Muriel McKay ‘would like to come home’ as family bid to scan garden for remains

The grandson of a woman who was kidnapped and killed more than 55 years ago has said “she would like to come home for Christmas” after the High Court heard her family believes her remains are in an east London back garden.

Muriel McKay, the wealthy wife of newspaper executive Alick McKay, was kidnapped for a £1 million ransom in 1969 after being mistaken for Anna Murdoch, the then-wife of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Two men were convicted and jailed for Ms McKay’s murder in 1970 but her body has never been discovered despite several police searches.

On Monday, barristers for two of Ms McKay’s children, Ian McKay and Dianne Levinson, asked a judge to order that the homeowners of two neighbouring properties on Bethnal Green Road allow the family to conduct a “ground-penetrating radar survey” of a shared back garden.

One of the homeowners, Madeleine Higson, opposes the injunction bid, which would also stop her from disturbing the garden.

Mr Justice Richard Smith said he will hand down his judgment at 2pm on Tuesday, stating the case involved “not uncomplicated legal sensitivities”.

Speaking to the PA news agency following the hearing, Ms McKay’s grandson Mark Dyer said the bid to discover her remains was “important to the whole family”.

He said: “We do not want to be felt sorry for, we just actually want to get on and … scan the place, check for my grandmother.

“We’ve been told she’s there, most probably there, so we need to pick her up.

“She would like to come home for Christmas this year and what is left of her is purely some remains, some bones.

“They should find a place where the family can go and visit, where whoever’s interested in what happened to her should go and visit, and that’s the right thing to do.”

Ms McKay, 55, was taken from her home in Wimbledon, south London, on December 29 1969.

Brothers Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein were later arrested and found guilty of her murder, and sentenced to 25 years and 15 years in prison, in one of the first murder cases to be brought without a body.

The court heard on Monday that the injunction bid came after the family received new information from a woman called Hayley Frais, whose father ran a tailor shop at the premises on Bethnal Green Lane at the time of the killing, where Arthur Hosein was employed.

Benjamin Wood, for Mr McKay and Ms Levinson, said Ms Frais had claimed that her father said on his deathbed that he noticed a strong smell at the premises at the time of Ms McKay’s disappearance.

In written submissions, he said: “Ms Frais’s evidence, particularly when combined with what else the claimants know about the circumstances of Muriel’s disappearance, leads them to believe that their late mother was buried in the outside space.”

In court, Mr Wood said: “It is right that in 2023, Ms Frais went to the police, and unfortunately, even with that information, the police did not inform the family about that at the time.”

He continued that the police were not willing to excavate or survey the garden as it did not meet their “evidential threshold”, but were “receptive to information” coming from any scan.

Mr Dyer said that Ms Frais had been “incredibly brave” and that the information provided by her “does kind of tally up”.

He said: “I think when you get leads like this, the anxiety of not investigating them is appalling and I would say to anybody who does not want us to do this search, think again.”

Callum Reid-Hutchings, for Ms Higson, said in written submissions for Monday’s hearing that while his client has “considerable sympathy” for Ms McKay’s family, this “cannot displace the requirement for a proper legal foundation” for the injunction.

He continued that it was “telling” that the police did not deem a scan appropriate, stating in court that the bid “assumes entitlement to investigative access”.

The barrister also said that Ms Higson had been subject to repeated attempts to gain access to the property.

These included visits from a man who claimed he wished to take photos of the garden for a “sentimental montage” for his grandfather and a woman who claimed to be purchasing a nearby property and wished to conduct a drainage survey.

They also included visits from a “solicitor or consultant” connected to the McKay family, who did not disclose their position and said they would visit “every day”, Mr Reid-Hutchings said.

In court, the barrister continued that the “bombardment” was “borderline harassment” which had caused Ms Higson “significant distress”.

Mr Wood said that the McKay family “offer their sincere apologies for the distress and inconvenience caused in relation to this deeply personal and sensitive matter”.

Following the hearing, Mr Dyer accepted that the people who visited the house “perhaps, you know, are some of our team”.

He said: “It’s a backyard that no-one uses, and to go in there with a little bit of a scanner, a cover story, it probably was a sensible idea, because you see where we are now.

“I don’t think anything was meant to harm anybody, I think it was more to protect people.”