The murder without a body

​The murder of Mary Eileen Spargo is historic - for the first time there was no body, but her husband was still convicted of murder. And it changed how murder trials were run across the world.
George Cecil Horry was born in Sheffield, England, on May 6, 1907, to Charles Henry Horry and his wife Lily. He attended school there before the family came to Auckland in 1921. He worked as a meter reader
But by the end of that year he was racking up convictions for assault, burglary and theft.
Horry decided to reinvent himself, using the name George Horace Collver, a steel manufacturer from Wentworth, and went on to marry Evelyn Edna Bates, a divorcee, and started over in Sydney.
But Horry was up to his old tricks - ending up in jail for passing fraudulent cheques before being deported back to New Zealand. He promptly went back to prison for crimes he had committed before marrying and on the day he got out he broke into a house. Evelyn had had enough and the marriage was dissolved.
In 1942, he married Mary Elieen Jones - called Eileen - under the name George Arthur Turner. She believed he was wealthy and would one day inherit a title. He had told her parents they were going back to England where he worked in a secret capacity for the British government.
The day after their wedding Eileen disappeared….and so did Horry.
Then five months later he married again under his real name. This time to Eunice Marcel Geale. He had been seeing her while marrying Eileen.
A week after he did, “George Turner” visited Eileen’s parents and told them she had been lost at sea when their ship was torpedoed. But it made them suspicious and they went to the police.
It took Detective Sergeant William Fell eight years to put it all together. He discovered Turner was actually Horry and that he had obtained the proceeds of the sale of Eileen’s house and the contents of her bank account. Letters written to explain her disappearance had actually come from him and he had arranged for them to be posted from Australia.
A search warrant for his home found some of her clothes and he gave another unlikely explanation for her disappearance, that she had paid him to marry her so she could disappear with her American soldier lover.
Before he could be arrested he was conscripted into the army then transferred into the Royal New Zealand Air Force. But his criminal habits saw him arrested for forgery and burglary and sent to jail.
Fell faced a dilemma. He had no body and the witnesses were ageing. After taking legal advice he went ahead and arrested him on May 14, 1951. A law that said anyone who was missing for seven years could be considered legally dead helped.
A jury took 155 minutes to find him guilty, the first time anyone had been convicted without a body.
He was released from prison in 1967 - still married to Eunice. He died in 1981 having changed his name by deed poll to Turner. He is buried at Purewa Cemetery.
Shortly after his trial - murder cases in America and the United Kingdom succeeded where there was no body - based on Horry’s case.
Pic by Alexandre Boucey.