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From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. And this is British Scandal. So Alice, in some ways, Maxwell has been our most epic story. Yeah, it kind of spanned the whole of the 20th century. Second World War, Soviet Russia, Maggie Thatcher. Maxwell had a ringside seat in so many of these major world events. But at the same time, this is also a family story.
Yeah, he had a huge impact on his children, of course. Ghislaine Maxwell, which is another whole terrible scandal all of its own. Yes, and that's Maxwell the man. But what about Maxwell the boss? What was he like to work for? OK, so who have we got? We have got a Fleet Street legend. We're talking to Roy Greenslade. He was the editor of the Daily Mirror when Maxwell was the owner. He also worked for Rupert Murdoch and he wrote a book about Maxwell called The Rise and Fall of Robert Maxwell. That's coming up next.
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So, Roy, you worked as editor of The Mirror, appointed by Robert Maxwell and worked underneath him. But let's start at the start. How did you first meet each other and what was your first impression of him? Oh, well, my wife worked for The Daily Mirror and won an award for some of her reporting. And to celebrate, Maxwell decided to give her dinner and therefore I was invited too. It was at a place I think called Maxim's in London, a club, a gambling club.
And he behaved outrageously throughout the whole thing. He swept us all the cutlery and crockery aside to begin with and said, relay the table to the waiters.
He was bombastic and difficult throughout, intimidating waiters, intimidating people at the table, except for my wife, who he adored. And then, so I got a feeling of him just from that one amazing, drunken, wild evening. And did he have a reputation? Before you started the job, what was your awareness of him?
Oh, yeah. I mean, look, from the moment that one knew Maxwell was going to buy the Mirror, a lot of people, there were large intakes of breath because his reputation went before him. He'd been a difficult and silly and rather idiotic MP being called a man who should not steward a public company in an inquiry by the Department of Trade. So he had a pretty poor reputation. Once he took over the Mirror...
His reputation then was as a bit of a buffoon because he wanted to have his picture in the paper all the time. He was very demanding of editors. He sacked people on the turn of a sixpence. One can hardly believe that I went to work for him and knowing all this, but I had turned down a job for him before that. He'd
asked me to be deputy editor of the London Evening paper that he'd started, the London Daily News. And I turned that down thinking, you know, I desperately don't want to work for this man.
But when he came calling the next time, I'm afraid the editorship of the Mirror, the paper that I'd first read as a boy, the paper that roughly had my politics, the paper that was really, could I thought, be turned round, and I thought...
He can't surely be worse, as bad at least, as his reputation and can't be worse than working for Rupert Murdoch. So I'm afraid I walked in, eyes open, ears shut, and decided to pick up the baton, believing stupidly, I can handle him. Unlike anyone else, I'll deal with him fine. You mentioned his time as a Labour MP. He was MP for Buckingham for six years. Yes.
Did he have grand political ambition? And how was he viewed in Labour circles? Did Wilson take him seriously? He was an embarrassment to the Labour Party because he made vainglorious speeches in Parliament. They didn't know what to do with him, so they put him in charge, I think, of the wine cellar, or at least hospitality, where he also apparently misbehaved. But he was boorish. His ideas were...
protectionist. He was joined that campaign to buy British only, so he had no wider understanding of capitalism. Strange for a capitalist, but he didn't really grasp the nature of the system that he operated under. And so I think within the Labour Party, they were
He was shunned largely by the majority of the party, never promoted, of course, never given an inkling of promotion. And of course, his views were out of kilter with most left wing MPs. And yet at the same time, he never forged any kind of links with the right wing either.
Well, that's what I was going to ask. How much of a Labour man was he? Well, he wasn't really. It was just a flag of convenience as far as he was concerned. Look, the most important man in Robert Maxwell's life was Robert Maxwell. And anything which he could do to promote himself...
in the belief that by self-promotion he was advancing himself and the world would be better for his advancement. That's how he thought. He had, you know, a massive ego. You know, look, we're dealing here with a psychopath, a sociopath, I don't know which way you'd go, certainly a megalomaniac. And so the greater good for the world was always served by anything which Robert Maxwell did...
So, Roy, you get the call then. I'm guessing out of the blue, a surprise. From day one, did you get a feel for what working with Maxwell would be like? Right, yes, the call itself was very strange. I mean, he called on a person who was a very, very good friend of his.
a boxing day morning about 6.30, 7 o'clock in the morning and the voice came booming. I mean, like anyone else, I'd had an enjoyable Christmas day the day before and when this booming voice came on the phone and I rolled over and said to my wife, cupping the phone, Robert Maxwell's on the phone, we both agreed it must be
A friend of ours called Paul Callan, who was well known for imitating Maxwell. So I very shrewdly said, well, thanks, Bob. That's very nice. I will. Can I call you back?
