The second episode traces the movements of Dr Kelly in the days before he died.
The second episode traces the movements of Dr Kelly in the days before he died.
SAM - The mysterious death of Dr David Kelly, a British government scientist and weapons inspector, is an event that lives on in the national consciousness.
IN MARCH 2003 BRITISH FORCES INVADED IRAQ AFTER TONY BLAIR SAID THE COUNTRY COULD DEPLOY WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION AT 45 MINUTES’ NOTICE.
IN JULY 2003 DR KELLY WAS UNMASKED AS THE ASSUMED SOURCE OF A BBC NEWS REPORT CHALENING THIS CLAIM. WITHIN DAYS, DR KELLY WAS FOUND DEAD IN A WOOD NEAR HIS HOME. BLAIR IMMEDIATELY CONVENED THE HUTTON INQUIRY, WHICH CONCLUDED DR KELLY COMMITTED SUICIDE.
YET KEY QUESTIONS REMAIN. COULD DR KELLY REALLY HAVE TAKEN HIS LIFE IN THE MANNER OFFICIALLY FOUND? AND WHY DID BLAIR’S GOVERNMENT DERAIL THE CORONER’S INQUEST INTO DR KELLY’S DEATH?
Journalist Miles Goslett has spent years researching and writing about this case, work that resulted in a book that draws together its various complex strands. In this series Miles joins me to go through the official version of events and to reveal the facts that he and many others have worked tirelessly to unearth that call into question everything the establishment would like you to believe happened in this case.
The podcast, like Miles' book, is called An Inconvenient Death.
EPISODE 2
SAM - So Miles we rejoin the story on the 9th of July 2003 just over a week before Dr. Kelly’s body was found. At this point the government, or at least Alistair Campbell, was after the BBC for running a story about false intelligence that had been used to take Britain into war against Iraq. And Dr Kelly was now about to be publicly outed, by the government, as the supposed source of the story. And is it right that, as the official version has it, Kelly was called by the MoD that evening to say ‘leave your house as you’re about to be swamped by journalists’?
MILES - That’s right. The Kellys then apparently got into their car and headed for the motorway. They are said to have broken the journey that night in a hotel in the Somerset seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare, about 85 miles away, and the next morning, Thursday 10 July, continued driving south, arriving in the Cornish village of Mevagissey at about midday.
SAM – So the Kellys are said to have left their home in Oxfordshire together and headed to Cornwall... and over these next few days Dr Kelly's name became headline news.
MILES – It certainly did. I suppose you could say his name became public property.
SAM – And the official account has it that they had fled their house quickly, in the space of a few minutes.
MILES - Yes. Dr Kelly and his wife then passed the weekend quietly in Cornwall, where they dealt with the fallout from Dr Kelly having been named by the MoD as Gilligan’s source. This included Dr Kelly being rung by his boss at the Ministry of Defense and told that the following week he would be required to go to Westminster to give evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), which was still conducting its inquiry into Britain’s invasion of Iraq. He would also be required to appear before the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC).
SAM – Was he due to appear at these hearings anyway or was it because of this scandal he'd found himself involved with?
MILES – No he wasn’t due to appear anyway. It was Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, who ultimately decided these appearances must take place, even though senior Ministry of Defence staff opposed the idea.
Dr Kelly was told that the FAC inquiry would be televised and apparently this upset him a great deal while he was in Cornwall. But he had no choice. He had to co-operate.
The Kellys agreed it would be best if Dr Kelly returned to Oxfordshire to stay with his daughter Rachel, who lived in Oxford, and he used her house as a secret base to dodge reporters. So on Sunday the 12th of July Dr Kelly made the 6 hour drive back to Oxford alone.
SAM – So just to elaborate a little on this crucial period of time. It’s, starting from the evening of wednesday the 9th of July when Dr Kelly was told he was going to be named as Andrew Gilligan’s source, its this period that has been held up by the establishment shall we say, as the time during which Dr Kelly became so desperate that just over a week later he took his own life. But you disagree with this Miles.
