During all their years at Borley, Marianne was misconducting herself with a series of lovers. Her Chilean friend, Santiago Monk, was posted to England and they found opportunities of meeting. This was especially when she was living during weekdays in Wimbledon in 1933‑34. At all times he was generous with his gifts. Marianne liked to accept presents and had a taste for finery. But what she wanted from her love affairs was to be admired, cosseted and made love to ‑ one might say Cupid, not cupidity.

   In March 1931 Frank Pearless, a London flower‑seller, took up residence in the cottage attached to the Rectory. He gave himself the fancy name of François d'Arles; and his little boy whom he brought with him went by the same name. The little boy stayed with the Foysters and was a companion for Adelaide. But his father was around in the Rectory a lot too. Sex relations began almost at the first opportunity although, as Marianne said, she did not like him "particularly". When Miss Dytor came to stay as a nurse companion in 1932, she thought Marianne looked on "François d'Arles" with fear and dislike. This suggests a compulsive quality in Marianne's sexuality. It is as if sex relations were a necessity, and the opportunity had to be taken when it could be found.

   Miss Dytor had come to Borley to help Marianne look after a baby boy, John Emery, whom Marianne was supposed to have adopted. Frank Pearless was convinced the boy was his own child by Marianne; and anyone who reads Dr. Hall's text carefully will be inclined to agree, whatever Marianne maintaine in 1958. John Emery died before he was five months old, to the great grief of Frank Pearless, and Marianne too. Miss Dytor left Borley about two months later.

   In December 1932 Ian finished his schooling in Canada, for which Lionel had been paying (out of that stipend of £219 p.a.?). He returned to England  and came to Borley to live with his mother. But he stayed only three months. On the 20th February 1933 Frank Fearless and Marianne took a tenancy on a shop in Wimbledon, and opened it as a florist's, "Jonquille et Cie". During the week Marianne lived there with Fearless as man and wife in the apartment over the shop. Ian went to live with them. At weekends Marianne went back to Borley, presumably to see how Lionel and Adelaide were getting on. But the business was not a success, and when it was sold in November 1934, they all separated for good. Ian went back to his grandparents for a time; Frank and little Franois went off; and Marianne went back to the Rectory. Some­where about the time of that parting, the Foysters' adoptive daughter Adelaide, then aged about six, ceased to be a member of the family. At a later time she was said to be in a boarding school, but no more is heard of her.

   Marianne said she loved children and wanted a baby to care for. It was not long before she got another one for adoption, a baby boy. But by this time she had also got herself a new husband. Incredible as it may sound, Marianne made her third marriage, to Henry Francis Fisher, on the 23rd February 1935, while she was still living with Lionel as the wife of the Rector of Bor­ley. Just as she had taken leave from Borley to create an establishment in Wimbledon, so sometime in 1934 she found herself a second home in Ipswich. She took a furnished room in the name of Miss Marianne Voyster, and in due course, in Ipswich, met a young man of about her own age, Henry Francis Fisher. He fell in love with her practically at first sight, and it was not long before they were lovers. After a while she told him she was pregnant, and he would have to make an honest woman of her. After their marriage in Ipswich on the 23rd February 1935, they made their home for a time at Borley Rectory. This was the occasion for an extraordinary charade. Lionel undertook the role of Leon Alphonse Voyster, Marianne's "father", of independent means. Henry never discovered the truth. He was a commercial traveller, and away a lot; so he never met any of Lionel's parishioners to tell him the truth. It is strange indeed that Lionel was willing to condone what he knew was a bigamous marriage. He was willing to excuse himself and Marianne by saying that in the sight of God their marriage was no true marriage, that he had baptized her and so was more of a father than a husband. With this sophistry he tried to cover a truth which he was unwilling or unable to face. He had not been a husband to Marianne in any way that law and custom require. Perhaps he had never con­summated the marriage, leaving it void if that were so proved. He cetainly had not fulfilled a wife's expectations of a loving bodily relationship. He had not given her a child of their own. He had not supported her with his strength, nor guarded her against her indiscretions. He had not given her leadership or companionship or excitement or adventure. Nor had she found with him the spi­ritual values and the emotional appeal for which she went to the Roman Church.