He gave me his number. Noreen knew the number. She said, yeah, that is Maxwell. Even then, I thought maybe Callan's up to tricks and he knows the number and I'm going to get. So I rang him back 10 minutes later and he said, I want you and your lady wife to come and see me at lunchtime.
Now, at this moment, I didn't know what he wanted. And when we went up to his, I don't know, 10th floor flat next to the Mirror Group, and we're talking about Boxing Day morning, remember, no one else about. I think both Noreen and I fell back on the sofa when he said, I have the honour of offering you the editorship of the Daily Mirror.
in that very ponderous tone that he had. And I mean, you know, both Noreen and I knew well the editor who was there, had respect for him and had no idea. And I think we both said, well, what about Richard? Richard Stott, the current editor. He said, oh, I've got big plans. We've got big plans, Richard and I. So...
It wasn't as if I was really even robbing someone else's job. He seemed to be suggesting that he was going to look after him.
So I still was wary. The whole performance that day was extraordinary and I wanted time to think about it. And he said, I have as much time as you like. Call me later. In other words, make up your mind straight away. I think we went home. We discussed it. All the possible parameters of difficulty that we would face. I mean, my last experience.
And I agree that's a bad thing to go on lust, but my lust for the editorship of The Mirror...
persuaded me, I persuaded myself that I would be okay. So I'm afraid I gave in to wild ambition. I was very happy in the job I had. I was number three on the Sunday Times. I've been there three years. I was enjoying the job. I got on well with Andrew Neil, the editor, and I was well placed perhaps one day to have even advanced there.
So, I don't know, I threw it all up and decided to take it anyway. The relationship between proprietor and editor is always a fascinating one, particularly when it's Robert Maxwell. Was he hands-on or hands-off as a boss? He only knew hands-on. You know, I've been used to working at the Sun and at the Sunday Times where everyone...
was always second guessing, I suppose, Rupert Murdoch in one way or another, even though I worked with tough editors, Kelvin McKenzie at The Sun and Andrew Neil at The Sunday Times, and they handled Murdoch pretty well. But Murdoch really didn't interfere that much.
When I got to the Mirror, I found that Maxwell micromanaged every area of the place in every way. He interfered in the advertising, he interfered in the management, he interfered even to the extent of sacking sports reporters or news desk flunkies and so on. Anyone who
that he could lay hands on at any time. He tried to sack. There were difficulties about reinstating them afterwards or even pretending you'd fired people when you hadn't and so on. He wanted to know what was in the paper. He wanted to be...
involved in every aspect of the running of the paper. So he was the most interfering boss one could ever imagine. You know, he really basically wanted to be the editor. And at the same time, he didn't have any of the skills to be editor. He had wildly impossible views about what should be in the paper and what shouldn't.
And wildly, of course, grandiose views of his own contacts and ability and so on. I mean, you know, he had no political grasp at all beyond a lot of help from a senior man called Joe Haynes, who was his biographer, of course.
and was the leader writer of the Daily Mirror. And he took most of his political sounding from Joe. Anyway, it was skewed. It was difficult because the other thing Maxwell did was,
is that he consulted people around you all the time so that you didn't know what he'd been talking about to other people. He didn't believe really in any hierarchy and so on. He would pick up his information or badger people into giving up information which you as the editor didn't know about.
Can you think of any specific examples, Roy, of those moments where he overreached or he interfered? Well, one of his great moments of interference was if you dared to take a day off. My wife and I had not long before bought a house in Ireland and we risked, and I think it was in the first five, six weeks, a quick trip across to Ireland. He rang and said...
I want to see you. And I said, well, I can't get back from Ireland. I'm coming myself, he said. I said, how are you getting here? He said, helicopter. I said, Bob, there's a war on where we live in Donegal. You won't get permission. He said, I will get permission. Of course, he didn't get permission. But in his frustration...
He rung the sports desk and didn't like the attitude of the young man who answered the phone and fired him. So I then got calls from the sports editor saying he's fired one of my best men. What are you going to do about it?
So we gave up being in Ireland and flew back. And I had to reinstate this guy, tell Bob he couldn't do that sort of thing. He, of course, was apparently contrite. Yes, you're quite right. Yes, that shouldn't happen. So and that kind of thing happened, I suppose, five or six times of firing people, which is always very difficult because it's the worst thing. These people look to you as the editor to...
to save them and so on.
