Whatever doubts Allen had about Camilla Lyman's fate had been erased. But he and his clients still they had no proof, no body, no weapon, and no murder scene.

For one brief moment in 1994, it seemed as if the family and Allen finally had the proof they needed. Hunters in Chester County, Pa., stumbled across the skeletal remains of a body that, in terms of size and ambiguous gender, more or less fit Cam Lyman's description.

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The body had been stuffed in a trunk and left in an area where Lyman was believed to have visited. Frank Bender, the noted forensic sculptor, was called in. Bender was most famous for crafting a bust of John List, the man who spent 17 years on the lam after murdering his wife, mother and children in their Westwood, N.J., mansion because he feared that they were slipping away from God. The bust, which showed in remarkable detail how List would have aged during his years as a fugitive was shown on a national television broadcast and was widely credited with leading to List's arrest in 1990 in Richmond, Va.

Frank Bender, with his re-created bust of John List

But Bender's work on the skull retrieved from Pennsylvanian had less conclusive results. Cam's siblings studied it, and though it seemed to resemble their sister, they could never conclusively say that they believed it was Cam.

In the end, it turned out to be a false lead, and the body was never positively identified. Chester County officials later said that most of it was later discarded. "We still have the head," a spokeswoman said. "It's still officially a John Doe."

Though there was little chance of building any kind of murder case without a body, the family at last decided that it was the best course of action to have Cam Lyman declared legally dead.

In 1995, they succeeded.

Linda Urso, Hopkinton's probate court judge, began what would prove to be a lengthy and complicated case that in a way ended as inconclusively as everything else had in the strange saga of Cam Lyman. Though she declared Cam Lyman to be dead, she left open the possibility that the missing dog breeder might someday resurface, and gave her four years to do it and still be able to reclaim at least part of her fortune. In her ruling, Urso also cast further suspicion on O'Neil, claiming that his version of the events leading up to and even after Cam's disappearance, were "not wholly credible."

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