[SPEAKER_01]: Warning, this episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing. [SPEAKER_01]: August 2010, London, England. [SPEAKER_01]: A slight quiet man in his early 30s is making his way through a crowd of shoppers. [SPEAKER_01]: He ducks into herids and buys cakes. [SPEAKER_01]: Then he walks a few blocks and purchases pepper and stakes. [SPEAKER_01]: Whatever he was planning for the week ahead, it seemed delicious and fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that's the last time we have a confirmed sighting of garrison Williams, a lot. [SPEAKER_01]: Eight days later a police officer led him into Williams' government-owned flat in Pimlichen. [SPEAKER_01]: Right away he noticed the curtains were drawn, the heat was on, a woman's wig was on the back of a chair, a cell phone which had been factory reset on the dining table. [SPEAKER_01]: and then he walked into the on-suite bathroom.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the bathtub, there was a small, north-faced stuffle bag sealed with a small padlock. [SPEAKER_01]: Inside the bag was the naked decomposing body of Garus Williams. [SPEAKER_01]: The 31-year-old was a brilliant mathematician. [SPEAKER_01]: One of the country's most gifted codebreakers and here's where things get really strange. [SPEAKER_01]: The padlock was locked from the outside. [SPEAKER_01]: The key was inside the back underneath his body.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a study of strength. [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back to the podcast. [SPEAKER_01]: I am Michael. [SPEAKER_01]: You might have noticed this interesting story bouncing around recently about a group of missing or deceased scientists that all worked for government agencies or NASA or weapon systems. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a fascinating story and the White House even commented on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I recently released an exclusive episode of the show specifically for our [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't bring this up to pitch sub-stack, although I should be doing that. [SPEAKER_01]: Please go support the show by joining our sub-stack. [SPEAKER_01]: You get episodes before they're released, add free, you get additional content, articles, please go check it out through the support tab of our website, astudyofstrange.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mainly bring this up because it inspired me to do an episode on the Garus Williams case today, because it also similarly, [SPEAKER_01]: There's theories around espionage, government coverups, assassinations, it's very mysterious and strange. [SPEAKER_01]: It probably fits this show better than any other topic I've ever covered. [SPEAKER_01]: You're going to want to stay and listen to the whole episode because this one runs deep.
[SPEAKER_01]: Gary's win Williams was born in the 26th of September 1978 in Wales. [SPEAKER_01]: And from the very beginning, he seemed to be operating on a completely different frequency from everybody around him, meaning he was exceptionally brilliant. [SPEAKER_01]: A 10-years-old he passed his GCSE in mathematics for my fellow U.S. listeners that's a test [SPEAKER_01]: As they say over there, he went to Bangor University and graduated with a degree in mathematics at just 17.
[SPEAKER_01]: from there he pursued a PhD at the University of Manchester, and it was here that the GCHQ spotted him. [SPEAKER_01]: The government communications headquarters is a UK intelligence security and cyber agency. [SPEAKER_01]: The GCHQ is, it's kind of like the equivalent to the NSA here in the United States. [SPEAKER_01]: It was born from Bletchley Park, the legendary wartime operation that cracked the Nazi and Nigma codes.
[SPEAKER_01]: and in the modern era GCHQ is the engine room of Britain's digital intelligence, signals interception cyber defense code breaking, at a scale, I don't think any normal people like my self can really imagine. [SPEAKER_01]: It's housed in a building that locals call the donut because of its round shape, and it lies in the suburbs of Cheltenham. [SPEAKER_01]: Gary's William started at GCHQ in 2001 at 22 years old, and he would live in the area for about a decade.
[SPEAKER_01]: By all accounts, Gary's was intensely private. [SPEAKER_01]: He was very much an exercise and fitness he loved cycling, going on long solitary rides through the countryside, he loved running, and climbing and whales with his father. [SPEAKER_01]: He was not particularly social. [SPEAKER_01]: and his landlords described him as utterly reliable and quiet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then in 2009, Garth applied for a permanent position at MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, the Human Counterparts to the GCHQ MI6, that's where James Bond was an operative. [SPEAKER_01]: You can relate it, I think, to the CIA and the US. [SPEAKER_01]: and Gareth didn't get the role he applied for, but he was accepted on a three-year second mint, which is a temporary transfer, and there was the intention behind this that he would return to the GCHQ when it was done.