MILES – That’s right. As far as I’m concerned, it’s from the 9th of July that two different accounts emerge. There’s the official account, which as you say was pushed by the Establishment after Dr Kelly’s death, and there’s the unofficial account, which I and others who have looked at this case in detail, have found. And the two accounts are quite distinct. And by the way when we talk about the Establishment, we mean everyone from Tony Blair down. So that’s senior members of the judiciary, senior politicians, the intelligence services and the police.
SAM –So are you really suggesting that all of these important and powerful people and institutions somehow worked together on this?
MILES - What I believe is either wittingly or unwittingly different elements have in different ways concealed the truth about Dr Kelly’s death, whether through ensuring a certain line of enquiry was pursued or was not pursued or whether by following an order or by bending the law. This cover up didnt have to rely on dozens of people in authority acting in concert, it’s more subtle than that as I hope to demonstrate.
SAM - So tell me how you can back up your scepticism?
MILES – Well, we will come to this in more depth later, but it is very important that people keep in their minds this sense of there being a split narrative. Let’s take, for example, Dr Kelly and his wife supposedly fleeing their house on the evening of the 9th of July and heading for the West Country. It sounded very dramatic and it did indeed fit in very neatly with this sense of Dr Kelly being in retreat, both physically and mentally, but I have spoken to some people who told me they were in fact with Dr Kelly on the night of the 9th of July in one of his local pubs in Oxfordshire. And more to the point, they – and the landlord of this pub – told police about this immediately after his death when they were interviewed. Now, contradictions like this blow a hole in the official version of events, I think. As I say, we will look at this more closely later on, but I just want people to be aware that this case is mired in mystery. Seemingly innocuous details unravel when you pull certain threads. And since we are talking about a sudden and unexpected death, it’s impossible to ignore this sort of thing.
SAM – OK, we’ll return to the witnesses in the pub later but for now let’s carry on with the official story so that we have it as a platform to work off. So Dr Kelly returned from Cornwall and stayed with his daughter in Oxford before he appeared at the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in London on July the 15th. Miles, what can you tell us about his appearance at the hearing?
MILES – Well, the conditions were pretty tough. The 15th of July 2003 was a boiling hot day in London. Dr Kelly had to give evidence in public in this overheated committee room in the Houses of Parliament. It was televised so was more like a show trial really. There were rows of reporters and members of the public there, plus of course the group of 11 MPs who had been instructed by the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon to interrogate Dr Kelly.
SAM – It was claimed afterwards that this committee hearing was the major event which perhaps tipped Dr Kelly over the edge and led directly to his death, I know you’ve watched the entire thing - is that plausible?
MILES – Well I think he did pretty well under the circumstances. He was asked a lot of questions in less than an hour and he handled himself very professionally. He was quite relaxed, he spoke fluently and steadily.
This committee hearing is remembered for one short piece of what I’d call parliamentary pantomime provided by a MP Andrew Mackinlay, in which he appeared to speak to Dr Kelly quite aggressively. This brief exchange came about five minutes before the end of the 51-minute session, went as follows:
ARCHIVE
Andrew Mackinlay: I reckon you are chaff; you have been thrown up to divert our probing. Have you ever felt like a fall-guy? You have been set up, have you not?
SAM - I remember this being one of the key clips from the hearing that was played on news programmes at the time. To the untrained eye it probably looked like Mackinlay was attacking Dr Kelly. But actually Miles you’ve talked to Mackinlay and you can tell us that the exact opposite is the case.
