The Real Murder on Mustique by Rick Klepfer
Anne Glenconner recently published a novel titled “Murder on Mustique,” in which a fictitious socialite is murdered on the tiny Caribbean island of Mustique. While the murder in Glenconner’s book is a made-up tale, the island is an actual place and is indeed occupied by rich and/or famous folks. A brutal murder did take place there in the late 1990s but it has never been solved. Having lived on Mustique at that time, I had a front-row seat to those curious events. Mustique prides itself on the creation of an exclusive closed society where people with a lot of money can go with little chance of being bothered by paparazzi or having to maintain their publicfacing image. Many of these people have been regular features in the magazines that you might page
through while waiting in grocery store checkout lines, but there are many more denizens of Mustique that are the behind-the-scenes type of rich people ~ the “quietly wealthy.” Luminaries such as Mick Jagger, Princess Margaret and David Bowie have all maintained villas on the island and enjoyed relative anonymity there. Tommy Hilfiger has built a massive residence there, and other people, less known to Americans, such as David Linley, Lord Litchfield and my friend the late Sir Rodney Touche, have been regular inhabitants of the place. It’s not particularly easy to get to Mustique. While a few yachtsmen show up there each season to spend a few days in the rolling and unprotected anchorage at Britannia Bay, most visitors come by air. Many
The diminutive island of Mustique from the air. 61
