Beyond Reason (7 page)
Authors: Ken Englade
FOR HER OWN REASONS, THESE WERE THINGS ELIZABETH Haysom was not telling Kirkland and Gardner. There were things she did not want them to know, one of them being that she was a pathological liar. It would take them a while to find that out.
ELIZABETH TOLD KIRKLAND AND GARDNER THAT AFTER the drug incident school officials prohibited her from contacting Derek and Nancy and kept her incommunicado for several days. It was more than she could stand. “I flipped out,” she said. “I went off to Europe on my own.” She amended her statement. “Well, with a friend,” she added. “I was away, I don’t know how long, about five months or something. And by that time I was terrified to come home.”
“Did you contact your parents during this period?” Gardner asked.
“No,” she replied.
“Had no contact?”
“No.”
“In other words,” Investigator Kirkland interjected, “they didn’t even know when you left?”
“No,” Elizabeth repeated, looking smug. “Oh, there was a wonderful hoo-haw. I mean, just like now, you know. There was ICMP, Interpol, Scotland Yard, military intelligence in Europe—”
“You had everyone looking for you?” Gardner interrupted.
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, smiling nervously. “The French Interior Department, everybody. I finally turned up on the doorstep of some Colonel Herrington and he shipped me off to London where my half-brother Julian met me and then Dad came over.”
“Were you trying to be elusive?” Gardner asked.
“No, not really. But I didn’t have any money and I didn’t have any credit cards and I didn’t have anything anybody could trace me with. I just took off.”
“How did you support yourself?”
“I was really lucky,” she said brightly. “I got a job in Paris. My French is good, and I got a job doing research for a law firm. And I worked for IBM in Berlin.”
Investigators would later discover these assertions were totally false. In France she worked at menial jobs, earning barely enough to eat on, and in Berlin she did not work at all. When she got to Germany, she was virtually destitute and survived by moving in with a group of toughs. They kept her drugged much of the time and used her body whenever they wished. But this was not what she told Gardner and Kirkland.
Her adventure in Europe couldn’t have been better, she related almost cheerfully. It was great, she said, right up to the time when she tripped on the stairs and hit her head. That frightened her, she claimed, and made her seek help.
What actually happened has never been determined. In other reports Elizabeth also claimed she was attacked and thrown down an elevator shaft.
“In other words you just sort of turned yourself in?” Gardner prompted, not yet aware of her liberties with the truth.
“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “I was in severe concussion. I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. I just kind of got this silly belief that I was pregnant and that I was covered in lice. I couldn’t keep any food down and stuff so I decided that really the time had come to amend my life. I went to the British Consulate and they immediately notified Colonel Herrington and he was there within half an hour. He took me home, got me to a doctor, and got my head plastered up, and then I was sent off to England, where Julian met me and Dad came over.”
This, at least, was partially true. But her fear that she was pregnant was not a “silly belief”; it was a very real consideration. Neither had she been imagining that she was louse-infested; she had been. Her claim that Herrington had rescued her was accurate.
What was not yet clear to investigators was just how proficient Elizabeth was at lying. In the interview with Gardner
and Kirkland she made her European sojourn sound like a vacation with a few more than normal problems, a sort of How-I-Kept-My-Chin-Up-and-Survived-My-Summer-in-Europe. Gardner and Kirkland were not to blame; Elizabeth’s tales would fool investigators and others for a long time to come.
and Kirkland she made her European sojourn sound like a vacation with a few more than normal problems, a sort of How-I-Kept-My-Chin-Up-and-Survived-My-Summer-in-Europe. Gardner and Kirkland were not to blame; Elizabeth’s tales would fool investigators and others for a long time to come.
ALONE IN HER ROOM IN RUBEN HOUSE AFTER ALL HER friends had graduated, Elizabeth began to dwell on her situation, allowing her anger toward her parents to fester. The more she brooded, the more angry and vengeful she became. She added up the wrongs she perceived they had committed against her and found that there were quite a few and that they went back a long way, all the way, in fact, to at least the attack in the Nova Scotia schoolyard.
She had told the detectives that a teenage thug, angry at her father’s antiunion stance, had jumped her and smashed her face against a brick wall, knocking out her front teeth. Indeed, she
may
have been attacked; the attack
may
have been caused by her father’s fight with labor; she
may
have had her face smashed against a brick wall. She did have a cut on her chin, and it left a thin scar, but her teeth were not knocked out. Damaged enough to require extensive dental work, yes, but not permanently lost. Whether she was attacked or whether she fell is known only to her.
may
have been attacked; the attack
may
have been caused by her father’s fight with labor; she
may
have had her face smashed against a brick wall. She did have a cut on her chin, and it left a thin scar, but her teeth were not knocked out. Damaged enough to require extensive dental work, yes, but not permanently lost. Whether she was attacked or whether she fell is known only to her.
