Italian investigators reopen Lady de Rothschild’s unsolved ‘murder’ from 1982
Italian investigators have launched a fresh inquiry into whether the ex-wife of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and her secretary were murdered in a case dating back more than four decades.
Jeanette Bishop May, the former Lady de Rothschild, and Gabriella Guerin, her secretary, disappeared in a freak snowstorm in the rugged Marche region in northern Italy in November 1980.
Following an intense police search, which involved police helicopters and sniffer dogs, the women’s badly decomposed bodies were discovered by hunters 14 months later near Lake Fiastra in the Sibillini mountains.
Wild boars had reportedly ravaged the corpses.
Their tragic demise has baffled Italians for years and provoked wild speculation about links to the mafia, an art theft in Rome and the murder of an Italian antique dealer and the mysterious death of Roberto Calvi, a Vatican banker, in London in 1982.
Prosecutors in the town of Macerata have now reopened the investigation into the cold case, and police will begin hearing testimony this week from a dozen witnesses, who knew the women at the time they disappeared.
Giovanni Fabrizio Narbone, the chief prosecutor, has declined to disclose details about what had motivated the fresh inquiry but confirmed a double murder investigation into the women’s deaths had been reopened.
“We reread all the records, to see if there were any glimmers to assess the existence of contradictions, and we felt that there was a chance of getting to the bottom of it,” Mr Narbone told local media.
“The more time passes, the more people who might have been involved in this story, or who knew of it, are bound to disappear.”
The striking Lady de Rothschild, a former model, cut a glamorous figure as a member of the international jet-set and first wife of Sir Evelyn De Rothschild, the British financier and member of the famous banking family. The couple divorced in 1971 and she then married Stephen May, a businessman.
‘She was enchanting’
At the time of her disappearance, Mrs May had been in the Marche region organising renovations for a home she had purchased in the village of Schito. She and her secretary were last seen driving a Peugeot up a remote mountain road in poor weather.
The car was found three weeks after their disappearance and investigators found no sign of a struggle or force. The bodies were not found until fourteen months later.
Nazzareno Venanzi, a surveyor, was one of the last people to see the former Lady de Rothschild alive. “In the morning she showed me a gate she liked for the cottage she was renovating,” he told the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera.
“We drank an aperitif before lunch, then she asked me if I wanted to accompany them both in the mountains that evening, but I declined because I was busy. When I learnt they did not return to their hotel, I was worried and notified the police.
“She was enchanting, a former model with fine manners,” he said. “It was only after her death that I learned she was well-known in England, the former wife of the banker, Rothschild.”
A Roman antique dealer
In December 1982, Alessandro Iacoboni, a Macerata prosecutor, investigated the case as a possible murder. An initial inquiry found the cause of the women’s deaths was hypothermia.
At the same time, Scotland Yard was investigating the death of Sergio Vaccari, a Roman antique dealer, who was stabbed to death in Holland Park in September 1982. Bishop was reportedly one of his contacts.
In September 1989, the investigating prosecutor found the women were victims of a double murder by unknown perpetrators, using unknown means.