The strange case of Baroness de Stempel: How the death of an eccentric
architect revealed a web of murder, fraud and intrigue
Twenty years ago, an eccentric architect was bludgeoned to death at his
crumbling mansion. The dramatic trial of his ex-wife revealed a web of
murder, fraud and intrigue, shining a harsh light on Britain’s
aristocracy. But what happened next in the strange case of Baroness de
Stempel?
Investigation by Terry Kirby
The Independent/UK
Published: 04 August 2007
The ancient church of St Edward sits on a hillside, overlooking the
scattered houses of Hopton Castle, an isolated Shropshire hamlet, which
lies just where the lush green meadows of England merge with the brown
hills of Wales. The background sounds are of sheep bleating, water
running and a breeze that rustles through the pines across the valley,
bringing a scent of far-off wilder places to the west.
To get to the churchyard, you park on the grass verge, cross a rickety
bridge over the stream, and go through two aged wooden gates, before
entering the churchyard. There, on the left, near a stone wall, is a
striking black granite headstone. Its border is a series of engraved
images: some books, a few scrolls, a typewriter and an architect’s
compass. At the top, there is another, of a mansion. The inscription
reads:
Simon Dale
Architect and Scholar.
Who with his wife saved Heath House from demolition.
17 June 1919 ` 11/12 September 1987.
REQUIESCAT IN PACE.
The casual visitor might think this headstone poses more questions than
it answers. Who was this architect and scholar? What is Heath House?
Why is the date of death uncertain? And who was, or is, the wife, whose
name is curiously absent?
In 2007, William Wilberforce, the Victorian politician whose name will
forever be associated with the abolition of slavery, has been justly
celebrated, not least in the film Amazing Grace and a new biography by
William Hague, because this year marks the 200th anniversary of the
date Parliament approved his bill to ban the transport of slaves. This
year, there has been one other significant anniversary associated with
the illustrious Wilberforce name: an event much less celebrated,
although it might make a better film than Amazing Grace. It is the
story behind the headstone.
Simon Dale, an architect who was blind and whose scholarship was deeply
eccentric, was married to Susan Wilberforce ` the unnamed "wife" of the
headstone ` the great-great-grand-daughter of William Wilberforce.
Twenty years ago next month, one sunny Sunday afternoon in September,
he was found battered to death in the kitchen of Heath House, the
crumbling mansion that they, as newlyweds, had saved from demolition
and turned into their family home, but which, after their divorce,
became the subject of an acrimonious dispute. And Susan Wilberforce was
charged with the murder of her ex-husband, although she was cleared at
trial. Hence the absence of her name. Two decades on, the murderer is
still at large, the police file still open.
That is not all. While investigating the murder, detectives stumbled
across another crime: Susan, together with her second husband, Baron
Michael de Stempel, and two of her five children, had defrauded
Margaret, Lady Illingworth, her elderly and senile aunt, who had once
organised Susan’s debutante party, of an estimated £1m. Susan pleaded
guilty to fraud; Michael and two of her children, Marcus and Sophia,
both in their mid-twenties, were found guilty. The judge called Susan a
"malign and appalling influence" on her offspring.
While entertaining to outsiders, the affair was deeply embarrassing to
the Wilberforce family, a dynasty created by the abolitionist’s four
sons that has given centuries of unstinting service to the nation’s
institutions, reinforcing their reputation for integrity, without ever
accumulating the serious wealth of other such families. Susan’s
great-uncle was Lord Wilberforce, a Law Lord, who died in 2003, while
her brother John, who died in 2001, was the British High Commissioner
in Cyprus. Both gave evidence for the Crown at the fraud trial.
Unanswered questions remain. Why did the Wilberforce clan not report
the stripping of Lady Illingworth’s assets? What happened to the
£12m-worth of gold bars possibly in Lady Illingworth’s possession? Who
did kill Simon Dale? Why were crucial witnesses not called? For
answers, one must look further than the graveyard at St Edward.
Susan Wilberforce, then 23, met and married Simon Dale in London in
1957. Fifteen years her senior, he was a cultivated man from a
middle-class Oxford family who worked on restoring country homes; she
was a young woman about town. Her upbringing had been one of large
chilly houses, strict discipline, finishing school in Paris and rather
distant relatives. Her father, Lt Col William Wilberforce,
great-grandson of the abolitionist, died in the Second World War; her
mother remarried and was a marginal presence in her life ` hence the
involvement of her father’s sister, Lady Illingworth.
