Gareth Williams: The Spy in the Bag

There's this old Russian folk tale about a man who cannot be killed. Koshie the Deathless. Koshie hides the one thing that can destroy him. His one weakness far from his body. It's hidden inside layers upon layers, locked inside a needle, inside an egg. Inside a duck, inside a rabbit, inside an iron chest, buried beneath a distant island. If you want to kill him, you don't fight him. You dig through all those layers, until you finally reach the truth. The tiny precise needle holding his fate. That's the trick. Koshie isn't invincible, he's just well hidden. This folk tale isn't about magic, it's about secrecy, about burying the thing that can hurt you. The subject of today's story had its own secrets buried. And when he dies under strange circumstances, the investigation looks a lot like that folk tale. Everyone goes hunting for the needle, the truth, the motive, the person responsible. In the case of Gareth Williams, a brilliant private British codebreaker, the layers and the questions are very real. And when he's found zipped inside a bag in his own bathtub, everyone starts digging for the hidden truth. I'm Harvey Gien, and this is Killer Stories. We all compartmentalize our lives, in some way. We show one version of ourselves to family, another to co-workers, another to the people we flirt with or fight with, or only text after midnight. It's normal, it's survival, but there's this brutal thing that happens when we die. All those compartments, they crack open at once. Everybody who knew us and pieces ends up in the same room, passing stories around like a box of old photos, small memories, big secrets, and suddenly you're grieving two people. At the same time, the person you knew and the person you never got a chance to. All the questions you never asked, all the conversations you never had, because everyone was too busy living their own lives to imagine yours might end. In August 2010, Gareth Williams is still very much alive. He's 30 years old, originally from North Wales, now living in London. On paper, he's the kind of person you wish you had as a neighbor. Quiet, reliable, pays his bills, mines his business. In real life, he's a little more interesting than that. He loves fashion and art. He goes shopping, he goes rock climbing, he runs, he cycles. He's that guy who's always in motion like he's trying to outrun an invisible deadline. Only he can see. He was a bit of a math part of G growing up, and now he works for the government. He enjoys keeping busy, but he doesn't love certain parts of his job. The small talk, the red tape, the networking. He's not the type of person to grab a drink with people after work, or after he finishes a race. He has friends, he's close with his family. He just values his privacy. The compartments suit him, which maybe why it takes some time before someone in his life reports him missing to the police. That person is Garrett's sister, Carrie. She is maybe the closest person to Garrett, and it's been days since she last heard from her brother, so a police officer goes to check on him at his flat. It's a top floor apartment in a wealthy white collar neighborhood. Lots of bankers, some politicians, people who work near power or incited. Someone from the building lets the officer in. The place is silent. The first thing the officer notices is a woman's wig hanging off the back of a chair. Not what you expect as your opening visual of a missing person welfare check. The flat itself looks calm, almost staged. No signs of struggle, no obvious mess, but the bathroom door is closed, and there's a bathrobe on the floor outside, like someone undressed and just never finished what they were doing. The officer opens the bathroom door. There's a red North Face Carrier bag in the bathtub, big bulging zipped up and secured with a padlock, a surprising find in a tub. He walks over and lifts it a few inches. It's heavy. It's too heavy. Then he sees it. A dark red fluid seeping out. That's when he calls for backup. Pretty soon, Garrett's apartment is no longer a home. It's a crime scene because inside that bag is Garrett. He's completely naked, no clothes, no ID, no obvious wounds, based on the state of his remains, officials estimate that he's been dead for around eight days. Right away detectives are thrown by what they're seeing. Underneath his body, inside the bag, they find the key to the padlock that locked it. There's no sign of a break-in and then they learn a weird little fact. You can unlock his front door by reaching a hand through the letterbox and turning the knob from the inside. So yes, someone could have come and gone without a trace. If you're a homicide detective, finding a body in a bag isn't unheard of, but usually it's dumped somewhere in the woods, in a river, in the trunk of a car. You don't expect it to be zipped up in a carry-all in the victim's own bathtub. And that is just the beginning. For some reason, the heat is cranked up in the flat even though it's summer. The high temperature speeds up the decomposition, which conveniently makes it harder to figure out how Garrett died. Detectives dust and swab everything, the padlock, the zipper, the rim of the tub, all the places a human hand would naturally touch if they were climbing in, or sealing it or trying to get out, they find nothing. No usable fingerprints, no footprints, no DNA on the lock or the zipper. There is one lonely scuffmark on the edge of the bath. Just enough to suggest that perhaps someone lifted the bag in and placed it there. But that someone does not appear to have left any trace of themselves behind. They collect 10 DNA samples from around the apartment. Every single one is too small to analyze with current technology. Could it be that someone tried to erase the fact that another person was there? The rest of the flat tells a different story. The apartment is incredibly clean and orderly almost obsessively so. Some of Garrett's belongings are laid out with care like someone wanted to make sure they were noticed. On the living room table lies a