JAMES MORTON DELVES INTO THE BRUTAL WORLD OF MURDERS AND DISCOVERS THE VITAL ROLE A MISSING BODY CAN PLAY IN THE OUTCOME OF A CASE

 It is always entertaining to watch someone else's court case go awry and particularly in a murder case with no body when the supposed victim turns up. Even more so, when the evidence is dependent on what the Americans engagingly call a jailhouse snitch. It happened last month in Australia and, although it is rare, it is not the first time.

Natasha Ryan had been missing for something like five years and Leonard John Fraser was on trial for her murder when she was found alive and well in Rockhampton, Queensland. Amazingly, she had been with her boyfriend all the time.


As for Mr Fraser, he was on trial after having allegedly told a fellow inmate that he had smashed her head while she slept and dumped the body in a lily pond. It wasn't quite the ending where defence counsel says 'And now I call my last witness - Ms Ryan', because it was the prosecutor who made the announcement. All round it was pretty embarrassing because it has turned out that Ms Ryan rang a helpline, which in turn informed the police three weeks before Mr Fraser stood trial. However, things are not yet over for Mr Fraser. He still stands trial for the murder of three other women.


The oldest English case of no body was the so-called Compton Wonder in the 1660s. A steward of the local manor disappeared and three people were executed as a result. Given the methods of torture used in those days, it is perhaps not surprising that one of them confessed and implicated his mother and brother.


The bodies were still swinging from the gibbet when the steward turned up with a weird and wonderful tale of how he had been kidnapped by Turkish bandits who must have been prevalent in and around Oxfordshire at the time, had been sold to work in a harem - he was fortunate not to have been emasculated for his troubles - and had escaped to make his way back to England.


Ms Ryan is reported to be likely to receive money for the film and television rights of her story but the steward was not so fortunate. He died shortly after his return. The probable truth (if that is not an oxymoron) is that this was the time of the Restoration and for some it was prudent to absent themselves from their village or town until tempers had cooled.


So, for nearly 300 years, the 'no body-no murder' rule was in play. It is generally regarded that Polish farmer Michail Onufrezck was the first person to be convicted where there was no body in modern times, but it is not quite the case. One Thomas Davidson holds that dubious distinction. He admitted to killing his eight-year-old son John, who had been missing for some months, drowning him and then putting his body on a blazing rubbish tip.


At his trial, he retracted the confession, saying he had found the body in the canal. The Court of Appeal upheld his conviction but he was reprieved. After that came the notorious Camb-Gibson murder case, in which a steward pushed a passenger through the porthole. He was convicted and like Davidson was reprieved.


Onufrezck's case was slightly different. Davidson and Camb both had admitted there was a body. It was merely the circumstances of the death which were in issue. Onufrezck claimed there was no death. He had stayed on in Britain after the war and farmed in Wales with his fellow Pole Stanislaw Sykutt, who disappeared shortly before Christmas 1953.


Sykutt had complained to the police about Onufrezck's bullying and was trying to dissolve the partnership. The only thing that could be found were some 2,000 tiny specks of blood on the walls and ceiling, and a fragment of bone, but this was before the days of DNA. Onufrezck said Sykutt had sold his share in the farm and returned to Poland.


Lord Goddard, dismissing the appeal and never one to display much sympathy to defendants, said that things had moved on since the days of the Camden Wonder and set out the minimum requirements for conviction in a no body case.


Onufrezck was another who was reprieved. The story behind that was apparently a lingering fear that Sykutt had in fact disappeared behind the Iron Curtain and might be produced at an embarrassingly inconvenient political moment. He never really learned English in prison but he was a good chess player and taught several London villains how to play. He was released in 1965 and went to live in the Polish community in Bradford, where he was killed in a car accident the following year.


However, the case clarified the law and opened the way for the trial in 1949 of John George Haigh, the acid bath murderer. For him there was no reprieve.

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In my constant effort to provide new avenues of work for enterprising solicitors, I wonder if they have noticed the possibility of actions for false imprisonment by the children who have been quarantined over severe acute respiratory syndrome? I am sure it must be arguable that this is in breach of their human rights.


James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist