March 25, 2025 • 42 mins
In this episode we examine the lesser told story of Agatha Christie: that of her sudden disappearance. The beloved crime fiction writer, whose works are still being adapted, starred in her own real-live mystery, a true story of love, loss, and betrayal.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Mary Kay McBrayer
Developed by Scott Waxman, Emma DeMuth, and Jacob Bronstein
Associate Producer is Leo Culp
Produced by Antonio Enriquez
Theme Music by Tyler Cash
Executive Produced by Scott Waxman and Emma DeMuth
Special thanks to:
Carter, Stephen L.. Invisible. Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
Order Lucy Worsley's biography 'Agatha Christie, An Elusive Woman' at Pegasus Books
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
On Diversion Audio. A note this episode contains mature content
and descriptions of suicidal audiation that may be disturbing for
some listeners. Please take care in listening. In the early
(00:33):
morning hours of December fourth, nineteen twenty six, a dazed
looking woman made her way up to the Clanden railway platform.
The small outdoor train station was just three miles from
the rolling green hills of Newland's Corner. It was a
scenic slice of the English countryside, but the woman who
(00:55):
stumbled out of the fields that day contrasted with her surroundings.
She wore a gray skirt and a thin cardigan, clothing
not warm enough for the harsh chill of the winter day.
Her shoes were caked in mud, and there were smears
of blood on her face and hands. She must have
slumped and shivered as she stood there in the frigid
(01:16):
morning air. Her head was injured and her shoulders were
in terrible pain. But despite all of that, no one
gave her a second glance. Something about this woman seemed
to defy the interest of the people around her. They
went about their business, and she slipped unnoticed onto a
train bound for Waterloo. No one at the station would
(01:40):
remember her. They wouldn't realize that they had just encountered
the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie, or that she was
about to become the single most famous missing person in
all of British history. Welcome to the greatest true crime
(02:14):
Stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode, we're
calling Agatha Christie, the original Gone Girl, to jog your memory.
She's the beloved crime fiction writer who created some of
the twentieth centuries most cherished and enduring characters in over
sixty detective novels, titles that are still being adapted, like
(02:38):
Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.
But what many people don't know is that in nineteen
twenty six, Christie starred in her own real live mystery,
A true story of love, loss and betrayal more after
the Break. Okay, listeners, we're a true crime podcast. But
(03:15):
I know you know Agatha Christie. She's one of the
most prolific crime fiction writers ever. I'd even go so
far as to say her writing is typically the gold
standard of the genre. And even though what we share
in this show is true crime, it would be ridiculous
to deny that her plot lines are nearly always the
(03:36):
starting formula for any mystery narrative, whether consciously or not.
In summation, Agatha Christie has had a huge influence on
how we view crime narrative. Also, one could argue that
this story isn't true crime. I'd counter argue that one.
It's pretty damn close. We're talking about ethics, cruelty, emotional
(04:00):
abuse and its consequences and how it impacted one of
the greatest crime fiction writers ever. Plus we still have
a big intrigue involving a disappearance and a potential murder
without a body, So let's go. Agatha Christie was not
(04:23):
always the respected and self assured icon she became in
her old age, and the journey from Agatha Miller to
Dame Agatha Christie was a long and tumultuous one. It
involved the death of both her parents, a world war,
a bad husband, and a disappearance that would have the
whole world watching. Agatha was born into a tight knit,
(04:52):
upper middle class British family in September of eighteen ninety.
Her father, Frederick, was the kind of person who lived
did his occupation as gentlemen and his favorite activity as
doing nothing. In spite of this level of privilege, Agatha's
father was a good guy, and Agatha's mother, Clara, adored him.
(05:14):
From the outside, Agatha's childhood seemed idyllic, but nothing is perfect.
In fact, Frederick's wealthy upbringing left him with a sense
that money was an infinitely renewable resource. He had a
terrible weakness for shopping in parties. He'd once hosted six
hundred guests at the Waldorf for his eldest daughter's coming
(05:36):
out party, which I mean, if you got money for that,
do it up and then invite me please. In nineteen
oh one, one of the trustees for the family fund
committed suicide after making a series of bad financial decisions.
Suddenly the family needed to cut corners, but Frederick Miller
had no idea how to do that. His solution was
(05:59):
to rent out the estate and take his family to
stay in a series of hotels in France. When that,
somehow didn't make them less broke, Frederick was forced to
do the unthinkable look for a job. Anyone who's hunted
a job knows how stressful it can be, especially when
you need the money. There's the old joke that finding
(06:21):
a job is a job, and it really does require
serious tenacity. I can't imagine having to do that for
the first time when I was in my fifties. Soon
after beginning the job hunt, Agatha's father had a series
of small heart attacks that ultimately led to his death
in nineteen oh one at the age of fifty five.
(06:42):
Clara was heartbroken, not destitute, but still poorer than she'd
ever imagined being. For eleven year old Agatha, all this
meant that her idyllic childhood came to a crashing halt.
In truth, she was always somewhat of an anxious child,
which can relate. My childhoods stress dreams were of my
(07:03):
dad dying in freak accidents, like a gas station billboard
falling on him and squashing him flat like wily coyote.
But my worst childhood imagining had kind of already happened
to little Agatha. As a girl, she suffered from recurring
(07:28):
nightmares that she called the gunman. Usually in her stress dreams,
Agatha was doing something ordinary and comfortable. When she felt
a creeping sense of unease, she'd look up and a
one armed man in eighteenth century military garb would appear
carrying an old fashioned musket. As soon as she looked
(07:51):
into his pale blue eyes, Agatha would wake up screaming.
Other times, the gunman would take the form of a
beloved family member. Agatha would be sitting across from her
mother or sister, and when she looked up, they'd transform
into the gunman. In the biography Agatha Christie An Elusive Woman,
(08:11):
author Lucy Worsley points out how the themes of this
dream played out in Agatha's life again and again. Something
comfortable and familiar transformed into a nightmare. I was not
surprised at all to learn that her stress dreams intensified
after her father died. Her older brother and sister both
(08:32):
moved out at that point, and Clara was forced to
lay off many of the household staff. Agatha found herself
trapped alone with her grieving mother. Her once beloved childhood
home was transformed. In spite of her turbulent childhood, The
next six years saw Agatha growing into a well adjusted
(08:53):
young woman. The tragedy and hardship did bring Agatha and
her mother closer together. Clara was determined that, in spite
of everything, her daughter was going to pursue the greatest
goal a Victorian woman could aspire to marrying up. Clara
enrolled Agatha in several French finishing schools. From what I understand,
(09:15):
these were boarding schools, but instead of learning science and math,
she studied etiquette, which forks to use, and how to
make small talk about the Empire. Although to be fair,
Agatha's education also entailed a rigorous music curriculum centered around
singing in piano, and for her part, Agatha didn't seem
opposed to the role her mother chose for her. As
(09:39):
Agatha put it in her autobiography, that was what made
being a woman so exciting. You were waiting for the man,
and when the man came, he would change your entire life.
And on October twelfth, nineteen oh six, the man showed up.
