Conspiracies: The Facts * the Theories * the Evidence (26 page)

timed (with investigations into the WMD debacle looming),

somehow too
obvious
. In the days following his death, it wasn’t too hard to find someone expressing this in conversation.

Once, maybe, such alarmist talk would have seemed like fringe

eccentricity, but not in the wake of recent history’s deceptions and disappointments. Again, pol s are revealing here, with one 2010

survey on Kel y revealing that by then only ‘one in five’ people

still believed he had committed suicide.7 As with Diana, such a

statistic speaks either of a blanket mistrust in authority, or of the weaknesses of the government-sponsored investigation.

With echoes of the Warren Commission, the Hutton Inquiry that

delivered the suicide verdict on Kel y has been heavily criticized for its failure to interview key witnesses or to address particular points of concern. The hasty setting-up of the inquiry has itself been the subject of some scrutiny. Kel y’s death was reported to Tony Blair while he was on a flight to Japan, yet Lord Hutton had already been appointed to lead an investigation even before the plane touched

down, as if everything had been pre-prepared in anticipation of such a tragic event. Hutton was not general y considered the best man

for such a position, never having chaired any such inquiry before, raising reasonable assumptions that he was more likely selected for his record of defending the British government against accusations of irregularities (as a former senior barrister in Northern Ireland), rather than as someone who might take the authorities to task.

Suspicious Circumstances

As it happens, the whole timing of Kel y’s death was serendipitous for the Blair administration, with parliament having just adjourned 158

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for the summer on the very day that Kel y went for his final walk in the woods, sparing the government humiliating televised scenes

in the Commons. Even more serendipitous was the fact that the

Thames Valley Police investigation into Kel y’s death, Operation

Mason, was, according to police records, apparently opened nine

hours
before
its own subject’s disappearance was reported – an incongruity that has never been satisfactorily explained. Again, it suggests signs of pre-planning for an event that someone knew

was coming. The name of the police operation has also raised

eyebrows among truthseekers concerned with the influence of

secret societies in such matters.

The behaviour of the police after Kel y’s absence was first

reported by his wife Janice is no more explicable, with a

mysterious 45ft radio antenna (size claims vary) being erected in the Kel y family garden on their arrival. No reason has ever been given to explain this procedure, unheard of in a missing persons

case. Some believe the aerial may have been installed to enable

the police to communicate directly with Blair’s plane, which

would have interesting implications, especial y since at this point, as far as anyone official y knew, Kel y could still have been found alive and well at any time. Janice herself was unceremoniously

evicted from her own house and forced to stand in the garden

at night while police searched the house with a sniffer dog

(even looking into the airing cupboard at one point, as if Kel y

might have been hiding there); yet it was already clear that Kel y was definitively missing, hence his wife’s call to the emergency

services. Bizarrely, wal paper was even stripped from their sitting room wall that night – a highly unusual forensic test to make

when searching for someone. A helicopter that came down over

the nearby woods where Kel y’s body was found the next day is

another unexplained mystery of Operation Mason, the purpose

of which has never been declared, leading even the
Daily Mail
to ask whether the craft might have ‘either deposited or collected somebody or something’ at the site.8

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With the eventual discovery of Kel y’s corpse by daylight,

things became more, not less, confused; both the placement and

condition of his body have become the most contentious aspects

of all in what has become one of the more pondered potential

assassination scenarios of modern times.

Louise Holmes and Paul Chapman, the two local search party

volunteers who first happened upon Kel y’s dead body, both

testified that it was sitting slumped against a tree. However, by the time the police arrived and recorded their ‘official’ finding of Kel y, he was flat on his back, entirely separate from the tree. By this time a blunt gardening knife, a watch and a partial y drunk

bottle of mineral water were also very visibly part of the scene –

none of which was original y present, according to Holmes and

Chapman. This has led conspiracy observers to wonder whether

either the occupants of the unexplained helicopter or the police

themselves had somehow redressed a murder scene to give it

more of a suicide ‘look’.

The water, of course, could explain how Kel y was able to down

29 of the 30 co-proxamol tablets (the odd remaining tablet left

in the packet has stimulated more suspicions, as if it was left

specifical y to make for an easy identification of the drug), while the knife, one which Kel y had owned for many years, might

account for the gash to the ulnar artery on his left wrist. Yet herein lie some of the main problems with the official suicide verdict.

The Hutton Inquiry insists that the main cause of death was a

mixture of blood loss and the effects of the overdose. However, all those who witnessed Kel y’s body at Harrowdown Hil , whether

in its first or second position, reported that only a small amount of blood was visible. Critics of the conspiracy theories contend

that much of it might have soaked into the ground by the time

the body was found, but a major point of dispute surrounds the

ability of the small ulnar artery to vent such a fatal loss of blood in the first place, particularly in cold night air, which general y closes wounds more quickly than would be required to be fatal.

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One of the first major challenges to the suicide verdict came

from a consortium of three independent doctors, making their

doubts about Kel y known through a letter to the
Guardian

newspaper. In 2009, other medical experts joined them in

campaigning for a new inquiry, much of their concern based on

the observations regarding the inability of the ulnar incision to have been a main cause of death. It has been countered that Kel y had a heart condition that gave him unusual y narrowed vessels in the arteries, making him more susceptible to a smaller blood loss than might usual y be fatal, but other factors here have kept the doubters vocal.

