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Authors: Ken Englade

BOOK: Beyond Reason
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NOT ONLY HAD ELIZABETH HAYSOM BROUGHT HERSELF to the interview, but she had lugged along her lunch as well. As soon as she, Gardner, and Kirkland were seated around the teacher’s desk in a remote classroom, Elizabeth delved into her purse and produced a thick sandwich sealed in Saran Wrap. She laid the sandwich on the desk, unwrapped it, and broke off a chunk. Popping it into her mouth, she commenced to chew, daintily but enthusiastically.
Gardner stared at her. He looked down at the sandwich, which consisted of two pieces of stale-looking white bread separated by a generous helping of a dark, viscous substance. Then he looked back at her. “Is that good?” he asked somewhat incredulously.
“Very,” she said in proper Oxbridgian tones.
“Is that what I think it is?” he asked.
“What do you think it is?” she asked.
“Chocolate pudding.”
She laughed. “Chocolate pudding?”
“I’ve never seen anyone eat a chocolate pudding sandwich before.”
“It’s Marmite,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Marmite,” she repeated, explaining that it was a beefflavored extract made from brewer’s yeast, a very popular snack food in Britain. It could be eaten between bread, as she preferred it, or it could be used as a base in soups and stews. The consistency was more like softened ice milk than pudding, dense enough to spread and not diluted enough to dribble. It was like a Texan’s definition of the silt-laden Rio Grande: too thick to drink, too thin to plow.
“It’s just chock full of vitamins,” she said, pronouncing the word in the British fashion: VIT-amins.
“Uh huh,” Gardner mumbled, shuffling a stack of papers in front of him and giving her a wary glance. “I guess we’d better get down to it.”
 
WHILE GARDNER SET UP HIS TAPE RECORDER AND DEBBIE Kirkland squared away a notebook and pen so she could make some notes as they went along, Elizabeth broke off another piece of bread and Marmite, looking as poised as Maggie Thatcher waiting for questions from Members of Parliament.
The first thing the investigators wanted to determine was where she had been at about the time her parents had been murdered. Elizabeth couldn’t be helpful enough. In a carefully modulated I’m-here-to-help-anyway-I-can voice, Elizabeth told them that the last time she had seen her parents had been the weekend of March 23-24. She had taken the bus down from Charlottesville on Saturday to help her father celebrate his birthday. That night, she said, her parents went out with some friends for dinner while she stayed home alone. On Sunday Derek and Nancy had driven her back to Charlottesville. Since then she had talked to them once, on the following Thursday, just to say hello. She told them she would call again on Sunday, March 31, at about eight o’clock.
“I phoned, and I didn’t get a reply, but that’s not that unusual because, you know, they did what they wanted to do. Sometimes, if something came up, they’d just bypass the phone call.”
She said she tried to reach them late Monday morning and twice that evening, but again there had been no answer. On Tuesday she tried at about eight o’clock in the morning and late that night with no luck. By then, she said, she was getting worried.
“On Wednesday morning, as soon as I got up, I phoned Annie Massie to try and discover if she knew what was going on.”
At midmorning Wednesday she left a message with Annie’s maid asking her to ask Annie to check on her parents. Soon after that, Annie went to the house, opened the door and found her father’s body.
“You said y‘all prearranged for you to call Sunday at eight o’clock,” said Kirkland. “Is that normal? Do y’all normally do this?”
Elizabeth smiled. “Well, sometimes my parents find it quite hard to get hold of me, and I find it quite hard to get hold of them, so if it was something specific we had to discuss, we would arrange a time to call. This was something specific, so I said let’s get together Sunday at eight.”
“What were y’all planning on talking about?” Kirkland asked.
“I have my housing needs that I had to discuss. We had trouble with our landlady. She didn’t want undergraduates in the house, and we had to go and see her and try to bring her around to the idea that we were okay. So I had to discuss with them whether that had gone all right, because if that had failed, I would be up the creek for housing. I didn’t have any university housing.”
Gardner interrupted, sounding a little impatient. He was interested in motive. So far the investigators had no idea why Derek and Nancy had been murdered. If they could find the why, the investigator reasoned, it would help them find the who. He soon discovered that was going to be difficult. To hear Elizabeth tell it, Derek had a left a number of enemies back in Canada. For the next hour virtually all he heard about was how many people had it in for the murdered executive, from fellow executives to union officials and members of the local news media.
When Derek began working for Sydney Steel, Elizabeth said, he invented a procedure called the “submerge injection process,” which she claimed had revolutionized steel-making.