(10:08):
Archie Christie was not the refined gentleman Clara pictured for
her daughter. He was the son of an English lawyer
who died of syphilis in an asylum when Archie was
only seven. After that, Archie's Irish mother raised him until
he joined the British Air Force at the age of
twenty three. He was a tough young pilot who drove
(10:32):
a motorbike, spoke his mind, and was mysterious about his
tragic past or. As biographer Lucy Worsley puts it, he
was incredibly hot. Agatha was already engaged to someone else
when she first met Archie, but when Archie asked her
to break it off and marry him instead, she didn't
think twice naturally, her mother disapproved of the match, not
(10:56):
only because of Archie's social status, but because there was
something about him that seemed off. Would try to explain
that to a teenager. In later years, Agatha wrote a
semi autobiographical novel about her life, using pseudonyms for herself
and all her relatives. In that book, the mother character
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confesses that she believed her daughter's fiance to be a
cruel and ruthless man whose heart was quote like a rock.
In Agatha's defense, I would like to state from personal
experience that sometimes it's hard to distinguish between a tough
guy with the heart of gold and a well mannered asshole.
(11:39):
But Agatha was undeterred by her mother's reservations. On Christmas Eve,
nineteen fourteen, Agatha and Archie were married in a last
minute ceremony at a small chapel in Bristol. Thanks to
the outbreak of World War One, Archie and Agatha spent
the first four years of their marriage part He served
(11:59):
as a transport and equipment officer in France. Meanwhile, she
lived at home, volunteering at a hospital and working on
her writing. In nineteen sixteen, during the Great War, Agatha
began work on her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair
at Styles. It's a story about a fictional country mansion
(12:20):
where the members of an upper middle class household must
come to terms with the lies and denials that drove
them to murder. Stiles was not so different from the
place where Agatha herself grew up. Both homes featured an
overbearing mother figure who held her children back with, as
Agatha put it, a dangerous intensity of affection. In nineteen eighteen,
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the war ended and Agatha got the chance to move
out from under her mother's shadow. She and Archie rented
a small flat in London and were living together at last.
Before long, Agatha gave birth to their first child, a
little girl named Roslin. Shortly afterwards, she received news that
her novel was accepted by a publisher. The Mysterious Affair
(13:19):
at Styles was a roaring success, and it soon led
to a book deal for five future publications. Archie saw
professional success as well. He was invited to come on
a world tour and serve as the financial officer for
a project that would quote showcase the products of the
British Empire. So Agatha and Archie sailed around the world
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on a refurbished prisoner of warship named the S S.
Kildonan Castler. They visited South Africa, Australia, Hawaii and New Zealand.
Agatha swam in the ocean and learned how to surf.
The couple was happy together by all accoun ounce that
(14:01):
was the last time. When Agatha and Archie returned to England,
she was well on her way to becoming a public
figure as a crime fiction writer. All three of her
novels received rave reviews. They sold well too, and now
(14:22):
newspapers and magazines asked her for interviews. The couple decided
to move out of the city and into a large
country estate in the posh suburb of Sunningdale. The wealthy
township seemed like the right place to be given their
newfound prosperity, and offered Archie ample opportunity to pursue his
passion for golf. The house they moved into was an
(14:45):
imposing Tudor style mansion, with three massive double chimneys rising
above the half timbered exterior. Igeta decorated the home in
a style that was all her own. It was stuffed
to the brim with books souvenirs from her travels nineteen
twenty's Maximalism at its finest. The couple decided to name
(15:08):
their new home after the ill fated estate from Agatha's
first novel. At Archie's suggestion, they called it The Styles,
after the book that brought her quote a stake in life.
Agatha hated it nearly from day One. Of the home's
previous owners, rumor had it that one went bankrupt and
(15:29):
another was murdered. Agatha found all this gloomy and morbid.
She also complained that the lane where the estate sat
was lonely, and the house itself got on her nerves.
I completely understand that the suburbs really and truly bummed
me out to but The Styles was not really to
blame for Agatha's unhappiness. The real problem was Archie. Ever
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since the couple had moved to Sunningdale, they'd grown further apart.
Archie spent all day working in the city, and when
he came home, he claimed he was too tired to
spend time with Agatha. He was too tired to host
guests or go out to dinner with their new neighbors.
He was never too tired to go golfing on the weekends, though,
(16:16):
and this was something he preferred to do without Agatha.
Apparently her novice golf game would only drag him down.
I didn't know that this stereotype of an unfeeling suburban
husband dressed in pastels, leaving his wife stranded with all
the childcare and housework was over one hundred years old,
did you. Just like in her old childhood nightmares, Archie
(16:38):
was changing into someone who Agatha barely recognized. He had
become a cold, distant and threatening stranger, someone who seemed
capable of anything, maybe even murder. At least that's how
Agatha seemed to feel. It seems like a bit of
a leap. I mean, he can be a jerk and
not a killer. But soon enough people would agree with
(17:01):
her assessment. By the spring of nineteen twenty six, Agatha's
(17:25):
career was thriving. Her most recent novel, The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd was one of the most talked about books
in the country. The devious twist ending made her into
a household name and proved that she didn't always need
to play by the rules. But while Agatha's career was thriving,
her personal life was falling apart. The problems in her
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marriage had only gotten worse in the last few years.
Agatha was isolated at the Styles. She'd made few friends
in Sunningdale, perhaps because Archie prevented her from entertaining guests
at the estate. He claimed that visitors ruined his weekends.
The isolation and stress of her failing marriage began to
weigh on Agatha. Her health was declining and she developed insomnia.
(18:13):
If this sounds like the second act of a Gothic novel, well,
then Agatha's mother passed away. Clara had been suffering from bronchitis,
but the death still came as a surprise. When Agatha
got the news that her mother was dying, she rushed
to her bedside, but she didn't arrive in time. Agatha
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loved her mother deeply. Clara had been the pillar of
Agatha's life for as long as she could remember. Now
it felt as though everything she knew was falling down
around her. Perhaps one of the most devastating parts of
losing her mother was her husband's reaction, and Agatha likely
expected that Archie would not be there to support her
(19:04):
when things got rough. As she wrote in her autobiography,
I had always realized that he had a violent dislike
of illness, death and trouble of any kind, But she
never could have imagined the depth of his indifference, or
how much it would sting. Archie was in Spain for
work at the time of Clara's death, and he couldn't
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be bothered to come home early for the funeral. When
he did return to England, his initial reaction was to
try and cheer her up. He suggested his wife come
back to Spain with him so she could be distracted.
But Agatha was grieving a massive loss, not overreacting to
some minor disappointment. This kind of grief could not be
(19:46):
shrugged off with a trip to Spain, so instead Agatha
took their daughter and went back to her childhood home
to clear out her mother's things. Archie's response to this
was to retreat even further from his grieving wife. His
letters to Agatha became few and far between, and the
ones he did send, he talked about golf and his
(20:08):
new partner on the Links, Nancy Neil, an attractive woman
ten years younger than thirty six year old Agatha. When
Archie agreed to come visit Agatha at her parents' house
for their daughter's seventh birthday, the mood was tense and
strained between them. After a day and a half of questioning,
Archie came out with the truth he was having an
(20:30):
affair with his golf partner, Nancy Neil. He wanted a divorce.
