Monica Coghlan, the Tiny Hooker with the Big Trick

The story broke?as this kind of Peck's bad boy story invariably seems to break?in the tabloids. A bleary photograph of a man handing an envelope to a woman stared out from the pages of the Oct. 26, 1986, issue of Britain's News of the World. The man: Michael Stacpoole, spin doctor for then 46-year-old Conservative Party deputy chairman and multimillionaire novelist Jeffrey Archer. The woman: Monica Coghlan, a tiny but well-proportioned 35-year-old prostitute. The setting: platform 3 of London's Victoria Station. The envelope's contents: £2000 ($3200) in £50 bills.

The transaction had taken place two days earlier when, wired with a pair of microphones and trailed by half a dozen sting-seeking News of the World reporters-photographers, Coghlan gratefully accepted Stacpoole's offering. In that same Oct. 26 issue the paper thundered that Coghlan was "at the centre of politically sensational claims involving Archer which he strongly denies." Archer, the News of the World attested, had used Stacpoole as a liaison, directing him to pay Coghlan the cash with the understanding that she would use it to leave the United Kingdom. While not denying that particular charge, and while granting that his action constituted a "lack of judgment," the Tory high muck-amuck, former member of Parliament and author of a clutch of bestselling, mass-market thrillers?First Among Equals, A Matter of Honor and Kane & Abel, among others?hastened to point out that the money was intended to aid Coghlan, whom he characterized as a down-on-her-luck damsel in distress, to flee a persistent pack of baying reporters. And yet damage control required an act of contrition: Archer fell on his sword, resigning his post as party deputy chairman.

Within a week a bolder and more brazen Daily Star alleged that Archer had, in fact, been Coghlan's client. Fleshing out suspicions raised in the News expose, the Star contended that late on the night of Sept. 9, 1986, Archer and Coghlan had met in a central London area long renowned for its sex trade, and, after coming to an agreement, the pair repaired to room 6A on the second floor of the Albion Hotel. According to the Star, £70 ($112) changed hands. Infuriated, Archer hit back hard and fast, adamantly denying the Star's charges, while suing the paper and its editor Lloyd Turner for libel.

But in May 1987 as the principals?Coghlan, Turner, Archer and his wife Mary, an ex-Cambridge professor?prepared to convene for a jury trial at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, the Daily Star revealed that it had made a slight mistake: the sexcapades actually had transpired on Sept. 8, not the 9th, as originally reported. Representing Archer: Robert Alexander. Representing the Star: Michael Hill. Presiding over the proceedings: Justice Bernard Caulfield. (Conspicuously absent was Archer aide-de-camp Stacpoole.) For three weeks in July, titillating testimony, including conversations between Coghlan and Archer secretly taped by the News of the World, rocked the courthouse, accompanied by buckets of tears cried by both the prostitute and the wife.

Speaking from the witness box, the diminutive Coghlan, a mere 4 feet, 11 inches tall, pointed out Archer, sitting in the front of the courtroom with his wife, as the man who 10 months earlier had paid her £70 for sex: 50 up front, 20 afterward.

"I had no difficulty seeing his face," she testified. "I was lying on top of him the whole time. He commented on how lovely I was. He was quite surprised by my nipples. It was over very quickly?about 10 minutes, what with getting undressed and the actual sex. Because it was over so quickly, I suggested that he relax for a while and he could try again.

"I lit a cigarette and I laid down on the bed with him. I asked him what he did for a living. He said, 'I sell cars,' and he had no sooner said that than he jumped off the bed and said he should go and move his car."

For his part Archer insisted that nothing of the sort had occurred, maintaining that he had spent the evening of Sept. 8 dining with Richard Cohen, his literary agent, and Cohen's wife, at London's posh Le Caprice restaurant, a mile from the Albion. When that couple departed at 10:30 p.m., Archer ran into his film and television agent Terence Baker at the restaurant's bar. They chatted until Archer obligingly gave Baker a lift home around 12:45 a.m., then drove on to his own apartment, a separate residence from the home he shared with his wife, where he went to bed?alone.

"Did you at any time that evening pick up any girl or prostitute?" his attorney queried. "Did you go to the Albion Hotel?"

Archer: "No sir, I did not."

Cross-examining Archer, Hill elaborated a different scenario. After recounting the preliminaries, he asserted, "She [Coghlan] told you that for an extra £20 you could take your time. Then you paid her the extra £20."

Archer: "No sir."

