BREAKING BARRIERS: Aviators Bill Lancaster and Jessie 'Chubbie' Miller, the wreckage of the upturned plane in the Sahara desert. Source: The Sunday Mail (Qld)
IT IS April 1933 and sheltering under the wing of an upturned biplane in the Sahara desert is the dashing pilot Bill Lancaster, once a hero celebrated throughout Queensland.
He and his girlfriend Jessie Miller had made a record-breaking flight from London to Brisbane in 1928 before shocking the world with a sex scandal and murder mystery that remains unsolved more than 80 years later.
Bill had been in the desert for eight days after his engine died and his airplane crashed into the Sahara sand.
Trying to stay alive under the wing, his lips had swollen grotesquely, his skin was cracked and peeling, and the blood from wounds suffered in the crash had become dried scabs all over his weathered, leathery face. With his shaking hand he scrawled into his log book his final words of love for his family and for his lover, the young married woman nicknamed "Chubbie", who was the catalyst for his cyclonic downfall.
Just a few months earlier, "Old Bill", as he called himself, had somehow escaped the electric chair in Miami when on trial for murdering a rival for Chubbie's heart. The case had seemed clear-cut.
"Sex was the motive," prosecutor Henry Jones told the hushed court. "The greater a man's love for a woman the greater his motive for killing a rival."
Bill walked free, though not for long. Out in the desert of Algeria, after eight days of torment, he waited to die. Bill scribbled to his loved ones: "I am waiting patiently. Goodbye my darlings."
It would be 30 years before a detachment of the French Foreign Legion stumbled upon Bill's mummified corpse and his letters to his lover, his wife and his children.
His words were photographed and returned to Chubbie but after she died childless in London in 1972, they were lost again.
Now Lancaster's relative, filmmaker Andrew Lancaster, 41, is scouring Australia for anyone who may know the whereabouts of these precious documents. He is putting the finishing touches to a documentary titled My Great Uncle. It's a tale of forbidden love, courage, romance, passion, loyalty, lust, bigamy and probably murder.
FLIGHT FASCINATION: Andrew Lancaster is making a documentary of his great uncle's incredible exploits.
"I have been fascinated by Bill's story all my life," Andrew says. "He was my grandfather's brother and since I can remember my family has told stories about my great uncle."
Chubbie Miller was born in Western Australia and, after Bill's death, married another pilot in London. She lived out her life as Mrs Jessie Pugh and Bill's diaries were locked in a bank safe. Andrew hopes someone in Queensland, a relative of Chubbie's, may be able to help retrieve them.
Andrew and producer Nonie Couell have interviewed Bill's relatives and aviation and legal experts about his daredevil life and the salacious sex trial that almost ended it.
It was 1927 when Bill and Chubbie met amid the raucous beat of that new American music they called jazz at a party in London.
With his marriage to Kiki Lancaster falling apart, Bill fell for the charms of the vibrant Chubbie, 26, who was married to the sports editor of a Melbourne newspaper but had left him for a life of excitement in London.
She found it in "Old Bill" - a 30-year-old, who'd been a jackaroo in NSW, a boxer, rodeo rider, infantryman in the Australian army and a captain in the Royal Air Force.
Bill and Chubbie had a lust for each other and for adventure. He had a dream to make the first flight from England to Australia in a light plane but had no cash to fund it. She agreed to bankroll him if she could come too, and be the first woman to make the journey.
They took off from London, farewelled by the press and movie newsreel cameramen.
Bill and Chubbie survived sandstorms, jungle crashes and the appearance of a venomous snake wriggling around the cockpit while 1500m above Burma.
Their journey was stalled in Singapore when their plane needed repairs and Bill's friend Bert Hinkler, the boy from Bundaberg, overtook them in the race to Australia. Eventually, they reached Queensland to enormous acclaim. Cheering crowds greeted Bill and Chubbie in Longreach, Charleville, Roma and Toowoomba before they landed at Eagle Farm on March 26, 1928.
Chubbie then became an international celebrity, racing across the US against the likes of Amelia Earhart.
But when the Depression hit the couple's fortunes nosedived. Bill's Catholic wife wouldn't grant him a divorce and, before long, Bill and Chubbie were living in a rented Miami bungalow surviving on chickens Bill would steal from their neighbours coop.
Bill suggested they try to make some money with a book about Chubbie's extraordinary life and in 1932 they hooked up with a handsome young ghostwriter named Haden Clarke, a drug addict and bigamist.
Bill joined forces with a couple of shady characters to form a new airline flying between Mexico and California and travelled out west to get the new company airborne. Before long he realised his partners were planning to import marijuana and illegal aliens from south of the border.
He headed back to Miami only to discover Haden Clarke had moved in with Chubbie and was planning to make her his third wife.
A huge argument ensued before Chubbie went to bed, leaving the men to sort it out.
At 3am she was woken by Bill banging on her bedroom door and shouting that "something awful" had happened. He said Haden had used Bill's revolver to shoot himself in the head. He'd even left two suicide notes.
Under police grilling Bill admitted he'd written the notes. He said he'd panicked after Haden shot himself, fearing he'd be blamed.
Bill went on trial for his life in the packed Dade County Courthouse. Reporters banged away on typewriters, catching every juicy detail of the case and runners would sprint with each page to the nearest telegraph office for transmission around the world.
Haden Clarke's body was exhumed and at one stage his blackened, decaying skull was held up for the jury to examine.
Old Bill was cool in a crisis though and somehow he managed to seduce the jury. His acquittal was greeted with wild cheers.
Bill and Chubbie returned to England and, in 1933, Bill set out to impress her by breaking the flying record from London to Cape Town in what would be his final, doomed flight.
Some people had suspected that it was Chubbie who killed Haden Clarke that night and Bill was so smitten he was willing to die for her in the electric chair.
He knew he'd pushed his luck once too often, though, when his plane started to sputter over the Sahara.
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