[SPEAKER_01]: He moved into number 4-H-E-36 Alderny Street in Pimlico, a government-owned flat just a half mile from MI6's headquarters at Voxhall Cross. [SPEAKER_01]: He started working, and then within a year... [SPEAKER_01]: He knew he wanted to leave. [SPEAKER_01]: His sister would tell the enquest that he hated in my sixes culture. [SPEAKER_01]: I look at that as he didn't like city life. [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't like the hustle on bustle. [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't like the drinks after work.
[SPEAKER_01]: He just didn't fit him. [SPEAKER_01]: He was a country boy, a cyclist, a man who really wanted the hills and quiet of the open rooms. [SPEAKER_01]: And by the summer of 2010, he had already told his managers that he was done and was arranging to return [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of speculation and questions around what Gareth Williams was actually doing at MI6. [SPEAKER_01]: The spy agency is, well, it's a spy agency, so they don't want people to know what's going on there.
[SPEAKER_01]: The foreign secretary William Hague signed a immunity certificate, a legal mechanism that allowed the intelligence agencies to withhold classified information from the coroner's in-quest. [SPEAKER_01]: Similarly, the U.S. State Department asked that no details of Williams' American working relationships emerge in the proceedings. [SPEAKER_01]: But here's what we do now. [SPEAKER_01]: Gareth Williams was working as technical support.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gathered intelligence from London embassies of hostile nations, and he analyzed this that data. [SPEAKER_01]: He was not a field agent. [SPEAKER_01]: He did not meet contacts in dark alleyways. [SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't running assets. [SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't... [SPEAKER_01]: jumping off bridges, shooting guns, and, you know, using parachutes as spies do and movies, his particular expertise was accessing information from mobile phones and other devices.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is important when we dive into theories. [SPEAKER_01]: In July of 2010, just weeks before his death, Garis was in Las Vegas, Nevada, intending hacker and cybersecurity conferences. [SPEAKER_01]: An investigative journalist reported that Garis was part of a team of intelligence officers, sent to monitor and penetrate hacking networks that were operating both in the US and the UK. [SPEAKER_01]: He returned to London on August 11th.
[SPEAKER_01]: and, according to CCTV footage that was recovered by police, he spent the next few days in the West End and Night's Bridge. [SPEAKER_01]: He was captured on a camera on the tube, and on Sunday I was 15th, that's when they saw him purchasing cakes and herids and peppered stakes at waitrues. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's the last time anybody saw him alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: His laptop showed activity in a cycling website in the early hours of August 16th and after that, [SPEAKER_01]: for about a week, silence. [SPEAKER_01]: And then there was a phone call made to the police. [SPEAKER_01]: The Garus Williams had it been to work all week. [SPEAKER_01]: Garus absence went unreported for five days when he failed to report for work five days.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you have a small team that he worked with, a tight net operational unit that was working on sensitive material in a building and agency that was all about security protocols and yet it still took them five days to be like, [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, you know, maybe we should like check in on Geris we haven't heard from him in a while. [SPEAKER_01]: Now this is likely just a poor mishab by the secret services, but it lends itself to some conspiracies and theories around this case.
[SPEAKER_01]: Think goodness though that they finally did call the police, and a welfare check was sent to his flat on August 23rd. [SPEAKER_01]: The police officer went in through the front-shared door to the apartment building, and the scene the police found was this. [SPEAKER_01]: It was a two-bedroom flat who lived there alone, in the living room a woman's wig hung on a chair, a cell phone, which they later found to be factory reset was on the table.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was nothing to suggest a struggle had taken place. [SPEAKER_01]: In the bathroom, that's where you found the north face, hold all, or duffle bag as we might call it in the states. [SPEAKER_01]: It was 81 centimeters by 48 centimeters, padlocked, and sitting in the tub. [SPEAKER_01]: The officer lifted up, or tried to lift it up. [SPEAKER_01]: It was very heavy, and he noticed fluid on the bottom of the tub. [SPEAKER_01]: And that's when he started to notice a smell.
