Medical Detectives (28 page)

Like most medical detectives, John Glaister had his share of poison cases and he was fascinated by the features which put poisoning into a class of its own. He acknowledged that, of all forms of murder, poisoning was both the most cruel and the most difficult to solve. Because poisoning is a crime founded on careful, premeditated planning in which the poisoner, acting alone, takes every precaution to avoid suspicion and escape detection, circumstantial evidence plays an important role. The value of circumstantial evidence has often been derided, usually by defence lawyers, but, equally, its virtues have been praised by various judges. Lord Coleridge described circumstantial evidence as being a mere gossamer thread linking a suspect to a crime, yet it might be strong enough to convict. When circumstances connect closely with each other, they can form a strong web, constituting a level of proof which will satisfy a jury. In a case of poisoning, this type of evidence might be the only kind that has a chance of leading to a successful prosecution.

The knowledge and skill of the forensic pathologist, aided by toxicology and scientific method, can add decisively to the circumstantial evidence available in cases of poisoning. The ease with which symptoms of poisoning can assume the cloak of disease and the apparent reluctance of general practitioners to think of poison in domestic deaths, lent weight to the arguments of those who persuaded John Glaister to write
The Power of Poison
in 1954. He did so, as he noted in his preface, ‘as the result of promptings from several quarters’. He used a number of historical cases to illustrate the difficulties of assessing suspicion of poisoning.

One such case was that involving Eugène Marie Chantrelle, a Frenchman who taught in Edinburgh in the 1860s. The amorous teacher seduced a teenage pupil and he married her when she reached the age of sixteen. Within months she had born her first child and her life degenerated into misery as her husband resorted to beating her and issued threats of greater violence. In October 1877, contrary to her wishes, Chantrelle insured his wife for £1,000, the terms of the policy being that the insurance would be met only in the event of accidental death.

On New Year’s Day in 1878, Elizabeth Chantrelle was unwell and retired early to bed. The following morning, the maid found Mrs Chantrelle in some distress. She had been vomiting and the room smelled of gas although the gaslight in the room had been extinguished. Chantrelle, who was sleeping in the nursery with the three children, was called to attend to his wife. He remarked that something was wrong with the gas supply and, after opening the window, went off to fetch a doctor. While the master was out of the house, the maid noticed a plate containing pieces of an orange and grapes, together with a tumbler partly filled with lemonade, on Mrs Chantrelle’s bedside table. Later that morning Chantrelle told her he had drunk the lemonade and asked her to wash the empty glass.

Chantrelle was absent for about half an hour and, when he returned, he was on his own. A short while later, Dr Carmichael arrived and examined the patient who he believed to be suffering from coal-gas poisoning. He decided a second opinion was needed and sent for Dr Harvey Littlejohn, the city’s police surgeon and also a toxicologist. The two medical men believed Mrs Chantrelle was dying and arranged for her to be admitted to hospital where she succumbed soon after arrival.

Littlejohn noticed the smell of gas as soon as he entered the bedroom and asked Chantrelle about it. ‘That’s the difficulty, I can’t make out,’ was the reply. When the dead woman was subjected to post-mortem examination, there were none of the usual signs associated with coal-gas poisoning and blood tests proved negative. What was of diverting interest was Littlejohn’s conclusion, having seen the woman while still alive, that her symptoms were more consistent with opium poisoning. This view was substantiated by the traces of the narcotic in the vomitus on the bedclothes. But no opium was found in the stomach, although there were the remains of fruit eaten some time before death.

The whole of Edinburgh’s medico-legal fraternity became fascinated by the mystery of Elizabeth Chantrelle’s death and the French teacher found himself up against a formidable array of forensic expertise when he was tried for murder in the High Court of Justiciary.

Littlejohn reported that the stain on the bedclothes contained about three-quarters of a grain of opium which was nearly a poisonous dose. He had experimented by mixing opium and lemonade and found that the cordial had little effect on the taste of the mixture. He had found opium and other drugs in Chantrelle’s house and it was known that the Frenchman had bought extract of opium from a druggist in the city. Dr Douglas Maclagan, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Edinburgh University, examined Mrs Chantrelle when she was admitted to hospital and did not think she was suffering from coal-gas poisoning. He believed the signs were more indicative of narcotic poisoning.