MILES - It is true that Mackinlay can at times appear abrupt, but yes I have spoken to him about this and it’s just that the phrase he used was not clear enough for people to understand what he meant I am certain that in a professional sense he cared greatly about what was going on at the time, and was keen to help Dr Kelly out of the hole into which he thought he had been discarded by the Ministry of Defence and the government. Mackinlay was trying to sympathise with Dr Kelly by telling him that he believed he had been served up to the FAC on a plate by the government and/or the Ministry of Defence as a diversion, to prevent them from reaching the truth. Because Mackinlay thought – and still believes – that Dr Kelly was being used to prevent the FAC from confirming the identity of Gilligan’s principal source - who Mackinlay did not believe Dr Kelly to be. By the way - Mackinlay later felt such remorse over the way his words were interpreted that, after Dr Kelly’s death, he apologised publicly. But understandably Dr Kelly saw things differently at the time.
SAM – Wasn’t there a trickier moment earlier on, when Dr Kelly was questioned about his contact not with Gilligan, but with another BBC journalist called Susan Watts, who was at that time the science correspondent of the BBC2 programme Newsnight.
MILES – Yes, having established that Dr Kelly had only ever met Watts once, in November 2002, a long quote, attributed to Dr Kelly, was put to him by a committee member called David Chidgey, who was a Liberal Democrat MP. Chidgey claimed that these words were taken from notes made by Watts during or after their meeting:
SAM - SO HERE IS THE QUOTE THAT WAS READ OUT AT THE HEARING...
“In the run-up to the dossier the Government was obsessed with finding intelligence to justify an immediate Iraqi threat. While we were agreed on the potential Iraqi threat in the future there was less agreement about the threat the Iraqis posed at the moment. That was the real concern, not so much what they had now but what they would have in the future, but that unfortunately was not expressed strongly in the dossier because that takes the case away for war to a certain extent…The 45 minutes was a statement that was made and it got out of all proportion. They were desperate for information. They were pushing hard for information that could be released. That was one that popped up and it was seized on and it is unfortunate that it was. That is why there is an argument between the intelligence services and Number 10, because they had picked up on it and once they had picked up on it you cannot pull back from it, so many people will say 'Well, we are not sure about that' because the wordsmithing is actually quite important.”
MILES – Chidgey asked Dr Kelly if he agreed with these comments. As Dr Kelly believed that he had said nothing of the sort to Watts during their only meeting the previous November, he denied having said those words QUOTE “on that occasion”. He said he did not recognise the words.
SAM – And then didn’t a Tory MP called Richard Ottaway step in?
MILES - Yes Ottaway did indeed step in, he pursued the same line of questioning and read the same quote from Watts’s notes, asking Dr Kelly if they were his words, to which Dr Kelly replied: “It does not sound like my expression of words. It does not sound like a quote from me.” So he again denied it.
SAM - Why were these two MPs suddenly so interested in what Dr Kelly had – or hadn’t – said to Susan Watts? Her name had never been mentioned in relation to Dr Kelly before, yet these politicians appeared to have done a considerable amount of research into her recent BBC broadcasts.
MILES - The answer is that Andrew Gilligan sent this information to Chidgey. Gilligan did so, apparently, having studied one of Watts’s Newsnight reports from June 2003 and allegedly guessed that Dr Kelly had spoken to her.
SAM – Why did Gilligan do this?
MILES – Well it was certainly extremely unhelpful to Dr Kelly. Gilligan had previously been only too happy to use as a source. Dr Kelly’s contact with Watts had never been of concern to anybody up until then. I wonder if this was an attempt by Gilligan to take some of the heat off himself by showing that he wasn’t the only BBC journalist who had spoken to Dr Kelly in recent weeks. Whatever the reason, it gave no thought to the position it might put Dr Kelly in.
SAM - Technically, Dr Kelly was telling the truth to the committee about Watts, wasn’t he, because he hadn’t said these things to her when they met.
MILES – Yes, and yet it could be argued that he had been economical with the truth because it subsequently came to light that he had made those comments to Watts, but he had done so during a telephone conversation in June 2003 – the month before he died. Unbeknown to him, Watts had recorded this conversation. But it is significant to say Dr Kelly died before his contact with Watts was known publicly.
