Online exclusive
Scene of the Crime: In July 1942, a man claiming to be a British Secret Service agent married then murdered Auckland divorcee Mary Eileen Jones. Her body would never be found. But nearly a decade later, her wedding dress helped make legal history.
If there was a bigger liar born than George Cecil Horry, it must have been the devil himself.
A serial conman, a persistent pants man and a perennial jailbird, George Horry was a thief, a fraudster and a burglar. He was, said one judge before condemning him to three years’ hard labour, a “habitual criminal”. He had been that way since the age of 16.
In all, Horry, 44, had been convicted of some 64 crimes and spent more than 10 years in borstal and prison before he entered the dock at Auckland’s Supreme Court on August 5, 1951.
The British-born rogue, who worked as a tailor’s presser in Auckland when not committing crimes, had done time for passing bum cheques, breaking and entering, burglary, forgery, assault, theft and demanding money with menaces. But this time, it was different. This time, he was charged with murder.
His crime, crown prosecutor Vincent Meredith, KC, told the Supreme Court jury, was both fantastical and unprecedented in the history of New Zealand. Calling himself George Arthur Turner and claiming to be an aristocrat’s son, Horry had married a well-to-do divorcée called Mary Eileen Jones (née Spargo), nearly 10 years before.
“The Crown suggests,” Meredith told the court, “that Horry swept an impressionable woman off her feet by the glamour of his alleged riches and English connections and a story that he was a British Secret Service man on loan to the New Zealand government.
“It will be alleged,” Meredith continued, “that he married her on July 12, 1942, secured possession of her money, approximately £1000, destroyed her the next day, and by means of bogus letters, stifled inquiry as to her disappearance.”
There was just one problem for the Crown’s case, and it was a big one: there was no body. And in 1951 in New Zealand, under a principle long established under English common law, no conviction for murder had ever been obtained without the recovery of the victim’s corpse.
To secure a guilty verdict, Meredith would have to make legal history by using only circumstantial evidence to prove Horry murdered his new wife the day after their wedding.
“There is, I know, a view sometimes expressed that without a body no murder can be established, but this is entirely wrong,” Meredith told the jury in his opening address. “Death and the cause of death can be proved by circumstantial evidence . . . It would be a dreadful thing to suggest that a killer who could conceal or destroy a body should be immune.”
Yet as strong as he said the circumstantial evidence might be, it must still reach the highest legal test, he counselled the jury. “It is my duty to warn you that although the death of Eileen Jones can be proved by circumstantial evidence, these circumstances must bring to your minds a certainty beyond all doubt that she is dead. And if they do, there must be a certainty beyond reasonable doubt that Horry was criminally responsible for her death.”
Too good to be true
Detective Bill Fell had long since decided, without the merest sliver of a doubt, that the cunning Horry wasn’t just a chancer and a crook but criminally responsible for the death of Eileen Jones.
Like a character from a Dashiell Hammett novel, Fell was the sort of cop who wore a trench coat, sported a fedora and would never give up until he got his man. And it would take this tenacious head of Auckland’s CIB the best part of a decade to get this particular lowlife.
For Fell, the case opened just before Christmas, 1942, when Eileen’s desperate and panicked parents reported their daughter’s strange disappearance to police. The Spargos had quite a story to tell.
Earlier that year a man calling himself George Turner had swept Eileen off her pumps. The debonair, wavy-haired charmer was, he told Eileen, a British aristocrat, the heir to a cutlery empire and -- nudge, nudge, wink, wink -- a spy in New Zealand on a secret assignment for the British government. He would soon inherit his father’s posh title, too, “Turner” claimed; his entire family had been wiped out by Luftwaffe bombs during the Blitz.
He seemed too good to be true. He was too good to be true. What he didn’t tell Eileen was that he was a habitual, conniving criminal who was out on parole, that he was already engaged to a woman called Eunice Geale and that his intentions toward Eileen were not just dishonourable, but entirely murderous.
Soon enough, however, the suave, smooth-talking so-called spy was offering marriage to the smitten Eileen, whose 1939 divorce settlement included a home in Ponsonby. She accepted his proposal and a date was set. The whirlwind wouldn’t end there. They would leave New Zealand for Mother England almost immediately upon the “I dos” and Eileen’s life would be that of an aristocrat’s wife.
But first, and before the wedding, he told Eileen she must sell her house and withdraw her savings so, on the day after their wedding, they could depart by boat for Britain via Australia. His spy work was done, he said; he had to return to base at once.
With a cheque for around $110,000 in today’s money in Eileen’s possession and her bridal dress adjusted for a better fit by her girlfriends -- a detail that would become highly significant nearly a decade later -- the couple were married at Auckland’s Pitt St Methodist Church on the afternoon of July 12.
It was the first time the Spargos had laid eyes on their daughter’s intended. He was odd and oily. He said that to maintain his secret identity, no wedding photos would be taken, then he laid on the soft soap. “I shook hands with him,” Eileen’s mother later told police, “and he put his arms around me and kissed me, saying, ‘Thank god, I’ve got a mother at last.’”
