Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
WIDOW BREAKS 44-YEAR SILENCE OVE
IT was a crime which stunned the globe. Not so much the kidnapping of the grandson of the richest man in the world... such wealth will always attract the wrong kind of attention.
No, it was incredulity at J Paul Getty’s refusal to pay the ransom when 16-year-old John Paul Getty III was abducted by the Roman Mafia in 1973.
In the end he was held for five months and only returned after much negotiation about reducing the $17million ransom and the encouragement of a cutoff ear from the criminals.
Now no less than Danny Boyle, the mastermind of that spectacular London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, is causing controversy with a TV drama about the saga, which started this week.
In BBC2’S Trust he suggests victim John Paul Getty III, known as Little Paul, came up with the plan for the kidnap in the first place.
This week Little Paul’s wife has confirmed for the first time he did discuss such an idea with her in advance of the crime. Gisela Getty said he speculated about his own kidnap, aiming to use the profits to create an arts colony paradise in Marrakech, where LSD would flood the water supply.
Gisela, now 69, admits: “We wanted to do something better with the money than they did – to make a better world, but it got us into very deep waters.”
The money “wasn’t to make us rich. It was really to bring our vision into the material world”.
This “vision” consisted of 10 “crazy ideas a day” cooked up by Little Paul, Gisela and her twin sister, Jutta Winkelmann.
In their hippy world of nightclubs and political demonstrations, Little Paul shared a bed with both of the radical German sisters, known as the
“It girls” of Rome, in his “Dungeon” – a squalid basement with no windows.
The daughters of a Nazi SS officer, the twins were already famous in their native Germany when they
ON THEIR HIPPY VISION
moved to Rome in early 1973. At 23, they were seven years his senior, and the trio envisioned a left-wing utopia.
In TV’S Trust, a different story is suggested that
Little Paul owed money because he had run up