And, of course, his other thing was he'd ring when you went home at night, should you dare to go home, and he never slept and never worried about time. He would ring the news desk and demand that they publish some story or other that he'd got a half an interest in or that somebody, some old friend had rung and told him or somebody in the city had mentioned him.
And of course they had to, they had this difficulty, what do they do? This is not a proper story, it's not a Daily Mirror story.
And he was always doing that. I mean, he rang me once and said, I've got your splash for you tomorrow. My heart sank when Bob said he got a splash. And he said, I'm calling you from Israel, where I've just bought the two major teams in Jerusalem. Imagine Rangers and Celtic. I bought them both in Israel. There's your splash.
So I said, well, Bob, and he went, you're going to defy me, aren't you? You're going to defy. You're always defying me and slam the phone down. So, you know, that that was fairly impossible. But I think the major example of madness was when he rang me one day and said, what's on your front page tomorrow? And I said, well, Bob, it's amazing. Russian troops.
have gone into Lithuania and surrounded the media center. And it's almost as if it's a reinvasion that Gorbachev has launched.
And there was a long silence. He said, Mr. Green said, you are an idiot. Actually, I am saying idiot. He called me a four letter word, which began with C. So, you know, a pretty grim conversation. And I said, why is that, Bob? He said, because Gorbachev wouldn't do anything without calling me first.
Wild. There you go. Another example. Let me give you another example. These things flow out of you when you talk about Bob Maxwell. When the first Gulf War broke out, 1990, I commissioned, assigned a good reporter and a good photographer to go out immediately.
One of them rang the news desk and the news desk rang me to say that they are not taking off from Heathrow because they'd been called in before setting out by Bob Maxwell and told that their job when they got out to Iraq was to locate troops in the trenches and sell them encyclopedias.
Bob had got this ancient stack of Caxton encyclopedias that no one wanted. And he'd got an agent he'd sent out to Doha and was expecting his journalist to sell encyclopedias to the troops. You know, of course, I told them, you know, no such thing will happen. And he forgot about it. You never knew what he'd remember and what he'd forgot. But anyway, he gave up on that one.
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Some of the things he got involved in, at the time, tabloids had all sorts of competitions. People of my generation and older will remember Spot the Ball, even local papers did it. And for those of you too young to know what it was...
You would get a picture of a moment in a football match, usually where at least two players would look like they were going up for a header. And you would have to mark on the picture with a biro. I think you got 10 different crosses to put around the place where you thought the ball was. And if you matched where either the ball was or where the expert panel said the ball was, you won £100, £1,000. In Maxwell's case, £1,000,000.
But there was something different about the way the mirror ran it, wasn't there? Yes. So he decided we needed to get one up on the sun and have a big prize of a million pounds for a spot-the-ball competition. But then when he decided this, and I think it was a meeting in his room involving the promotions...
director, great and straightforward and straight up honest man called John Jenkinson and myself and I think somebody from the advertising department. And as we all agreed that this would be fun and we could outrank the sun, as we were leaving, he called back John Jenkinson and myself and said, of course, no one must win.
And I said, well, how's that going to work? He said, you can always place the ball where no one can find it. And I thought, well, that's not quite in the spirit of the thing. Outrageous. Yeah, outrageous indeed. And to my great regret, I said to John Jenkins, well, how can I do that? And John said, well, it's doable. Now, I left the mechanics up to him and so on, and I just turned a blind eye.
One or two readers did complain that it was farcical, but...
I'm afraid I let it go thinking, look, no one believes these competitions are straight or believable anyway, so it doesn't really matter. But I'm afraid once that reached public knowledge and it reached public knowledge, people think that it leaked out. In fact, when I wrote my biography of Robert Maxwell, I confessed to that one, which has been held against me ever since for some reason. But
I just have to put up with that, I'm afraid. It was a Bob Maxwell decision and I lived with it. And it was the beginning of what would, of course, become his belief that he could do anything and would indeed in the end, when he asked for something too much, would lead to me quitting.
You've described his ego and his love of power and influence and also your experience with Rupert Murdoch. How big of an inspiration was Rupert Murdoch on Bob Maxwell? Maxwell is obsessed with Murdoch. Murdoch, whatever one might think of him, was hugely successful, clever, thoughtful and strategic.
