Condemned to death by daddy
She’s the public schoolgirl turned pusher killed in a hail of bullets. We reveal how her fate was sealed by her father — the five times married, brothel-owning drug dealer who was Britain’s most depraved peer
HER body lay on the side of the road, blood oozing everywhere. Bullets sprayed from an automatic weapon had cut her down, tearing into her abdomen and her chest.
Four sachets of deadly ‘ice’ crystals – the addictive drug crystal methamphetamine that she used and sold — were in one trouser pocket, two mobile phones in another.
It is a long way from the pastoral English pleasures of the Malvern Hills to the drugs-cursed streets of Manila.
To the killers, almost certainly acting for a Philippines government bent on ruthlessly eliminating the drugs industry, Aurora Moynihan — the Hon Aurora, to be precise — was just another dealer. They left a cardboard epitaph between her feet that said ‘Pusher to the celebrities — you are next’.
To the family of the clipped-voiced Baron Moynihan — once Margaret Thatcher’s Minister of Sport, Colin Moynihan — it was yet another sordid chapter in a dynastic drama that seems to have no end. Aurora was his niece, aged 45, and a mother of two. Her late father Tony, Colin’s half-brother and previous holder of the Barony, was the notorious 3rd Lord Moynihan, confidence trickster and fraudster, drugs dealer and bigamist.
Of Tony’s four daughters and one son (he also had five wives), Aurora was the one who, tragically, had followed in his sordid footsteps.
Ironically, of them all, it was Aurora — cheerful, bold, bright and popular as a teenager — who was the one who seemed to be specially marked out for success.
‘If only,’ one family friend was saying this week. ‘If only her crazy father had allowed her to stay on at school to do her A-levels and go on to university instead of introducing her to his sleazy world. She could have been anything — perhaps a successful lawyer. She was a girl who had everything.’
Why didn’t he? He preferred to send her to finishing schools around Europe.
No harm in that, you may think, but it shut off the academic promise that she enjoyed and which was being developed with such care at the exclusive St James’, in Malvern, Worcestershire.
This is the private school that educated the Queen’s late aunt, Princess Alice of Gloucester, and produced Dame Clara Furse, the first woman chief executive of the Stock Exchange.
How chilling now, and how depressing, to compare the squalid scene of Aurora’s roadside execution with the gilded life that might have been, and with memories of a spirited girl and gifted hockey player, full of promise — memories recalled affectionately this week by her former headmistress, Elizabeth Mullenger.
Now 70 and retired, Miss Mullenger remembers Aurora as ‘ a lively and diligent student’. When she arrived as head at St James’ in 1986, Aurora was a model pupil beginning her O-levels.
St James’ — now merged with a former local rival into the Malvern St James school for girls — was an exclusive private establishment for just 200 pupils.
‘All the girls worked hard. They had ambition; that was part of the culture of the school,’ recalls Miss Mullenger. ‘It was a small school and everyone joined in with everything. She was keen on drama and sport and all the things we did.’
But these ambitions didn’t accord with those of her pleasure-loving father, the 3rd Baron, who for years had enjoyed a sleazy reputation running a string of ‘massage parlours’ in Manila with his Filipina third wife Luthgarda. He didn’t want his bright and ambitious daughter to stay at the school a moment longer than he thought necessary.
‘Dad didn’t think it worth her doing A- levels,’ Aurora’s elder sister Antonita — who lives in Manila, where she is a well-known actress — has explained.
‘He pulled her out and sent her to a finishing school in Switzerland, and then for a year in Heidelberg and then . . . oh God, he seemed to be sending her to schools everywhere.’ (Another was the Sorbonne in Paris.)
At the end of the polishing process Aurora could speak eight languages fluently. But by then, unlike Antonita who insisted on going her own way and finishing her college education, Aurora had fallen under her father’s controlling influence.
Between periods at the various schools, he had also introduced her to his sleazy drugs-based underworld of prostitution and nightclubs. By 19 she was living with him and his Filipina fifth wife in Manila, where he often spent afternoons in bed with women.
Her half- sister Miranda, whose mother, Lord Moynihan’s second wife, was a belly dancer, has recalled calling at their house to see her father, and her stepmother saying: ‘He’s in the bedroom’.
‘I would go in there and he’d be in bed with two or three naked girls,’ explained Miranda. ‘ It was absolutely awful.’
What soon became apparent was that, of all Tony Moynihan’s children, it was Aurora who was very much her father’s daughter. She rather enjoyed joining in the squalid hedonism that was her father’s constant indulgence.
And then, just before Christmas 1991, when he was 55, Tony Moynihan was dead. He’d had a sudden stroke while eating Irish stew at his favourite Manila wine bar, Le Souffle. Suddenly Aurora was exposed and vulnerable; one could say at the mercy of his seedy world. She was just 20, and it didn’t help that she didn’t get on with her father’s latest wife Jinna, a former local hotel receptionist.
‘Aurora was left out in the cold,’ said Antonita, two years her senior. ‘The rug was pulled out from under her feet. When Daddy disappeared all of a sudden, she didn’t know what to do.’
The tragedy is that she had found she was, as Antonita said, ‘ exactly like him — and he had been moulding her’. She liked drink, the high life — and drugs.
