William Mackinnon Gray | The Spy Turned Wife Killer

William MacKinnon Gray was born on the 28th of January 1902 in Bayswater, London.

His father shared his name.

His mother was Elizabeth Paul Munro.

Gray later described his father as a heavy drinker, though he insisted he was never mistreated as a child.

He joined the British Army in 1923.

He married for the first time in July 1926 in Colchester to Edith Barbara Stevenson who came from a town called Beverley in Yorkshire.

Army postings sent the couple to Egypt for eight years and it was there that Grey picked up a case of malaria that would keep coming back roughly once a year for the rest of his life.

Their son, also William, was born in 1931 and the family later lived in Istanbul.

The marriage ended in 1936.

Edith had learned Grey was having an affair with a woman named Frieda Candler and the two were discovered together at a hotel in London.

By then, Grey had a second career, but it never came up in the divorce proceedings.

William Gray joined Britain's secret intelligence service in 1932.

There was no formal training track for new officers in that era.

He learned his craft on the ground in Istanbul, the way most SIS recruits did, then moved on to Jerusalem as an assistant.

In 1935 he got his own posting, head of station in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Just like every head of that station going back to 1920, he worked undercover as a passport control officer.

Diplomatic immunity came with a job.

So did the real work behind it, watching Bulgaria's communists and passing what he learned back to London.

Questions began circulating in early 1937 about how Grey was paying his agents.

MI6 sent Charles Limpenny, the man Gray had replaced in Sophia, to investigate.

He found no evidence of theft, just careless, sloppy bookkeeping.

The kind that let money go missing without anyone able to say exactly where.

Officially, any local spending needed sign-off from London first, a rule Gray had stopped bothering with.

In practice, station cash sat in Grey's own account before moving on to one held offshore and whenever agents needed paying in local currency, it fell to a junior staffer's wife to source it, usually off Sophia's Black Market, known locally as the Black Bourse.

By September, Grey was gone.