The Spy in the Bag

There’s just something special about spy stories. People can’t help but find the drama, thrills, and oftentimes moral ambiguity compelling. It’s why everybody loves James Bond, except of course for bartenders who are sick of people ordering vodka martinis shaken, not stirred. But real secret intelligence work in the modern age bears very little resemblance to Bond stories.

While undercover agents obviously still exist, there has been a dramatic shift in recruitment thanks to technology revolutionizing the way that nations conduct operations. These days, you’re probably more likely to get a job in secret intelligence because of your skills as an underground keyboard warrior than because of anything we associate with spy thrillers.

When I found out a friend from high school was working for the NSA, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world and had so many questions, but they all went unanswered. All my friend told me was that he couldn’t say anything about his work, and that he was contractually obligated to report anyone who asked too many questions about it. So come to think of it, I may have been on a government watch list long before writing about cases like this.

I recognize that saying “my friend had a cool job that I know nothing about” may feel like an incomplete and disappointing anecdote, but it’s meant to illustrate a point. There have been other suspected spy cases, like the Isdal Woman or Jennifer Fergate, where the lack of evidence and unusual circumstances led people to believe they were spies, though we don’t know for sure. But Gareth Williams is a bit different.

We know for a fact that he was working for MI6, which means that there’s a lot of information that would be useful for this case that we simply don’t know. You’ll probably have a lot of questions that simply can’t be answered, chief among them being: exactly how long was MI6 planning to let Gareth’s body decompose before they bothered to go looking for their missing employee?

The Discovery of the Body

It began on the morning of Monday, August 23, 2010, but it should have happened a lot sooner. Gareth Williams’ sister Ceri hadn’t heard from her brother in over a week, which she considered abnormal. Worried that something might have happened, she decided to call his work to see if he had been there. And from the moment she placed that phone call, this whole situation was already extremely suspicious.

If Gareth had no-call, no-showed to his job at a local retail store for even one day, you had best believe that HR would be calling to find out where he was. And yet when Ceri placed her phone call to MI6 to ask about her brother, she discovered he hadn’t shown up to work since the previous Monday. Technically Ceri’s phone call might have been placed to Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) rather than MI6 directly; that’s not entirely clear.

Regardless, the government hadn’t actually done anything about Gareth’s unexcused absence. Not only should they have called him, but they could easily have popped by to check in on him in case he was somehow too sick to use the phone. The apartment where Gareth was staying, an MI6-owned safe house, was just a five-minute walk from his office.

At least it used to be an MI6 safe house. Since we can identify that Gareth was living in the top-floor apartment of 36 Alderney Street, Pimlico, there is nothing safe about that location anymore. From a secret intelligence perspective, that is; Central London is lovely.

Ceri made her phone call at 11:30 am, and MI6 acted with all the expediency you would expect from a government bureaucracy. It wasn’t until five hours later that anything actually happened, with a phone call being placed to 999 at 4:30 pm. This was also a seemingly unusual decision. Ignoring the fact that the apartment was so close that they could have checked on the missing officer themselves, calling 999 shouldn’t have been necessary.

According to experts, GCHQ and MI6 would both have their own, more efficient channels for communicating with the police. But that’s the decision they made.

The door was locked when police arrived on the scene, so they had to get a spare key from a lettings agent who was then asked to wait downstairs. Inside the apartment everything looked tidy, which wasn’t a big surprise to the officers. As far as they knew, they were just doing a standard wellness check on somebody who had missed work. Aside from a couple of iPhones and multiple SIM cards on a table, everything seemed to be in order. The only unusual thing about the apartment was the temperature.

Despite the fact that it was a typical August in London with temperatures in the 70s, the heat for the apartment was turned all the way up. Continuing their cursory search of the apartment, officers noticed a large holdall inside the bathtub. For Americans, it’s what we would refer to as a particularly large duffel bag or gym bag. The bag was padlocked shut, and there was a red liquid leaking out of the bottom that looked like blood.

And while the police weren’t sure yet at that point, it looked like blood because it was blood.

After removing the padlock, police discovered that there were exactly two things inside the bag: one was the key for the lock, the other was Gareth’s naked and decomposing body. It was so badly decomposed and contorted that police initially thought the limbs had been severed and stuffed in the bag, but this was not actually the case. Later investigation showed that he had almost certainly been alive when his body was placed in the bag.

There were no signs of a struggle anywhere in the apartment, and the initial assessment was that this was a “neat job,” meaning that Gareth had been killed by a professional. And that certainly would make sense. Not only could his work at MI6 have made him a target, but there were two very notable details about the state of the body itself. Because the heat had been cranked up so high, the body was in an advanced state of decomposition which would interfere with evidence collection and make it difficult to determine a time of death.

Then there was the location of the body itself. You would expect the smell of a heavily decomposing body to attract the attention of other people that lived in the building; this is often the only way elderly loners who die in their homes are ever discovered. However, because the body was sealed in a bag and placed in the bathtub, this wasn’t going to happen.

Much of the scent would have been trapped within the bag, and the blood and other smelly, decomposing bits that oozed out of the bag went straight down the drain. Either the killer made a lucky decision placing the bag in the tub, or they knew exactly what they were doing.

Dr. Fiona Wilcox conducted the coroner’s inquest into Gareth’s death, which lasted for two years. There was not enough evidence for her inquest to return a verdict of murder, so she instead returned a narrative verdict. We don’t really use that term in the United States, but basically it means that Dr.

Wilcox gave a summary of what she believed happened without stating an official cause of death. According to her verdict, Gareth’s death was “unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated.” She was “satisfied that on the balance of probabilities that Gareth was killed unlawfully.”

But the police felt differently. The Metropolitan Police finished their investigation a year after the coroner’s inquest, and they did not believe there was anybody else involved. According to Detective Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt, Gareth placed the bag in the bathtub, climbed inside, then sealed and padlocked the bag—by accident. The police weren’t actually claiming that the actions themselves were an accident, just that Gareth hadn’t planned on killing himself when he definitely locked himself inside the bag without assistance.

