Chester Stern's Blog

Towards the end of my time as Crime Correspondent for The Mail on Sunday I got to know Kate Kray, the former wife of gangland legend Ronnie Kray. Kate is a bubbly, vivacious, blonde with enormous charm who has been able to trade on her association with the notorious Kray twins by developing a network of underworld friends and contacts who trust her completely. As a result she has become a highly-successful author of crime books both fiction and non-fiction.
One day Kate and I got to discussing her friend Linda Calvey, the legendary gangsters’ moll and female armed robber known throughout the underworld as The Black Widow and the model for Linda La Plante’s hit TV series Widows about a gang of criminals’ wives. At the time Linda was serving a life sentence in the female lifers’ wing of Wakefield Prison along with the likes of Myra Hindley and Rose West. Kate said that Linda was keen to have a book written about her life to boost her campaign for early parole. For some reason Kate was not keen to actually write the book herself so I volunteered. Kate would acquire the material during her regular visits to see Linda and I would actually write the words.
Kate smuggled a tape recorder into the prison and asked a series of questions, at my prompting, every time she visited. Linda would then answer the questions in detail and add anecdotes of her own in the privacy of her cell. The next time Kate visited there would be a tape recording to take away for me to transcribe. This procedure lasted for many months until eventually the book was written and published.
One of the reasons I took on the task was that I thought Linda’s incredible story would make a great movie but in the event the book must have slipped under Hollywood’s radar because no film producers or studio chiefs ever came to call. I don’t know whether the book made any difference but Linda Calvey was eventually released in 2008 after 18 years inside. She has since married for the third time.

The cover blurb for “The Black Widow – the Life and Crimes of Linda Calvey” reads: “Known as The Black Widow because every man she has ever been involved with is either dead or in prison, Linda Calvey is the stuff of East End legend. Her life of crime began when her first husband was shot dead by police when an armed robbery went badly wrong. Left alone with two young children, she began to take part in robberies - first as lookout, then as a getaway driver and finally donning a balaclava and wielding the shotgun herself. Then she met Ronnie Cook, a tough, violent gangster who was eventually jailed for his part in the Brinks Mat bullion robbery. On his release, Calvey hired hitman Danny Reece to dispose of her husband and in 1991 they were both jailed for life for his brutal murder. They later married in prison”.

As a young police press officer in South London during the 1970’s I was often required to attend postmortem examinations of murder victims. During that period I became very familiar with several of the Home Office pathologists who turned up regularly to carry out their gruesome task. One of the younger doctors on the circuit was Professor Iain West of Guy’s Hospital’s Department of Forensic Medicine. Iain was a dour Scot, professional, focussed and detached when he was working but witty and charming when off duty. He was enormously popular with the detectives whom he advised and much admired by judges, barristers, and jurors alike for the clarity of the evidence he presented in court when called upon to do so. It quickly became apparent that Iain was perhaps the most talented forensic pathologist of his generation and as his fame spread he was invited to take on the highest profile and most complicated cases both in Britain and abroad.
In 1994, I was approached by a literary agent who had been asked by the publishers Little Brown to find an author who knew West and could persuade him to co-operate with a book about his work.
I talked to Iain and he readily agreed to work with me. After an initial discussion in which we identified forty of his most interesting cases I began the research. I was allowed to examine every one of his case files, make notes, and then sit down with him and flesh the story out by asking the kind of questions a layman might ask while trying to tease out appropriate anecdotes which might bring the cases to life. Progress was slow because of West’s heavy work schedule but I completed the 120,000 words in time to deliver the finished manuscript just inside the publishers’ deadline.
Then we hit a snag.
Iain had read the book as we went along but, being the precise and almost pedantic scientist that he was, he now insisted on re-reading it line-by-line and making extensive amendments. This process was slow and laborious because, once again, it had to be fitted around his busy working life. It was also prolonged by the fact that I had to defend the creative side of the writing by arguing against the use of too much dry, colourless, scientific language. The book had to be a good and accessible read for the ordinary man or woman in the street. Iain and I had many a robust debate over this aspect and I was the loser more often than not. As a result of these delays we lost out on the opportunity to have the book serialised in a national newspaper but eventually it was published, to critical acclaim, in 1996. Two hardback and two paperback editions followed and the book continued to sell well around the world for many years. It was even translated into Japanese and is still available through several international book outlets.
Sadly Iain West died in 2001 at the age of 57.