Susan provided Dale with, in the words of his friend the late
Christopher Hurst, a publisher, "entry to the class he had courted
professionally" , and he brought a solid, male presence to what had
been a rather rootless life. Pursuing their ambition to restore a
country house, they purchased Heath House in 1959, paying £2,000 of her
money for a semi-derelict shell its owners had been about to demolish.
Built in 1620 for a local squire, the house sits squarely amid the
trees, facing the hills to the south-west, in what is still a rural,
sparsely populated area, a few miles west of Ludlow. While it is a
peaceful, beautiful region, almost entirely by-passed by tourism and
motorways, even its strongest admirers admit Heath House was isolated
and gloomy. "My heart sank at what they were contemplating," said
Hurst.
The 1960s passed them by as the couple remained cocooned in Heath
House, spending all their money on schooling their five children and
renovating the house.
Contact with neighbours was minimal, partly because of their
preoccupations, partly because few locals had much in common with them.
But it was also because Susan, like many of the Wilberforces, was shy
and reticent, characteristics reinforced by her upbringing. What others
might see as aloofness and disdain is the Wilberforce way.
There were few distractions, apart from family visitors. Curiously, in
view of later events, in November 1968, a local GP, Dr Alan Beach, was
lured to the house by the husband of a patient, unhappy about the late
diagnosis of cancer in his wife; the doctor was shot dead in his car at
the top of the drive. The incident had nothing to do with the Dales,
but seemed of a piece with the aura of the place.
By the end of the 1960s, the marriage had broken down. Dale’s eyesight
was failing, his outside work had dried up and the idea of his wife
getting a job was unfeasible. There were arguments and she later
claimed he suffered ……… violent moods, frustrated by his
condition. They lived in different parts of the house, with the
children mostly away at a succession of schools. They divorced in 1972
and she left a year later. As a condition of the settlement, Heath
House was to be sold and the profits divided between them.
It never was. For the next 15 years, a combination of unstable house
prices, a scarcity of buyers and Dale’s refusal to move frustrated any
sale. Susan, relying on family handouts, moved around before settling
at Forresters Hall, a grandly named but small roadside cottage in f
Docklow, near Leominster; the younger children were mostly with her,
bonding into an insular unit, but they also visited their father. The
correspondence between the solicitors mounted up, but both parties were
too impoverished to pursue the matter in court.
Meanwhile, Dale lived mainly in the kitchen, sleeping upstairs in a
four-poster bed. The rest of the house was half-empty, full of dusty
furniture and discarded children’s toys; one room contained just two
rocking horses. "Like the Marie Celeste," said Hurst. Dale’s
determination to stay was founded mainly on a belief, based on his
excavations and researches, that Heath House was an important historic
site: he claimed variously it was the location of Camelot, the centre
of a Pagan cult and the lost city of the ancient Armenians. "What I
appear to have found are streets, 40 feet wide and 200 yards long…
shops, houses, that sort of thing," he told the Manchester Evening News
in the late 1970s. He was writing two books about the remains and
wanted the site preserved, with himself as curator.
The scepticism of professional archaeologists only reinforced his
belief that the establishment was conspiring against him. His friends
and children took it with a pinch of salt: "Simon was fine if you kept
him off the old Armenians," remembers Veronica Garmen, one of a group
of locals who took pity on him in the mid-1980s. "He had no money, of
course, and I used to have to darn his only sweater.
"And…" she says, still conscious of the rumours, "Simon was not
violent. Never. He was a big gentle man. Neither was he a recluse ` he
was just cut off in that big old house and a bit lonely. We used to go
around and cheer him up."
All his friends and those who used to read for him and help in his
researches have only fond memories. "He was a reasonable chap, but
eccentric, a five-star eccentric," said Bill Harper, a neighbour. He
saw him frequently: a tall, balding man, who would stride, despite near
total blindness, across the fields to Leintwardine, the nearest
village, where he would buy his regulation small white loaf and cheese
from the shop. He would make each loaf last precisely two and a half
days.
While Dale hung on, the extraordinary figure of Baron Michael Victor
Jossif de Stempel had re-entered the life of his ex-wife. From a
wealthy Russian émigré family, holders of an ancient Latvian title, De
Stempel, who describes himself as an economist, may in fact never have
done a proper day’s work in his life. This is a man whose own barrister
said a jury might consider him to be a "monumental snob", a "congenital
liar" and "a man without courage".
Susan first met him in the rooms of her brother John, at Oxford,
shortly before he, Michael, was sent down. He became a man about town,
spending his nights at the Ritz ` they pleased him by addressing him as
" Monsieur le Baron" ` and attending parties such as Susan’s coming-out
ball. He was obsessed with ancient families: the intense, black-eyed
Susan Wilberforce, proud that she could date her ancestry back to the
12th century, fascinated him. They began a relationship shortly
afterwards, although she rejected his marriage proposals because of his
unreliability. The affair continued, on and off, for several years;
Dale came along when Michael was away in South America. Michael married
the first of his three wives shortly afterwards.
