As a pilot, as a lover, he was famous for coming in second. But then he disappeared. On the night of April 13, 1933, Captain Bill Lancaster took off in his small blue-and-silver biplane from the Moroccan outpost of Reggan. His craft was equipped with no lights and no radio. Twenty-four hours later, the first search party went into the desert, followed by others over the next week and a half. Finally they gave up.
Back home in England, many people thought he'd probably crashed on purpose, out of remorse. Others speculated that he'd slipped off to some far part of the world to start a new life under another name. For several years, Captain Lancaster was the world's most celebrated missing pilot. Then Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937, and history forgot him.
In February 1962, 29 years after he was last seen, a motorised patrol of the French foreign legion came heaving through the sands of the Tanzerouft - aka The Land of Thirst, a part of the Sahara so inhospitable even the roaming Bedouins avoid it. Miles away across the flatlands, a soldier noticed a speck. Approaching, the convoy came first upon the wheel tracks, undisturbed for three decades, ploughed up by the plane as it crashed and flipped over. Under one tattered wing lay the mummified body of Lancaster. Close by was his wallet - containing two photographs of his fellow aviator Jessie Maude Miller, the love of his life - along with his lucky horseshoe and a diary he had kept there in the desert during the eight days it took him to die. Once the find was reported in England, and the Lancaster story resurrected, people were naturally curious to know if the diary contained any mention of the murder.
He was always a bit of a square - faithful, fearless and greyly optimistic. But in June 1927, this horseman, boxer and former captain in the RAF was in a funk. Like a thousand other aviators he had been galvanised by Charles Lindbergh's epic flight from New York to Paris the month before, and now he yearned to set a big record of his own: to be the first to fly a light plane from England to Australia. Time was of the essence, but money was too, and Lancaster, 29, had a wife, two children and very little in the bank.
Then at a London party he met Jessie Miller, a 25-year-old Australian thrill-seeker. Known to one and all as 'Chubbie' (she weighed barely 100lb), Miller offered to help raise the funds if he would take her along. Reluctantly, Lancaster agreed. It turned out to be a media masterstroke. For a woman to attempt such a flight was unheard of, and the press and potential donors loved it. On October 14, 1927, the pair took off from Lympne airfield aboard a small biplane christened the Red Rose. They reached Egypt in two weeks, then Baghdad in early November. They forged through whipping rain, sandstorms and a near-plunge into the shark-filled Arabian Sea. The shark episode was so harrowing that that evening on the ground Lancaster and Miller made love for the first time, in a survivor's high under the Persian stars.
The trip got tougher after that. They were dogged by engine problems, shot at by tribesmen. Airborne out of Rangoon, Miller discovered a poisonous snake at her feet and wrenched the control stick free as the only available club. They barely managed to reinsert it and regain control of the plane. Soon after, their luck ran out. A blocked fuel line sent them crashing into an island jungle off Sumatra, and though they survived with minor injuries, and were afterwards well entertained by the British colony in Singapore, they were stranded for weeks waiting for replacement parts. Another British pilot, Bert Hinkler, grabbed the chance to beat them to Australia.
Even so, when Lancaster and Miller finally reached her home country, five months after starting out, they were feted and lionised everywhere. Chubbie in particular was the darling of the day. Not only had she flown 14,000 miles, several times further than any woman ever had before, she had also been a vital partner: along the way, Lancaster had taught her how to fly and repair the plane. The pair were invited to Hollywood, but the promised movie was never made. They liked America, though, and stayed - still forced to live the fiction that they were not lovers, since Lancaster's Roman Catholic wife wouldn't grant him a divorce. In New Jersey, Miller got her pilot's licence and became a star. She competed in the first Women's Air Derby (aka the Powder Puff Derby) of 1929, with the greatest aviators of the day, beat Earhart in point-to-point races, and set transcontinental speed records in both directions across the US.
Then the Depression hit, and Lancaster and Miller found themselves in a new kind of club: celebrities on the skids. By 1931 they were living in a bungalow in Coral Gables, Florida, months behind in their rent, eating grapefruit off trees in the yard, and poaching the neighbours' chickens after dark. An attempt at a big flight to rescue their fortunes put Lancaster in a hospital in Trinidad for three months. Flat broke, they thought of peddling Chubbie's memoirs, asked around for a ghost writer and found a young man from New Orleans, Haden Clarke. To write the book quickly, and to save expenses, Clarke moved in.
The partnership did not go well. Instead of her memoirs, Clarke and Miller collaborated mostly on bathtub gin while Lancaster was out looking for work. At last he got an offer. In February 1932, he was asked to fly transport in Mexico for a few weeks. But when he arrived in Texas, he learnt what the real job was: smuggling illegal Chinese and opium from Mexico into the US.
Though Lancaster refused, he was now stuck out west with a bunch of hoodlums and no cash. Worse, Chubbie stopped writing. It's uncertain if he suspected then that she and Clarke had started an affair. But two days later Lancaster was shown a letter that a friend had received from his own wife back in Miami. 'Chubbie and Clarke came round tonight,' she wrote. 'I really think now that Clarke has gained Chubbie's affections, and Bill lost them.Don't tell Bill, but I believe she is well satisfied.' The last two words were underlined.
Lancaster copied it all into his diary, and wrote underneath: 'Mental agony!!! Hell!' Two weeks later, when he made it east to St Louis, he found a letter waiting. 'The inconceivable has happened,' Chubbie wrote. 'Haden and I have fallen in love. We want to get married.' Lancaster wept over a pint of Scotch, then sent the pair a telegram: 'Am no dog in manger, but hold your horses kids until I arrive. Insist on being best man.' Then he purchased a gun - to replace, he said later, a company-owned pistol he'd pawned in Texas.
At his next stop, Nashville, he bought bullets.
The lovers met him at the Miami airport on the evening of April 21, 1932, and they all went home together. It was a recipe for hell: there were bursts of arguing throughout the evening until Miller went to bed. As she lay reading - a detective story about somebody being pushed off a roof - she could still hear the men's voices. Even a laugh or two, a good sign. She fell asleep. Around 2.30am she was awakened by a pounding on her door.
'A terrible thing has happened,' Lancaster shouted. 'Haden has shot himself.'