SAM – OK so, as the hearing ended, and even though it obviously hadn’t been a particularly pleasant experience for Dr Kelly, did it seem to have taken a heavy toll on him? Enough to drive him to suicide a few days later?
MILES - Well, Dr Kelly returned to Oxford after the hearing and rang his half-sister, Sarah . He told her that he had been “overwhelmed” by the number of friends and colleagues who had rung him to offer their support. He also mentioned that an offer of setting up a financial fund had been made, should one be required in the event of legal action being taken against him by the Ministry of Defence. Ms Pape, a plastic surgeon, later remembered:
“It really 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… 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.”
SAM – So Dr Kelly had appeared at the hearing to determine if he was in fact Gilligan’s primary source of the claims that the government had fabricated intelligence to inflate the threat posed by Iraq. What was the conclusion after his appearance?
MILES - Straight after the hearing, the FAC committee chairman Donald Anderson wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, saying that the committee’s view was that it was QUOTE “most unlikely that Dr Kelly was Andrew Gilligan’s prime source”. He also said the committee believed Dr Kelly had been “poorly treated by the government” since admitting two weeks earlier to having met Gilligan.
SAM - Just explain what the relevance of this, Miles?
MILES - I think this term ‘PRIME SOURCE’ is of the highest relevance. Remember how this story started, with the head of MI6 Richard Dearlove telling two senior BBC journalists that Iraq wasn’t considered a major threat. I think it is eminently possible that Dr Kelly was merely a second or confirmatory source who backed this idea up. But like the FAC committee that day, I don’t think Dr Kelly was the prime source. He clearly wasn’t the only person who was sceptical about why the British government had invaded Iraq.
SAM - On Wednesday 16 July Dr Kelly appeared at another select committee hearing, this time it was the Intelligence and Security Committee. It lasted less than an hour. Although it was held in private it is known that Dr Kelly was accompanied by his boss at the Ministry of defence, Bryan Wells, and another colleague, Wing Commander John Clark. Wells said later that Dr Kelly seemed more comfortable than during his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee and was in good spirits afterwards, even going so far as to discuss when he would return to Iraq. A tentative date of 25 July was agreed on, which apparently cheered Dr Kelly up. So Miles, Dr Kelly had been dragged through these two hearings, what happened next?
MILES – Well that afternoon Dr Kelly returned to Oxford. His daughter Rachel, to whom he was very close and who was about to get married, met him at the station. Although he was anxious to return home so he could do some work, Rachel persuaded her father to stay for supper and Dr Kelly’s wife, Janice, then arrived by train from Cornwall. Rachel, plus her parents and fiancé David, then ate supper together during which Dr Kelly was, according to Rachel, quiet but cheerful and looking forward to going home.
Dr Kelly and his wife left at 10pm but before doing so Dr Kelly arranged with Rachel that they would meet the following evening, Thursday 17 July, to walk down to a field near his house to look at a foal together, something they had done several times since its birth in May. Rachel was working the next day, and no set time was agreed upon for their walk.
SAM - The next morning was Thursday 17 July. Miles, this is the day on which Dr Kelly would go missing and was never seen alive again, so it is obviously a key moment in this story. What is known about his behaviour that day?
MILES – Well, from what we know – and by the way this comes from various sources including his wife, Janice - it was a fairly normal day. The Kellys woke up at home at 8.30am and Dr Kelly was in his study working by 9am. Colleagues from the MoD sent him some parliamentary questions tabled by a Conservative MP relating to his recent conduct. He was asked to help answer them and agreed to do so. At about 10am Dr Kelly’s colleague Wing Commander Clark rang him. He later said he sounded tired but in good spirits. I think it’s significant that Dr Kelly confided in Clark when they spoke that Janice Kelly had taken recent events badly and had been very upset that morning. But he and Clark then talked about his imminent return to the Middle East. And Clark booked a return plane ticket to Iraq for Dr Kelly, scheduled for eight days later, on 25 July. So he was certainly making future plans. Afterwards, Dr Kelly sent eight short emails to friends and professional contacts. He had typed these messages earlier but records show they left his email account simultaneously at 11.18am.
