About this episode
Unravel the mystery of Gareth Williams, an MI6 codebreaker found dead in a padlocked sports bag, and the clashing official reports that followed.[INTRO]ALEX: In August 2010, London police entered a high-end flat in Pimlico and found a red North Face sports bag sitting in a bathtub. Inside that bag, padlocked from the outside, was the naked, decomposing body of a 31-year-old genius mathematician named Gareth Williams.JORDAN: Wait, padlocked from the outside? That sounds like a clear-cut case of murder.ALEX: You’d think so, especially since Gareth was an MI6 codebreaker. But thirteen years later, the official police stance is that he probably just climbed in there himself and got stuck.JORDAN: You are kidding me. How does a top-tier spy end up as a 'bag accident' and why is the government so eager to stick to that story?[CHAPTER 1 - Origin]ALEX: Gareth Williams wasn't your typical James Bond. He was a Welsh math prodigy who graduated university at 17 and earned a PhD before most people finish their bachelor's. He worked for GCHQ, the UK's signals intelligence agency, but he was on a high-stakes secondment to MI6 in London.JORDAN: So he's the guy behind the scenes, the one cracking the codes the field agents use. What was the world like for a guy like that in 2010?ALEX: The digital shadows were lengthening. Williams wasn't just doing math; he was reportedly helping the NSA track international money-laundering routes. We’re talking about tracing the billions of dollars moving through Moscow-based mafia cells and organized crime groups.JORDAN: So he’s poking his nose into the pockets of the Russian mob and global cartels. That is a very dangerous place for a 'quiet mathematician' to be.ALEX: Exactly. He was just one week away from finishing his London stint and moving back to his home base in Cheltenham. He had his bags packed, literally, but then he just stopped showing up for work.JORDAN: And I assume MI6, being an elite intelligence agency, noticed their star codebreaker was missing immediately?ALEX: That’s one of the biggest red flags. MI6 waited seven full days before they bothered to tell the police he was missing. For a week, Gareth lay in that bathtub while the heating in the flat was cranked up to the max during a London August.[CHAPTER 2 - Core Story]ALEX: When the police finally broke in, they found a 'pristine' scene. No signs of a struggle, no forced entry, and most bafflingly, no fingerprints. Not on the bathtub, not on the padlock, not even on the zipper of the bag.JORDAN: That doesn't sound like an accident. That sounds like a professional 'cleaner' swept the room.ALEX: That was the conclusion of the coroner, Dr. Fiona Wilcox. During the 2012 inquest, she watched an expert escapologist try to lock himself in an identical bag. He tried 400 times. He failed every single time.JORDAN: So the science says he could