Gruesome though it is to consider, those who choose to commit

suicide by cutting their wrists usual y carve vertical lines down the main arteries along the inside of the forearm, causing a huge loss of blood. Kel y, a doctor of microbiology, would very likely have been aware of this. The ulnar, on the other hand, is a very

tough artery to cut and would have been especial y painful and

difficult to saw through, especial y with the blunt concave-edged knife found by police at the scene. Whatever Kel y’s state of mind may have been, he had no history of self-harming which might

suggest he would choose such an agonizing method, one which

had far less guarantee of success. There were no other reported

British suicides in 2003 that used such an awkward ‘technique’.

Moreover, a friend, Mai Pederson, informed the police inquiry

that Kel y had a long-term weakness in his right arm that meant

he struggled to cut even steak at mealtimes. Why, then, would

Kel y choose such an especial y hard way to exit the world?

The co-proxamol tablets are problematic in themselves. Not

only was the amount found in Kel y’s blood just a third of what

should have been necessary to have killed him (according to the

official inquiry), but only a fifth of one tablet was actual y found left in his stomach, the rest presumably having been vomited out

– or never swallowed in the first place. A quirk in the personality of Dr Kel y throws doubt on the fact that he would select such a

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way to go; it was well-known among his close acquaintances that

he found it difficult to swallow even a small number of tablets in normal circumstances.

The standard official response to this – that Kel y was not

in his normal frame of mind and therefore took his life in a

more peculiar way than might be expected – makes the wide

assumption that Kel y was depressed enough to be in this state in the first place. Testimony from friends and family suggest no signs of this being the case. Unquestionably, Kel y was stressed by the unexpected spotlight that had been thrown on him, but even his

sister, Sarah Pape, a consultant plastic surgeon, when telling the Hutton Inquiry of her final chats with her brother, described his demeanour thus:

[He was] tired, but otherwise it real y was a very normal

conversation. Believe me, I have lain awake many nights

since, going over in my mind whether I missed anything

significant. In my line of work I do deal with people who

may have suicidal thoughts and I ought to be able to spot

those, even in a telephone conversation. But I have gone over
and over in my mind the two conversations we had and he

certainly did not betray to me any impression that he was

anything other than tired. He certainly did not convey to me

that he was feeling depressed; and absolutely nothing that

would have alerted me to the fact that he might have been

considering suicide.9

Indeed, Kel y seemed to have many pleasures still to live for

at the time of his death. Things were looking up: the worst of

the parliamentary inquiries seemed to be over; his daughter’s

wedding was approaching, something he was reportedly much

looking forward to; and his own cherished work as a weapons

inspector in Iraq was about to resume despite all the fuss, with a new trip scheduled.

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The cynical might point out that it is almost as if whoever

might have planned a faked suicide for Kel y didn’t bother to

do their homework in a number of areas, given the weakness

of his cutting arm, his aversion to swallowing tablets and his

increasingly cheerful state of mind in the days before his death.

It is almost as if the planners were given the wrong script to work from if they wanted to create a scenario that wouldn’t fall prey

to endless conspiracy theories. They had also chosen a man who

was a practising follower of the Bahá’í faith – a religion that firmly denounces suicide.

How and Why?

If Kel y was killed, then how this might have been achieved can

only be speculation in the absence of – official y, at least – any other obvious causes of death from the post-mortem. Poison or

asphyxiation would presumably have shown in the post-mortem,

although it has long been believed that shadowy intelligences

may have electromagnetic devices that can induce heart attacks.

Hardcore conspiracists say both former Foreign Secretary Robin

Cook and Labour leader John Smith may have fallen victim to

this technique when each became obstructive to the unstoppable

ambitions of the Blair camp. Why this dubiously useful weapon

would not be used for the quiet removal of all targeted figureheads, however, has never been properly reasoned, unless such repeated

action would begin to look too obvious. Others point out that

more subtle forms of death may simply never have been looked

for in the face of an apparently obvious suicide.

It is curious to note that David Kel y appears to be yet another

victim who seemed to have a premonition of his own ultimate

fate, albeit more ambiguously this time. Kel y had reportedly

made assurances to Iraqi officials that no military action would

be taken against the country if they complied with UN weapons

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inspections, but he feared there might be a threat to his life if such action did go ahead, once telling a British ambassador, David

Broucher, that if Iraq were invaded then he would ‘probably be

found dead in the woods’.

The British government were predictably happy to allow this

reported statement to sound as if Kelly might always have been

someone capable of taking his own life, although this would

seem an uncharacteristically weak retreat for such a reportedly

stolid personality. Was it in truth that Kelly knew his own people might need to remove his awkward presence in such a situation

– as the majority of conspiracy theorists believe? Or was it,

as a number of moderates have suggested, that either Iraqis

angry at Kelly’s apparent betrayal, or exiled dissidents resentful at anything that was seen to exonerate Hussein’s regime, may