Winter 1969. Rupert Murdoch, newly arrived in Britain, has taken over The Sun and the News of the World, and immediately provoked outrage by serialising the sensational memoirs of Christine Keeler.
He is interviewed live on television to defend his actions. Watching from a dilapidated farmhouse deep in the countryside, two men are captivated by the huge sums of money being discussed. A plan is hatched to kidnap Murdoch’s wife, Anna, and to demand one million pounds for her safe return. But the plan goes wrong.
Following Murdoch’s Rolls Royce to a house in Wimbledon, the two men are unaware that Murdoch has gone to Australia for Christmas and loaned the car to his friend and colleague, Alick McKay. On Monday 29th December 1969, Alick returns home from work to find his 55-year-old wife, Muriel, has vanished. She was never seen again.
A Desperate Business is the story of one of the most bizarre and frightening crimes in British legal history. It is a tragedy played out in a country undergoing seismic change, on the cusp of the Murdoch takeover of its cultural and political identity, a Britain in which a desperately ill-equipped police force was battling with a new crime, and a new type of newspaper. It is a case half a century old which in 2022 was finally reopened by Scotland Yard.
This new investigation, exhaustively researched over three years, features a wealth of information which has never before been made public. Drawing on newly opened Home Office files, new interviews, meticulous research and incisive deduction, this is a sensitive but fearless account of a haunting and perplexing tragedy. It provides unsettling glimpses back to a bygone Britain that we are still struggling to understand today. It presents for the first time a possible solution to a shocking mystery. And it finally restores to the centre of the story the wife and mother who became both an innocent victim of monstrous greed and cruelty, and a pawn in a desperate press circulation war.
By Simon Farquhar