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That night and the next morning, March
27th, Green’s sister, Priscilla West, tried to call him several times from
her home near Oxford but got his answering machine; John Michael Gibson
called him in the morning and also got the answering machine. But instead
of the greeting in Green’s voice that had been on the machine for ten
years, they both heard a strange voice saying, in an American accent,
“Sorry, not available.’” Gibson thought he must have dialed the wrong number,
so he dialed again, slowly; again he got the American voice. Green’s sister
became alarmed, went down to London, and pounded on his door but got no
response. She called the police, who broke into the house.
They
found Green downstairs, surrounded by his collection of Sherlock Holmes and
Doyle materials. He was lying on his bed with a black shoelace wrapped
around his neck. Stuffed toy animals were on the bed with him. A wooden
spoon was near his hand, and a partly empty bottle of gin lay nearby. The room
was locked from the inside, with no sign of forced entry. Although no note
was found, the police concluded that Green had committed suicide and did
not check any of the items for fingerprints. I think the officers’ names
were G. Lestrade and Athelney Jones.
The Westminster
coroner, Dr. Paul Knapman, held an inquest on April 23rd. Green’s sister
and Lawrence Keen, the friend who had had dinner with Green the night
before his body was found, testified. Keen shocked the family and Green’s
other friends by revealing that he and Green had been lovers some years
before; no one else had known that he was gay. Not that there’s anything
wrong with that. Professor Sir Colin Berry, president of the British
Academy of Forensic Sciences, who conducted the postmortem examination,
testified that Green had died of asphyxiation. The coroner, who had once
conducted a mock inquest at a Sherlock Holmes Society meeting into a Holmes
story about a murder in a locked room, recorded an open verdict. He said:
“There are many comments in this case in favour of suicide. He was acting
strangely and he seemed to be scared and there is no evidence of violence.
I am perfectly content to say that suicide is the most likely possibility
but we have no note and it’s a very unusual way of killing yourself to put
a lace, which must hurt, around the neck and continue to twist it. The
second possibility is unusual behaviour—often some form of deviant sexual
behaviour. There is nothing that actually points to this form of death. As
for murder, there is not much in the way of direct evidence. It’s an
unusual form of death that can be done by others. We do have interesting
messages from him about the paranoia he was feeling but it is assumed by
all to be without much foundation.” The theory was that Green had garroted
himself by tightening the shoelace with the wooden spoon, although Sir
Colin Berry of the Academy of Forensic Sciences had testified that he had
seen only one suicide by garroting in thirty-one years. John Michael Gibson
told David Grann, who wrote an article on the case for the December 13,
2004 issue of The New Yorker, that “Self-garroting is extremely
difficult to do . . . people who attempt it typically pass out before they
are asphyxiated.” A posting on an Internet chat room by someone calling
himself “inspector” pointed out that “self-garroting . . . is like trying
to choke oneself to death by your own hands.”
Grann, the New
Yorker writer, went to Edinburgh to interview Owen Dudley Edwards, who
had been the general editor of the Oxford University Press edition of the
Canon that Green had annotated two volumes of; Edwards also wrote a
biography of Doyle’s early life, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, that
was published in 1983. That’s an interesting book, by the way. Owens finds
many parallels between the Holmes stories and Doyle’s life; for example, he
shows that the description of Baskerville Hall is an almost perfect match
for Stonyhurst, the boarding school Doyle attended. Anyway, Owens told
Grann that Green “was the world’s greatest Conan Doyle expert. I have the
authority to say it. Richard ultimately became the greatest of us all. That
is a firm and definite statement of someone who knows.” He said that he had
met Green in 1981, when Owens was researching his biography of Conan Doyle
and Green and Gibson were still working on their bibliography, and that
Green had shared all of his data with Edwards. He read Grann the passage
from “A Case of Identity” where Holmes says that “Life is infinitely
stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent” and went on to
talk about the auction. He said that his and Green’s lives had “been
dominated by the fact that Conan Doyle had five children, three of whom
became his
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Literary heirs. The two
boys were playboys. One of them, Denis, was I gather, utterly selfish. The
other one, Adrian, was a repulsive crook. And then there was an absolutely
wonderful daughter.” According to Edwards, Green “had become so close to
Jean Conan Doyle that he became known as the son she never had.”
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