newspaper clipping. The top five regrets of the dying. People on their deathbets talking about wishing they'd been more honest, lived truer to themselves, spent less time at work. You've seen talk about these articles in the instaur that ticked talk 1,000 times. Next to that is a neat little constellation of electronics. A laptop, some SIM cards, and four mobile phones. Two of them are regular phones. Two are pay as you go. The kind people call burner phones. The kind used to, I don't know, for drug dealers cheating spouses or anyone who doesn't want their calls traced. Taking together, it paints a picture. Someone with compartments, someone with layers, someone with the life he wasn't sharing. with everyone. And that's when investigators discover the first real twist in this case. Because Gareth wasn't just some anonymous 30-year-old with a strange private life, Gareth was a spy. In 2010, a family of four in California goes missing and the clues left behind some investigators on a years-long search. Is this a family on the run or is the truth far more sinister? From ABC Audio in 2020, this is what happens to the mixtaves coming in August 11th. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app, or subscribe to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts to listen early and ad-free. Is this an assassination style killing? And everybody saw it. Now, as Luigi Mangioni prepares to stand trial for the murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson, which he denies, a new podcast series from ABC Audio in 2020 goes inside this captivating case. I'm ABC News Legal Analyst, Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to burden-of-proof Luigi Mangioni, wherever you get your podcasts. I told Gareth Williams worked for the government, but I didn't mention that at the time of his death, he was working as a codebreaker for MI6, the UK equivalent of the CIA. It's their arm of the government that deals with foreign espionage. The apartment Gareth was living in, it was a safe house for people working in intelligent services, but people only found out what he really did for work after he died. His family knew it was probably something important and maybe classified, but they didn't ask a lot of questions, and it's not like Gareth was advertising his life as a spy. But here's another twist in this story. He wasn't going to be a spy for much longer. He'd been on a Simon with MI6 for three years, and his contract was about to run out in a matter of days. So it's possible he would have returned to his old job at the government communications headquarters, but instead he died as an MI6 codebreaker. And when a spy dies under strange circumstances, you'd hope the truth would come out fast, but that's not what happens here. Because in the world, Gareth worked in, information isn't just data. It's currency, leverage, a weapon. Some things can be shared. Some things can't. And some things are twisted on purpose. Motives get blurry, silence becomes strategy, and if you're not careful, you don't just lose the truth. You lose the person underneath all the rumor and noise. And here's what really matters at this point in the story. While the tabloid starts circling and MI6 starts closing ranks, Gareth's family is grieving. His friends are terrified. This wasn't just a spy. This was a gentle, brilliant, shy man who called his sister every week, who loved fashion and climbing and solving impossible problems. This was someone's brother, someone's son. And if this were your brother, what do you want answers? Not theories, not whispers, not distractions about wakes or burner phones, real answers. A homicide investigation isn't just about finding a killer or protecting the public. It's about giving a family the truth they need to breathe again. And in Gareth Williams case, that truth becomes harder to chase the deeper investigators look. That's when the questions start. Not just about what happened, but about who might be trying to keep it hidden. Case in point, hours after his body is found inside that bag, a secret meeting takes place between the head of MI6 and the head of London's police force. The media finds out about it later, and no one knows what they actually talk about, but the public eventually learns that homicide detectives are blocked from interviewing Gareth's colleagues at MI6, which takes a ton of potentially useful information completely off the table. But still, officials say they are dedicated to solving the case. And their investigation goes on for well over a year, during which time an avalanche of information is made public about Gareth. Information about his private life and about his final days. Let's start with his final days. Gareth was last seen alive on Sunday, August 15, 2010, around 3pm. A CCTV camera caught him walking down the street. He lived on with two bags in his hands. We know he liked a shop, and we know he visited two retail stores that weekend. He doesn't appear to be nervous in the footage. He looks relaxed. We don't know what happened next, but Gareth likely died in the early morning hours the next day. The 16th, which leaves about 19 hours unaccounted for. Around 11.30pm, that same Sunday, someone backed up data from one of Gareth's phones to his laptop. It could have been him, we just can't be sure. And on Monday, Gareth obviously doesn't show up for work, which his sister says should have been a red flag. Gareth was an extremely punctual person. It would have been unusual for him to be late for a meeting, let alone not show up to work, but for some reason, not a single person who works at MI6 reports in missing to the police. Monday goes by Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday. An entire work week has passed and no one says anything. Not his colleagues, not his boss. By the time Gareth's sister, Carrie, files a missing person report the following Monday, it's been 10 days, since anyone at work has seen him. And that's not the only suspicious part of the timeline. Carrie contacts police at 11.30pm in the morning, but the first officer