Hewitt defended this conclusion by stating, “The coroner drew an inference. I am now drawing a different inference.” And that’s certainly true—he drew a completely different inference than the coroner, the media, and arguably every sane person in the world. Of course, the media’s conclusion was also pretty insane, but we’ll get to that when we circle back to the investigation and theories. First, let’s take a look at Gareth himself.

The Smartest Kid in School

Gareth Williams was born on September 26, 1978 in the small town of Valley, Anglesey, Wales. He had about as normal a childhood as would be possible for a freak mathematical genius, which is to say that he had a loving and supportive family and roughly zero friends. Rather than playing outside with kids his own age, Gareth was happier being indoors at the library, learning everything that he possibly could. He was absolutely obsessed with math and computers, and was seen as a bit of a prodigy.

But that’s not to say that Gareth was your stereotypical nerd; he was actually quite athletic. His father got him into cycling which gave them the opportunity to bond and spend time together, and the two would talk for hours while riding together. Of course, his father also admitted that Gareth wasn’t much of a conversationalist. It’s been heavily speculated by experts that he was autistic, though he was never diagnosed as such.

It certainly would make sense, but his social awkwardness could also have been the result of the lack of friends growing up.

At first this was because Gareth was so much smarter than his peers and preferred learning to anything else, but his mathematical aptitude was only going to serve to alienate him further. Gareth passed the GSCE in math while he was still in primary school (possibly in the first year the GSCEs even existed), and he began studying math at Bangor University while attending secondary school. By the time he was 17, Gareth had already graduated from Bangor with a first-class degree in math. A first-class degree is basically the same thing as graduating magna cum laude from an American university.

From there he immediately began working towards a PhD in math from the University of Manchester. As impressive as all of that is, it is also rather detrimental to social development. So much so that, in the United States at least, it is becoming exceedingly rare for a child to skip a grade, and rarely more than one. College students who spent all weekend getting drunk and having sex probably aren’t going to want to socialize with their classmate whose balls haven’t even dropped yet.

Gareth was a bit shy and awkward, and his classmates noted that he was particularly naïve as well, believing pretty much anything he was told by someone older than him—which was everyone. This naivety resulted in classmates occasionally pranking him, though it wasn’t anything particularly malicious. Again, this is unfortunately an expected side effect of people who skip multiple grades before ever learning how to socialize with peers. Though he did have a few friends as an adult, this awkwardness with socializing never stopped being an issue.

However, even while getting his PhD, Gareth remained active in athletic pursuits with his father. They were members of a cycling club and would compete in races and time trials, and Gareth’s father got him into rock climbing as well. But Gareth wasn’t the type to go out to the pub to hang out with the club members after a race. Even when engaged with others in a shared passion, he was simply too shy to make friends.

After earning his PhD, Gareth began taking post-graduate courses at St. Catharine’s College in Cambridge, but he dropped out after deciding there was nothing left there for him to learn. Besides, he had a new job offer on the table. In 2000, when Gareth was just 21, he was approached by British secret services to come work at GCHQ. He began the job in 2001 after his background check was completed.

For the next eight years, Gareth worked at GCHQ in Cheltenham while renting a room in Prestbury, Gloucestershire. And he was the perfect tenant. He didn’t have a TV or stereo, he didn’t drink, and he almost never had friends or family visit him at his apartment. He never made a sound or caused a problem, except maybe that one time. But we’ll come back to that.

Gareth is described as working as a codebreaker, though obviously there’s not a lot of specific details about his work. We know he worked for GCHQ, and this work often entailed traveling to the United States to aid the NSA. Former coworkers said that Gareth was extremely capable, but was a middle-ranking technician. That might have just been because he didn’t have the seniority required to get promotions or because he wasn’t interested in one.

Honestly, it doesn’t sound like he would have been particularly great at managing subordinates, so he was probably happier in the position he had.

But whatever it was that Gareth was working on, he was clearly quite skilled. So much so that in 2009 he was seconded to MI6 to help them work on other vague tasks. For American readers, “seconded” essentially means that he was temporarily assigned to work there—kind of like if you were a store manager at a large retail chain and corporate sent you for a few months to go help open a new location. Except with way more spy stuff going on in this case.

Ceri was the person Gareth was closest to in the world. He had taken her and her husband to tea at the Ritz in London for their second wedding anniversary in June of 2010, and the two spoke on the phone regularly. Gareth was very meticulous, and she described the phone calls as arriving like clockwork, hence her concern after not hearing from him for over a week. And it’s from Ceri’s testimony at the inquest that we know Gareth wasn’t happy with his new job at MI6.

She explained, “He disliked office culture, post-work drinks, flash car competitions, and the rat race. He even spoke of friction in the office.” She went on to explain how Gareth was uncomfortable with all of the bureaucratic red tape slowing down his work, though it’s somewhat surprising that hadn’t been the case at GCHQ as well.

Technically we would have known that Gareth was unhappy even without this testimony. He had been assigned to MI6 for a three-year contract, but he had already requested a transfer back to GCHQ less than a year in. He was set to return to Cheltenham on September 3, little more than a week after his body was found. But it’s thanks to Ceri that we have some idea of exactly why he wanted to return to his old position.

And really, that’s most of what would have been known about Gareth up until his untimely death at the age of 31. He basically went straight from diapers to college, and from college to government intelligence. Unfortunately, since pretty much the entirety of Gareth’s adult life is classified, there’s only so much information available.

But that doesn’t make for sexy headlines, and it would take two years for the coroner’s verdict to come in with the police’s official report taking an additional year. With a dead MI6 officer and no concrete details to go on, the media was left with only one choice: make up a bunch of slanderous lies to distract people. After all, according to British law you can’t defame a dead person, so what other choice did reputable publications like The Sun have?

