Patrick Radden Keefe

I think that there is a reality here, which is that the Metropolitan Police has had decades of cutbacks.

I think there's another aspect of this, which is that Zach died just in advance of COVID and the COVID pandemic hit, which I don't think you can blame everything on, but I do think it was a factor.

I think that there is a kind of...

pattern recognition that people in a big, busy police force do where they have certain boxes that they can put things in.

And at the point where they realized that they weren't dealing with a kind of cut-and-dried murder, that it might be something a little bit more exotic, I think that they sort of lost interest because it would require just too much work for too uncertain a prosecutorial outcome.

And then the last bit of this...

Over the decades, there was a kind of learned behavior on the part of the Metropolitan Police, a kind of passivity, a sort of a sense that when you see something that has the whiff of international intrigue, you kind of studiously look in the other direction.

And the thing about Zach's death is it really did seem that way.

It turns out he's this boy who was pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch.

He had actually pulled this thing off.

And then Zach goes off the balcony.

Gravity is often a factor in these mysterious deaths.

You often have people falling in one way or another.

And so I think that there was a kind of...

just a sort of institutional reluctance to say, all right, let's really get to the bottom of this thing.

And, you know, the reason I know that is, I should say, the Met Police didn't cooperate with my investigation.

They wouldn't really talk to me for the article.

They didn't talk to me for the book.

They didn't respond to fact-checking queries.

At all.