Murdered with a gunshot through each bewitching eye
It’s the crime that’s transfixing modern-day sleuths. Was brilliant doctor Naomi Dancy killed by her disturbed brother — or her fantasist husband? And why, 90 years on, the mystery is tearing her family apart
HE WAS a dashing former army officer, resuming his medical career after World War I. She was among Britain’s first female surgeons, her brilliance combined with a radiant beauty. They first met in 1918, while working at a West London hospital. Gallantly wiping Naomi Tribe’s shoes clean of some chemical she had spilled in the laboratory, Dr John Dancy remembers being captivated by her bewitching eyes.
As he wrote in his memoir, many years later: ‘They were most surprising . . . the nearest thing to a royal blue. I had never seen anything like them before and have never done so since.’
What Dr Dancy pointedly omitted to mention, when describing that opening encounter with his future wife, was that, 19 years after her eyes set his pulse racing, they stared out hauntingly beneath lurid newspaper headlines.
Sometime after midnight on November 22, 1937, Naomi’s brother Maurice Tribe — emotionally disturbed after incurring a brain injury during the war — had stolen into her bedroom, pressed a revolver to each of her eyes and pulled the trigger.
Having murdered her in this chillingly deliberate manner, at the Dancy house in Richmond, Surrey, Tribe, 43, shot at her husband, who confronted him on the landing.
In one swift movement, however, Dr Dancy, then 46 — two and a half years younger than Naomi — saved himself by flicking off the light switch and falling to the floor, feigning to have been hit. Tribe, meanwhile, locked himself in the toilet and slit his throat with a razor.
When the doctor broke down the door, he found him dead.
That, at least, is the heroic story that Dr Dancy told the police, who, almost without question, believed his version of events. And when, rarely, this grisly chapter in the Dancy family’s otherwise illustrious history arises, it is the story that passes between his descendants, who reverentially refer to their inspirational patriarch as ‘Feyther’.
A high-achieving clan, they include his namesake son, John, a progressive headmaster who first admitted girls to the Princess of Wales’s public school, Marlborough, and his greatgrandson, actor Hugh Dancy, who has appeared in films such as Black Hawk Down and the TV series Law & Order and who is married to Homeland star Claire Danes.
In recent months, however, much to their discomfort, the Dancys have seen the bedrock of their dynasty being slowly chipped away.
For the 90-year- old supposition that the brutal deaths of Naomi and her brother were an open-and-shut case of murder and suicide has been picked apart in a gripping and hugely successful podcast series.
Called Ghost Story, for reasons that will become apparent, the series, which topped the charts in Britain and several other countries, explores a sensational theory: that ‘Feyther’ — Dr John Dancy — himself might have been the true double killer.
Some Dancy family members would prefer that the secrets buried beneath these old coals were left alone. That they are being raked over by an incomer into the Dancy ranks — journalist Tristan Redman, who is married to Feyther’s greatgranddaughter Kate — has deepened their dismay.
The denouement came last Monday when a live examination of the case entertained West end theatregoers. The packed audience effectively became a jury, using mobile phones to vote interactively on Feyther’s guilt or innocence.
THOUGH Redman’s wife joined him on stage, the absence of any other Dancy relatives spoke volumes. The only one to be seen was Tash Cutts, another of Feyther’s great-granddaughters, who stood in protest outside the theatre and explained her grievances in leaflets handed out to the audience.
She claims Redman deceived her into granting him an interview by failing to explain the true purpose of the podcasts.
He only revealed that he was investigating Naomi’s murder, and that he believed her husband killed her, when she spoke to him a second time, at his family home in Paris, she says.
‘He told me this deeply shocking news whilst recording my reaction on tape. I felt completely blindsided and shocked.
‘It was a mic drop moment deliberately engineered to produce the best content for his true crime podcast . . . I was struggling with the news but I was also deeply hurt to have been set up by someone I considered family.’
Ms Cutts withdrew her co-operation but the podcast company refused her request to pause the production. ‘Tristan was putting his podcast before the mental health of someone in his family,’ she writes in the leaflet.
‘Of course I wanted to know the truth of what happened to my greatgrandmother. But I also wanted an opportunity to deal with the truth before an international audience was able to grasp all the details.’
During the series, Redman makes no secret of the fact that others, including at one stage his wife, have had misgivings about the merits of his personalised cold case probe.
‘If you come out with a piece that says he (Feyther) was a murderer, then I’ll be sorry that I ever said we would contribute to it,’ the patriarch’s grandson, Dr Mark Dancy, intones gravely in one episode.