It is true that soon after that she went abroad to school, but it could have been her idea as well as Derek and Nancy’s. Nevertheless, she told herself that it was their idea, and she began to hate them for it.
There was another incident at her first overseas school, St. George’s in Switzerland. Later, she swore that she, as a ten-year-old, was raped on the school grounds by two or more French youths. But she also told her brother Howard and apparently her parents that it was not a case of rape by two teenagers but an incident of genital exposure by one man. Regardless of what transpired at St. George’s, she told herself that it was rape and that her parents treated her horribly afterwards. She felt her mother blamed
her
for the incident,
insinuating that she provoked it and calling her a little whore. She said her father was not affected at all, that he tried to pretend it never happened. Still, it was enough to convince Nancy and Derek to change her schools. The next term she went to Riddlesworth in Britain.
her
for the incident,
insinuating that she provoked it and calling her a little whore. She said her father was not affected at all, that he tried to pretend it never happened. Still, it was enough to convince Nancy and Derek to change her schools. The next term she went to Riddlesworth in Britain.
THE TWO YEARS AT RIDDLESWORTH APPARENTLY WERE uneventful, as were her first years at Wycombe Abbey, except that during that period she and her parents became even more estranged. Although Derek and Nancy occasionally visited her in England, she usually saw them only during school holidays or summer vacations. When she was with them, she felt her mother tried to smother her with affection and hardly let her out of her sight. Back at school, she told her classmates that she was adopted.
In her last year the changes in Elizabeth became too noticeable to be ignored. It was then that she changed from a near model student into a rebellious one. She let her weight get out of control, and she chopped off her hair in a period when only riffraff wore short hair. This gave her a punkishdykish look, which tended to set her apart from the other trend-conscious students even more. She was determined, it seemed, to make herself look as miserable as she felt.
Then, too, her drug abuse came into the open. She would later claim that her proclivity for substance abuse started even before she was sent away to boarding school. When her parents were away from their home in Nova Scotia, she said, she would raid the liquor cabinet, dipping liberally into her father’s scotch, her mother’s gin, and what was to become her own favorite, vodka. When she grew older and she realized it was difficult to obtain liquor at a boarding school, her taste turned to chemicals, which were much easier to secure and conceal.
About this time, in a rather desperate search for friendship, she began a furtive alliance with another eccentric student, a girl named
Melinda Duncan.
For different reasons Melinda was as unhappy with her family situation as Elizabeth had convinced herself she was with hers.
Melinda Duncan.
For different reasons Melinda was as unhappy with her family situation as Elizabeth had convinced herself she was with hers.
Melinda was a lesbian. Whether this played a role early in their relationship is unknown, but it certainly was not a repellent as far as Elizabeth was concerned. Elizabeth’s sexual history up to then is murky. Later, she admitted to a sexual experience with another girl when she was twelve or thirteen, but she brushed it off as unimportant, equating it to boys and girls playing doctor and nurse. Since she went to girls’ schools and had no little boys to play with, she explained, it was natural for her to turn to another girl to satisfy her sexual curiosity.
Both she and Melinda were unhappy in their circumstances at the time. They both longed for freedom and adventure. But one thing kept them back: their separate but parallel plans for the future. Elizabeth had wanted to go to Trinity College at Cambridge University and major in history. Melinda had her mind set on Oxford. But before they could fulfill their ambitions, Elizabeth’s drug use caught up with her. One day, virtually on the eve of the last exams she would ever take at Wycombe Abbey, she was found out. She went into the chapel, she said, to take her place in the choir, and school officials sought her out and told her she was going to have to leave. If she was not truly shocked, she did a very good job of pretending. She was already an accomplished actress.
Her parents were off on a trip to Africa when this occurred, and their inaccessibility saved her from immediate explusion. School officials agreed to let her stay through the examination period, but they said that would only postpone the punishment, not obviate it. She still would have to leave under a very dark cloud.
They wanted to send her back to Canada with a nurse, Elizabeth scornfully complained to Gardner and Kirkland. She was outraged about the idea of a nurse. Yet they never asked her if she might need some psychiatric help.
Being expelled from Wycombe Abbey scuttled her plans for attending Cambridge. With a black mark like that on her record and her unsatisfactory score on her oral entrance exam, she was not likely to be accepted at Trinity College.
