Medical Detectives (31 page)

The court-martial lasted nine days, during which Camps gave evidence and attended a reconstruction of the crucial incident which was supposed to have taken place in the car. Emmett-Dunne, with the help of a volunteer playing the part of Sergeant Watters, demonstrated the way in which he claimed to have struck his fellow soldier. Camps observed this re-enactment with a critical eye. He knew that the injuries resulting from the blow demonstrated by Emmett-Dunne would have landed on the side of the neck, whereas the fatal blow had been directed at the throat. It seemed that Emmett-Dunne, who was known to have undergone commando training in 1942, felled Watters with a chop to the throat delivered with the side of the hand.

Returning to the courtroom, armed with diagrams showing the anatomy of the neck and with the dead man’s larynx mounted in a transparent box, Francis Camps continued his evidence. He described what had happened as, ‘… straightforward mechanics’. Asked if death had resulted from hanging, he replied simply, ‘No.’ He said that the injuries carefully described by the army pathologist were consistent with the body being suspended after death. The court-martial concluded with a guilty verdict and Emmett-Dunne was sentenced to death. He was spared the gallows, though, because Britain had signed a convention with Germany whereby the death penalty would not be acted upon in crimes committed by British military personnel. A sentence of life imprisonment was imposed, of which the ex-Sergeant served ten years before being released in 1965.

In the wake of this affair, Francis Camps was appointed Honorary Consultant Pathologist to the British Army. He had shown the value of experimentation in the Emmett-Dunne case by arranging with a Japanese ju-jitsu expert to show him how a traditional martial arts blow would be delivered and with what amount of force. The purpose of this improvisation was to judge the difference between the way in which certain unarmed combat blows were delivered. He judged that the position and direction of a ju-jitsu blow was inconsistent with the injury that killed Sergeant Watters, whereas a commando-style chop would have delivered sufficient deadly force.

Christmas Humphreys, who appeared as prosecuting counsel in many murder trials, including that of Donald Hume, had numerous encounters with Francis Camps. In his autobiography, Humphreys referred to the pathologist in his index, perhaps mischievously, but certainly erroneously, as, ‘Sir Francis’, and went on to criticise him for occasionally answering first and thinking afterwards. He did, though, praise him as a pioneer in experimentation, what he called, ‘practical pathology’. Camps himself looked upon experimentation as a valuable means of avoiding worn-out theories. The astute lawyer perhaps recognised an impetuosity in Camps’s character that was not always his best quality.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle observed, through comments attributed to Sherlock Holmes, that when a doctor goes wrong he is the ‘first of criminal minds’ because he has both nerve and knowledge. This seemed to apply to Dr John Bodkin Adams when he was charged with murder in 1956. Several of his patients died in suspicious circumstances after leaving him substantial legacies. Rumours had swirled around the general practitioner in his hometown, Eastbourne on the Sussex coast, for several years. These grew in intensity as his name frequently appeared as a beneficiary in the wills of his deceased patients, many of whom were elderly, wealthy widows. To all intents and purposes, he was an upright citizen and a servant of the community. He had practised in Eastbourne for over thirty years and lived the life of a bachelor. He had some 2,000 patients on his list, many of whom paid privately for his services.

Dr Adams had the good fortune to be left legacies by many of his grateful patients. A thousand pounds here, a few hundred there, enabling him to live comfortably, looked after by a housekeeper and employing a chauffeur. Undercurrents of gossip had begun to circulate in 1935 when a patient died and left him £3,000. A drip-feed of innuendo and knowing looks persisted for the next twenty years. Matters came to a head in July 1956 following the death of fifty-year-old Gertrude Hullett. She had been treated by Dr Adams, who prescribed barbiturate sleeping pills. The doctor drew suspicion to himself by writing to the coroner about what he termed a ‘very peculiar case’, and seeking to make arrangements for a private post-mortem for his patient, who was not yet dead. The coroner was surprised and, no doubt, shocked when he learned later that Adams had been left money and a Rolls-Royce by Mrs Hullett.