   Nevertheless, of course, Lionel knew that Marianne's marriage to Henry Fisher had been a criminal act, and that Henry had been wickedly deceived and gravely injured. He knew that any children of that bigamous marriage would be bastards without a name of their own. In living with Henry and Marianne as "Mr. Voyster" he was himself entering into that wicked deception; and every day in his daily life he was acting out a daily lie. How can one explain it? Even in the early Borley days Lionel was suffering from rheumatic arthritis and poor physical health. In mind also he was deteriorating and losing his powers of memory. There was a soft spot in Lionel's character, a deviousness and lack of rectitude of which he had given signs in earlier years. We must suppose that under the influence of cerebral disease (or when, as Marianne put it, the blood did not get to his brain), that soft spot grew like the rotten­ness in an apple. By then, reduced to a puppet, he did as he was told.

   Henry, of course, wanted a home of his own. He bought a house in Ipswich, 4 Ancaster Road, and the newlyweds moved there in July 1935. Lionel did not follow them until October of the same year, when his failing health compelled him to give up work altogether. He went to live with Marianne and Henry as Marianne father, "Mr. Voyster". The ignominy of this role did not trouble him. As his cousins, the Bells, said of him, he "had always been, and still is, infatuated with Marianne. He seems to count every moment she is absent from him."

   Marianne's "pregnancy" in 1934‑5 resulted in the addition of a baby boy to the family. She sent Henry off to his parent's home for a few week's holiday. While he was away she visited a church fostering agency whose address she had got from an advertisement. On the 19th August 1935 Henry received a telegram from Borley: "It's a boy." On the 22nd December 1935 John Francis Henry Fisher was baptized, the date of birth being given as the 19th August. Later on Mari­anne successfully repeated the deception. This time she adopted, and claimed as Henry's and her own, a baby girl. She was christened Astrid Marianne Zaida Fisher on the 22nd March 1937. She was said to have been born on the 3rd of March. Henry was never quite comfortable about this addition to his family; but he never had any doubts about John.

   Lionel, like Marianne, was fond of children, and could make them happy. He behaved like a loving parent to John. In later years John told how Lion­ells bedroom became a refuge for him, when Marianne was in a bad temper. The two children, John and Astrid, together with Marianne and Henry and "old Mr. Voyster", constituted the whole of the family. Adelaide was said to be away at boarding school. But she never appeared again.

   Between 1935 and 1945, when Lionel died, there werea great number of changes of residence. In September 1936 the family moved from Ancaster Road to Woodbridge Road East, Ipswich. In June 1938 they moved on again to Hill House, Chillesford, where John attended the village school and "old Mr. Foyster" was still sometimes seen. In May 1940 they moved on again to Snape. And in June 1941 Lionel made his last move with the Fisher family to Dairy Cottages, Rendlesham. During these years Lionel showed several signs of life. His memory was not so impaired that in 1938 he could not undertake an account of the Borley hauntings in his 'Summary of the Evidence". And in 1940 and 1941 he was in correspondence with Harry Price. But his bodily health deteriorated steadily to the point where he became bedridden. He died in his home at Rendlesham on the 18th April 1945, aged 67. The causes of death were certified as "(a) Exhaustion, (b) Bed Sores, (c) Rheumatoid Arthritis". The informant was “Marianne E. H. Foyster. Widow of Deceased. Present at the death." So Marianne stayed with him to the bitter end, and she it was who closed his eyes. The bedsores are a reproach. With good nursing they should not have happened. But good nursing for a bedridden man was more than Marianne could have managed on her own. One cannot say that she failed in her duty.

   It is not easy to say why Marianne dragged Lionel and Henry and the two children from one home to another over those years. Both the breaking up of one home and. the building up of a new one are an expense and an exhausting ef­fort for most people. Not for Marianne. For her each new home was a new adventure which she entered on with gusto. If not done for their own sake, these movements seem purposeless. One cannot suppose that Henry's wishes were taken into consideration any more than Lionels. A curious and unexplained feature of her wanderings is the fact that she seemed to prefer remote spots, with few neighbours and few contacts with such neighbours as there were. In this way she secured the maximum freedom of mcvement, no questions asked. That may have been reason enough, though it is surprising behaviour for someone as extraverted and socially responsive as she was.