SAM – And do you know what was contained in these emails?
MILES - Six of the messages spoke of his expectation of flying to Baghdad on 25 July. The seventh email, to a Philippe Michel, did not mention Baghdad but was also positive in that Dr Kelly wrote: “I know that I have a lot of good friends who are providing support at a difficult time.”
The eighth email was in reply to Judith Miller, a reporter on The New York Times whom he had known for several years. She had written to him the previous day offering kind words over the political spat in which he had been caught and to congratulate him on his very smooth performance in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee. In view of the fact that his body was found on Harrowdown Hill less than 24 hours later, Dr Kelly’s response was darkly ominous. He wrote: “Judy, I will wait until the end of the week before judging – many dark actors playing games. Thanks for your support. I appreciate your friendship at this time. Best, David.”
SAM - Mrs Kelly has said her husband was in a low mood, which distressed her. What sort of state do you think she was in?
MILES – Not good. She has said she was suddenly struck by a headache and nausea, and vomited, but surprisingly, within a few minutes she made her husband some sandwiches for lunch. He ate – apparently in silence - as she sat with him at the kitchen table.
SAM – Is Mrs Kelly a well person generally?
MILES – Well she suffers from chronic arthritis, unfortunately, and has done for some time. At about 1.30pm, after he had eaten, Mrs Kelly went upstairs to lie down – something she did often. Dr Kelly apparently returned to his study for a while and then he went upstairs to check on her. He also changed into a pair of jeans in preparation for a walk.
SAM – What time did he leave for this walk?
MILES - Just before 3 o’clock. Mrs Kelly heard the phone ringing downstairs. She thought it could be an important call for her husband from the MoD, so she got up to answer it. By the time she was downstairs she found him talking quietly on the phone in his study.
SAM – And was it work, was it the MoD?
MILES - She didn’t know who had rung her husband but, by process of elimination, it is thought to have been Wing Commander Clark, whose phone records show that he called Dr Kelly at 2.54pm for a further chat about a letter that was to be sent to the FAC. Clark told Dr Kelly that the letter needed to be tweaked so that the BBC reporter Susan Watts’s name could be taken out of the general list of journalists to whom Dr Kelly had spoken and put into a different paragraph which referred to the specific contacts that he had had with journalists. Dr Kelly agreed to this.
SAM – Is this interaction he’d had with Susan Watts relevant?
MILES – Well some people say it is. I’m not so sure. I don’t see how it had any material bearing on the situation he was in. He had admitted to meeting Watts. He had denied saying the words which OK he had actually said to her. But we can never know if this was a matter which changed things for him so dramatically that he took his own life. On balance, I would say it certainly wasn’t.
SAM - So Mrs Kelly returned to her bedroom without saying another word to her husband and he didn’t say goodbye to her. When she went downstairs at 3.20pm, he had gone. She never saw him again. And Miles, something else of significance was happening at the same time.
MILES - At exactly the same time in London, Andrew Gilligan, whose BBC news report seven weeks earlier had triggered this saga, was in Westminster for a closed session in front of the Foreign Affairs select committee. This was the second time in the space of a few weeks that Gilligan had been required to give evidence to the FAC, which was still investigating whether Tony Blair’s government had exaggerated the case for invading Iraq. It was apparently a bad tempered affair which did not go well for Gilligan. According to contemporaneous newspaper reports, the committee chairman, Labour MP Donald Anderson, holding an impromptu press conference in which he accused Gilligan of changing his story about his meeting with Dr Kelly two months previously.
Even more significant, though, is the curious choice of words Gilligan used near the end of this highly-charged meeting.
SAM – What did he say?