Susan, though, was not forgotten. "It was a mutual fascination, but
Michael undeniably weakened her," as one of her children later said.
They never lost touch and Michael visited Heath House with both of his
first two wives. He rather liked it and at one point began having his
post directed there.
In 1982, with both divorced, Michael began to visit Susan at Docklow.
The relationship resumed ` sometimes they would spend the day in bed,
studying Debretts and the Almanach de Gotha ` and he helped Susan out
financially, not least in the defrauding of Lady Illingworth.
She, the widow of Lord Illingworth of Denton, a former Postmaster
General from a prosperous Yorkshire wool family, had lived the life of
a Mayfair socialite at her home in London’s Grosvenor Square. Now in
her early eighties, living in a mansion flat and suffering from senile
dementia, Lady Illingworth was brought "for a holiday" to Docklow in
February 1984 by Susan’s daughter Sophia, who had been staying with her
while working as a temporary secretary. Police believe the fraud was
not planned in advance, but grew out of Susan’s belief that after the
poverty of the past decade, she was entitled to family money. Her
brother John, resident in the Wilberforce family home in Markington, in
Yorkshire, was the main beneficiary of their mother’s will, while Susan
may have known she was excluded from Lady Illingworth’s, again in
John’s favour. And, anyway, were not the Illingworths just a bit
nouveau?
Within a couple of weeks of the arrival of Aunt Puss, as they called
her, her bank accounts had been plundered using a series of forged
signatures, her shares were sold and, as insurance, a new will forged,
leaving the bulk of her possessions to Susan. Also using forged
authorities, all her furniture, antiques, jewellery, paintings and
other valuables were taken from her London flat, out of storage and
from bank vaults and sold at auctions. They got away with around £1m,
spent mostly on cars, holidays and a flat in Spain. After nine months,
Lady Illingworth was dumped in a Hereford nursing home, because, Susan
told social workers, they could not cope with her senility.
In late 1984, Susan and Michael finally married in St Helier, Jersey, a
trip funded by the sale of £13,000-worth of Aunt Puss’s jewellery. It
lasted barely a year. They found it impossible to live together.
Michael refused to commit himself and became involved with another
woman. He would later claim he had only been "technically married" to
Susan, who was still, he said, "fiscally married" to Simon. Now it was
Susan’s turn to beg, writing imploring, melodramatic letters: "My heart
aches at the thought of being apart from you." She even claimed to be
dying of cancer.
When Aunt Puss herself died at the end of 1986, she was cremated in
virtual secrecy at Hereford, with none of the other Wilberforces, who
had only been dimly aware of her whereabouts, told until later; the
cremation directly contravened the request in her earlier will that she
be buried alongside her husband, at the Illingworth family tomb in
Bradford. The obituaries suggested she had spent her last days in a
suite in Claridges. Her real fate remained unknown to the wider world
until Simon Dale was murdered.
On 13 September 1987, Simon Dale’s body was found by Giselle Wall, who
had helped with his research, lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen,
toad-in-the-hole was still cooking in the oven. He had been battered
around the head with a hard, narrow instrument.
Police suspicion immediately fell on Susan after they learnt that she,
together with Marcus and Sophia, had been spending much time there
improving the house’s exterior and grounds in the expectation that
renewed legal efforts to evict Simon would bear fruit. She admitted
breaking in sometimes to take furniture she considered hers. All this
had led to angry verbal confrontations with Simon ` who felt himself
under siege ` and visitors to the house. Susan, Sophia and Marcus were
charged with his murder, although proceedings against the children were
halted after a few weeks. All three, plus Michael, were charged with
the fraud, discovered during routine financial checks.
Susan treated the police with contempt: "You would have been proud of
me," she wrote to Michael, "if you had heard the lectures I gave all
those little men about the ancient nobility of your family and mine."
The little men, in turn,
were astounded at the lack of emotional response when they broke the
news of Dale’s death to those at Docklow. Susan refused to answer
questions, or gave dismissive denials.
It was a short, dramatic murder trial at Worcester. The Crown had no
direct evidence other than accounts from visitors to Heath House who
had seen her lurking in the grounds on the previous Friday evening. A
recently cleaned crowbar found in a cottage used by the trio was put
forward as the murder weapon, although there were no traces of blood.
