The Spy in the Bag: The Death That Britain Ruled Two Ways

2025-05-15 · Unexplained Deaths · 2 min read

On 23 August 2010, police entered a top-floor flat at 36 Alderney Street in Pimlico, London, after the tenant's employers finally raised the alarm. In the bath of the en-suite bathroom sat a red North Face holdall, zipped shut and padlocked from the outside. Folded inside was the naked body of Gareth Williams, a 31-year-old Welsh mathematician who worked as a codebreaker for GCHQ, Britain's signals-intelligence agency, and was on secondment to MI6. The key to the padlock was inside the bag, underneath his body.

Williams had probably been dead for about a week, yet no one had reported him missing, a delay for which MI6 later formally apologised. There was no sign of forced entry, no evidence of a struggle, and no injuries on the body. Strangest of all, the heating in the flat had been left on in the middle of August. The warmth accelerated decomposition so severely that pathologists could never establish how he died; suffocation and poisoning both remained possible, and neither could be proven.

Reader comments (0)