Medical Detectives (12 page)

The private man with the lone instinct was made famous and turned into a public figure by popular acclaim after the Crippen trial. It was probably his elevation to the status of a public figure which so irked some of Spilsbury’s contemporaries and later detractors. But, in the 1920s and ’30s, the public wanted to indulge its courtroom heroes such as Curtis Bennett, Marshall Hall and others, because they added drama and character to otherwise sombre judicial proceedings.

Newspaper reporting of the great criminal trials was at its peak and, while most of those who stood accused of murder were portrayed as evil midgets, those who defended and prosecuted them were giants. Spilsbury, erect of stance, firm of jaw and sure of speech, was cast in a giant mould and ‘the coming man’ satisfied public demand. He made no claims to greatness or infallibility for himself and it was not in his nature to dwell on his reputation. His desire was to pursue his chosen craft for the public benefit without equivocation and to the very best of his ability. He was a man for his time, no more and no less.

EGYPT IN THE 1920
s was a place of political ferment. The British Government had ended its protectorate status in 1922 and announced that the country was an independent sovereign state with its own king. In practice, the British High Commissioner counselled the sovereign and every government minister had a British adviser. The country remained under martial law, which had been in force since 1914 against a background of civil unrest.

In January 1924, Said Pasha Zaghloul, the nationalist leader who had been exiled by the British, returned to the country and was elected Prime Minister. He beat a path to London for talks with the British Government about full independence but returned to Egypt empty-handed when the talks broke down. The atmosphere in Cairo was tense and the flashpoint came on 19 November 1924.

Soon after midday, Sir Lee Stack Pasha, the Sirdar, or Commander-in-Chief, of the Egyptian Army and Governor-General of the Sudan, left his office at the War Ministry to return home. He was driven through the busy streets of Cairo accompanied by his aide-de-camp, Captain Patrick Campbell. As the driver slowed the car to negotiate the traffic in the centre of the city, several gunmen appeared at the roadside and fired a number of shots at the occupants of the car.

Although wounded, the Sirdar’s driver accelerated to put his car beyond reach of the gunmen, and drove to the British Residency. Lord Allenby, Special High Commissioner for Egypt, was taking lunch with Herbert Asquith when their meal was interrupted by the news of the assassination attempt. Sir Lee Stack, mortally wounded, was carried into the drawing room and help was summoned. The Sirdar had been hit with several shots and he died the following day in the Anglo-American Hospital. The gunmen had made a clean getaway in a waiting car.

News of the assassination caused anger and consternation in London. The popular view was that the killing had been masterminded by Zaghloul and there were anxieties at the consequences for Egyptian claims for independence. In the middle of the crisis involving soldiers and diplomats there emerged the unlikely figure of Dr Sydney Smith. Since 1917 he had been in charge of the medico-legal section at the Parquet, a department of the Egyptian Ministry of Justice responsible for the investigation of crime.

Smith was well versed in the examination of firearms evidence, for his time in Egypt had coincided with the country’s period of unrest and there had been ample opportunity to study crimes of violence. He probably did not realise it at the time but he was about to become a pioneer in the field of forensic ballistics. A reconstruction of the crime was ordered and an examination made of all the spent cartridge cases found at the scene of the shooting and of the bullets retrieved from the victim’s bodies.

The nine cartridge cases were all of .32 automatic pistol ammunition and the marks on them indicated that they had been fired from three different weapons identified as a Mauser, a Browning and a Colt. Five of the bullets, including the one which had killed Sir Lee Stack, had been modified as dumdum ammunition by cutting a cross into their metal tips. The fatal bullet bore marks characteristic of having been fired from a Colt pistol with a well worn-barrel.

Because of the prevalence in Egypt of crimes committed with firearms, Dr Sydney Smith had adopted an experimental technique being developed in the USA. This involved combining the optical systems of two microscopes in order to compare two different specimens side-by-side in the same field of vision. Thus it became possible to examine and compare bullets and cartridge cases in minute detail.

When Smith examined the bullet which had killed the Sirdar, he saw a familiar mark on it. Between the normal rifling grooves scratched on the bullet as it spiralled its way out of the gun’s barrel was another wider groove which he had seen before. The bullet had been fired from a weapon with a defect in its muzzle which left its characteristic mark. What was significant about it was that he had seen exactly that same mark on bullets recovered from a number of previous murders. With characteristic boldness, he told the officers in charge of the investigation that he could identify the murder weapon.

Making full use of informers and acting on ‘information received’, police officers hunting the Sirdar’s assassins narrowed their search to a group of nationalists led by Shafik Mansour, a lawyer who had been arrested several times on suspicion of murder. Initial enquiries failed to produce any useful evidence so the police decided to use a spy. Two of the assassins were quickly identified as the Ennayat brothers whom it was thought would confess if they realised the inevitability of being convicted.

A ruse was devised based on Smith’s belief that if he could lay his hands on the brothers’ guns, he would be able to confirm them as the murder weapons. The brothers were therefore advised by the spy to make a run for it in the expectation that they would take their weapons with them. They reacted as expected and fell neatly into the trap laid for them. They were arrested on a train which they believed would carry them beyond the reach of the authorities. A basket of fruit in their possession was searched and four automatic pistols and a quantity of ammunition were found.

Two of the weapons were .25 calibre pistols and hence of no immediate interest to the murder investigation. But the remaining guns were both .32 calibre, one a Browning or Sûreté type and the other, a Colt. Smith took the two .32 pistols to his laboratory and in a tense atmosphere with the Chief of Police and Director of Public Security looking on, test-fired them into boxes containing cotton wool. This was a standard procedure to ensure that the only marks made on the bullets would be those left by the guns.