The highlight of the trial was her performance during a two-day-long
interrogation by Anthony Palmer QC, one of the country’s best
inquisitors, who was treated like a dim retainer for even suggesting
her mounting anger with Dale had turned into violence. "I wish you
would get into your head, Mr Palmer," she announced loftily, "that I
was not angry with Simon." Another accusation was dismissed with:
"Bollocks, Mr Palmer!" Ian Bullock, the detective superintendent in
charge of the murder inquiry, remembers her disarming composure: "At
the end of a long day in the witness box, it was she who looked down at
me and said, ‘You do look tired, Mr Bullock’ ." Most observers felt she
had won on points ` the jury clearly agreed.
But Susan remained in custody for the fraud, changing her plea to
guilty shortly before the trial started. At those proceedings, in
Birmingham in early 1990, the jury rejected Marcus and Sophia’s claim
that they had simply been unwitting tools in the defrauding of Aunt
Puss. The jury also rejected Michael’s protestations of being "merely a
porter"; his assistance in the intricacies of banking and wills had
been fundamental.
Afterwards, he said: "It was about what I would have expected from a
working-class jury." Susan got seven years, Michael four, Marcus 18
months and Sophia 30 months; police believed the judge correctly
apportioned sentences to their respective involvement in the plot.
Throughout, no one mentioned the gold bars.
The gold bars were just one of several mysteries around the case which
have never been resolved. Police were told by one of the men who moved
Lady Illingworth’s property into storage when she left Grosvenor Square
in the late 1960s that he had seen a number of gold bars in the
basement, apparently sent for safekeeping by a French family who
perished in the Second World War. They were shifted to the local
NatWest bank vault, the one plundered years later during the fraud. But
no gold bars were itemised on the bank’s own inventory. There was a
reference to "Boxes (very heavy)" , but the police could find no
evidence they existed. But someone clearly believed they were real. A
month into their prison sentences, all four received writs from
solicitors acting on behalf of Lady Illingworth’s estate demanding the
return of "30 gold bars, each 18 inches long, total value £12m". All
thought it laughable; the police privately agreed: " If they had got
that much, they would not have stayed in that little rented cottage in
Docklow," said one source. f Even so, the writs prompted a police dig
in the grounds of Heath House. Nothing was ever found by the trustees
in bankruptcy.
I got to know Susan and three of her children when researching a book
on the case, published in 1991. Susan, whom I interviewed in prison and
corresponded with, was, as billed, a disquieting combination of
aristocratic aloofness and impeccable manners, coupled with an ability
to brush aside uncomfortable questions as if the whole thing was simply
too distasteful. She told me she refused the police offer of a plea to
manslaughter on the murder charge. "I would rather have gone to prison
than admit to something I did not do." Apart from a "she was very
happy", questions about Aunt Puss were sidestepped. But one thing she
was clear about: her pedigree. "I know who I am. The one thing money
can’t buy is breeding, don’t you agree?" she wrote. There was no irony.
After her release she was penniless, spending her time with lawyers and
accountants attempting to sort out the tangled mess of wills, bank
accounts and competing writs she caused. One accountant recalled the
same air of denial: "She sat, handbag on her lap, very polite, a fixed
expression, as if we were having tea and scones. When I pointed out
that she had taken all her aunt’s money, she simply gave me one of
those ‘if looks could kill looks…’. " Several publishers were offered
her version of the affair but none was prepared to pay.
Predictably, the relationship with Michael resumed, although they never
lived together. She lived in Wales and London, but then when the
relationship foundered again a few years ago, moved to Hastings, where
she still is. Now in her early seventies, she has recently suffered
heart problems. Last year, she sent a card to "Darling Michael" on his
75th birthday with the message: "Hurry up, it will soon be too late" .
The Baron mostly stays with his second wife, Francesca Tesi, in a small
terraced house in Acton, west London. Their son, Alexander, died in
2003. The three children from his first marriage have enjoyed success:
one daughter, Sophie, an artist and a former model for Lucien Freud, is
married to the actor Ian Holm; Tatiana, his other daughter, is also a
painter; his son, Andrew, is a doctor.
Marcus and Sophia Wilberforce, when I met them, seemed much younger
than the average late-twentysomething, despite their resolutely
old-fashioned dress sense and introverted manners. Sophia received
psychiatric treatment during the trial and never read a word of the
official papers. During long sessions with their lawyers she would
offer to make tea. When she confronted her mother about the enormity of
what had occurred, Susan simply said: " Don’t be a bore."
"We were used," Marcus told me, eventually, very quietly. One dark
winter’s night he showed me around Heath House’s dusty rooms; we
chatted around the table where his father ate and worked, in the
kitchen where he lived and died. Asleep on the table was Oats, the cat
they bought for Aunt Puss.