The university’s Professor of Chemistry, Dr Crum Brown, and Professor of Materia Medica, Thomas Fraser, added their testimony to the investigation of Mrs Chantrelle’s death. They endorsed their colleagues’ opinions and Crum Brown experimented with various preparations of opium to see if he could duplicate the staining effect found on the bed linen. He concluded that the most likely form of opium used was the solid or semi-solid variety.

All the experts agreed that Mrs Chantrelle had died as the result of narcotic poisoning. It looked therefore as if the leak of coal gas was either coincidental or a deliberately contrived diversion. That it was the latter was proved by employees of the Edinburgh Gas Company who examined the gas supply in the house. The gas bracket on the mantelpiece of the bedroom which appeared to be the only source was functioning perfectly. The gas supply was turned off at the meter when the fitter inspected the house. The meter was working normally and, turning on the supply, the fitter returned to the bedroom where he immediately noticed an escape of gas, but not from the mantelshelf bracket. Closely examining the room, he found a place near the window frame where a gas bracket had been removed. There was a fractured pipe between the woodwork and the wall. Lying on the window ledge was a section of gas pipe which fitted the gap in the supply pipe.

As John Glaister wrote in his account of this unusual case, ‘The evidence, considered as a whole, was entirely circumstantial, and the unification of the links, when finally made to form an unbroken chain which established the guilt of the prisoner in the minds of the jury, must surely be considered instructive by those who have an interest in criminology.’ Suffice it to say that the jury found Chantrelle guilty by a unanimous decision and he was subsequently hanged for his crime. The case was certainly instructive in bearing out the maxim of forensic medicine that things are not always as they seem. The affair also highlighted the quality of Scotland’s forensic system, particularly the willingness, later pursued by Glaister, to draw in experts from other disciplines.

Another Scottish case in
The Power of Poison
and one which drew together Glaister himself and Sydney Smith as expert witnesses for the prosecution was the Oxgang Farm affair. Mrs Margaret McMillan was charged with both attempted murder and murder in a case of arsenic poisoning. The victim was her husband, thirty-nine-year-old Robert Brennan McMillan, who died on 6 January 1940 at his Dunbartonshire farm after a period of gastric illness. McMillan had a history of illness going back to 1937 when his mother noticed his yellow colour which she attributed to jaundice. He also suffered from gastric upsets and neuritis.

Mrs McMillan senior visited her son in the presence of his wife on 3 January 1940 when he complained that his throat was raw down to his stomach. He vomited twice while she was there and she sought reassurance from her daughter-in-law that if he became worse she could call her. On 5 January, she received a telephone message informing her that the doctor on his visit that day had given a satisfactory report on her son. Robert McMillan died the next day. Eleven grains of arsenic were found in his stomach and intestinal tract.

It was known that McMillan had used arsenic around his farm for killing rats. An acquaintance who worked at a glass factory where arsenic was regularly used in large quantities as part of the processing, obtained 2 or 3lb of the poison, which he handed in a paper bag to McMillan. One night, in March 1937, he helped the farmer lay poison traps by spreading the arsenic on slices of bread and placing them strategically around the farm. In December 1939, he supplied Mrs McMillan with about 1lb of arsenic, which he took from the large storage drum at the glassworks. She had complained about rats in her bedroom and he supplied the poison at her request. Following Robert McMillan’s death, and the news that his friend had been poisoned, he called at the farm and spoke to the widow. He expressed his anxieties about having to answer questions from the police and she told him there was nothing to worry about. When he enquired specifically about the quantity of arsenic he had given her, she told him that McMillan had flushed it down the drain.