doesn't show up to Gareth's apartment until 4.30pm in the afternoon. That's five hours later, which is strange. I mean, what were they waiting for? Why the delay? Officials examine Gareth's body one day after it's found, nine days after his death. The tests don't find anything significant in the system, but enough time has passed that certain substances wouldn't have shown up, things like cyanide and chloroform. And since there are no major injuries on Gareth's body, officials determine he most likely died from poison or a lack of oxygen. Importantly, they don't say if they think it was murder or not. They leave the door open to both suicide and an accidental death. But that begs the question, how would someone intentionally or accidentally end up inside a zipped bag that's patlocked shut? Let's talk about Gareth's private life and the information that's leaked to the press. It's a lot to sift through, but there are basically two major headlines. One, that Gareth had a collection of women's clothing in his apartment, and two, that he had interests in bondage, a sexual practice where one partner gets tied up or restrained. And before we go any further, I want you to remember the folktale we started with. The one where a man's real life is hidden inside a needle, inside an egg, inside a duck, inside a rabbit, and inside a chest. Because this part of Gareth's story, his clothing, his browsing history, the fragments of his private life, this is where investigators start treating him like a chest full of nested secrets. Break open one layer, and suddenly everyone assumes they know what's inside the next. Put a pin in the bondage for a second, okay? The woman's clothing found inside Gareth's apartment were apparently old designer and worth around 20,000 pounds, and that could be a lot of items, or it could just be a few. It depends on the designer, right? Reports don't say they only say designer, expensive, secret. They mention the costs, the makeup, and a red wig. Just enough details to make it sound like they've cracked open a box, but not enough to know what's actually inside. And every outlet that brings up the clothing also brings up the same two anecdotes, that Gareth once attended a drag show, and that he may have been seen at a gay bar one time. Not confirmed to just repeat it, another layer added, another box inside the box, until suddenly people aren't talking about Gareth, the mathematician, or Gareth, the code breaker, or Gareth, the human being, but Gareth. Garith, the mystery, Garith, the secret, Garith, the double life. As if his identity were something you could peel open like the layers of that iron chest and in the folktale, each detail treated as a clue to something hidden deeper within. Now, let's talk about the bondage part. Garith's browsing history apparently revealed he spent some time on bondage websites, but that's not all. One of his old landlords tells police about an interaction she had a few years back. It was 2007, in the middle of the night, she woke up to cries for help coming from Garith's apartment. And when she and her husband opened the door, they found Garith lying on his bed with his hands tied to the headboard. He told him he was practicing how to escape, but they both walked away assuming it was a sex thing. Other stuff comes out too, like a naked video of Garith wearing only leather boots. And a story about how he secretly took a ten week fashion course without telling any of his friends or family. I mean, all together, it paints a picture of a secret lifestyle that Garith may have had, totally separate from his work as a spy and somehow related to his death. So the question becomes, is that true, or is that just what officials want people to think? Now, there are a lot of rabbit holes we can go down. We can talk about how Garith's family and friends were an actually surprised to learn about the woman's clothing, how they assumed the clothes were meant as gifts, or how experts later said that he was probably working undercover as a woman. He can discuss the actual amount of time he spent on bondage websites compared to other websites, or the difference between bondage and claustrophilia, the desire to be in tight spaces. At the end of the day, it can all be blocked out as noise, because the truth of what happened to Garith Williams ultimately comes down to a very simple question. Could he get into that bag alone? By 2013, two opposing conclusions are reached, in Garith Williams case. The London police say his death was most likely an accident, part of a sexual experiment, and an independent coroner says he was most likely killed, unlawfully. Which one makes more sense? Well, as I said, one relies on Garith being able to get into that bag alone and two different experts weigh in on that possibility. One of them is Peter Folding, a guy who specializes in helping people get out of confined spaces, which it turns out is a job, it actually is a job. Peter says he ran a bunch of tests. He tried to get into that same bag, pat lock it, and sit bit shut by himself while in a bathtub. And he tried this, you know, not once, not twice, but 300 times, and he was never successful. He doesn't conclude that it's impossible, but he does think that it's totally improbable. He says even Houdini would have struggled. As for the second expert, well, that guy runs very similar tests, 100 of them, and he tries to do it with the help of an assistant, and he also fails every single time. Like Peter Folding, he can't see how he could have done it, but he also can't rule it out completely. But there are other reasons Garith climbing into that bag alone is even more improbable. Like the fact that officials didn't find footprints or fingerprints in the bathroom. Not on the tub, not on the zipper or pat lock, none of the places he would have needed to touch with his naked body. It's not like he could shut himself in the bag and then wipe everything down. And if it really was a sex accident, why would he care if he made a mess in the bathroom? In his mind, he would have just cleaned it up later. He