   This also was a time when she was at her most inventive in her "soap operas". She was at the top of her form with an avid and credulous listener, such as Mrs. Fenton (see p. et seq.). She said she loved to boast to impress people, and as people became impressed by her, she had "a glorious time in playing the part.' But her life style consisted in mixing fiction with fact, and attempting to escape from the dreariness of everyday. All through her life one sees the need for thrills, excitement, adventure. One sees also the boldness in execution with which she introduced into her life one complic­ation after ‑ or on top of ‑ another. She had the courage, the swift reactions and the decisiveness of a gambler. Her motivations grew out of the unrealities of romantic fiction. She had no feeling for long term planning. She adjusted to the immediate contingency, and it all came to her naturally. "I do not know why I do a lot of things' she said.

   The excited mood in which she spent so much of her life suggests the hyper­thymic mood states of the cyclothyinic personality. Psychiatrists have noticed how many of the confidence tricksters of history and the courts have shared this disposition. Depressive as well as elevated moods are the rule. In Marianne's case we know of only one episode of depression, when she attempted suicide by swallowing Lysol. For the greater part of her life she seems to have been al­most over the edge in the opposite direction. The moods of the cyclothymic run a periodic course. Such swings of mood may have been the effective causes which shook her out of one abode into another. Very often the mood swings of the cyclothymic have a seasonal incidence; and a change is particularly likely about the early summer. This is shown rather markedly in the life of the Foy­sters. The move to Ancaster Road was in July 1935; the one to Woodbridge Road in September 1936; the one to Chillesford in June 1938; the one to Snape in May 1940; the one to Rendlesham in June 1941. In June 1945 Marianne began her affair with Robert O'Neil while staying in Ipswich. In September 1945 she moved to Martlesham.

   Marianne's marriage to Henry Fisher did not long survive the death of Lionel Foyster. In Ipswich she had met an American service‑man, who was very free with his money. She set her sights on getting to America as his wife. This was an idea much favoured by many English girls, who imagined that all America was either Broadway or Hollywood. Marianne formed a plan and took the consequent steps.

   Once a satisfactory sex relationship had been established with Robert, she discovered that she was pregnant and went through a form of marriage with him on the 11th August 1945. In 1958 Marianne denied she had been pregnant at that time; but both the Registrar and a witness thought she was. One cannot dismiss the possibility that, despite her denial, she was pregnant then; but if so, she miscarried. For the time being this marriage was kept dark. She then found a new home for her family at 1 Deben Avenue, Martlesham. While Henry was away on one of his business journeys, on the 20th September she moved the entire contents of Dairy Cottages, Rendlesham, to the new address at Martlesham, taking with her both the children. Although she had gone through the form of marriage with O'Neil six weeks before, she installed herself at Martlesham as Mrs. Fisher. This was an important part of the plan. Henry was to be jettisoned. Mrs. Fisher was going to disappear at one place, and Mrs. O'Neil to surface again at another. When Henry Fisher returned from his trip to his home at Dairy Cottages, he found the place empty. Marianne was gone. So were John and Astrid, his children. So was the piano and all the furniture. The blow was too much for him. He could not cope with the devastating situation by taking any practical measures. The next we hear of him he was in hospital with a nervous breakdown.

   When Marianne was settled in at Martlesham, Robert O'Neil would come and stay the night whenever he could ‑ and so did some other American service‑men. He stayed as a paying guest, and not as her husband. The war was ended, and all American General Intake Service‑men would shortly be demobilised. Arr­angements were being made by the authorities to transport to the United States the brides they had married while stationed in Britain. Marianne wished to take advantage of this opportunity. A suitable baby boy had come to her no­tice. He had been born on the 9th October 1945, and was to be fathered onto Robert O'Neil. She did not take delivery of the baby right away. But he ap­peared in a pram towards the end of her stay in Martlesham, causing great sur­prise to her neighbour, Mrs. Nelson, who had noticed none of the usual warning signs. Robert had gone on tour to Germany for his last duties. He was de­mobilised from there, and was home for Christmas. He did not meet his little son till many months later.

