Disappearance
In late 1926, Christie’s husband revealed that he was in love with another woman, Nancy Neele, and wanted a divorce. On 3 December 1926, the couple quarrelled, and Archie Christie left their house in Sunningdale, Berkshire, to spend the weekend with his mistress at Godalming, Surrey. That same evening, Christie disappeared from her home, leaving behind a letter for her secretary saying that she was going to Yorkshire; she also sent a letter to the Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey Police saying that she feared for her life. When her car was found at Newland’s Corner, near Guildford, Surrey, police dredged a nearby lake and conducted a search of the surrounding countryside. Her disappearance excited great interest in the press, though the novelist Edgar Wallace speculated that her disappearance was an attempt to spite her husband and that she would be found alive and well in London.
Eleven days after her disappearance, Christie was identified as a guest at the Hydropathic Hotel (now the Hydro hotel), Harrogate, Yorkshire, where she was registered as ‘Mrs Teresa Neele’, from Cape Town. Christie gave no account of her disappearance, two doctors having diagnosed her as suffering from amnesia, and opinion remains divided as to the reasons for her disappearance. One suggestion is that she had suffered a nervous breakdown, brought about by a natural propensity for depression, exacerbated by her mother’s death earlier that year and by her husband’s infidelity. Many people at the time believed the disappearance to be a publicity stunt, and public sentiment was predominantly negative, largely because of the substantial cost to the taxpayers of the police investigation, while Edgar Wallace’s suggestion that the disappearance was an attempt to embarrass her husband continues to find support, even to the extent of suggestions that Christie was trying to make people believe her husband had killed her in order to punish him for his infidelity.
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