Lost on a Honeymoon

Before Mary Eileen Spargo was married nine years ago, she drew $1,200 from her bank account, which she closed, and collected a check for $2,700 from her lawyer for the sale of property. Her husband, a tailor's presser named George Cecil Horry, announced that he was taking Mary Eileen to England. Instead, the couple left on a honeymoon trip to New Zealand's lonely Waitakere Mountains. The bride was never seen again.

For a time Mrs. Horry's parents received letters bearing Australian postmarks signed "George & Eileen." Then one day Horry called on his in-laws, said that he had just returned from England, and told them sorrowfully that Mary Eileen had died in the Atlantic torpedoing of the Empress of India. What Horry did not know was that Mary Eileen's parents knew he had never left Auckland. One of the letters which he had arranged to have posted back from Australia had been opened by the New Zealand wartime censor of outgoing mail, who thus accidentally gave police a vital clue. Confronted by the cops, Horry had a new story: Mary Eileen had paid him to marry her, he said, then eloped with an American G.I. Police found clothes belonging to Mary Eileen in the possession of a woman Horry was living with. They would have charged Horry with murder right then, except for one crucial missing piece of evidence: the body of the bride.

For eight years, New Zealand authorities patiently waited before bringing Horry to trial. Then under the common law principle that anyone who has been declared a missing person may, after seven years, be presumed dead, they seized Horry. Last week, without a trace of a body or part of a body or direct evidence that death had taken place or a confession by the accused, the court convicted Horry of his wife's murder. The sentence: life imprisonment.

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