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E027: Richard Lancelyn Green
1.7k Plays6 years ago
Richard Lancelyn Green obsessed over detail and channeled the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Could authorities use those same powers of logic to solve Green’s untimely death? Sleuthhounds, YOU decide-- was it suicide, murder, or a centuries old curse that led to his fate?
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Transcript
Virtual Graduation and Future Lessons
00:00:00
Speaker
Phew! We finally got caught up. Maggie and I got our grades turned in, recorded a multi-day virtual graduation, analyzed data, created virtual lessons for next year in the likelihood that we will need to have them ready to go.
Farewell to Students and New Beginnings
00:00:19
Speaker
and said tearful goodbyes to some of our students. Sad to see them leave our high school, but so excited to see where this life's journey leads them and to hear about their successes along the way.
Appreciation for Listener Patience and Research
00:00:32
Speaker
And we want to take this moment to thank you listeners for bearing with us last week to give us that extra time to get work completed. Maggie and I debated and debated, and we finally decided that we could not bear the thought of giving short shrift to anyone's story.
00:00:50
Speaker
especially since our goal is to always be thorough in the hopes of finding closure for the families of our victims. We decided, even though it meant taking a week off, that we just couldn't justify it in our hearts to tell a story only having done cursory research. You deserve more than that. And what's more, our victims and their families deserve more than that.
Isolation Reflection and Engagement Need
00:01:13
Speaker
So thank you again for understanding and for sticking with us. We hope you're doing well. It's odd because even though we have the world at our fingertips with technology, this COVID pandemic has made so many of us feel isolated and alone. It sometimes feels like we're living in a vacuum. Maggie and I feel it too.
00:01:34
Speaker
It's funny because I think Maggie and I need you guys even more than you need us. We don't want you to ever feel that this podcast is just us telling stories, that it's one-sided. The opposite is true. This needs to be a conversation.
00:01:50
Speaker
We want to hear your thoughts, your theories, your personal connections. So after you listen to our episode, please leave us a comment. Go to the Coffee and Case's podcast Facebook page, comment on this week's episode or a past episode post. And never forget, Sleuthhounds, that Maggie and I care about you. Stay together, united in the human spirit, even if not physically, and stay safe.
00:02:21
Speaker
Now, onto this week's episode.
Richard's Sherlock Holmes Obsession
00:02:24
Speaker
I can recall one time in fifth grade that I read a horror book. I do not know what possessed me to do it. I am not one who handles fright well, let me tell you. It was not a smart idea. The book was about a poltergeist that took over a home. The family who lived in the home had developed some kind of like knocking system in an attempt to communicate with the spirit. Well, for months
00:02:54
Speaker
After finishing the book, nearly every knock or bump that I heard, I was convinced was the spirit from the book now inhabiting my house. Since then, I've not had good luck with horror movies either. The night after seeing The Grudge, I couldn't sleep because I kept seeing the girl with a hair all in her face, so I decided to read until I fell asleep. It was a book for graduate school then, so enough to put me to sleep.
00:03:23
Speaker
I had learned my lesson about reading horror by this point, but obviously not yet watching it. At about four in the morning, I woke to the sound of water dripping in my bathroom. I opened the door and flipped on the light to find the entire floor was water.
00:03:45
Speaker
If you've ever seen the movie, then you know how terrified this site made me. I screamed at the top of my lungs until my roommates Angie and Katie came running. Even though the next day I found out from a maintenance worker that a pipe above my bathroom had burst and the water was dripping through the vent in the ceiling, a logical explanation.
00:04:09
Speaker
I guess I've always had a hard time shaking, especially after all the books and the films, that something evil could be following me. It's a similar feeling that the topic of our case today couldn't shake. He was much more logical than I am, though. His fear was that something tangibly dangerous was at play. And perhaps he was right.
Unfinished Biography and Mysterious Death
00:04:36
Speaker
This is the story.
00:04:38
Speaker
of Richard Lancelin Green.
00:05:16
Speaker
Welcome to Coffee and Cases where we like our coffee hot and our cases cold. My name is Allison Williams. And my name is Maggie Dameron. We will be telling stories each week in the hopes that someone out there with any information concerning the cases will take those tips to law enforcement. So justice and closure can be brought to these families.
00:05:36
Speaker
With each case, we encourage you to continue in the conversation on our Facebook page, Coffee and Cases podcast, because as we all know, conversation helps to keep the missing person in the public consciousness, helping to keep their memories alive. So sit back, sip your coffee, and listen to what's brewing this week.
