Maid May Have Stumbled Onto Murder Scene

A maid working for a British family of five who died mysteriously said she may have stumbled onto a murder scene the morning after authorities believe the man of the house fatally shot his wife and children.

The maid, who identified herself only as Paula, said in a report published Thursday that she arrived at work on Nov. 2 only to find the family’s luxury rental home in Rancho Santa Fe unusually quiet.

Normally, 46-year-old Ian Stuart Spiro, an international commodities broker from London, would be dressed and busy making coffee or bagging the children’s lunches, according to the maid.

She said Spiro, dressed in a bathrobe and looking disheveled, told her there was no work for her and that he would drive her back to her home in a migrant camp.

She said she asked why she couldn’t work that day and that he replied: “Because my wife and kids are not here.”

The maid said she never saw any bodies. But investigators believe that on the morning Paula was there Spiro’s 40-year-old wife, Gail, daughters, Sara, 16, and Dina, 11, and son Adam, 14, were, in fact, at home--dead in their beds.

Authorities say the four were killed late Nov. 1 or early Nov. 2. Their bodies were found Nov. 5. All had been shot in the head.

Ian Spiro’s body was found days later inside his vehicle in the remote Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The Blade-Citizen of Oceanside and the San Diego Union-Tribune have reported that traces of the deadly drug cyanide were found in the vehicle.

Investigators suspect that Spiro killed his wife and children and then committed suicide.

According to the maid, before Spiro drove her home, he changed his clothes, putting on a green, short-sleeved shirt and blue jogging pants. Detectives said Spiro was wearing those clothes when he was found dead.

When Spiro dropped the maid off at the migrant camp, he said: “I’m sorry. I have problems,” she quoted him as saying.

After a memorial service for the family Wednesday at the St. James-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in La Jolla, Gail Spiro’s brother, Ken Quarton, told reporters that he believed that all of the family members, including Ian Spiro, were murdered.

Quarton said he believed the deaths were linked to threatening telephone calls that Ian Spiro said he was receiving less than a week before the deaths.

Quarton quoted Spiro as saying: “Something has come back to haunt me, and if you want to know what it is, read the book by Terry Waite.”

Spiro would have been referring to a book being written by former Anglican Church envoy Terry Waite, who worked to release Western hostages held in Lebanon before he, himself, was taken captive in 1987. Waite was released in 1991.

The Spiro deaths prompted speculation in the British press that Spiro might have been the target of terrorists from the Middle East. London newspapers have reported that Spiro worked for the CIA and British intelligence in Lebanon in the 1980s and assisted Oliver North and Waite in attempts to free hostages.

“In that book, it made it sound as if he worked for the CIA,” Quarton said. “Terry Waite must be having a lot of trouble with his conscience.”

In a statement prompted by questions over the death of the Spiros, Waite said he had met with “hundreds of people prior to my first face-to-face meeting with the kidnapers in Beirut.”

“Many contacts preferred to remain anonymous. Most adopted a false identity. Some were helpful. The vast majority were not.”

Quarton said the bodies of his sister and the children probably would be buried in a small village churchyard in Cumbria, England, a mountain community on the border of Scotland. It is the wish of Spiro’s mother that her son be cremated, he said.