The Investigation and Media Confusion

I mentioned earlier that Gareth’s apartment looked tidy, because that’s just the way he lived. There was no clutter and not a lot of personal items. He had his laptop and phones and SIM cards, but the shelves weren’t covered in little baubles or tchotchkes. However, the apartment wasn’t just neat and orderly, it was entirely too clean. Especially the bathroom where Gareth was found.

There was simply no forensic evidence to be found. The bathtub, the bag, and the padlock were all completely free of prints and DNA. If we’re to believe, as the police eventually determined, that Gareth got into the bag of his own accord, surely there should be some evidence of this. While touching an object does not guarantee that your fingerprint or DNA will be transferred to it, Gareth would have had to do a lot of maneuvering to get inside the bag.

He also had to do this on a hot summer day while the heat was on full blast, meaning he should have been sweating. That would only increase the chances that this stunt would have left forensic evidence. Technically, a couple small samples of DNA were found on the padlock, but they were eventually found to be contamination resulting from the investigation rather than actual evidence.

It was highly suspicious, but it wasn’t conclusive. As unlikely as it may seem that someone could lower themselves into the bag, contort their way inside, and close the padlock without leaving DNA or sweaty footprints on the bathtub, the lack of forensics meant there was a lack of definitive proof of another person’s involvement. Dr.

Wilcox made the inference that someone must have cleaned up the crime scene, while the police believed that, since there was no evidence of another person, there must not have been another person there. You know, because if a body is found to have bled out from what looks like a stab wound but there’s no knife next to the body, well then they obviously couldn’t have been stabbed with a knife now could they.

Of course, at this point we should probably mention that any information about the police investigation that’s been released to the public isn’t necessarily the most reliable. After much debate about how to handle the situation, the investigation was officially led by the Metropolitan Police Homicide and Serious Crime Command, but they weren’t the only ones involved. SO15, the police’s counter-terrorism organization, had an active role investigating within MI6, and they are known to have withheld information from the homicide detectives—which we’ll get back to.

But there was also serious pressure on the police from both British Secret Intelligence and the US State Department. Given the top secret nature of Gareth’s work, no details about what he did could be revealed at the inquest. This makes sense since it could be a matter of national security for both the UK and the US, but it does make analysis more difficult. The police didn’t have all the information to begin with, and much of what they knew wouldn’t have been revealed at the inquest or in public statements.

Anyway, let’s get back to the very minimal evidence found in Gareth’s apartment. Returning to his body, the coroner found no signs of injury. He hadn’t been stabbed and there were no defensive wounds found on his body. The interior of the bag also lacked defensive wounds, so to speak.

There was nothing to indicate that Gareth was struggling to free himself from the bag, and the few minor scratches inside the bag were believed to have been made from the padlock key rather than Gareth’s nails. If he had accidentally locked himself in the bag and was trying to escape, a lot more damage to the bag’s interior would have been expected. This would suggest that if he got into the bag intentionally, he wasn’t actually trying to get out—which doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It also doesn’t make sense that the door to Gareth’s apartment was locked from the outside. Admittedly, this detail is somewhat unclear. There are definitely certain locks that can only be done from the inside, but it’s not familiar that any traditional locks would only work from the outside rather than the inside. It’s a very important detail as it raises even more questions about how Gareth could have acted alone, and the reporting on this is extremely consistent.

Back to the body: a toxicology screen was done to see if perhaps Gareth had been drugged, but it was ruled inconclusive after coming back negative for everything they tested for. The accelerated decomposition was going to make all sorts of forensic analysis difficult, and there are substances that wouldn’t have shown up. For example, if Gareth had been drugged with either cyanide or chloroform, those would no longer be detectable.

And of course, it’s hard to test for poison if you don’t know what you’re looking for. There are a lot of different poisons out there, and you can’t test for everything. According to a forensic scientist from a different case, it’s standard to test for 50 common poisons and 50 rare ones. But that’s far from inclusive.

It’s hard to get any sort of definitive number, but conservatively there are thousands of different poisons and realistically it’s at least tens of thousands. Since we’re dealing with someone in secret intelligence, if poison is on the table as an option then we’re probably just looking at “countless” different options. With no clues as to what specifically to test for, the chances that a standard tox screen would find anything are effectively zero.

If there wasn’t physical evidence, what about digital evidence? There was a laptop and a couple of phones, and London is one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world. Recent estimates put the number of CCTV cameras in London at just shy of one million. Granted a reasonable percentage of those are privately owned cameras for businesses and the like, but it’s still an enormous number of cameras. Surely Gareth must have been caught on CCTV doing something, right?

Well yes, but not anything particularly interesting. Gareth returned to London from the US on August 11, and went shopping at Selfridges department store. The next day he went shopping at a couple more department stores as well as the supermarket. He briefly stopped by the office that day to drop off some documents, but that seems to be all he did there.

On Friday, August 13, Gareth went to work as normal, this time for a full day. That night he went to the Bistroteque to see drag queen Jonny Woo perform. Further investigation showed that Gareth occasionally went to see drag performances and had tickets for a couple more shows in the future.

Whatever Gareth had been looking for at those other department stores he must not have found it, because on Saturday he went to luxury department store Fortnum & Mason. Of course, all of these places have been described as department stores, but Fortnum & Mason seems to be best known as a high-end grocery store so maybe he was just buying food. As far as is known, the details of those purchases were never revealed, assuming he bought anything and wasn’t just browsing.

On Sunday, Gareth again went out shopping. This time he bought some cakes at Harrods and a couple grilled pepper steaks from Waitrose, one of which would be his dinner that night. He returned to his apartment at 3:05 pm that afternoon, which was the last time he was caught on any CCTV cameras. So basically in the week leading up to his death, Gareth went to the US for some combination of a work conference, a vacation, and maybe some spy stuff, then came home and engaged in a few days of retail therapy.

