Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘My son may have been murdered because of his job’
The girlfriend of a conspiracy theorist feared murdered by “enemies” is to be quizzed by police, it has been reported.
Max Spiers, from Canterbury, was found dead by a friend in Poland just days after texting his mother: “Your boy’s in trouble. If anything happens, investigate.”
Vanessa Bates, 63, of the city’s Merchants Way, fears her son – who sought to expose government cover-ups – may have been murdered because his work had “made him enemies”.
“I think Max had been digging in some dark places and somebody wanted him dead,” she said.
Mr Spiers, 39, died on the sofa at the home of his girlfriend, Monika Duval, in Jozefow, Otwock in July last year – days before he was due to speak at a conspiracy theory conference in Poland.
At the opening of an inquest into his death in December, the coroner was told how he had vomited two litres of black fluid before he died. The hearing has been adjourned while the inquiry is continuing.
Polish police are now reported to have opened an investigation into involuntary manslaughter and are to question science fiction writer Duval, who was with Mr Spiers at the time of his death.
For the prosecution in Warsaw, Lukasz Lapczynski told the BBC: “Our initial investigation indicates that it was Mr Spiers’s partner who called the ambulance, but the nature of this relationship is unclear.
“The doctor started resuscitation, which was not successful. As a result of the doctor’s decision, the police weren’t involved in conducting additional procedures. The information about Max Spiers’s death reached the prosecution office on August 30, when the body had already been transported to the UK. We couldn’t do a post mortem, which is essential in such cases. The prosecutor told me he plans to interview everyone that was present when Max died. We know Monika was there, but it’s unclear who else was around.”
The death of father-of-two Mr Spiers was initially dismissed as being from natural causes by the Polish authorities.
His body was repatriated to the UK, but a post mortem examination at Margate’s QEQM Hospital was unable to determine how he had died. A spokesman for the coroner’s office said this week: “We are still in the investigation stage so no inquest date has been fixed yet.