David Yallop

David Anthony Yallop (27 January 1937 – 23 August 2018) was a British author who wrote chiefly about unsolved crimes. In the 1970s, he contributed scripts for a number of BBC comedy shows, including Minder. In the same decade he also wrote 10 episodes for the ITV court drama, Crown Court.

His controversial book, In God's Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (1984), posited that Pope John Paul I, found dead at age 65 in his chambers barely a month after becoming pope in 1978, had been poisoned by secretive Masons who had infiltrated the Vatican and the Vatican Bank. Reviewers, and the Church, dismissed the book as groundless conspiracy theory. The book made the New York Times Best Seller list for 15 weeks, was translated into multiple languages, and was repeatedly reprinted, selling over six million copies.In October 1992 he lost his job when, as a scriptwriter for EastEnders, he proposed killing some of the characters by means of an IRA bomb. Yallop successfully sued the BBC for breach of contract. He was also one of the co-authors of Graham Chapman's autobiography, A Liar's Autobiography (Volume VI).

Yallop described himself as a "Catholic agnostic".Yallop suffered from Alzheimer's disease in his later years. He died aged 81 in London on 23 August 2018, leaving a widow (his second wife, Anna Rutherford), three daughters, and a son. The cause of death was complications of pneumonia.