26th October, 2022 in True Crime

The calm before the storm: The murder of Muriel McKay

By Simon Farquhar

‘The first evening we had a dinner party out on the terrace for twelve (David’s birthday). It was a lovely mild evening, no jackets needed. Dancing on the terrace until 2am.’ – Muriel McKay, Calader, Mallorca, 9 September 1969.

Christmas descends again, a season of enchantment and disillusion, anticipation and mourning, prettiness and sadness. I am standing outside St Mary House, on Arthur Road in Wimbledon village. It is approaching six o’clock in the evening. Across London, white winter sunshine is handing over to the night shift of headlights and fairy lights. It is almost precisely half a century since this fine, cherished house, in this safe and stately realm, which was then home to the McKay family, became a scene of atrocity and despair.

On 29 December 1969, sometime between 5.30 p.m. and 7.45 p.m., between driving her housekeeper home and her husband returning from work, Muriel Frieda McKay had her home invaded and her life devastated. She was never seen again.

We will never know for certain the precise details of what happened that evening, nor the precise details of the torturous events which followed.

Christmas delivers prettiness and sadness, and so too, for the last fifty years, have the few photographs that the world has seen of Muriel McKay. Once images of happiness, they are now images of anguish. Happy photographs from carefree, happy times, like the carefree, happy words on picture postcards, develop a poignancy and a pathos when the lives that they remain souvenirs of are no more.

Like so many of the victims of extraordinary or infamous crimes, this blameless woman is remembered for her death and not for her life. Her name has been remembered more than that of many victims, since to a country that became obsessed with the story, she was a missing person, and the first victim of kidnapping-for-ransom in Britain since the Middle Ages, long before she was declared a victim of murder and her killers identified. Her name and her image endure because of the continuing, perplexing question of what exactly happened to her, and where her body may lie, and her story remains one of the most tragic and outlandish mysteries of modern criminal history.

Extracted from A Desperate Business by Simon Farquhar