At the height of the English summer, a large police presence, an earthmover, and a gaggle of reporters and camera crews descended on a quiet corner of Hertfordshire, the flat farming country north of London.
The police were there to excavate a farm in the hope of solving a 55-year-old murder mystery: Whatever happened to Australian woman Muriel McKay?
Muriel's story is so strange and sad it's hard to believe it's true. In 1969, she was abducted from her suburban house in London, held for ransom and presumed murdered.
This tragic series of events was all the more sensational because the kidnappers had meant to abduct Anna Murdoch, wife of the young Australian media baron, Rupert.
Australian Story came across the McKay family's story as part of the research for a three-part series on Rupert's son, Lachlan Murdoch.
Muriel was kidnapped 18 months before Lachlan was born, but the tragedy cast a shadow over the Murdochs' years in Britain, and Anna would later say it was one of the reasons why the family moved to the United States.
Despite taking the wrong woman, the kidnappers push on with their plan to extort an outrageous sum of money in exchange for Muriel.
But their twisted plan came to nothing and Muriel was never seen again.
The McKay family had given up hope of ever finding their mother's remains until three years ago when they made contact with one of the convicted murderers.
He told them where he'd buried her. The family launched a campaign to persuade the Metropolitan Police to dig up the farm where she had been held captive and, in May, the police agreed.
In July, 82-year-old Ian McKay travelled from NSW's Southern Highlands, and his older sister, 84-year-old Di Levinson, flew in from Majorca to witness the excavation.
After all these years, would the McKay family finally find the answers they'd been searching for?
Husband joined Murdoch business 10 days before abduction
Ian's face is etched in grief. A tall, quiet man, Ian has decided to speak on camera about his mother's abduction for the first time. But it's hard going. Tears well up in his eyes, and the emotion is raw. We stop and start the interview a number of times. But Ian wants to push on.
Ian says his father, Alick McKay, was "an alpha male". A confident, creative newspaper executive, Alick rose through the ranks of Keith Murdoch's Adelaide News before moving to work at The Argus newspaper in Melbourne. In the 1950s, the legendary Welsh editor and publisher Hugh Cudlipp poached Alick to work for him in England at The Daily Mirror Group.
Alick moved to London with his family — his vivacious and stylish wife Muriel, 12-year-old son Ian and teenage daughters Dianne and Jennifer.
Alick had always stayed in touch with "young Rupert", even after Keith died. When the ambitious young Australian arrived in London in the late 60s, buying two newspapers, The News of the World and The Sun, he persuaded Alick to join him as his deputy.
In December 1969, Rupert and Anna left the London winter for an Australian Christmas and, as a parting gift, the boss lent his right-hand man the use of his Rolls Royce and driver. Neither man knew that the car was being watched.
Months earlier, two brothers, immigrants from Trinidad, happened to watch TV presenter David Frost interview Rupert on the BBC. The pair presumed this brash young media mogul had lots of money and hatched a plan to get some of it.
They went to Rupert's headquarters off Fleet Street and followed his Rolls Royce to what they thought was his home in the comfortable, tree-lined suburb of Wimbledon.
On the evening of December 29, they broke into the house and abducted Muriel. When Alick arrived home that night, he found the front door unlocked, the house in disarray and the dinner Muriel had prepared uneaten in the kitchen.
The police and hordes of media soon descended on the house. Muriel's daughters rushed to be with their father and 27-year-old Ian jumped on a plane in Sydney.
The next six weeks were a nightmare for the McKays. Kidnappings were unheard of in the UK and Ian says the police "had no knowledge about how to deal with it". With a huge media pack camped outside and the police inside, the family was under extraordinary pressure, fielding calls from the kidnappers who were demanding a ransom of 1 million pounds, worth more than 20 million pounds today ($40 million).
In Alick's view it was "an absurd sum of money" and he didn't expect Rupert to pay.
Alick told one of the kidnappers as much on a recorded phone call. "Well, nobody's got 1 million pounds. And I mean, quite frankly, it's ridiculous", he says, clearly distraught.
"Alick, darling, I'm blindfolded and cold … Please do something to get me home. Please cooperate or I can't go on," she wrote in shaky letters. "What have I done to deserve this treatment? Can you do something, please?"
After six weeks of failed police searches, two bungled money drops and gallons of spilled tabloid ink, the police finally tracked the kidnappers' car to a farmhouse in Hertfordshire. The family's worst fears were realised — there was no sign of Muriel.
