Murder on a Holiday

Except for a few peasant farmers and tourists, the foothills of the Maritime Alps north of Marseille are deserted and desolate. It is not country to be stumbling about in at night. So when 32-year-old Gustave Dominici, whose farmhouse overlooks the river Durance, heard shots sometime after midnight on Aug. 5, he turned over and went back to sleep. But as soon as it was daylight Dominici took a walk along the riverbank in the direction of a car he had seen parked by the road the evening before. Beside the river he stumbled over the body of a small girl in pajamas, her skull shattered. Dominici sprinted toward the car. Under a plaid rug, among the roadside weeds, he found the body of a woman dressed in a kimona. Across the road, under an overturned camp cot, he found the bullet-pierced body of an elderly man in blue pajama pants.

Tourists were already speeding along the road. Dominici stopped a passing cyclist and sent him for the gendarmerie in Forcalquier, seven miles away. The cops failed at first to identify the dead; there were no passports or other papers. Then they found a child's exercise book. On the cover was written: Name: Elizabeth Drummond Form III. Subject: Summer Holiday. Parent: Jack Drummond.

Elizabeth's Diary. The dead man was Sir Jack Drummond, 61, famed British biochemist, who had devised Britain's palate-poor but vitamin-rich World War II diet of cabbage salads, carrots, grey wheaten bread, potato pastry, and dried eggs. Scientific adviser to wartime Food Minister Lord Woolton he had developed an emergency meal for the bombed-out called blitz soup, and later a predigested food for starved survivors of Hitler's prison camps. A quiet, modest but convivial man, Sir Jack (he refused to be known by his correct Christian names: John Cecil) had once collaborated with a government scientific worker in a book about English food, then married her. The child was their daughter, aged 10. The Drummonds had left England late in July, motoring through France in their Hillman station wagon, sometimes staying at hotels, sometimes camping, as the hour or mood caught them. Wrote Elizabeth in her diary on July 29: "Papa is not content. He says it is too cold to camp. Mama and I teamed against him. We won." Because Elizabeth wanted to see a bullfight, on the fatal night, the Drummonds had doubled back towards Digne, where they remembered having seen one advertised, and on the way back camped beside the road.

The Moon Was High. Surprised by the killer, Sir Jack, onetime college welterweight boxer, had apparently resisted until two shots got him. Four bullets more accounted for Lady Drummond. Elizabeth, a witness of the murders, had fled toward the river, but the killer had overtaken her, clubbed her to death with the butt of his rifle. If money was his objective, as it possibly was, the killer had overlooked 5,000 francs ($14) in Lady Drummond's handbag. In the river, police found the murder weapon: a U.S. Army M1 carbine.

But gendarmes, flying squads, villagers and passing tourists, milling around the Drummond camp, had obliterated all possible clues. Footprint experts, fingerprint experts and bloodhounds were unable to pick up a lead, though Parisian headlines feared what the unsolved murder might do to French tourism. It seemed likely that the only record of the Drummond family's last hours would remain Elizabeth's entry in her diary of the evening before: "The moon is high and shining. We are camping. I have just done something I always wanted to do. All alone I went swimming in the river--like in a movie or a dream! It was wonderful. So that they [her parents] would not notice, I put on my pajamas when I was still wet. It's cold!"

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