Murder conviction without a body
George Cecil Horry, who was born 111 years ago on this day, was a career criminal, conman, thief and ultimately a murderer.
He arrived in New Zealand with his English parents in 1921 and by the end of 1923 had been convicted of more than 20 charges, including assault, breaking and entering and theft, according to his biography in the encyclopaedia Te Ara.
On October 30, 1935, Horry married Evelyn Edna Bates in Auckland. She knew him as George Horace Collver, a steel manufacturer. They moved to Sydney, and by December, Horry had been sentenced to three years’ detention for passing bad cheques. He was released in May 1938 and deported to New Zealand.
He was immediately arrested for earlier New Zealand crimes and sent away for six months. Freed again, he was arrested for entering a house and ‘‘demanding money by menaces’’. This charge is still on the books and was last year described by a New Zealand judge as: ‘‘Give me the money or I will beat you up.’’
Horry got three more years in the pen and was declared a ‘‘habitual criminal’’. This law allowed courts to detain prisoners after their sentences had been served, a sort of three-strikes law passed in 1906.
During this latest stint in gaol, the marriage to Bates was dissolved.
By 1942, Horry was out of prison and not interested in fighting the war. Instead, he met 37-year-old Eileen Jones, who was divorced and owned her own home in Ponsonby, Auckland. In those days, Ponsonby was a modest neighbourhood. Jones was comfortable but not wealthy.
Nonetheless, this is where Horry’s role in legal history begins. He told Eileen that his name was George Arthur Turner. He claimed to be the son of a titled, wealthy English manufacturer, according to the Te Ara author, Brian Stephenson.
He also let it be known that he was in New Zealand on something hush-hush having to do with the war.
She apparently fell for this bluster. On the morning of July 11, 1942, Eileen effectively signed over to Horry the proceeds of her sold home and all of her savings – about £1000 total. They married that afternoon.
The next day, the pair visited a friend in Titirangi and Eileen was never seen again.
The newlyweds were supposedly travelling to England.
Instead, five months later, in December 1942, Horry used his real name to marry Eunice Marcel Geale, also in Auckland.
About a week after that, Horry visited Eileen’s parents. He had a tale: They’d been crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the Empress of India when the ship was attacked by a German U boat. Their daughter Eileen was killed. Horry, calling himself Turner, had barely survived.
Presumably distraught, the parents called the police.
Enter a senior police detective named Bill Fell. He soon unravelled the Horry-Turner fraud. He also figured out that letters from Eileen to her parents from Sydney had been forged by Horry and elaborately routed through accomplices in Australia to give them authentic postmarks. Even the Empress of India didn’t exist.
Evidence was mounting but Fell didn’t have confession or a body. There was apparently a rule of thumb in English common law that held, ‘‘No body, no murder’’.
This rule was said to date to the 1660s and the Campden Wonder case. An Englishman had vanished and three people were hanged for his murder. A few years later, the victim sauntered back into town, clearly not dead.
Led by Fell, police mounted various expeditions into the Waitakere Ranges looking for Eileen’s body. It has never been found.
Years passed and Fell’s witnesses, including Eileen’s parents, were getting old.
Fell conferred with Crown solicitors and they agreed to attempt a murder trial even without a confession or Eileen’s body. They had enough circumstantial evidence. Horry was arrested in June 1951.
At trial, Horry’s lawyer made much of the missing body. It was unreasonable to conclude Eileen was dead, let alone killed by her husband, he told the jury.
Horry’s story was that Eileen wanted to disappear for reasons of her own. Horry helped and got all of her money in return.
The jury convicted him of murder and he appealed.
In 1952, the NZ Court of Appeal upheld the conviction, ruling in the formal legal language of the day, that ‘‘the circumstantial evidence [was] so cogent and compelling as to convince a jury that upon no rational hypothesis other than murder can the facts be accounted for’’.
Those principles were soon used by other courts. In People v Scott, a California court in 1960 quoted the Horry decision to find that Scott had murdered his common law wife and hidden her body.
In the UK, Michail Onufrejczyk was convicted of murdering a fellow Pole in 1953. Again, there was no body and no confession. But there were almost 2000 human blood splatters in the house. The case is also known as an early example of forensic science in court.
There was also an earlier case in the UK, known as the Porthole Murder. In 1948, James Camb was convicted of murder after he pushed his victim’s body out of ship window while on the high seas off Africa.
Judges and juries in these cases had to overcome the ‘‘no body, no murder’’ problem. They did so because it couldn’t be the case that murderers who successfully dispose of bodies can never be held to account.
Horry was released from prison in 1967, a 16 year term. He died in 1981.