Murder of Yvonne Gilford

Yvonne Gilford was an Australian nurse who was murdered in the King Fahd Military Medical Complex, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia on 12 December 1996. Two British nurses, Deborah Parry and Lucille "Lucy" McLauchlan, were arrested for the crime. Parry confessed the murder and McLauchlan to being an accessory, though both subsequently claimed to have been coerced into signing the confession. Parry was sentenced to death by beheading, and McLauchlan to eight years' imprisonment and 500 lashes. Parry's sentence was reduced to life imprisonment after Gilford's elder brother Frank accepted a "blood money" payment of approximately £750,000, and both sentences were eventually commuted to time served after personal intervention from King Fahd.

Yvonne Gilford

Yvonne Gilford was born in 1941 and grew up on a farm in Jamestown, South Australia, along with her parents and brother Frank. She became a nurse at the age of 28 and initially worked in Auckland, New Zealand, before moving to London in 1973 and then Johannesburg, South Africa in 1976. After working in various hospitals in the city for the next twenty years, she accepted a new job in Dhahran in April 1996, and moved to Saudi Arabia with her ultimate aim being to earn enough money to retire from nursing and return to Australia. She initially found herself with few colleagues who spoke English, and quickly befriended Parry and McLauchlan after they arrived in Dhahran in August of that year.^[1] For Parry it was her second time working in the country, having previously worked there between 1993 and 1994, while it was McLauchlan's first time working abroad, having been dismissed from her previous job for credit card fraud. It subsequently emerged she had used fraudulent references to obtain the job in Dhahran.^[2]

Murder

Gilford was last seen alive on the evening of 11 December, when she, Parry and McLauchlan held an "early

Several days after their arrest, Parry eventually confessed to having been in a relationship with Gilford, and that she had attacked her (albeit without intent to kill) following an argument. McLauchlan agreed that her account of events was true, though by the time of the trial both had unsuccessfully attempted to withdraw the confession, claiming that they had been intimidated, deprived of sleep and subjected to threats of sexual violence in order to coerce them into signing it.^[3] Prior to the trial, the lawyers for the two nurses discovered similarities between Gilford's death and the 1994 murder of Liberty de Guzman, another nurse at the same complex, but that case was judged to not be relevant to the trial.^[4]

The actual trial was relatively swift, in large part due to the confession that the two nurses had signed. There was no

The case attracted much attention in the UK and Australia owing to the fact it would have been the first execution of a western woman by Saudi Arabia.[1] Other factors were the British media's reporting over the case and the political pressures that prompted Fahd to release the nurses.^[5] The case was mentioned in Desert Royal, a memoir of a Saudi princess written by Jean Sasson.^[11]

References