55 years later, will Muriel McKay be found?

A shocking, callous kidnapping in 1969 left a legacy of pain and grief

In 2020 I was asked to be a contributor on a TV documentary. The was series was called The Real Prime Suspect. So I started to research the case I’d been asked to discuss, which was the kidnapping and murder of Muriel McKay just after Christmas in 1969.

The 55-year-old was the wife of Alick McKay, a deputy to newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Australian then laying the foundations of his UK press empire. The kidnappers had mistaken the victim for Anna, Murdoch’s then wife, expecting the mogul would be rich enough to pay a huge ransom.

The case was a shocking news story at the time, with many twists. These days, however, it had largely been forgotten when I was asked to talk about it, which meant I had some digging to do to research it.

However, just this year the case has sprung back to life, as the McKay family seeks to resolve the question of where Muriel McKay’s body is.

Abduction and a £1m ransom demand

The recent developments powerfully demonstrate how a case that almost 55 years ago was a passing media obsession has never ceased to be a source of pain and heartache for the family.

Mrs McKay was abducted from her home in Wimbledon, south London. The kidnappers were two Trinidadian brothers of Indian descent, Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein.

Alick McKay arrived home from his job as acting chairman of the News of the World, the scandal sheet then owned by Murdoch, the first of his Fleet Street acquisitions. The kidnappers phoned Alick, demanding £1million.

The husband, flanked by the McKay’s adult children – Jennifer, Dianne and Ian – read out a public appeal to the kidnappers for his wife’s return.

Alick McKay apparently annoyed the police for calling the editor of The Sun, which Murdoch had bought after his purchase of the News of the World, and given the daily paper the story for a front-page splash.

After further calls and a missed rendezvous with the kidnappers, the police finally traced a dark Volvo used by the brothers to a farm they owned in Hertfordshire, 35 miles north of London.

The Hoseins were arrested and tried at the Old Bailey. They were found guilty of kidnap and murder. Arthur died in prison, while Nizamodeen was deported to Trinidad after serving 20 years.

However, Muriel McKay’s remains were never found, despite extensive searches of Rooks Farm, the Hoseins’ property. This prompted painful rumours for the McKay family that she had been fed to pigs.

Prosecution without a body

The case was unusual at the time because there had been a reluctance previously to charge suspects when no body could be found. The McKay trial was one of the first to be prosecuted when the victim had not been located.

I seem to remember that during my interview on The Real Prime Suspect , which was shown on CBS Reality (now rebranded as True Crime in the UK), I was asked about blame in this case. The implication was that the press, particularly The Sun, had not helped the police investigation.

One of the old books about it that I had found on a second-hand book site was written by two journalists at the time – Peter Deeley and Christopher Walker’s Murder in the 4th Estate: An Investigation into the Roles of the Press and Police in the McKay Case (Golancz 1971).

This book and other research led me to argue on the programme that police at the time had little experience of kidnapping investigations, such crimes never having been common in the UK. The police certainly made mistakes, despite their determination to get Mrs McKay returned safely.

Even after the ransom demand, at first suspected of being a hoax, detectives were still considering a scenario in which Mrs McKay had absconded of her own accord.

The tragedy was compounded by the bungling and callousness of the Hoseins, who did not even think to leave a ransom note, which led to much initial headscratching by police over what had actually happened in the McKay home.

On the other hand, publicity stirred up by The Sun and an early statement to the Press Association had led to police being bombarded with phone calls that had hampered the investigation.

After a 2021 Sky documentary called The Wimbledon Kidnapping, Nizamodeen Hosein started talking. He had had some king of epiphany, responded to a lawyer for the McKay family and eventually spoke to Dianne, now 84.

He claimed her mother died of a heart attack. He agreed to help the McKay family locate Muriel’s body on the farm and pointed to her whereabouts in a photo. There has been a subsequent police search, which has failed to find any remains.

McKay family battles on

However, the family believed police had been looking in the wrong spot and that the search had been too limited. Nizamodeen has offered to return to the UK to assist a search.

Here’s an ITV interview with the family this summer in which they voice their frustrations with police and their plans to press on. Muriel’s grandson, Mark Dyer, talks also of a third kidnapper called Adam, who died in 2021.

‘We haven’t had a Christmas for 54 years in this family,’ Mark says, succinctly depicting the grief ignited by this awful crime.

After the guilty verdicts at the Old Bailey, Mr McKay apparently said, ‘I wish to God I knew what happened to my wife. All I want to know is where my wife has been buried so that I can go and place some flowers.’

The ITV interview carries a police statement that the Met don’t believe bringing the surviving kidnapper to the UK will help the search, which may perhaps suggest they don’t trust him. This final chance to lay Muriel to rest after all these decades, while tantalisingly close, for the moment remains cruelly just out of reach.

• A new BBC podcast also covers the case – Worse than Murder