In the hours leading up to his death, Gareth backed up one of his phones to his computer. The other phone had been completely wiped. As for the SIM cards on the table, their contents don’t appear to have ever been publicly revealed. At around 11:00 pm he visited a cycling time trial website, which is the last indication that he did anything while alive.

Since the time of death could not be determined from the body itself, the digital trail led investigators to believe that Gareth was killed in the early morning hours of Monday, August 16.

Two days after his body was discovered, police made an official announcement that a GCHQ officer had been found dead in his apartment. The next day they identified him as Gareth Williams, and said they believed he may have been killed by a jealous lover. Where did that conclusion come from?

Nobody really knows. But immediately the media was full of speculation, rumors, and outright lies thanks to that statement, the fact that Gareth occasionally attended drag performances, and one other detail that the police decided to disclose: stored in a few boxes in the apartment’s spare bedroom was about $25,000 worth of designer women’s clothing.

This left news outlets with a dilemma. Their first option was to run with the story “Intelligence Officer Found Dead in MI6 Safe House Just 500 Yards from MI6 Office Demonstrates Possible Threat to National Security.” Examining the story from that angle, while accurate, would be scary. And sure, fear is definitely a way to move newspapers, but know what sells even better than fear? Sex.

Why focus on accurate reporting of a potentially serious issue when they could instead run with the headline, “Gay Transvestite MI6 Spy Killed by Jealous Lover, Police Say.” It’s true that the police said it may have been a jealous lover, but the rest was a total fabrication supported by even more fabrications.

According to the initial reporting, Gareth was a known member of the gay community who performed in drag, had an apartment full of bondage gear, and frequented male sex workers. It was suggested that his love of bondage also included claustrophilia, which as you might guess is the exact opposite of claustrophobia. Aside from potentially being straight-up murder from a jealous lover, it was theorized that Gareth’s death may have been a sex act gone wrong.

Almost all of these stories were based on rumors and stories from anonymous sources, which has led many intelligence experts to believe it was a coordinated effort to distract the public. And it definitely worked. These details were originally reported as facts and have been repeated so many times that it can make it difficult to find accurate information about the case. However, there is almost no actual evidence to support any of this.

To start, all of Gareth’s friends and family were convinced he was straight. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything because people lie about that all the time, but he and Ceri were extremely close. She was absolutely convinced that if he were gay he would have just told her. After all, this was 2010 not 1910, so to most people that’s not a big deal anymore.

Sian Lloyd-Jones, a primary school classmate with whom Gareth reconnected in 2006, was also sure that he was straight. The two had become close friends, and Sian said, “He cherished the time he had with his sister and with me, and he wanted that with other girls.” But he didn’t have that with other girls because, well, socially awkward guy who was rarely anywhere besides work or home alone. Or apparently department stores.

Like most people, I don’t particularly care whether or not Gareth was gay. And again, this was 2010, so GCHQ and MI6 wouldn’t have cared either. They might have wanted to know just to know, but it wouldn’t have disqualified him from any work or clearances.

It could have mattered to the NSA, but only if he went out of his way to tell them, since the US was still operating under “don’t ask, don’t tell” until 2011. However, the whole thing being a lie is relevant when in concert with the other more provable lies, as it gives credence to the idea that all of this false reporting was a deliberate distraction to keep people’s attention away from what really happened.

And speaking of more provable lies, there was absolutely no evidence that Gareth ever hired a sex worker, male or otherwise. Or that he was known in the gay community. Police wasted time chasing down that lead, but nobody they interviewed recognized him or remembered seeing him at any gay bars or events. While he did enjoy viewing the occasional drag show, there was also no evidence that he ever performed in one. Or that he ever wore women’s clothing.

So why then was his spare bedroom full of tens of thousands of dollars of women’s designer clothing? There are a couple possible answers for that. Sian believed that the clothes were intended as gifts. She commented how generous Gareth was, stating, “He bought me a high-end Balenciaga top, a Gucci bag, a Mulberry bag, an Armani fur. He did the same for his sister. I truly believe that Ceri and I were going to receive the clothing. We received so many things from him, that wouldn’t have been strange.”

If this was something he was known to do that would make sense, and maybe there was so much of it because the shopping was better in London than in Cheltenham so he was just stocking up on presents before he moved back in a couple weeks. But another possibility was that not only was Gareth transferring back to GCHQ, maybe he was thinking about quitting secret intelligence altogether.

Gareth enjoyed art and fashion, and he had even attended a 10-week fashion course at Central St. Martin’s College. His family and friends were unaware he had taken this course, which many have claimed is evidence he was lying about all sorts of aspects of his life. Any reason given as to why he never told Ceri or anyone else about this course would be purely speculation, but it showed he had a genuine interest in fashion as an art form.

And if the speculation from mental health experts that Gareth was autistic is correct, then having $25,000 of women’s clothing certainly tracks. The purchases seem to have been well within his means, and it’s the sort of behavior one might expect from someone with the kind of obsessive hyperfixation on an interest that is common among people with autism. Either would certainly make more sense than the claims being made in news outlets, especially since none of the women’s clothing found in his apartment had ever been worn.

In fact, most of the reporting indicates that the clothes wouldn’t even have fit him in the first place. A couple sources said they were his size, but that may have been a holdover from all the misinformation being spread. Although the presence of all these women’s clothes was noteworthy, there are multiple non-salacious explanations for why he had them that are completely plausible. There were a couple wigs amongst the clothes as well, but it’s believed these were intended for a costume party he was attending with a friend in October where he would be dressing as an anime character.

All in all, the clothes were likely a red herring. Sian felt that the police did Gareth a grave disservice by stating the clothes were there without mentioning that he also had about $12,000 of mountaineering equipment in his apartment from when he would go rock climbing with his father. Decisions like that from the police only made it easier for the media to put forth the narrative that Gareth was some secret degenerate whose only interests were cracking codes and other activities.

