It was his clothes, meticulously folded and abandoned on a Miami beach, that set off the alarm.
He had intentionally left it there for what finally happened to happen.
British Member of Parliament (MP) John Stonehouse had traveled to the United States in November 1974, leaving his post without notifying the government; upon his return a rebuke awaited him.
But he didn’t come back. On the 19th of that month, she went out to the beach of the hotel where she was staying and simply disappeared.
Despite the fact that there was no evidence that it had gone into the sea, the authorities concluded that a misfortune had occurred, that the Atlantic Ocean had swallowed it.
In the United Kingdom, Speculation arose about his mysterious disappearance.
His friend William Molloy, another MP, claimed that Stonehouse had been killed by enemies “all over the world” for his defense of democracy and fight against poverty.
He added that it could not be ruled out that the mafia was involved either.
Others conjectured that he had committed suicide over business problems, for which he was facing a lawsuit.
They also revived rumors that he had been a spy in the 1960s, sparked after a former Czech intelligence officer, Josef Frolik, denounced him as such in 1969, forcing then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson to to deny the charges in the House of Commons.
But as outlandish as the assumptions sounded, the reality was too.
On December 24, Stonehouse was arrested by police in Melbourne, Australia, at the seaside resort of St Kilda.
What had happened?
indiscreet politician
At the time of his “first death,” Stonehouse was 49 years old with a wife and three children.
He had been a member of the Labor Party since he was 16 and of Parliament since 1957.
During the 1960s, he rose rapidly, became a young star and came to be regarded as a politician with the potential to become prime minister.
However, while his parliamentary career was dignified, it was never quite spectacular.
To make matters worse, at the end of that decade he was sunk in a miasma of suspicions of espionage, after Frolik associated his name with that of “Agent Kolon”.
According to the Czech, a file stated that “in 1964 provided information on government plans and policies and on technological subjects, including aircraft, and had received payments over the years of £5,000 in total.
Questioned by the UK’s Internal Security Service, MI5, Stonehouse flatly denied it was him but, although he was never formally charged with treason, his political rise peaked.
(Years later, declassified documents from the former Czechoslovakia and the United Kingdom seemed to give credence to the suspicions. Among other things, it emerged that in 1980 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher accepted the advice of Attorney General Sir Michael Havers to cover it up, despite that he “was certain that Mr. Stonehouse had been a spy for the Czechoslovaks,” according to Downing Street minutes.
(Stonehouse’s daughter Julia continues to deny this is true.)
doubtful trader
Without leaving his seat, he then dedicated himself to creating a series of companies, mostly involved in the import-export business, which were resounding failures.
The most notorious was the British Bangladesh Trust (BBT), whose stated aim was to encourage trade between the United Kingdom and Bangladesh.
But it got off to a bad start due to an unfavorable article in the Sunday Times, which accused the company of fraud for circulating a Bengali leaflet containing false statements.
Stonehouse hoped to raise £500,000 for the BBT, but received only £15,000, so he had to supplement the shortfall with his personal and business resources, and loans.
He would later say that “I had bailed out, but in the process had chained myself to the wheels of a carriage; when turning, his nails buried me, slowly draining me of blood and preparing for a final sacrifice in a Roman circus”.
With his business affairs going from bad to worse, his dealings being investigated by the police, an addiction to drugs, and rumors circulating that he was a spy for communist Czechoslovakia, wanted to escape…
…and what better way to escape than to die.
Except that…
dying is not so easy
It requires a lot of planning, if you want to be reborn elsewhere.
The first thing he did was coldly calculating the creation of two alternate identities for himself.
In July 1974, he contacted a hospital in his parliamentary constituency and asked for information on recently dead middle-aged male patients, saying he had money available for their widows.
They gave him the names and addresses of five men, including those of Mr. Donald Mildoon and Mr. Joseph Arthur Markham.
Stonehouse visited the widows of the two men to gather information to support their requests for copies of their birth certificates.
He used them to purchase passports and forged the signature of another member of parliament to obtain it.
He then took out an insurance policy on his life for £125,000.
He withdrew money from his companies, deposited it in bank accounts in the name of the late Markham, and fled to Miami to fake his death. and go to Australia to start a new life with his secretary and lover, Sheila Buckley.