“It was a fabulous process,” she gushed. “Almost immediately, the Americans, the Japanese, the Germans, the British all bought it.”
Wasn’t that good? Gardner wondered. Before he could ask the question, Elizabeth told him why it was not.
“The Canadian unions were upset with the idea,” she said. “I think they felt that they were going to lose their jobs or something.”
Okay, Gardner told himself, the steel unions didn’t like him. Who else? She told him.
The local politicians didn’t think much of him either, Elizabeth explained. “Unfortunately, the political situation in Canada changed a year after Daddy came. Since Sydney Steel was a Crown corporation, he had to deal with politicians, and that was something he didn’t enjoy. He thought they were scum.”
Gardner could understand how an attitude like that might not endear him to the local officials. But Elizabeth was just getting wound up. The local media didn’t like Derek much either, she said. Some of them, Elizabeth claimed, criticized him sharply because he was a South African. “They were asking, ‘Why do we have a South African doing this? He’s obviously going to discriminate against black people.’ So, in fact, Daddy got nothing. No credit at all for his invention.”
“So he sort of got screwed on that deal?” Gardner suggested.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, nodding vigorously. “He got screwed big time. Once everything started to boom, everybody started saying, ‘Well, now we’re going fine, we can blow money on this, that, and the other,’ and he was saying, ‘No, the reason we’re booming is because we’re not doing that.’”
“I’ll bet that didn’t sit well,” Gardner said.
“You’re right,” Elizabeth confirmed. “It caused a lot of strikes. Finally he just couldn’t stand it any longer. They started striking left, right, and center. The abuse was quite something. I was threatened a couple of times at school. In fact, I had all my front teeth knocked out.”
Gardner sat upright. “Oh,” he said. “Why did this come about? Who did he make mad up there?”
“Well, as I said,” Elizabeth explained, “he started the idea that if you work for the company, you had shares in the company, so as the company grew, you made more. The unions didn’t like that. It was too abstract for them, so they just went on strike. Daddy’s office was ransacked. Windows were broken. There were picket lines all over the place. We got phone calls. I answered a couple of calls and some of them were threats like, ‘Don’t think you’re going to see your Daddy tonight.’ Something like that. Things like, ‘You’d better move.’”
Soon after all the trouble started, she said, she was attacked. “I was at school playing in the playground during the break,” she said, “and a guy smashed my jaw, knocked out my front teeth—”
“You say a guy?” interjected Kirkland. “You mean a kid or an adult?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “Sixteen. Maybe seventeen.”
“What happened then?” asked Gardner.
“I guess that was the deciding factor,” Elizabeth said. “Mummy and Daddy decided that I was definitely going to be sent away.”
“Did the school know who did it?”
She nodded. “The school knew who did it. My parents knew who did it.” She paused. “Actually, no,” she said, correcting herself. “My parents did
not
know who did it. They had an idea of who was involved, but the school refused to take any action.”
“What do you mean?”
“The school actually went so far as to say that it didn’t happen, that I had already had a broken jaw and broken teeth when I arrived.”
“How did your father take
that
?”
She smiled tightly. “My father … well, his initial reaction was to be just totally out for blood, you know.”
“Uh huh.”
“But after he calmed down, it was just as though he were saying, ‘Well, this has happened, and we’re never going to be able to do anything about it, and it won’t do any good anyway.
We’re just going to have to send you away some place.’”
“Was that the end of it?” Gardner asked.
Elizabeth said no, that the incident, along with her father’s growing disenchantment with politics, convinced him he should quit Sydney Steel. “He just cleaned out.”
“All right,” Gardner said. “He left Sydney Steel. Did he have any feelings toward the board? Towards anyone? Did anyone have bad feelings toward him?”
Elizabeth bobbed her head. “I think there was tremendous ill will,” she said forcefully. “If he was given the opportunity, he would go into a rage about it. If you can see the picture, my parents had moved there and they had built their all-time house, a magnificent property, you know. It was absolutely magnificent. They put their heart and soul into it. And one day he just got up and walked out. Literally. I mean he phoned us one day and said, ‘I’ve sold the house. I can’t handle it anymore. I can’t bear it.’”
 
THEN THE TALE GOT MORE COMPLICATED.
