But while authorities claim to be closing in on the dog-breeding transvestite's killers, there are some who fret that the cops might be barking up the wrong tree.
Allen is among them.
"I don't know if it's just that being in this business this many years you develop a kind of skepticism, a paranoia, and are always thinking that something can't be as simple as it seems," Allen says.
There are, he thinks, just too many things that don't seem to add up. He wonders how it would be possible for a brittle man like O'Neil to withstand more than a decade of whispers and innuendo without cracking unless he actually were innocent.
If O'Neil were the killer, he wonders, why then would he take the risk of dumping Lyman's body on her own property, a property he later sold, particularly in a septic tank that sooner or later would have to be opened, when, as O'Neil once told Siner, "there's 75,000 acres of swampland in southern Rhode Island where somebody could dump a body"?
But most haunting is the memory of a message he received not long after news reports of the Lyman case first began to surface.
"I received a phone call...and it was a person who was very definitely...in the loop," Allen says. "I mean they were someone who hadn't just read news articles, who knew things that had not been in the paper and who wouldn't have known these things if they weren't tied into this thing somehow. And they told me that there was a game going on here that I didn't know about."
The mysterious caller told Allen that there was "a whole separate agenda, as they put it, ...they indicated that O'Neil would inherit the money but that it would then be extorted from him."
Though he tried to pursue the matter, Allen quickly lost contact with the tipster, and he tried to put it out of his mind, he said. But for nearly a decade, it has continued to haunt him. "There's been a lot of speculation about who that person was. I mean some people thought it might have been...someone...put up to make the call.
"That was my first thought at the time. But it has left me thinking. And I have thought all along on this that there was something else going on here in addition to what there appeared to be. And I don't know if that's just being in the business many years you develop a kind of skepticism, a paranoia...but when people have said over the years, 'You must know O'Neil did it,' I'll say, 'Well, no, I really don't.'
"It appears that he stole money from her...and of course a lot of people just automatically make the jump to 'Well, he killed her,' and that...may not be the case."
-Faces-of-Camilla.jpg) |
| The faces of Camilla Lyman |
This piece, a narrative investigation into the life and death of Camilla Lyman was produced after scores of interviews with the principals in the story. In some cases, the action has been compressed in the interest of maintaining the narrative. All quotes are from the author's interviews with those quoted.
email
print
default
increase
decrease
