Final journey for father in tortuous quest for justice over nurse Helen Smith

The former policeman’s coffin was bedecked with red flowers and a hat yesterday as it was carried into Wakefield Crematorium, where his daughter’s funeral also took place 30 years after her death.

Floral tributes left by mourners included one which said: “To a dear brother” and another which read: “In loving memory of Uncle Ron.”

Mr Smith, 83, died earlier this month at St James’s Hospital, Leeds.

He leaves children Graham and Beverley, who live in the United States, and David, who lives in Wakefield.

Speaking before his father’s funeral, his 51-year-old son David, said his father deserved recognition for being the “little man” who won the right for an inquest into her death to be heard in the UK – which led to coroners being able ever since to investigate deaths abroad where the subject is returned to this country.

“He deserves recognition for standing up and getting the law changed. It was like the little man taking on not just the English law but the Saudi law as well,” he said.

He revealed that while sorting through his father’s belongings he had found details of two film offers Mr Smith had received to tell of his quest for truth.

He had turned them down but his son said it might now be time to tell of his father’s single-minded determination.

Mr Smith refused to bury Helen, a 23-year-old nurse, leaving her body at the morgue at Leeds General Hospital, as he tried to prove her death in a fall from a balcony was not accidental.

Her corpse earned a macabre place in the record books as being the longest period of time a body had been kept without burial or cremation in Britain.

Mr Smith accepted she had died at an illegal drinks party in the Muslim city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on May 20 1979, but was adamant that she had been pushed from a balcony.

A 15-day inquest was held at Leeds Town Hall in 1982 and recorded an open verdict.

Mr Smith, who had lived alone in Leeds, never got the public inquiry he wanted for what he insisted had been a national cover up.

He never accepted that Helen had fallen accidentally 60ft from a sixth-floor balcony and was disgusted at the suggestion that she might have had sex that night with a Dutch tugboat captain whose body was found close to hers, impaled on a spiked fence.

The living room of his Leeds flat had been converted into a study where he kept a dossier that summarised his life’s work and the evidence he had gathered.

In an interview given several days before his daughter’s funeral in 2009, he told how he had been spending more time in hospital on kidney dialysis than anywhere else.

Along with the oedema swellings and aches he said he was tired and struggling to concentrate.

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