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International
At 7.30am that morning a stewardess knocked on the door of cabin 126. Unexpectedly the door was unlocked, but the occupant, twenty one year old actress Gay Gibson, was nowhere to be seen.
The stewardess noticed that the porthole was open, but saw nothing unusual in the cabin. Assuming Miss Gibson was in the bathroom she tided the room and left.
Two hours later, with still no sign of Miss Gibson, a call was put out. No one had seen her, could she have fallen overboard? The ship was turned back, though in such shark infested waters the chances of her being found alive were slim.
A prime suspect was identified, James Camb, but with no body and only a speculative motive to work with, only outstanding detective work could help to convict him of a heartless rape and murder.
But sentenced he was, to death. However, he avoided the gallows due to a parliamentary debate surrounding capital punishment. Instead he served eleven years in prison. Twenty years after his release he was sent back to prison for indecent assault.
He ended his days as a waiter in a country club, always denying he had murdered Gay Gibson.
No body, no crime?
The next case covered in this episode had to deal head-on with the dilemma of trying to convict a murderer in the absence of a body.
It was an investigation that involved thousands of hours of police manpower and several cloak and dagger undercover operations.
On Monday 29 December, 1969, Alick McKay, the deputy chairman of The News of the World newspaper returned to his home in Wimbledon, South London.
The McKays had recently suffered a burglary, and because of this Mrs McKay always kept the front door locked with the chain on. Yet when Alick McKay received no answer to his specially coded ring, to his surprise he found the door unlocked.
His wife’s glasses lay on the floor, the telephone lead had been wrenched from the wall. Her handbag lay open, its contents strewn up the stairs. Something was seriously wrong. Next to some elastoplast and twine lay a billhook.
Thinking that he may have interrupted an intruder he picked up the billhook and searched the house. He soon realised he was alone.
Unusually the fire had been unguarded, their evening meal was left by the grill and his wife’s winter coat hung over the back of a chair. Wherever she’d gone she’d left in a hurry. Alarmed, he went next door and called the police.
But Mr McKay, and by now his family who had been alerted to the situation, knew of no reason why Muriel would have left. Apart from her jewellery all her other possessions were untouched. It was unlikely that a woman who loved clothes would not have taken at least a few favourite items with her.