After Derek left Sydney Steel, he took a $75,000 a year job as chairman and president of Metropolitan Area Growth Investments, Ltd.—MAGI——a venture capital organization owned jointly by the federal and provincial governments. About eighteen months after he climbed aboard, MAGI put up almost six million Canadian dollars for a mortgage on a Bermuda-registered cruise ship named
Mercator I
. Ostensibly, the ship would be used to help boost tourism. But when the details of the deal were revealed, it caused quite a disturbance. Derek was caught in the middle.
To begin with, the ship cost about half a million dollars more than originally planned. Then MAGI came up with another one hundred thousand dollars off the top for refitting. But what really caused the fuss was that virtually none of the money being spent on the project—Canadian government money—was being spent in Canada. The refitting was performed in a German shipyard, and provisions for the ship’s first cruise were bought in Britain. Worse, almost half
of the 110 crew members were residents of Thailand. This was a particularly sore point because unemployment was at a near record level in Nova Scotia.
According to Nova Scotia newspapers, the scandal over the ship contributed significantly to the defeat of the thenruling provincial government in the 1978 elections.
In the end the furor was so great that Derek resigned from MAGI. In just a few years he had left two top jobs because of politics and clashes with people in power. And he had made somebody so angry that his daughter had been horribly beaten.
Gardner had come into the interview looking for a possible motive—just one simple reason why someone would want Derek dead. Now he was being deluged with a lot of reasons, was being given a veritable shopping list of potential enemies the man had made. However, his enemies would have had to want him dead pretty badly to have killed not only him but his wife as well. There were many reasons for people having been angry with Derek Haysom. But were the reasons strong enough for murder? Would someone travel from Nova Scotia to Virginia to settle an old union dispute? Or to slice two people to ribbons because of a bad investment?
Gardner sighed and rubbed his temples. He was quickly developing a splitting headache. And Elizabeth Haysom was just hitting her stride.
LIKE THE STORY SHE WAS TELLING, ELIZABETH’S PERSONALITY was multilayered, complex, often opaque, evolving before investigators Gardner and Kirkland with more twists and turns than the Blue Ridge Parkway. They had barely begun to scratch the surface of Elizabeth Haysom.
From talking about her father’s occupational history, Elizabeth moved effortlessly to the more personal side of their family life, telling the detectives that her mother and father had loved her and supported her and fought for her—that they had been the best parents in the whole wide world.
Once her parents became aware of the seriousness of threats against the family after the incident at the school in Nova Scotia, they decided to send her abroad to study. First she went to a school in Switzerland, at a place called St. George’s. Then she went to a posh elementary school in Britain, Riddlesworth, the same school that Princess Di had attended. Then she went to one of the most highly regarded girl’s schools in Britain, Wycombe Abbey. After that, she claimed she was destined for Cambridge University but decided to join her parents in Virginia instead and attend the University of Virginia.
In the telling, the story did not come out this lucidly. Elizabeth, like Margaret Louise Simmons, tended to wander sometimes, to go off on her own tangents and explore roads the investigators did not know were even on the map. But Margaret Louise’s diversions were unintentional; Elizabeth’s, they later learned, were deliberate. Talking to her could be like pulling teeth; by the time he was finished with her, Gardner would be qualified to hang out a dentist’s shingle.
 
 
ONCE SHE WENT ABROAD TO STUDY, ELIZABETH SAID, she saw very little of her parents.
“How’d you feel about that?” Gardner asked.
“Well,” Elizabeth replied, looking thoughtful, “in terms of school it was awful because the school had complete authority over me. Although I did well academically, and I was involved in sports and that kind of stuff, the British are very prejudiced against foreigners. I had a
hell
of a time in school. And Mom and Dad knew that. They tried to get me out, but once you get stuck in the system it’s really quite difficult to change schools. The last couple of years were really quite horrific.”
Part of the reason it was so horrific, she explained, was because school officials had framed her on a drug incident. “A couple of girls were caught with drugs, and for some reason they blamed it on me,” she said indignantly. “I mean, I barely knew the people. The police came in and ransacked my room, tore everything apart, questioned me, hounded me, you know, gave me a bad time. I hadn’t done anything.”
Gardner and Kirkland exchanged glances. Where the hell is this going? the look said. This is uncharted territory.
 
INVESTIGATORS HAD NOT YET LEARNED HOW TO EVALUATE Elizabeth’s information carefully. Although Gardner and Kirkland did not know it yet, most of what she was telling them was a skillful blend of fact and fantasy, a wellwoven tale craftily conceived to confuse and intimidate. Elizabeth
did,
in fact, go to St. George’s; she
did
go to Riddlesworth; and she
did
go to Wycombe (pronounced “Wickham”) Abbey. But her experiences were nothing like what she had described to the detectives.
