In my current release, The Deepest Kill, the central murder may possibly relate to a lucrative missile defense contract. One character compares it to a series of real-life deaths, prompting my agent to ask, “Did that really happen?”
Yes. Yes it did.
The late 1980s really did witness a series of deaths involving scientists who worked on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also famously known as “Star Wars.” This ambitious space-based missile defense program, proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, would intercept missiles while they were still in the air.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. The concept turned out to have a few reality checks that couldn’t be gotten around and besides, the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. After that, politicians and taxpayers alike were happy to stop throwing money at it—and we’re talking a lot of money, as in thirty billion over ten years. The kind of money that makes people ambitious and maybe crazy.
But during SDI’s heyday more than 20 SDI scientists, primarily employed by the British defense company GEC-Marconi, met untimely deaths. A few took place between 1982 and 1985, but the vast majority occurred in a clump between August of 1986 and October 1988.
Now, yes, people die every day. But ‘untimely’ isn’t an apt description here. Out of the reported deaths, only one was attributed to natural causes, while the rest—well, here’s an abridged summary:
We begin with Dr. Keith Bowden, a senior computer scientist and SDI contractor for GEC-Marconi. One night in March 1982, after attending a social function in London, Bowden’s car veered off a bridge, hurtling down an embankment into an abandoned rail yard. The official account suggested drunken driving, but Bowden’s wife and solicitor didn’t buy it.
Three years later, in 1985, the Marconi radar designer Roger Hill died by shotgun at his home. Hill’s death was followed by Jonathan Wash’s fall from a hotel window later in the same year. He had left GEC and gone to work for British Telecom, and had expressed fears for his life.
In August 1986 Vimal Dajibhai, a 24-year-old scientist working on computer control systems at Marconi, jumped 331 feet from a suspension bridge over the Avon River. His body was recovered with his pants around his ankles and a needle-sized puncture wound on his buttock, something that mystified the Bristol coroner and has never been explained.
In one of the most bizarre incidents, Arshad Sharif, another Marconi satellite detection system scientist, allegedly tied one end of a rope to his neck, the other end to a tree, jammed his foot on the accelerator, and decapitated himself. Sharif had been acting strangely in the days leading up to his death, but that method of suicide is beyond strange.
1987 began with Richard Pugh, a computer expert and consultant to the Ministry of Defence (MOD). Pugh’s body was found in his flat with his feet bound, a plastic bag on his head, and a thick rope coiled around his body. The coroner controversially ruled it as an accident due to sexual misadventure, which is a useful verdict if you want the family to stop asking questions. In April, Mark Wisner, software engineer at the Ministry of Defence, was found dead with a plastic bag on his head and clingfilm wrapped around his face. Once again, the verdict was death by sexual misadventure. Today they might guess (or press) suicide, but asphyxiation by plastic bag method was just warming up in the ‘80s.
More followed in succession during 1987 and 1988: A MOD researcher, Avtar Gingh-Gida, disappeared and turned up four months later in Paris, unsure how he got there. MOD scientist John Brittan died in an apparent suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. So did Marconi engineers David Skeels and Trevor Knight, MOD researcher Peter Peapell, and British Aerospace engineer Andrew Hall.
In March 1987, David Sands, a senior scientist working on computer-controlled radar at a Marconi sister company, made a sudden u-turn in his car to crash into an empty café at high speed. The vehicle burst into flames,2 maybe because there were two additional five gallon cans full of gas in the car.3 Sands was identified only through dental records.
Others dead in car crashes were Michael Baker, 22, digital communications expert for Plessy, a Marconi acquisition and Stuart Gooding, research student at the Royal College of Military Science. A systems analyst for another contractor, George Kountis, drove his car into the Mersey. Plessy communications expert Michael Baker crashed through a barrier near his home.
On the same day as Gooding’s death, David Greenhalgh of ICL (a defense contractor) paused in his drive to work to jump off a bridge. He survived for a few days afterward, stating he had no idea how or why he’d been there.
In April of 1987 Shani Warren—the only female on this list—was found gagged, with hands bound behind her back and her feet tied, and with a noose around her neck. Official reports suggested that she had somehow done all of that herself, then hobbled in her four-inch stiletto heels to the lake to drown herself in 18 inches of water. GEC Marconi bought her company a week later. However, thanks to the magic of DNA, this case was solved in 2021 with the arrest of a serial rapist who had nothing to do with either Marconi or the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Plessey electronic weapons engineer Frank Jennings, 60, died of a heart attack in June. Granted, a sixty-year-old dying of heart attack back then wasn’t so odd. What is odd? Plessy software engineer Alistair Beckham, 50, completed some light Sunday afternoon gardening. Then he went in the shed, attached wires to his chest, pushed them into a power socket and, with a handkerchief jammed in his mouth, hit the power. Beckham’s wife described how secretive he was about his work and how just hours after his death men from the Ministry of Defence arrived at the scene and took away several documents and files.
Later the same month, Marconi marketing director John Ferry, 60, jammed stripped wires into his own tooth fillings and electrocuted himself.
It wasn’t that no one noticed. By this point several articles (and eventually a book4) had appeared questioning whether there was actually some kind of KGB or Eastern bloc conspiracy to kill the scientists. A few MPs and a trade union leader called for an inquiry into the deaths. But the UK Defence Ministry declared the cluster to be coincidence, at best attributable to the unusually high stresses associated with secret defense research.
But is it that stressful? A 2021 CDC survey5 lists the detailed occupational groups with the highest suicide rates among males: Agricultural/Food Scientists, Logging, Entertainers, Fishing and Hunting Workers, and Construction/Extraction Workers. A 2016 survey did not vary by much. Engineering ranked lower and Computer/Mathematical, much lower still. There is variation among reports but general conclusions remain steady. But that’s America—in a UK study of 1979-1983, veterinarians topped a list of thirty (yet they were nowhere to be seen on the list for 2001-2005).
However, it is likely that ‘aerospace computing engineer’ is simply too narrow a category for reliable statistics. It’s not difficult to guess why the field could be particularly grueling, and SDI provides an excellent example. Global political pressure, the kind of money that could make or break a company, a race against well-matched rivals both external and internal, and oh yes, perhaps just the fate of the free world depending on your abilities. It could have all been a plot worthy of le Carré and the facts will stay forever buried under Red Square—but suddenly a mental health crisis cluster doesn’t look so far-fetched.
We will, almost certainly, never know.
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