MILES - Parliamentary records show that when asked again about the identity of the source for his now-infamous Today programme report Gilligan said QUOTE: “I have tried to persuade my source to go on the record, for obvious career reasons he is unable to, and I must respect that confidence.” In response to this, Conservative MP Sir John Stanley said: “The fact you have just said that is clearly absolute confirmation from you that your source is not Dr Kelly.”
SAM – So Sir John Stanley was saying that because the identity of Gilligan’s alleged source was by now publicly known – ie it was supposedly Dr David Kelly, who had been named by the MoD the previous week - there was no reason in Gilligan continuing to protect the name of his source?
MILES – Exactly. But Gilligan said: QUOTE: “I simply cannot add anything at all to the evidence I gave about my source.”
SAM – So some might say Gilligan inadvertently suggested that Dr Kelly was not the source he believed was primarily responsible for tipping him off about the claims of “sexing up” the case for war?
MILES – Well Sir John Stanley certainly appeared to think so. From this, the question follows – yet again - did Gilligan in fact have another source – a principal source – to whom he or, for instance, one of his BBC colleagues had spoken before or after his meeting with Dr Kelly? If he did, it is not far-fetched to consider that this person – who Gilligan had referred to as a man - was well known, or the occupant of an elevated post in public life. This would certainly explain Gilligan’s unnecessarily reticent reply.
SAM - and of course now because it has subsequently come to light that the BBC had spoken with the head of MI6, presumably this primary source really could have even been someone else. The point is, you don’t think it was Dr Kelly.
MILES - That’s right.
SAM – At this moment, Dr Kelly had set off on his walk in Oxfordshire. It is not known exactly what route Dr Kelly took from his house because nobody saw him leave, but it’s most likely he turned left and walked a few hundred yards before turning right and heading north along a bridleway which eventually took him over a bypass to the village of Longworth. This was the first part of a walk lasting about half an hour which he often did with his family and sometimes did alone to aid a back condition from which he suffered. Miles, did he see anybody on this walk?
MILES - By 3.20pm, Dr Kelly was about half a mile from his front door and he was chatting to Ruth Absalom, his 75-year-old neighbour. They bumped into each other at the top of Harris’s Lane in Longworth. She later said she found his behaviour normal - friendly and polite. Her recollection is that he wasn’t carrying anything and she thought he was wearing a jacket. After chatting for a few minutes Dr Kelly apparently said: “See you again then, Ruth, Cheerio”.
As she recounted the day after he was found dead, it couldn’t have been a more natural exchange of words. “He wasn’t edgy or anything like that,” she told one newspaper reporter.
SAM – So did she say in which direction he walked?
MILES Yes, she said Dr Kelly walked to her right – in other words, east - towards the Appleton Road, which led ultimately to another neighbouring village, Kingston Bagpuize.
The Appleton Road represented one of two possible routes home for Dr Kelly. It is a long, straight road with few houses on it and no pavement for the most part. One of the few turnings off it is Draycott Road, which leads back to the bypass and then to his village of Southmoor. On this basis, the Appleton Road would only have been the logical route for Dr Kelly to take had he been returning home. And that is the direction Ruth Absalom saw him walking in.
SAM - So it would not be the route to take if heading to Harrowdown Hill, the place where Dr Kelly’s body was found the following morning?
MILES – No, he walked off in the wrong direction altogether.
SAM – Did he see anybody else?
MILES – Not that we know, but that’s the point in a way. Because it is equally interesting to consider the number of people who did not see him that afternoon, despite being in the immediate area at the same time as he would have been on his walk. When the police carried out house-to-house inquiries in the weeks after his death, they visited more than 150 local properties. Each was carefully selected to include any “premises which overlooked the possible routes taken [by Dr Kelly on 17 July 2003].” A checkpoint was established by the police on the public footpaths that cross Harrowdown Hill woods in an effort to identify potential witnesses to the movements of Dr Kelly. And yet not a single positive sighting is known to have been logged. It is as though Dr Kelly just vanished.
