Medical Detectives (17 page)

The prosecution case took six days and, with help from Smith who passed him notes on the forensic aspects of the evidence, Birkett began to demolish its credibility. Concerning the exhumation of the bodies at Lewannick, he suggested that in an area distinguished for the mineral content of its soil, arsenic could readily have contaminated the exhumed corpse and open specimen jars from dust in the churchyard. ‘Am I right in saying,’ he asked the doctor who carried out the post-mortem, ‘that a piece of soil, so small that you could hold it between your fingers, and dropped on to the body would make every single calculation wrong?’

‘Yes,’ came the answer.

Later in the proceedings, sixty-year-old Herbert du Parcq, leading counsel for the Crown, collapsed and was taken from the courtroom. The way the trial had been proceeding, this might have been seen by some superstitious members of a Cornish jury as a warning from the Almighty not to convict an innocent woman. Certainly Mr Justice Roche was at pains to point out that Mr du Parcq’s indisposition was not something of which a mystery should be made.

In any event, Birkett had taken a firm hold on the trial and he dealt severely with Dr Roche Lynch when he said he had never attended one living patient suffering from arsenical poisoning, ‘yet he speaks of symptoms with the same confidence that he spoke on other matters.’

‘Let the cobbler stick to his last …’ was his stinging rebuttal.

Having weakened the prosecution case regarding the arsenical poisoning of Annie Hearn’s sister, Birkett turned his attention to the poisoning of Mrs Thomas. The vehicle for administering the poison was alleged to be the salmon in the sandwiches made by Annie and the poison was supposed to be weedkiller which she had bought four years previously.

Smith had done his homework on this aspect of the case knowing that the Arsenic Act of 1851 required arsenical preparations to be coloured with indigo, he had little doubt that when powdered arsenic was sprinkled onto a sandwich, the filling would become discoloured. Roche Lynch had estimated that about 14.3 grains of weedkiller would have been used and the implication was that Annie Hearn added the poison to the sandwiches a few hours before they were eaten. To be absolutely sure of his ground, Smith carried out an experiment with tinned salmon and weedkiller. Within half an hour, his sandwiches thus prepared were stained a bluish-purple.

Armed with this information, Birkett was able to test Roche Lynch in cross-examination. ‘If you put fourteen grains (of arsenic) in a moist sandwich and carried it for hours,’ he asked, ‘is it not inevitable that the sandwich would be discoloured and blue?’

‘I have not tried it,’ answered Roche Lynch, adding rather unwisely, ‘but my opinion, for what it is worth, is that it would not.’ Birkett could easily have demolished the witness but he chose not to, believing, correctly, that he was winning his case in any event.

When he discussed the content of his closing speech with Sydney Smith, Birkett acknowledged the religious nature of the Cornish people. He said he would illustrate the paradox of the loving care which Annie Hearn gave to her sister with the contention that she was also poisoning her, by quoting from The New Testament. The gospel according to St John contains the passage, ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.’ Birkett changed his mind when he heard that the jury on its last night together, which happened to be a Sunday, was offered the choice of attending church or going for a drive and elected for the latter. ‘Ah! There go my Father’s Mansions,’ he remarked to Smith.

In a powerful closing address, he asked the jury, by its verdict, to send Annie Hearn ‘back into the sunlight away from the shadows which have haunted her for so long’. They did just that by bringing in a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict. Three weeks after she was acquitted, Annie Hearn wrote to Sydney Smith thanking him for putting aside important engagements ‘to come to Bodmin and help to save a life, my life.’ Annie Hearn disappeared into obscurity but, despite her acquittal, local gossip persisted in believing that she was discharged, less on account of her innocence than because of Herbert du Parcq’s collapse and Norman Birkett’s masterly defence of which Sydney Smith was the chief architect.

Controversy seemed to surround many of the cases with which Smith became involved. Hard on the heels of the Hearn trial came a death by strangling which brought him and Spilsbury together again, not in confrontation as in the Fox trial, but both arguing in the defence of a man charged with murder. As Smith put it, ‘It was the first time we had been colleagues in a case – and it was also the last.’

Peter Queen was a thirty-one-year-old clerk who worked in his father’s bookmaker’s business in Glasgow. In the early hours of Saturday, 21 November 1931, he walked into one of the city’s police stations; he placed two house keys on the desk and said, ‘Go to 539 Dumbarton Road, I think you will find my wife dead.’ Two constables were despatched to the address given. In the bedroom of Queen’s two-room apartment, they found the pyjama-clad body of a woman lying on the bed with a piece of cord tied around her neck.

Chrissie Gall, aged twenty-eight, was not Queen’s wife but she had been living with him for several months. She lay with the bedclothes pulled up over her chest, her left arm was outside the blankets and her right arm was underneath. One of the policemen loosened the rope around her neck which had been pulled tight in a half-knot. There were no signs of a struggle having taken place; everything about the room, and particularly the bed, was neat and tidy. There was no doubting that Chrissie Gall had been strangled and Peter Queen was charged with her murder.

Strangulation was confirmed as the cause of death by the pathologist carrying out the post-mortem who discovered the usual signs of asphyxia in the internal organs. The ligature around the dead woman’s neck had been pulled sufficiently tight to create a groove in her flesh and the cricoid cartilage in her throat was broken. Not surprisingly, this led to the conclusion that her death was homicidal.

