Medical Detectives Read online

  Dedicated to the memory of Joe Gaute, crime historian, publisher and friend.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I WISH TO THANK NON, as always, for her patience and encouragement. Grateful thanks are also extended to Andrew Rose for his support and advice, to Annie Hepburn who processed all the words, to David and Ann Tolley for checking them, and to Alan Greeley for his assistance with illustrations.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of photographs but, in some instances, unsuccessfully. Where this is the case, acknowledgement is given to the original published source. I would also like to acknowledge the Joe Gaute archive of crime photographs and documents.

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword by Professor Bernard Knight CBE

  Introduction

  1 The Coming Man: Sir Bernard Spilsbury

  2 The Patriarch: Sir Sydney Smith

  3 The Professor: John Glaister

  4 The Mentor: Francis Camps

  5 The Teacher: Keith Simpson

  Bibliography

  Glossary

  Plates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  by Professor Bernard Knight CBE

  IN SPITE OF THE CURRENT OBSESSION of television producers portraying forensic pathologists as willowy blondes, aged twenty-five, this macabre occupation was dominated during the last century by a handful of mostly middle-aged or elderly men of all shapes and sizes, some of whom became ‘household names’.

  Robin Odell has taken five of the most prominent of these and expertly welded their personal histories to their most notorious cases, producing an engrossing record of how homicide was investigated during the twentieth century.

  As it seemed almost obligatory for such men to write their memoirs – or have them ‘ghosted’ for them – much of the material has already been published, but some of these books have their faults. The early biography of Spilsbury. in 1951, was really an adulatory homage and it took until 2007 for Andrew Rose to write a more realistic assessment of the great man – and now Robin Odell has again offered a balanced view of Sir Bernard.

  Though I knew of all five – and had met them all except Spilsbury during my half-century forensic career – my main interest was reading about Keith Simpson and Francis Camps, who I knew so well and whose personalities could not have been more different.

  When I left the army to look for a job, I turned up at St Pancras mortuary one morning, still in uniform, and found Camps up to his elbows in a corpse, the inevitable fag in mouth, and was laconically told to ‘start on Monday’ with not even a mention of a salary! How different from the formal, immaculate Simpson, with his archbishop’s voice that delivered superb lectures, compared with Camps’ disjointed ramblings. Yet they both had their strengths and weaknesses, though their personal differences were sometimes too publicly ventilated.

  Writing a biography of an eminent professional is not easy, as I found when I did that of Milton Helpern, the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. It is hard to avoid trotting out a dry rehash of journalistic articles and court records, but Robin Odell, a veteran author of true crime, has imbued these pen-portraits with a true feeling of what the men were like, warts and all, offering a book that not only informs, but entertains.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE DEVELOPMENT OF FORENSIC MEDICINE in Britain is told through the lives of the five great pathologists who dominated the scene throughout most of the twentieth century. Their careers spanned seventy years of personal achievement and innovation which laid the foundations of modern crime scene investigation.

  Sir Bernard Spilsbury was an iconic figure who put forensic pathology on the map with his involvement in the Crippen case. Headlines such as, ‘Spilsbury called in’, turned an essentially shy man into a celebrity. He was in essence a loner; an interpreter who exemplified the role of the expert witness. Sure of himself, certain of the facts and not requiring a second opinion, he stood tall in the witness box. In an age when capital punishment was still in use, his courtroom testimony made him an arbiter of life and death. A roll call of his cases reads like a catalogue of famous British murders. His conclusions, though, were often controversial and contested and remain so to the present day. He was the epitome of the expert; aloof, assured and respected.

  His contemporary, Sir Sydney Smith, by contrast, was an innovator, a clubbable man who worked on a broad canvas and drew people towards him. Born in New Zealand, he pursued his training in Scotland, the spiritual home of forensic medicine. He honed his skills in Egypt, where he worked during the inter-war years, and pioneered the development of forensic ballistics. He returned to Edinburgh to concentrate on teaching and helped to put forensic studies onto a sound academic basis.

  John Glaister also prospered in the Scottish tradition and played a major role in furthering his nation’s pre-eminent position in forensic medicine. He was a professor for thirty years at Glasgow University where he succeeded his father. His particular contribution was to apply scientific methods to the examination of trace evidence gathered at crime scenes. His work on the identification of hair was a significant breakthrough and, like Smith, he was willing to share knowledge and to call for specialist help when it was needed. This was evident in the Ruxton case when he pioneered photo-imposition as an identification technique.

  Francis Camps was an organiser rather than an innovator. He had a vision of coordinating the emerging skills of the broader medico-legal profession and, to that end, created a world-class forensic department at London University. He had his share of important crime cases but was at his best when managing people and resources to advance the knowledge and professional status of forensic work. He was a founding member of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences which succeeded in bringing science, medicine and the law together to serve the ends of justice. Camps also reached out to the USA to add an international element to what he viewed as best practice.

  Keith Simpson combined a number of talents as teacher and practitioner. He was also an important innovator, breaking new ground in the understanding of factors which determined time of death and helping to put forensic dentistry on the map as a means of establishing identity. Like his contemporaries, he was involved in many headline murder cases, Heath, Haigh and Christie being prominent among them. He was a highly effective communicator, noted for his succinct delivery of evidence in court, in addition to his lecturing and writing activities.