In the weeks that followed, Agatha moved back to the Styles,
but nothing changed between her and her husband. He started
spending several nights a week in London, and Agatha sank
deeper into her depression. Friday, December third, nineteen twenty six,
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dawned bright and cold. Archie left the Styles by the train,
as he always did, taking the nine fifteen into the
city for work. Shortly after that, Agatha took her daughter
for a drive up to her grandmother's. Archie's mother noted
that Agatha was acting odd at tea that day. At
one point, she saw that Agatha was no longer wearing
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her wedding ring. When asked about it, Agatha did not
initially respond. Instead, she stared off into space for a moment,
and then she gave an eerie, unhinged laugh and turned away.
Agatha returned home from her mother in law's around six
pm that evening. She took a phone call from her
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living secretary, Carlo. Carlo was worried about Agatha and wanted
to make sure that she was all right. After the call,
Agatha sat down to write so several letters, kissed her
daughter good night, and bade goodbye to her beloved terrier.
Then she went out to her car and drove off
into the night. Carlo was distressed when she returned that
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evening to find Agatha gone, and when she read the
letter that Agatha had left for her, her fears only grew.
We still don't know exactly what Agatha wrote in that letter,
though the coming week saw plenty of rumors and wild
speculation about its contents. What we do know is that
the letter asked Carlo to cancel Agatha's upcoming stay at
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a hotel in Yorkshire, and it made Carlo concerned enough
that she called Archie and asked him to come home.
When he arrived back at the Styles, Archie noticed a
letter addressed to him sitting on the whole table. This
letter was even more mysterious than the one written to Carlo.
The only thing Archie ever said about it was that
it was personal. That letter itself no longer exists because
(23:03):
Archie destroyed it the moment he was done reading to me,
that sounds a lot like something someone would do in
an Agatha Christie novel. The following morning, a local constable
phoned the Styles to report that Agatha's car was discovered
at the edge of a quarry fifteen miles away. The
car seemingly careened off the road and down the steep
(23:26):
slope toward the perilous pit below. It was found crashed
into a hedge, with its front wheels hanging over the
edge of the quarry. Agatha's coat, packing case, and briefcase
were all inside the car, along with her driver's license,
but Agatha herself was nowhere to be found. At this point,
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the search for Agatha began in Earnest. Police interviewed suspects
and potential witnesses. They put out a description of Agatha
in the newspaper, dragged a nearby pond and flew planes
over the countryside to look for her. Soon, the story
that one of the most famous crime fiction writers disappeared
caught the attention of the national press. As the days
(24:09):
passed with still no trace of Agatha, the Superintendent of
the Surrey Constabulary became more and more convinced that they
were looking for a body, and his suspicions fell squarely
on Archie Christie. Archie was cagy about everything from the
contents of Agatha's letter to his reasons for spending the
night away from home. As it turned out, Archie had
(24:31):
good reason to lie about this last detail. When he
claimed to be spending the weekend celebrating with his friends,
he failed to mention that one of those friends was
his mistress, Nancy Neil. He also didn't specify that what
they were celebrating was their engagement. Fortunately for Archie, three
days after Agatha's disappearance, there came a development that seemed
(24:54):
to absolve him of any suspicion. Archie's brother, Campbell, claimed
he'd gotten a letter from Agatha saying she'd gone to
a spa in Yorkshire to recuperate from her ill health.
At the time, he hadn't thought much of it and
actually lost the letter itself, but he still had the envelope.
It might have seemed like the end of the whole thing,
(25:14):
but when police and journalists reached out to spas in Yorkshire,
they came away empty handed. No one named Agatha Christie
appeared to be staying anywhere in Yorkshire. The mystery deepened,
and the media frenzy grew by the minute. This news
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caused the investigation to expand exponentially. Two thousand volunteers came
out to help search the area around Agatha's home. Police
even brought her dog to the spot where her car
was found, in hopes that he might follow her scent.
He did not. Terriers don't great search dogs. And then
there were the spiritualists. If there was a hot mystery
(26:06):
in the nineteen twenties, you could bed the spiritualists were
not far behind it. People held seances and conjured visions,
trying to communicate to Agatha, or at least her spirit.
Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and known spiritualist,
visited Styles with his personal medium. She held one of
(26:27):
Agatha's gloves and then announced that Agatha was not dead
at all. And they would all hear from her the
following Wednesday. In spite of the good news, Archie did
not seem reassured. Everything he'd done since his wife's disappearance
was to protect the reputation of his new fiance. If
it came out that the two were seeing each other
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while Archie and Agatha were still married, the scandal could
ruin Nancy's reputation. But in spite of his best efforts,
the press could not be kept at bay for long.
(27:14):
On December eighth, the Westminster Gazette reported on the young
woman friend who had been staying with Archie when his
wife disappeared. Nancy had been outed, and now Archie seemed
to have a very good motive for murder. I just
want to take a moment to admire this twist. Agatha
(27:35):
got to ruin the reputation of her husband's mistress without
being the snitch herself. And I love that suddenly police
were tailing Archie in London and calling him in to
be questioned. At this point, the letter from Agatha to
his brother only made things look worse. How convenient that
(27:57):
Campbell lost the letter that happened to exonerate his beloved
brother there was no doubt about it. Archie was getting sweaty.
Newspaper reporters harassed him for interviews, and the police posted
a guard outside his home to make sure he didn't
try to run. Archie needed a way out, He needed
(28:20):
a way to cast suspicion on to someone else. On
the evening of the eighth, Archie agreed to an interview
with The Daily Mail, where he floated the idea that
maybe Agatha wasn't dead at all, Maybe she decided to
put her clever and conniving mind to use. She could
have saved up a secret cash of money and created
(28:41):
this whole media circus just to drum up sales for
her new book. Imagine how silly he sounded when he
suggested that Agatha Christie was never the mild mannered lady
that everyone thought they knew, but was instead someone else entirely.
I love this moment too. Is there anything more satisfying
(29:03):
than watching the bastard deny it? Even proclaiming your innocence
makes you look guilty. On December eighth, nineteen twenty six,
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Teresa Neil of South Africa awoke in a ground floor
room at the Harrogate hydropathic hotel in Yorkshire, feeling calm.
Her stay there was pleasant and RESTful. She'd spent her
days wandering the manicured lawns, soaking her injured shoulders in
the hotel's health spot in shopping. The shopping was as
(30:04):
much out of necessity as anything else. Teresa came to
the hotel with little more than the clothes on her back,
and she needed the proper attire for dining and dancing
in the hotel's ballroom. It must have seemed odd to
come to a hotel without even a toothbrush, but Teresa
tried not to think about it too much. Teresa was
(30:24):
a widow with a son who died very young. Somehow,
those tragedies seemed distant. Here they were over. She came
to this hotel to rest and recuperate. That morning, Teresa's
maid brought her the paper along with her breakfast, just
as she had yesterday and the day before that. Teresa
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drank her tea and flipped through an interview with the
husband of that missing author. She thought missus Christy had
acted quite stupidly, and it seemed likely that the writer
was dead. Still, there was something familiar about the woman
pictured in the news paper. Teresa couldn't help thinking that
they looked quite a bit alike. She pointed this out
(31:06):
to several other guests at the hotel, and they had
all agreed with her. But she couldn't help feeling there
was something else there, something at the edge of her mind.