The ceremony over, the couple, via Eileen’s parents’ home, drove to the Helensville Hotel where, at midnight, Eileen rang her lawyer to ask him to make over the cheque for $110,000 to her new husband.
The following morning, the couple visited Celia Shepherd, a friend of Eileen’s living in Titirangi, before ostensibly leaving to catch their boat to Australia. It was July 13, 1942, and it was the last time Eileen was seen alive.
Death at sea
Just before Christmas that year came a knock at the Spargos’ door. It was their new son-in-law, and he had bad news. Although the elderly couple had received a letter from Eileen from Australia — a letter cunningly organised to be posted from there by Horry — they hadn’t heard from her since. But then she had never made it to England. A U-boat, said Turner, had torpedoed the couple’s ship in the Atlantic. Miraculously, he had survived. Eileen had not. Now, having delivered the tragic news, he had to return to Australia to carry-on his spy work.
It was, of course, a lie — and one built on Horry’s rising panic. He’d never left Auckland. And a week before he turned up at the Spargos’ door, he had, using his real name, been married to his real fiancée, Eunice Geale. Stupidly and pathetically, however, he’d done it in the most public away possible: live on a popular religious programme, The Friendly Road, a weekly 1ZB radio show that featured live weddings and christenings by its host “Uncle Tom” Garland.
Eileen’s parents knew nothing of that, but grief stricken and suspicious of Turner’s story, they immediately reported her disappearance to the police. The file came to Bill Fell on Christmas Eve, and his eight years of dogged police work began.
The first thing he established was that this “George Turner” was a crook well-known to Auckland cops: the shady liar and thief, George Horry. Fell had encouraged the Spargos to write to “Turner” in Australia pretending to accept the story of Eileen’s death. Again, Horry’s Australian accomplice did his job, sending the letter back to New Zealand. When the cops later observed Horry collecting and destroying the letter, they knew they had their man.
A search of George and Eunice Horry’s Mt Albert home turned up Eileen’s clothing, including her wedding dress -- the one her girlfriends would later confirm they had altered for her. Under long, close police questioning, Horry’s lies collapsed, but only into more lies. Sure, he’d married Eileen, sure she’d given him all that money, sure he’d banked it under another false name. But he’d done all that to help her run off with another man.
So, what about the story he’d told about the U-boat and the Atlantic, the cops asked? Horry had no explanation. This guy was guilty. But did the cops have enough on him to get a conviction without a body? Fell reckoned not, but he wasn’t giving up yet.
Crimes continue
Nor had George Cecil Horry given up being a no-good petty crook. By 1944, he had been conscripted into the army. He soon transferred to the Air Force in Christchurch. Within months, he’d been convicted for house-breaking and forgery and sentenced again to prison. When his two-years lag was done, with the war now over, he returned to Auckland, returned to work as a tailor’s presser and returned to having gotten away with murder.
By 1951, Fell was worried it might stay that way. His witnesses in the so-called missing bride case were “dropping like flies” and an earlier police search for Eileen’s body, near Kaipara Heads, had turned up nothing. Fell decided to talk crown prosecutor Meredith into pursuing the case anyway. Meredith agreed it was now or never, and on June 14, the cops arrested Horry at his home. As Fell was about to put the cuffs on, the con man blundered into giving the prosecution another juicy tidbit. “It’s that Turner business,” he told wife Eunice in front of Fell and another officer.
“Why, has she turned up?”
“That’s impossible, she couldn’t have,” Horry replied. “Say nothing. Tell Them nothing.”
Two months later, the truth of the case and of Horry’s murderous duplicity were laid bare: the lies, the fake letters, the cheque fraud, Eileen’s disappearance the day after their wedding, the fake U-boat story, the fake story about Eileen concocting it all to run away with another man, and finally Eileen’s clothes in a suitcase and a hatbox at Horry’s home, including the altered wedding dress. It took the Supreme Court jury just under two and a half hours to come to a verdict with all that evidence, circumstantial or not: the accused was guilty as charged.
If Horry had ultimately not succeeded in getting away with murder, he had definitely succeeded in setting a new legal precedent for New Zealand, one which was soon upheld by the Court of Appeal: if the circumstantial evidence was strong enough, no body was needed to prove murder. The decision would go on to influence law in Britain and the United States.
Horry’s luck wasn’t completely out, however; there was just enough left to keep him from hanging. The first National government, elected in 1949, had not long restored capital punishment. However, Eileen’s murder had taken place before the reinstatement, and Horry instead served life imprisonment with hard labour, instead of swinging from a rope.
He did 16 years, was released in 1967 and changed his name to Taylor. Apparently untroubled enough by his heinous crime to ever admit to it, he lived out his days with Eunice in Auckland. His life of lies finally came to an end in 1981, nearly 40 years after he murdered Eileen Jones in cold blood for her money. The whereabouts of her body died with him.