Meanwhile, Melinda’s application to Oxford was rejected, and she faced the unhappy future of attending the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, which she considered a second-rate school. Angry and frustrated, the two decided to leave family and academia behind. On July 1, 1983, the day they finished their last exams, Elizabeth and Melinda slipped off the Wycombe Abbey campus and fled to the Continent.
Meanwhile, Melinda’s application to Oxford was rejected, and she faced the unhappy future of attending the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, which she considered a second-rate school. Angry and frustrated, the two decided to leave family and academia behind. On July 1, 1983, the day they finished their last exams, Elizabeth and Melinda slipped off the Wycombe Abbey campus and fled to the Continent.
Their jaunt was nothing like the carefree adventure Elizabeth described to Gardner and Kirkland.
Certain that their parents would try to track them down, they carefully laid down a smokescreen. When they left the Wycombe Abbey campus, it was ostensibly to attend a rock concert at the town of Milton Keynes, about twenty miles away. Realizing the authorities would be on their tail very quickly, they further obfuscated their maneuverings by making plans through a local travel agency to go to the English port city of Harwich, then take a ferry to Holland, and from there take a train, with one-way tickets, to West Berlin.
Instead, they took a much different route. Rather than going to Harwich, which is northeast of London, they made their way to Dover, which is southeast of London. From there they took a ferry to France and went from there to Paris. To the two former students it was a wonderful little trick to pull, a magnificent start to a grand adventure. In reality it was a noble effort for beginning an affair that ended very ignobly indeed.
THEIR FIRST STOP WAS PARIS, WHERE THEY CELEBRATED their successful escape. From there they went to Nice. After that, the timetable and exact itinerary becomes a little fuzzy, due in large part to the fact that both Melinda and Elizabeth were heavily into drugs.
During July, August, September, and October they moved around almost constantly, usually by hitchhiking. They took work where they could find it. For a while they picked grapes on land owned by Moet-Chandon, the champagne
people. They also worked temporarily for a vintner near the town of Ay in northern France, but quickly moved on when the man made sexual advances toward Elizabeth. That must have been particularly disturbing to the pair since they had become lovers. Melinda, called “Melie” by Elizabeth, and “Bunnie,” as Melinda called Elizabeth, had begun sharing a bed.
people. They also worked temporarily for a vintner near the town of Ay in northern France, but quickly moved on when the man made sexual advances toward Elizabeth. That must have been particularly disturbing to the pair since they had become lovers. Melinda, called “Melie” by Elizabeth, and “Bunnie,” as Melinda called Elizabeth, had begun sharing a bed.
“It was too bad,” Elizabeth later confided to a friend, speaking of the circumstances that forced them to leave the vineyard in Ay. “The pay was good, the room and board were paid, and we had all the champagne we could drink.”
During this period, they visited, among other cities, Bonn and Trier in Germany; Luxembourg; Reims and Dijon in France; and San Remo and Genoa in Italy. In Nice they were mugged by a man armed with a knife.
When they couldn’t find work, they existed by selling their blood and possibly their bodies. Melinda was hospitalized for three days while they were in Italy, suffering from anemia. They also stayed for several days at a compound run by the Hari Krishnas while she recuperated further.
In Paris Elizabeth, who had been traveling on a British visitor’s passport she had obtained the night before she and Melinda left Wycombe Abbey, applied for a six-month Canadian passport. Why Elizabeth, who already had a Canadian passport that was valid for another year, did this is not known, unless it was to try to hide her trail and keep her parents from finding her. Nevertheless, a new Canadian passport, number XR 126047, was issued to her on October 6, 1983 and it was good until the following March. Long before then her odyssey would be over.
With her new passport in hand, she and Melinda took off again, this time for Germany. They entered the eastern sector and hitchhiked to Berlin, arriving on October 13. There, at least initially, they acted like ordinary tourists, traipsing from one site to another. They were especially fascinated with the Wall. But they were running out of money and, since German work rules are rigid, were unable to find employment. Both had slimmed down to the point of emaciation,
and they had just about exhausted their inventory of ways to keep alive. They could find no work, and they had nothing left to sell. Most of their luggage had either been stolen or deposited in a left-luggage facility in France. They did not even have coats, and winter was rapidly approaching. They had no money to pay for lodging, so they ended up in a flophouse.
and they had just about exhausted their inventory of ways to keep alive. They could find no work, and they had nothing left to sell. Most of their luggage had either been stolen or deposited in a left-luggage facility in France. They did not even have coats, and winter was rapidly approaching. They had no money to pay for lodging, so they ended up in a flophouse.
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