Revisiting ‘the crime of the century’ using forensic speech analysis

Posted on 17 September 2021

Researcher in York provides linguistic expertise for documentary about kidnap/murder case

In August Dr Dominic Watt (Dept. of Language and Linguistic Science) appeared in a documentary called ‘The Wimbledon Kidnapping’, the focus of which was the kidnap and presumed murder of Muriel McKay in 1969/70. The victim was the wife of Alick McKay, the then editor of The News of the World, and it appears that she was abducted by mistake: the intended target was Rupert Murdoch’s wife Anna. The documentary is currently being shown on Sky NOW.

Dr Watt, with help from former MSc in Forensic Speech Science student Jasmine Rouse, undertook speech analysis work on 17 intercepted ransom phone calls from 1970. For comparison purposes, he used a 2019 filmed interview with Nizamodeen Hosein, who with his brother Arthur had been jailed for over 20 years for his part in the crime. Using a mix of auditory and acoustic measurements, in combination with automatic speaker recognition software and a prototype automatic speaker age estimation tool, Dr Watt concluded that the voices of at least two members of the kidnap gang can be heard in the ransom calls. It seems very plausible, on the basis of the data, to suppose that neither/none of the voices in the calls was that of the young Nizamodeen, so there must have been at least one more gang member involved. But no third man has ever been definitively identified.

‘The abduction of Muriel McKay and the ransom demand her kidnappers made in exchange for her safe return to her family was unprecedented in the UK at the time. It seems incredible from our perspective now, but back in 1969 the police in this country hadn’t ever had to deal with a crime of this type before. It’s not too unfair to say they didn’t handle things as competently as they might have! We still don’t know what happened to Muriel, and it’s possible we never will. It’s a really tragic case. I found the analysis of the ransom calls a fascinating exercise, though, and trying to compare the speech of a man in his seventies with that of a man 50 years his junior was very challenging because it’s so difficult to factor out the changes that have happened to a person’s voice over half a century of his or her lifetime.’ - Dr Dominic Watt, Department of Language and Linguistic Science

To watch the documentary on Sky NOW: The Wimbledon Kidnapping