At her father’s cremation in Manila’s ‘Court of Everlasting Peace’, Aurora found herself alongside two of his five wives as well as a busload of girls from his New Dawn of Life massage parlour, on this occasion not wearing their business uniforms of tiny miniskirts and tight tops pinned with a numbered plastic heart.
Manila would be her home, too, now. The fact is, she was already hooked on the city, and especially its underworld. Like her father and his friends, drugs had entered her life. So began the slide from which she would never extricate herself.
Even so, it was ten years before her first drugs bust, by which time she had also become a dealer and a familiar figure in the worst, and the best, establishments in the city.
With her when police pounced that first time was the nephew of Manila’s deputy mayor, so they got off with a slap on the wrist.
By her mid-20s she was married to musician Eddie Boy Rocha, son of a film producer, and had two sons before their divorce in 2006. As her crystal meth habit increased, the boys were largely looked after by aunts and other family members and are now described as ‘just great, amazingly well-adjusted’.
In the shadowy drugs world where she was known to be always polite — ‘classy’, even — Aurora, by 2013, was working with a syndicate, and she was on a police drugs watch. Again she was arrested, warned and released.
But it was inevitable that her luck would eventually run out, especially after the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte four months ago ordered a brutal crackdown on drugs gangs which, so far, has led to the violent deaths of 3,000 people.
Inevitably, family memories of what might have been have been stirred.
Aurora’s first cousin Jacqueline Vance, 53, who lives in Pinner, NorthWest London (her mother was Tony’s sister), remembers a cosy family evening with their dowager grandmother that she spent with Aurora and Antonita at Lady Moynihan’s townhouse in Bayswater.
‘Aurora was 14 and such a lovely, bright girl and so promising,’ she recalls. ‘Actually [when she died], I hadn’t seen her for 31 years. What happened to her is such a tragedy.’
As for Colin Moynihan, when he took the ermine as the 4th Baron to become a working Tory peer in the House of Lords, he hoped it would bring an end to the scandals that had beset the title for so long.
The Barony goes back to 1929 when it was bestowed on the distinguished, Leeds-based surgeon Sir Berkeley Moynihan, the man who introduced rubber gloves into the operating theatre.
It then passed to his only son Patrick, a barrister and stockbroker who became chairman of the Liberal Party. He had two wives and five children, including Tony by his first wife, and Colin by the second.
Ostensibly he led a blameless life. But in 1965, when he was 58, he was arrested in Piccadilly Circus and charged with persistently importuning young men for an immoral purpose.
On April 30, just a few days before he was due to appear before Bow Street magistrates, he was found dead. Enter Tony — educated
‘She was exactly like him ... he moulded her’ ‘He’d be in bed with two or three naked girls’
at Stowe, commissioned in the Coldstream Guards — as the 3rd Baron, then aged 29.
Tony already had a reputation as a bongo-playing serial roisterer. At 20 he had fled to Australia to escape his father’s wrath for soiling the family name after police had to break up one of his all-night parties.
He was already married to a nude model, Ann Herbert, daughter of an Australian electrician. It lasted three years and was childless.
Other marriages, with children, came and went until, with the unexpected death of his father, he found himself in the House of Lords.
He certainly had fun there, denouncing fellow peers as ‘cretins’ and campaigning for Gibraltar to be given back to Spain.
All this was in tandem with his other life, which was taking him into contact with people such as the Kray twins. Among other things, he’d been cheating in casinos and writing dud cheques (including one for a Rolls-Royce).
By the time he fled British shores for the second time, and for good — this time to escape the law — he was facing 57 charges of fraudulent trading and false pretences. He delighted in his new soubriquet, ‘The Ermine Pimpernel’.
It was 1971, the year his daughter Aurora was born to his third wife, that he left Britain, first for Spain, but then, when his extradition was sought, on to Manila. He found the city a perfect fit, and decided to put down roots.
Soon, fresh accusations were accumulating, including drugrunning, pimping, money-laundering and even murder, none of them ever brought to court.
His unexpected death, far from introducing a period of calm for the Barony, was the trigger for a fiveyear battle over inheritance of the title.
The three who claimed the title before a Lords committee were two young boys, one allegedly by each of his fourth and fifth marriages, and Tony’s half- brother Colin, the Oxford- educated Olympic rowing silver medallist and MP for Lewisham East, who had been close to Mrs Thatcher.
The claim of one boy, Andrew, failed when a blood test showed he was not Tony’s son.
That of the second, Daniel, also failed when it emerged that he was born within wedlock to the fifth wife, three weeks before the fourth marriage had been dissolved.
That meant that the fifth marriage was bigamous, and Daniel was, therefore, illegitimate. He still keeps his father’s House of Lords robes — those that he hoped to wear — in his wardrobe at home in Manila.
So Colin Moynihan, Tony’s halfbrother, emerged the victor, and the new Baron Moynihan.
It had been, he declared, ‘five years of constant hard work to bring together all the evidence’.
But at least the Moynihan Barony was at peace — or so it seemed until this week when news of Aurora’s bullet-riddled body emerged.
Unsurprisingly, the present Lord Moynihan has had little to say publicly about the family tragedy, other than to express his sadness at the turn of events.
‘It is heart-breaking,’ he said. ‘She always had such potential in life.’
The baronial motto is ‘Sunshine after rain’.
Too late for Aurora, but let us hope, finally, it may prove to be so.