00:05:54
Speaker
Richard Lancelin Green was born July 10, 1953. The youngest of the family, his parents, due to his father Roger Lancelin Green being a best-selling children's book author, exposed young Richard to famous authors like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis who were friends of his father.
00:06:15
Speaker
The home in which he grew up had been a family estate passed down through the centuries. Now, however, the colorful carpets had lost their luster and the drapes had developed thin spots, but it didn't matter. Richard grew up surrounded by imagination.
00:06:34
Speaker
According to David Grant's article in The New Yorker, quote, intensely shy and with a ferociously logical mind and a precise memory, he would spend hours roaming through his father's enormous library, reading dusty first editions of children's books.
00:06:52
Speaker
and by the time he was 11, he had fallen under the spell of Sherlock Holmes." The stories enthralled him. He couldn't shake the sensation that perhaps Holmes had something, that really seeing the details of this world, that intelligence and power of deduction, that maybe those things could capture evil, that they could heal the world,
00:07:22
Speaker
Richard read the stories over and over again. He wanted to see what Holmes saw. To know a profession before someone said what they did for a living. To know guilt without a confession. And since detail mattered, and it was Holmes' calculated style that he wanted to emulate, Richard knew he must bring the pages to life.
00:07:47
Speaker
So when Richard Lancelyn Green was 13, that's just what he did, and his career as a Holmes collector was born. Richard transformed his attic piece by piece from items bought from local sales and antique stores into a perfect replica of Holmes and Watson's apartment.
00:08:09
Speaker
He had a mantle complete with a knife stabbed through a bunch of unpaid bills, slippers stuffed with tobacco, a pillbox labeled poison, a brass microscope, a sign labeled Baker Street. He even had recorded noise of horses hooves hitting cobblestone streets and wagon wheels rattling by.
00:08:31
Speaker
In short, this replica was so impressive in its comprehensive detail that Richard became the youngest person to ever be invited to join and to be inducted into the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, a serious accomplishment.
Doyle's Letters and Death Theories
00:08:48
Speaker
It seems that Richard's eye for detail was one for which Holmes himself would have been proud.
00:08:56
Speaker
Sometimes, when the world seems mad with misguided and dangerous passions, it is the reliance on reason that's calming. Passion and emotions can be evil. Facts usually aren't. That's Holmes' appeal.
00:09:16
Speaker
to illustrate grand sites in that same New Yorker article, Edgar W. Smith's article entitled, What is it that we love in Sherlock Holmes? to give us confirmation of that appeal. Quote, We see him as the fine expression of our urge to trample evil, and to set a right, the wrongs with which the world is plagued.
00:09:37
Speaker
He is gallahad and Socrates, bringing high adventure to our dull existence and calm judicial logic to our biased minds. He is the success of all our failures, the bold escape from our imprisonment."
00:09:58
Speaker
For the members of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, Holmes was real, and so was Watson. In fact, they even referred to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the one who penned the sacred writings, as Sherlock Holmes aficionados called the four novels and 56 short stories of Holmes as merely Watson's literary agent. The stories themselves were one great puzzle, for which inconsistencies were not mistakes, but clues.
00:10:26
Speaker
ones you could figure out if you honed your powers of deduction enough. So after Richard graduated from Oxford University, it made sense that he was led back to those tales from his childhood that had never left him. He decided that he would write the best, most comprehensive biography of the author or literary agent for Holmes and Watson.
00:10:52
Speaker
But while Richard went on to write numerous articles and more than nine books about Doyle, over 200 works in total. The ever elusive, most comprehensive biography that could be written was a lifelong project. A decades long endeavor that required even more research than most scholars would be capable. Hunting down manuscripts, chasing thought to be missing letters, et cetera.
00:11:18
Speaker
Obviously, the 712-page biography of Doyle that Richard and friend John Gibson had collaborated on previously wasn't comprehensive enough for Richard Green. If Green were to live up to Holmes' expectations, then he wouldn't just need facts. He would need all the facts. This biography, unfortunately, was never published by Richard Lancelin Green since his body was discovered in his apartment in 2004.
00:11:49
Speaker
However, the details surrounding his death just didn't add up. This was a true mystery indeed. So, Sluthown, since Green was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, with his fascination with detail, let me give you the details we know and have you deduce what you believe happened to him.
