Medical Detectives (20 page)

Apart from the grim nature of the discovery which eventually amounted to seventy pieces of two dismembered bodies, the case was significant for a number of other reasons. The perpetrator of these two murders and subsequent disposal by dissection was a doctor and the investigation which followed was distinguished by some remarkable forensic innovation. Sydney Smith and his department played a major role in this but chief credit went to John Glaister. The full story is therefore told in the next chapter which is devoted to Glaister’s life and work. Suffice it to say here that Smith played a characteristically unselfish role from the moment he arrived back in Edinburgh on 7 November. He was consulted by the Chief Constables of Edinburgh and Lancaster to assist in identifying the remains. One of his university colleagues, Professor James Brash, Regius Professor of Anatomy, was already helping the police working alongside Glaister.

The trial of Dr Buck Ruxton took place at Manchester in March 1936. Sydney Smith was the last witness to give evidence and he was cross-examined by Norman Birkett who had so impressed him at the trial of Annie Hearn. Birkett was defending Ruxton and had been advised on the medical evidence by Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Smith made it clear that the two bodies had been dismembered after death by means of disarticulation at the joints, ‘carried out in a sufficiently expert manner to show that the operator was quite familiar with human anatomy’.

The murderous Indian doctor from Lancaster was found guilty of killing his wife and maid and he went to the gallows on 12 May 1936. A curious footnote to this case was provided by the discovery among the scattered remains of Ruxton’s victims of a Cyclopean eye. This is an unusual phenomenon in which the eyes of a malformed animal, usually a sheep or pig, fuse into one. Even more rarely, this malformation can occur in a human being. The condition takes its name from the one-eyed monster described by Homer in his
Odyssey
and named the Cyclops. In the Greek story, the monstrous Cyclops was blinded when Odysseus destroyed his single eye.

The Cyclopean eye which featured in the Ruxton case was of animal origin and had evidently been fixed at one time in preserving fluid. Smith’s explanation was that Ruxton, who had an interest in ophthalmology, probably kept the eye as a preserved specimen. A possible explanation for the eye being found with the remains of his victims was that he emptied a jar of preservative over them and inadvertently tipped out the Cyclopean eye. Smith, in his memoirs, drew attention to a literary reference to the Cyclops made by Thomas de Quincey the essayist, in a piece entitled
A Vision of Sudden Death
, published in 1849. ‘But what was Cyclops doing here?’ he wrote. ‘Had the medical man recommended northern air, or how?’ He recollected, from such explanations as he volunteered, that he had an interest at stake in some suit-at-law pending in Lancaster; so that probably he had got himself transferred to this station for the purpose of connecting with his professional pursuits an instant readiness for the calls of the lawsuit’. This story, published in
Blackwood’s Magazine
under the title
The English Mail Coach
was thick with coincidence, particularly bearing in mind Ruxton’s residence at Lancaster.

Sydney Smith was at the peak of his career and had attained international status in the late 1930s when he was appointed as adviser to the World Health Organisation. He visited Ceylon in his advisory role to review the country’s medico-legal services and to recommend improvements. It was a project in which he had something of a vested interest for the Professor of Forensic Medicine at Colombo University, Dr G.S.W. de Saram, was a former student. Not surprisingly, while in Ceylon, the visiting expert was prevailed upon to give his opinion of a controversial murder case going through the courts at the time.

As the decade drew to a close, so the Second World War loomed in the shadows. At the age of fifty-seven and with his particular talents, Smith was of greatest use for the war effort as a back-room boy. He spent the next five years investigating the ballistic characteristics of military ordnance and working for the War Office as a consultant in medico-legal matters. One of the factors he looked at was the penetrative power of various types of ammunition, finding, for example, that American cartridges produced more powerful effects than those manufactured in Britain. The chemical composition of the different propellants accounted for this discrepancy but the British manufacturers were not keen to give up their use of cordite.

