Don Jimmy

Whatever inner agonies had assailed 21-year-old Eileen Gibson, known as "Gay," they were forever resolved in the early morning of Oct. 18. Ninety miles off the coast of Portuguese Guinea, she was pushed through a porthole into the ocean --perhaps alive, perhaps dead--from a first-class cabin on "B" deck of the steamship Durban Castle. Eight days later, when the Durban Castle put into Southampton, detectives came aboard and arrested James Camb, a deck steward, for the murder of Eileen Gibson.

Five months to the day after Gay's disappearance, Camb went on trial for his life. He sat in the dock at the Hampshire Assizes in a shedlike courtroom of canvas and plywood, incongruous amidst stained glass and granite pillars, within the 13th Century Great Hall of Winchester Castle. Most of the space in the public gallery was occupied by fashionably dressed women, many of whom appeared daily at 5:30 a.m. to make sure of a seat. The press made much of this welcome diversion from the European crisis.

Eileen Gibson, an actress of sorts, had been playing Lorna, the prizefight manager's floozy in a South African production of Golden Boy. Some testified that she was something like Lorna in real life. Others testified that she was given to inexplicable bouts of hysteria and fainting; that she had said she was pregnant; that she had accepted her fare home and -L-350 from a nightclub owner.

And what of Camb? At 31 he was a self-assured rounder with a Lancashire accent and a high shine to his black hair. Shipmates called him "Don Jimmy." A married man, he had boasted of an affair a voyage; two girls had accused him of rape. Said a fellow steward: "Jimmy was always saying we were jealous of him."

At a dance on the last night of Gay's life the steward had murmured that he had half a mind to take a drink to her cabin. At 2 a.m. he did. When she had finished it, Camb said, "I climbed on the bed beside her. She raised no objection." Later, she fainted. Camb could not revive her. In a panic, he snaked her body through the porthole into the sea. It was never found.*

The Crown contended that the steward had strangled the girl and had disposed of the body to hide his crime.

Last week, after four days of hearing the evidence, 45 minutes of deliberation, the jury found the steward guilty of murder. Mr. Justice Hilbery donned the black cap. Did Camb have anything to say before he was sentenced? "My Lord," replied Camb coolly, "at the beginning of this case ... I pleaded not guilty. I repeat that statement now. That is all."

Mr. Justice Hilbery pronounced sentence of death on Don Jimmy.

* Many whodunit addicts think that a suspect cannot be held for murder unless there is a corpus delicti--"often used erroneously to designate the physical body of the victim of a murder" (Webster). Actually, corpus delicti is the "substantial and fundamental facts necessary to the commission of a crime." Britain's last murder-without-body was in 1934, when a poultry breeder, Thomas Joseph Davidson, drowned his eight-year-old son. He was sent to prison for life.

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