Helen Smith (nurse)

Helen Linda Smith (3 January 1956 – 20 May 1979) was a British nurse who died in allegedly suspicious circumstances in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, after apparently falling from a balcony during a party. Her father refused to accept that her death was an accident, and alleged that there was a conspiracy to conceal the truth.

Mr Smith's campaign led to changes in the rules concerning inquests to violent deaths of UK citizens occurring outside the country. Helen Smith's body was stored for thirty years before being buried in 2009. The official version of her death was never disproved.

Following a party at the house of Dr Richard Arnot and his wife Penny, the bodies of Helen (23) and Johannes Otten (35), a Dutch tugboat captain, were found in the street 70 feet below the Arnots' sixth floor balcony. Helen was found lying in the road clothed but with her underpants partly off and Johannes, whose underpants were around his thighs, was impaled upon the spiked railings surrounding the apartment block.

Also present at the Arnots' that night were Tim Hayter, a diver from New Zealand, a marine biologist named Jacques Texier, four German salvage operators and quite a number of other people who were never traced.

The presence of alcohol at the party in a "dry" country, and evidence given by Jacques Texier of a sexual encounter between Tim Hayter and Mrs Arnot at the time of the deaths, led to increased interest in the case, and the prosecution of Mrs Arnot by the Saudi authorities for "unlawful intercourse". Richard Arnot was sentenced to eighty strokes of the cane, to be administered in public, for illegally supplying alcohol – although the sentence was never carried out. Arnot also potentially faced a year in prison for "allowing his wife to talk and dance with other men".

The official Saudi investigation into the incident concluded that the couple had fallen from the balcony while drunk, possibly after or during a sexual encounter. This conclusion was endorsed by the British Foreign Office.

Helen's father Ron Smith, a retired policeman, refused to accept the conclusion and embarked upon a lengthy campaign to expose what he considered to be a Saudi–British coverup. He accused Richard Arnot of murdering his daughter. Arnot later wrote the book Arabian Nightmare about his experience of being prosecuted in Saudi Arabia and being subsequently accused of rape and murder by Ron Smith.

At her father's insistence, Helen's body was left unburied for more than 30 years in storage at Leeds General Infirmary, thought to be the longest time a body has been stored without burial in the United Kingdom. Some six different post mortem examinations and forensic investigations were performed over this period, with varying conclusions.

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Wikipedia