The behaviour of high-velocity bullets was very much part of Smith’s stock-in-trade and the war years allowed him to extend his already considerable knowledge of the subject. The home front produced its own casualties and, tragically, not always due to enemy action. One night in July 1940, a Royal Air Force Sergeant challenged a car being driven late at night in Edinburgh after an air-raid warning had sounded. The car, which did not stop, was being driven to police headquarters in the city and one of the passengers was the Assistant Chief Constable. The Sergeant fired at the car as it sped by and a .303 bullet passed through the celluloid rear-window, striking the Assistant Chief Constable in the face. The unfortunate officer died three days later and the RAF Sergeant was charged with assault and culpable homicide.

Although it was thought that only one shot had been fired, an examination of the car revealed a number of holes in the vehicle, including two in the windscreen, and there were dents in the metalwork. Consequently, it appeared as if at least two, and possibly more, shots had been fired. Smith carried out the post-mortem on the policeman and was able to reconstruct the course of the single deadly bullet which severely wounded him and caused his death. The bullet, a .303 aluminium-tipped projectile with a cupro-nickel jacket, struck the man on the right side of the jaw, completely shattering the bone and disintegrating as a result of the impact. Fragments of the bullet punched holes in the windscreen and the aluminium tip struck the metal frame and ricocheted to the back of the car where it was found on the rear seat.

Lord Aitchison, presiding judge at the High Court of Justiciary, ruled that although subject to military discipline, the RAF marksman was still within the law of the land. It appeared that he was legitimately armed in the post-Dunkirk period, with invasion fears running high when servicemen on leave took loaded weapons home. The Sergeant was on leave and had spent several hours that evening carousing with friends. When the air-raid siren sounded at about midnight, he took it on himself to act as a roadside sentry. Before the police car appeared, he challenged and threatened a car driven by an Auxiliary Fire Service officer. Then came the shooting tragedy. Despite his protestations that he was entitled to fire on vehicles not answering his challenge during an air raid, the RAF Sergeant was found guilty. He received a rather lenient sentence of six months’ imprisonment.

In another tragedy on the home front, Smith was called in to examine a Home Guardsman shot dead during an exercise ostensibly involving blank ammunition. The exercise was staged near Edinburgh in the summer of 1942 and involved both regular troops and the Home Guard. The mock battle was stopped as soon as it was realised that one of the participants had been badly wounded. The man had been hit with a high-velocity .303 bullet which disintegrated on impact, creating injuries from which he later died.

Eyewitness accounts of the way the soldier reacted when struck by the bullet enabled Smith to determine the direction of the shot. Assisted by detectives from Edinburgh CID, he found an empty cartridge case that had fired a live round, among a number of blanks in an area occupied by a force of twenty-six soldiers representing an attacking group during the exercise. The rifles used by this group were collected by the police and test shots fired from each weapon.

Sydney Smith, a pioneering forensic ballistics expert, was in his element. He was able very quickly to identify the rifle which had fired the fatal shot by distinctive marks made on the cartridge case by the firing pin. The man responsible for this weapon had decided to make the military exercise more realistic by firing the occasional live round of ammunition. Following psychiatric examination he was found to have acted under a sense of diminished responsibility.

After the cessation of hostilities, Smith took part in a commission to assess the medical aspects of German war crimes. He and his colleagues, meeting in Frankfurt in 1946, heard a great deal of evidence about medical experiments carried out in the Nazi concentration camps. Every conceivable type of experiment was conducted, ranging from the pseudo-scientific to the merely sadistic. What struck the Allied doctors was that given access to unlimited human guinea pigs and with no ethical constraints, the experimenters worked without objectives or proper methods. ‘The experiments,’ wrote Smith, ‘were not merely carried out with gross indifference to the value of human life and callous disregard to human suffering, but were incompetent in both conception and execution from a purely scientific point of view.’

In December of the following year, the world of forensic medicine mourned the loss of Sir Bernard Spilsbury. The circumstances of his suicide were tragic but a hint of rancour came through in Sydney Smith’s appraisal of the man; after all, they had endured several bitter clashes. He referred to his rival’s death as, ‘the inquest on his last case of suicide – and there was no room for doubt this time – he was the deceased.’ Although he sincerely mourned his colleague, Smith felt there was really no place for the stubbornness of opinion that was Spilsbury’s hallmark. ‘One might almost hope that there will never be another Bernard Spilsbury,’ he wrote in his autobiography. If it was a wish, it was one which came true, for the up-and-coming medical detectives were men of a different breed and there was not to be another Spilsbury among them.