Maxwell was not clever, not thoughtful and had no concept of strategy. But he model he he believed he could be as big and was as important as Rupert Murdoch. So everything Murdoch did, he watched it. He had, of course, a bad history in the sense that.
He tried to take over the Sun... Oh, sorry, first. He tried to take over the News of the World in 68 and Murdoch beat him. He tried to take over the Sun in 69 and Murdoch beat him. He tried to take over the Today newspaper and Murdoch beat him. Murdoch beat him.
to introduce computer technology. Murdoch beat him to expand into the United States and to go global. So in every way, Maxwell was the loser.
But it was his obsession to try and beat him, to try and be as big as him, which drove him and annoyed him and irritated him. Whereas on the other side, I know from Murdoch that he just... Murdoch just found it extremely amusing and didn't take Bob Maxwell seriously. They're often obviously grouped together, partly because, as you say, they fought it out for the ownership of the News of the World and The Sun. And today...
It sounds like they're fundamentally different people, and not just in terms of the way that they approach business, but Murdoch's ability to delegate within his organisations, a trait that it sounds like Maxwell didn't possess. That's right. Murdoch did have a sense of delegation. Look, he was interfering with his senior staff too. He too is a megalomaniac, and he too gets his own way within his organisation, but he's cleverer at it
And most importantly, he did it at the discrete level. And so there was no public bombast from Murdoch. Murdoch avoided speaking in public.
didn't seek the limelight. Bob did the opposite, which made him into a buffoonish character in a way that Murdoch didn't. Murdoch suffered from the fact, or perhaps benefited, when you actually think about it, from the fact that when he first came to Britain in 1968, he was interviewed on television by David Frost and suffered...
from Frost's questioning him, cross-examination as it were, and that really hurt Murdoch. And so he thought, well, I'm never going to do that again. And it taught him a lesson about being unprepared for the kind of quizzing on TV that exposes you. So he never did that again. And something that Maxwell never learned because he had no...
He had a thick skin and he had no sense of himself. So he didn't even realise when people were actually taking the mickey out of him. It sounds like now, Roy, you have this great clarity about Maxwell, about his psychology, about his motivations. But then was there a turning point? Was there a moment that made you feel that you wanted to or that you had to leave the mirror?
Look, it was accumulation of things. I've mentioned some of the madness. My days became weary. My wife could see that it was impossible because she was much more subtle in her handling of Maxwell. He was much nicer to her. She didn't have, of course, the senior position on the paper, so she didn't have to take the kind of decisions.
But it became intolerable and really there had to be a moment where the straw would break this camel's back.
And it came when he demanded that I publish an offer in the paper for pills that he claimed would improve the IQ of schoolchildren. My God. The astonishing thing was that we discovered that he had a financial interest in the company producing the pills.
The nutritionist that he got on board was at the end of his life and was probably being manipulated.
And I had a terrible feeling about the kickback, the backlash that would come from persuading people that giving tablets to their children day after day to improve their IQ would really... I just didn't feel... I mean, I could stand over spot the ball as a bit of nonsense, but I couldn't have people across Britain...
forcing their children to take tablets on the basis that they would improve their children's school performance. So I just refused, point blank, to publish it. Maxwell sent, you know, good people to me to try and persuade me otherwise, but I just refused. And so...
I think he sent Kevin, his son, as the final persuader. Now, I'd not much time for Kevin. He wasn't awful, Kevin, but I'd not much time for him. Within a week, I was gone. You mentioned Kevin there. Obviously, Ian was around as well, and there's a lot of contemporary interest in Ghislaine. Did you ever see Robert and Ghislaine together? What was their relationship like?
The interesting thing about the children was that he was pretty rude to the boys in front of people. Ian, I ought to say, was smooth and charming and delightful. Kevin was a bit more edgy and difficult. I think I flew to Berlin on Maxwell's behalf when he bought newspapers in East Berlin after the fall of the wall.
And I won't, Kevin, he was impressive in his dealings with people and so on. But always having to keep in mind that he was acting on behalf of a father who was mercurial in his decision making.
By contrast, on this one major occasion that I met Maxwell when Ghislaine walked in, I was up in his office one night and we were alone discussing, as very often in the evening, discussing politics.
and Murdoch and other things. And Ghislaine suddenly appeared and he said, well, what's this business about you jumping out of a helicopter on water skis? And she went, oh, that was just a bit of fun, Daddy. And then it had become clear that she had dived over the side of a boat and hit her head on a pole and she did.
risk her life but she was very light with him giving him kisses on his cheek and so on and he said I never want to hear about this again you be careful in future and she left and as she left I said to him children eh
And he went, "Well, she's a very naughty girl." But I could see how much in a different way he treated her from the way he treated Kevin and Ian. He was soft with her. She was a favourite. And that's probably the reason he named the yacht after her and so on. He was indulgent with her in a way that I'd never seen him be with either of his sons.