The test bullets and cartridge cases were put under the comparison microscope and viewed next to the bullets and casings taken from the scene of the Sirdar’s assassination. The results showed that the Sûreté pistol had been fired three times at the murder scene and the Colt was clearly identified as the murder weapon on account of the flaw in its barrel which left the characteristic mark on bullets if fired. With some excitement, Sydney Smith wrote later, ‘I was able to say with absolute certainty that this pistol, and no other, had fired the bullet that killed the Sirdar.’

Faced with the certainty of conviction, the Ennayat brothers confessed and implicated others in the assassination incident. In the mopping-up operation which followed, police arrested six others, including the gang leader, Shafik Mansour, and located the workshop containing the tools used to convert the bullets into ‘dum-dum’ ammunition.

The trial of the eight men accused of conspiring to kill Sir Lee Stack was held in May 1925. Dr Sydney Smith gave evidence for the prosecution. Asked if any of the pistols featuring as exhibits had been used in the shooting, he picked up the Colt and held it above his head; in his other hand, he held a jeweller’s lens. Referring to the defect in its barrel which left a tell-tale mark on bullets fired from it, he said, ‘I declare definitely that they (the murder bullets) were both fired from this Colt.’ The eight assassins were found guilty and sentenced to death. Seven were hanged and one had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

The outcome was a triumph for Smith and his application of a little-known scientific procedure. The doctor with his jeweller’s lens became a much-admired figure and, like Sir Bernard Spilsbury, made a signal contribution to the development of forensic medicine. Smith was a pragmatist. When his former tutor, Professor Harvey Littlejohn, visited him in Cairo, a batch of Marsh Test apparatus sets for identifying arsenic became a subject for discussion. ‘Why do you need so many?’ asked Littlejohn. ‘Homicides,’ replied Smith with disarming simplicity. He applied the same criterion to the need to cope with crimes involving firearms – find a technique that works and use it.

The contrast between Sydney Smith’s birthplace in New Zealand and that of Spilsbury in England could hardly have been greater. The distance separating Roxburgh, Otago from Leamington, Warwickshire is considerable but the social and environmental gulf in the last century was enormous. Smith’s father was a road builder in an underdeveloped region inhabited by goldminers and sheep farmers, whereas Spilsbury senior was a professional man in a prosperous town. Despite the differences, there was one common thread – both families had a love of learning and culture.

Smith was born in Roxburgh in August 1883 and, as a schoolboy, came under the spell of a perceptive village schoolmaster. Stimulated at school and encouraged by his parents, young Smith decided he wanted to see the world and believed that the best way of achieving his ambition was to become a doctor.

He began his scientific education in unfashionable Roxburgh by working as apprentice to the local pharmacist. This provided a useful stepping stone to the position of chemist’s assistant in Dunedin and opened the door to formal tuition and the chance to gain some qualifications. At the age of twenty-three, Smith qualified as a pharmacist and started to earn a modest salary. He at once began to study for entrance to the University of New Zealand and, in due course, enrolled as a part-time student at Victoria College, Wellington.

He combined his studies with his job of dispensing pharmacist at Wellington Hospital and thus could claim a toe-hold in the world of medicine. The aspiring doctor achieved good results and in 1908 he decided that Edinburgh was the place to learn his chosen profession. Using money saved from his earnings as a pharmacist, he made the first of many long journeys from the Antipodes to Scotland. There he secured a scholarship worth £100 for three years and settled down to study at one of the world’s great centres of medical learning. He cherished his early experiences of Edinburgh and, years later, the student was destined to return as master.

Sydney Smith qualified as a newly fledged medical practitioner in 1912. He gained a first class degree and also won a research scholarship. The young man about to make his mark on the world thought it prudent to share his life and he married soon after graduating. Kitty would be his ‘good companion for half a century’ as he described her in his memoirs.

He embarked on a career in forensic medicine almost by accident. He worked in general practice for a month as a
locum tenens
in Fife, but concluded from the experience that he was not cut out to be a GP. Ophthalmology was the subject he chose for his research scholarship and he had just started at the Eye Department of Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary when he was interviewed by the Dean of the Faculty, Professor Harvey Littlejohn.

Littlejohn was also Professor of Forensic Medicine in the university and had succeeded his father Henry in the Chair. He was part of the rich Scottish tradition of forensic medicine, being to Edinburgh what the Glaisters, father and son, were to Glasgow. Littlejohn saw potential in the young New Zealander and talked him into becoming an assistant in his department at a salary of £50 a year. Thus began Sydney Smith’s journey into forensic medicine, a branch of learning that Scotland had put on the map in 1807 by establishing the first professional Chair of its kind in the English-speaking world.

Edinburgh is the true home of the forensic arts in Britain, for, in addition to the city’s pioneering lead in the teaching of forensic medicine, it was also the spiritual home of Sherlock Holmes. The great fictional detective, famed for his investigative genius, was the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who, as a young man, had studied medicine at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. One of his tutors was a distinguished surgeon, Joseph Bell, a doctor with an enviable reputation for his diagnostic skills. He was also renowned for his powers of observation which he used to study his patients’ appearance and thereby deduce the nature of their occupation and character.

Bell urged his students to use all their faculties before coming to a decision about anything. It was admirable advice for a young man in any profession but for a doctor it was particularly significant. Merely by observing one of his patients and without questioning or examining him, Bell informed a group of students that the man was left-handed and a shoe-repairer by trade. Explaining himself to both patient and students, Bell remarked that the worn patches on the trousers were caused by gripping a lap stone between the knees and the fact that the right side was more worn than the other indicated that the cobbler wielded the hammer in his left hand. Conan Doyle recognised this perceptive gift and moulded it into the character of Sherlock Holmes with the telling force that emerged with his stories.