Phill News Entertainment – Phill News
When John Stonehouse’s clothes were discovered in a pile on Miami Beach on November 20, 1974, many assumed the British MP had drowned while swimming – until he turned up alive and well in Australia on Christmas Eve. History highlights the most incredible stories of the man who died twice.
When John Stonehouse planned to disappear for good, he was troubled. His political career was stalled, shady dealings ruined his finances, he was accused of being a Communist spy and he was having an affair with his secretary. In a technique based on Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Jackal, Stonehouse stole the identities of two dead people. He went on a business trip to Miami but disappeared there in November 1974, then boarded another plane to Australia. The ruse lasted a little over a month. His mistaken capture in Australia was by British aristocrat Lord Lucan, another notorious fugitive who disappeared around the same time.
So how did Stonehouse explain his actions? The British MP claimed to the BBC in January 1975 that he was “on a fact-finding mission which touches not only on a geographical point of view but on the inner workings of a political entity”.
To the British public in the late 1960s, he must have seemed like a man who had it all. At 43, he was postmaster general, had a beautiful wife and three children, and was seen as a likely future Labour prime minister. He was the man who oversaw the introduction of first and second-class stamps, a role that could not have been more successful in his political career.
The decline began in 1969 when a defector from Communist Czechoslovakia claimed that Czechoslovakia had recruited members of parliament as informers. Stonehouse protested his innocence to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who believed him. Such accusations were widespread during the Cold War, but they tarnished Stonehouse’s political reputation. When the Labour Party lost the 1970 general election, there was no Stonehouse seat in the opposition. Disillusioned, he decided to devote more time to his business interests in London, mainly the export service, which he had developed thanks to his international connections.
In 1971, Bangladesh’s struggle for independence from Pakistan awakened new enthusiasm in Stonehouse. He became emotionally committed to the Bengali cause and became such an endearing and likable figure to Bengalis that after the war ended, he became a citizen of the new state as a sign of respect. That was just the beginning.
I have heard some strange rumors, but they are all unrelated to my husband’s character, so they are not worth answering. – Barbara Stonehouse
He was asked to help set up the British Bangladesh Trust, a bank to serve Bengalis in Britain. However, the way the bank was run later drew criticism in the Sunday newspapers and attracted the attention of the Fraud Commission and investigators from the Department of Trade and Industry in London. The bad publicity and these official investigations alienated the bank from many of its supporters. Mr Stonehouse was deeply depressed and felt that he was also losing the respect of his parliamentary colleagues.
He devised a plan to get away from it all. First, he forged a passport application in the name of Joseph Arthur Markham, a recently deceased foundry worker from Walsall, a constituency in the West Midlands of England. Under this new identity, he became a globetrotting export consultant, with bank accounts in London, Switzerland, and Melbourne. He then assumed a second identity, Donald Clive Mildoon, who also recently died in Walsall. To finance his new life, Stonehouse transferred large sums of money from his business into a series of bank accounts.
‘A divided personality’
On November 20, 1974, Stonehouse supposedly disappeared while swimming in the ocean off Miami, Florida. Aside from a pile of clothes left on the beach, there was no trace of the 49-year-old man. Was he washed up at sea? Was he murdered and placed in the concrete block found near Miami Beach? Was he kidnapped?
His wife Barbara had no doubt it was a tragic accident. She told BBC News: “I have heard some extraordinary rumors but they are all so out of character for my husband that they are not worth responding to or thinking about. I am convinced it was a drowning accident. All the evidence we have suggests that he drowned.”
In London, the police had their suspicions. Sheila Buckley, 28, Stonehouse’s secretary and secret girlfriend, claimed to friends that he was dead, but she knew the truth: some of her clothes had been packed in a suitcase and sent to Australia a month earlier. She had made transatlantic phone calls with him and also sent semi-encrypted letters through one of two Australian banks. It was these two bank accounts, with different names – Markham and Muldoon – that eventually led Melbourne police to trace him. At the time, they were searching for the notorious missing aristocrat Lord Lucan, who had mistakenly disappeared on November 8th after murdering his children’s nanny. Police initially thought he might be an earnest Englishman who had been seen signing a forged cheque.
While Lucan’s disappearance had baffled police for 50 years, Stonehouse’s mystery lasted just over a month. On Christmas Eve, Stonehouse was forced to confess his true identity. He then asked at Melbourne Police HQ if he could call his wife in the UK. Although he did not know it at the time, the telephone conversation in which he told her a startling fact had been recorded.
He said: Now, they have discovered the false identity here. From this, you realize I have been deceiving you. I’m sad about that but in a way I’m glad,d it’s all over.” Stonehouse was held in detention in the centre for several days before his family arrived and his girlfriend later joined him in Australia.
