to which matters were put to the jury
that it was an unusual crime,
as foreign as the people who committed the crime.
-I've never been in a court before in my life.
Nobody said, "This is what it's going to be like."
So you're suddenly standing in this daunting place.
You feel quite overwhelmed.
I just burst into tears.
And I could see the two Hosein brothers there.
They were there.
And that is really horrific moment, really horrific.
The elder brother, Arthur Hosein,
he had specially tailored a suit to wear
to conduct his own defense,
and the young one,
all I could do was look at the young one,
and just think, "You are the evil."
He, to me, he was the evil.
The other one was mad,
but he was evil.
And I'd always felt that he was the one that killed my mother
and dispose of her body, however -- however, he did that.
-They plead not guilty.
And so you have to respect that.
Let the prosecution prove they're guilty.
That's the pattern of our law: it's the prosecution's job.
But he was very, very difficult to see,
100 percent evidence as to guilt or not guilt.
-Arthur's fingerprints was found at the House.
The bill hook, his neighbor found it missing from his farm
and then identified it.
The twine that every farmer uses --
there it was at the farm.
But of course, search went on for weeks at the farm.
We didn't have the benefit of what we've got now.
No DNA; purely on fingerprints.
There was no sign of her at the farm, never has been.
It was a case of, "prove your case."
There was nothing other than the forensic
to prove it.
-The body of evidence that went to the court
and that the prosecution put to the jury
was substantial but inconclusive.
My recollection within the Black community
was that they were unable to say categorically
that those two men
had actually murdered Muriel McKay,
because they had no evidence.
-And then...
Nizamodeen, at the Old Bailey,
made certain admissions.
Nizamodeen admitted getting the details of the Rolls-Royce
that belonged to Rupert Murdoch.
By admitting that,
he'd then involved Arthur.
-He then admitted
his fingerprints were on the paper flowers
put down for the drop;
said that he'd done that because Arthur had told him to do that.
So Nizam turned on Arthur.
It was devastating for both of them.
-Nizam was probably so frightened,
he was so frightened that he probably admitted,
when we spoke to him, and we all spoke to him,
that he was prepared to admit certain things.
He was aware of what he was doing.
We wanted to show that he was pushed into something,
dominated by somebody else.
And so Nizam made some admissions --
when his brother couldn't reach him or get in touch with him.
-It's a good defense, isn't it?
He was a weak character,
you could see that by looking at him.
He was a weak character who would do anything
the elder brother said -- that's what I felt.
-I don't think even mum believed what was going on at the time.
I don't think she believed that it was possible
that he would do such a thing;
if he'd done it, she didn't know,
and she was backwards and forwards
to London going into court.
And she came back one day and she said to me,
"What would you do if you found something?"
And I said, "I don't know, Mum, what --
what have you found," you know,
"Have you found something of any importance?"
Said, "No, I just wondered what you would do?"
There was a place where Arthur used to hide his money
behind the bar,
and there was an inset in the wall.
-There must have been a box or something like that.
And she looked in -- she looked in there...
-And she thought, "Mm, has he left me any money?"
And she had a look, and she pulled out some jewelry.
-The police want anyone who's been offered for sale jewelry
by men of Indian descent to come forward immediately
and help them with the further inquiries in this case.
-She said, "And I took her in to visit Arthur,
and I said to him, 'You are guilty,
because I've got something in my bag,
and you know what it is, I found it behind the bar',"
and she said to me,
"That's the first time I've ever seen a Black person go white."
And she said, "Arthur, you did do it.
You were involved."
-When mum found the jewels,
she was scared because I did ask her,
why didn't you give it to the police?
'Cause she was scared.
I don't know why.
She phoned then Adam, my other uncle,
and Adam said,
"Right, we're going to the Thames and throw in the Thames."
That's what mum told me.
-Right, so your dad is terribly ill.
He would not be able to comply with the instructions
as so you'll do it in stride.
-Instruction is for one person to be alone,
one person to be alone now.
All right? Now, uh...
Your mum wrote a letter last night,
posted it a few minutes ago.
One is to your dad.
Well, it's one of both.
Other is to...
-It was very sad that the judge
wouldn't allow voice prints to be heard.
I think that was a mistake.
It may be law, but it's not justice.
It's not getting to the bottom of what has happened
and why it's happened.
All of the evidence, all the relevant evidence,
should be given,
and the relevant evidence was not given here.
-So we're having all the evidence --
handwriting, fingerprints --
reassessed by modern forensic experts.
If we get you to repeat these recordings --
-Yeah. -Do you think that
might help to clear your name?
-"I am on my way to a meeting."
-I am now on my way to a meeting.
-Our business handled by intellectuals, the heads.
Now is a meeting of the semi-intellectuals.
-To be passed on to the third party, the ru--
the ruffians, we call them.
-To be passed on to ruffians, we call them.
-The mark on the cigarette packet
is the same as a left thumb.
The mark on the newspaper is the same as the left palm.
-Whether she should be executed or at what time?
-And the mark on the letter is the same as the left palm.