   Marianne knew that she would have difficulty in getting to the States as the wife of Robert O'Neil, if she were encumbered by two of Henry Fisher's children. They had to be disposed of. Sometime in 1945 Astrid was found a place in an Essex orphanage. The problem of John, now about eleven years old, was more difficult. Marianne's solution had the simplicity of genius. In February 1946 she got probate of Lionel's will, as "Marianne Foyster" his widow. The estate realized £848. She then went ahead to sell all the contents of 1 Deben Avenue; and the furniture was taken away, piece by piece, by the buy­ers, till the place was practically stripped. She had gossiped with a certain Mrs. Knight for a number of months, and had found her receptive of a good story well told. At last the time had come when she and Robert's putative son would have to go on their way. The denouement is best re‑told in Dr. Hall's own words (p.52):

Mrs. Knight said that after Marianne had been living in Martlesham about eight months she called one day, and in the course of conversation asked Mrs. Knight if she would do her a favour. Marianne said that she had to go to Ireland for a couple of days during the following week to sign some papers in connexion with the estate of her late father, the Rev. L. A. Foyster, and she wondered if Mrs. Knight would be kind enough to look after John during her absence. She could manage to take the baby Vincent with her, and other arrangements had been made as regards Astrid. Mrs. Knight said that she would be glad to help Marianne by having John, who was then about eleven years old, to stay with her for two or three days, and the following week Marianne duly arrived at Woodbridge with the boy. After a few minutes conversation she kissed John "goodbye", and took her leave... Mrs. Knight said that Marianne went out "just as if she were going to post a letter". After five days had passed Mrs. Knight became perturbed, and taking John with her she went to 1 Deben Avenue, Martlesham, only to find the house empty. Enquiries among the neighbouring houses revealed that Marianne and the child Vincent had vanished three or four days before. Nobody had seen them actually leave. They were there one day it was said, and the following morning the house was empty and abandoned. Marianne had kept herself aloof from the neighbours in Deben Avenua and practically nothing was known about her. Mrs Knight reported the matter fully to the police.

   The police made a number of enquiries, but could discover nothing. They could not trace Henry Fisher, who of course had never been seen at Martlesham. Mrs. Marianne Fisher had vanished like a fish into water. Mrs. Marianne O'Neil was admitted to the US Army transit camp at Tidworth, Hants, early in May, together with her baby. She soon took steps to regularize the status of her "son" by having him baptized at a RC church at Axminster, Devon, as Robert Vincent O'Neil junior, son of Robert Vincent O'Neil senior, born on the 2nd November 1945. The true date of birth of this baby boy, as Dr. Hall dis­covered, was the 9th October 1945. It is not easy to see how Robert O'Neil could be persuaded of his paternity if he had not had sex relations with Marianne be­fore June 1945. To make his paternity plausible, sex relations must have begun not later than February 1945 while Lionel was still alive and Henry Fisher was living with the family at Rendlesham. Dr. Hall thinks there was cohabitation at least four months earlier than August 1945 (p. 21).

   After three months in the transit camp Marianne and baby Vincent crossed the Atlantic to America. A new life began for her, and she became a different woman. This is one of the strangest reversals that I have ever met. Her life divides itself into three phases, each of them so different from the others that they might belong to three different people. The first twelve years encompass Marianne's infancy and childhood. The second period, from menarche to menopause, takes up the next thirty‑five years. The last post­menopausal era lasts another thirty‑five years from 1946 to the present time of writing. Almost the whole of the events with which we have been concerned be­long to the middle period, and are governed by the stormy nature of Marianne's sex life. But to see her justly we must see her whole.

   We do not know what were the horrors she had to go through in her "terrible life as a kid". The Shaws were improvident and miserably poor. Marianne was born in one of six very small cottages ‑ one room and small scullery below, two rooms above, with one WC at the back for the whole row. The later circumstances of the family do not seem to have been much better. The father may have been a man of some education, since as "clerk", "publican", "schoolmaster" and "time‑keeper", he did not have to do the roughest work. But he was irregularly em­ployed, and usually proved a failure at whatever he undertook. Poor food, poor clothing and poor care, a rough life, hard knocks, lack of love and early sexual initiation were almost certainly the pattern. With all this the girl was ex­ceptionally intelligent, well‑spoken and learned to take on the ways and the idiom of gentility. In later life she presented herself as a woman of family and connections, with a university education, from "the upper crust" she might have said.