[SPEAKER_01]: He cut the bag open, making sure not to disturb the lock or zippers as a way to preserve evidence, and then he was really struck with the foul smell of a decomposing body. [SPEAKER_01]: Inside the lock bag was Garus Williams, he was nude in a fetal position, there were no signs of physical harm, meaning no bruising, no cuts, no bashes, so it didn't look like somebody forced him into the bag.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, most unusual of all is that the key to the lock was in the bag below his body. [SPEAKER_01]: Investigators found no footprints in and around the bath. [SPEAKER_01]: There were some partial footprints, found in other parts of the apartment, but they weren't enough to connect to anybody, but Garus Williams. [SPEAKER_01]: There were no fingerprints in the bathroom, not on the bathtub, not on the lock or other bits of the top of the bag.
[SPEAKER_01]: and that made it appear as if things had been wiped clean. [SPEAKER_01]: Also, there was no DNA found on the padlock on the bag where the edges of the tub. [SPEAKER_01]: The heat in the apartment was turned all the way up high. [SPEAKER_01]: And the reason I bring that up is not just that it's a strange detail, but you would imagine that Garrith was perspiring if he himself climbed into the bag.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would have left some kind of perspiration residue around the edges of the tub, but they didn't find any of that. [SPEAKER_01]: There are a few other details commonly reported that I need to comment on, I commonly hear that there were a few phones found in the flat, and all of them were restored to factory settings. [SPEAKER_01]: That's not true. [SPEAKER_01]: One phone was restored to factory settings, and that might be related to work you work with phones and computers.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a number of those devices around. [SPEAKER_01]: I say this because there's another phone. [SPEAKER_01]: that they did find that wasn't factory reset that had personal information on it and this is how they looked up search history information a lot of times when you read the story it's from his computer it wasn't it was from a phone and they found that he had looked up some bondage and SNM sites.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will also mention a very odd detail that a previous neighbor would come forward and say that they found him once handcuffed to his bedposts in his underwear and awkward embarrassing situation and he told the neighbor that he just wanted to see if he could escape. [SPEAKER_01]: So what's emerging when you hear about SNM and being handcuffed to his bed is that there's a story now there's a theory floating around that he was into those things just for lack of a better term.
[SPEAKER_01]: This might have been a bit of a kink for him and connected to that or maybe not. [SPEAKER_01]: Gareth also had around $20,000 worth of women's clothing in his flat. [SPEAKER_01]: Most of it, if not all of it, had not been used. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's an important detail. [SPEAKER_01]: We also have the women's wig found on the chair, and I watched an interview with the officer that went into his apartment.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think he mentioned there were multiple wigs in the apartment. [SPEAKER_01]: He also had a tinted drag shows in the past. [SPEAKER_01]: There is a reporting that someone saw him in the week he was missing or dead. [SPEAKER_01]: Had a drag show that's likely untrue because he would have had to have been deceased when they saw him there.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what's being connected here, there's this narrative right of he's in debondid, she goes to drag shows, maybe he's a cross-dresser because he's women's clothing. [SPEAKER_01]: In fact, though, he had been taking fashion design classes, and the clothes and his apartment could have been related to that. [SPEAKER_01]: These are all important details to share, but I want to point out that most of the narrative we've heard around these things. [SPEAKER_01]: is all speculative.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's one of the difficult things about this case is there's just so much speculation. [SPEAKER_01]: I also have to talk about the door to the apartment because in about 99% of the articles or blogs that I've researched about this case mentioned that the door was locked from the outside, which infers that someone must have killed him and then locked the door on the way out.
