It certainly wasn't that she was romantically involved with him, though that was something the authorities would later explore. As Maitland had said, Camilla was a virgin, and had never been romantically linked to anyone, male or female. O'Neil has also denied that he was ever intimate with Cam Lyman. In fact, he laughed derisively when a reporter put the question to him. "Did you ever see her?" he sneered. "She was gay," he said, and then, as if pondering the possible permutations of that statement considering Cam's ambiguous gender, he quickly added, "she liked women."
Allen and others would later conclude that O'Neil had figured out that his opportunities were in indulging the eccentricities of a person who at time seemed to despise her own wealth, a woman who though she couldn't bring herself to sit down and pay her bills with the funds funneled to her monthly from the old family accounts, stashed cash anywhere and everywhere: ten thousand dollars under the tray in the microwave, five thousand under the mattress in her old motor home. O'Neil had been willing to take all that off her hands, and Cam Lyman was more than happy to be rid of it.
The caretakers at the old house were always talking about how they were forever stumbling across great wads of cash in the oddest places. The owner of a convenience store just off Route 95 used to laugh about how Cam once walked in to buy a gallon of milk carrying $20,000 in cash.
When she changed her name from Camilla, the frilly, potpourri-scented moniker her mother had given her, to the more gender-neutral Cam, it was George who filled out all the paperwork, carried it to the borough hall in Hopkinton and it was George who endured the ever-so slightly judgmental stare from the elderly clerk.
She trusted him so completely that she gave power of attorney — in effect granting total control of all her affairs — to O'Neil and her politically well-connected lawyer, Robert Ragosta, and when it came time to make out her will, she left George O'Neil in charge of her estate.
But more than that, and more so than all of her old friends or her casual acquaintances from the dog show circuit, O'Neil was the beneficiary of all Camilla's good will.
O'Neil seemed to find a certain droll amusement in the notion that there were some in the dog show world — many, perhaps — who believed that he exerted an almost-Mephistophelean power over Cam Lyman. He acknowledged that at dog shows, he would hover around Lyman, and he recognized that it might have made anyone who tried to approach her uncomfortable and might even have made them shy away.
But Cam Lyman was hardly a lap dog, he said. She would often explode in fury, he told Allen, as he would later tell the courts and investigators in Rhode Island, and on more than one occasion, George O'Neil ended up in the doghouse.
The last time it happened was July 20, 1987. That was the day Cam Lyman disappeared.
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