Death in Jeddah: Helen Smith

 

Helen Smith was born in Britain in 1956. She was working as a nurse in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia when she met her death at the age of twenty-three in 1979. She had been working in Saudi Arabia for only four months. The circumstances of her death are still unclear, though it is known that she died violently.

On the evening of 19 May 1979, she went to a party at the house of Dr Richard Arnot and his wife Penny. In the morning, after the party, her body was found in the street seventy feet below the balcony of the Arnots’ third floor apartment. Beside her, impaled on the spiked railings that surrounded the apartment block, was the body of Johannes Otten, a thirty-five year old Dutch tugboat captain. They had clearly died in the same catastrophic accident or act of violence.

There were some clues as to what might have preceded Helen’s death. Although she was fully clothed, the trousers and underpants of Johannes Otten were round his ankles, implying that some sort of sexual activity or attempted sexual activity took place immediately before their deaths.

There was an official Saudi investigation into the incident. Its conclusion was that the couple had accidentally fallen from the balcony while they were drunk, perhaps during a sexual encounter on the balcony. At the time, this finding was endorsed by the British Foreign Office.

Helen’s father, a retired policeman called Ron Smith, was unable to accept the official version of events, which he saw as a cover-up for murder. He believed that the cover-up came from a high level in the British establishment. He spent twenty-five years trying to uncover what really happened that night in Jeddah, and get justice for those who, he believes, killed his daughter. While he pursued this quest, Ron Smith refused to allow his daughter’s body to be buried. Instead it was preserved at Leeds General Infirmary so that it was available for forensic tests. During the long years following Helen’s death, her body was investigated in no less than six post mortem examinations, which did not all arrive at the same conclusions.

Ron Smith attempted to have an inquest into his daughter’s death in Britain. The autopsy report he ordered after inspecting her body in Jeddah was kept by the British Foreign Office, and he was refused a copy in spite of requesting one. When it was finally released, one vital page was missing; eventually that too was passed to Mr Smith. He tried to have an inquest opened in West Yorkshire, but coroner Philip Gill refused to hold an inquest on the grounds that the death occurred outside his jurisdiction. A Home Office pathologist examined Helen Smith’s body and found evidence that she had injuries that were not consistent with a fall from the balcony. She had received a series of blows to her head and face. Two other pathologists, one of the British, the other Danish, carried out their own post mortems and they too concluded that the injuries were not consistent with a fall. There was an implication that the two victims had been murdered and then thrown from the balcony to make the double murder look like an accident.

In March 1982, there was a High Court hearing to decide whether the West Yorkshire coroner was right, and it neither upheld the coroner’s decision nor overruled it, which was frustrating for Mr Smith. The High Court judges, Lord Justice Ormrod and Mr Justice Forbes, reserved judgment because of the complexities of the case. The eventual inquest returned an open verdict.

In July 2002, Ian Lucas MP asked a question in the House of Commons about the case. He asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he would order a new inquiry into the death of Helen Smith. Hilary Benn MP, answering, said, ‘An inquest was held into Helen Smith’s death in 1982. Inquest proceedings can be reviewed by the courts and we are not aware of any grounds for the government to take further action.’

Ron Smith still refuses to have his daughter buried until her killers are brought to justice. He remains convinced that she was murdered and that the murder was made to look like an accident. ‘People say it is a mystery, but there is no mystery. She was murdered and I know who murdered her. I will just keep up the fight. What else can I do?’

At the root of the problem in Jeddah is the clash between the lifestyles of Western migrant workers, like the doctors and nurses at the expatriate party, and the official, Islamic code of conducted expected by the Saudi authorities. When individuals are caught out, for example consuming alcohol, their Western embassies often fail to support them strenuously. It is possible that something of this kind happened regarding Helen Smith. However she actually died, the Saudi version of events clearly indicated that as far as the Saudi authorities were concerned she was behaving badly, by drinking and engaging in casual extra-marital sex. She was in the wrong. What Ron Smith found when he went to Jeddah is that both Saudi and British authorities were uncommunicative. The Embassy’s subdued response implied that Helen should not have been at the party in the first place. That naturally made Ron Smith suspicious. But was he right to assume foul play?

His hypothesis, that Helen was raped and then murdered, was openly supported by many of the people she worked with at the Baksh Hospital. Naturally, the other guests at the party did not wish to incriminate themselves or their friends and they all insisted that Helen’s death was an accident. Some of the people at the party were in fact surprisingly frank. One woman admitted that she did not know what was happening to Helen because she (the non-witness) was in another room having sex with a man who was not her husband. It was an extraordinary admission to make, in a country where the punishment for adultery is death by stoning. Given the drinking at the party and the other violations of Saudi law, the expatriates at the party were given, by Saudi standards, light sentences. The host was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment; the others were sentenced to public flogging.

The testimonies of the guests at the party give cause for suspicion in that they contradict one another in many important details. Something was being concealed. Could it have been the presence there of a Saudi? Ron Smith had great difficulties in finding out anything at all. The press helped, sniffing the scent of a good story, and dug out one or two more crumbs of information. One significant fact was that Johannes Otten’s clothing and belongings had been tampered with to cover up the fact that he had been murdered. Another was the arrival of a mysterious Saudi at the crime scene shortly after it was discovered.

We may never know what happened to Helen Smith – unless one of the guests at the party one day decides to tell the whole truth about that evening in Jeddah.