The Last Secret of Diana Dors

[Si Hunt]

One of my icons.



Diana Dors was adored by the British public. A star of the silver screen for nearly forty years, the woman once dubbed the 'English Marilyn Monroe' was a larger than life character who seemed to have it all fame, riches, beauty.

When she died in 1984 her estate was worth only 200,000, a seemingly small sum for someone who had been successful for so long, yet her eldest son, Mark Dawson, had reason to believe that there was a lot more money to be found. 18 months before her death, Diana had given her son an envelope containing a sheet of code. A code that she said would lead Dawson to a sum of 2,000,000 that she had hidden away in bank accounts and safety deposit boxes across Britain.

Diana Dors also told her son that her third husband, Alan Lake, had the key to the code but when he committed suicide just five months after Dors died, it looked as though the location of her millions would be lost for good.

Only now, 20 years later, has Mark Dawson begun to unravel the mystery of his mother's secret fortune.



Diana Dors was an avid fan of crosswords and used her interest in such puzzles to great effect when hiding her fortune. The sheet of paper that she gave her son, Mark, was written in her own hand and consisted of a top line of 17 symbols, followed by a series of groups of 5 letters set out in a table, 5 columns wide and twelve rows deep.

In attempting to crack the code, Mark consulted a member of the team that had broken the German Enigma code during the Second World War, who told him that that the key to the remaining code was most likely to be a memorable sentence or phrase chosen by his mother.

Mark also consulted Inforenz, a company specialising in encryption and codes to analyse the paper, as well as conducting his own research, which took him to the library of the Grand Lodge of England after he discovered that his grandfather had been a freemason.

It was in this library that Mark made the breakthrough that revealed what information the page held. Diana Dors had used two codes, one for the title of the page (the 17 symbol list) and another for the groups of 5 characters. Mark learned that the top line was encrypted using an old freemason code based upon a Tic-Tac-Toe board, and found that the symbols revealed the page title, "Locations and Names". However, the rest of the page appeared to use a completely different form of encryption.

Thankfully for Dawson, Inforenz had developed cryptography software that suggested a possible ten-letter key that might break the code. The key was DMARYFLUCK, a phrase immediately familiar to Mark, for his mother's real name had been Diana Mary Fluck.

When this key was used to decipher the code, it gave a list of names and locations across Britain. The first name matched that of a bank statement that had been found amongst Alan Lake's old papers, which in turn matched figures and dates listed in the 'little black books'.

Despite this confirmation, there is still insufficient detail with which to trace the money. It is possible that there may have been another sheet of paper that may have given bank details to match the names and locations but nobody knows what could have happened to such a paper and so the mystery goes on.

--

Intriguing hey? I had no idea she left behind such a mystery. I wonder if anyone will ever find the missing money?

Si.

[Andrew Curnow]

Gosh! That's fascinating. I do vividly remember being quite... not upset, but shocked, when she died.