On the night of Friday, March 26th, he had dinner with a longtime friend, Lawrence Keen, who later said that Green had confided in him that “an American was trying to bring him down.” After the two men left the restaurant, Green told Keen that they were being followed, and pointed to a car behind them.
The same evening, Priscilla West phoned her brother, and got his answering machine. She called repeatedly the next morning, but he still didn’t pick up. Alarmed, she went to his house and knocked on the door; there was no response. After several more attempts, she called the police, who came and broke open the entrance. Downstairs, the police found the body of Green lying on his bed, surrounded by Sherlock Holmes books and posters, with a cord wrapped around his neck. He had been garroted.
“I will lay out the whole case for you,” John Gibson, one of Green’s closest friends, told me when I phoned him shortly after learning of Green’s death. Gibson had written several books with Green, including “My Evening with Sherlock Holmes,” a 1981 collection of parodies and pastiches of the detective stories. With a slight stammer, Gibson said of his friend’s death, “It’s a complete and utter mystery.”
Not long after, I travelled to Great Bookham, a village thirty miles south of London, where Gibson lives. He was waiting for me when I stepped off the train. He was tall and rail-thin, and everything about him-narrow shoulders, long face, unruly gray hair-seemed to slouch forward, as if he were supported by an invisible cane. “I have a file for you,” he said, as we drove off in his car. “As you’ll see, there are plenty of clues and not a lot of answers.”
He sped through town, past a twelfth-century stone church and a row of cottages, until he stopped at a red brick house surrounded by hedges. “You don’t mind dogs, I hope,” he said. “I’ve two cocker spaniels. I only wanted one but the person I got them from said that they were inseparable, and so I took them both and they’ve been fighting ever since.”
When he opened the front door, both spaniels leaped on us, then at each other. They trailed us into the living room, which was filled with piles of antique books, some reaching to the ceiling. Among the stacks was a near-complete set of The Strand Magazine, in which the Holmes stories were serialized at the turn of the twentieth century; a single issue, which used to sell for half a shilling, is now worth as much as five hundred dollars. “Altogether, there must be about sixty thousand books,” Gibson said.
We sat on a couch and he opened his case file, carefully spreading the pages around him. “All right, dogs. Don’t disturb us,” he said. He looked up at me. “Now I’ll tell you the whole story.”
Gibson said that he had attended the coroner’s inquest and taken careful notes, and as he spoke he picked up a magnifying glass beside him and peered through it at several crumpled pieces of paper. “I write everything on scraps,” he said. The police, he said, had found only a few unusual things at the scene. There was the cord around Green’s neck-a black shoelace. There was a wooden spoon near his hand, and several stuffed animals on the bed. And there was a partially empty bottle of gin.
The police found no sign of forced entry and assumed that Green had committed suicide. Yet there was no note, and Sir Colin Berry, the president of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences, testified to the coroner that, in his thirty-year career, he had seen only one suicide by garroting. “One,” Gibson repeated. Self-garroting is extremely difficult to do, he explained; people who attempt it typically pass out before they are asphyxiated. Moreover, in this instance, the cord was not a thick rope but a shoelace, making the feat even more unlikely.
Gibson reached into his file and handed me a sheet of paper with numbers on it. “Take a look,” he said. “My phone records.” The records showed that he and Green had spoken repeatedly during the week before his death; if the police had bothered to obtain Green’s records, Gibson went on, they would no doubt show that Green had called him only hours before he died. “I was probably the last person to speak to him,” he said. The police, however, had never questioned him.
During one of their last conversations about the auction, Gibson recalled, Green had said he was afraid of something.
“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Gibson told him.
“No, I’m worried,” Green said.
“What? You fear for your life?”
“I do.”
Gibson said that, at the time, he didn’t take the threat seriously but advised Green not to answer his door unless he was sure who it was.
Gibson glanced at his notes. There was something else, he said, something critical. On the eve of his death, he reminded me, Green had spoken to his friend Keen about an “American” who was trying to ruin him. The following day, Gibson said, he had called Green’s house and heard a strange greeting on the answering machine. “Instead of getting Richard’s voice in this sort of Oxford accent, which had been on the machine for a decade,” Gibson recalled, “I got an American voice that said, ‘Sorry, not available.’ I said, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I thought I must’ve dialled the wrong number. So I dialled really slowly again. I got the American voice. I said, ‘Christ almighty.’”
Gibson said that Green’s sister had heard the same recorded greeting, which was one reason that she had rushed to his house. Reaching into his file, Gibson handed me several more documents. “Make sure you keep them in chronological order,” he said. There was a copy of Jean Conan Doyle’s will, several newspaper clippings on the auction, an obituary, and a Christie’s catalogue.
That was pretty much all he had. The police, Gibson said, had not conducted any forensic tests or looked for fingerprints. And the coroner-who had once attended a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society to conduct a mock inquest of the murder from a Conan Doyle story in which a corpse is discovered in a locked room-found himself stymied. Gibson said that the coroner had noted that there was not enough evidence to ascertain what had happened, and, as a result, the official verdict regarding whether Green had killed himself or been murdered was left open.
Within hours of Green’s death, Sherlockians seized upon the mystery, as if it were another case in the canon. In a Web chat room, one person, who called himself “inspector,” wrote, “As for self-garroting, it is like trying to choke oneself to death by your own hands.” Others invoked the “curse,” as if only the supernatural could explain it. Gibson handed me an article from a British tabloid that was headlined “‘CURSE OF CONAN DOYLE’ STRIKES HOLMES EXPERT.”
“So what do you think?” Gibson asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
Later, we went through the evidence again. I asked Gibson if he knew whose phone numbers were on the note that Green had sent to his sister.
Gibson shook his head. “It hadn’t come up at the inquest,” he said.
“What about the American voice on the answering machine?” I asked. “Do we know who that is?”
“Unfortunately, not a clue. To me that’s the strangest and most telling piece of evidence. Did Richard put that on his machine? What was he trying to tell us? Did the murderer put it there? And, if so, why would he do that?”
I asked if Green had ever displayed any irrational behavior. “No, never,” he said. “He was the most levelheaded man I ever met.”
He noted that Priscilla West had testified at the inquest that her brother had no history of depression. Indeed, Green’s physician wrote to the court to say that he had not treated Green for any illnesses for a decade.