The mysterious kidnapping of Shergar, a champion racehorse

They were directed to the isolated farm 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 opened his window, someone asked him if he was Derek Thompson. “I looked at him and said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘We are the police.’” I replied, “Thank God for that!”

Over the next eight hours, Thompson received between 10 and 12 more phone calls, each beginning with a different password, while police attempted to trace the calls. The conversations never went beyond the kidnappers’ demand for an initial sum of £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 had an accident, it died. Then he hung up.

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According to the 2018 BBC documentary Searching for Shergar, these calls are believed to be an elaborate hoax used as a decoy for negotiations taking place elsewhere. The real kidnappers were now in direct contact with the Aga Khan’s office, but negotiations did not progress quickly. In a call recorded by police, a man said: “If the phone number is not answered tonight at 9am, you can forget about the horse – you will never see it again.” Three days after the kidnapping, there was a chilling final message: If the ransom demands were not met, “it will be over.”

As the police search for Shergar continued, reporters needed new angles on the story to meet public demand, and Officer Murphy continued to deliver the goods. Nicholas Witchell, the BBC’s Ireland correspondent at the time, told the 2018 documentary: “Super Murphy became this delightful character, turning up every morning in his trilby, telling us absolutely nothing, but doing so in a charming, delightful way. In the absence of any concrete information, we had to use our imagination as to how to cover this.”