The ridge detail on both the mark and the prints
have been made by the same donor,
namely Mr. Arthur Hosein, and by nobody else.
-I'm reasonably sure that the GLC application,
that Nizam wrote this.
And he admitted writing it.
But in general terms,
the handwriting wasn't conclusive in either way.
So this is the cigarette packet note.
And I -- I've said that it's inconclusive,
I can't tell one way or the other
whether it was written by Arthur or not.
Equally, it could have been written by another person.
With the examples that I've seen,
I'm more inclined to agree with the defense's case.
-The data that we have indicate that we're dealing
with an older individual,
older than Nizam would have been
at the time that the ransom calls were made.
My strong feeling is that where we're dealing with
more than one speaker in the calls.
That means there are three individuals involved.
So there is, uh, one or more unknown individuals in the mix,
and therefore it's quite possible the outcome
of the trial of Nizam Hosein would have been different
if the jury had been able to listen to those recordings.
We'll never know.
-Found guilty on all charges,
Arthur was sentenced to life imprisonment
plus 25 years, plus 14 years for blackmail,
plus 10 years for sending threatening letters.
Nizam got the same, except for 10 years less
on the kidnapping charge.
Inspector Smith and his team
were delighted at their success in this extraordinary case.
-It's not a triumph, it's a relief.
But it's not...
It's not success,
because you haven't brought my mother back alive.
-Alick made a comment at the Old Bailey after the trial
that, "I just want to know where she is
so I can put flowers where she is."
If they did kill her,
then of course, they were -- they were evil.
But...
I don't know.
I don't know if Nizamodeen knows where the body is.
Did Arthur do it on his own?
Nobody knows.
-I've never bought the theory that it was the two of them.
They were probably involved in the plot.
Were the real killers ever caught?
I don't think so.
I think they were either commissioned to do it
or they were the middlemen
who then commissioned someone to do it.
They could have come clean,
they could have told what they knew.
Why didn't they try and do that?
And the answer for me has to be that
there were other people involved.
Far as Bill Smith and John Minus cared,
that was the end of the case,
they'd successfully got arrests
that led to successful convictions.
But a lot of the younger police were very unconvinced
by the whole thing.
-The man with the loneliest job in the world
works only a step off the streets of London.
He's the night watchman at Madame Tussaud's Waxwork.
Night plays tricks on the eyes,
concerning this gallery of the world's greatest criminals.
-We went to Madame Tussaud's afterwards.
Arthur and Nizam were there in Madame Tussaud's,
standing in front of the pretend prison cells.
That was quite a shock, actually.
-Looking back on it,
I suppose there was a certain demonization.
I mean, there was unquestioned sort of prejudice in Britain,
and we lived in a very different world.
And the fact that they had --
that the people who've been accused of this crime
were not white
probably played an element in the public's view
that they got the right people,
and probably the police view they got the right people.
But it never occurred to me that they got the right people.
-I had to go down to Trinidad for a double murder
that I was investigating for a British man on death row,
and I wanted to investigate Adam Hosein,
because he was obviously deeply involved in
the cartel money laundering that was behind that double murder.
I wanted to talk to Adam, and I went to his house
and I met this older woman at the door
who I took to be his mother,
and she said Adam wasn't around, but we got into conversation
and somehow we got to talk about the Muriel McKay murder.
She said that he was the smart one,
and he was the one who got his brothers into trouble,
that it was Adam who was the one behind that
and not the other two boys.
She said Adam did it.
I've been involved in representing people
in over 400 murder cases over the years,
so I've got to know people's MO fairly well,
and one of the things that clever people do
when they're involved in a murder
is they set themselves up with an alibi,
a free-willed alibi, if you will.
And then the other person goes down for it.
It then becomes way more difficult for the police to say,
"Oh, but you were still the mastermind behind it,"
because then they've got to get someone to snitch on you,
and that's always harder.
I got the impression that there were a number of people
involved in the Muriel McKay case,
and that there were some really bad guys involved
who could have been involved in London gangs,
who you wouldn't want to cross.
-My father, he did deserve it.
Definitely.
Not Nizam.
He didn't do anything, he had to do these things
for Arthur,
because I know how he treated him at home.
I know exactly how, so I can imagine how that went.
We all cried...
Because of Nizam going in prison for so long --
20 years, I think.
That's -- no.
-I do wake up and think about her.
You know, she is always there.
-Such a lovely mother to us all.
-And one of the kindest people that I've ever known.
And she was just delightful.
-I looked for my mother.
You know, you sort of catch sight of someone flashing by,
and say, "Oh, my God, it's her!"
You know, you just could not have that --
you could not close the door,
you just could not close up on it.
Whatever you knew or suspected, you never knew.
And it's always that element of hope.
-I drove with my sister.
I said, "My mother could be on the Thames,
she could be quite close."
And we drove all along the river.
And I said,
"This is so hopeless."
That -- the feeling of hopelessness.
Someone taken from you.
Well, I suppose you always hope
that somebody might have some information somewhere.
Maybe something comes out of somebody's watching this.
And maybe they -- they do know what happened.
Maybe.
You know, where is she?