   With sexual maturity she became intensely sexually aware, and avid for experience which she sought for its own sake. Her attitude to sex was more like that of a young man than a girl. Sexual excitation was not accompanied by emotional involvement. None of her lovers engaged any deep affection on her side. While she liked to receive presents, she made no trade of herself. She wanted the sex, the admiration, the adventure and the fun that her lovers could provide. She complained that while living with Lionel there was never enough money at Borley even to eat properly. Yet in the whole of her life she made no serious plan to improve her lot. A woman with more eye to the main chance would surely have left Lionel for, say, Santiago Monk ‑ or someone else who could have given her consequence and prosperity. One wonders why, with her intelligence, she did not plan her life differently? Perhaps it was because imagination was more important to her than reality. She was not really a practical‑minded woman; she was a fantasist. The novelettish romances she made up for herself and her hearers gave her, perhaps, more delight than she could have got from, say, a prudent marriage. As a fabricator of plausible fairy‑tales she takes a very high place in history. She should not fail to secure immortality in the text‑books (rubric: pseudologia fantastica)

   Marianne had a rare combination of physical and biological advantages. She does not seem to have had a day's illness in all her long life until the stroke in her eighties. Once out of her teens, she had the health, the vigour and the looks of someone much younger than her years. Even at the age of seventy‑five the had the elasticity and the looks of a woman of sixty. She was still working at the age of seventy‑nine, when retirement had been due at sixty. The biological vigour of her constitution shows also on the sexual side, the strength of the urge, the intensity of the enjoyment, and the level of the performance.

   On the intellectual side she was equipped with an excellent intelligence of a practical but not theoretical kind. She never stopped to ask herself where she was going. In the main she was no long‑term planner, but answered deftly to the puff of any breeze. However, she was capable of planning when it became important. The way in which she disburdened herself of the Fisher family, without leaving a loop‑hole for the police to dig into, shows a well­planned strategy on the one side, and on the other an utterly ruthless disregard for a man who had loved her with all his heart, and for two children to whom she had been their mother. This cruel act was not done with unkindness at heart but with an icy affectionless concern with expediency.

   Although she told romantic stories of the lushest kind, they came from a playful spirit untouched by sentimentality. She was in nature a hard‑boiled pragmatist. She regarded the Borley phenomena with contempt, although she was herself a participant. She felt no fellowship but only dislike for her fellow trickster Harry Price. He did not keep his word over Lionel's manuscript: "He was not an honourable man." Her relationship with Prank Fearless began within a few weeks of his arrival. She was asked "You felt that you liked him when he first arrived?", and replied "Not particularly." One notes the coolness underlying the sex relationship; one notes also the blunt honesty of her reply. In general, her answers in the Gladstone Hotel inquisition were surprisingly forthright. There is no evasion. She does not pretend that either her mind or her behaviour were other than what they were. There was a masculinity about her character that disdained feminine wiles. Usually one finds self‑deception as the soft centre in a cheat: not in Marianne.

    As Dr. Hall has pointed out, not the least of her intellectual gifts was an excellent memory. She told innumerable complicated and untruthful stories about her superior family connections, her interesting personal history, and a mythical set of present circumstances. The particulars of these fictions varied as she moved from one group of acquaintances to another. But she kept all the threads distinct in her mind, never erring as she shifted from one romance to another, or from one alias to another. There were only two occasions when she got caught out. One was in the earliest days of her marriage to Lionel, when she ennobled hertvbrothertl Ian Shaw with the surname and style of "von Kiergraff". The other was when Henry Fisher's sister discovered that Marianne had entrapped him into a bigamous marriage.

   With so much going for her, one wonders how it was that she made such a mis­erable failure of the middle era of her life. Several causes suggest themselves. The first is that she did not have a sensitive appreciation of the character, or lack of character, of the men with whom she allied herself. One cannot fairly blame her for the imprudence of her first and only legal marriage to a seventeen­year‑old boy who promptly deserted her. However, it was not a good idea at the age of twentyhree to accept Lionel Foyster for her husband. When he made his proposal he was just double her age; and she must have known him already for a weakling and one lacking in sexual dynamism. To go to the wilds of Canada to live with him as a partner was the mistake of a lifetime. She would have done very well to have stayed where she was to find herself a man of ability and drive. With her attractions she could have won for herself almost any man who came within range.

