In 1986 a woman named Nerissa Bowes-Lyon died in a medical institution in Surrey, England, aged 66. She was buried in a grave marked only with a plastic tag and a serial number.
British tabloid newspaper The Sun investigated (Bowes-Lyon was the maiden name of the Queen Mother) and, in 1987, under the headline QUEEN’S COUSIN LOCKED IN MADHOUSE, the paper revealed that Nerissa and her sister, Katherine, who was still alive, were, in fact, the Queen Mother’s nieces.
The two women were the children of the Queen Mother’s brother, John Bowes-Lyon. The Sun reported that the royal family had hidden the girls away and that 24 years earlier their mother, Fenella, had claimed they were dead.
Burke’s Peerage, which publishes details of the British aristocracy, had indeed, since 1963,…