But what about the whole bondage angle? It would be hard to come up with such a mundane excuse for why there was so much bondage gear in his apartment, right? Well yes, that would be true, but luckily that doesn’t need explaining because that was just a lie. There wasn’t any bondage paraphernalia at all in Gareth’s apartment. Of course, like most lies, this was based on a kernel of truth.

An investigation into Gareth’s browser history revealed that he occasionally visited bondage websites. “Occasionally” isn’t ever properly defined, though he only ever spent 30-60 minutes looking at stuff. It’s also never fully explained exactly what types of websites they were. If they were instructional websites then sure, he might have had a passing interest or curiosity about bondage.

But if the sites were more pornographic in nature, that could have just meant that every few months he got tired of the glut of step-family offerings on traditional porn sites and decided he wanted to watch something different for a change. But that’s all getting back into speculation territory, especially since no other porn was found on his computer.

What isn’t speculation is that Dr. Wilcox was aware of the browser history during her inquest. Based on her interviews with experts, she concluded that Gareth’s visits to these sites were far too short and infrequent to suggest he had an active interest in bondage. She also dismissed the idea that getting into the bag was some sort of auto-erotic activity, like claustrophilia.

Dr. Wilcox had both an escapologist and yoga expert attempt to lock themselves in an identical holdall to the one Gareth was found in. After they each tried 300-400 times without success, she deemed that the act was impossible. The escapologist repeatedly was quoted as saying that “even Houdini would struggle” to lock himself inside that bag.

That’s not to say that he couldn’t have gotten himself into the bag; that part was actually pretty trivial. But actually zipping closed and padlocking the bag was deemed nigh impossible.

However, a week after Dr. Wilcox released her verdict, another expert came forward with one simple trick bag manufacturers don’t want you to know. Well, he was less of an expert as he was a 49-year-old military reservist, but he was aware of a trick that was commonly used by baggage thieves to reach into locked bags. By pinching the sides of the bag together, the extra slack given to the zipper creates an opening that can easily be reached through even when the two zippers are padlocked together.

The man was too large to fit into the bag himself, but his daughter was 5’5” which allowed her to demonstrate the technique. This was also roughly the same size as Gareth, though his exact height is unclear. Various reports list him as anywhere from 5’5” to 5’8”, but the extra three inches wasn’t going to make a difference in terms of maneuverability inside the bag. After a few minutes of struggling the daughter was successfully able to lock herself in the bag.

She repeated the demonstration so many times that she was eventually able to pull it off in under three minutes. This technique was even repeated by a journalist who was able to lock herself in the bag.

Of course, these demonstrations faced some amount of criticism. People argued that the two women who had demonstrated this were much smaller than Gareth, which isn’t really true. Getting into the bag required curling into the fetal position, hence a couple inches of height not mattering. And while Gareth was athletic and very fit, he was a cyclist not a power lifter; his body was rather slender, not dissimilar to the women that had shown this feat was possible.

However, the other more pertinent criticism was that in all of the successful demonstrations, the bag was placed on the floor in a room with no nearby obstructions. This was very different than being inside a bathtub, which it is argued would severely restrict just how much the person could move around. It doesn’t seem like there’d be a lot of movement once the person was already in the bag, but it did still require a surprising amount of maneuvering. Whether or not this would be possible inside a bathtub is unclear—there don’t appear to be any demonstrations with the bag inside a tub.

So it was theoretically possible for Gareth to lock himself in the bag, but how would he then lock his apartment door from the outside? There’s no good answer to that, but there is an easy alternative: somebody else could have had a key to the apartment. Follow-up interviews with neighbors revealed that, in late June or early July, a tenant on the ground floor had let in a Mediterranean-looking couple who appeared to be in their 20s or early 30s.

Police released an E-fit of the couple (essentially a police sketch but made with computers) but nothing seems to have come of this lead. Which is weird, because it’s more than a little suspicious. Gareth rarely had any visitors, but the couple told his neighbor that they were going to visit their friend who lived in the top-floor apartment and that they had their own key. They went upstairs and were never seen again by the neighbor.

Most interestingly, the name they gave for their friend was Pier Paolo rather than Gareth.

There is some speculation that Gareth had started taking a role as a field operative, an actual spy, rather than just doing codebreaking and other computer stuff. Since he was such a fan of fine art and the like, some people believe that Gareth took the name Pier Paolo after Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Personally, I don’t buy that at all. It’s my understanding that spies don’t get to pick their own names like that, and even if they do they wouldn’t be allowed to pick something so obvious.

It would be almost as bad as James Bond masquerading under the name Hercules Rockefeller or Rembrandt Q. Einstein.

What’s stranger than this whole situation is that it seems to have died off completely. Perhaps it was just another piece of misinformation that was being planted to throw detectives off the scent of the real culprit, but most coverage of the case never even mentions this detail. Everyone talks about his former landlord’s claim that she once found him calling for help from his bed wearing nothing but his boxers after having tied himself to the bed and being unable to escape, but this couple are never brought up at all.

As for the landlord’s story, it’s unclear what to make of it. She claimed that she believed the act was sexual in nature rather than being an attempt at escapology, but it’s not clear she’s qualified to make that assessment. There’s also some question about how much credibility to give this statement. She said that Gareth was the perfect tenant who never made a sound, and she was happy to rent to him again when he called after requesting his transfer back to GCHQ.

Since this was allegedly an isolated incident in his eight years renting from her, it’d be understandable to let it slide, but something about the story feels off. It fits the narrative the police settled on a little too well for comfort, since nothing else does.

The only other major piece of evidence was something that the police didn’t even know existed until the last day of the hearing. Inside Gareth’s locker at work had been discovered nine memory sticks belonging to Gareth. For anyone unaware, that’s a huge deal. You can’t just walk into a secret intelligence building with a flash drive and stick it into a computer.

Not only are they strictly forbidden, but they have advanced screening technologies to detect the presence of such devices. Dogs can be trained to sniff out electronic devices with shocking levels of accuracy.