The cover blurb for my book Dr Iain West’s Casebook reads: “A comprehensive and fascinating record of some of the most famous and controversial cases of his illustrious career, this book reflects the status that forensic pathology now commands in the field of criminal investigation. With detailed reference to acts of international terrorism, war crimes, major disasters, serial murder and domestic violence, crime journalist Chester Stern explores how Dr West helps police and juries understand the full horror of such incidents, how fresh interpretations of existing evidence increasingly support damages claims by victim's relatives, and how, in the strange circumstances of Robert Maxwell's apparent drowning, he uncovered crucial clues which put a whole new complexion on the mystery of the tycoon's death. Probing death in many bizarre forms, this is a compelling, chilling but never lurid insight into the work of a man for whom death is a way of life”.

On the morning of 31st August 1997 the world awoke to the numbing news that Diana, Princess of Wales was dead.

At just thirty-six, the most photographed and, arguably, the most loved woman on the planet had been killed, along with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, in a Paris car crash.

Her death sparked a universal outpouring of grief such as the world had never seen. But while millions mourned, the French authorities hastily concluded that the crash was nothing more than a routine traffic accident caused by the chauffeur being drunk and driving too fast to avoid a chasing pack of paparazzi.

For some, however, that conclusion was reached far too hastily. There were suspicious circumstances surrounding the crash and questions to be answered. In the weeks and months that followed, the controversy spawned a rash of conspiracy theories and the emergence of the largest number of worldwide websites, devoted to debating a single topic, in cyber history.

The quest for truth was led by Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, who pressed relentlessly for a full and transparent investigation. His campaign for justice lasted many years.

In 1999 a French judicial inquiry concluded that the driver of the Princess’s Mercedes - Ritz Hotel acting head of security Henri Paul - was solely to blame because he lost control of the car while intoxicated. In 2006 an investigation, led by Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir John Stevens, came to much the same conclusion. And in April 2008, after a six-month inquest at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, the jury declared that the occupants of the car had been unlawfully killed. Their statement attributed the deaths to “grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes” and added that additional factors were “the impairment of the judgement of the driver of the Mercedes through alcohol, the fact that the deceased was not wearing a seat belt and the Mercedes struck a pillar rather than something else”.

So that’s it and all about it. Or is it?

It is well-known that Diana was openly concerned for her own safety. She famously told her lawyer: “…my husband is planning an accident in my car, brake failure and serious head injury…”. And she was widely quoted as saying once: “One day I will go up in a helicopter and it’ll just blow up. MI5 will do away with me”.

Were these just the paranoid ravings of a scorned and embittered woman, or did the princess have legitimate grounds for her fears?

There is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that, right from the moment Diana joined the Royal Family as a fresh-faced teenager, she was a thorn in the side of the British establishment. At first it was simply her ‘normality’ which became an irritant. The public loved her for it but the Royal Family had no direct experience of how their subjects lived their lives from day-to-day and Diana’s behaviour was baffling. To the hidebound Royal household it was disturbing, even threatening. And as she grew in confidence and began to assert herself in Royal Circles the wider Establishment began to fear that she might become a figurehead for modernisation and change – change which offended against their traditional view of the world.

When her relationship with Prince Charles began to crumble, she made herself many powerful enemies by laying bare her innermost feelings and publicly revealing the secrets of her marriage in the devastatingly candid book ‘Diana. Her True Story’. More antagonism was to follow when she gave her notorious interview to the BBC ‘Panorama’ programme in which she expressed the belief that Prince Charles was weak and would never be king. To some observers she “signed her own death warrant” with that performance.

Diana was also convinced that she was being spied on by MI5 and that she was the victim of a dirty tricks campaign orchestrated by the security services. For that reason she went to great lengths to keep secret her contacts with author Andrew Morton who wrote “Diana. Her True Story’ and with Martin Bashir who interviewed her for ‘Panorama’.

Evidence that her concerns in this regard were well founded came in 1992 with the newspaper publication of a telephone conversation between the princess and a boyfriend who referred to her affectionately as “Squidgy”. It emerged that the conversation had taken place on New Year’s Eve 1989 and had been picked up and recorded several days later by a couple of radio hams – clear evidence that the conversation had been eavesdropped, recorded, and then re-broadcast to ensure that it would enter the public domain.

The Queen was furious at this intrusion and ordered MI5 to conduct an internal investigation. After Diana’s death Her Majesty warned the princess’s butler, Paul Burrell, to beware of “Dark Forces”, telling him that “…there are powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge”.

But the British were not the only ones who were bugging Diana. Al Fayed’s investigations revealed that various American agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency between them held more than a hundred files comprising more than two thousand pages of transcripts of Diana’s telephone conversations.

At the time her worldwide anti-landmine campaign was gaining massive support and it is thought the potential damage to the Americans’ multi-billion dollar defence industry might have been the reason behind the United States’ close monitoring of the princess.

