Medical Detectives (39 page)

Of all the theories, once the main suspects had been eliminated, was Keith Simpson’s reconstruction based on his post-mortem findings. Joan Woodhouse, possibly in a disturbed state of mind following the break-up with her boyfriend, wanted to get away from it all and simply relax by soaking up the sun. Thinking she was safe in a secluded, wooded corner of Arundel Park, she took off her outer clothing and stretched out on the grass with the sun on her face. Her misfortune was to be seen by someone, a passing opportunist, who saw the possibility of a lustful adventure. When she ran off after he sexually assaulted her, he gave chase and silenced her before she could call for help. Perhaps the last word, quite literally, on this unsolved murder, should rest with Fred Narborough. His book of memoirs published in 1959, concluded with the line, ‘All the time, there is that murder on my mind.’

A pathologist’s repertoire of cases would not be complete without a few poisonings. They make a change from the round of fatal shootings, stabbings and strangulations and are often more imaginative than other forms of killing. Poisoning usually involves careful premeditation and calls for subtlety, stealth and cunning. Keith Simpson had his quota of poison cases and often shared their investigation with his old sparring partner, Francis Camps. A number of these are described in Chapter Four but one which stands out in Simpson’s archives is a case which he described as ‘one of the coolest murders by arsenic that ever came to lie in my crime files … ’. Margery Radford was very ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and was being treated at Milford Sanatorium at Godalming, Surrey. She was pale and very thin and relied on relatives to bring her food and drinks to stimulate her jaded appetite. Her husband, Frederick, was an attentive visitor, invariably bringing her fruit and soft drinks. He worked as a laboratory technician at nearby St Thomas’s Hospital.

These bedside rituals were dramatically interrupted one day in April 1949 when Mrs Radford experienced constant vomiting after eating a fruit pie which her husband had given to a relative to take to her. She confided in a friend, Mrs Formby, who visited her in the sanatorium saying she believed that she was being poisoned as a result of eating some of the things brought in by her husband. She asked her friend if she would send the fruit pie to Scotland Yard for analysis. This was an unusual request and her friend responded not by contacting the police, but by leaving the pie in the office of the sanatorium superintendent with a note saying a letter of explanation would follow. This was a course of action that was to have a dramatic outcome.

Unaware of the significance attached to the pie, the Superintendent took it home with the thought that some well-meaning visitor had left him a little treat. He took a few bites out of the pie and quickly became unwell with violent stomach pains and severe vomiting. He spent the remainder of the weekend in bed recovering from his sickness and wondering about the provenance of the fruit pie. He returned to work on Monday where Mrs Formby’s letter voicing Margery Radford’s concerns was waiting on his desk. He showed the remainder of the pie to Mrs Radford who identified it.

The police were informed of the turn of events and arranged for the offending pie’s contents to be analysed at Scotland Yard’s laboratory. The analyst found over 3 grains of potassium arsenite in the pie and immediately reported his discovery to detectives. On the same day, 12 April 1949, Margery Radford died. Keith Simpson carried out the post-mortem examination supported by Scotland Yard’s analyst. He confirmed the advanced state of the dead woman’s tuberculosis and found that her frail body was riddled with poison. From the arsenic present in her hair roots it was possible to estimate that she had been systematically poisoned over a period of twelve weeks. As the pathologist observed, Margery Radford’s deterioration was put down to her tuberculosis and none of the medical staff at the sanatorium suspected, or had any reason to suspect, that she was also being poisoned.

When he was interviewed by detectives, Frederick Radford asked, ‘Why should I want to kill my wife? I knew she was going to die anyway.’ He pointed out that as a laboratory technician he knew how easy it was to detect arsenic and would not have been so foolish to use it. He challenged the police to charge him and let the jury decide the outcome. He attended the opening of the inquest into his wife’s death and was driven home afterwards in a police car. Keith Simpson said in his memoirs that Radford invited the officers into his home for a cup of tea but, as he put it, ‘they understandably declined.’ On the following day, Radford was found dead in bed, having taken his own life with poison. He knew that arsenic was for the long haul so he chose cyanide as the fastest means of procuring his own death.

But for Margery Radford’s suspicions, it is likely that her own death would have been recorded as due to the tuberculosis from which she was suffering and her husband would have got away with murder. The assumption was that Radford grew tired of looking after his chronically sick wife and decided to assist her departure from a tormented life.

Simpson noted that general medical practitioners as a rule do not include the possibility of murder in their considerations of cause of death. The symptoms of poisoning may masquerade as genuine illness and the sick bed environment of the chronically ill provides ready cover for the intending poisoner, as in the case of Frederick Radford. Writing in 1972, Keith Simpson noted that only 0.2 per cent of all deaths from poison were attributable to arsenic.