00:12:13
Speaker
After all, as Sherlock Holmes himself said in A Scandal in Bohemia, quote, it's a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Incensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts, end quote. So first, sleuth hounds, let's start with the background leading up to the nighting question.
00:12:38
Speaker
I mentioned briefly that to write the aforementioned most comprehensive biography, Richard needed access to documents, like letters. Well, one set of letters in particular became a point of contention for Richard.
00:12:54
Speaker
As part of his research, Richard discovered that there was a large collection of Doyle's letters that were being held by Adrian, the eldest of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's five children. As the story goes, Adrian had made an agreement with the rest of his siblings to keep the letter safe.
00:13:12
Speaker
but
Curses, Family Disputes, and Paranoia
00:13:13
Speaker
the possibility of making some money off of collectors by selling some of the letters had become too great for him. In the midst of selling them, however, Adrian suffered from a heart attack and died, and the letters vanished.
00:13:31
Speaker
According to Melissa Sartor in her article, the mysterious death of Richard Lancelin Green, the most famous Sherlock Holmes scholar in the world, quote, because Conan Doyle had been so outspoken about the deaths of Bertram Fletcher Robinson and George Herbert. The fifth Earl of Carnarvon. He claimed they both died of an Egyptian curse after having come into contact with mummies.
00:13:56
Speaker
His son's death was seen by some as quite the coincidence. Had Conan Doyle cursed himself and his own artifacts with his ideas about spiritualism? Was anyone who touched those hidden papers destined to meet a death similar to the Earl of Carnarvon, victim of the so-called Curse of Tutankhamen?" The mystery
00:14:26
Speaker
my sleuth-hounds, was deepening. It is believed that the other siblings continually double-crossed one another to gain possession of the letters, lending more credence to those who believed there was an actual curse on the letters. Eventually, Richard Lancelin Green decided to reach out to Doyle's youngest daughter, Jean, to glean what information he could about the whereabouts of those letters.
00:14:56
Speaker
By all accounts I read, Jean was quite different from her elder brothers who had quibbled over the letters. While their reputations had blemishes, as David Graham's research reveals, Adrienne of insubordination and subsequent dismissal from the British Navy, and Dennis, who was a regular playboy, in contrast,
00:15:18
Speaker
Jean was a well-respected and strong-willed person, an officer in the Royal Air Force, and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. When Richard met Jean, she was in her 60s, and they struck up a great friendship. Jean would tell Richard stories of her memories of her father. Richard would feed off of those stories, hungry for more.
00:15:45
Speaker
She showed him photographs as she would talk, and one day, buried in a box of memorabilia, Richard thought that he saw part of those seemingly lost letters. Asking her about them, Dame Jean did reveal that because of the current dispute among the family, she couldn't allow Richard to see those papers, yet.
00:16:12
Speaker
but that her plan was to donate all of the belongings of her father to the British Library, where the world, including scholars like Richard, would have complete access to them. But when Dame Jean passed away in 1997, that transfer never happened. Again, the letters seemed to vanish.
00:16:38
Speaker
Nearly seven years after Dame Jean's death in March 2004, Richard Green opened his copy of the London Sunday Times to receive quite the shock. There was to be a sale at Christie's auction house in May of a lost archive of Doyle's letters and memorabilia.
00:17:03
Speaker
Richard was convinced that this collection was the very same that Dame Jean had owned which she had bequeathed to the British Library that was now being sold by Doyle's distant relatives and by which they were expected to profit millions of dollars.
00:17:24
Speaker
However, if those letters that Richard Green had yet to be able to read were sold to private collectors, he would likely never gain access to add the information to his biography, and the memorabilia would end up scattered across the globe, the highest bidder likely being an American collector. Besides, Richard knew that the sale wasn't supposed to happen, so he attempted to stop it.
00:17:53
Speaker
Richard went to the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and he went to other organizations dedicated to Holmes like the Baker Street Irregulars and the Doylians. Anyone he thought could help and he told him that the sale wasn't to happen as scheduled. Richard shared with them and with the London Times that he had a will to prove it.
00:18:18
Speaker
You see, Sleuthowns, he had a copy of Dame Jean's will, giving all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's letters, diary entries, manuscripts, and writings to the British Library. His argument was that this sale was in violation of that will. With the help of those organizations Richard told, they even presented the case to members of Parliament and began to campaign to block the sale.