SAM - Back at Dr Kelly’s house, Mrs Kelly still felt unwell. She was soon disturbed more than once by what she has described as some “callers” at the front door, whom she spoke to momentarily. Who were these callers?
MILES - Publicly, nothing about them is known. Their identities, the times they called, whether Mrs Kelly had ever met them before, how many separate callers there were, what they wanted, or for how long they engaged Mrs Kelly in conversation, all remain a mystery.
SAM - And weren’t there some phone calls for Dr Kelly on his landline at this time?
MILES - Records show his colleague Wing Commander Clark rang Dr Kelly’s house for a second time at about 3.20pm. He spoke to Mrs Kelly who explained that her husband had gone for a walk. Clark later said he asked whether Dr Kelly had his mobile phone with him and Mrs Kelly said she didn’t know. Clark then rang Dr Kelly’s mobile phone. It was switched off. Clark said he was “very surprised” by this because Dr Kelly prided himself on being contactable at all times.
Clark also rang Dr Kelly’s landline again because the response to the FAC letter needed to be finalised that afternoon with Dr Kelly’s help. Clark later said: “I spoke to her [Mrs Kelly] and said I had not been able to contact Dr Kelly on his mobile and I thought she might say something but she was quite matter of fact…I then said: ‘Could you ask Dr Kelly when he returns, could he give me a ring.’ That is how the message was left with his wife.”
SAM - Presumably if Dr Kelly was walking in the countryside his signal could have been poor at times but the records show it had to have been switched off is that right as there were so many regular calls?
MILES - Clark rang his mobile every 15 minutes until 4.50pm without success: his phone was always switched off. Clark then left work and handed over his duties to his colleague James Harrison.
SAM - And it wasn’t just work colleagues who were looking for Dr Kelly, was it Miles?
MILES – No. Between 5 o’clock and half past five Dr kelly’s daughter Rachel rang her parents’ house to ask her father what time that evening they were going to see the foal together, as they had arranged to do the evening before. She and her mother spoke twice, and Mrs Kelly explained that Dr Kelly still hadn’t returned. Rachel rang her father’s mobile phone but couldn’t get through. Her reaction was the same as Wing Commander Clark’s: this was odd. Her father’s phone was always on.
SAM - And what did Rachel do?
MILES - She drove to her parents’ house, arriving at around 6 o’clock, and spoke to her two sisters en route to tell them about Dr Kelly’s apparent disappearance. Sian, the eldest, lived in Hampshire. Ellen, Rachel’s twin, lived in Scotland.
SAM - And so at this time, now three hours after Dr Kelly had gone for his walk, didn’t something change regarding his mobile phone?
MILES - At 5.50pm, James Harrison of the MoD rang Dr Kelly’s mobile. Whereas before, when his colleague Wing Commander Clark had rung it, the phone appeared to have been switched off and a generic electronic message was played, on this occasion the phone rang and rang. Harrison made a note of this at the time and he also discussed it with colleagues the next morning after it was announced by police that Dr Kelly was missing. Either Dr Kelly’s phone had been switched off previously when Clark had tried to ring him and had then been switched on again when Harrison rang it; or the phone had been in an area with no reception when Clark had tried it but had been in an area where it could receive a signal when Harrison rang it. Whichever explanation is true, nobody who rang Dr Kelly’s mobile phone that afternoon managed to speak to him on it.
SAM - And then this colleague from the MoD harrison spoke to Mrs Kelly?
MILES - Yes, having failed to get through on the mobile, Harrison then rang Dr Kelly's home number and spoke to his wife. She told him that Dr Kelly had gone for a walk by the river because of a bad headache – a location and an ailment which she has at no point mentioned since.
Harrison rang two colleagues to update them on the situation, one being Bryan Wells, who also tried to ring Dr Kelly’s mobile phone without success.