Determining the distinction between accident, murder and suicide is among the judgements a pathologist makes on a daily basis and it is not always straightforward. In 1959, Simpson managed to solve the riddle of two deaths in Portugal despite having been prevented from examining the circumstances at first hand. In February of that year, a family of four set out from England for a motoring holiday in Portugal which ended tragically when Arthur and Patricia Trist were found dead in their motel chalet, leaving their two children as survivors. The family had settled into their accommodation near Lisbon and, after putting the two children to bed, the couple went out for a meal. The alarm was raised the next day when the maid reported that after three attempts, she had failed to get a response from the occupants of the chalet. The manager decided to force the door and found Arthur and Patricia dead and two very confused children who could not get their parents to wake up. Police were called to the scene but found nothing that might indicate foul play.

The two bodies were examined by a local police surgeon who found no injuries on either. The knowledge that the dead couple had dined out on shell food the previous evening, linked to vomit stains on their clothing, led the Portuguese authorities to conclude that the cause of death was food poisoning. This diagnosis did not hold up too well when enquiries showed that other diners at the restaurant who had also eaten shell fish suffered no ill-effects. Nevertheless, the authorities were adamant that the cause of death of the two English visitors was food poisoning. Requests that a pathologist from Britain should be allowed to examine the bodies were indignantly refused.

By this time, Keith Simpson had been asked to review the post-mortem findings and he quickly identified several shortcomings. The poor quality of the examination carried out by local doctors was highlighted when their report mentioned the condition of both lungs in Patricia Trist’s body. As her medical records confirmed, she only had one lung following surgery several years earlier. Simpson noted that blood and muscle samples needed to test for carbon monoxide poisoning had not been taken. This was especially significant in view of reports from representatives of the family who had been permitted to enter the chalet and take stock of the surroundings in which the Trists had died. Their attention focussed on the bathroom which was very small and fitted with a gas water heater. The ventilation was poor and there was no flue to conduct combustion fumes to the outside of the building.

The pathologist suspected carbon monoxide poisoning was the likely cause of death and the indications of vomiting were consistent with this. These conclusions were put to the Portuguese authorities but were promptly rejected on the grounds that the matter had already been resolved. The importance of establishing an accurate cause of death lay in any claims made by the two surviving children of the tragedy and the accident insurance which had been taken out by their father. Having been denied the opportunity to carry out independent post-mortem examinations, Simpson played what he later described as his ‘trump card’. The Trist family’s request to the Portuguese for the return of the bodies to their homeland could hardly be refused and was duly acted upon. As soon as he viewed the returned corpses in his laboratory at Guy’s Hospital and saw the tell-tale cherry-pink colour of their skin, he knew that carbon monoxide poisoning was the cause of their deaths. The mystery, as he later described it, was that the Portuguese medical examiners had missed the obvious.

The source of the carbon monoxide was the gas water heater in the holiday chalet which subsequent tests showed was of a type that could build up a fatal concentration of gas in a confined and ill-ventilated space. The Portuguese authorities were notified of these latest findings but continued to hold firm to their original line that the English couple had died of food poisoning. The family’s insurance company honoured the policy which Arthur Trist had taken out before the ill-fated family holiday.

There was some diplomatic fall-out following this case, when Portugal complained to the Foreign Office about the British pathologist’s involvement in the enquiry. This was to rebound some twenty years later with headlines in the British press about deaths in the Algarve from carbon monoxide poisoning arising from faulty gas water heaters. The
Sunday Times
, on 23 January 1983, reported the deaths of ten British tourists in Portugal holiday resorts, claiming that death certificates were issued with incorrect causes of death, including natural causes and food poisoning, when the classic indications of carbon monoxide poisoning evident on post-mortem examination should have alerted local doctors to the real cause. Interviewed by the newspaper, Professor Simpson was quoted as saying, ‘It’s disgraceful’ and observing that the cases discovered were ‘the tip of the iceberg’. The press reports provoked concerns about the safety of British tourists and raised questions regarding the quality of Portuguese investigation of unexpected deaths.

Some murder cases, although apparently closed, seem to rumble on in the public conscience for years. One such was the A6 Murder, for which James Hanratty was judged guilty and hanged. Keith Simpson was called to the scene of a fatal shooting on a stretch of road known as Deadman’s Hill on 23 August 1961. A double shooting had occurred in the early hours of the morning which left Michael Gregston dead and his lover, Valerie Storie, badly wounded. The couple had been sitting in their parked car near Slough when they were threatened by a man with a gun. He sat in the rear seat and ordered them to drive away. After travelling north for about thirty miles, he told Gregston to pull into a lay-by on the A6. There, he shot Gregston twice in the head and, after raping Valerie Storie, fired five shots at her, leaving her paralysed. The assailant then drove away in their car.