Whenever she tried to think of it, her head ached
with the strain of trying to remember, so she didn't.
Maybe there were things she couldn't understand or remember, but
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Teresa Neil was a happy woman. She didn't want to
do anything to change that. Unfortunately for the woman calling
herself Teresa Neil, her happiness could not last. The world
she left behind when she checked into the Harrogate Hydropathic
Hotel was about to come crashing back down, and once
(31:47):
it did, Teresa Neil would disappear forever. On Monday, December thirteenth,
the police arrived at the Harrogate Hydropathic. They were acting
(32:11):
on a tip from two members of the hotel band
who recognized Agatha Christie after she made requests for songs.
After making a few inquiries, the police discovered that Agatha
was indeed staying at the hotel under the name Teresa Neil.
You might think that when Archie arrived at the hotel,
Agatha took one look at him and snapped back into reality,
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but that's not how it went. Even after being reunited
with her husband, Agatha still seemed to have no idea
who she was. She introduced Archie to the other guests
as her brother. Later, when she arrived back at Styles,
she couldn't remember her own daughter. On the night she disappeared,
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Agatha Christie had entered into a dissociative fugue, a state
of amnesia brought on by stress and trauma. Agatha literally
lost her identity, and it would take her a while
to get it back. As we know, Agatha had been
in a state of deep depression ever since her mother's death,
and Archie's affair compounded things. When she drove her daughter
(33:26):
home in the afternoon before she disappeared, Agatha passed by
the quarry where her car would later be found. For
a moment she considered driving into it. Of course she didn't,
but the implications of that thought shook her to her core.
She was so depressed that her first thought was of
ending her own pain rather than of her daughter sitting
(33:47):
in the backseat. When Agatha arrived home that evening, she
learned that Archie went to stay with Nancy, and something
in her broke. Agatha took her car back to the
quarry that she'd seen her earlier that afternoon. She turned
the car off the road and let the wheel slip
from her hands. Agatha was lucky the car careened into
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a hedge that stopped it from going off the edge
of the cliff. Agatha escaped with some bruises and a
mild head injury. After that point, her recollections become somewhat fragmented.
By Agatha's account, this is the moment that entered into
her dissociated fugue. Or else she put it, she lost
(34:30):
her memory. Look, I believe women, I do. And yet
the storyteller part of my brain, the part of me
who is a big fan of Agatha Christie's work, sees
this fugue state as a lot like the one that
Walter White had in Breaking Bad, And by that I
mean absolute genius. The nobler interpretation of these events is
(34:54):
to believe Agatha's story at face value, and even if
we do take it at that, we have to at
least acknowledge that some part of her mind had to
be concocting the situation that one portrayed her cheating husband
as a murder suspect, two ruined the reputation of his mistress,
and three completely absolved her of causing either of the
(35:17):
other two things. All while she rested in anonymity in
a spa in Yorkshire under the maiden name of her
husband's future wife. She only recalled her time at the
hydro Gate after working with a hypnotherapist. While there, Agatha
created an alternative personality for herself. The persona of Miss
(35:41):
Teresa Neil was South African. She was from one of
the last places that Agatha and Archie had been happy together.
She was free from Agatha's burdensome memories of later occurrences,
and as a result, she could stay happy. But as
Agatha started to gain her own memories back, the shame
and depression came back along with them. Making everything worse
(36:16):
was the continuing media coverage of Agatha's disappearance. Newspapers picked
up Archie's depiction of Agatha and ran with it. Of course,
the papers added to the narrative in a way that
Archie did not intend. They'd given Agatha a motive beyond
trying to sell books revenge on an unfaithful husband. Agatha
(36:38):
went from a tragic victim to a callous master of deception,
and when she was finally found, things got worse. As
far as the public was concerned. Agatha was living it
up at a spa while the whole country tore itself
apart looking for her, and she'd done it just to
spite her husband. This mentality must have been a very
(36:59):
era specific attitude, because I can't imagine a contemporary public
responding this way. I can imagine them rallying with her,
and in my opinion, a publicity stunt to sell books
is way less respectable than indirectly shaming a cheating spouse,
regardless of what I think. As Agatha came back to reality,
she found herself at her lowest point yet. But when
(37:22):
you hit bottom, the only way to go is up.
Agatha still loved Archie and it wouldn't be easy to
move past their relationship, but agreeing to a divorce was
a good first step in the process of separating. Agatha
gave an interview to The Daily Mail where she recounted
everything that happened during those eleven days in nineteen twenty six. Well,
(37:46):
the interview itself must have been painful. Telling her side
of the story went a long way towards repairing Agatha's
tattered reputation. In April of nineteen twenty eight, Archie finally
got his divorce. Soon after he married Nancy, Agatha was
free to move on, and she did. The silver lining
(38:08):
from the events of nineteen twenty six was that Agatha's
disappearance did have a significant impact on the sale of
her books. Novels that were doing pretty well before sold
thousands of copies. For Agatha, this sudden success was a
mixed bag. While it was good to have the extra money,
(38:30):
she couldn't help feeling that she didn't deserve it, that
her books were only selling because of her celebrity status.
While that was true in the short term, I think
the reason they continued to sell was because Agatha had
genuine skill. I mean as recently as twenty twenty three,
one of her novels was adapted into a film starring
director Kenneth Brannaw and Tina Fey. You probably saw Haunting
(38:54):
and Venice. I did. It was gorgeous anyway. Ever since
Agatha was a til she had this incredible imagination. Her
characters felt like actual people. I think it's interesting to
note that some people who go into a dissociated fugue
do not develop any kind of alter ego. They simply
(39:14):
erased their past and move forward as a blank slate.
But for Agatha, even in her low estate, she was
able to invent a person who seemed so real that
for eleven days no one could figure out that she wasn't.
Agatha always put down herself in her writing. For decades
she listed her occupation as married rather than writer, But
(39:38):
now there was no denying her profession. In nineteen thirty,
Agatha signed a six book deal with her publisher, and
she used the proceeds to travel to Iraq, where she
lived in the Expedition House for an archaeological dig excavating
the ancient city of Or. Two years later, Agatha returned
(40:02):
to Orr and met an attractive young archaeology student named Max. Look,
I'll say it even hotter. This was the man who
became her second husband, and with whom she would travel
the world and use the material to write some of
her most famous novels. Agatha and Max would have many
(40:25):
happy years together I mean talk about marrying up. Look
at her now, Clara, But Max wasn't there on that
first trip to Iraq. On that trip, Agatha focused on
rediscovering herself. Thank you to Lucy Worsley for her biography
(41:09):
Agatha Christie an Elusive Woman, which was a great help
in writing this episode. Other sources include Agatha Christie, the
Finished Portrait by Andrew Norman, and several news articles. All
of these sources are linked in our show notes. If
you want to learn more, join me next week on
the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told for a story
(41:31):
about a photojournalist who truly did whatever it took to
get the shot. Her name was Letitia Battaglia and she
was the Sicilian photographer who shot the Italian Mafia. The
(41:55):
Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Diversion Audio. Your host is me Mary Kay mcbraer and
this episode was written by Zoe Louisa Lewis. Our show
is produced by Emma Dumouth and edited by Antonio Enriquez.