The lady died on 23 July and Dr Adams certified death as due to cerebral haemorrhage. A post-mortem was ordered and Francis Camps found that Mrs Hullett had taken a fatal dose of barbiturates, amounting to 115 grains. The coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of suicide and Dr Adams came in for some sharp criticism from the coroner who reprimanded him for ‘careless treatment’. The press seized on the suspicions building up around the Eastbourne doctor and all but accused him of murder. Deaths of his patients over the preceding twenty years were brought into view and speculation was rife. The police had been carrying out enquiries and taken an interest in the death in 1950 of eighty-one-year-old Edith Morrell. Dr Adams had been treating her for arthritis with heroin and morphine to relieve the pain. In her gratitude, she bequeathed her car and some silver cutlery to her doctor. When he was informed of the public interest in Mrs Morrell’s death, Dr Adams said, ‘Easing the passing of a dying patient is not all that wicked. She wanted to die. That cannot be murder.’ On 19 December 1956, Dr Adams was arrested and charged with murdering Edith Morrell.

The police had applied for exhumation orders in respect of two former patients who had died while under the doctor’s care. He sought help from the Medical Defence Union who asked Dr Keith Simpson to maintain a watching brief as far as the exhumations were concerned. In the event, only one body offered any prospect of a useful autopsy and Camps and Simpson agreed that cerebral thrombosis was the cause of death which confirmed what Dr Adams had recorded at the time. From the investigators’ point of view, it was a pity that the murder charge was brought in connection with Mrs Morrell’s death. The fact that she had been cremated made the prosecution’s task more difficult. Crucial evidence at Dr Adams’s trial at the Old Bailey was given by the nurses who had attended the old lady. Their recollections of what had taken place six years previously appeared to be at variance with notes made in the nursing logbooks.

The outcome of the trial was generally regarded as a triumph for Geoffrey Lawrence QC who exploited weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. His ruthless cross-examination of Dr Arthur Douthwaite, a colleague of Keith Simpson’s at Guy’s, was pivotal to the proceedings. The doctor said there was no justification for administering barbiturates to patients following a stroke and his evidence unequivocally pointed the finger at Dr Adams whose intention in prescribing drugs for Mrs Morrell was ‘to terminate her life’. But counsel was able to show from her medical records that four doctors had seen her on different occasions and all had prescribed morphia. He also pointed out that Dr Adams had made fewer visits to his patient and administered less morphia than was supposed. Keith Simpson’s view was that ‘subtle pressure’ had been put on Dr Douthwaite to give his testimony against Adams, who declined to take the witness stand. This meant that evidence relating to patients other than Mrs Morrell was not permitted. Hence it was not possible for the nurse in attendance on one of them to repeat what she had said at the time: ‘You realise, Doctor, that you have killed her.’

Francis Camps was called to give evidence on the thirteenth day of what, at that time, was the longest murder trial conducted in Britain. He was asked by the Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, to deal with questions related to cremation and the role of a second doctor or medical referee. The pathologist outlined the procedure which required two doctors to sign a form authorising cremation. He said that where the deceased had expressed a wish to be cremated, it had become the practice to carry out a post-mortem because, as he very succinctly phrased it, ‘cremation is the final act’. Asked about the feelings relatives might have regarding the need for post-mortems, Camps gave a careful reply to the effect that in circumstances where relatives might prefer burial in full knowledge that a deceased person had made a bequest in favour of the attending doctor, the medical referee, or second doctor, would automatically notify the coroner. His comments would have resonance forty years later when another medical practitioner, Dr Harold Shipman, was tried for murder.