Speaking to me this week, however, Wellington- educated Redman, 43, a producer with Al- Jazeera TV, insisted he had been ‘very open with everybody’.
While his research had been ‘challenging’ for some in the family, others thought it valuable to discover who Feyther really was ‘and what he may, or may not, have done’.
What, then, is the truth behind this tragic but undeniably intriguing case? A case riddled with so many caveats that two eminent retired Scotland Yard murder detectives who examined the evidence drew opposing conclusions.
First, I should explain the extraordinary set of coincidences that caused Redman to take an 18-month sabbatical from his job and begin his quest.
During his teens, when his family lived in an edwardian house on Queen’s Road, Richmond, he says strange things would happen in his top-floor bedroom. Vases would move, seemingly on their own, and a ‘cold feeling’ would come over him.
Families who moved in there later reported similar experiences and there were sightings of a ‘faceless woman’: hence the podcast’s ghoulish title.
All this took on greater significance after Redman began dating Kate at university, in 2002, and invited her grandfather John Dancy ( the Marlborough headmaster) to lunch.
Arriving in Queen’s Road, he gazed at the house next door to Redman’s and declared: ‘That’s where my mother was murdered.’
Bizarrely, it turned out that this handsome adjacent property had been home to Feyther and Naomi, and their three children, and that the doctor had remained there for almost 30 years after her death.
OVER the ensuing years, Redman and Kate put these oddities aside, marrying and starting a family, and forging successful careers: he in journalism, she with the united Nations educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (unesco).
In 2020, however, while hunting information for her father’s obituary, Kate came across an obscure but well-researched blog. It raised disturbing questions over the so- called murder- suicide of Naomi and Maurice Tribe.
The author, a freedom of information assessor at the National Archives, had been browsing through the police file when she found a remarkable letter, written to a Scotland Yard Commissioner by the renowned crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers, in December 1937.
Sayers (the creator of aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey) alerted the top policeman to a disconcerting, out of the blue phone call she had just received from a Dr John Dancy of Richmond.
Sounding remarkably chipper given that his wife had been murdered barely three weeks earlier, Dancy — alias Feyther — said he thought the
author might find it informative to hear how Tribe had perpetrated the crime.
Promising Sayers he would reveal details which she ‘wouldn’t read in the News of the World’, he invited her to dinner the next night.
She politely declined. Instead she sent a transcript of the deeply suspicious phone call to the Commissioner.
This same blog also revealed that two anonymous informants had urged the police — vainly — to investigate rumours that Feyther murdered his wife and brother-inlaw and pinned the crime on the mentally impaired Tribe.
When Redman’s wife told him all this, and he linked it with the spooky goings-on in his old house, the idea for Ghost Story was born.
So, who did kill Naomi? Even by 1930s standards, the investigation was remarkably lax, on that much the two former Scotland Yard detectives Redman enrolled for the podcast, Hamish Campbell and Jackie Molton, agree.
Back then, the police didn’t trouble to test the account given by Feyther, in a 50-page statement. In it, he portrayed Tribe — who had lost the sight in one eye as well as suffering a brain injury in the wartime explosion — as a suicidal alcoholic and drug-user.
Though Tribe had won a bravery medal while fighting in the trenches, and later earned respect for his work rehabilitating released prisoners, this damning depiction was seemingly borne out by the cocaine found in his room (along with pornographic postcards).
Shortly before the murder, Feyther claimed, the deranged Tribe — who lived alone in South London — had threatened to shoot out his sister’s beautiful eyes.
Since Tribe visited the Queen’s Road house weekly, so that Feyther could give him some sort of injection to improve his failing eyesight, this was deeply worrying.
The more so because of a simmering wrangle over Naomi’s life insurance policy, which Tribe had arranged and provided him with commission.
As the policy was about to expire, Feyther told the police, he and Naomi were about to take out a fresh one which would pay £6,500 (worth about £554,000 today). Tribe was angered to learn about this, for he stood to lose his commission.
On the night of the murder, Tribe received his jab then retired to the spare room. Naomi, meanwhile, returned home after delivering one of her acclaimed medical lectures and went to bed. Feyther sat up late, writing in his study. Then he heard the gunshots.
FROM here, his breathless account might have been plucked from one of Sayers’ crime novels. As he emerges from his room, Tribe shoots at him (police later found a bullet hole in the window behind where he stood) and he falls, ‘foxing’ to be fatally wounded.
