GREAT BRITAIN: A Mummy in the Closet

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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.