Elaine Mason pushed her husband’s wheelchair through Cambridge on Valentine’s Day in 2004, a red balloon shaped like a heart tied to the frame, printed with the words “I love you.” A few miles away, Cambridgeshire police had an open file on her, built from months of trying to work out how Stephen Hawking kept getting hurt.
Elaine had been part of Hawking’s life since the middle of the 1980s, first as one of his nurses, then, from 1995, as his wife.
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Before 1995
She joined Hawking’s care team not long after a tracheotomy took away his ability to speak without a voice synthesizer. At the time she was married to a computer engineer named David Mason, who had helped build the machine that gave Hawking his voice, fitting it to the arm of his wheelchair so it could travel with him. She and David Mason had two sons together.
Her marriage certificate later listed her as Elaine S. Mason. According to a 2004 Vanity Fair investigation into the marriage, the S stood for Sybil, and she had been born Elaine Sybil Lawson in Hereford, the daughter of a clergyman. Before she trained as a nurse and married David Mason, she spent four years working at an orphanage in Bangladesh.
Hawking left his first wife, Jane, in 1990, after twenty-five years of marriage. By 1993, two years before he would marry Elaine, his daughter Lucy, then 22, was visiting a house in Pasadena, California, where Hawking was staying with Elaine while he taught at Caltech. Vanity Fair later reported that Lucy woke one night to the sound of Elaine shouting at her father to throw her out of the house, then heard someone at her door and saw the handle turning. She climbed out through a ground floor window and spent the next ninety minutes outside, jogging around the neighborhood rather than risk staying in the house.
His divorce from Jane was finalized in 1995, and he married Elaine that September in a civil ceremony in Cambridge. A contemporary wire photograph dates the wedding to September 15. His daughter Lucy and son Timothy did not attend. Two years later, Jane married Jonathan Hellyer Jones, a church choir organist she had grown close to while he helped her care for Stephen during her marriage to him.
1999 to 2004
In November 1999, Lucy got a seven a.m. phone call on her own birthday. A nurse was telling her that her father’s wrist had been broken. Lucy went to David Crighton, the head of Cambridge’s physics department, where Hawking worked, and together they tried to persuade Hawking to protect himself. He refused.
Around 2000, with Hawking still unwilling to file a complaint about the wrist or anything else, Cambridgeshire police opened their first investigation into his injuries anyway. He was angry enough about it, according to Vanity Fair, that he threatened to sue the police for harassment. At the time, only Hawking himself could file a formal complaint against a member of his own household, and since he would not, the case closed without going anywhere.
More injuries were reported after that:
- In January 2001, contemporary news coverage cited by Vanity Fair described a broken arm and a split lip.
- In January 2002, at celebrations for his sixtieth birthday, he broke his femur after his wheelchair crashed into a wall, an accident Hawking joked about himself, saying only that “the wall won.”
- In August 2003, a nurse reported that he had been left outside on the hottest day of the year and suffered heatstroke and sunburn.
That August report is what finally pushed Lucy to go to the police herself. By February 2004, with Hawking hospitalized for pneumonia, Cambridgeshire police opened a second, more formal investigation. Detectives eventually interviewed twelve people, including Stephen and Elaine themselves. Elaine came in voluntarily, with a lawyer beside her, for under an hour.
One of Hawking’s former assistants, Sue Masey, told Vanity Fair she had quit her job because she could not stand what she believed she was witnessing. She said the injuries she heard about always happened when Hawking and Elaine were alone together, and she called Elaine “a monster.”
Hawking never agreed with her. In a statement issued through Cambridge University, he said:
“I firmly and wholeheartedly reject the allegations that I have been assaulted… My wife and I love each other very much, and it is only because of her that I am alive today.”
Around a decade before any of this became public, Masey had started keeping a red notebook, logging what she called perceived incidents of abuse, because, as she put it, nurses tend to be bad at protecting themselves with paperwork. It was tucked away under lock and key at the physics department, the same building where Crighton had tried to help Lucy in 1999. Crighton died the following year, and the notebook remained there for years afterward.
The investigation closed on March 29, 2004. Detective Superintendent Michael Campbell called it thorough and said police could find no evidence that anyone had committed a crime against Hawking. He thanked Stephen and Elaine for their full cooperation, the same two people whose lawyer had, weeks earlier, sent nurses letters reminding them of their confidentiality agreements and warning them against speaking to the press.
Police did not hand the notebook back. One nurse said officers called each of them afterward to say they were not throwing anything away, and told her not to give up on it. Jane got a similar call. Neil McKendrick, the master of Hawking’s own Cambridge college, later said part of the reluctance around Cambridge to look closely at any of it came down to what he called “the beautiful myth,” the idea of a man who could not move but who seemed to have everything else, money, fame, a family, and that no one wanted to be the one to puncture it.
After the divorce
Stephen and Elaine were still appearing together in public as late as October 2005, at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Their divorce came through in 2006, after eleven years of marriage, and was cited simply as a breakdown of the relationship.
Hawking and Jane grew close again in the years that followed. She later wrote that they were able to spend time together freely again, and that it felt “quite like old times.” In December 2014, they appeared together at the London premiere of The Theory of Everything, a film based on her memoir about their marriage.
Hawking died on March 14, 2018. Elaine Mason attended his funeral at Cambridge’s Great St Mary’s Church, among about 500 mourners, and told a reporter there that Stephen “was the love of my life and still is.”
No death has ever been publicly recorded for her since. The last confirmed word of her whereabouts is from 2021, when she turned down a request to take part in a television documentary about the Hawking children.
