Best selling Hamnet author Maggie O'Farrell and the mystery of her chilling mountainside encounter with a sex attacker who tried to strangle her with binocular straps - and went on to murder a backpacker

By NICK CRAVEN, SENIOR REPORTER Published: 15:55, 30 May 2026 | Updated: 15:55, 30 May 2026 Award-winning novelist Maggie O'Farrell has moved and thrilled millions of readers with her books, especially Hamnet, the movie adaptation of which claimed Best Actress Oscar for Jessie Buckley this year. But perhaps less well-known is a darker episode in the writer's teenage years when she had a chillingly close encounter with a sex murderer on a lonely mountainside. As she put it: 'Death brushed past me on that path, so close that I could feel its touch.' In her 2017 memoir 'I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death', Ms O'Farrell, now 54, evoked the terror experienced by her younger self as she took a walk in the hills during a break from a job at a guesthouse. 'On the path ahead, stepping out from behind a boulder, a man appears,' she recalled. 'He straddles the narrow track with both booted feet and he smiles.' At one point the man looped the leather strap from his binoculars around her neck and she was convinced he was about to strangle her. What followed was a terrifying cat-and-mouse encounter in a remote landscape – a split-second confrontation between a predator and an 18-year-old girl who somehow sensed, instinctively, that one wrong move could cost her life, yet managed to evade his deadly grasp. According to her account in the book, she was horrified to discover a fortnight later that the same man had raped and murdered a young female backpacker from New Zealand nearby. Novelist Maggie O'Farrell wrote in her 2017 memoir 'I Am I Am I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death,' about a chilling encounter with a sex murderer on a lonely mountainside a teenager In the passage O'Farrell describes how as an 18 year old, she was walking along a footpath when a man emerged from behind some boulders and smiled at her. What followed was a terrifying cat and mouse chase where the author managed to escape his grasp Yet in the memoir, Ms O'Farrell admits she has never been able to find any trace of the murder years later on the internet. Crucially, she has never revealed exactly where it happened, and when approached by the Daily Mail this week, her agent replied: 'The location and specifics are deliberately disguised.' The Mail followed the few clues she left in the book, but found nothing that matched, though in the light of her agent's statement, it's impossible to know which elements were 'disguised'. Although we could find no case that matched the murder depicted in Ms O'Farrell's book, there was one startling case which shared some of its key features. We undertook archival searches of local and national newspapers in the UK and in New Zealand, and contacted that country's Foreign Affairs Dept, without finding any case that matched. But all our enquiries kept leading us back to the tragic death of British backpacker Monica Cantwell, 24 in November 1989. She was raped and murdered by her attacker on Mount Maunganui on New Zealand's North Island, making it almost a mirror image of the O'Farrell case, occurring on the other side of the world during the Antipodean Summer. Ms Cantwell, from Surrey, was also strangled and her body discovered three days after the murder. Her killer was found and served 30 years for the crime. Such was the rarity of the crime that the case has remained in the memories of locals, partly because the mountain, an extinct volcano, is regarded as a sacred site to the Maori, who call it Mauao. So could this be the case Ms O'Farrell was referring to in her passage? Her agent was tight-lipped, declining to respond to further questions. One feature of the memoir which was entirely absent from the Cantwell case is the role played by the binoculars. But yet another famous Kiwi murder that year did involve binoculars, our researchers found. Swedish tourists Sven Urban Höglin, 23, and his fiancée Heidi Birgitta Paakkonen, 21, disappeared during a hike on the Coromandel Peninsula. Police, residents and military conducted the largest land-based search ever undertaken in New Zealand. In the book O'Farrell says she reported the incident to police who didn't initally take her seriously - but then returned after the murder A suspect, David Tamihere, was tried and convicted in 1990 for the killings although the bodies had not then been discovered. One of the key pieces of evidence was that Tamihere had stolen the couple's possessions from their car, including a pair of binoculars. Heidi Paakkonen was thought to have been strangled, based on testimony given by a later-discredited cellmate of Tamihere's. Paakkonen's body has never been found and Tamihere has recently had his conviction quashed. Again, could Ms O'Farrell have borrowed elements of this case to help disguise her real-world ordeal? But there's nothing in the story to suggest a Southern Hemisphere location. Other clues in the text of Ms O'Farrell's book appear to point in various directions. For example, at one point, she refers to the valley as a 'Glen', a Scottish word she no doubt learned in her childhood which was spent in North Berwick, East Lothian, as well as Northern Ireland, Wales and Dublin. In another section she refers to a 'tarn', a word for lake used almost exclusively in northern England. Could this be part of her deliberate misdirection? She describes the boss of the guesthouse where she worked as an old hippie from the 'Haight-Ashbury' days, a reference to the flower power generation in 1960s San Francisco. Could the guesthouse have been in the United States? Then again, the guests described are British or European – another misdirection from the author? Ms O'Farrell's account mentions that the would-be assailant draws her attention to the eider ducks they can see through the binoculars. The eider is a Northern Hemisphere migratory bird found across North America, Northern Europe and Russia. More misdirection perhaps? Further complicating the question is what Ms O'Farrell has made public about her own life in writings elsewhere. She has, for example, written more than once about her spell living in Hong Kong after finishing university, where she waitressed, taught English and worked for a computer magazine. She spoke about how this was formative for her to The Guardian in 2005, saying: 'I spent a year in Hong Kong. I'd just left