wasn't expecting to die. Garith's sister has called him, quote, "the most scrupulous, wrist assessor ever." She says, "If her brother thought there was any danger of him dying in that bag, he would have taken a knife in with him. He would have had a plan B." And do you know what he probably wouldn't have done? Turn on the heat. The heat being on in the apartment accelerated the decomposition of Garith's body, which made forensic testing much harder. And the bag being placed in the tub meant the decomposition liquids flowed out and then down the drain, which prevented the smell of decay from building up in the apartment. That's possibly why neighbors didn't notice. And early on in the investigation, officials suspected the scuff that was found on the tub was made by someone lifting the bag up and into the bath. Which, for obvious reasons, Garith couldn't have done. Based on the evidence or lack thereof, Peter Fowlding called Garith's death the perfect crime. Which yes, means he thinks Garith was murdered, like the independent corner, like Garith's family, like a lot of people, including the most senior officer who showed up to the crime scene that day, he says he immediately suspected Fowl play. To him, it was evident that someone had spent a lot of time cleaning up and staging evidence to confuse people, like that weird newspaper clipping about dying regrets. But who knows, maybe it doesn't matter that stuffing yourself into a bag has nothing to do with bondage. Maybe it was a coincidence that everything that came out about Garith's personal life seemed to cast him as dishonest. Like if he really was gay or trans or a crossdresser and not out, that meant he must have been a sexual deviant with something to hide, because he took a naked video, because maybe he had a kink or a passing curiosity. Sure, maybe the police were right. No one was trying to hide anything and Garith's death was an accident. After all, eight years after the investigation ends, officials conduct a second forensics review. It starts in 2021 and the results are released in November 2023. They allegedly find no new evidence and no new lines of inquiry, which maybe isn't surprising, but what is surprising is they say no more evidence means the case is solved, as in that somehow proves they were right all along. So they close the case despite the fact that there is still DNA evidence to this day that was found in Garith's apartment like a single hair follicle that can't yet be tested, not with our current technology. It's just too small. Now for one final layer, if you dig deep enough into this case, you'll find that in between the first investigation that concluded in 2013 and the forensics review that ended in 2023, someone came forward saying they knew what happened to Garith. The new witness was a Russian defector, a former KGB member. He claims that Garith found out that one of his colleagues was actually a Russian asset, working as a double agent. The person tried to recruit Garith using details from his private life as leverage, but Garith refused. So, he was, quote, exterminated. Here's something you should know about the world, Garith lived in. London in 2010 wasn't just a global banking hub or a political center. It was also quietly a battlefield. The kind fought with intelligence networks, shell companies, encrypted data, and people who vanish when they became inconvenient. British authorities knew they had a problem. Russia had been fortifying its spy networks in the UK for years. By the time Garith moved to London, officials estimate there were dozens of active Russian intelligence operatives working on British soil. Some embedded, some clandestine, some moving money and secrets through the city's underbelly, like it was just another transit line. And MI6, Garith's employer, was deeply involved in tracking those networks. Now, I'm not saying Garith was being hunted, yet. But I am saying this was not a safe field to play in. Garith was brilliant, discreet, and trusted with highly classified work. And in the years after he died, Buzzfeed News investigative reporters, leader backed by US intelligence sources, would uncover something chilling. Gareth wasn't an isolated case. He was one of 14 suspicious deaths. In the UK, all involving people connected to Russia and all officially dismissed as accidents or suicides. While British police were calling Gareth's death strange but accidental, American intelligence agencies were collecting evidence that pointed towards something else entirely. Money laundering networks, organized crime groups tied to Moscow, Russian spies operating under deep cover. This is the environment Gareth was working in. This is the backdrop to his final days. Not paranoia, not conspiracy theories, but documented geopolitical reality. And now that you know that, the bag in the bathtub stops being a weird detail and starts becoming a question. Unfortunately, it's a question without an answer. Because officially, the case is closed. We are supposed to ignore the Russian defector, the suspicious circumstances of his death and the impossibility of the condition of his body stuffed into a bag locked from the outside. Instead, we're supposed to believe his family and friends are supposed to believe. It was just a sex accident. In the old folktale, Koshes life is hidden away in a place no one can reach nested inside layer after layer after layer. Gareth's truth feels a lot like that, sealed off, protected, obscured. A body inside a bag, inside a tub, inside a government safehouse. A case inside a controversy, inside an investigation, inside a wall of official silence. But maybe that just means the story isn't over yet, maybe someone will still find the chest or the rabbit or the egg or the needle. There's still time to solve his case and to rewrite his story. Things are tuned into killer stories, a Spotify podcast, new episodes release on Mondays. If you like today's story and want to learn more, we drop some of our favorite sources in the episode description. Until next time, I'm Harvey VN. Stay safe, Alfred.