Our theme music is by Tyler Cash. Executive produced by
(42:16):
Scott Waxman.
On Diversion Audio. A note this episode contains mature content
and descriptions of suicidal audiation that may be disturbing for
some listeners. Please take care in listening. In the early
(00:33):
morning hours of December fourth, nineteen twenty six, a dazed
looking woman made her way up to the Clanden railway platform.
The small outdoor train station was just three miles from
the rolling green hills of Newland's Corner. It was a
scenic slice of the English countryside, but the woman who
(00:55):
stumbled out of the fields that day contrasted with her surroundings.
She wore a gray skirt and a thin cardigan, clothing
not warm enough for the harsh chill of the winter day.
Her shoes were caked in mud, and there were smears
of blood on her face and hands. She must have
slumped and shivered as she stood there in the frigid
(01:16):
morning air. Her head was injured and her shoulders were
in terrible pain. But despite all of that, no one
gave her a second glance. Something about this woman seemed
to defy the interest of the people around her. They
went about their business, and she slipped unnoticed onto a
train bound for Waterloo. No one at the station would
(01:40):
remember her. They wouldn't realize that they had just encountered
the famous mystery writer Agatha Christie, or that she was
about to become the single most famous missing person in
all of British history. Welcome to the greatest true crime
(02:14):
Stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode, we're
calling Agatha Christie, the original Gone Girl, to jog your memory.
She's the beloved crime fiction writer who created some of
the twentieth centuries most cherished and enduring characters in over
sixty detective novels, titles that are still being adapted, like
(02:38):
Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.
But what many people don't know is that in nineteen
twenty six, Christie starred in her own real live mystery,
A true story of love, loss and betrayal more after
the Break. Okay, listeners, we're a true crime podcast. But
(03:15):
I know you know Agatha Christie. She's one of the
most prolific crime fiction writers ever. I'd even go so
far as to say her writing is typically the gold
standard of the genre. And even though what we share
in this show is true crime, it would be ridiculous
to deny that her plot lines are nearly always the
(03:36):
starting formula for any mystery narrative, whether consciously or not.
In summation, Agatha Christie has had a huge influence on
how we view crime narrative. Also, one could argue that
this story isn't true crime. I'd counter argue that one.
It's pretty damn close. We're talking about ethics, cruelty, emotional
(04:00):
abuse and its consequences and how it impacted one of
the greatest crime fiction writers ever. Plus we still have
a big intrigue involving a disappearance and a potential murder
without a body, So let's go. Agatha Christie was not
(04:23):
always the respected and self assured icon she became in
her old age, and the journey from Agatha Miller to
Dame Agatha Christie was a long and tumultuous one. It
involved the death of both her parents, a world war,
a bad husband, and a disappearance that would have the
whole world watching. Agatha was born into a tight knit,
(04:52):
upper middle class British family in September of eighteen ninety.
Her father, Frederick, was the kind of person who lived
did his occupation as gentlemen and his favorite activity as
doing nothing. In spite of this level of privilege, Agatha's
father was a good guy, and Agatha's mother, Clara, adored him.
(05:14):
From the outside, Agatha's childhood seemed idyllic, but nothing is perfect.
In fact, Frederick's wealthy upbringing left him with a sense
that money was an infinitely renewable resource. He had a
terrible weakness for shopping in parties. He'd once hosted six
hundred guests at the Waldorf for his eldest daughter's coming
(05:36):
out party, which I mean, if you got money for that,
do it up and then invite me please. In nineteen
oh one, one of the trustees for the family fund
committed suicide after making a series of bad financial decisions.
Suddenly the family needed to cut corners, but Frederick Miller
had no idea how to do that. His solution was
(05:59):
to rent out the estate and take his family to
stay in a series of hotels in France. When that,
somehow didn't make them less broke, Frederick was forced to
do the unthinkable look for a job. Anyone who's hunted
a job knows how stressful it can be, especially when
you need the money. There's the old joke that finding
(06:21):
a job is a job, and it really does require
serious tenacity. I can't imagine having to do that for
the first time when I was in my fifties. Soon
after beginning the job hunt, Agatha's father had a series
of small heart attacks that ultimately led to his death
in nineteen oh one at the age of fifty five.
(06:42):
Clara was heartbroken, not destitute, but still poorer than she'd
ever imagined being. For eleven year old Agatha, all this
meant that her idyllic childhood came to a crashing halt.
In truth, she was always somewhat of an anxious child,
which can relate. My childhoods stress dreams were of my
(07:03):
dad dying in freak accidents, like a gas station billboard
falling on him and squashing him flat like wily coyote.
But my worst childhood imagining had kind of already happened
to little Agatha. As a girl, she suffered from recurring
(07:28):
nightmares that she called the gunman. Usually in her stress dreams,
Agatha was doing something ordinary and comfortable. When she felt
a creeping sense of unease, she'd look up and a
one armed man in eighteenth century military garb would appear
carrying an old fashioned musket. As soon as she looked
(07:51):
into his pale blue eyes, Agatha would wake up screaming.
Other times, the gunman would take the form of a
beloved family member. Agatha would be sitting across from her
mother or sister, and when she looked up, they'd transform
into the gunman. In the biography Agatha Christie An Elusive Woman,
(08:11):
author Lucy Worsley points out how the themes of this
dream played out in Agatha's life again and again. Something
comfortable and familiar transformed into a nightmare. I was not
surprised at all to learn that her stress dreams intensified
after her father died. Her older brother and sister both
(08:32):
moved out at that point, and Clara was forced to
lay off many of the household staff. Agatha found herself
trapped alone with her grieving mother. Her once beloved childhood
home was transformed. In spite of her turbulent childhood, The
next six years saw Agatha growing into a well adjusted
(08:53):
young woman. The tragedy and hardship did bring Agatha and
her mother closer together. Clara was determined that, in spite
of everything, her daughter was going to pursue the greatest
goal a Victorian woman could aspire to marrying up. Clara
enrolled Agatha in several French finishing schools. From what I understand,
(09:15):
these were boarding schools, but instead of learning science and math,
she studied etiquette, which forks to use, and how to
make small talk about the Empire. Although to be fair,
Agatha's education also entailed a rigorous music curriculum centered around
singing in piano, and for her part, Agatha didn't seem
opposed to the role her mother chose for her. As
(09:39):
Agatha put it in her autobiography, that was what made
being a woman so exciting. You were waiting for the man,
and when the man came, he would change your entire life.
And on October twelfth, nineteen oh six, the man showed up.
(10:08):
Archie Christie was not the refined gentleman Clara pictured for
her daughter. He was the son of an English lawyer
who died of syphilis in an asylum when Archie was
only seven. After that, Archie's Irish mother raised him until
he joined the British Air Force at the age of
twenty three. He was a tough young pilot who drove
(10:32):
a motorbike, spoke his mind, and was mysterious about his
tragic past or. As biographer Lucy Worsley puts it, he
was incredibly hot. Agatha was already engaged to someone else
when she first met Archie, but when Archie asked her
to break it off and marry him instead, she didn't
think twice naturally, her mother disapproved of the match, not
(10:56):
only because of Archie's social status, but because there was
something about him that seemed off. Would try to explain
that to a teenager. In later years, Agatha wrote a
semi autobiographical novel about her life, using pseudonyms for herself
and all her relatives. In that book, the mother character
(11:17):
confesses that she believed her daughter's fiance to be a
cruel and ruthless man whose heart was quote like a rock.
