Maxwell’s death shocked the world. Few will forget the moment that the news was first broadcast. I heard it in Moscow while speaking to the former head of the KGB’s Department S, a man responsible for sending ‘illegal’ agents into the West. During his last months, Maxwell had been a frequent visitor to the Kremlin. Bizarrely, it later transpired that he was negotiating to sell blood donated by Russians in the West – a market inspired by the new HIV crisis. Even thirty years later, the end of Captain Bob’s life remains astonishing, and provides a lesson which should never be forgotten.
ONE The Autopsy – 9 November 1991
The corpse was instantly recognizable. The eye could follow the jet-black hair and bushy eyebrows on the broad Slav head down the huge white torso towards the fat legs. Until four days earlier, the puffy face, recorded thousands of times on celluloid across the world, had been off-white. Now it was an unpleasant dark grey. The body was also disfigured. An incision, 78 cm long, stretched from the neck down the stomach to the crotch. Another incision crossed under the head, from the left shoulder along the collar bone. Firm, black needlework neatly joined the skin to conceal the damage to the deceased’s organs.
Lying on a spotless white sheet in a tiled autopsy room, the corpse was surrounded by eight men and one woman dressed in green smocks. An unusual air of expectancy, even urgency, passed among the living as they stood beneath the fierce light. It was 10.25 on a Saturday night and there was pressure on them to complete their work long before daybreak. Over the past years, thousands of corpses – the victims of the Arab uprising – had passed through that undistinguished stucco building in Tel Aviv. But, for the most part, they had been the remains of anonymous young men killed by bullets, mutilated by bombs or occasionally suffocated by torture.
This cadaver was different. In life, the man had been famous, and in death there was a mystery. Plucked from the Atlantic Ocean off the Canary Islands, he had been flown for burial in Israel. Standing near the corpse for this second autopsy was Dr Iain West, the head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy’s Hospital, London. His hands, encased in rubber gloves, were gently touching the face: ‘He’s been thumped here. That looks genuine. You don’t get that falling just over the edge of a boat. You don’t get this sort of injury.’ West’s Scottish-accented voice sounded aggressive. Retained by the British insurance companies who would have to pay out £21 million if the cause of death were proved to have been accident or murder, he found his adrenalin aroused by a preliminary autopsy report signed two days earlier by Spanish pathologists. After twenty-one years of experience – and 25,000 autopsies – he had concluded that there were no more than two Spanish pathologists who deserved any respect: the remainder were ‘not very good’. The conclusion of Dr Carlos Lopez de Lamela, one of that remainder, that the cause of death was ‘heart failure’ was trite and inconsequential. West was thirsting to find the real cause of death. His first suspicion was murder. Yet he knew that so much of pathology relied upon possibilities or probabilities and not upon certainties. Mysteries often remained unresolved, especially when the evidence was contaminated by incompetence.
The Briton’s position at the autopsy was unusual. Under the insurance companies’ agreement with the Israeli government, he could observe but not actively participate. West regretted that he would not be allowed to follow the contours and patterns of any injuries which might be discovered and privately felt slightly disdainful of his temporary colleague, Dr Yehuda Hiss. He recalled the forty-five-year-old Israeli pathologist – then his junior – learning his craft in Britain in the mid-1980s. He had judged him to be ‘competent’, although unused to the traditional challenges of autopsy reports in Britain. West was nevertheless now gratified to learn that his lack of confidence in the Spaniards was partially shared by Hiss. In the Israeli’s opinion, Dr Lamela’s equivocation about the cause of death was unimpressive.
West watched Hiss dictate his visual observations. Touching the body gently, even sensitively, the Israeli noted small abrasions around the nostrils and rubbed skin under the nose and on the ear, but no signs of fresh epidermal damage anywhere on the head or neck. There were no recently broken bones. Although the body had apparently floated in the sea for up to twelve hours, the skin showed no signs of wrinkling or sunburn. ‘We’ll X-ray the hands and the foot,’ ordered Hiss.
His dictation was interrupted by West: ‘I wonder if they’ve looked at his back?’
‘No, no,’ replied Hiss, going on to note a small scar, thin pubic hair and circumcision.
Again he was interrupted: ‘The teeth are in bad condition.’
‘The dental treatment is poor,’ agreed another Israeli.
‘Very poor’, grunted West, ‘for a man who was so rich.’
‘Are you sure it’s him?’ asked an Israeli. ‘We’d better X-ray the teeth for a dental check.’
‘Well, it looks like him,’ snapped West. ‘The trouble is we’re up against time. He’s being buried tomorrow. I think we’ll take fingerprints.’ Again, he criticized the Spaniards: ‘The fingernails haven’t been cut off. They said they’d done it.’
Midnight passed. It was now the day of the burial. The corpse was turned over. ‘We’ll cut through and wrap it back,’ said West impatiently. The two pathologists had already concurred that the Spanish failure to examine the deceased’s back was a grave omission – it had been a common practice in Britain since the 1930s, as a method of discovering hidden wounds.
There was no sentiment as two scalpels, Hiss’s and an assistant’s, were poised over the vast human mound. None of the doctors contemplated its past: the small baby in the impoverished Czech shtetl or ghetto whose soft back had been rubbed after feeding; or the young man whose muscular back had been hugged by admiring women; or the tycoon whose back five days earlier had been bathed in sunshine on board a luxury yacht worth £23 million. Their scalpels were indiscriminate about emotions. They thought only of the still secret cause of death.
After the scalpels had pierced the skin and sliced through thick, yellow fat on the right side, West’s evident anticipation was initially disappointed: ‘I’m surprised that we didn’t find anything.’ A pattern of bruises was revealed to be only on the surface, the result of slight pressure, but not relevant to the cause of death. More dissections followed, mutilating the body tissue, slitting the fat, carving the flesh inch by inch in the search for the unusual. Minutes later there was a yelp.
‘Do you see that?’ exclaimed Hiss.
‘It’s a massive haematoma!’ gasped West, peering at the discovery. There, nestling among the flesh and muscle in the left shoulder was a large, dark-red blob of congealed blood.
‘Nine and a half by six centimetres,’ dictated Hiss in Hebrew, ‘and about one centimetre thick.’
West prodded the haematoma: ‘There’s a lot of torn muscles – pulled.’ It was those tears which had caused the bleeding.
Here was precisely the critical clue missed by the Spaniards: since there were no suspicious bruises on the skin, they had lazily resisted any probing. Now the new doctors were gazing at violently torn fibres. Yet Hiss was not rushing to the conclusion he sensed was already being favoured by West. ‘The trouble is, it’s also an area where you often hit yourself,’ he observed.
‘It’s not a hit,’ growled West.
There was, they agreed, no pattern of injuries of the kind which usually accompanies murder – no tell-tale grip, kick or punch marks, no small lacerations on the skin which at his age would easily have been inflicted in the course of a struggle or by dragging a heavy, comatose body.
‘There’s tearing,’ insisted