00:18:46
Speaker
Apparently, however, these were dangerous waters. And Richard began reporting to his sister, Priscilla West, that he had begun to receive threats. Richard Green even told a reporter for the London Times that something might happen to him, that someone was after him.
00:19:09
Speaker
He began to grow increasingly paranoid. He told his sister that he couldn't trust anyone and he even questioned if she were who she said she was. Richard even believed that he had mentioned both the will and that the letters were to go to the British Library in a BBC interview that Richard had conducted years earlier, so he called up a friend to confirm.
00:19:34
Speaker
That friend, however, said that no statement had been made like that in the interview. Instead of believing the friend, Richard became irate and called the world Kafkaesque, implying a labyrinth-like distortion, even accusing his friend of conspiring against him. Such blasphemy sparked his friend to respond that Richard was, quote, losing it, end quote.
00:20:03
Speaker
The call was on the last day Richard Lancelyn Green was alive. In the hours before his death, Richard had also called up an old friend and an ex-lover.
00:20:17
Speaker
When that friend, ex-lover, arrived, Richard treated the gentleman to a meal at which Richard consumed nearly a full bottle of wine. When the meal was over, the two men had gone back to Richard's for coffee, which he insisted that they drink in the garden because Richard believed his apartment was bugged.
00:20:40
Speaker
This all after telling his friend on the way home that they were being followed by a particular car that Richard had pointed out. In the garden, Richard told his friend of the Christie auction and that he hadn't slept in several nights. But he also added that an American was trying to quote, bring him down.
Death by Asphyxiation: Suicide or Murder?
00:21:07
Speaker
The friend left, and later that night, Richard's sister Priscilla attempted to ring him, but it went to the answering machine, which, oddly, no longer had Richard's voice on it. Instead, it was an American voice, not Richard's British one on the machine. Now that was puzzling.
00:21:32
Speaker
After unsuccessfully trying to reach him several more times that night and early the next morning, Priscilla thinking about Richard's paranoia, even the fact that he had given her a message with names and phone numbers of three individuals in case something happened to him, she decided to phone the police who entered Richard Lancelyn Green's apartment on March 27th, 2004,
00:22:02
Speaker
only to find him dead. Now Sleuthhounds. Some details about the murder scene. There, in the midst of all the Sherlock Holmes memorabilia, they found Richard Greene's body in bed. There was a wooden spoon near him and a half-empty bottle of gin.
00:22:25
Speaker
Green had died of asphyxiation. He had a shoelace tied around his neck that had been garroted, which is when an instrument like a cord or a shoelace is placed around the neck and continually tightened until the victim suffocates. The coroner deduced that this could be a suicide. Yes, Luthounds, a suicide.
00:22:54
Speaker
So the belief was that Richard Greene had strangled himself. There are many who question this theory, however, and you could probably tell by my tone. The biggest question that they and I have is how does one strangle one's self?
00:23:18
Speaker
Now, I get it. Many argue that that was the purpose of the spoon. It could have obviously been the instrument that was used to tighten the shoelace around Richard's neck, and it would have had a long enough handle that Richard would have been able to use it to kill himself. But here's the problem. Most people would have passed out from the lack of oxygen long before death would have occurred.
00:23:46
Speaker
To illustrate, the coroner himself admitted that while it had happened before that someone had strangled himself in a similar way, the coroner had only seen it in his lifetime once. Besides that, the wooden spoon was found near the body, not twisted up in the shoelace, and that's a detail I can't get past.
00:24:15
Speaker
If this were a suicide, then Richard Green went to great lengths to make his suicide look like a mysterious murder. But that's just it. Given Richard's obsession with Sherlock Holmes, some argue that that's precisely what Richard wanted to do.
00:24:40
Speaker
Some, including John Gibson, with whom Richard had collaborated on that 712 page biography of Doyle that I mentioned earlier, believe that the death was suicide. Gibson argues that his friend, quote, staged the whole thing. He created the perfect mystery, end quote.
00:25:03
Speaker
Gibson believes that Richard Green wanted us to question why there was no sign of forced entry, but also no suicide note. He wanted us to question why someone who had just drunk nearly a whole bottle of wine would follow that up by drinking gin. Now, I don't know anything about drinking, but according to the research I completed, that is
00:25:29
Speaker
something that I guess one would know not to do, especially from what I read. Since Green was a connoisseur of wine, he would have known not to follow wine with gin. Richard wanted us to question, again, according to his friend, John Gibson, whether someone could strangle himself in the fashion scene here, and he wanted us to observe the red herring.