In Agatha's defense, I would like to state from personal
experience that sometimes it's hard to distinguish between a tough
guy with the heart of gold and a well mannered asshole.
(11:39):
But Agatha was undeterred by her mother's reservations. On Christmas Eve,
nineteen fourteen, Agatha and Archie were married in a last
minute ceremony at a small chapel in Bristol. Thanks to
the outbreak of World War One, Archie and Agatha spent
the first four years of their marriage part He served
(11:59):
as a transport and equipment officer in France. Meanwhile, she
lived at home, volunteering at a hospital and working on
her writing. In nineteen sixteen, during the Great War, Agatha
began work on her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair
at Styles. It's a story about a fictional country mansion
(12:20):
where the members of an upper middle class household must
come to terms with the lies and denials that drove
them to murder. Stiles was not so different from the
place where Agatha herself grew up. Both homes featured an
overbearing mother figure who held her children back with, as
Agatha put it, a dangerous intensity of affection. In nineteen eighteen,
(12:56):
the war ended and Agatha got the chance to move
out from under her mother's shadow. She and Archie rented
a small flat in London and were living together at last.
Before long, Agatha gave birth to their first child, a
little girl named Roslin. Shortly afterwards, she received news that
her novel was accepted by a publisher. The Mysterious Affair
(13:19):
at Styles was a roaring success, and it soon led
to a book deal for five future publications. Archie saw
professional success as well. He was invited to come on
a world tour and serve as the financial officer for
a project that would quote showcase the products of the
British Empire. So Agatha and Archie sailed around the world
(13:41):
on a refurbished prisoner of warship named the S S.
Kildonan Castler. They visited South Africa, Australia, Hawaii and New Zealand.
Agatha swam in the ocean and learned how to surf.
The couple was happy together by all accoun ounce that
(14:01):
was the last time. When Agatha and Archie returned to England,
she was well on her way to becoming a public
figure as a crime fiction writer. All three of her
novels received rave reviews. They sold well too, and now
(14:22):
newspapers and magazines asked her for interviews. The couple decided
to move out of the city and into a large
country estate in the posh suburb of Sunningdale. The wealthy
township seemed like the right place to be given their
newfound prosperity, and offered Archie ample opportunity to pursue his
passion for golf. The house they moved into was an
(14:45):
imposing Tudor style mansion, with three massive double chimneys rising
above the half timbered exterior. Igeta decorated the home in
a style that was all her own. It was stuffed
to the brim with books souvenirs from her travels nineteen
twenty's Maximalism at its finest. The couple decided to name
(15:08):
their new home after the ill fated estate from Agatha's
first novel. At Archie's suggestion, they called it The Styles,
after the book that brought her quote a stake in life.
Agatha hated it nearly from day One. Of the home's
previous owners, rumor had it that one went bankrupt and
(15:29):
another was murdered. Agatha found all this gloomy and morbid.
She also complained that the lane where the estate sat
was lonely, and the house itself got on her nerves.
I completely understand that the suburbs really and truly bummed
me out to but The Styles was not really to
blame for Agatha's unhappiness. The real problem was Archie. Ever
(15:54):
since the couple had moved to Sunningdale, they'd grown further apart.
Archie spent all day working in the city, and when
he came home, he claimed he was too tired to
spend time with Agatha. He was too tired to host
guests or go out to dinner with their new neighbors.
He was never too tired to go golfing on the weekends, though,
(16:16):
and this was something he preferred to do without Agatha.
Apparently her novice golf game would only drag him down.
I didn't know that this stereotype of an unfeeling suburban
husband dressed in pastels, leaving his wife stranded with all
the childcare and housework was over one hundred years old,
did you. Just like in her old childhood nightmares, Archie
(16:38):
was changing into someone who Agatha barely recognized. He had
become a cold, distant and threatening stranger, someone who seemed
capable of anything, maybe even murder. At least that's how
Agatha seemed to feel. It seems like a bit of
a leap. I mean, he can be a jerk and
not a killer. But soon enough people would agree with
(17:01):
her assessment. By the spring of nineteen twenty six, Agatha's
(17:25):
career was thriving. Her most recent novel, The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd was one of the most talked about books
in the country. The devious twist ending made her into
a household name and proved that she didn't always need
to play by the rules. But while Agatha's career was thriving,
her personal life was falling apart. The problems in her
(17:48):
marriage had only gotten worse in the last few years.
Agatha was isolated at the Styles. She'd made few friends
in Sunningdale, perhaps because Archie prevented her from entertaining guests
at the estate. He claimed that visitors ruined his weekends.
The isolation and stress of her failing marriage began to
weigh on Agatha. Her health was declining and she developed insomnia.
(18:13):
If this sounds like the second act of a Gothic novel, well,
then Agatha's mother passed away. Clara had been suffering from bronchitis,
but the death still came as a surprise. When Agatha
got the news that her mother was dying, she rushed
to her bedside, but she didn't arrive in time. Agatha
(18:44):
loved her mother deeply. Clara had been the pillar of
Agatha's life for as long as she could remember. Now
it felt as though everything she knew was falling down
around her. Perhaps one of the most devastating parts of
losing her mother was her husband's reaction, and Agatha likely
expected that Archie would not be there to support her
(19:04):
when things got rough. As she wrote in her autobiography,
I had always realized that he had a violent dislike
of illness, death and trouble of any kind, But she
never could have imagined the depth of his indifference, or
how much it would sting. Archie was in Spain for
work at the time of Clara's death, and he couldn't
(19:26):
be bothered to come home early for the funeral. When
he did return to England, his initial reaction was to
try and cheer her up. He suggested his wife come
back to Spain with him so she could be distracted.
But Agatha was grieving a massive loss, not overreacting to
some minor disappointment. This kind of grief could not be
(19:46):
shrugged off with a trip to Spain, so instead Agatha
took their daughter and went back to her childhood home
to clear out her mother's things. Archie's response to this
was to retreat even further from his grieving wife. His
letters to Agatha became few and far between, and the
ones he did send, he talked about golf and his
(20:08):
new partner on the Links, Nancy Neil, an attractive woman
ten years younger than thirty six year old Agatha. When
Archie agreed to come visit Agatha at her parents' house
for their daughter's seventh birthday, the mood was tense and
strained between them. After a day and a half of questioning,
Archie came out with the truth he was having an
(20:30):
affair with his golf partner, Nancy Neil. He wanted a divorce.
In the weeks that followed, Agatha moved back to the Styles,
but nothing changed between her and her husband. He started
spending several nights a week in London, and Agatha sank
deeper into her depression. Friday, December third, nineteen twenty six,
(21:07):
dawned bright and cold. Archie left the Styles by the train,
as he always did, taking the nine fifteen into the
city for work. Shortly after that, Agatha took her daughter
for a drive up to her grandmother's. Archie's mother noted
that Agatha was acting odd at tea that day. At
one point, she saw that Agatha was no longer wearing
(21:28):
her wedding ring. When asked about it, Agatha did not
initially respond. Instead, she stared off into space for a moment,
and then she gave an eerie, unhinged laugh and turned away.