Tragicomedy
But even the best-laid projects go awry, and Stonehouse’s plans went awry from the start.
As his daughter Julia tells in the book “John Stonehouse, my father”, the parliamentarian could only disappear after a failed attempt.
On November 6, he arrived in Miami and cleared immigration as Stonehouse, turned back, and re-entered as Joseph Markham.
The next day, he looked for a place to leave the clothes he would use to flee after pretending to have drowned in the sea. He went to the airport to buy a ticket under the name of George Lewis, and to purchase a suitcase and clothes, to leave it, along with Markham’s forged documents, in a locker.
He returned and left a change of clothes hidden in the place he had found near the beach.
Everything was ready.
He put on his bathing suit, shoes and a shirt, went down again, left the last two on the hotel veranda and went into the sea. He swam to the place where the hidden clothes were, put them on, went outside, took a taxi to the airport and flew to Houston.
From there he would travel to Mexico City to take the weekly Quantas flight, having left the US as Markham. But he was late and missed the plane.
He thought that as an alternative he could get to Australia leaving Los Angeles but he didn’t make it either, so he had to return to Miami, where he realized that, despite two days of absence and the clothes left behind to alert the world of his disappearance, no one had missed him..
cartoonish denouement
His troubles continued.
He returned to London and celebrated his 26th anniversary with his wife, before returning to Miami to carry out his plan.
When he finally arrived in Australia, his life as Joe Markham did not last long, for assumed another “parallel personality”that of Donald Clive Mildoon, because -as he later said- the presence of John Stonehouse, “was oppressive to me, and I had to put an additional barrier between him and me”.
He withdrew most of his money from the Markham account at the Bank of New South Wales in Melbourne and opened an account in Mildoon’s name at the Bank of New Zealand around the corner.
that was his downfall.
An employee of the first bank saw him go into the other and discovered that he had two identities.
Victoria State Police initially thought he was involved in bank fraud.
Soon after they began to suspect that it was “Lucky” Lord Lucan, the aristocrat who had disappeared two weeks before Stonehouse, after his ex-wife’s nanny was found murdered in London.
They verified that it was not the lord, since they did not find a scar on his left leg that betrayed Lucan.
However, he had been discovered and, despite the fact that his lawyers tried to prevent his extradition on the grounds that it was not a crime to have more than one name, after trying to obtain asylum from Sweden and Mauritius, he was deported to the United Kingdom in June 1975. .
Psychological suicide?
On reaching London he was held in jail, but was later released pending trial.
He refused to resign as an MP, antagonizing the Labor Party and the press.
In November he published “Death of an Idealist”in which he portrayed what happened as a crisis caused by “the hypocrisy and farce of English society and politics”, and stated that it produced a psychotic split in his personality.
“Although I didn’t fully recognize it at the time, it was operating on three levels.
“One, the picture man: cool, calm and seemingly in command of all his senses, leading the life normally expected of him.
“Two, the original manwho wore all the heavy cloaks of the imagined man as a burden and despised that role, suffering deep torment as the hopelessness of his position became more apparent.
“Three, the Phoenix man: an imaginary person who was clear of problems and tensions and, through natural relaxation, gave comfort to the other two.
“The first two men had to die because the stress of living was too great for them. I wanted them to want to die. I wanted them to die. Wanted to die. There was no other way.”
Both he and his defense attorney, Geoffrey Robertson QC and, to this day, his daughter Julia, they justified what he did as an existential crisis that led him to commit psychological suicide.
did not convince
Shortly before his April 1976 trial, Stonehouse dismissed his legal team and undertook his own defense, which included reading the statement from the dock. longest in british history.
spanned over 6 days and it so annoyed the judge that he later advocated, successfully, for that ancient right to be abolished.
In the end, Stonehouse was sentenced to 7 years in prison on charges of robbery and false pretenses.
The judge concluded by saying: “You are not an unfortunate idealist. You committed these crimes when you intended to ensure your future comfort.”
Stonehouse was released three years later, recovering from open-heart surgery, after suffering three heart attacks during his time in jail.
He married Sheila Buckley in 1981, who had also been sentenced to two years in prison, for her part in Stonehouse’s plans.
With her he had a son, wrote several novels and made several television appearances before dying of a heart attack in 1988.
Lord Lucan’s whereabouts are still unknown.
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