[SPEAKER_01]: This does [SPEAKER_01]: or interviews I've read about the inquest, even the officer that was the one that went in, doesn't seem to have ever mentioned that. [SPEAKER_01]: That seems like a bit of internet fodder that's just spun out of control that this is both a locked room and a locked bag mystery. [SPEAKER_01]: It's just a locked bag mystery. [SPEAKER_01]: I've even researched the door which was replaced by MI6 that appears to be more security measure related.
[SPEAKER_01]: They owned the flat. [SPEAKER_01]: I've also researched the type of locks used on these doors, and can't find anything about them being just locked from one side or the other. [SPEAKER_01]: So take all that with a grain of salt when you read it, and if you listen or if you have more specific information about that to clarify this for me, email me at a study of strange at gmail.com. [SPEAKER_01]: Investigators initially thought this was murder. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's too weird.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's too odd. [SPEAKER_01]: This can't have been an accident or a suicide. [SPEAKER_01]: It's got to be murdered. [SPEAKER_01]: So they launched an inquiry and over three years, they investigated very diligently. [SPEAKER_01]: There were some leads, including as an example, a couple that was seen entering the apartment building at one point that didn't live there, but that lead like others hit dead ends and could never be connected to Garus Williams directly.
[SPEAKER_01]: In May of 2012, the inquest delivered its findings. [SPEAKER_01]: Coroner Dr. Fiona Wilcox ruled that Garus had been killed unlawfully, murdered. [SPEAKER_01]: A year later, the Metropolitan Police concluded their own re-examination and arrived at a different conclusion that William Stath was probably an accident, and that he most likely died alone. [SPEAKER_01]: The coroner said murder, the police say accident.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, pretty much right off the bat, we have two different conclusions. [SPEAKER_01]: Then, in 2021, an independent forensic review was commissioned in its findings were passed to the police in 2023, the centerpiece of that review, modern forensic techniques were applied to a green towel found in a kitchen cupboard in the flat, an item that had been considered potentially significant by investigators.
[SPEAKER_01]: The DNA on that towel belonged to Garus Williams himself, not a third party not anybody else. [SPEAKER_01]: Combined with no new DNA evidence found anywhere in the resumission, the police sources said that this made it more likely that Williams was alone when he died. [SPEAKER_01]: If Garus was alone, why was he in the bag? [SPEAKER_01]: Alright, so we have to stop here, do a little bit of housekeeping. [SPEAKER_01]: I got to clear up some more misconceptions in the case.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know it's a lot too digest, but the reporting on this case was very sloppy. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that has to do with the fact that it's very easy to come up with sensational headlines for this case, and it just led to a lot of misinformation. [SPEAKER_01]: So the first misconception I want to talk about here is that it is physically impossible to lock oneself in that bag.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the end quest, one expert testified that despite hundreds of attempts, he was unable to lock himself inside the hold-off, and that became the dominant narrative for years in the story, but after the end quest, a retired royal artillery sergeant, [SPEAKER_01]: demonstrated that it is physically possible. [SPEAKER_01]: You can climb into the bag draw your knees up, pull the zippers together and reach through the gap to lock the padlock shut.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are videos online of other people doing this as well. [SPEAKER_01]: So the impossibility argument, though important, it just doesn't hold up under scrutiny, especially let's say, let's say, let's hypothetically say the garroth Williams was into this type of thing, which I'll talk a little bit more about [SPEAKER_01]: This might not have been his first time doing it. [SPEAKER_01]: He actually might have developed a technique to be able to get himself in this bag.
