Having previously said I wouldn't give consideration to motives in relaton to Gareth Williams' death, I would add this:
Murder aside, most of the theories currently abroad centre around his personal life when looking for reasons as to why he would get into a holdall but there is a very small, if apparently unlikely outside chance of an operational motive: in 2011, Spanish police arrested two men who had been involved in a series of robberies from the luggage of passengers travelling in a coach between Girona and Barcelona. One of the pair would hide inside a suitcase and be loaded into the hold of the coach, then emerge during the journey to raid the suitcases of other passengers, before returning to the suitcase in time for arrival in Barcelona. A bizarre MO to be sure but, then again, who would have imagined that SIS were using a spy rock in Moscow until it became news?
Otherwise, I fear that Gareth Williams deliberately intended to take his own life. The inquest has heard that he was a model employee who failed only one assessment in his career. It also heard that this failure caused him intense disappointment at the time, but that he took the course again and passed showing huge improvement.
The inquest has also heard from another witness that he failed his initial training course for secondment to SIS in 2007. So, given that he only failed one assessment in his career, it seems clear that this was the assessment he failed. It seems, therefore that GW was extremely keen to achieve the move from Cheltenham to London.
And taking the evidence of his former landlady Jennifer Elliot into account regarding the 'escapology' incident in 2007, the question is raised over whether the two events are related. The suggestion would be that, rather than seeking a move to London, GW was seeking a move away from Cheltenham, perhaps as a result of embarrassment over the incident at Elliot's house. From other witnesses, it certainly seemed that GW was much happier at GCHQ than SIS.
Moving on to 2010 and Helen Yelland's call to police to report GW missing - she mentioned that he had been "pulled from a job and wasn't sure how he'd taken it". When questioned as to where she got the information, she was unclear, but the suggestion is that, contrary to previous claims in the press GW may have been leaving SIS 'under a cloud' and was not as keen to return to Cheltenham as has been said.
Ultimately, though, if Gareth Williams did get into the bag himself, his motivation may never be known for certain. From his school days onward, he was widely regarded as a genius and perhaps, after ten years of solving puzzles he decided to set one that the rest of us can only imagine we might one day understand.
Certainly, this is one 'circus' trick that will not be forgotten in a hurry.
UPDATE
It's a good while since I posted on this and, reading back through, I
find myself slightly surprised at some of my own conclusions. Bearing
in mind the area in which he was known to have been working and having
since looked at the background and family connections of some of the people with whom he was
known to associate towards the end of his life, I would say "all bets
are off" as to the cause of his death, which now seems equally likely to
have been the result of a "work related injury" - an injury that prematurely ended a (very) long game aimed at infiltrating a major international money-laundering organisation.
I'm not sure that injurylawyers4u.com would have much joy pursuing this one in court though.
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