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The hand in the sand

An insurance scam that was a comical farce.

By David Cocksedge

TRUTH IS often stranger than fiction. So if this bizarre case reads like a Monty Python TV script, I make no apology. A man named Arthur Rannage Howard was reported drowned on 10 October 1885 at Taylor's Mistake, a lonely bay near the seaside resort of Sumner, in Christchurch, New Zealand. An award of fifty pounds sterling was offered as a reward to anyone who could recover his body or supply any part of it for Christian burial. This message was duly published in The "Christchurch Times" newspaper.

On 16 December 1885, two brothers surnamed Godfrey and their two sons visited the sergeant on duty at the central police station in Christchurch. They crowded into the office and slapped down a parcel wrapped in newspaper on his desk. The sergeant gingerly unwrapped the package and found a human hand nestling in the folds of damp newsprint. It was pallid and wrinkled and on the third finger, left hand, was a gold ring. The Godfreys told him, "That's Howard's hand. Bit off by a shark!" Then they pointed to the reward notice in the local newspaper.

The Godfreys were also ready to make a statement. They had spent the day swimming at Taylor's Mistake, they said, and at about 2 pm the brothers had discovered the hand lying on the sandy beach just below the high water mark. The elder brother, named Elisha, asked the sergeant to examine the ring. The sergeant duly drew if off the cold, wrinkled finger and on the inside were the scratched initials "A.H."

The Godfreys were sent off without a reward. The duty sergeant thought that the whole affair smelt badly of opportunism. From that day on, the Godfreys were kept under constant observation by the police. The sergeant then called on Mrs Sarah Howard and asked her to come to the station. At the sight of the severed hand, she cried out that it was her husband's. Then she burst into tears.

A few days later, a coroner's inquest was held on the hand. Three insurance companies were represented. If the hand was indeed Howard's hand, they were due to pay out sums amounting to 2,400 pounds on three policies. The policies had all been transferred into the name of Sarah Howard.

The circumstances of the alleged accident were gone over at the inquest. On 10 October 1885, Arthur Howard, a railway workshop fitter, had walked from Christchurch to Sumner. On his way he fell in with some others who remembered his clothes and his silver watch on a gold chain. He said that he meant to go for a swim at Taylor's Mistake at Sumner, where in those days the waters were dangerously shark-infested.

The next morning (11 October) a small boy had found Howard's clothes and watch on the end of the pier at Sumner. A few days later insurance had been applied for and refused; the advertisement had been inserted in the local paper and, as if in answer to his widow's prayers, the Godfreys had discovered the hand on 16 December.

Appended to the coroner's report were the examination results of ten doctors who had examined the hand. They disagreed in small details, but all agreed on the following points: (a) The hand had not been long in the sea; certainly not since 10 October. (b) A shark had not bitten the hand off as the Godfreys claimed. It had been severed from the arm by the teeth of a hacksaw. (c) The hand was that of a WOMAN, not a man. This was certainly not good news for the Godfrey brothers.

This damaging report was followed by a statement from an engraver. The initials "A.H." on the inside of the ring had not been made by a professional's tool, but had been scratched by an amateur.

The Godfrey brothers were asked whether, in view of the evidence, they would care to make a further statement. Elisha said that in his former statement he had withheld certain information, which he would now divulge. He stated that he and his brother had been sitting on the sand after lunch when a man wearing blue goggles and a red wig suddenly sprang out from behind a boulder. The stranger told them, "Come here! There's a man's hand on the beach just over there!"

This multi-colored apparition then led Elisha and his brother to the hand lying in the sand, and Elisha had instantly declared, "That must be Arthur Howard's hand!"" The stranger in the goggles and wig had then said, ""Poor fellow; poor fellow. The sharks must have got him."

"Why didn't you tell me about this chap in the goggles and wig?" The sergeant asked Elisha Godfrey.

"Because he begged me to promise that I wouldn't let anyone know he was there," said Elisha after a thoughtful pause.

The sergeant sighed wearily. He passed a copy of this amazing deposition across to Elisha Godfrey. "If you've still got the nerve, sign it," he suggested. Both Godfrey brothers read it through and then signed their names on spaces at the bottom of the last page. Then they left the police station, muttering darkly to each other.

Christchurch police then made routine inquiries for information regarding a gentleman in blue goggles and a red wig in the vicinity of Sumner and Taylor's Mistake on the day in question. To their intense astonishment they very quickly found what they were looking for.

Several people came forward saying that they had been accosted by this bizarre figure, who excitedly told them that the Godfrey brothers had found the hand of Mr. Arthur Howard on the sand at Taylor's Mistake. This odd looking man had also been seen on the night of the alleged drowning, heading north on the ferry steamer. He had taken jobs as a manual laborer, and most strangely, he had appeared at dawn one day by the bedside of a fellow worker and tried to persuade the man to open a grave with him. His name, he had said, was Mr. Watt. Perhaps most interestingly of all, the man with goggles and wig had gone for a long walk with Mrs. Sarah Howard on 18 December, two days after the hand had been found.

Using this information, the police promptly arrested the Godfrey brothers and Mrs. Howard on a charge of attempting to defraud the three insurance companies involved.

But a more dramatic arrest was made in a drab suburb of the capital city. Here the police ran to earth a strange figure that had been attempting to break into a deserted house. The man wore clothes too big for him, and was wearing blue goggles and a red wig. Yes, you've guessed it - the man was Arthur Rannage Howard, who had supposedly drowned on at Taylor's Mistake 10 October 1885!

At the trial in April 1886, the jury surprisingly found the Godfreys and Mrs. Howard not guilty on both counts and Mr. Howard guilty on the second count of attempting to obtain money by deception and fraud.

He was sent to jail for three years.

No clue has ever been produced as to the owner of the severed hand. Of eight graves that were subsequently opened in search of a body to match the hand, none contained a dismembered body. But the hand had certainly been hacked off by someone. Could Arthur Howard have bribed a dissecting-room janitor or enlisted the help of some undertaker's assistant? And as it was definitely a woman's hand; where was the rest of the woman? It was fairly obvious that Howard himself had scratched the initials "A.H." on the inside of the ring. He may also have sawed off the hand.

The most puzzling aspect of this case is Howard's extraordinary masquerade. In trying to "disguise" himself, he had in fact made himself grotesquely conspicuous. Why did he blaze a trail all over the country, making himself instantly memorable to all that saw or spoke to him? Was he a victim of the artistic temperament, or just plain loony? His antics were worthy of John Cleese, leaping about and yelling dementedly in an episode of the comedy series "Fawlty Towers".

The late Mr. Justice Alper records that Howard's lawyer told him that he knew the answer. But soon afterwards the lawyer died. And Arthur Rannage Howard quietly did his jail time and never talked with anyone about his laughable attempt to swindle three insurance companies by faking his death by drowning and placing a severed hand on a lonely beach. Perhaps he was just plain embarrassed.

(Research: "The Case of the Hand in the Sand" by Ngaio Marsh, 1990).

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