GREAT BRITAIN: A Mummy in the Closet

Nobody relishes a good murder trial more than the British public, and British murderers have responded by exhibiting a gory ingenuity that few practitioners of other nationalities can match. One 1949 classic that gripped all Britain involved a man who did in nine people over a period of years, pausing each time to sip a wineglass of warm blood before dissolving the body in a vat of sulphuric acid. Another British murderer, convicted in 1953, consummated his frequent love affairs by strangling his partners and hanging their bodies behind the kitchen wall.

Last week newspaper readers hung over every detail of a new thriller that promised to follow the classic tradition. Its setting was the town of Rhyl, a drab Welsh working-class seaside resort. There, one rainy day last May, 29-year-old Leslie Harvey, taxi driver, decided to clean out an old, locked closet on the upstairs landing in the shabby boardinghouse on West Kinmel Street owned by his mother, Mrs. Sarah Jane Harvey, 65. She had been under treatment for a cancerous stomach tumor, and he planned to have the house spruced up as a surprise for her when she got back from the hospital. Forcing the bolt of the closet, he opened the door and fell back in horror. Huddled on the floor at his feet, under thick layers of cobwebs and dust, was the shriveled body of a woman, partly covered with a moth-eaten blanket and the decayed remnants of a blue dressing gown. The skull was bare of hair, the eye sockets were hollow, and the skin was parched to the color of dark leather and hard as rock. Beside the body lay an empty bottle of disinfectant.

Grooves on the Neck. An unidentified mummy clearly was too much for Rhyl’s local police force, and the call went out for expert help. The Home Office sent Pathologist Dr. Gerald Evans and Biologist Dr. Alan Clift. Entomologists studied the dead moths and flies found in the closet. Also enlisted was a London University Egyptologist who was a specialist on ancient mummies. For weeks the experts studied their find. Unwrapping and comparing a 2,500-year-old mummy from Liverpool University, they measured the shrinkage of the bones to determine that the woman had died two decades ago, probably in 1940. Police missing-persons files helped establish her identity: a Mrs. Frances Knight, who was last seen in March 1940. Mrs. Knight was then 56, and known to be ailing.

Discarding one theory after another, the experts finally were forced to the conclusion that no chemical had been used to induce mummification; rather, by a “freak of chance,” warm air from below the floor, flowing through cracks in the door and out a trap door at the top of the closet, had stopped the normal decay of flesh a few days after death. What was the cause of death? Looking close, Dr. Evans spotted traces of fabric embedded in grooves around the neck. It was the remnant of a length of woman’s stocking. At its end was a reef knot, twisted tightly.

The Word of the Clerk. But there were still no clues to the “killer” or the motive. Then the police traced Mrs. Knight’s former husband to a town in Sussex. He had not seen his wife in 24 years, he said, but grumbled that nevertheless he was still paying her £2 ($5.60) a week in support money via the clerk of the magistrates’ court in Rhyl. Quite right, confirmed the clerk; since 1940 he had handled $5,877 on her behalf. But, he added, for many years the person who had come to pick it up was not the invalid Frances Knight, but her landlady, Sarah Jane Harvey. Almost every week for 20 years, said the clerk. Mrs. Harvey was asked: “How is Mrs. Knight?” The usual answer: “About the same.” When the money was late, she protested that Mrs. Knight would “play hell,” and sometimes at Christmas Mrs. Harvey would say that Mrs. Knight was demanding payment in advance. Last June, Mrs. Harvey was arrested.

On trial for her life last week, shriveled Sarah Harvey sat impassively beside her nurse, collapsing into sobs only when her son took the stand. But she stuck to her story that Mrs. Knight had been taken suddenly ill one night and died in agony before she could summon a doctor. In panic, said Mrs. Harvey, she had dragged the corpse into the closet; she had collected the money only because she feared she would be accused of murder if the death were discovered. The prosecution’s case hung like a thread on the ligature around the mummy’s neck.

Stretching a Point. For five hours Mrs. Harvey’s attorney, huge (238 Ibs.) Andrew Rankin, 36, hammered at the calm, moderate Dr. Evans. Suppose, he asked, that the stocking found around Mrs. Knight’s throat had not been stretched. Would the cause of death be certain? “No,” replied the scientist. Then Rankin moved in on Witness Clift, the government biologist who had rashly admitted that he was an “expert on stocking strangulation cases.” “Did you ever ask if that stocking had been stretched?” he thundered. With a sigh. Dr. Clift replied that he had not. Had the stocking really looked like a rope, as Clift had testified? Clift paused, then admitted: “It was not twisted as a rope is twisted, but it reminded me of rope.” Snapped Rankin: “And you call yourself an expert?” With that, Clift fainted dead away on the witness stand. The government’s case collapsed with him. After the adjournment, Britain’s embarrassed Solicitor General, Sir Jocelyn Simon, rose with a prosecutor’s motion that the murder charge be quashed. “I agree entirely,” said the judge, Mr. Justice Edmund Davies.

But Sarah Harvey’s troubles were not over, for there was still the fraud charge to be dealt with. “It is quite impossible to shut one’s eyes to the fact that during the whole intervening period of those charges, you have been obtaining £2 week by week,” the judge said sternly to Mrs. Harvey. “In effect you have swindled Mr. Knight of something like £2,000 . . . You will go to prison for 15 months.”