THE case has gone down in history as one of the most notorious murder cases of our time.o

The kidnap and murder of Muriel McKay was featured on ITV1, when the Manhunt programme retold the story of how Arthur Hosein, 34 who had lived in Ongar and his brother Nizamodeen, 22, were found guilty of what has been described as Britain's first kidnapping, after police searched their farm near Bishop's Stortford.

On a December evening in 1969, Alick McKay, deputy to media magnate Rupert Murdoch, was dropped off at his London mansion to find the front door open, the lights on and his wife gone.

The phone was pulled out of the wall. The contents of his wife's handbag were strewn over the stairs. A rusty meat cleaver lay on the floor.

Several hours later, a call came through from a phone box. The Mafia was holding his 55-year-old wife, Muriel. They wanted £1m or she would be killed.

The kidnappers thought they had snatched the publishing tycoon's young wife, Anna. Mrs McKay was using the company's car while the Murdochs were on holiday in Australia.

The kidnapping involved false leads, tapped phones, stakeouts, press leaks, mediums, conmen trying to get a piece of the action and armed detectives in wigs and dyed hair delivering suitcases full of fake £5 notes in bungled money drops.

Ransom demands for £500,000, in two suitcases, started with a request for the money to be taken to a telephone box in Church Street, Edmonton, and then to another in Bethnal Green Road. The trail then led to Epping, and Bishop's Stortford.

After five weeks, the kidnappers were traced to an isolated farm at Stocking Pelham. There was no sign of a body. To this day, no one knows what happened to Muriel McKay, except her killers.

In the five weeks, they made 18 phone calls to her family, who were schooled in what to say by police.

Tape recordings of the conversations between the McKays and the kidnappers were broadcast in the programme for the first time.

A Post Office telephonist had, by chance, overheard the first ransom call. He was so frightened by it that he failed to phone the police and tell them it was coming from a call box in Epping Forest.

At the time, a member of the McKay family believed he may have heard her being killed.

Answering one of the hundreds of anonymous calls made to the family home during the hunt, Mrs McKay's eldest son-in-law spoke to a frightened woman who appeared to be in the same room as another woman who was being held captive.

Suddenly he overheard the frightened woman apparently being struck, then the sound of a shot, then the phone went dead.

The Hosein brothers bought Rooks Farm, near Stocking Pelham, in 1967 and moved there in May 1968, keeping pigs. Arthur Hosein, a tailor by trade, had previously lived in Longfields, Ongar.

When police swooped on the farm Arthur's fingerprints matched those found on the ransom demands. Police scoured the farm for several weeks but could find no trace of Mrs McKay, or of what had happened to her.

In October 1970, the brothers were found guilty at the Old Bailey of kidnapping, murder and blackmail. Both received life sentences for Mrs McKay's murder.

Arthur Hosein was jailed for 25 years and his brother, Nizamodeen, for 15 years.

December 12, 2001 8:39