Agatha returned home from her mother in law's around six
pm that evening. She took a phone call from her
(21:49):
living secretary, Carlo. Carlo was worried about Agatha and wanted
to make sure that she was all right. After the call,
Agatha sat down to write so several letters, kissed her
daughter good night, and bade goodbye to her beloved terrier.
Then she went out to her car and drove off
into the night. Carlo was distressed when she returned that
(22:17):
evening to find Agatha gone, and when she read the
letter that Agatha had left for her, her fears only grew.
We still don't know exactly what Agatha wrote in that letter,
though the coming week saw plenty of rumors and wild
speculation about its contents. What we do know is that
the letter asked Carlo to cancel Agatha's upcoming stay at
(22:39):
a hotel in Yorkshire, and it made Carlo concerned enough
that she called Archie and asked him to come home.
When he arrived back at the Styles, Archie noticed a
letter addressed to him sitting on the whole table. This
letter was even more mysterious than the one written to Carlo.
The only thing Archie ever said about it was that
it was personal. That letter itself no longer exists because
(23:03):
Archie destroyed it the moment he was done reading to me,
that sounds a lot like something someone would do in
an Agatha Christie novel. The following morning, a local constable
phoned the Styles to report that Agatha's car was discovered
at the edge of a quarry fifteen miles away. The
car seemingly careened off the road and down the steep
(23:26):
slope toward the perilous pit below. It was found crashed
into a hedge, with its front wheels hanging over the
edge of the quarry. Agatha's coat, packing case, and briefcase
were all inside the car, along with her driver's license,
but Agatha herself was nowhere to be found. At this point,
(23:46):
the search for Agatha began in Earnest. Police interviewed suspects
and potential witnesses. They put out a description of Agatha
in the newspaper, dragged a nearby pond and flew planes
over the countryside to look for her. Soon, the story
that one of the most famous crime fiction writers disappeared
caught the attention of the national press. As the days
(24:09):
passed with still no trace of Agatha, the Superintendent of
the Surrey Constabulary became more and more convinced that they
were looking for a body, and his suspicions fell squarely
on Archie Christie. Archie was cagy about everything from the
contents of Agatha's letter to his reasons for spending the
night away from home. As it turned out, Archie had
(24:31):
good reason to lie about this last detail. When he
claimed to be spending the weekend celebrating with his friends,
he failed to mention that one of those friends was
his mistress, Nancy Neil. He also didn't specify that what
they were celebrating was their engagement. Fortunately for Archie, three
days after Agatha's disappearance, there came a development that seemed
(24:54):
to absolve him of any suspicion. Archie's brother, Campbell, claimed
he'd gotten a letter from Agatha saying she'd gone to
a spa in Yorkshire to recuperate from her ill health.
At the time, he hadn't thought much of it and
actually lost the letter itself, but he still had the envelope.
It might have seemed like the end of the whole thing,
(25:14):
but when police and journalists reached out to spas in Yorkshire,
they came away empty handed. No one named Agatha Christie
appeared to be staying anywhere in Yorkshire. The mystery deepened,
and the media frenzy grew by the minute. This news
(25:43):
caused the investigation to expand exponentially. Two thousand volunteers came
out to help search the area around Agatha's home. Police
even brought her dog to the spot where her car
was found, in hopes that he might follow her scent.
He did not. Terriers don't great search dogs. And then
there were the spiritualists. If there was a hot mystery
(26:06):
in the nineteen twenties, you could bed the spiritualists were
not far behind it. People held seances and conjured visions,
trying to communicate to Agatha, or at least her spirit.
Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and known spiritualist,
visited Styles with his personal medium. She held one of
(26:27):
Agatha's gloves and then announced that Agatha was not dead
at all. And they would all hear from her the
following Wednesday. In spite of the good news, Archie did
not seem reassured. Everything he'd done since his wife's disappearance
was to protect the reputation of his new fiance. If
it came out that the two were seeing each other
(26:50):
while Archie and Agatha were still married, the scandal could
ruin Nancy's reputation. But in spite of his best efforts,
the press could not be kept at bay for long.
(27:14):
On December eighth, the Westminster Gazette reported on the young
woman friend who had been staying with Archie when his
wife disappeared. Nancy had been outed, and now Archie seemed
to have a very good motive for murder. I just
want to take a moment to admire this twist. Agatha
(27:35):
got to ruin the reputation of her husband's mistress without
being the snitch herself. And I love that suddenly police
were tailing Archie in London and calling him in to
be questioned. At this point, the letter from Agatha to
his brother only made things look worse. How convenient that
(27:57):
Campbell lost the letter that happened to exonerate his beloved
brother there was no doubt about it. Archie was getting sweaty.
Newspaper reporters harassed him for interviews, and the police posted
a guard outside his home to make sure he didn't
try to run. Archie needed a way out, He needed
(28:20):
a way to cast suspicion on to someone else. On
the evening of the eighth, Archie agreed to an interview
with The Daily Mail, where he floated the idea that
maybe Agatha wasn't dead at all, Maybe she decided to
put her clever and conniving mind to use. She could
have saved up a secret cash of money and created
(28:41):
this whole media circus just to drum up sales for
her new book. Imagine how silly he sounded when he
suggested that Agatha Christie was never the mild mannered lady
that everyone thought they knew, but was instead someone else entirely.
I love this moment too. Is there anything more satisfying
(29:03):
than watching the bastard deny it? Even proclaiming your innocence
makes you look guilty. On December eighth, nineteen twenty six,
(29:39):
Teresa Neil of South Africa awoke in a ground floor
room at the Harrogate hydropathic hotel in Yorkshire, feeling calm.
Her stay there was pleasant and RESTful. She'd spent her
days wandering the manicured lawns, soaking her injured shoulders in
the hotel's health spot in shopping. The shopping was as
(30:04):
much out of necessity as anything else. Teresa came to
the hotel with little more than the clothes on her back,
and she needed the proper attire for dining and dancing
in the hotel's ballroom. It must have seemed odd to
come to a hotel without even a toothbrush, but Teresa
tried not to think about it too much. Teresa was
(30:24):
a widow with a son who died very young. Somehow,
those tragedies seemed distant. Here they were over. She came
to this hotel to rest and recuperate. That morning, Teresa's
maid brought her the paper along with her breakfast, just
as she had yesterday and the day before that. Teresa
(30:44):
drank her tea and flipped through an interview with the
husband of that missing author. She thought missus Christy had
acted quite stupidly, and it seemed likely that the writer
was dead. Still, there was something familiar about the woman
pictured in the news paper. Teresa couldn't help thinking that
they looked quite a bit alike. She pointed this out
(31:06):
to several other guests at the hotel, and they had
all agreed with her. But she couldn't help feeling there
was something else there, something at the edge of her mind.
Whenever she tried to think of it, her head ached
with the strain of trying to remember, so she didn't.