college after I'd flunked finals and had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I wanted to travel so I just got on a plane and flew to Hong Kong. Looking back I must have been nuts, but it worked out.' Nothing in the 'Neck' story suggests a Hong Kong setting – but if she had, say, had a summer job in North America or New Zealand, at 18, three years previous to the Hong Kong spell is it really conceivable that it would never have come up since? Ms O'Farrell says the second visit from detectives came after the same man a fortnight later raped and murdered a young female backpacker from New Zealand After her terrifying ordeal Ms O'Farrell went on to write the critically acclaimed Hamnet for which she accepted the BAFTA Outstanding British Film Award alongside Jessie Buckley Indeed in the same interview when asked about other long-haul travel she has done in her life she mentioned a three-month spell in South America in 2002-3. But nothing about working abroad at 18. Questions surrounding the chapter have certainly intrigued Ms O'Farrell's readers, some of whom have taken to Reddit to discuss their sleuthing efforts. One user wrote in 2019: 'I did a search, and can't find the case of the murdered New Zealand tourist, nor a serial killer who used binocular straps in 1990. 'Can anyone find any information to back up her claim… I also accept that this may not have actually happened as written.' Fourteen fellow users approved the post with a 'thumbs up' – suggesting they too struggled with finding correct information relating to the case. A Daily Mail journalist methodically used various combinations of search terms at the British Library to trawl through local and national newspapers between January 1989 and December 1992, but the murdered Kiwi backpacker appeared not to exist in the historic cuttings. There were many other sexually-motivated killings, but nothing that matched any of the details provided by Ms O'Farrell, from the nationality of the victim to the use of the binocular strap as a ligature. The encounter took place, we are told, when the author was 'just 18' which would place it in the summer of 1990. Restless, adventurous and desperate to escape the pressures of exams and family life, she had fled to work at what she describes as a 'holistic, alternative guesthouse' at the foot of a mountain. On the day in question, she recognised the man blocking the trail as someone she'd passed earlier and exchanged a brief hello with. Every instinct screamed danger. Yet remarkably, the terrified teenager forced herself to remain calm. 'It seems important not to show my fear, to play along,' she wrote. 'So I keep walking, keep putting one foot in front of the other.' 'Hello again,' the stranger said, but his eyes betrayed his intentions. 'It is a glance more assessing than lascivious, more calculating than lustful,' she recalled. 'It is the look of a man working something out, planning the logistics of a deed. 'I have to clear my throat to say, 'Hi.' Trying not to panic, she slipped past him on the narrow track, only to hear his footsteps close behind her seconds later. 'Lovely day,' he said, putting his arm at her shoulder in a seemingly friendly way. 'Yes,' she replied weakly, 'it is.' 'Very hot. I might go for a swim.' 'A swim,' she answered. 'That sounds nice.' 'He answers by putting his binocular strap around my neck.' At 18, alone on a mountainside, she said she instantly understood what was about to happen. What saved her life, she believes, was an extraordinary act of improvisation. 'So I played along with the birdwatching game. I knew that this was my only hope.' Feigning interest in birds she could barely see through the lenses, she ducked free of the strap. 'He came after me, of course he did, with that length of black leather, intending to lasso me again.' She somehow managed to keep walking to stay out of his grasp while convincing her attacker that she was expected back at the hotel and people would be waiting for her. She reported the man to the local police but wasn't taken seriously. However, she wrote, the true horror only emerged two weeks later when two detectives arrived at the guesthouse and asked asked her to describe the man she had encountered on the mountain. When she reached the part about the binocular strap, both detectives froze and made her repeat the detail. 'He killed someone,' she asked the officers quietly. 'Didn't he?' She described the victim as a 22-year-old backpacker from New Zealand travelling around Europe with her boyfriend. On the day of her death she hiked alone while her partner stayed behind feeling ill. 'She was raped, strangled, then buried in a shallow pit,' Ms O'Farrell wrote. 'She was found three days later, not far from the path where I had been walking.' She said that the murdered woman has haunted her ever since. 'She had light-coloured hair, held back in a band, a freckled face, a wide, guileless smile.' 'It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that I think about her, if not every day, then most days.' Even now, decades later, she said she wouldn't allow anyone to touch her neck and recoils instinctively from scarves, polo-necks and necklaces. After the Daily Mail researched the possible incident Ms O'Farrell was referring to, her agent said the author had deliberately disguised location and specifics to protect the victim's family from further distress Ms O'Farrell's next book, Land, due out on Tuesday (June 2) is eagerly awaited by fans and critics alike. It is described as 'a multi-generational epic that alternates between the west coast of Ireland during the Great Hunger in 1865 and locations as far as Canada and India.' It will be her 14th book in a stellar career which launched in 2000 with her debut novel, After You'd Gone. The author has admitted frequently weaving biographical details into her fiction. When approached by the Mail this week, Ms O'Farrell's agent said 'Maggie has no wish to cause further distress to anyone involved so would be very grateful if this could be left alone.' Of course her thoughtfulness in this regard is entirely understandable given her extraordinary proximity to the murder - but she seems to have disguised the victim so thoroughly that she is likely to remain unidentified forever. And nearly four decades on, the full mysterious background of her narrow escape on a mountain path is clearly not one she intends to share with readers. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. 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