Francis Hughes, the head pigman at Oxgang Farm, made it known that he had been asked to dispose of a bottle of white arsenic powder by throwing it into the River Clyde. He was given this task while Mr McMillan was ill in bed and was told that the bottle contained arsenic. During his employer’s illness, Hughes helped him when he wanted a bath because his mobility was affected. He asked McMillan the cause of his illness and was told that he had been mixing arsenical rat poison. Apparently undaunted by the implications, Hughes kept the bottle of arsenic for his own use in killing rats and even supplemented it by asking the McMillans’ supplier for more.

Margaret McMillan appeared on trial in June 1940 before the Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Aitchison. John Glaister and Sydney Smith, both veteran investigators of arsenical poisoning cases in Egypt, gave medical evidence. Glaister believed that the symptoms of McMillan’s illness in 1937 were consistent with arsenical poisoning and he believed that all of the arsenic ingested at that time would have been excreted from the body well before his death three years later. Consequently, the arsenic found at post-mortem must have been ingested nearer to the time of death and his estimate was within a four-month period.

His basis for this estimate was an examination of the dead man’s hair and fingernails which showed arsenic passing out of the body over that period. He believed that the clinical picture over the last two weeks of life was fully consistent with arsenical poisoning and thought that a massive quantity of arsenic had been ingested in one or more doses within twenty-four hours of death. This conclusion was based chiefly on finding 2.33 grains of arsenic in the liver and 11.06 grains in the stomach and intestines. Asked by the Solicitor-General if the arsenic might have entered the body accidentally, Glaister replied, ‘… if one adopted this thesis, the accident must have been oft repeated and repeated over a long interval of time.’ On the question of suicide, his opinion was that it would be difficult to understand a person intent on suicide dragging out the process over such a long time.

Glaister was asked if he could give an estimate of the times when, ‘arsenic may have got into that man’s body,’ as the Solicitor-General quaintly phrased it. The expert witness repeated his earlier statement that the terminal illness presented a clinical picture of arsenical poisoning with indications of a rally on 5 January, followed by a rapid deterioration in the early hours of the following morning. His opinion was that, after McMillan took to his bed on 29 December, there were one or more doses of arsenic ingested up to 5 January with a further massive dose or doses within the last twenty-four hours of life. At this point, the Lord Justice Clerk intervened to press John Glaister on the possibilities for explaining McMillan’s death due to either accident or suicide. Lord Aitchison asked, ‘Supposing the facts in this case show – I ask you to assume – that this man had been getting arsenic into his system to an extent to make him seriously ill, off and on, over a period of months, would that fit in with any case of suicide that you have heard of?’

‘No,’ came the witness’s reply.

‘So far as you know,’ continued the judge, ‘has there been any case in which a man has sought to take his own life, prolonging the agony for a period of months?’

‘No,’ answered Glaister.

Asked by the judge if, in his experience, the witness had ever encountered a case of accidental poisoning by arsenic which continued over a period of months, John Glaister answered once more with an emphatic ‘No.’

Sydney Smith supported the opinion of his forensic colleague and it was left to Lord Aitchison to sum up for the jury which he did at some considerable length. He began by telling them there were occasions when human life was taken in which it was open to a jury to say that something less than murder had been committed. But, he was quick to point out, not in this case. The law would not permit an intermediate verdict of guilty of culpable homicide; the only possible verdicts were ‘Guilty’ or ‘Not Proven’. He acknowledged that poisoning was a secret crime and one that was difficult to detect, although that did not absolve the Crown from the requirement to prove it, relying on circumstantial evidence if necessary.

Having set the working limits for the jury’s deliberations, the judge went on to review the evidence. It was undisputed, he said, that Mrs McMillan’s husband had died of arsenical poisoning, the poison entering his body during the four to six months prior to his death. The medical evidence had shown with certainty that a massive dose of arsenic had been ingested within twenty-four hours of death. The question was, how did the fatal quantity enter his body; voluntarily, accidentally or by an act of deliberate poisoning on the part of someone else with the intention of killing him. ‘If he was murdered, was he murdered by the accused?’ asked Lord Aitchison, and continued, ‘Now, unless the Crown can prove the third of these propositions, that the late Mr McMillan was murdered, and murdered by the accused, unless the Crown can prove that and prove it satisfactorily, then you are bound to acquit.’