   Her other long‑term lovers were all of them disasters. Pearless was a brutal uneducated man with whom she constantly fought. His only recommendation was on the physical side of the sexual relationship. Henry Fisher was quite another personality. Kind, gentle and loving, he was a lover who matched her own desires. But he was no business‑man, an unsuccessful provider, and liable to nervous illness and nervous breakdown. Her last consort, Robert O'Neil, was a man of no quality at all. Her ten years of married life with him in America compelled her to take on herself alone all the responsibility of the family, while he sponged on her and lived the life of a layabout drunkard. One of the features of Marianne's life which it is really difficult to account for, is that two men, Lionel and Robert, each of them wretched failures as men and as hus­bands, enjoyed her protection and support for so many years.

   Could it have been from a kind of maternal feeling? The maternal instinct was very strong in Marianne. But in the main it was awakened by babies and very young children. Throughout the middle phase of her life she was seeking for one child after another. Her own Ian was taken from her by her parents. Her John Emery died at four‑and‑a‑half months. She tried to fill the rest of her life with one adopted child or another: Adelaide, John, Astrid and Vincent. But she was not a good mother. John later told of temper and beatings, and having to take refuge with his "grandfather" in Lionelts bedroom. One after another each of these children was cut off and abandoned, until she succeeded in making a successful and lasting relationship with Vincent.

   The painful history of these children (except for the last) shows Marianne's character at its worst. She was capable of setting up the beginning of a family; but after a few years she grew bored, and impulsively pulled every­thing down. It was the same with her home‑making. From Borley on, she set up establishments of a kind at Worple Road, Wimbledon; Ancaster Road, Ipswich; Woodbnidge Road, Ipswich; Hill House, Chillesford; The Whin, Snape; Dairy Cottages, Rendlesham; Gippeswyk Road, Ipswich; Ranelagh Road, Ipswich; Deben Avenue, Martlesham. All of them were scrapped. Often enough she would main­tain two homes, just as she would maintain two identities, at the same time. When it had served her turn, the identity would be discarded, the home destroyed. The thirty‑five years of her middle life were spent in a feverish restlessness, of a type to suggest a biological (cyclothymic) disturbance. Her hormonal balance was seriously out of trim. It needed the menopause, which seemingly coincided with her arrival in America, to put her on the level.

   The long last post‑menopausal phase, equal in duration to the rest of her adult life, was, for a wonder, irreproachable. On arrival in America in 1946 she and Vincent settled with Robert's widowed mother, two aunts and a grand­father, in a small farm in the hills of Minnesota. Robert proved to be a neer­dowell who could never keep employment; and by 1949 Marianne had become the sole support of the family. She tolerated Robert's idle drunken ways for a number of years; but she finally got a divorce in April 1959. In November of that year she got her papers as an American citizen. She brought up Vincent to be a polite well‑mannered boy. There were no more extramarital affairs, although Robert indulged himself this way. She worked as a school teacher, a newspaper reporter, and finally a social worker. In this last capacity, when she was concerned with the welfare of old people, the quality of her work was outstanding. With two other ladies in La Crosse, Wisconsin, she organized the La Crosse Committee on Aging in 1963. In 1965 this received an aldermanic char­ter, and became "the only agency devoting full time service to the elderly and handicapped in all areas of their interest and need." In 1968 the Committee had its own building, and the project became officially state‑aided. Marianne's work received the highest praise in an official citation.

   In the third and last phase of her life Marianne still maintained some of the ways that marked her English phase. For a time she was still restless and moved from one home to another till she settled in La Crosse. She still liked to fabricate stories from time to time. They always went down well; but they were not used to secure her any material advantage. To be sure she gave some lectures on her exciting experiences in London during the bombing. They were much enjoyed by her audience; and they may perhaps have been rewarded by a lecture fee. But it is just as likely that she was willing to exercise her virtuosity for the enjoyment of it, and for free.