[SPEAKER_01]: But, what is significant is that Garus DNA was not found on the padlock, the zippers, or other fascinating mechanisms. [SPEAKER_01]: I've also seen a lot of posts and articles claiming that he was undruns. [SPEAKER_01]: toxicology test conducted after his death revealed no traces of drugs, alcohol, or poison in his system. [SPEAKER_01]: There was a later report that some GHB, GHB, I think it's called GHB, the date right drug, was in his system.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, it was natural levels, so meaning your body actually creates that it wasn't an amount that correlated to him being drugged. [SPEAKER_00]: that brings us to theories. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to start with that this could be an intelligence hit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most people that believe this point to Russia, so that's going to be the focus of my story here, but I will also mention [SPEAKER_01]: that hypothetically, if that's what happened, it could have been other hostile minations, and some people also believe it could have been a cover-up by Garus' own government. [SPEAKER_01]: Garus worked with extremely high security clearances, and Britain has a documented and grim history of Russian state violence on its soil.
[SPEAKER_01]: And here are a few examples, just a few examples out of many. [SPEAKER_01]: There was Alexander Lipvenenko in 2006. [SPEAKER_01]: He was a former FSB officer who had publicly named Putin as responsible for the murder of a journalist and Alexander was poisoned with Polonyum 210, a radioactive isotope, so rare that only a state-level operation could source it. [SPEAKER_01]: And it was administered in his tea. [SPEAKER_01]: There's also Sergei Scrippel in 2018.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a former Russian military intelligence officer turned British double agent. [SPEAKER_01]: A Russian GRU hit squad smeared a nerve agent on the door handle of his home. [SPEAKER_01]: He and his daughter Eulia survived, but a British woman named Don Sturgis, who came into contact with this, uh, did not survive. [SPEAKER_01]: two GRU officers were publicly identified by name and Russia, of course, denied everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: Boris Barazovsky, in 2013, he was a Russian oligarch, fierce Putin critic. [SPEAKER_01]: He was exiled, and he was found dead in his locked bathroom with a ligature around his neck. [SPEAKER_01]: Officially, it's a suicide, however, [SPEAKER_01]: most people in experts tend to say that this was a hit. [SPEAKER_01]: Again, those are just some examples.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those operations do share a signature, there's sophistication, there's deniability, and forensically, relatively clean.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the specific claim that Russian intelligence would want to target garrison Williams, that theory came about because of a story that he may have [SPEAKER_01]: A former KGB defector named Boris Carpich Cobb gave interviews in 2015 claiming that Russian intelligence had killed Garrett with an untraceable poison, introduced through his ear to protect a mole inside GCHQ. [SPEAKER_01]: There is a significant problem with this theory, though.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most important is that of 2024, a police sources with direct knowledge of the investigation [SPEAKER_01]: And their specific point that Karis was never in direct contact with Russian intelligence officers whose work was technical. [SPEAKER_01]: That all undermines the framing of him as someone that the foreign service or a foreign service would need to neutralize face-to-face.
[SPEAKER_01]: other people and experts that know Carpichkov and have looked into his story can also not verify any of it being real. [SPEAKER_01]: Also there's an interview I saw in a documentary made for Channel 5 about this case with a spy expert, I believe he's a former MI6 agent, mentioned that when you assassinate somebody, when governments do this, you make sure that the person you're targeting is dead.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, in this situation, Gareth was alive in the bag for a period of time after he was put in in the left. [SPEAKER_01]: Could have gotten out after he was put in the bag and, you know, that the assassin or assassins had left, you don't leave the potential for that to happen. [SPEAKER_01]: And then I just thought that was a very, it's like an obvious statement, but as that was very astute and to me that kind of points away from a potential assassination.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, the heat in the apartment was turned up. [SPEAKER_01]: That's never been explained, and one of the theories behind that is it could have been turned up to speed up decomposition, which then points back to murder.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's this story is just so strange, it's so bizarre, and also if this was his own government taking a hit-out on on the only reason to suspect that is that he wasn't reported missing [SPEAKER_01]: The next theory is the accidental death, the, what's called, claustrophilia hypothesis. [SPEAKER_01]: And this is what the Metropolitan Police is working conclusion currently is.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some investigators who worked the case came to believe that Williams was into what was turned claustrophilia. [SPEAKER_01]: Deriving pleasure from confining himself and tight, enclosed spaces. [SPEAKER_01]: The evidence assembled around this view is circumstantial, but it's not negligible. [SPEAKER_01]: His chelton Hamland lords found him tied up to his bedframe that I mentioned earlier.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, he looked up some bondage sites, and crucially there was the key inside the bag with him positioned as what a metropolitan police source described as possibly his way of punching a hole out sort of a safety emergency exit that he just might not have reached in time. [SPEAKER_01]: The theory is that it would have worked like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Garrison climbed into the bag voluntarily, locked it from the inside, and was overwhelmed [SPEAKER_01]: which is to build up of carbon dioxide as the oxygen inside the bag depleted. [SPEAKER_01]: The pathologist confirmed that this would have taken just two to three minutes. [SPEAKER_01]: There were no injuries on his body, consistent with being forced in, and no injuries consistent with a struggle in the apartment.