Either Gareth somehow managed to sneak all those memory sticks into MI6 and then foolishly left them in his locker where they could be discovered instead of taking them home, or he had been granted special permission to have them. We don’t know which is the case because we have no idea what was on them. The police didn’t even know they existed until their hearing was basically over, and it wasn’t specifically brought to their attention by their SO15 liaisons.

The only reason the police found out the flash drives existed were because they were listed on an inventory of electronics presented on the last day of the hearing. This all highlights another major issue with this case.

There has been intense criticism of the Metropolitan Police and what is seen as their bungling of the case. Because of the sensitive nature of Gareth’s work, homicide detectives weren’t actually allowed direct access to a lot of the witnesses, evidence, or experts. Instead, SO15 acted as a go-between for detectives and intelligence officers.

SO15 asked the questions detectives wanted asked on their behalf, then provided detectives with anonymous notes of whatever was deemed pertinent information. There were no transcripts or anything nearly that helpful, and the homicide investigators didn’t have direct access to a lot of the evidence. There are even claims that a high-ranking police officer was intentionally sabotaging the investigation.

That’s all the evidence that we have access to, and it certainly leaves a bit to be desired. But hey, that’s why cases like this generate so many wild theories. And it’s high time we jump right into those theories.

Theory #1: Suicide

This is going to be a quick one, because this theory doesn’t seem particularly serious. It appears to be a misunderstanding of the details of the case and the conclusion of the police more than anything else. Even though police believed that Gareth got into the bag of his own accord, they also believed that his death was accidental. There is nothing to suggest that Gareth wanted to end his own life, and plenty to suggest that he didn’t.

It was just two weeks before Gareth was leaving the job he wasn’t in love with to go back to the one he enjoyed much more. He had made arrangements for his move, and by all accounts fully intended to go through with it. There were even the tickets he had purchased for upcoming drag shows, indicating he planned to be around at least long enough to go see those.

Of course, that last one doesn’t necessarily mean anything—plenty of people who plan to end their lives make future plans as a way of masking their intentions. But that doesn’t seem to have been Gareth’s motivation. He also had the upcoming costume party with his friend.

There doesn’t appear to be anything indicating that Gareth may have been depressed or wanting to end his life, and the theory seems to stem from a misunderstanding. After all, locking yourself inside a duffel bag certainly seems like it would end in death, so if the police believed that the action was intentional then what else could have been the motivation?

Theory #2: Gareth Got in the Bag Willingly. Because Reasons.

There are two variations to this theory. The first is that Gareth did this while acting alone, the other is that there was somebody else involved.

With regards to the first theory, we know it’s possible for Gareth to have gotten into the bag himself. He would definitely fit, and it was possible to get in and probably zip the bag shut. As for padlocking it shut, that’s a different story entirely. It’s not impossible, since we know it can be done when the bag is unrestricted, but whether or not it could be locked while in the confines of the bathtub is thus far inconclusive.

But let’s assume it was possible. This was the police’s theory, because there was no evidence of a struggle or of another person having been there. That’s all well and good, but there wasn’t really evidence of Gareth having been in the bathroom either. It’s hard to ignore the lack of any prints or DNA on the bag or bathtub, as it was demonstrated to be impossible to get into the bag without needing to place feet or hands all over the tub at some point. And obviously onto the lock and the zipper and such as well.

It also leaves the questions of how the door was locked from the outside and why the heat was turned up. If we were to suppose this was some sort of sexual act rather than an attempt at escapology, it raises additional questions. For the heat to make sense, Gareth would have likely needed to be into both claustrophilia and autoerotic asphyxiation. If that were the case then maybe the stifling heat making it difficult to breathe could make it more arousing, but this is really stretching the bounds of believability at that point.

Of course, this obviously would have been a dangerous thing for somebody to do on their own, and what exactly would Gareth’s escape plan have been? Although demonstrations showed it was possible to lock a bag from the inside, nobody then let themselves out. There was always another person with the key that released them. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but the risk is exceptionally high.

Having seen the manner in which these locks were closed from the inside, it seems likely that it would be impossible to unlock the bag while inside it. At the very least it would be extremely difficult.

Attempting this while taking nothing into the bag with himself besides the key doesn’t make any sense. Ceri said that Gareth was meticulous about assessing risk, and other intelligence operatives agreed that there was no way Gareth would ever do something like this without bringing a knife or something to cut himself free if it went wrong. Doing it in the bathtub also doesn’t particularly make sense, as it would add another needless impediment to his already restricted movement.

And look, we have all done really stupid and sometimes risky things that we otherwise wouldn’t have when we got horny. But there are limits to that.

So what if there was another person involved? Could this have been a consensual sex act gone wrong? That’s certainly a theory, but that makes less sense than it being a solo sexual act. At what point would the other person involved realize that the key was in the bag with Gareth rather than with them, and why wouldn’t they get a knife or something to cut him out? You would also expect there to be extensive damage to the bag from Gareth struggling to break free.

It also seems strange that another person would be involved and just leave, locking the door behind them. While calling the police would obviously result in an extremely uncomfortable interview, it seems much better than running away and hoping nobody ever caught them. If the other person involved happened to know that Gareth worked in secret intelligence, trying to flee the scene seems even more risky.

There’s also one other piece of evidence found that likely destroys any narrative about this being a sex act gone wrong, with or without another person involved. There was a bit of semen found on the bathroom floor that matched Gareth’s DNA and which was determined to have been deposited there shortly before his death. No specific time frame is given besides just “shortly,” but that seems to have been interpreted as being so close to his death that he wouldn’t have been ready to go again yet.

But if putting himself in the bag was a sexual act, then this doesn’t make any sense. If the act of being confined was arousing to Gareth, you would expect to find semen in the bag, not outside of it. Or if it was found outside, that would logically be drippage after having escaped. If he had already gotten off, there wouldn’t have been a reason to get inside the bag afterwards as some sort of kink.