Tribe locks himself in the lavatory. Feyther dashes into the marital bedroom to see blood ‘spurting’ from one of Naomi’s eyes, then urges Tribe to come out.
‘Stand away from the panels or I’ll shoot you like a dog!’ Tribe supposedly cries. Feyther smashes down the bolted door. Inside he finds Tribe with his throat slit and a razor in his hand. He checks the murderer’s pulse. He is dead. According to Hamish Campbell, the Met’s renowned former murder chief, while this story raises questions, it is supported by key facts, one of which concerns Tribe’s three neck wounds. The post-mortem report suggests they are ‘hesitation wounds’ — cuts that are at first shallow because they have been tentatively self-inflicted.
For the podcast, a leading pathologist backs this view, saying it would be close to impossible for Feyther to have mimicked them. There are other compelling reasons why Campbell believes the murdersuicide deduction to be correct.
There is insufficient space to list them here but he dismisses as ‘nonsensical’ the notion that the doctor could have shot his wife, slit Tribe’s throat, escaped from the locked bathroom — perhaps by climbing out of the window and shinning 25ft down the drainpipe — then returned to smash down the bathroom door.
However, seven other homicide detectives, whose opinions Redman sought, disagree. Listing a plethora of discrepancies in Feyther’s statement, they say all the evidence points to him.
For instance, he said he washed the blood off Tribe’s hands before taking his pulse and afterwards
replaced the razor in his hand. Why ever would he do that?
Why didn’t the bullet that narrowly missed him make a hole in the curtains, which would surely have been drawn at that hour.
Might the answer be that he fired through the windowpane himself, to substantiate the ‘playing dead’ part of his story, but forgot to shoot through the curtains?
Then there was the blood ‘spurting’ from Naomi’s eye. As a leading American sleuth noted, by the time Feyther reached her she would have been dead for several minutes, yet blood stops gushing from a dead person after two or three seconds.
As for his Houdini-like escape from the locked toilet, and his ability to kill Tribe with a razor without receiving any defensive wounds, all this would have become possible if, as former Scotland Yard detective Jackie Molton suspects, he drugged Tribe into unconsciousness, perhaps when giving him his eye injection.
Moreover, had detectives bothered to probe Feyther’s personal affairs in 1937, they would have discovered motives for doing away with his wife.
It’s possible he was having an affair with Mary Marston, a nurse who comforted him in the aftermath of the murder and whom he married barely a year later.
(That Mary also died mysteriously, six years after their wedding, is another curious twist).
And though he claimed Tribe was enraged by Naomi’s new insurance policy, it was Feyther who stood to receive £554,000 on her death. As Jackie Molton says: ‘Red flag! Red flag!’
But then the pendulum of doubt swings back. For there is no evidence that Feyther ever treated his wife cruelly.
Indeed, their daughter Bindle — now aged 99 and living in West Virginia — told Redman their family life was idyllic. In a letter sent to their children at boarding school, Feyther admires Naomi’s youthfulness (she is approaching 50 but looks 20 years younger, he observes), speaks of their shared passion for gardening, and, only a week before the murder, remarks on her wonderful company, on a long car journey.
Given this confused scenario, it is hardly surprising that the theatre audience ‘jury’ were split last Monday.
WHEN the vote was taken, 36 per cent judged Feyther to be wholly innocent, 30 per cent pronounced him guilty of both murders, while 12 per cent believed he killed his brother-in-law after discovering he had shot Naomi. The remainder were undecided.
This outcome seems unlikely to sooth his descendants.
Almost equally disconcerting, however, is Redman’s discovery that the esteemed Dancy patriarch was not the swashbuckling adventurer and polymath he purported to be in the 3,000-page memoir he wrote in his later years. This document bristles with such stirring escapades that after his death it was turned into a BBC documentary.
In it, he claimed to have spied for the British secret service (a leading intelligence historian casts doubt on this); gained a Cambridge scholarship (the university has no record of him); written several hit songs include one that topped the U.S. charts (a blatant lie); and much more besides.
When his fantasised biography is exposed in the podcast series it is too much for Sarah Dancy, the wife of Feyther’s grandson Jonathan, an acclaimed philosopher. ‘God! His whole life has been a Walter Mitty. It’s tragic,’ she exclaims.
It is indeed. But did Dr John Dancy’s undoubted talent for deception enable him to get away with a horrific double murder? Armchair Agatha Christies will doubtless go on debating this question but one suspects we will never know.