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's what Nags had me, and at plenty of investigators, is the absence of his DNA on the fascinating mechanisms to lock the bathtub. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, you're not guaranteed to always leave a fingerprint or DNA on everything that is sort of a misnomer, but there's so much of not DNA or fingerprints that it's just, it's, it's odd. [SPEAKER_01]: And if you're locking a padlock, your hands are going to touch the padlock.
[SPEAKER_01]: If your zipping is it, or your hands are going to touch the zipper, and yet nothing. [SPEAKER_01]: Also, why a key as your safety emergency exit? [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think a little key to a little padlock is strong enough to get through the canvas. [SPEAKER_01]: I think those bags are made out of canvas. [SPEAKER_01]: Why not? [SPEAKER_01]: Sizzers. [SPEAKER_01]: Or a knife. [SPEAKER_01]: it just doesn't make sense. [SPEAKER_01]: And also I mentioned again the heat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why was the heat on? [SPEAKER_01]: It was hot outside, there's no reason to have the heat on, and it was turned all the way up. [SPEAKER_01]: Why would you do that to yourself? [SPEAKER_01]: Is that part of the claustrophilia thing? [SPEAKER_01]: I just know when's been able to explain that clearly. [SPEAKER_01]: And the last theory is that there was a known visitor who panicked. [SPEAKER_01]: This possibility involves garrison-viting somebody into his flat.
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone from his private life that hasn't been shared with other people, like friends or family. [SPEAKER_01]: and they decided to do this thing where Gareth gets into a bag and then something goes wrong. [SPEAKER_01]: So the theory here being that everything was consensual. [SPEAKER_01]: And perhaps his companion panicked when Gareth lost consciousness very quickly and wiped the services in a panic and left.
[SPEAKER_01]: This theory element is harder to sustain after the forensic review when they found no evidence of anybody else being in the flat at all. [SPEAKER_01]: I will point out that's often usually incorrectly reported that there's just no DNA anywhere. [SPEAKER_01]: There was, like there's DNA and they found samples of DNA around the apartment, but nothing deported to people being there that night, except for Williams.
[SPEAKER_01]: However, it's worth mentioning that theory because it is a possibility. [SPEAKER_01]: Garis Williams was buried on the 26th of September 2010, his 32nd birthday. [SPEAKER_01]: Former colleagues from the intelligence service attended and so did Sir John Sawyer's the head of MI6, the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service at the funeral. [SPEAKER_01]: Make of that, what you will.
[SPEAKER_01]: His parents and family have never spoken publicly about the death, and there are so many things that we don't understand about this case, even investigators forensic experts, former intelligence officers, all of these people that have investigated the case and been interviewed about it and contributed to the inquest. [SPEAKER_01]: It seems they all have different theories.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Garth William spent his career turning complexity into meaning, decoding patterns, finding secret code, he was by all accounts, exceptional at it. [SPEAKER_01]: The secrets of his own death appear unsolvable, and I've one wish that we had his help. [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to a study of strange. [SPEAKER_01]: If you have experienced something strange, mysterious and unusual, I want to hear about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Email me at a study of strange at gmail.com and you might get to be on the show. [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you. [SPEAKER_01]: Good night and stay strange.