Gareth locking himself in the bag alone is what the Metropolitan Police officially believe definitely happened, but that conclusion is difficult to accept. Though homicide detectives are used to dealing with sloppier crimes of passion with lots of evidence, the fact that there was a suspicious lack of evidence in the death of an MI6 officer should probably have rung alarm bells. It’s especially bizarre that initially they wanted to tie it to a jealous lover, publicly stating that they did not believe Gareth’s work in secret intelligence was related to his death.

Whatever you say, boys. But that brings us to the final theories.

Theory #3: It Was Murder

Once again, we have multiple variations of this theory. The first is that it was indeed a jealous lover, the second is that he was killed by MI6, and the third is that he was killed by a foreign spy.

The idea that Gareth was killed by a jealous lover doesn’t seem to have much basis in reality. As far as can be determined, this theory is only popular because it was part of the initial statement from the police and because enough people find sex scandals more exciting than international espionage.

Of course, there should be an obvious problem with this theory thanks to Gareth’s social awkwardness. Having a jealous lover typically requires having multiple lovers at the same time. Based on available research, it’s not fully convincing that he even had one. Ever. There’s nothing anywhere about Gareth having any sort of sexual history. Sian said that he wanted a girlfriend, but there’s no indication anyway that he ever had one. Or a boyfriend, for that matter.

Don’t get me wrong. Gareth was a young, successful guy in great shape, and by all accounts was a really kind and generous person. But his accelerated education disrupted his social development, and then it was straight to working very long days for secret intelligence. And as noted before, he almost never had any visitors at his apartments.

Unless it was a lover that was jealous about how much time he spent at work, the idea he could have been juggling partners doesn’t make a lot of sense. Ceri doesn’t appear to have mentioned him ever dating anybody either, and she likely would have been quite vocal about that to help dispel the gay crossdressing rumors.

Besides, if it was a jealous lover then this would have been the type of crime of passion that Scotland Yard was more familiar with. There would have been stab wounds and blood everywhere. For a jealous lover to sedate Gareth and lock him in a bag as a form of murder, the person would have to possess such an incredible level of psychopathy that it might actually qualify as a superpower. The whole thing doesn’t fit your typical jealous lover scenario, and it’s unlikely he would have ever been in such a situation anyway.

So what about the idea that Gareth was killed by MI6? That may seem like a wild theory since nothing said so far really points to that being a logical possibility. Well, almost nothing, but it’s still pretty out there. There’s only two pieces of evidence that point to MI6 having been involved in Gareth’s death.

The first is the flash drives found in his locker that were hidden from the police. It’s speculated that Gareth may have been accessing the MI6 servers to perform illegal searches for a friend, the results of which were on the memory sticks. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense though.

As already noted, it would be beyond difficult to bring unauthorized electronics into the office and incredibly stupid to leave them in his locker instead of taking them home. Realistically, their presence and contents weren’t shared with homicide detectives because it was a bunch of classified material that it was decided they didn’t need to know.

But the more concerning piece of evidence is that Gareth’s absence from work didn’t prompt any action on the part of MI6. He’s been described as being meticulous, hardworking, running like clockwork, and so on. An unexpected absence from work should have been highly suspicious.

Beyond that, he was scheduled to take part in two office meetings during the week he was decomposing in the bathtub. Even if someone wanted to argue that it was a busy office with lots of people and it was possible for nobody to notice the quiet, mostly solitary Gareth wasn’t at his desk, failing to show up for the meetings should have been impossible to miss.

While I don’t personally think MI6 was involved in his death, that one detail does really bother me. I can’t figure out a good explanation for it either. I don’t really believe that secret intelligence organizations would have a laissez-faire attitude towards attendance, nor that they would fail to take the disappearance of someone with access to lots of highly sensitive projects seriously. But I guess that’s the world we’re living in.

That just leaves the final option, and by far the most plausible in my opinion. Gareth was murdered by a foreign spy. Based on all the details we’ve gone over, I find it impossible to believe this was anything but murder. Specifically, murder by a professional. Whoever killed Gareth must have had enough knowledge of forensics to eliminate any evidence showing that another person was in the apartment.

The placement of the bag in the bathtub to reduce odor and turning up the heat to accelerate decomposition also point to someone that really knew what they were doing. Surely these were done to hinder the investigation by providing the maximum time possible for Gareth’s body (and any potential evidence contained within) to decompose as much as possible.

Even though we don’t know a lot of specifics, we know that Gareth was a codebreaker and did work involving cybersecurity, protecting London’s banks from international money launderers and such. Colleagues may not have given details about his work, but they did say he worked on a lot of top secret projects, any one of which could have resulted in someone wanting to kill him. Employees may generally be seen as replaceable, but since Gareth was exceptionally talented and only 31 at the time of his death, he posed a very real threat of being a major pain in the ass to adversarial intelligence agencies for decades to come. Whoever would take his place if he were eliminated may not have been as skilled, and sometimes it’s just about sending a message anyway.

But there’s also the chance it was something much more specific than that. According to Boris Karpichkov, a former KGB spy living in the UK under witness protection after defecting, it was the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) that killed Gareth. And in case there’s any doubt that Boris is the real deal, he is currently engaged in a lawsuit against Britain’s National Crime Agency for revealing his new, secret identity while responding to an extradition request from Latvia. Boris is definitely a former KGB spy, and thanks to this data breach he may be in serious danger.

According to Boris’s sources in Russia, Gareth was killed by the SVR after they failed to turn him into a double agent. The SVR tried blackmailing Gareth into working for them, but it didn’t work. It’s possible that it could have ended there, but Gareth may have overplayed his hand. Boris’s sources claimed that Gareth responded to SVR’s threats by saying he knew the identity of a double agent working at GCHQ.

He may have thought that gave him leverage to get them off his back, but all it would have done was put an even bigger target on his back. Allegedly the SVR killed Gareth “by an untraceable poison introduced in his ear.”

But killing a British intelligence officer on British soil would surely be a dangerous game. Are we to believe Russia would have actually done something so bold? Of course they would, and allegedly they did so at least 14 other times in a span of 10 years.