00:25:59
Speaker
the fact that he had been strangled with a black shoelace when Richard was known to only wear slip-on shoes. Could he have been so distraught over the sale at Christie's that it led to this? Could he have staged his own death with all of these questions?
00:26:24
Speaker
Well, unfortunately, Sleuthhounds, those same pieces of evidence are what make the death also a possible murder scene as well.
00:26:36
Speaker
Thus the coroner ruled the death as inconclusive. This could be a suicide or it could be a murder. Just as there were those who were close to Richard who believe he was capable of staging his own death, there are just as many or more who argued that he would never do such a thing. Green's sister Priscilla testified that her brother had no history of depression.
00:27:06
Speaker
Friend and home scholar Owen Dudley Edwards believes Richard knew too much about the lost archives that were to be sold and that someone got rid of him so the sale could continue.
00:27:22
Speaker
Edwards reported that Richard had made plans for a holiday in Italy the next week with a mutual friend. Generally speaking, those who plan to take their own life don't make future plans.
00:27:38
Speaker
Additionally, Richard Green was notorious for keeping notes and jotting things down.
Curses and Holmes Mysteries
00:27:45
Speaker
Recall the phone numbers right on that list that he gave to his sister as an illustration. Would someone known for writing down literally everything have really not left a suicide note?
00:28:00
Speaker
Edwards concluded by arguing how devoted Richard had been to his mother and that he would have never put her willingly through the pain of his suicide. And Sleuthhounds, remember, there is a suspect, the American who was after him.
00:28:24
Speaker
This American is believed to be a man who worked as a policy strategy analyst for U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and was also a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast.
00:28:38
Speaker
As he's never been named a suspect, I won't disclose his actual name either. This American, Sleuth Hounds, was in England at the time and did, according to some sources, have something to do with cataloging the items to be sold at that Christie's auction.
00:29:00
Speaker
According to David Gran, Richard Green believed that this American was trying to undermine his claim that the auction materials belonged to the British Library per Dame Jean's will. But the American himself claims that he has no idea why Richard Green would think him a threat. The American also has an alibi.
00:29:27
Speaker
The day of the murder, he had been on a Jack the Ripper tour with several others, including his wife. He also stated that he hadn't spoken to Richard Green in over a year, and that perhaps the culture of Sherlock Holmes's fanaticism had finally consumed Richard. And perhaps it had.
00:29:52
Speaker
The recorded message with the American voice that alarmed Richard's sister is now just believed to have been the default message on the machine that merely said, sorry, not available.
00:30:07
Speaker
Now, Sleuth Hounds, I remember having an answering machine when I was younger, but the very first thing we did was to customize the message. So I honestly have no recollection of what the default message was. If any of you Sleuth Hounds out there remembers, comment on our Facebook page. So I don't know enough to say, okay, yeah, that was the default setting, or no, this is a detail that we need to pay attention to.
00:30:33
Speaker
And one of the other pieces of evidence that would seem to indicate foul play, the giving of the three numbers to Richard's sister in case something had happened, well, that didn't pan out either. According to an article by Elizabeth Day, two of the numbers were reporters and the other one was for a worker at Christie's auction house.
00:30:56
Speaker
And besides all of that, nothing was taken from Richard Green's apartment and he owned an extensive and extremely valuable collection of Sherlock Holmes items, all of which remained untouched.
00:31:14
Speaker
Richard's brother remains incredulous, believing that murder is the cause of death. In an interview in The Guardian, his brother stated, quote, it doesn't seem like suicide and that there's no note. He was very organized and tidy. I can't believe that he would have done something without leaving some kind of evidence. It's entirely possible he was murdered. That's all we can say, end quote.
00:31:42
Speaker
And Sleuthhounds, it's the that's all we can say that indicates to me that there could be more to the story, more details that might later be revealed. Until then, like Holmes and Watson, the best we can do is deduce. But there is a third option.
00:32:07
Speaker
Let me remind you of the curse I mentioned earlier in this episode. According to an article by Kato Conroy, it's believed that those close to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were more susceptible to premature and mysterious deaths and or susceptibility to insanity.