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Did he ever talk about his background? Were you aware of his childhood, his upbringing? Oh.
Oh yeah, he did. You didn't have to push him very much to talk about that. He talked about mostly the war. He said how he found it necessary to kill people in the war, to execute in fact someone, a mayor I think he talked about. I think that's on record somewhere as well. Occasionally, just occasionally, he'd talk about how he'd made his way across Europe, but he didn't
He didn't talk about the Holocaust to me anyway. There was no reference really to what he'd lost. It was all, I think, hidden away. Because he'd not even assumed in public his Jewishness for a considerable period of time. It was, in fact, oddly and ironically, his wife died.
who formed this organization for Christians and Jews to be together. It was not until she got heavily involved that he really made much more in public of having been a Jew.
Just thinking about the downfall of Robert Maxwell, obviously one of the things that he's really known for is plundering the Mirror Group newspaper's pension fund. I mean, this must have affected people that you'd worked with, maybe even affected you personally, Roy. Are people still sore about the money they lost out on?
To be honest, so cataclysmic was the discovery of the missing 600 million in the pension fund that the government stepped in and laws were passed, compensation funds were set up. In fact, it was only relatively small amounts of people in obscure printing department, printing areas, printing companies that he owned.
That really suffered losses and even those were made up later. But of course, what it did was it absolutely terrified people that they were going to lose their money. It was I mean, this thing took a couple of years to sort out.
So, no, I don't think we can say that people suffered. I mean, my wife was a major, had been at the Mirror for so long. Obviously, her pension was in jeopardy at that time. And it's true that even today that there's a strong pensioners organisation. Everyone pays attention to who gets elected to look after their pensions. It remains a matter of great nervousness.
I, by the way, on a personal level, I just didn't trust the man. Of course, following the IQ pills drama, I just didn't trust him anymore. So I took my pension out. As I left, part of the deal was that I could take my pension away. I guess the point is that those people were rescued by legislation and by the law. Maxwell himself was fully prepared to let those people lose their money.
Oh, yeah. Well, was he? And this is one of those moot points. And I and I have some sympathy with those that believe that he genuinely believed he was only borrowing the money. I think it's really important to grasp this. I don't think he was a criminal in the sense that we think he
of him actually believing that he was going to get away with milking the pension funds for 600 million. His whole strategy, if there was a strategy in financial terms, was to keep switching money from account to account, from country to country,
stealing from Peter to pay Paul in reverse and so on. And so he believed by circulating the money, he could keep everyone happy. So I think he got himself into it. I mean, look, it was a criminal act. There's no doubt about that. And I think that was a major contribution to my belief that he committed suicide. So I think there was an understanding that he he
he was borrowing it and that he would pay it back. Of course, you know, many a robber, many a burglar, especially white-collar criminals, believe they are roughly doing the same. So it's not a great argument on his behalf. But as to him setting out
to appall people and to steal from them. I don't believe that he thought of it in those terms. You say, kind of pointedly, you believe that he took his own life because, of course, there were...
conspiracy theories swirling. Do you remember the moment you heard about his death? The editor of the Today newspaper, my great friend Martin Dunn, ran towards me screaming, Maxwell's gone down, his plane has gone down, you've got to come and write everything that you know, all those stories you tell, please come now. Well, by the time we got, I had sat at a desk and
We knew that it wasn't a plane. It was the yacht. I think his body had been found by that time. And I sat at the desk with all these memories of Maxwell swirling about me. I mean, I'd only gone six months before, five months before. And
For the first time, and indeed the only time in my journalistic career, I couldn't at that moment write. I couldn't perform in the way that I'd been trained for all my life. And I had to call my wife and say, look, I did some notes. Can you fax them to me? Those great days of fax machines.
And a sort of very faint group of notes came across and that stimulated me back into action. Not one of my greatest pieces. And even though I told lots of funny stories, they were somewhat toned down in order to be slightly kinder. There was a feeling, I suppose, Murdoch didn't want to be seen to be dancing on Maxwell's grave at that moment.
And it was four weeks before we found out about the pension fund plunder. So my piece was slightly kinder than it might have been.