All schools have their cliques and subgroups, the small coteries of students who stick closely together, pointedly excluding others from their circle. This is particularly true in boarding schools, where the students not only attend classes together but live together, existing in a vacuum in an
isolated world of their own. And probably in boarding schools of no other nationality is this cliquishness as well developed as it is in supremely class-conscious Britain.
The British are infamous for their snobbery. Class is stamped on every facet of a Britisher’s existence, from the choice of newspapers to the color of socks. And just in case the physical flags aren’t obvious enough, there is the unmistakable banner of language. To an American ear, the speech pattern perpetuated at Oxford and Cambridge is a caricature of itself, a sometimes barely intelligible mishmash of ingroup slang and strange pronunciation; a whole world of broad
A
’s, nasal exclamations, and swallowed prefixes. Especially broad
A
’s. Across the Atlantic
bath is baath, tomato is tomaato, rather is raather.
Snooty British women say
raather
a lot. It is a standing joke—a not-so-gentle jab—to describe a snob as being “very raather-raather.” Elizabeth Haysom got to be very raather-raather.
But she may have been telling the truth when she told the detectives that the early days abroad were tough. As a stranger from Canada, a girl without strong ties to powerful British figures, notwithstanding her relationship to Lady Astor, she may have been snubbed when she first enrolled. But as she learned the language and customs, her life became easier. By the time she got to Wycombe Abbey, just as she was going into puberty, she seemed to be adapting well to the system.
Wycombe Abbey School is in the town of High Wycombe, which is in the center of an area called the Chilterns, a forty-five-minute train ride from London’s Marylebone Station. This is the heart of some of the loveliest countryside England has to offer, a picture-book landscape of rolling green fields and bubbling streams, a favorite destination for citydwellers desperate for an escape from noise and grime.
Wycombe Abbey School gets half its name from the town and half from the centerpiece of the campus, an imposing former cloister built of cold gray stone, complete with parapets, turrets, and pointy, gothic windows. Inside the austerelooking
structure are two dormitories, Ruben House and Pitt House, each one accommodating forty or more girls. There are eight other houses in the school, which also have a population of forty or more each. Five of the houses are in their own red-brick buildings, and three others are shoehorned into another large structure called Daws Hill House. Other edifices quarter laboratories, an art center, a music center, and a gymnasium. Naturally there is a chapel too. Surrounding the cluster of dormitories and school buildings are 160 acres of parklike grounds with flower-bordered walking paths criss-crossing the playing fields, broad lawns, and secluded groves of hardwoods. There is even a small lake.
The single jarring note in this Edenic setting is the tenfoot-tall brick wall that separates the school from the town. No matter how well it is camouflaged by flora, the wall goes a long way toward destroying the feeling of unbridled spaciousness that is otherwise so strong. The wall, practical though it may be, forms a psychological as well as a physical barrier. Life at Wycombe Abbey is designed to confine and constrict on the one hand while ostensibly broadening on the other. Regulations are strict, and the academic workload is demanding, going far beyond what most American students are accustomed to. School officials do not want students to feel
too
free or have too much time on their hands. The days are highly structured, beginning with a morning prayer service in the Church of England tradition, and continuing late into the night, which is the only time many students have to work on the exhaustive projects expected of them.
For a while, Elizabeth appeared to have no problem with this regimen. During her middle years at Wycombe Abbey, she was a classic overachiever. She authored one near booklength essay on Byron, another on the history of ancient warfare, and a monster 140,000-word treatise on the history of scientific invention. Those alone required months and months of work.
There was no escape from the school on weekends either.
Only once during each of the three twelve-week school terms are students permitted an extended break. Called long leave, it amounts to an expanded weekend—three nights away from the institution. During the summer and autumn terms there also is another brief respite. Called short leave, it permits each student one absence from roughly noon on Saturday to sundown on Sunday.
Emphasis at Wycombe Abbey is and has been on education. While she was interested, Elizabeth accounted well for herself. Her specialties were English, history, and languages, which included Latin, German, French, and Greek. Her curriculum vitae shows she scored at the distinction level, which is higher than the American A, in her use of English, and in her translation capabilities in Latin, Greek and French. She had A’s in history, business French, and applied math, which included courses in what the British call the A (for advanced) levels, or roughly what would compare closely with college-level work in the United States. Her lowest grade was a C.
