Killer asks to return to UK 55 years after murder to help find victim's body | Crime

The chilling words of a convicted murderer will soon be heard, going back decades to a winter night in 1969, in a revealing new recorded interview with one of the two brothers who kidnapped and killed Muriel McKay. “Perhaps the only solution is to be there. To be there again, I must retrace my steps,” Nizamodeen Hosein will say.

The notorious killer at the centre of a police manhunt that dominated the news 55 years ago has suggested that a trip from Trinidad and Tobago, where he was deported in 1990 after serving 20 years in prison, could refresh his fading memory of the location of the body of the 55-year-old woman he abducted from her Wimbledon home in an extraordinary case of mistaken identification.

Hosein confirmed that McKay's body was still lying somewhere on the Hertfordshire farm he once shared with his late brother Arthur. He claimed he could not remember what he last told police. The investigation was reopened this year because Hosein confessed three years ago and provided new evidence to McKay's children when they visited him in Trinidad. Detectives also flew to Trinidad in March this year to question Hosein.

Last month, a police attempt to locate the burial site at Rook's farm in Stocking Pelham failed. McKay's son Ian, who lives in Australia, was present at the dig and was desperate to solve the mystery. After the search, the victim's family said they planned to ask the Home Office for permission for Hosein to temporarily fly back to revisit the crime scene.

Hosein, who spoke to BBC journalist Jane MacSorley this month, has now asked for another chance to help. “As I said, I have to go to the place to remember, so I can't tell you from here,” he said.

On the evening of December 29, 1969, Hosein and his older brother kidnapped the mother and her wife from their home because they believed they were Anna Murdoch, the second wife of media magnate Rupert Murdoch. McKay's husband Alick was a high-ranking colleague of Murdoch at the Sun and had borrowed his boss's car. McKay's own vehicle was being repaired, so Murdoch had offered to use his chauffeured Rolls-Royce while he and Anna spent the Christmas holidays in his native Australia.

The Hosein brothers followed the Rolls-Royce in their mud-blue Volvo, misidentifying the house where they thought the wealthy newspaper owner lived. They took Muriel with them, leaving the empty house behind, which her horrified husband found when he returned home from work.

This summer, MacSorley re-examined the case for Radio 4 in her podcast Worse than murder: The final two episodes will be broadcast on BBC Sounds this Monday and next, and will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Wednesday 28 August and Wednesday 4 September. They contain grim new conclusions about police failures in handling the ransom demand from the brothers, who referred to themselves as 'M3' in a series of gruesome phone calls to the McKays' home.

Muriel's children have told MacSorley that the family were offered no financial help to get closer to M3's £1m demand, worth £14m today.

A series of botched police attempts to catch the kidnappers, including one in which dozens of police cars converged on another Hertfordshire village, are believed to have delayed the arrest of the Hoseins. They were eventually tracked down by their car number plate and arrested at the farm before being jailed in 1970. Muriel McKay was never found.

In the last episode of Worse than murder, MacSorley accuses Hosein of prolonging the McKays' suffering. “I have been a journalist for over 30 years,” said MacSorley. “I have interviewed paedophiles, rapists, murderers… But I have never interviewed anyone like Nizamodeen Hosein. He seemed to me like a disturbed and disillusioned man with no sense of remorse whatsoever.”