Chrissie Gall’s personal history was highly relevant in this case. She had only ever worked ‘in service’ and had developed a weakness for drinking. When she met Peter Queen, he tried to wean her away from alcohol; at the time, he was separated from his wife, who was being treated for chronic alcoholism. The couple moved in together in December 1930 and, with the aid of friends, Queen sought to combat her drunkenness. She was subject to bouts of depression and, in the presence of friends, had threatened to commit suicide by drowning herself; ‘making a hole in the Clyde’, as she termed it. On another occasion she attempted to gas herself and spoke also of hanging herself or of taking an overdose.

During the two days prior to her death, Chrissie was in a state of almost continuous inebriation. She spent the final day of her life in bed, sleeping and being cared for by friends who tried to persuade her to eat and drink something non-alcoholic. She was awake when the friends left at about 10.45 but a little over four hours later Queen reported that she was dead.

Smith and Spilsbury examined the bedroom at Dumbarton Road and together considered their stance on the likely cause of death. The natural position of the body with upper denture still in place, the undisturbed bedclothes and tidiness of the room all indicated a lack of struggle and went against murder. The physical signs on the body lacked the telling force of murderous strangulation. There was no bruising in the deeper structures of the neck which indicated that only a small degree of force had been used. This was consistent with the half-knot which had been used to pull the ligature tight around the neck. Stranglers usually employ considerable force, first to overcome the struggles of their victim and then, when a ligature is involved, to prevent the knot slipping.

Spilsbury concluded, ‘It was a suicide.’ Smith agreed. ‘Certainly there isn’t much to suggest murder,’ he said, adding, ‘I have never seen a case of homicide by strangulation in an adult in which there were so few signs.’ He was still concerned though over the half-knot and he wondered if it would have kept tight enough to cause asphyxia after Chrissie Gall had lost consciousness and released her grip on the ends of the cord. Spilsbury partially satisfied him on this point after examining the cord, part of a clothesline, under a microscope. It could be seen that the fibres were roughened at the point where the ends of the cord crossed over and bit into one another.

The trial of Peter Queen was held in Glasgow on 5 January 1932 and lasted five days. There were a number of unsatisfactory aspects of the prosecution’s case. It was alleged that Queen’s declaration to the police, ‘I think I have killed her’, was as good as a confession. It was due to close questioning by the Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Alness, that it emerged the police had not made a written record of Queen’s remarks. The accused man, when he reported Chrissie’s death, claimed he had said, ‘Don’t think I have killed her’. There was an obvious world of difference between the two versions. Furthermore, the doctors who had carried out the post-mortem neglected to carry out an analysis of either the blood or the stomach contents. This was particularly unfortunate as the murder allegation rested on the assumption that the victim had been too drunk to resist. In the absence of proof of alcohol in the dead woman’s system this remained at best an assumption.

The experts for the prosecution, including Dr Andrew Allison, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Glasgow, contended that the appearance of the body did not indicate suicide. Against this view was the weight of Spilsbury’s evidence, supported by Sydney Smith, that self-strangulation was entirely consistent with the circumstances of the woman’s death. Although Smith tended towards the suicide explanation, he was not entirely convinced. The case was very much on the borderline but not for Spilsbury, whose lack of hesitation in giving his opinions ‘took my breath away’, said Smith later. In the event, the jury rejected the Scottish formula for dealing with borderline cases – the Not Proven verdict – and found Peter Queen guilty. As Smith recorded in due course in his memoirs, ‘… in the only case where Spilsbury and I were in pretty complete agreement, the jury believed neither of us.’

Although sentenced to death, Queen was reprieved following an impressive public petition raised on his behalf by the citizens of Glasgow. He worked in his former occupation of bookmaker’s clerk when he was released from prison until he died in 1958. Smith believed there was insufficient evidence to justify Queen’s conviction and admitted that suicide by strangulation was not a common phenomenon although there were a number of recorded incidents. Indeed he came across another case of self-strangulation a short while after Queen’s conviction. The victim was a forty-five-year-old spinster who suffered from depression. She died by a combination of smothering and strangulation; a handkerchief was found inside her mouth blocking the air passages and a scarf had been tied tightly around her throat. Like Chrissie Gall, she had threatened suicide when friends were present and the scene of her death was marked by a similar lack of disturbance. The advent of the nylon stocking and of materials with high elasticity have made self-strangulation more feasible. A pre-knotted ligature can be stretched over the head and, once around the neck, the material contracts to its original shape, thereby exerting a powerful constriction effect.

Smith’s next encounter with Spilsbury was less congenial. The two pathologists appeared on opposite sides of the fence in a controversial case involving the reputation of a fellow doctor. Abortion was not a subject discussed in polite society in the 1930s and any doctor accused of carrying out a criminal abortion faced a very serious charge indeed. In October 1933, Dr Avarne, a member of the surgical staff of the General Hospital at St Helier in Jersey, travelled to Edinburgh to consult Smith on a professional matter – he had been charged with carrying out a criminal abortion and was due to face trial the next month.

The circumstances involved Dr Avarne’s friendship with a hotel proprietor in Jersey who asked him to advise on the delicate matter of his young mistress’s pregnancy. The twenty-eight-year-old woman had been pregnant in 1926 when the putative father gave her money to have the baby in England. When she told him in May 1933 that she was pregnant again, he denied responsibility but suggested she see Dr Avarne who was a personal friend.