Maybe there were things she couldn't understand or remember, but
(31:27):
Teresa Neil was a happy woman. She didn't want to
do anything to change that. Unfortunately for the woman calling
herself Teresa Neil, her happiness could not last. The world
she left behind when she checked into the Harrogate Hydropathic
Hotel was about to come crashing back down, and once
(31:47):
it did, Teresa Neil would disappear forever. On Monday, December thirteenth,
the police arrived at the Harrogate Hydropathic. They were acting
(32:11):
on a tip from two members of the hotel band
who recognized Agatha Christie after she made requests for songs.
After making a few inquiries, the police discovered that Agatha
was indeed staying at the hotel under the name Teresa Neil.
You might think that when Archie arrived at the hotel,
Agatha took one look at him and snapped back into reality,
(32:34):
but that's not how it went. Even after being reunited
with her husband, Agatha still seemed to have no idea
who she was. She introduced Archie to the other guests
as her brother. Later, when she arrived back at Styles,
she couldn't remember her own daughter. On the night she disappeared,
(33:02):
Agatha Christie had entered into a dissociative fugue, a state
of amnesia brought on by stress and trauma. Agatha literally
lost her identity, and it would take her a while
to get it back. As we know, Agatha had been
in a state of deep depression ever since her mother's death,
and Archie's affair compounded things. When she drove her daughter
(33:26):
home in the afternoon before she disappeared, Agatha passed by
the quarry where her car would later be found. For
a moment she considered driving into it. Of course she didn't,
but the implications of that thought shook her to her core.
She was so depressed that her first thought was of
ending her own pain rather than of her daughter sitting
(33:47):
in the backseat. When Agatha arrived home that evening, she
learned that Archie went to stay with Nancy, and something
in her broke. Agatha took her car back to the
quarry that she'd seen her earlier that afternoon. She turned
the car off the road and let the wheel slip
from her hands. Agatha was lucky the car careened into
(34:09):
a hedge that stopped it from going off the edge
of the cliff. Agatha escaped with some bruises and a
mild head injury. After that point, her recollections become somewhat fragmented.
By Agatha's account, this is the moment that entered into
her dissociated fugue. Or else she put it, she lost
(34:30):
her memory. Look, I believe women, I do. And yet
the storyteller part of my brain, the part of me
who is a big fan of Agatha Christie's work, sees
this fugue state as a lot like the one that
Walter White had in Breaking Bad, And by that I
mean absolute genius. The nobler interpretation of these events is
(34:54):
to believe Agatha's story at face value, and even if
we do take it at that, we have to at
least acknowledge that some part of her mind had to
be concocting the situation that one portrayed her cheating husband
as a murder suspect, two ruined the reputation of his mistress,
and three completely absolved her of causing either of the
(35:17):
other two things. All while she rested in anonymity in
a spa in Yorkshire under the maiden name of her
husband's future wife. She only recalled her time at the
hydro Gate after working with a hypnotherapist. While there, Agatha
created an alternative personality for herself. The persona of Miss
(35:41):
Teresa Neil was South African. She was from one of
the last places that Agatha and Archie had been happy together.
She was free from Agatha's burdensome memories of later occurrences,
and as a result, she could stay happy. But as
Agatha started to gain her own memories back, the shame
and depression came back along with them. Making everything worse
(36:16):
was the continuing media coverage of Agatha's disappearance. Newspapers picked
up Archie's depiction of Agatha and ran with it. Of course,
the papers added to the narrative in a way that
Archie did not intend. They'd given Agatha a motive beyond
trying to sell books revenge on an unfaithful husband. Agatha
(36:38):
went from a tragic victim to a callous master of deception,
and when she was finally found, things got worse. As
far as the public was concerned. Agatha was living it
up at a spa while the whole country tore itself
apart looking for her, and she'd done it just to
spite her husband. This mentality must have been a very
(36:59):
era specific attitude, because I can't imagine a contemporary public
responding this way. I can imagine them rallying with her,
and in my opinion, a publicity stunt to sell books
is way less respectable than indirectly shaming a cheating spouse,
regardless of what I think. As Agatha came back to reality,
she found herself at her lowest point yet. But when
(37:22):
you hit bottom, the only way to go is up.
Agatha still loved Archie and it wouldn't be easy to
move past their relationship, but agreeing to a divorce was
a good first step in the process of separating. Agatha
gave an interview to The Daily Mail where she recounted
everything that happened during those eleven days in nineteen twenty six. Well,
(37:46):
the interview itself must have been painful. Telling her side
of the story went a long way towards repairing Agatha's
tattered reputation. In April of nineteen twenty eight, Archie finally
got his divorce. Soon after he married Nancy, Agatha was
free to move on, and she did. The silver lining
(38:08):
from the events of nineteen twenty six was that Agatha's
disappearance did have a significant impact on the sale of
her books. Novels that were doing pretty well before sold
thousands of copies. For Agatha, this sudden success was a
mixed bag. While it was good to have the extra money,
(38:30):
she couldn't help feeling that she didn't deserve it, that
her books were only selling because of her celebrity status.
While that was true in the short term, I think
the reason they continued to sell was because Agatha had
genuine skill. I mean as recently as twenty twenty three,
one of her novels was adapted into a film starring
director Kenneth Brannaw and Tina Fey. You probably saw Haunting
(38:54):
and Venice. I did. It was gorgeous anyway. Ever since
Agatha was a til she had this incredible imagination. Her
characters felt like actual people. I think it's interesting to
note that some people who go into a dissociated fugue
do not develop any kind of alter ego. They simply
(39:14):
erased their past and move forward as a blank slate.
But for Agatha, even in her low estate, she was
able to invent a person who seemed so real that
for eleven days no one could figure out that she wasn't.
Agatha always put down herself in her writing. For decades
she listed her occupation as married rather than writer, But
(39:38):
now there was no denying her profession. In nineteen thirty,
Agatha signed a six book deal with her publisher, and
she used the proceeds to travel to Iraq, where she
lived in the Expedition House for an archaeological dig excavating
the ancient city of Or. Two years later, Agatha returned
(40:02):
to Orr and met an attractive young archaeology student named Max. Look,
I'll say it even hotter. This was the man who
became her second husband, and with whom she would travel
the world and use the material to write some of
her most famous novels. Agatha and Max would have many
(40:25):
happy years together I mean talk about marrying up. Look
at her now, Clara, But Max wasn't there on that
first trip to Iraq. On that trip, Agatha focused on
rediscovering herself. Thank you to Lucy Worsley for her biography
(41:09):
Agatha Christie an Elusive Woman, which was a great help
in writing this episode. Other sources include Agatha Christie, the
Finished Portrait by Andrew Norman, and several news articles. All
of these sources are linked in our show notes. If
you want to learn more, join me next week on
the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told for a story
(41:31):
about a photojournalist who truly did whatever it took to
get the shot. Her name was Letitia Battaglia and she
was the Sicilian photographer who shot the Italian Mafia. The
(41:55):
Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Diversion Audio. Your host is me Mary Kay mcbraer and
this episode was written by Zoe Louisa Lewis. Our show
is produced by Emma Dumouth and edited by Antonio Enriquez.
Our theme music is by Tyler Cash. Executive produced by
(42:16):
Scott Waxman.
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