So if there was a conspiracy to harm Diana, to silence her forever, where might the threat have come from? An American Special Forces hit team? An MI5 undercover unit? An MI6 assassination squad? Or a renegade group of Establishment figures loyal to the crown and mistakenly convinced of Diana’s treason?

Conspiracy theorists have always focussed on two characters, with connections to the security services, who came into contact with Diana during the final weeks of her life.

The first is Henri Paul himself. We know that he worked as a paid agent of MI6 – the British Secret Intelligence Service – and there are strong suggestions that he was also an agent of the French equivalent of MI5 – the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire). It is not unusual for the security services of various countries to pay security men at top international hotels to be their eyes and ears and keep them abreast of the comings and goings of politicians, prominent businessmen, arms dealers and other persons of interest.

The second is James Andanson, an internationally renowned photographer, who led the pack of paparazzi which hounded Diana and Dodi throughout their last summer of romance together. Andanson, too, was employed by the DST under the codename of “Le Rabbateur” which translates as “The Beater” in English and there is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that he worked for the British and possibly the Americans too. He was a high-profile acquaintance of President Mitterrand and a close friend of several Prime Ministers. Much has been made in the French press of the fact that a number of prominent French celebrities, who apparently committed suicide, were photographed by Andanson shortly before they died. In some cases just hours before. Several conspiracy theories exist concerning the suicide of former Prime Minister Pierre Beregovoy who was due to be a key witness in an investigation into a financial scandal engulfing Mitterrand. Andanson was a friend of Beregovoy and photographed him on the day he died. Three years after Diana’s death, just as a new investigation into the Beregovoy affair was due to be launched, Andanson was found dead in a burned out car. The location was 400 kilometres south of his home when he had told his wife that he was going on an assignment in Paris, 150 kilometres to the north of his home. According to his wife there was no indication that her husband was suicidal, no reason to take his own life, and he left no suicide note.

Today, even after the conclusion of the French judicial inquiry, the Scotland Yard investigation, and the London inquest, several questions still remain unanswered:

• Henri Paul had a number of bank accounts into which he paid large amounts far in excess of his Ritz Hotel salary. Who was paying him and what for?
• On the night of the crash Paul left the Ritz at 7 pm and did not return until 10 pm. There are no witnesses as to where he went and whom he met.
• When he died Paul had cash amounting to £2,000 in his pocket. Who gave it to him and why?
• Paul had driven the route from The Ritz to Dodi’s apartment in the Rue Arsene Houssaye on many occasions yet chose to take a longer route despite knowing that the paparazzi were in pursuit. He had been drinking but was not intoxicated enough to be prevented from driving by the two bodyguards so why deviate from the plan?
• Witnesses said that as the Mercedes approached the first exit from the Cours de Reine which would have avoided entering the Alma tunnel where the crash happened, Paul was prevented from taking the slip road by a lone motorcyclist standing astride his bike and blocking the roadway. Who was he? He has never come forward.
• Throughout the afternoon and evening of the fateful day, as Diana and Dodi came and went from the Ritz, two mystery men remained for hours standing and watching on the periphery of the crowd. They were picked up on the hotel security cameras. One wore a baseball cap. They have never been identified and have not come forward despite repeated appeals in the world’s press. Who are they and what were they doing there?
• Just before dawn on the Sunday morning, a few hours after the crash, James Andanson boarded a plane from Paris to Corsica. The inquest heard evidence that he was on an assignment to photograph Gilbert Becaud but why leave Paris when such an historic news event had just happened? Was there another reason for him to visit Corsica?
• The inquest also heard that Andanson’s death had been determined as suicide by a local magistrate. But was it? Could he have been killed to prevent him revealing a damaging secret?

Part of the cover blurb on my book, “The Decoy”, reads as follows: “…on the night she (Diana) died two secret operations – one connected to the British Establishment and one involving major figures in the French government – collided unintentionally with catastrophic results. From Bosnia to Baghdad, from Paris to Washington, from Angola to London this ‘faction’ thriller tells the compelling story of the British, French and American secret services’ involvement in the most iconic car crash in history…and beyond. The names, dates, places and events are real. Only the storyline is fiction. Or is it? As the former head of Scotland Yard’s press bureau, crime correspondent for a Sunday newspaper, and personal adviser to Mohamed Al Fayed, the author has a unique insight. Among the countless conspiracy theories, his is the most plausible account so far. This is a ‘must read’ for all students of the subject”.