And now, in retrospect, how do you feel about him? Do you ever miss him? No, I never miss him. No, I think I put him in context as the years move on. I see him for what he was. I'm often reminded about the funny stories involving him. And so the badness, as it were...
I kind of overlook nowadays. I see him in the context of his background, you know, escaping the Holocaust, losing his family. I see him as a man on the make who didn't believe in rules because rules have been no good for him in the past.
I see him as a rugged capitalist buccaneer on a scale that I've seen other people ever since. I have him not as a bad man, certainly a stupid one, but stupid and clever at the same time. I mean, who else?
could have lived like he did, private plane, private helicopter, private yacht, running many, many companies, and yet doing it all by fooling us into believing that he had a great pile of money in Liechtenstein when he had nothing at all. I mean, it was an amazing financial juggling act. And I suppose there's some skill in that, even if that skill means that you turn out in the end to be a robber.
Well, that's the thing. What you've described is certainly not a traditional out-and-out charmer. So it's kind of incredible that he got away with what he did for so long. When he wanted to charm you, he could, though. I mean, you know, he could be very nice. He was very... You probably already realise there are many contradictions about him. One of the contradictions was that he was a rather dainty man. A friend of mine actually had an affair with him
And she talked about how gentle he was in bed, how dainty he was. She used to use the word dainty. And it is odd to think that... And he's got these quite small feet and he was very light on his feet.
And he could, when he wanted you, he could charm you, he got great manners. Then against all that, he was boorish and mercurial and difficult and careless of other human beings who didn't do his bidding. So he was both those things at once. Is it fair to say at times as well he was vulnerable? I mean, I've read various books about him, we've covered him in this series. He seemed to suffer at times from deep shame sometimes.
and at times almost behaved like an animal who'd been caught eating food. Do you recognise that part of his character? Yes, I do. I mean, that's right. He was, I suppose, look, his vulnerability would be that he had been a lucky young man to have escaped, to have a life, as it were. And, look, they ended up in Auschwitz. I talk about him as not caring about rules. And...
being a rule breaker or not even knowing that the rules existed. But you've got to think that for him, the very fact that he'd managed to make it, that was a triumph in itself. And he felt, I think, both vulnerable and invulnerable at the same time. So that did give him a fragility, which made him, I suppose, which was one of the reasons he acted the way he did.
Of course, the official narrative is that he had a heart attack. Why don't you subscribe to that? Well, no, I don't, I'm afraid. You've got to think he's on this boat and he'd done some strange things in the lead up to the boat. He had the plane fly overhead. He never took long breaks alone.
So that was in the build-up, that was very strange indeed. Only he knew that he was going to be pressed for £54 million he didn't have and that he'd been pressed and pressed. He knew that in the investigation that would follow that, the chances of him going to jail were very great indeed.
He couldn't possibly take the ignominy that that would involve. And I think he therefore knew that he was going to take his own life.
That's the build-up. That's the reason I think that. But then when we get to the actual physical matter of the yacht, I tried to actually reproduce the conditions under which he went over the side of the boats. And so I went to a yacht exactly the same as his that was in dry dock at Portsmouth with two of the crew that had been on the yacht.
And we experimented trying to throw ourselves off, trying to see if he'd step between the rails and so on. And it proved impossible to believe after a while that he could have done it accidentally, that he toppled over, that he had a heart attack and toppled over. None of that in the context of the of the.
railings on the yacht and so on made any sense whatsoever. The key piece of evidence for me is that the stateroom, as he called his bedroom, was locked.
And I believe that what Maxwell did, knowing what he was going to do, was remove the key so that no one could get in. And that gave him time. It meant he wouldn't be suddenly discovered. And I believe he let himself down over the side of the yacht. His muscles and his arm were torn. It's a typical way to commit suicide, not to jump.
but to gradually let yourself down. And then I think he floated and he died of basically of hypothermia rather than a heart attack. That's my belief and I will take that to my grave in the belief that it was a suicide. Roy, this has been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us. OK, it was my pleasure too.
Our thanks to Roy. His book is called The Rise and Fall of Robert Maxwell. Next week, we've got a new story, and it's your turn, Alice. Yes, next, we're taking on the story of the spy cops. This is the final episode in our series, Maxwell. I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. This episode was produced by Dee Key. Our senior producer is Joe Sykes. Our executive producers are Jenny Beckman, Stephanie Jens, and Marshall Louis for Wondery.
She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence, and then she left him there. In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.
Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.
And after the 10-week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision. To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is. Law and Crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen. You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.