Despite the extensive manhunt, she was not found for 10 days. Sayers visited the "scene of the disappearance", and used the scenario in her book Unnatural Death.Ĭhristie's disappearance was featured on the front page of The New York Times. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave a spirit medium one of Christie's gloves to find her. Over a thousand police officers, 15,000 volunteers, and several aeroplanes scoured the rural landscape. The home secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, pressured police, and a newspaper offered a £100 reward. The disappearance caused a public outcry. Her car, a Morris Cowley, was found at Newlands Corner, perched above a chalk quarry, with an expired driving licence and clothes. Late that evening, Christie disappeared from her home. On 3 December 1926, the pair quarrelled after Archie announced his plan to spend the weekend with friends, unaccompanied by his wife. He had fallen in love with Nancy Neele, who had been a friend of Major Belcher. At any rate, the two were divorced in 1928 and she later married archaeologist Max Mallowan.In August 1926, Archie asked Agatha for a divorce. The most plausible explanation is that she simply wanted to get away from a bad situation and embarrass her husband at the same time. Virtually no one believed this, though, and Agatha’s subsequent refusal ever to discuss the matter–she made no mention of it in her autobiography–has fueled speculation among mystery buffs that continues to this day. The Christies immediately went into seclusion, and several doctors were called in they put out the story that Agatha was suffering from amnesia brought on by grief over her mother’s death. Christie’s comment was, “Fancy, my brother has just arrived.”
Finally someone notified the police, who grabbed her husband and rushed up to have him identify her, which, on Tuesday, December 14, he did. As the days passed and her picture continued to appear in the newspapers, several of the guests recognized her, but she laughed off suggestions that she was the missing author.
They also organized 15,000 volunteers to search the surrounding countryside.Īs it rather anticlimactically turned out, Agatha had gone to Yorkshire after all, specifically to a health spa in the town of Harrogate, where she signed in on the morning of Saturday, December 4, under the name, significantly, of Teresa Neele. Hearing of the husband’s infidelities, the police tapped his phones and followed him wherever he went. The police promptly had the lake dredged, without result. A quarter mile from where her car was found there was a lake called Silent Pool that Agatha had used in one of her books one of her characters had drowned there. One, to her brother-in-law, said she was simply going for a vacation in Yorkshire another, to the local chief constable, said she feared for her life. Christie had committed suicide, been murdered, lost her memory, or simply constructed an elaborate publicity stunt.Īgatha had written several confusing letters to her husband and others before vanishing. There was an immediate uproar in the press, with speculation that Mrs. The next morning her car was found abandoned several miles away, with some of her clothes and identification scattered around inside. Around 9:45 PM Agatha announced she was going out for a drive. On the day Agatha disappeared, in fact, Archie had gone to the home of some friends to spend the weekend with his inamorata. Her mother, to whom she had been quite close, had died some months earlier, and perhaps more important, her husband Archie, a handsome war hero, was having an affair with a woman named Nancy Neele, which he made little effort to disguise. Nonetheless, she was known to have been nervous and depressed. She was an established mystery writer even then her seventh effort, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was on the best-seller lists. Christie disappeared on the evening of Friday, December 3, 1926, from her home near a small town in Berkshire, England. In any event, the famous “disappearance” you refer to occurred some 50 years earlier, and if she was senile at the time it is surely the most protracted case of that disorder in the history of medicine. However, you never know with these mystery writers. Inasmuch as Agatha Christie was buried in an English churchyard in 1976, I think it’s pretty safe to assume she’s dead.
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