Support truly
independent journalism
A family’s plea to fly a murderer back to the UK to help find his victim’s body after 55 years has been rejected by police over inconsistencies in the information he has given.
The search for the remains of Muriel McKay, who was murdered in 1969, was called off after a third search at a farm where she was held hostage and killed failed to find her body.
Mrs McKay was abducted from her Wimbledon home, taken to the farm in Hertfordshire and killed. She had been mistaken for the then-wife of newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
Two brothers were convicted of her murder and only one of them, Nizamodeen Hosein, is still alive – now released from prison and living back home in Trinidad.
The fresh search of the farm near Bishop’s Stortford had been carried out after new information was given by Hosein to the family and the Met Police.
But on Monday, Detective Superintendent Katherine Goodwin said details provided by Hosein about the whereabouts of Muriel McKay’s body were wrong.
Ms Goodwin told journalists on Monday: “I want to express our sincere condolences to her family and friends, as this is not the outcome we wanted.
“However, what we can now conclusively say is the information given by Hosein in the last two years is not correct.
“Muriel is not in the location that he has indicated.”
On whether he should have been brought back to the UK to help with the search, which the family had pushed for, she said: “If we thought there was a reasonable chance that he might be able to point out the true location, then this would be beneficial to the investigation.
“However, sadly, I don’t believe this to be the case.
“He’s already provided us with quite a lot of detailed information about the location of Muriel, which has unfortunately been proven to be incorrect.”
Ms McKay, 55, the wealthy wife of newspaper executive Alick McKay, was kidnapped and held ransom for £1 million. The brothers who kidnapped her had mistaken her for Anna Murdoch.
Ms McKay was traced to the farm, but the location of her body and how she met her death remains shrouded in mystery.
In his account, Hosein said he and his brother had never meant to kill her, but after drugging her with pharmaceuticals, she died from a heart attack.
He said, he alone carried her body out of the house and buried her near to a manure heap, not far from the main farmhouse.
The farm was searched at the time of the murder, in 2022, and again for several days starting last week, but nothing was found.
In the latest eight-day search at the farm, 33 specialist search officers were used, with forensic experts and archaeologists, but the dig was fruitless.
