SOLVED - THE LAST SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY; Richard Green Was Locked in a [Pounds Sterling]2m Battle over Secret Conan Doyle Papers and Lived in Fear of a Mystery American. Then He Was Found Garrotted in His Flat. Now Our Special Investigation Reveals the Truth about Green - and How He Died

Byline: SHARON CHURCHER;ADAM LUCK

Richard Lancelyn Green was certain he was being watched. Bugs had been installed in his London flat, he told his friends, and any sensitive conversations were to be conducted in the garden. Further, when he left a restaurant he claimed he was being followed by a mysterious dark car.

Green, the world's leading expert on Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, also warned his family that he was under threat from a relentless enemy, a shadowy American.

And then, on March 26 this year, his worried sister called him at his home in Kensington, West London, and got no answer.

The next morning she alerted the police, who broke open his locked front door and found the millionaire bachelor lying in his bed amid a clutter of cuddly toys and Sherlock Holmes posters and books.

Wrapped around his neck was a black shoelace. It had been tightened with a wooden spoon until it had garrotted him. Green's outstretched hand appeared to have been trying to reach a nearby halfempty gin bottle as the noose tightened on him.

Was he perhaps hoping to use the bottle as a weapon against an assailant?

Although the police made only a cursory investigation, assuming that he had killed himself, friends and relatives believed he had been murdered.

There was no suicide note, no medical evidence of mental illness, nor, according to the post-mortem examination, was it likely that Green had asphyxiated himself with the garrotte.

In the rare cases - there has been only one in the past 30 years - when someone has been desperate enough to take their life this way, they have used cloth under the garrotte to lessen the excruciating pain.

At the inquest, moreover, witnesses said they suspected his demise might be connected to the internecine feuds surrounding the literary archives of Conan Doyle, and the pivotal role that Green had hinted 'the American' played in them.

After years of wrangling between the …

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information: Article title: SOLVED - THE LAST SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY; Richard Green Was Locked in a [Pounds Sterling]2m Battle over Secret Conan Doyle Papers and Lived in Fear of a Mystery American. Then He Was Found Garrotted in His Flat. Now Our Special Investigation Reveals the Truth about Green - and How He Died. Contributors: Not available. Newspaper title: The Mail on Sunday (London, England). Publication date: December 12, 2004. Page number: 47. © 2009 Solo Syndication Limited. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group.

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