Smith himself reached the pinnacle of his career in 1949 when he was knighted for his services to forensic medicine and, as the 1950s dawned, he was planning for retirement. His opposite number in the Chair of Forensic Medicine at Glasgow University, John Glaister, was well established and building his own considerable reputation. The two men had worked together on a number of cases and, in 1931, collaborated in the writing of a book on
Recent Advances in Forensic Medicine
. It was typical of Smith’s attitude to break away from Spilsbury’s tendency towards isolationism and to use his knowledge to help others.

In London, Spilsbury’s old territory, Francis Camps and Keith Simpson were making their mark. Simpson had published his textbook,
Forensic Medicine
, in 1947, as if to put up a marker in the year of Spilsbury’s death. Although this book seriously challenged Smith’s own contribution to learning on the subject, he was generous in his acknowledgement of the newcomer. Indeed, in due course, Smith handed on to Simpson the editorship of
Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence
, which he had managed so masterfully for thirty years. Simpson would say of The Patriarch in due course, ‘He was like a second father to me as I grew up in the field of forensic medicine.’

It was part of Smith’s natural gifts as a teacher to encourage the next generation of forensic practitioners and he did so with characteristic generosity. In return, they sought to honour him by seeking his advice in their new enterprises. In the late 1940s, Simpson and Camps led a small group which proposed to establish a British Association in Forensic Medicine. Their idea was to provide a forum wherein forensic specialists could exchange experiences and learn from each other. As Simpson described it in his autobiography, they met at the ‘Bon Accord’ restaurant in Soho and invited ‘the only man who at that time stood head and shoulders above everyone in both academic stature and experience’ to be the first President of the Association. Sir Sydney Smith accepted graciously: the era of the lone expert, personified by the late Bernard Spilsbury, was ended.

Meanwhile, Smith began a trend which his successors would follow in due course; this was to use his expertise internationally to help solve important cases in countries lacking forensic capability. He travelled a great deal during the early 1950s before he retired, visiting New Zealand, the land of his birth, and also Egypt, which had been a kind of promised land for him in his younger days. 1952 was a momentous year, filled with academic engagements and medico-legal casework. He advised on a murder case in Kenya, lectured in Canada and undertook further work for the World Health Organisation.

Despite this busy programme, he found time to fly out to Ceylon to assist his friend and former student, Dr de Saram, who was involved in a difficult murder case in which his professional judgement was severely questioned. ‘The facts of the case were simple,’ wrote Smith years later. Mrs Sathasiran, estranged wife of the former captain of Ceylon’s cricket team, was found dead in the garage of her home in Colombo. Dr de Saram was called and he examined the body about an hour after it was discovered and carried out a full post-mortem on the following day. In the meantime, Sathasiran was arrested and charged with murdering his wife. Ten days after the crime, the Sathasirans’ servant, William, confessed that he had helped his master commit the murder by subduing the victim’s struggles when she was strangled. A key factor in his confession was that William said all this occurred before 9 a.m. and that, by 9.30 he had sold the jewellery stripped from the body and given to him in payment for his services. This statement was corroborated by the jeweller who had bought the articles.

Dr de Saram’s examination of the victim led him to different conclusions about the likely time of her death. The extent of rigor mortis in the body indicated that death had occurred between 10 a.m. and noon. It was known that Mrs Sathasiran had eaten breakfast comprising a type of pasta, grated coconut and milk around 8.15 a.m. The state of digestion of this meal as seen in her stomach and intestines, made it apparent that she had eaten breakfast some three hours before meeting her death. This conclusion was broadly confirmed by the temperature of the body. Despite the bland assurances to the contrary conveyed in detective fiction, it is extremely difficult to establish the time of death from the condition of the body, and rarely possible to do so with precision. Taking all factors into account, Dr de Saram’s estimate of the likely time of death was between 10 and 11.30 a.m. which was at variance with William’s confession.