Shall we ever know?: The trial of the Hosein brothers for the murder of Mrs. McKay

As bell-clear as “”Yes, my Lord,”” this courtroom documentary of a case which spanned three and a half weeks of alert attention in the old Bailey in the fall of 1970 when the two brothers Hosein, Arthur and Nizamodeen, were accused of kidnapping, imprisoning and murdering one Mrs. McKay although the corpus was never delicti. Following her disappearance, there was the phone call — “”it is the M3, the Mafia”” — and a letter asking her husband to cooperate with the sum of one million pounds handed over in two white suitcases. The brothers, one considerably older, one a “”stranger in a strange land,”” were pulled in from their home at Rook’s Farm where some proliferating coincidences (fingerprints, twine, paper and paper flowers, a billhook) all contributed to the hard-to-beat assumption of their guilt. Mr. Cooper handles the case and its inherent elements of reasonable doubt with admirable and authoritative composure.