00:32:27
Speaker
The curse, either the ancient one I mentioned earlier, or the family curse at the center of Conan Doyle's novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, according to Conroy, that curse is linked to many throughout the years. Quote, almost all of the victims finding their ruin after dealing with the Doyle family inheritance, end quote.
00:32:53
Speaker
But Richard Lancelin Green would not have been a fan of this theory. Despite those at the end who might say that Richard himself had fallen prey to the curse and was acting delusional, Richard was, regardless, a man of reason, and one who had actually always despised Doyle's dabblings into the world of spirituality and fairies. What's more,
00:33:21
Speaker
His sister argues that the most recent documents in Richard's computer were lucid documents. Richard Green's friend Owen Dudley Edwards argues that belief in a curse is merely an easy way out, saying in an interview in The Guardian as well, quote, Richard was very skeptical about the supernatural. He had no truck with spiritualism at all. The curse of Conan Doyle?
00:33:48
Speaker
is nonsense invented by drunken journalists to save themselves from doing a day's work." But the mystery, my sleuth hounds, has yet to be solved.
00:34:02
Speaker
Richard Lancelyn Green's obsession with Holmes was tangible. He wanted to own items merely because Conan Doyle had touched them. His walls were covered with Doyle's family photos. It was almost as though he wanted to become the characters he admired so much.
00:34:26
Speaker
Richard even admitted in an interview in 1999 that his drive to collect more was insatiable. Quote, it's self-perpetuating and I don't know how to stop, end quote. And he really didn't want to stop. At least not before having access to the materials that had been in Dame Jean's possession. He would do anything to get his hands on them.
00:34:54
Speaker
Sadly, Richard Lancelin Green died for nothing. The most important items that Richard thought were set to be auctioned at Christie's as part of the catalog did end up in the British Library.
00:35:11
Speaker
Dame Jean had not included them with the rest of the paperwork, but had set them aside to go directly to the library. Richard would have had complete access. He would have been able to complete his life's work.
00:35:29
Speaker
Perhaps the most perplexing for those trying to solve this cold case is that Conan Doyle, while mostly writing stories where an apparent suicide was actually found to be a murder, did have one story of the opposite. The problem of Thor Bridge, in which a wife had been shot at point blank range. All evidence
00:35:57
Speaker
pointed to one particular woman as the murderer. But the resolution? The wife had committed suicide and staged the scene to point the blame to the woman with whom her husband had an infatuation. The problem here, Sleuthhounds, is
00:36:19
Speaker
Which of these Sherlock Holmes stories provides the clue? Is it the one where it's a suicide that actually is a murder, or the one where there's a murder that's actually a suicide? Sherlock Holmes had said, quote, to a great mind, nothing is little, end quote, but which little detail is the significant one?
Richard's Death in Holmes Narrative
00:36:46
Speaker
Or was this, like the inconsistencies the Sherlock Holmes Society of London tried to reconcile in the stories? And we, looking at Greene's death, try to understand. Just something that adds to the mystery. You see, if you're not careful,
00:37:05
Speaker
It can lead to one giant rabbit hole where one can easily get lost. A trap for the mind with no clear answer. A trap that Conan Doyle himself felt haunted by with the inescapable nature of the Sherlock Holmes world being the curse itself. In 1893, Conan Doyle published The Final Problem, Sherlock Holmes's demise.
00:37:33
Speaker
In the story, instead of pursuing truth via deductive reasoning, it is Holmes who was being pursued by his arch nemesis. The two descended from logic to paranoia.
00:37:48
Speaker
However, Holmes fans couldn't let him die. So much so that Conan Doyle, years after the written death of Holmes, released the short story, The Adventure of the Empty House, where he indicated that Holmes did not die, but faked his death to avoid an evil pursuit. Unfortunately for Richard Lancelin Green,
00:38:14
Speaker
there was an empty house. And even though his death was real, he did give the world another story to add to the mythos of Sherlock Holmes.
Listener Engagement and Social Media
00:38:30
Speaker
Again, please like and join our Facebook page, Coffee and Cases podcast to continue the conversation and see images related to this episode. As always, follow us on Twitter, at casescoffee, on Instagram, at coffee cases podcast, or you can always email us suggestions to coffeeandcasespodcastatgmail.com. Please tell your friends about our podcast so more people can be reached to possibly help bring some closure to these families. Don't forget to rate our show and leave us a comment as well. We hope to hear from you soon.
00:38:59
Speaker
Stay together. Stay safe. We'll see you next week.