31st July, 2024 in True Crime

Muriel McKay: A Conclusion

By Simon Farquhar

Fifty-four years after the murder of Muriel McKay, a tragedy has again become a media sensation. A supposed confession by her surviving killer, Nizamodeen Hosein, has resulted in one final police search of Rooks Farm in Hertfordshire, once the home of the Hosein brothers. The search has yielded nothing.

Simon Farquhar, author of the critically-acclaimed A Desperate Business: The Murder of Muriel McKay, has been bound up in the case for many years. He reflects on recent events, and on the fascinating new evidence he unearthed – which may still hold the truth.

In the early evening of Monday 29th December 1969, Muriel McKay, wife of Alick McKay, deputy chairman of the News of the World, was abducted from her Wimbledon home. She was never seen again. Over the next forty days, her kidnappers terrorised the family with impossible demands for a million-pound ransom. Muriel became not only the first victim of kidnap-for-ransom in Britain since the Middle Ages but a pawn in a vicious press circulation war. The case culminated in life sentences for Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein and one of the first convictions for murder without a body.

My book A Desperate Business: The Murder of Muriel McKay, was the result of three years’ research, during which time I spoke to almost every surviving witness, gained access to previously closed files, uncovered information never previously shared with the police or the public, and came face to face with Nizamodeen Hosein. The book was as much about correcting myths and misinformation as it was about presenting the facts. Sadly, the recent press campaigns have shown a blatant disregard for facts. The consequences of this are not only exasperating. They are sinister.

Nizamodeen Hosein made his “confession” in December 2021, to a lawyer engaged by members of the McKay family, claiming, conveniently, that Muriel died of a heart-attack during her captivity and was buried by him a few feet from the farmhouse. Despite the press reporting this without challenge, every other detail in his account of Muriel’s abduction and death was easily disprovable, so there was little reason to give this any credence at all. However, blind faith and an understandably large amount of wishful thinking led the family to appeal to the Metropolitan Police for a new search of the farmland in question. In the spring of 2022, that search was conducted. It produced nothing.

Interviewing Nizamodeen for the book was an eerie and exasperating experience. Several things quickly became clear. One was that he had no remorse, no empathy and no interest in his crime or in restorative justice. He was also deeply manipulative, incapable of telling the truth and most of the time incomprehensible. Whether his confusion is an act of deliberate obfuscation, a symptom of his self-destructive and squalid lifestyle or a manifestation of the same mental illness which caused his brother to spend the later years of his incarceration in a high security hospital, I cannot say.

Despite the police’s justifiable scepticism, a final unsuccessful search of Rooks Farm has now taken place. Watching from a distance, one cannot help feeling that, wilfully or not, Nizamodeen has won this charade. He has had his revenge on the police by wasting a colossal amount of manpower, time, resources and public money. He has strung out the McKay family with false hopes and deceptions, just as he did half a century ago. He has also successfully manipulated much of the world’s media. The coverage of the case preceding the search, orchestrated to pressure the police into action, was mostly severely lacking in fact-checking or balance, and many of Nizamodeen’s claims about his role in the crime and the circumstances of Muriel’s death are now being passed off as established fact. A nonsensical account of a horrific crime, one in which he has cast himself as a virtually blameless bystander pleading for forgiveness and atonement, is in danger of becoming the accepted truth when in fact there is no truth to any part of it.

Whether or not Nizamodeen remembers where Muriel is buried, it is clear that he does not care. If she had died of natural causes, he could simply have led the police to her in 1970 and secured a charge of manslaughter. Desperate explanations for why this did not happen now include baseless conspiracy theories about a third man being involved in the crime, theories which fulfil a desperate desire to give the story weightier villains rather than to comprehend that two men as pathetic as the Hoseins could have by themselves caused so much carnage and suffering.

When I was researching A Desperate Business, I had a fantastical ambition that I would find that missing clue, that piece of paper that had slipped through the cracks and which now neatly delivered the answer to one of the greatest mysteries in British criminal history. To my amazement, I did find an overlooked piece of paper. Whether what was written on it is that answer, sadly, we shall probably never know.

Two years into Arthur Hosein’s life sentence, he briefed a new solicitor, in another doomed attempt at appealing his conviction. The solicitor then wrote to the Court of Appeal. In that letter, the solicitor reveals that his client has told him where Muriel is buried – and names the location. That letter is the only piece of paper, of all the thousands of pages of paperwork on the case, in which a possible burial place is named, except for those emanating from cranks, attention-seekers and psychics. This alone makes the claim interesting. However, the only evidence is circumstantial and a conclusive search of the area would be impossible.

There remains another possibility. At some point in the mid-1970s, information came to light suggesting that the Hoseins had buried Muriel in the trench that was being dug at the time near Rooks Farm to lay the North Sea Gas pipeline. Work there had been suspended over the New Year period of 1969-70 due to the perishing weather conditions. Where this information came from, we will never know. Uncharacteristically ingenious of the Hoseins though it sounds, the Home Office took it seriously enough to inform Alick McKay that they were prepared to fund a search of a small stretch of that pipeline. However, having already endured so much anguish, Alick declined the offer, reportedly saying, “If she is there, please just leave her in peace now”.

Both of these possibilities are explored in the book. Both are, to my mind, more plausible than anything that might be uttered by Nizamodeen Hosein. But at the end of this long and ultimately fruitless resurrection of a family’s suffering, I see that Alick McKay’s words all those years ago were born not just of desperate self-protection but of wisdom. Finding Muriel’s body would allow her a dignified burial, but it would no more deliver closure than it does to any family who lose a loved one in such a way. For most of those families, a body is recovered. The one thing that never comes with that recovery, however, is closure.