Archer also related how, two weeks after the supposed sexual encounter, Coghlan had phoned him in apparent distress, claiming that one of her clients, a lawyer, had spotted them together that night at the Albion and was now urging her to go to the tabloids with her story. Archer professed "initial surprise and disbelief," but nevertheless consented to give her £2000. "I was worried obviously that anyone could be going round telling lies," he testified. "But I did not take that seriously. I knew it was not true." While he readily admitted that the payment was "clearly a very foolish thing to do," he also stressed that it was not hush money; rather, the cash was meant to help Coghlan escape the press by leaving the country.

More susceptible to emotional outbursts than her alleged client, Coghlan wept repeatedly during her 16 hours of testimony, especially when attorney Alexander, in an effort to undermine her credibility, homed in on her professional life during cross-examination. He coaxed Coghlan to acknowledge that she'd slept with "many thousands of men" while earning "hundreds and thousands of pounds"; that she had paid no income tax while still collecting government benefits; and that the News of the World had rewarded her with £6000 (nearly $10,000) for her Archer story. But when pushed past her breaking point by Alexander, she lashed out at him and Archer, screaming through tears, "You're a liar. He's a liar and he knows it. He's even putting his wife through it. I've got nothing, he's got money. I can't even go back to work."

Regarding that "work," she unapologetically told the court, "I enjoy my job. As long as the men are all right with me, I'm all right with them." And when asked if some of those men were in search of kinky sex in anonymous hotel rooms, she parried, "What's wrong with that? Half the time it keeps marriages together."

On trial, too, after a fashion, was the Archers' marriage, portrayed by the couple as rock-solid. A sobbing Mary Archer stood by her man during her testimony, dismissing the whole Coghlan brouhaha as innately absurd: "Anyone who knows Jeffrey would know that far from him accosting a prostitute, if one accosted him, he would run several miles." Overcome by tears, she was assisted from the witness box. Later, though, she was recalled to refute a crucial detail: Coghlan had described the skin on Archer's back as spotted; Mary pooh-poohed this assessment, noting that, in fact, her husband possessed "excellent skin," his back unblemished.

Wrapping up the proceedings, Justice Caulfield advised the eight-man four-woman jury that it had to weigh Archer's word against that of a prostitute who, while perhaps deserving of "a great deal of pity," nonetheless had resorted to "guile and cunning" while in cahoots with the News of the World. Additionally, the judge deemed Archer "worthy and healthy and sporting," wondering aloud whether Archer was the kind of man who sought "cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice." Finally, in a bizarre and florid genuflection to Mrs. Archer, Caulfield reminded the jury that their "vision of Mary in the witness box would never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance?" More than four hours later the jury returned its verdict: judgment on behalf of Archer, declaring that the Daily Star must pay the novelist-politician £500,000 ($800,000) in damages, a record settlement back then. The court promptly tacked on £700,000 in costs, bringing the paper's total losses to £1.2 million ($1.86 million). Archer declared victory. Coghlan skulked home.

Born May 3, 1951, in Rochdale, just north of Manchester, the sixth of seven children, Monica Coghlan dropped out of school at 15 and left home. A violent and unwanted sexual attack followed not long afterward. She took a job as a hatcheck girl at a local cabaret, where men often propositioned her, and soon succumbed to the allure of prostitution's easy money at 17, first working the greater Manchester area as "Debbie," then switching to London after numerous arrests for soliciting back home. Her scrapes with the law also included convictions for marijuana possession and shoplifting, and she did two brief stints in prison. Throughout, Coghlan concealed her occupation from her family, telling them she worked in real estate.

Pregnancy induced her to retire from the demimonde, and she settled into in a Rochdale bungalow to raise her son, Robin, born in 1985. But when her partner died unexpectedly, she explained later, she returned to prostitution part-time "to secure the boy's future." Caring for the toddler during the week, she then dropped him with friends or relatives on weekends, commuting by train between home and London. There, one night in September 1986, she supposedly rendered services for Jeffrey Archer.

The resulting screaming headlines shocked her relatives. "We have to accept that this was her profession, but I am not going to condemn her," her brother Tommy observed at the time. "I am not making moral judgments about her. As far as I'm concerned I know her as a good sister to me and a great mother to her son. She adores her little boy and she is a good member of the family."

After the trial Coghlan made one last splash, cashing in on her notoriety by posing topless for a newspaper for £5400 ($8370). Then she quietly went about rebuilding her life in Rochdale?raising Robin, attending an aerobics class, swimming, and eking out enough money as a bingo caller to buy a small terraced house.

