A Codebreaker Was Found Padlocked Inside a Bag. The Key Was Inside With Him. Gareth Williams.

On August 23, 2010, police entered a top-floor flat on Alderney Street, in the Pimlico area of London, to check on a man who had not been heard from for days.

In the bathroom, in the bath, they found a large red sports bag.

It was zipped shut and padlocked.

Inside was the man who lived there. He had been dead for about a week.

The key to the padlock was inside the bag too, underneath his body.

His name was Gareth Williams. He was a mathematician who worked for GCHQ, Britain's intelligence agency for codebreaking and signals, and he had been on loan to MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service.

A coroner later said he was probably killed. The police later said he probably died by accident.

Both cannot be right.

Who was Gareth Williams?

Gareth Wyn Williams was born on September 26, 1978, on the island of Anglesey, in Wales. He grew up speaking Welsh.

He was brilliant at mathematics. While still in secondary school, he started part-time maths study at Bangor University. He finished a first-class degree at seventeen.

In 2001, he joined GCHQ, in Cheltenham. He rented a room nearby for almost ten years.

He was described as private, and a keen cyclist.

His academic record is described in different ways in different sources. He reportedly earned a PhD at the University of Manchester, and later left a postgraduate course at Cambridge. What is clear is that by his early twenties, Britain's intelligence services wanted him.

In the spring of 2009, he was sent on secondment to London, to work with MI6. He had recently qualified to do operational work. He had reportedly worked with agents from the American NSA and FBI.

But he had asked to go back to GCHQ. He was due back in Cheltenham on September 3, 2010.

He did not make it.

Seven days

Investigators estimated that Gareth died in the early hours of August 16, 2010.

Nobody raised the alarm for seven days.

He did not show up at work. MI6 did not report him missing. Finally, colleagues reported that he had been out of touch for several days, and police went to the flat for a welfare check on August 23.

The coroner later criticized MI6 for that delay.

After the body was found, the heads of the police and MI6 met to decide who would lead the investigation. The British Foreign Secretary signed a legal certificate to keep details of Gareth's work out of public view.

Gareth's funeral was held on September 26, 2010, which would have been his thirty-second birthday, in his home village on Anglesey. The head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, attended.

And the heating in the flat was on, in August. That sped up decomposition, which made it harder to find out how he died.

The bag

Here is what investigators found in the bathroom.

Gareth was naked, inside the red bag, in the bath. The bag was zipped and locked with a padlock from the outside. The key was inside the bag, under his body.

There were no gloves in the bag.

There were no fingerprints on the padlock. None on the bag. None on the rim of the bath. Not even his.

Tiny fragments of DNA from at least two other people were found on the bag. They were too small to give a result.

Four hundred attempts

The question everyone asked was simple. Could he have done this to himself?

Two experts tried to lock themselves inside a bag just like it. They tried four hundred times. They failed every time. One of them said there was still a small chance Gareth could have done it.

Another expert concluded that Gareth could not have locked the bag himself.

A senior police officer said it was theoretically possible to get into the bag without touching the rim of the bath.

A pathologist, Richard Shepherd, said that from the position of the body, it was more likely that Gareth was alive when he was put in the bag. Another pathologist said that, inside a closed bag, a buildup of carbon dioxide could overcome a person within two or three minutes.

"Criminally mediated"

In May 2012, the coroner, Fiona Wilcox, gave her findings.

She said Gareth's death was "unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated."

She said she was satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that he had been unlawfully killed. But she said there was not enough evidence for a formal verdict of unlawful killing.

She concluded that another person had put the bag in the bath, and probably locked it. She said he was probably alive when he was put in the bag, and that he most likely died from breathing in carbon dioxide, or possibly from a fast-acting poison.

She rejected suicide. She also rejected claims about his private life that had appeared in the press, saying they did not explain his death.

And she criticized both MI6, for the seven-day delay, and the police counter-terrorism unit, for failing to share items found at his MI6 office.

The police version

The Metropolitan Police reinvestigated. In November 2013, after a twelve-month review, they announced their conclusion.

They said there were no definitive answers. But their "most probable scenario" was that Gareth died alone, after accidentally locking himself into the bag.

So the coroner said someone else was probably involved. The police said probably not.

In 2024, another police review found no new DNA evidence, and no sign that a third person had been in the flat.

The theories

A case like this attracts spy theories.

In 2015, a former Russian KGB officer claimed that Russia's foreign intelligence service had killed Gareth after he refused to be blackmailed. He said this came from unnamed sources. It has never been verified.

That same year, the BBC aired a drama called London Spy, loosely based on the case.

There was also an embarrassing mistake in the forensic work. The company that analyzed the DNA apologized for a data-entry error that had led to a wrong DNA result.

Gareth's family has said they believe someone tampered with evidence. That has never been confirmed.

An independent forensic report was handed to police in November 2023. It did not change the official view.

What we still don't know

We do not know how a man ended up locked inside a bag, with the key inside with him, and no fingerprints anywhere.

We do not know if someone else was in that flat. We do not know whether it had anything to do with his work. And we do not know why nobody at one of the most security-conscious organizations in the world noticed he was missing for a week.

What we know is this. A coroner, looking at all the evidence, said he was probably killed by someone else. The police, looking at the same evidence, said he probably died alone by accident. And Gareth Williams's family is still waiting for an answer they can accept.

What do you think happened in that flat?