The police arrested two brothers Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein and charged them with murder, kidnap and blackmail. They were found guilty later that year. But the brothers never pleaded guilty or revealed how Muriel died and where they’d buried her. Arthur eventually died in jail, and his younger brother Nizamodeen was deported back to Trinidad and Tobago after serving his sentence.
'This should have been their story, not ours': Life without Muriel
How do you get over losing your mother in such circumstances?
Ian returned to Australia and never talked about it. "I just wanted to get on with my life," he tells Australian Story. He bottled up his grief and trauma for 50 years.
Di says her mother's death threw her life into chaos. Her first marriage ended and she was so frightened that "it took me years to allow my children to be normal children". Most of all she missed her mum. "I was very close to her. I was the first daughter to get married and have babies and she was crazy about babies. It was terribly hard."
Alick became depressed but remained loyal to Rupert, and kept working with him until he retired. When Alick remarried three years later, Rupert was the best man at his wedding.
Ian and Di don't blame the Murdochs for what happened but perhaps unsurprisingly, their feelings towards them are complicated.
Not long after it happened, Di and Ian remember being at a restaurant and spotting Anna across the room. When Anna came over to say hello, it was awkward.
"I felt this should have been their story, not ours," Di says.
Muriel's death affected the Murdochs too. Veteran British journalist Roy Greenslade, who worked at The Sun newspaper at the time, remembers '"it certainly affected how Anna thought of being in Britain, and certainly tightened security for her and Rupert".
Speaking to the BBC in 1981, Anna recalls how "it coloured my time there in Britain after that happened".
But Anna is quick to add that it was far harder for the McKays.
Hope for an answer
In 2021, a documentary series, The Wimbledon Kidnappings, came out and it included an interview with Nizamodeen, one of the two brothers convicted of murdering Muriel.
The filmmakers had interviewed him in Trinidad and Tobago. Watching him speak about those terrible events, Di was shocked but she saw an opportunity: he might be able to answer the family's questions about what happened to her mother.
The police conducted a search at the farm in 2022 but found nothing.
Meanwhile, Di and her son, Mark Dyer, built up a relationship with Nizamodeen, eventually travelling to Trinidad in early 2024 to meet him. They took maps and photos of the farmhouse, old and new, where Muriel had been held and had him explain where they had buried her.
Nizam, as he's called, told Di something that was both upsetting and a relief. He claimed they hadn't murdered Muriel but that she'd died of a heart attack just days after she was abducted.
Muriel didn't have a heart problem. "She was as strong as an ox," Di says, but she feels her mother probably died of "absolute terror".
"I'm just glad she died quickly and didn't have to stay there any longer."
Di, Mark and Ian resolved to use this new information to find Muriel's remains so they could finally give her a proper burial.
'We've done everything we can'
Well-connected in the media, the McKay family's quest to find Muriel's remains has been followed by the Murdoch-owned Sun newspaper, Sky TV and the BBC.
"This is earth-shattering stuff if we are able to find her after all this time," Ian told The Sun on the eve of the excavation.
But in reality, as the dig got underway, relations between the McKays and the police were severely strained.
The family wanted to bring Nizam from Trinidad and The Sun newspaper had agreed to fund his trip, but the police blocked his visit.
After eight days at the farm, the police had found nothing and closed it down, saying "We have searched all the areas identified as the possible site for Muriel's remains and that they were saddened that we were unable to bring them the closure they so desperately long for."
Ian says they are bitterly disappointed. They think the police didn't complete the dig and missed a crucial opportunity by not having Nizam there.
"We would have accepted the outcome of the search if he'd been brought over to help show the way," Ian says.
Detective Superintendent Katherine Goodwin from the Metropolitan Police has defended their decision not to allow Nizam to be there, "based on Hosein's reliability as a witness and the likelihood of a successful outcome".
Despite the failure to find Muriel and to learn more about how she died, Ian sounds like a changed man. He sounds lighter, as if a load has been lifted from his shoulders. "To go through all of this with my family has been healing in a strange way."
The McKays are continuing their campaign for another excavation, and with a number of media outlets behind them, they're a formidable force.
"We want to feel like we've done everything we can," Ian says.
Stream part 1 of Australian Story's three-part series Making Lachlan Murdoch on ABC iview. It continues on Monday, September 16.
[Zendesk]