Suddenly, though, in November 1999 the public glare returned unbidden. Archer?now Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare after being named a peer in 1992?stood on the cusp of a remarkable political resurrection, leading in the polls as the Conservative Party candidate for mayor of London. With the mainstream papers hailing him as Lord Archer of Rebound, the tabloids struck again. In mid-November the News of the World published a scalding account that cast the Coghlan affair in an entirely new light. According to former Archer chum Ted Francis, a tv producer, early in 1987, in preparation for the libel trial, Archer had asked him to provide an alibi for Archer's activities on the night of Sept. 9, 1986?at that time the evening that the Daily Star claimed Archer hooked up with Coghlan. Francis complied, writing, as requested, to Archer's lawyers that he and Archer had dined together on that date at an Italian restaurant, Sambuca. That was a lie, Francis now swore.

Confronted face to face by the News of the World with irrefutable evidence (taped discussions between Archer and Francis), the deflated baron corroborated the story, explaining that he'd engineered the deception to cover up yet another indiscretion: on Sept. 9 he actually was dining with a woman?not the fragrant Mary Archer, not the nippled Monica Coghlan, but his assistant Andrina Colquhoun, with whom, he eventually admitted, he'd engaged in an affair. The Conservative Party reacted swiftly, and, despite Archer's protestations that he could tough out the imbroglio and still win the election, the Tories yanked the plug on his campaign.

There was more. Not only had Archer asked Francis to lie on his behalf, but allegedly Archer also instructed his secretary to compile a fake appointment book, thereby authenticating the dinner date with Francis. This he turned over to his attorneys for use in the trial. Weirdly, Francis' letter and the appointment log were never introduced as evidence because the Star altered the date of the alleged Coghlan liaison to Sept. 8.

A pile-on ensued. Before the end of November 1999, ex-p.r. consultant and Victoria Station bag man Michael Stacpoole resurfaced, and he, too, was talking: Archer had paid him £40,000 ($62,000) in hush money, Stacpoole claimed, to vanish before the trial. "In effect he was paying me to keep my mouth shut?perverting the course of justice is what it is," the former fixer confessed to the Mail on Sunday. Stacpoole took the cash, relocating first to Paris, then Thailand. "If I'd have been asked under oath if Archer was a faithful husband," he added, "I would have had to confirm he was not because of his affairs with other women."

Still reeling, his political career in flames, Archer suffered another staggering blow. In late November the English press quoted Nick Elliott, a tv executive, as saying that, before the 1991 death of Terence Baker, Archer's former television and film agent?the man who during the 1987 trial provided the key alibi for Archer's whereabouts late on the night of Sept. 8?Baker had confided to him that the tale of the ride home from Le Caprice was a complete fabrication. Baker had lied under oath at Archer's behest, Elliott asserted. Scotland Yard launched an immediate investigation.

Lord Archer's abrupt demise?denounced by two old buddies, incriminated through a second party by his deceased theatrical agent?roped a reluctant Coghlan back into the miasma. Most disturbingly, the revelations clued in her son Robin, then 15, to his mother's former infamy. Seems he hadn't the foggiest. Watching tv as he did his homework, Robin paid scant attention when it was announced that Lord Archer had withdrawn from the race for mayor of London, but what followed riveted him to the screen: pictures of his mom?a hooker and disgraced liar, national scandal, the whole sordid affair. "I wanted to tell him, of course I did," Coghlan noted shortly thereafter. "He needed to know. But not then. Not like that."

In September 2000, 60-year-old Lord Archer of Rebound was hauled before the authorities and charged with two counts of perverting the course of justice, two counts of perjury and one of using a "false instrument" (the supposedly bogus appointment book). His trial opened this past Tuesday, May 15. Monica Coghlan will not testify.

Late on the afternoon of April 26, while driving her Ford Fiesta outside Huddersfield, northeast of Manchester, Coghlan was involved in a spectacular head-on crash with a speeding Jaguar. Police allege that the man behind the wheel of the Jag, 32-year-old Gary Day, had just robbed a nearby pharmacy of a trio of controlled drugs, and then, in rapid succession, commandeered a Peugeot taxi while brandishing a handgun, smashed that vehicle into a parked Land Rover and, finally, hijacked the Jaguar from a motorist who had stopped to lend assistance. Day barely had driven 500 yards when he collided with Coghlan's car.

Firemen cut through the roof of the mangled Fiesta to free Coghlan, who lay trapped inside for an hour. A helicopter then transported her to a hospital in Leeds, where she died of her injuries the following day, less than a week before her 50th birthday. Day has since been charged with manslaughter, robbery, theft and firearms violations.

A year and a half ago, Coghlan, bitter after being unwillingly dragged back into the news when Archer's fortunes swerved severely south, drew the peer into her sights when quizzed by an all-ears English press. "Jeffrey Archer took everything away from me," she lamented. "I lost my home, my dignity, my self-respect, and any hope of a future. While I was scrimping and scraping, he was clawing his way back to power and lording it up in his manor house. It just wasn't fair, simple as that. I have never denied what I was. I was a prostitute."