I once knew an eccentric Englishman who wrote a book about himself and his life. His name was Martin Bengtsson and the book was called: “If You’re Not In Bed By Ten, Come Home” – advice his father apparently gave him when he first discovered girls as a teenager. I worked with Martin from time to time or, rather, he imposed himself on me on a regular basis. Frankly he was a bit of a nuisance. But always entertaining. His fund of stories, about himself of course, was endless. And what a colourful life he had led. An extraordinary man. Last I heard of Martin, he’d moved to a small-holding in Ireland to play with his horses and his dogs. And Irish TV were making a documentary about him.
Martin Bengtsson became the blueprint for my detective character, Barrington Percival Shakeshaft. (I hope you don’t mind, Martin. In fact you should be flattered. I’m sure you will be).
Shakeshaft’s sidekick – the Dr Watson to his Sherlock Holmes if you will – is the crime reporter Logan Hunter. Something of an autobiographical representation. The storyline, too, is drawn from my past. In April 1968 a Kingston Grammar schoolboy, Roy Tuthill, disappeared on his way home from school. At the time there was a radio programme, called “Scotland Yard Calling”, which was broadcast nightly on BBC Radio 4. As a young press officer at the Yard, I was one of the presenters and, that day, led the radio news bulletins for several hours with an appeal for the distinctive Austin Westminster car, the driver of which had been seen talking to a boy of Roy’s description. Three days later the child’s body was found dumped in a beech plantation near a private road on the slopes of Box Hill. His school uniform was draped over him. He had been raped and strangled with a rope ligature. The pathologist declared that the boy had been dead for two or three days but the body had not lain at the spot where it was found for very long. One of the other roles I performed within the Public Relations Department at Scotland Yard in those days was to act as the in-house producer for the weekly crime appeals programme “Police Five” fronted by Shaw Taylor and broadcast on ITV. Two years after the murder of Roy Tuthill we prepared and filmed two fifteen minute “Police Five Specials”. One was about Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, then on the run in Australia. The other was about the notorious armed robber John McVicar who had also been on the run from prison for two years. The Biggs programme was broadcast but three days before the second programme was due to go out the Flying Squad captured McVicar, making any public appeals for information completely pointless. Faced with the need to find a replacement programme at short notice, I contacted Det. Ch. Inspector Paddy Doyle, the Surrey Police officer in charge of the hunt for Roy Tuthill’s killer. He agreed to take part in the show and arranged for his son, who was the same age as Roy had been at the time of his death, to wear the dead boy’s school uniform and retrace his last steps for the cameras. The Irish detective also revealed a number of fascinating aspects of the case – vehicles and people seen at a pub nearby when the body was dumped, insect migration which pinpointed precisely how long the body had lain in the position where it was found, unusual marks on the body indicating that it had been transported in the boot of a car, tyre tracks near where the body was found, and a multicoloured thread which indicated that the body had been wrapped in some kind of brocade material. The programme produced a huge response from the public but the case was to remain unsolved for thirty-three years until, in 2001, a sixty-five-year-old man, Brian Field, was stopped for drink driving in Birmingham and a gave a routine DNA sample which matched DNA taken from Roy Tuthill’s body on the National DNA database. Field admitted the murder and was jailed for life.

The cover blurb for my book “The Green-Inker” based on the Tuthill case and featuring a private detective modelled on Martin Bengtsson reads: ‘English eccentric Barrington Shakeshaft has retired from a colourful life of swashbuckling adventure to live in a caravan in the paddock of his daughter’s home in Sussex and tinker with his two most prized possessions – a Harley-Davison motorbike and a Caterham7 sports car. He amuses himself by perpetrating benign hoaxes on gullible journalists and duping greedy art dealers with forged paintings done in the style of famous painters.
When police announce a fresh appeal for witnesses on the first anniversary of the unsolved murder of a schoolboy, Shakeshaft comes up with a new prank. He decides to telephone a newspaper claiming to be the killer. But when he reveals the plan to Logan Hunter, chief crime correspondent of a Sunday newspaper with whom he occasionally has contact, the journalist points out to him the foolishness of such an action and the effect the false claim would have on the bereaved parents.
Filled with remorse at his own stupidity, and determined to bring justice to the parents, Shakeshaft sets out to find the killer himself.
The extraordinary investigation which follows breaches all the rules and accepted conventions of normal police work. He devises imaginative and bizarre methods of acquiring and examining forensic clues and draws on the experience of daring escapades and dubious enterprises he engaged in as a younger man to trick witnesses into telling him more than they should.
Shakeshaft teams up with Hunter and their inquiries lead them into the murky world of a sinister secret society, which practises the ritual abuse of young boys.
With the occasional grudging co-operation, but often bitter opposition, of Detective Chief Inspector Paddy O’Shaughnessy - the policeman in charge of the murder investigation - they solve the crime. Or do they? There is an intriguing twist at the end of this tale. This is an old-fashioned whodunit with a distinctly modern flavour’.