Both are now in their forties. Sophia still works as a temporary
secretary in London; Marcus married and lives in Scotland, where he is
a building surveyor. Their current relationship with their mother,
while unclear, seems unlikely to be close.
All four have repaid their debt to society. None has acted as if they
have access to £12m. Mike Cowley, the officer who headed the fraud part
of the inquiry and is now a CPS solicitor, said: "Anything which now
remains is a matter for their consciences."
Of the other children, Sebastian, the second oldest, the one closest to
his father, who shares the same eye condition, is a solicitor and
expert on charity law. He lives in New Zealand, with his wife and
family. I also got to know Sebastian during my researches: a decent,
diffident man, shattered by the events and concerned about the
reputation of his father, whose headstone he commissioned. I telephoned
to ask whether the children thought West Mercia police should use the
20th anniversary of the murder to launch a fresh appeal for witnesses?
"I’m sorry," he said. "I’ve nothing to say. And that goes for all of
us."
Which was the official Wilberforce line all along. The family closed
ranks, resisting questions as to why there was apparently only minimal
interest in what Aunt Puss was doing for the period of almost three
years between her move to Docklow and her death; only Yvette, wife of
Lord Wilberforce, told the trial she "regretted" never trying to find
why her letters to Aunt Puss at Docklow went unanswered. Police
believed they would never have discovered the fraud, if it had not been
for the murder.
If Susan didn’t kill Simon, who did? Inevitably, there were rumours of
hit men and disputes with local people, not called to give evidence. "I
never believed the hit-man theory, but then one policeman said if you
went into a certain pub in Leominster, there were people who might do
such a thing," said Veronica Garman. Then there was a mysterious
hitch-hiker, seen on the road outside over the weekend of his death,
but never traced. Crucially, as the headstone indicated, police never
established the time of death: the intense heat from the cooker
distorted the rigor mortis process. Most evidence pointed towards Simon
being killed on the Friday night ` the line taken by the Crown at the
trial. But according to Bill Harper, as dependable a witness as could
be, Dale was alive on the Saturday. "I am absolutely certain I saw him
striding across the fields on Saturday lunchtime, 80 yards away,
carrying shopping home from Leintwardine." He told me: "I wasn’t
treated very pleasantly by the police, because it did not suit their
case that he died on Friday. But it was him, I’d stake my last penny on
it." Neither Harper, nor the two people with him, was called to give
evidence. These issues may or may not be significant, but suggest the
evidence was nowhere near as straightforward as it seemed. Despite
scientific advances which have solved many "cold cases", West Mercia
Police has no plans to revisit the Dale file "in the near future". Or
in the words of another officer from the inquiry: "The case against
Susan was put to a jury and they didn’t agree."
The deepest irony is that Susan could never return to Heath House, the
place that consumed her money and energies, helped destroy her
marriage, break up her family and give two of her children criminal
records. It was sold at auction, to pay her creditors, for £272,000 in
1993. In 2000, it was bought by Rupert Lywood, a City figure, for
£1.5m. Today, it must be worth several million pounds. To get there,
you still take a sharp left off the main road, past the gate where Dr
Beach died, and plunge down a driveway through a copse. But now the
grounds, once wild and unkempt, have been landscaped.
Of the 30 gold bars, there is still no sign. The house has been
extensively renovated, although it is currently empty, and all traces
of the kitchen where Simon Dale lived, worked and died, are long gone,
along with the dusty upstairs rooms, the rocking horses, the broken
bits of furniture. The brickwork and the exterior have been cleaned,
although the original massive oak door remains, as does the gap in the
hedge by the kitchen door, the one Giselle Wall could not open because
Dale’s bloodied body lay on the other side. There is a swimming pool,
and several outbuildings have been converted into rented cottages.
"Gosh!" exclaims a young woman from one of the cottages, who says her
name is Heather, when I tell her it is the scene of not one, but two
murders, the latter still unsolved. She is genuinely surprised. "We’ve
been here a couple of months and no one told us. And my partner’s a
police officer over the border in Radnor ` he will be fascinated." We
joke about how he might solve it, one day. She says she came up from
Devon to be with him. "I love it here," she says, sweeping her arms
wide to show me across the lush green lawn, the pleasant shrubberies
and tall, mature trees. "It is such a peaceful place. We’re very happy
here." Good luck to them, one feels.
It is a warm, if showery, summer’s day. But as we talk, that sudden
cool breeze passes through the trees again, as if there was something
unsettling over the horizon.