Ever since it broke, the British newspapers had been full of the Nancy Collett story. People couldn’t get enough.

Repeatedly she was described as shrewd, cold, and calculating. There was an old photograph of her in the Sunday Mail, sitting with her husband, surrounded by chimpanzees at a tea party. She didn’t look shrewd or cold or calculating. She was wearing a spotted head scarf. She and her husband were eating ice cream, and they were laughing.

Another photograph had taken up the front pages of the Daily Mirror, the Yorkshire Evening Post, and the Sunday Dispatch of Nancy Collett before she dyed her hair. Almost unrecognizable. A plain young woman, wearing a hat with some plastic cherries on it. If anything, the hat was the bit you noticed.

A third: her wedding day, featured in The Times, the Daily Sketch, the Manchester Evening News. Her face was hidden by a bunch of flowers, but her husband (Percival Collett, forty-two, deceased) was wearing a suit. She had her arm through his. She looked very young. Full-faced. She was standing on tiptoe.

Nevertheless, Nancy Collett was repeatedly described as a sexual predator. At least thirty gentlemen had come forward, confessing to knowing her in intimate ways. Later, the same photograph had been splashed all over the daily and Sunday papers, showing her posed on a settee. She was dressed in a frilly blouse, suspenders, stockings and high heels, no skirt. She was leaning her head on her hand—that was certainly provocative—but her neck looked taut, and her smile was stiff, as if she would rather she still had her skirt on.

The crime was talked about, over and over. Frustrated by her husband’s war injuries, Nancy Collett had taken many partners for her pleasure. (MY CLOSE SHAVE WITH A KILLER ran one of the headlines.) Then, on the night in question, Nancy Collett—who was drunk in some versions of the story, but stone cold sober in others—had gone upstairs with a sharp knife and attacked him repeatedly while he was asleep. She had killed him because she could, and then sat gloating over the dead body before she made her escape in broad daylight.

Nancy Collett represented passion unleashed. She had spurned the restraints of civilized society and given in to animal instinct. The British public was appalled by what she’d done, and also fascinated. They bought every edition of the papers they could lay their hands on. They even went to gawp at her house. A neighbor stood outside all day retelling the story of how she’d come across the dead body. She was flogging bits of wallpaper from the scene of the crime.

WHERE IS NANCY COLLETT?

THIS WOMAN MUST HANG.

BRITAIN’S MOST WANTED CRIMINAL.

The truth was that even though she’d been spotted on the RMS Orion in mid-October, there was no record of Nancy Collett on the passenger list, and no record of her arriving in Brisbane. She had disappeared. Possibly under another name. No one had a clue.

Which was why the British papers had begun concentrating on her accomplice, the Woman With No Head. Very little was known about her, either. She lived alone. She’d been employed for twenty years as a teacher of domestic science. According to police records, she was some sort of petty thief. SPINSTER TEACHER IN DARK LOVE TRIANGLE! In the absence of a photograph, the cartoonists had a field day.

Nancy Collett was the big story of 1950, even bigger than the Norman Skinner case. It got so big she was mentioned on the wireless just after the king’s Christmas broadcast. “Scotland Yard are continuing their search for the murderer Nancy Collett and her mysterious accomplice.”