SAM - By this point, Dr Kelly hadn’t been seen by his wife for over three hours. You said his walk would normally take about 30 minutes assuming he followed his normal route. Were the family getting concerned?
MILES - Well, when Rachel Kelly arrived she told her mother she was going to search for her father. She returned at about 6.30pm having walked the footpath which she had assumed her father would have taken but there was no sign of him.
SAM - Then what did she do?
MILES - She then got into her car to see if she could find Dr Kelly in a different area and searched various local routes including one close to Harrowdown Hill, a few miles from her parents’ house, to no avail. It was an overcast evening and the light was fading earlier than expected for high summer. From the Harrowdown Hill area, Rachel drove to the nearby village of Hinton and then down to neighbouring Duxford. By the time she reached Duxford it was starting to get dark. She got out and walked around, feeling increasingly panicked and upset. She thought about looking in some barns but decided against doing so because she felt scared. She rang her sisters again as she made her way back to her mother.
SAM – And others joined in the search, didn’t they? But the police hadn’t been called.
MILES - That’s right. At about this point Sian Kelly, the eldest of the Kellys’ three daughters, rang and told her mother that she and her partner, Richard, would drive from their house in Hampshire, 70 miles away, to help look for her father.
At 6.40pm James Harrison rang Mrs Kelly again to say that he was leaving work for the evening and that there was no need for anyone to ring him back that night. He wrote in his notes: “Mrs K sounded okay.”
At about 7.45pm Dr Kelly’s friend, Olivia Bosch, rang Dr Kelly’s landline number. Her call went unanswered, which seems strange. Assuming Mrs Kelly was at home, she might have been expected to answer the phone in case it was her husband ringing in, or one of her daughters with news. Bosch then tried to ring Dr Kelly’s mobile number. She heard a message which said that the phone could not be connected at that time. Whether it was an answerphone is unclear. Certainly, she said, it did not ring.
SAM - But presumably at this stage the family are growing increasingly concerned?
MILES - Well as soon as Sian Kelly and her partner, Richard, arrived in Southmoor they drove up and down nearby lanes looking in churches, bus shelters, and anywhere else they thought Dr Kelly might have taken himself. They, too, drew a blank.
SAM - And by this point other people are helping too.
MILES - Two neighbours, John Melling and Paul Weaving, a farmer, were recruited to assist in the hunt for Dr Kelly. Weaving had known Dr Kelly for 20 years and, fascinatingly, during the afternoon he was last seen alive had been supervising a young apprentice who was cutting the grass in a field beside Harrowdown Hill. Despite being in such close proximity to the place where his friend was later found, he didn’t see him.
SAM - But as the search intensified that evening, did anyone think he could have gone off somewhere to meet somebody or something after his walk, maybe an appointment that none of them knew about?
MILES - It was logical for the Kelly family to presume that Dr Kelly had remained in the immediate area. His car was still parked in the driveway of his house and he had left his wallet at home. And yet there was nothing to say at that stage that he had not decided to perhaps visit a friend, however out of character this might have seemed.
SAM - Did anybody find anything on the first search?
MILES - No. With Rachel and Sian Kelly, and Sian’s boyfriend, Richard, having exhausted all immediate options, they returned to the Kellys’ house at about 11 o’clock feeling understandably uneasy and perplexed. Forty minutes later a member of the family rang Thames Valley Police to explain that Dr Kelly had gone for a walk at about 3pm and, almost nine hours later, had not returned.
SAM - How soon did the police arrive?
MILES - Within 15 minutes of the call being made to report Dr Kelly missing, three officers who were stationed at Abingdon Police Station arrived at their house. This was not standard practice: usually only two officers were sent out in a situation like this. Standing on the Kelly's doorstep on that cloudy and humid night the trio had a missing persons’ form with them.
NEXT TIME
In the next episode we look at the police investigation into Dr Kelly’s disappearance and, when his body was discovered, how the government kicked into gear to make sure any further investigation would be done on their terms via the infamous Hutton enquiry.