Still, Allen wasn't prepared to give up. He next explored the possibility — first raised in an off-hand comment by O'Neil —that Lyman might have slipped into the twilight underground of the international transsexual community. It took Allen months to penetrate the secretive subculture and to gain the trust of enough people in it to even begin his search for some trace of Cam. He spent several additional months grilling cross-dressing sources from Los Angeles to Denmark, and still turned up nothing.
In the years immediately following Lyman's disappearance, fewer than 40 women worldwide underwent the grueling psychological regimen and the terribly invasive surgery needed to change the F to an M on their driver's licenses, Allen learned. But Cam Lyman — who so loathed anyone in a white coat that she hadn't visited a dentist or a gynecologist in decades — was certainly not among them.
In the meantime, however, it was becoming clear that O'Neil was draining her accounts. Court records and documents showed that clearly. According to those records, the caretakers at Cam's estate, who now lived in a doublewide trailer outside Hopkinton, saw their monthly income increase from a few hundred dollars a week to $4,500 a month in the months after their old boss vanished.
What's more, the Cam Lyman Unitrust, which prior to Lyman's disappearance had been estimated at $900,000, dropped to $300,000, the records showed. Upon her death, the bulk of the money was to have been bequeathed to the American Kennel Club to support a museum the club operated. But within a few years of her disappearance, the money had been depleted to almost to the point of extinction.
The IRS had decided that Cam Lyman had failed to pay sufficient income tax in the four years leading up to her disappearance — years when O'Neil was supposedly handling all her affairs — and they slapped a $414, 281.86 lien on Lyman's estate at Hopkinton. The house, which had fallen into near-total disrepair, was later sold for $260,000 — a fraction of the more-than $675,000 Lyman had invested in it — to a former stockbroker, Gardner Young and his dog-breeding companion, Greg Siner. At the time of the sale, the house contained nothing except for a single box of old photographs — family portraits — that Lyman had stuffed in a dark corner of the attic, Young would later tell Allen.
Believing that Cam — who had so loathed money but still monitored it closely — would never have tolerated such fiscal profligacy if she were still alive, her family concluded that she must be dead. Barry Mills was certain of it. "We knew that Cam had been murdered," he had said. "We just knew it. We were quite confident we knew who murdered her, too."
Though Allen suspected that they were right, he wasn't prepared to give up all hope that Camilla was alive some place. It was until 1992, when O'Neil finally granted him permission to search the house in Hopkinton that Allen finally accepted the idea that in all probability Camilla Lyman was dead.
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