Cruellest twist of Britain’s first £1m kidnap
They wanted Rupert Murdoch’s wife — but snatched the wrong woman. Now her family pray a TV documentary 50 years on could yet crack the case
The moment newspaper executive Alick McKay opened the front door of his home in Wimbledon, south-west London, it was clear something was terribly wrong. On that evening of December 29, 1969, the telephone had been ripped off the wall, the contents of his wife Muriel’s handbag were strewn over the hall while a billhook and a roll of twine had been discarded.
McKay dashed from room to room calling desperately for Muriel, the billhook blade in his hand in case the intruders were still there. There was no sign of his wife. Then, a phone call came that would kickstart the first high-profile, kidnap-for-ransom case in the UK.
It was from a man demanding £1million — equivalent to £20 million today — if Muriel was to be returned alive.
But the case was all the more extraordinary because Muriel had been snatched by mistake. her abductors had planned to target Anna Murdoch, the 25-year-old wife of newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
Their taking of a middle-aged housewife was just one of a catalogue of bungles by both the criminals and the police pursuing them, as a recent Sky documentary explained.
With detectives adopting bizarre disguises in their attempts to outwit the kidnappers, who in turn were very far from criminal masterminds, there are elements of the story which beggar belief in the desperate search for Muriel.
Part of the problem for the police lay in the unusual nature of the abduction case.
‘This was a crime you might see in America, possibly in Italy,’ says the director of The Wimbedon Kidnapping, Joanna Bartholomew. ‘everyone kept saying this isn’t a British crime.’
The first officers on the scene were unable to comprehend that anything like it could have happened in Arthur Road — an avenue of desirable family homes only a few hundred yards from the All england Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club where the Wimbledon tennis championships are held each year.
AT first they suggested that 55-year-old Muriel might have eloped with a lover. This was a ridiculous notion to anyone who was familiar with the church-going mother of three grown-up children. And it was soon obvious that Muriel was just the victim of a terrible mistake.
She and Alick had moved to the UK from Australia so he could pursue his career in newspapers as the right-hand man to Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of The Sun and News of the World.
Murdoch first came to the kidnappers’ attention in a TV interview with Sir David Frost.
To find out where he lived, they tailed his Rolls-Royce from his office. But the tycoon was on business in Australia and it was Alick McKay using the car in his absence.
Thus mistaken, they set their sights on poor Muriel. We can only imagine what brutality she suffered at their hands that night, her terror apparent when a letter in her handwriting arrived at the house the next morning. It begged her husband to ‘Please do something to get me home. What have I done to deserve this treatment?’
With their home under siege from reporters and photographers, McKay tried to keep the phone line free for the kidnappers. Some 18 calls came over the next six weeks, from a man claiming to represent an international group called ‘Mafia 3’ — M3 for short.
he talked menacingly of ‘execution’ and told Alick the matter had initially been dealt with by ‘intellectuals’ at M3 but was soon to be put in the hand of its ‘ruffians’.
As negotiations continued for Muriel’s release, two more letters arrived in her handwriting. In one, she wrote ‘I am deteriorating in health and spirit. excuse writing. I’m blindfolded and cold. Please keep the police out of this and cooperate with the gang’.
Meanwhile, the family were being contacted by dozens of clairvoyants, all claiming that Muriel was alive and offering information about where she was being held. A Dutch psychic, Gerard Croiset insisted that the name ‘elsa’ was somehow associated with her kidnapping. As we will see, this would prove strangely accurate.
On January 30, 1970, more than a month after Muriel’s disappearance, the kidnappers issued instructions for the McKays’ son Ian to deliver the ransom in Rupert Murdoch’s Rolls-Royce, and in return Muriel would be returned.
Rather than put Ian in danger, the police insisted one of their own should pretend to be him and take a case filled mainly with fake banknotes. As instructed by M3, ‘Ian’ went to a specified London telephone box and waited for the phone to ring.
During the ensuing call he was given the location of another phone box where he went to receive another call. This continued from phone box to phone box until he ended up on the A10 outside London, leaving the suitcase of false notes on a grass verge marked by a bunch of paper flowers left by the criminals.
Although M3 had insisted that Ian should travel alone, the RollsRoyce driven by the police officer was conspicuously followed by a convoy of ‘undercover’ colleagues — three of them riding motorbikes and dressed as hell’s Angels in an effort to appear part of the normal flow of traffic.
Unsurprisingly, this did not fool ‘M3’ who left the money. A new drop-off was arranged — this time to be made by Alick and his daughter Dianne — and the kidnappers warned of dire consequences should the police be in evidence.
ONCe again, the detectives in charge decided family members could not be endangered and one of their men was to play Alick and another Dianne. The male officer given the latter part was chosen simply because he was the only one who could fit into her knee-length boots. When the make-up applied to his face by Dianne and her sister Jenny failed to make him look remotely feminine, it was decided that a policewoman would be sent instead.
This time the drop-off point was at a garage in Bishop’s Stortford, hertfordshire. All went well until, as the watching police officers waited for M3 to pick up the fake notes, a well-meaning passerby spotted the two suitcases in which it was left and reported them to local police who took them away.
All was not lost, however. Before the cases were removed, the