There were, of course, other aspects of Camilla's life that her friends and family found more disconcerting than her penchant for dressing up in men's clothing and swallowing handfuls of distilled bull semen. After her mother's death, Camilla Lyman became the sole occupant of Ricefields. But with her almost neurotic distaste for dealing with anything that smelled even vaguely of old money, the old house was soon falling into disrepair.

Camilla as a young woman

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On at least one occasion, Camilla Lyman, an heiress sitting on a mountain of money — $11 million by some estimates and all of it old money — fell so far behind in paying her bills that the electricity was turned off at Ricefields. That always amazed Camilla's less privileged friends. To them, it would have been better to eat your shoes than let the bastards cut off the lights.

But Camilla, it seemed, had no such reservations.

Charles Allen, investigator

"She hated to pay bills," said Charles Allen, a prominent Boston detective who spent years tracking the missing heiress and has spent the years since her body was discovered pondering her slaying. In fact, she so despised the pressure of dealing with the day-to-day aspects of being rich that she hired people to write out checks to pay her bills. And then, of course, she drove them mad. Unwilling to exercise control over her fortune, but at the same time unable to trust anyone else to do it, she would constantly monitor her check writers, Allen recalled. "One person who paid her bills...complained that she...kept rigorous ledgers and would often call to harass him for paying a bill she believed to be incorrect...so while she didn't want to handle the minutia, she was...aware of it, if not obsessed by it," Allen said.

All the same, "it wasn't like she was just this rich wastrel like a lot wealthy people tend to be," Allen would later recall. "On one hand, it might have even been an apologetic side to her...I think she felt a little guilty...Because dealing with her money reminded her continually that she was in a situation that a lot of people just weren't in...I think she liked being in that situation, because it did enable her to do what she wanted to do and not have to worry about getting a job, or holding a job or being in a job. But I think there was a guilt feeling that I really think a lot of wealthy people have on some level."

Her family and their retainers, by all accounts, may have been too distant to detect the signs of Camilla's inner conflicts, but they could clearly see that a significant asset, Ricefields, their ancestral home, was on the very of deterioration.

At one point, her friends and family said, Camilla and her siblings reached an agreement under which she and her pack of pedigree dogs would vacate the main house and moved to a smaller house, also owned by the family, across the street. By all accounts, she resisted the move, but ultimately relented, though not cheerfully. But her sojourn in the little house across the street was short lived. Not long after she moved in, for reasons that still remain somewhat murky, the small house burst into flames.

There was no doubt that Camilla hated the small house, and even discussed plans to sell it to Maitland and her family. But police who investigated the fire concluded that there was never any evidence that the blaze was anything but accidental.

It did however suggest to those around Camilla that perhaps, not unlike her finely bred spaniels, she too needed a handler.

She found it in George O'Neil.

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