The mysterious kidnapping of Shergar, the champion racehorse

They were directed to the isolated farmhouse of racehorse breeder Jeremy Maxwell, about 30 miles outside Belfast near Downpatrick. On the way, they were in the countryside when five masked men carrying machine-guns stopped their car. Thompson said that when he wound down his window, one of them asked him if he was Derek Thompson. “I looked at him and said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘We’re the police.’ To which I replied: ‘Thank God for that!'”

Over the next eight hours Thompson took between 10 and 12 more phone calls, each beginning with a different password, while police tried to trace the calls. The talks never moved beyond the kidnappers’ demand for an initial £40,000 (£137,000 or $187,000 today) and Thompson’s request for photographic proof that Shergar was alive. After hours of silence, the final call came at 06:55 the next morning. The caller said: “The horse has had an accident. He’s dead.” He then hung up.

Getting help from clairvoyants

According to the 2018 BBC documentary Searching for Shergar, these calls were thought to be an elaborate hoax used as a decoy for negotiations going on elsewhere. The real kidnappers were now in direct contact with the Aga Khan’s office, but negotiations were going nowhere fast. In one call taped by police, a man says: “If the phone number is not answered tonight at nine o’clock, you can forget about the horse – you will never see him again.” Three days after the kidnap, there was one chilling final message: if ransom demands were not met, “that’s it.”

As the police search for Shergar continued, journalists needed fresh angles on the story to satisfy public demand, and Ch Supt Murphy kept delivering the goods. Nicholas Witchell, the BBC’s Ireland correspondent at the time, told the 2018 documentary: “Supt Murphy became this delightful character, turning up every morning with his trilby hat on, telling us absolutely nothing, really, but doing so in a charming and delightful way. And in the absence of any definite information, we were forced to use our imagination as to how we were going to cover this.”