On 22nd November 1987 The Mail on Sunday published a two-page article I had written under the headline “THE END OF A PERFECT SPY”. It told the extraordinary story of 22-year-old Bashar Samara, an Israeli-born Arab. Samara was a deep-penetration agent working for the world-renowned Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. He had successfully infiltrated a British ‘sleeper’ cell of Palestine Liberation Organisation terrorists but his cover had been blown by a freak set of circumstances.
Three months earlier a prominent Arab journalist, Ali Al-Adhami, had been gunned down and killed in London after publishing a cartoon which lampooned PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s love life. Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorist Squad began a series of raids on the homes of known PLO sympathisers and soon found the boarding house where their suspected assassin had been living. In his haste to escape the gunman had left behind documents which indicated to detectives that they had stumbled upon a PLO sleeper cell. From the papers, police were able to draw up a list of cell members including the name of Bashar Samara. Two weeks later Samara was arrested as he walked off a cross-channel ferry with his English girlfriend. They were returning from a holiday in Israel. Samara had been unaware of the Cartoonist’s murder and was not expecting to be arrested. But, being detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, he was forced to reveal his true mission to his Special Branch interrogators. The revelation gave Scotland Yard a major diplomatic headache. If they released Samara he would almost certainly be walking to his death. So in order to avoid compromising the Government, the Yard decided not to tell Whitehall the full facts. Instead they arranged to have Samara deported under the Immigration Act because his ‘presence was not conducive to the public good’. Samara disappeared and was presumably given a new identity. His girlfriend, who had no idea that he was a spy, told The Mail on Sunday that the couple were engaged. She was planning to emigrate to Canada where her fiancé would join her, she said. But Scotland Yard asked the paper to withhold her name and refrain from publishing pictures of her. “If you print it she is dead” a senior detective told me.
Two of the main characters in my book Code Zulu are based on Bashar Samara and his girlfriend. The prologue to the book is also drawn from personal experience when, in 1977, as Head of the Press Bureau at Scotland Yard, I dealt with the murder of three prominent Yemenis who were shot in broad daylight by a lone gunman as they got into a car outside a London hotel.
As for the South African element, I wrote a story in 1986 revealing the existence of an Arab terror cell based in the Cape Province. Twelve South African citizens – all Moslems of Malay origin – had been arrested at Athens Airport attempting to fly to Harare. They had false passports and a hit-list of African political leaders. At the time the PLO were giving military training and support to South African militants and Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi was hosting representatives of the banned African National Congress at terror camps in his country. More recently, intelligence reports emanating from the United States indicated that Al Qaeda has a strong foothold in South Africa and is exploiting the country’s banking system.
I am a fifth generation descendant of the British 1820 Settlers to South Africa. I was born in Port Elizabeth and grew up in the country until moving to Britain at the age of fifteen. My grandfather, Albert Baker, was a lawyer (student friend and legal representative of Mahatma Ghandi, incidentally) who spent many years defending Zulus in the South African courts. A Zulu poet wrote a satirical nickname for him, whilst he was still a teenager and rather over-confident. The name in Zulu is :Jojo Kalo, Jojo nsimu –ka-nketshan’ Goqo vimbel’ zinkomo zi ka Kwini; nomasiki-siki, inyoni esindwa sisila. The poem uses imagery involving animals, birds, and the Queen’s cattle kraal to paint a picture of someone who is impertinent, inquisitive, and confident. In other words a poetic Zulu version of “Too big for his boots”.
In later years Grandpa Baker became a missionary and did great work among the Zulu people. As a child growing up I was constantly aware of the Zulu language being spoken around me and often heard tales relating to Zulu legend and idiom. My cousin, Kenneth Rycroft, became professor of Zulu studies at London University’s school of Oriental and African Studies. He composed and recorded Zulu traditional music and wrote the Zulu national anthem for his friend Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Hence the character of Annabelle Rycroft in the book.

The cover blurb for Code Zulu reads: “An ingenious code, devised from the ancient African myths, legends, and superstitions of the Zulu nation, holds the key to this intriguing terror plot. Nothing is what it seems. Murder, blackmail, kidnap, betrayal and treachery all form part of the fast-moving story as the action switches from London to South Africa, Malaysia, the Middle East, and back again. April McIntyre, bright young Deputy Director-General of MI5, activates a sleeper agent and infiltrates him into a cell which plans a spectacular terrorist outrage against an iconic British institution. She thinks she is in control but even she is shocked and amazed by the final outcome”.