Murrell McKay, who was 55 at the time, was kidnapped by Nizamuddin Hussein and his older brother Artur Hussein after they mistook her for the then wife of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whom they wanted to kidnap for ransom.
The brothers broke into the McKay home in Wimbledon, south-west London on 29 December 1969, kidnapped Murrell McKay, who was married to Murdoch's deputy director, Alick, and drove her to a Hertfordshire farm where they lived. They then demanded £1 million to release her, pretending to be the Mafia.
No one ever saw her alive again and her body was never found...
A documentary led to the revelation
According to The Times, Nizamodine Hussein, now 75, revealed that Murel McKay was buried on the 11-acre farm in Hertfordshire where she was being held. The confession was made by him to a lawyer representing her family after she was spotted in Trinidad by documentary filmmakers investigating the case last year. The killer, who denied involvement in the abduction, also insisted that no violence was used against her. He told her family that she collapsed and died while watching a television report on her abduction with him.
Murrell McKay's daughter Diane, now 81, told the Times, "We are pleased that the police have decided to take the case seriously. We have tried very hard over the last few months to get this far and we want the investigation to continue. Now that Nizam has told us where he buried my mother, we are forced to stop and wait. It's very difficult. We know there are certain protocols that have to be followed, such as getting a search warrant to search the area where she is buried, but all we really want is to move forward and finally be able to say goodbye to her, which is what we have been pursuing for the last 52 years."
A spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police said: "Murrell McKay's family contacted police in December 2021 regarding information they had received in relation to her murder. Officers from the Special Crime Command have met with the family and are in the process of reviewing all the material."
According to the Times, detectives went to the National Archives located at Kew two days ago to retrieve the original case files. However, the current owner of the farm refused to cooperate with the family's request to allow them to enter the farm so that the location Hussein located could be scanned using a ground-penetrating radar. Depending on the evidence, the Metropolitan Police may decide to launch an investigation to locate Murrell McKay's remains.
Nizamodin told Matthew Gale , a British lawyer in Trinidad hired by the family, that he wanted to "put an end" to the case before he died and therefore would reveal the location of McKay's body. In particular, he said: "In the farmhouse there is a wooden gate, it has a barn next to it, ten feet straight ahead of the barn and ten feet on this side
The chronicle of the abduction
The brothers were watching a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce owned by Murdoch, but used by Murrell McKay's husband, Alick, during Murdoch's absence from Great Britain. It was thought to have been used by Murdoch's then wife. So they accidentally kidnapped Murrell and took her to Rooks Farm, where they lived with Arthur's wife and children, who were on holiday at the time. Murdoch's newspaper executive, Mr McCay, returned to the house to find the telephone torn from the wall and the contents of his wife's handbag scattered in the hallway. He later received a call from a man demanding £1 million - the equivalent of £20 million today - to return Murrell McKay alive, sparking the UK's first high-profile kidnap-for-ransom case.
During the 40-day ordeal, the brothers, who claimed to be a mafia group called M3, sent three letters and made a further 18 phone calls demanding the money. They also sent Murrell McKay's husband five letters allegedly written by her, including one saying she was cold and blindfolded. Two attempts by police to deliver counterfeit notes to the kidnappers failed, but the second attempt led officers to Rooks Farm. After the trial in 1970, the brothers were sentenced to life imprisonment in one of Britain's first convictions for murder without the murdered man's body being found. The two brothers claimed innocence, but Arthur's fingerprints were found on the ransom notes and a notebook with the same paper on which Murel's letters were written , was discovered on the farm site. Nizamodin told the lawyer that he alone buried McCay, refusing to implicate his brother Arthur, who was also convicted of her murder.
He also claimed that he had not killed Murrell McCay, claiming that she had collapsed and later died of a heart attack at the farmhouse. "This will haunt me forever, for all my remaining days." His brother Artur died in prison in 2009.
Redemption after 52 years
Nizamodin also agreed to speak with McCay's daughter, Diane,in a video call. She stated: "I was terrified of the idea of talking to him. At first I wrote him a letter and I didn't succeed, I felt sick. Since then I tried very hard to manage it and finally I was able to confront him on a Zoom call. He told me that he wanted to put an end to it, to redeem himself before he went to meet his Creator. I felt absolute relief when he told me he was buried on the farm. I had thought about it so much over the years. I had terrible dreams of my mother being thrown into the sea. We have not once had a good Christmas since those things happened. For me it's a horrible time, it's the anniversary of what happened and New Year's Day really bothers me. We always used to go abroad at Christmas so we could forget about it for a bit." Diane added: "Everything we lived and are still living is always there, somewhere in the back of my mind. It makes me more anxious. I locked the doors and moved abroad, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, retired to a very secluded place. I didn't know whether to cry or accept it, it was a very confusing feeling. You can't be sad, you can't accept it, because there was no body When he told us these details, he told us where it was, how to get there, how many steps, it was a lot of details and I thought, "Oh my God, he's telling the truth, he can't be making it up..."
Source: protothema.gr
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