Sergeant_Pluck said:
I find it faintly amusing that anyone would consider the locking-himself-in theory in the first place. Someone killed him, stuck him in the bag as a means to transport the body with relative lack of suspicion (presumably a rolled-up carpet wasn't available)...
I've wondered, thinking about this possibility, if rather than being disturbed the alleged perpetrator had simply underestimated the weight of a human body and had to give up on the idea.
I have no idea what Gareth Williams actually weighed, but my impression is that he was a relatively slight figure. However, even a relatively lightweight male of 10 stone (63 kilos-ish) is still going to weigh in at the equivalent of two and a half big bags of plaster. I'm pretty handy, and I regularly have to lug around 25kg bags of plaster: I could pick up two and a half of those bags without a problem, but I'm not sure I'd want to walk very far with them.
To put this in another perspective, a fully laden British Army bergen on operation might be somewhere around the 100lb mark (roughly...I think - the average non-operational is considerably less than this), and 100lbs (45 and a bit kilos) is considerably lower than my guess for Williams. (Apologies for mixing my weights and measures - I tend to think automatically in a mix of both, and find it difficult to chuck the habit).
And, as for two people sharing the load: well, seems to me that you might as well wear a sandwich board with, THERE'S SOMETHING VERY, VERY MOODY ABOUT WHAT'S GOING ON HERE, written on it.
Strikes me that another factor which appears to have been obscured by the arguments about a live individual voluntarily entering such a confined space is that dead bodies are themselves notoriously unwieldy and uncooperative - I wouldn't mind betting a bag of toffees that trying to stuff one inside a bag which is only just big enough for the volume of freight involved is not exactly a cakewalk either.
Bigfoot73 said:
...It's only a holdall and you might think somebody in imminent danger of suffocation would have been able to struggle forcefully enough to maybe break the stitching somewhere and rip it apart from the inside out. Williams was a cyclist, surely he would have had strong enough legs?...
No, I really don't think this would be the case. If the North Face Base Camp duffel shown in all the pictures is the type used, then it's tough bit of kit; a double-stitched seam with bar-tacking and webbing reinforcement isn't going to be easy to split at the seams without some sort of hardwear - however desparate you are - and the ballistic nylon they are made from is developed from an original design for flak-jackets, so it's not going to tear without very considerable force. (I've got one, but I'm not about to test my hypotheses as I'm much too big, and the bag was much too expenseive.)
I'm not entirely sure why there's so little interest in what seems to me to be the entirely feasible third route to this in the possibility that the Intelligence services became involved in this after the fact, but before the police became involved.
In this scenario Williams employees discover he's dead and deliberately delay the official discovery until they've carried out their own investigation into his death and whether it was in any way linked to his work, and/or had in any way compromised that work. I can quite imagine that they would not be happy with the peelers charging all over the place until they'd carried out their own investigation - and I can also imagine that there's no love lost between the two groups. The advantage of this explanation is that it discards any need to explain why an apparently omniscient intelligence service managed to so royally bugger up the removal of the body (namely, because they hadn't actually tried to remove it), while at the same time explaining why there may be signs of an apparently professional involvement in the scene of crime - it would also accommodate many of the other anomalies, including the time lag between his non-appearance at work and the start of the official investigation.
(And yes, a lot of conjecture - like most everything else that's been written subject.)
Edit for typo.