7. Hell

This is the story of the world’s most high-profile kidnap...of a horse. Welcome to Epsom, the year is 1981 and Shergar, a prized stallion, has just won the 202nd Derby by ten lengths - the longest winning margin in the race’s history. Owned by the Aga Khan, the millionaire community leader, the champion horse gained international prominence and was regarded as a national hero during a difficult period in Irish history. On a cold winter night in 1983, a group of armed men entered the Ballymany Stud in balaclavas and stole the stallion declaring: "We have come for Shergar. We want £2 million for him." The codeword for future negotiations was to be King Neptune. While the facts of this case have been widely reported, this series unpicks the theories about the disappearance. We’ll revisit all the bizarre events that took place after the kidnap, from psychics to horse skulls to negotiations led by English journalists. We unpick the police case and the comedy character leading it, trilby-wearing superintendent James Murphy and meet the sport’s journalist Derek “Tommo” Thompson who was flown to Belfast to negotiate the release. Using archives, news reports and new interviews, we go along on a ride that has some strange turns, oddball characters and juicy conspiracies. Almost 40 years on from his kidnap, we look back at a story that gripped the world to try and understand why the horse’s legacy still lives on. Told by the Texan tones of Vanilla Ice, we’ll reveal some of the strange theories that made this Irish story go global.