Alexander Litvinenko was a former member of the Russian Federal Security Service who fled to London in 2000. On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko met with two former Russian agents in London. Later that day he was admitted to the hospital after having been poisoned with the extremely rare radioactive substance polonium-210. He died of radiation poisoning within a few weeks.

Matthew Puncher was a radiation scientist who worked on the case, calculating the amount of polonium inside Litvinenko’s body. In 2016 he was found dead in his home in Oxfordshire, having suffered numerous stab wounds from two different kitchen knives. There was no evidence of a struggle or anyone else in the home, so police ruled that he had used two knives to repeatedly stab himself. This death also happened shortly after Puncher took a work trip to Russia.

Alexander Perepilichny was a Russian businessman and whistleblower who tried to reveal massive corruption from the Kremlin before fleeing to London. On November 10, 2012, Perepilichny suddenly collapsed and died while going for a jog through his gated community of St. George’s Hill. He was only 44 years old with no health issues. Tests from one of his life insurance companies found traces of a Chinese plant Gelsemium elegans in his stomach. This plant is also known as “heartbreak grass,” because it triggers cardiac arrest when ingested. Despite this, Surrey Police maintained that no toxins were ever found in Perepilichny.

Then there was Boris Berezovsky, a Russian billionaire oligarch and politician who sought asylum in the UK following Vladimir Putin’s victory in the 2000 election. Berezovsky funded international opposition to Putin, and was found hanging dead in his home in Berkshire in 2013. He was also a close friend of Litvinenko. So in short, yes—the SVR would absolutely kill people on British soil, including British-born citizens.

In fact they seemed to be big fans of doing so, especially since the police refused to rule any of the insanely suspicious deaths as murders.

All that said, it’s difficult to speak to the veracity of Boris’s specific claim about why Gareth was killed. It makes sense and on the balance of probability it’s certainly inclined to be believed, but there isn’t any specific proof. Of course if there was, then the killer wouldn’t be very good at their job.

Wrap Up

It’s been 14 years since Gareth’s death, and while the answer seems obvious it officially remains an open mystery. However, anyone who followed this story may have noticed that there was a recent development. In early 2024, British newspapers began running headlines saying that the death of Gareth Williams was finally solved.

But those were publications like The Sun. More reputable newspapers correctly reported that the police’s reexamination of the case had concluded, and that the police found no new evidence in the mysterious death. As such, they chose to stick to their official story that Gareth was alone in his apartment when he died.

I’m guessing you don’t believe that any more than I do. To write about this case taking the stance that Gareth really was alone when he died would be a monumental challenge requiring leaving out every key detail. Besides, this happened just one year after David Carradine’s death by autoerotic asphyxiation made international headlines; anyone interested in such acts of autoerotic adventure would undoubtedly have taken heed of the cautionary tale.

That said, even if we agree it was murder, who was responsible still remains a mystery. While Boris certainly seems like a credible source, and there are plenty of contemporary examples of what appear to be Russian assassinations on British soil, we can’t prove it’s true. Since Boris is a known defector, it’s possible he was being fed false information. After all, it’s not like Gareth would have had any shortage of enemies based on the work he was doing.

In the end, we’ll probably never know with absolute certainty the full story behind Gareth’s death. But it was definitely murder.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Gareth Williams?

Gareth Williams was a British codebreaker and intelligence officer who worked for MI6 and GCHQ. He was known for his exceptional skills in mathematics and computers, and was described as a meticulous and hardworking individual.

What was Gareth Williams’ role in MI6?

Gareth Williams was seconded to MI6 from GCHQ to work on various top-secret projects. His exact role is not specified, but he was involved in cybersecurity and protecting London’s banks from international money launderers.

How was Gareth Williams found?

Gareth Williams was found dead in a padlocked holdall inside the bathtub of his MI6-owned safe house in London. His body was in an advanced state of decomposition, and there were no signs of a struggle or evidence of another person’s involvement.

What was the official police conclusion regarding Gareth Williams’ death?

The Metropolitan Police concluded that Gareth Williams died accidentally after locking himself in the holdall by mistake. They believed he was alone in the apartment at the time of his death.

What was the coroner’s verdict on Gareth Williams’ death?

The coroner, Dr. Fiona Wilcox, returned a narrative verdict stating that Gareth Williams’ death was ‘unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated.’ She was satisfied that he was killed unlawfully.

What theories exist about Gareth Williams’ death?

Several theories exist, including suicide, a consensual sex act gone wrong, murder by a jealous lover, murder by MI6, and murder by a foreign spy. The most plausible theory, according to the article, is that he was murdered by a foreign spy.

What evidence supports the theory that Gareth Williams was murdered by a foreign spy?

The placement of the body in the bathtub to reduce odor, turning up the heat to accelerate decomposition, and the lack of forensic evidence all point to a professional killer. Additionally, Gareth’s work in cybersecurity and protecting London’s banks made him a target for adversarial intelligence agencies.

What was the significance of the flash drives found in Gareth Williams’ locker?

The flash drives found in Gareth Williams’ locker were a significant piece of evidence. It is speculated that he may have been accessing MI6 servers to perform illegal searches for a friend, but the contents of the drives were never revealed to the police.

What was the role of SO15 in the investigation of Gareth Williams’ death?

SO15, the police’s counter-terrorism organization, had an active role in the investigation within MI6. They acted as a go-between for homicide detectives and intelligence officers, providing anonymous notes of pertinent information but withholding transcripts and direct access to evidence.

What was the media’s initial reaction to Gareth Williams’ death?

The media initially speculated that Gareth Williams was a gay transvestite who was killed by a jealous lover. This narrative was based on rumors and anonymous sources, and was later debunked as a deliberate distraction to keep the public’s attention away from the real circumstances of his death.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Spy in the Bag
• Hero image source by Dillan Payne / openverse, by-sa.