In her entrance exams for Cambridge she scored distinctions in British history, ancient history, language translation, and general subject matter, which included science, literature, art, and music. The only nondistinction was an A in European history. Oddly—given that she was captain of both the junior and senior debating teams at Wycombe Abbey and a winner of a national public speaking contest at age fifteen—her oral exam for Cambridge was scored unsatisfactory.
Later, in Virginia, when she took the SAT, she scored a 680 in the math section and a 740 in the language section. In both categories, an 800 is a perfect score. Her combined SAT of 1,420 easily put her in the top 10 percent of the country’s test-takers.
With such pressure to excel in academics at Wycombe Abbey and with such rigid rules concerning absences from the campus, the only real relief for students is through sports and school-sponsored extracurricular activities. Elizabeth
dove into these as well; she was an enthusiastic joiner and doer.
She was, for instance, a world-class skier who in 1980 won a berth on a national championship ski team. She also played tennis and lacrosse at an advanced level, and one year she captained the school lacrosse team. For four years running she was the winner of Wycombe Abbey’s outstanding sportsmanship prize.
In addition she was an indefatigable writer and performer. While at Wycombe Abbey, she wrote three one-act plays and two three-act plays, plus a sizable portfolio of poetry. When she was fifteen, one of her poems, which she entitled “Narcissus,” won fifth prize in a Britain-wide conpetition. She also was a cofounder and officer of a Wycombe Abbey poetry society.
Her mother loved music and acting. So did Elizabeth. She played the piano and the cello and won certificates for performance and aptitude from the Royal Academy of Music. On the stage, she played Becket in
Becket,
Henry Higgins in
Pygmalion,
Rosalind in
As You Like It
, Cleopatra in
Antony and Cleopatra,
Faust in Dr. Faust, and Puck in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The irony would later be striking: Cleopatra was a seductress, and Faust sold his soul to the devil.
For most of her stay there officials at Wycombe Abbey must have
loved
Elizabeth Haysom. She was extremely bright, uncommonly articulate, amazingly energetic, and frightfully ambitious. In her junior year school officials thought enough of her to make her Head of House, which meant she was responsible for the more than three-dozen girls in her dormitory.
Then something happened. More accurately, a combingtion of things happened. The result was the spectacular crash of starpupil Elizabeth Haysom. This was the part of her life she was trying to hide from Gardner and Kirkland.
Ironically, part of her problem was rooted in the way the dormitory system works at a British boarding school. When a girl enrolls at Wycombe Abbey, she is arbitrarily assigned to a house. Barring unusual circumstances, that is where she
stays until she graduates. Since there is very little mixing among the girls from the different houses, each girl is virtually isolated within a very limited group. In practice, her friends, confidantes, and supporters come from within an extremely small circle.
When Elizabeth enrolled in Wycombe Abbey at age twelve, she was assigned to Ruben House, one of the two dormitories in the main building. At age eighteen she was still in Ruben House. All her friends were in Ruben House. In and out of class she surrounded herself with others wearing the Ruben House colors, a distinctive pink tie. Over the years they began to look upon themselves like recruits in a Marine Corps boot camp: They suffered together, worked together, shared their successes and failures together, and together they would go forth to meet the world. Except when it came time for Elizabeth’s classmates to go forth, Elizabeth did not go with them.
Without consulting her, Nancy and Derek had made arrangements with the school for Elizabeth to be enrolled in a series of high-level science and math classes. Nancy and Derek had decided that their daughter would follow in Derek’s footsteps and be an engineer even though this contradicted her own desires to major in history. They thought that with a little push she would see the wisdom of their decision.
Unfortunately, they were mistaken. For Elizabeth, her parents’ decision resulted in disaster. She was unable to maintain the standards she had set for herself and those her parents expected. She studied relentlessly, but her grades plummeted and her morale bottomed out. After being bombarded with complaints both from Elizabeth and the school, Nancy and Derek eventually relented. But it was too late; the damage was done. The only way Elizabeth could get back on the history track was to repeat her entire senior year.
Unhappily, the ramifications extended beyond the fact that she would have to spend an additional year at Wycombe Abbey. Not only was she
not
graduating as she
had planned, but all her friends were. This was a blow to her self-esteem; she was being punished by having to stay behind while her friends went off to university. She began to resent her parents enormously for that decision, building a reservoir of ill will that would grow only larger and deeper in the coming months and years. At least that is one of the excuses she used later to explain her actions. In reality, the relationship between her and her parents, particularly her mother, had been uncomfortable for years. The decision to try to push her into engineering was, certainly to her, a hateful blow. But in her mind it also was only one of many.

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