On 10 April 1957, Dr Adams was found not guilty. He resigned from the National Health Service, although he continued to live in Eastbourne. He was struck off the Medical Register and there was public disquiet when the Director of Public Prosecutions declined to proceed against the doctor with other accusations of murder. Many believed that Adams murdered for gain, while other, more charitable commentators, suggested he simply practised euthanasia. The doctor regained his medical registration in 1961 and resumed his practice in Eastbourne where he died, aged eighty-four, in 1983.

Dr Adams certainly benefited from his years of medical practice. At the time of his death, his estate was valued at over £400,000 and he earned £10,000 from a national newspaper for his life story. A sale of his possessions raised £12,000 and the doctor’s medical bag bearing his initials went for £92. Unusually in a murder case, the trial judge, Patrick Devlin, wrote a book about it, called
Easing the Passing
, published in 1985. He retired early, reportedly because he found his work tedious, and died in 1992.

Francis Camps had been appointed Reader in Forensic Medicine at the London Hospital in 1954 and two years later collaborated with his friend, Bentley Purchase, to produce a textbook,
Practical Forensic Medicine
. Described as ‘the most famous coroner of his day’, Purchase began his career in the late 1950s and shared Camps’s no nonsense approach to their work. This joint effort was the first indication of their determination to put forensic investigation on the map and was a springboard for greater things to come.

According to his biographer, Robert Jackson, Camps was not a particularly effective lecturer. He tended to be over-enthusiastic and was easily blown off course by minor diversions. He did, though, have what observers described as a wicked sense of humour and was not always popular with his students. On one occasion in 1963 when he spoke to undergraduate members of the Chemical Society at Southampton University, it was apparent that he had not prepared too well. He brought with him a hastily assembled collection of projection slides which he used as prompts for a rambling account of practical forensic medicine. Unsurprisingly, many of his illustrations were of partially dissected or decomposing corpses on the mortuary table. This had a startling effect on some unsuspecting members of his audience who fainted in their seats or made a dash for the exit. Calls were put out to the St John’s Ambulance for assistance. While he was, possibly, not the most gifted of lecturers, Francis Camps compensated with his organisational and writing skills.

Meanwhile, routine forensic investigations proceeded apace and he frequently found himself in opposition to Keith Simpson. This was so in a case which captured headlines in July 1955 with the death of five-month-old Terence, the son of John and Janet Armstrong. It was supposed that the boy had eaten poisonous berries from the garden given to him innocently by his three-year-old sister who had also eaten some. She was sick but otherwise not ill.

A post-mortem carried out on Terence showed the presence in his stomach and trachea of red skins, presumed to be remnants of the berries. The doctor was not able to give a cause of death and the inquest into the boy’s death was opened and then adjourned. The parents were interviewed by the police and officers were surprised by the apparent lack of grief. Twenty-five-year-old John Armstrong, a Navy Sick Bay Attendant at the Royal Naval Hospital at Haslar in Portsmouth, lived with his twenty-year-old wife, Janet, and their two young children at Gosport. Detectives had their suspicions that the cause of death was not the berries and arranged for the skins retrieved from the child’s body to be sent to Scotland Yard’s Forensic Laboratory. Tests showed that there was a significant quantity of the drug, Seconal, in the sample. The supposed red berry skins were in fact the gelatine coating of Seconal capsules. Dr Lewis Nickolls, chief scientist at the laboratory, estimated the child had consumed about five Seconal capsules. The drug was a powerful barbiturate normally prescribed to assist sleeping.

The Armstrong family now came under scrutiny and it was discovered that the couple’s first son had died in 1954 from broncho-pneumonia. Their home at Gosport was searched with no suspicious consequences. Meanwhile, authority had been given for Terence Armstrong’s body to be exhumed. Keith Simpson conducted the post-mortem examination and concluded that the boy had died of a massive overdose of Seconal. Detectives checking on John Armstrong and his duties at Haslar Naval Hospital found that a cupboard containing dangerous drugs had been broken into several months previously and, among the items missing, were Seconal capsules.