Mystery Shrouds Millionaire’s Disappearance : Enigma: Cam Lyman looked and acted like a man. To some, she vanished as a cover for a sex change. But her sisters think she’s dead.

They had words, an angry exchange about their mutual passion--Clumber spaniels.

And then, George O’Neil said, his friend Cam Lyman disappeared.

Now, the two sisters of the eccentric multimillionaire dog breeder have taken steps to have Lyman declared dead, but O’Neil thinks his friend may have slipped off that summer day in 1987 to have a sex-change operation.

“She’d been talking about it for years,” O’Neil said Wednesday from his home in North Kingstown, R.I. With her close-cropped hair, her mustache and her habit of dressing in men’s clothes, Lyman “looked better as a guy than as a woman” anyway, O’Neil said.

The family of the woman--who had her name legally shortened from Camilla--believes she was kidnaped and murdered, said the lawyer for Lyman’s sisters. Barry Mills of Ellsworth, Me., said a worldwide search had produced no trace of the missing millionaire.

Mills also said he is disgusted with the prurient interest the case has generated. In the week after Christmas, he complained, the case has been the buzz of New England.

“When I think of the (cases) that we have handled, where people have been injured or killed, and nobody gives a damn, it just makes me sick,” Mills said. “Then someone says ‘sex change’ and everyone gets excited. It’s ridiculous.”

Even so, Mills confirmed that Mary Margaret Goodale of Maine and Edith Kuhn of Northern California have petitioned the court to have their sister declared dead in Rhode Island, where she maintained a 40-acre estate, and where she raised and cared for 58 show-quality Clumber spaniels and Field spaniels.

Lyman’s $2.1-million estate also includes an attache case filled with jewels that never left her side, even while she slept, O’Neil said. The case vanished with Lyman, who would now be in her late 50s, as did cash she kept squirreled around her house. Some of Lyman’s clothing also is missing, leading O’Neil to refute the notion that his friend was abducted. People who are being kidnaped, O’Neil dryly noted, normally do not “bring a change of clothes.”

But O’Neil’s attorney, Rosemary Healey of Providence, R.I., said that in his heart, even her client suspects Lyman died soon after her disappearance. Too much time has elapsed without contact or activity in Lyman’s bank account or credit cards, Healey pointed out. Well-known investigators have been unable to solve the mystery, she added.

“Maybe George hates to think of her as dead,” Healey said, and would like to think that Lyman went off for “that other purpose”--meaning the sex-change procedure.

But “in all likelihood, given the fact that there is no paper trail,” Lyman is probably dead, she said.

While holding out the possibility that Lyman may have left home voluntarily, only to have met some untoward fate thereafter, Healey said the fact that she left her dogs behind--particularly her champion Clumber spaniel, Raycroft Sheriff--makes her death a virtual certainty.

“Even if you don’t care much about money, you don’t leave your dogs behind,” Healey said.

In her will, the six-foot woman left most of her assets to the Dog Museum of St. Louis. Lyman also stipulated that O’Neil charter an airplane and sprinkle her ashes over New York’s Madison Square Garden during the annual Westminster Dog Show there.

“That was her desire, yes,” Healey said. “Unfortunately (without a body), it has not been able to be carried out.”

Lawyers for all parties said disposition of Lyman’s assets is not at issue. Rather, family members and friends, such as O’Neil and other members of the dog-show community, are eager “to put an end to the uncertainty and accept the fact of her death,” Healey said.

Rhode Island law holds that a person missing for more than four years may be declared dead. The state’s probate court is expected to make a decision in the Lyman case early in 1995.

In the meantime, Mills said, other events will no doubt sweep this case out of the limelight.

“The O.J. trial starts next week,” he said. “Maybe people will start focusing on that.”