Her transformation started off slowly and a bit secretly at first. In the beginning she simply donned the jackets and then the shirts. Later, she began to add ties to her wardrobe. As time went on, she began to venture out of her room, and then out of the house, wearing articles of men's clothing. She'd show up at dog shows dressed from the waist up in the image of her father, all jackets and ties, worn with ankle-length skirts and the ankle bracelets.

Camilla, dressed in her father's clothing

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But after her mother's death in 1973, Camilla, it seems, surrendered completely, if not to her father's ghost, at least to his sense of fashion as she wandered alone — except for her nearly 60 dogs — along the cavernous hallways of the deteriorating house at Ricefields. It wasn't that she felt any great sense of loss from her mother's death. In fact, Camilla showed little reaction to Mousy's death. When Doris Maitland was asked if she could remember any demonstration of grief on Camilla's part, she pondered the question for a moment and then simply replied, "Not much."

"She was devastated when her father died," Maitland had said. "Her father had been a friend. Her mother didn't participate in her growing up. I was being polite when I said she was caustic. I don't think any one of her four children ever pleased her."

All the same, with her mother gone and with the lonely sprawling mansion at Ricefields to herself, Camilla drifted further into her eccentricities. She dropped all pretense of femininity and gave herself over completely to the task of becoming a man, a man cut very much from the same cloth as her father. Gone were the ankle-length skirts; in their place were French-cuff trousers. She cut off her graying ponytail. And that was just the start of it.

Back in those days, dog breeders had easy access to steroids — distilled from bull semen, they were available by mail order from specialty catalogues, said Judy Colon, a long-time acquaintance of Lyman's. The drugs appealed to Lyman for a couple of reasons but most of all because they allowed her to transform herself into a man without having to turn to doctors, whom she avoided altogether.

Steroid pills, made from bull semen

Camilla had always hated doctors. She seemed to fear them. And she avoided them at all costs. She hadn't been to a gynecologist in her entire adult life. She never even went to the dentist, not even for a routine checkup. That was something that would later cause investigators a great deal of distress later when they discovered that the heiress who was worth a fortune when she vanished didn't even leave behind dental records.

It was clear that she certainly would never have submitted to the lengthy and arduous psychological testing that is a requirement for all transsexuals who hope to undergo reassignment surgery. There was an anecdote earlier in Camilla's life that seems to support that. It had happened in the 1950s, after Camilla's brief stint at Hollins College in Virginia. After just a few months at school, Camilla was asked to leave. The reasons for that remain a dark family secret — "I have thoughts about it," Mary Margaret said when asked about the circumstances, "But I'd rather not discuss them...it would simply be speculation."

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