  The five pathologists, each with their unique talents, represented a golden age of forensic development. Their careers overlapped to a considerable extent and there were strains of rivalry in their relationships at times. This was, perhaps, inevitable in the adversarial system employed in British courts which meant that experts were sometimes cast as opponents in the courtroom. As professionals, they did not always agree on the interpretation of evidence.

  Despite their differences, they elevated the gritty, not to say, gruesome, business of examining the dead to a multi-faceted profession calling on every available scientific resource and discipline. Crime scene investigation as it is practised today owes a great deal to these pioneers for their questing spirit and innovative genius.

  Robin Odell, 2013

  Chapter One

  THE COMING MAN

  Sir Bernard Spilsbury

  THE THIRTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD MAN who stood in the witness box at the Old Bailey on 18 October 1910 was tall, good-looking and self-assured. He was well-dressed, sporting a red carnation in his buttonhole, and spoke clearly and calmly when addressed by counsel for the Crown. ‘I am a Bachelor of Surgery of Oxford University and I hold the position of pathologist at St Mary’s Hospital,’
he told the court. The man was Bernard Spilsbury, whose name would become a household term epitomising the ascendancy of the medical detective, and the occasion was the trial for murder of Hawley Harvey Crippen whose name gained notoriety as a fashionable expletive.

  Dr Spilsbury was the most junior of the four experts called by the prosecution to present the medical evidence against Crippen. His appearance was brief, decisive and memorable. From his high perch in the wood-panelled courtroom, the Lord Chief Justice, bewigged and swathed in scarlet, questioned the young pathologist about his opinion. Spilsbury, unintimidated, replied, ‘I have an independent position of my own, and I am responsible for my own opinion, which has been formed on my own scientific knowledge … ’. Those present who understood the workings of the medico-legal world realised at once that they were witnessing something important. A young law student at the time, who would later achieve fame as a coroner, Bentley Purchase, remembered people leaving the court and saying of Spilsbury, ‘There is a coming man.’

  Crippen was the inoffensive-looking husband of Kunigunde Mackamotski, a stage-struck woman better known as Cora or by her stage name, Belle Elmore. The couple settled in England in 1900 after Crippen was appointed to run the London office of the Munyon Company, a Philadelphia-based patent medicine firm. Crippen’s medical qualifications, described as obscure and probably acquired through the post, nevertheless allowed him to use the title of ‘Dr’. It is doubtful, though, that he would have been allowed by the General Medical Council to practise in England. His success as a sales representative was matched by that of his wife as a stage artiste; he presided over dwindling fortunes selling quack medicine and she obtained minor parts in the music halls. Neighbours observed that he always appeared to be subservient to her wishes. Small in stature and mild in manner, his demeanour contrasted sharply with Cora’s music-hall persona.

  The Crippens lived at 39 Hilldrop Crescent in Camden Town in a gloomy house with a cellar. In January 1910, Crippen parted company with Munyons and began to run into debt. By this time, the little doctor was also running a double life with his teenage mistress, Ethel le Neve. They met secretly and shared warm embraces in the privacy of hotel bedrooms.

  On 2 February 1910, Crippen told Ethel le Neve that his wife had gone to America. Ethel joined him at 39 Hilldrop Crescent and a couple of weeks later appeared at a charity ball wearing a brooch belonging to Cora Crippen. The doctor let it be known that he had heard his wife was seriously ill and he was planning to travel to the USA to be by her side. He then announced that she had died and, on the day that her obituary was published in the theatrical newspaper, Era, he and Ethel le Neve left England for a honeymoon in Dieppe. On 31 March, one of Cora’s friends at the Music Hall Ladies’ Group reported certain suspicions to Scotland Yard.

  When Crippen and le Neve returned to Hilldrop Crescent it was to face visits from several of Cora’s friends asking embarrassing questions and, finally, from Chief Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard. This occurred at the beginning of July, weeks after Cora had disappeared. Crippen was disarmingly frank; ‘The stories I have told about my wife’s death are untrue,’ he declared. He said that as far as he knew she was still alive and had gone to America to join her lover. He had lied, he explained, to hide his shame.

  The policeman was thus put off the scent and Crippen, alerted to the danger he was in, prepared for flight. On 11 July, when Dew sought to question Crippen further, he found both the doctor’s office and 39 Hilldrop Crescent unoccupied. The house was thoroughly searched and human remains were found buried in the cellar. The experts were called in and Dew took passage across the Atlantic in a ship fast enough to overhaul the SS Montrose, whose passengers included Crippen and le Neve dressed as a boy. An alert had been broadcast by wireless from the ship’s captain to the owners in Liverpool. In an historic radio message, he said, ‘Have strong suspicion that Crippen London Cellar Murderer and Accomplice are among saloon passengers … ’.

  Under the brick floor of the cellar at the Crippen home, Dew and his Sergeant discovered the stinking remains of a human torso wrapped in a man’s pyjama top. Augustus J. Pepper, consulting surgeon at St Mary’s Hospital and a leading medico-legal authority, examined the cellar remains and reported that without question they were human. He called in his assistant, Dr Bernard Spilsbury, who sacrificed a holiday with his wife and son in Somerset for the doubtful privilege of evaluating the remains found at Hilldrop Crescent. Spilsbury’s rising reputation had already been noted and it was said that Richard Muir, who prosecuted Crippen at his trial, especially asked for Spilsbury to work on the case.

  The pathologist wrote out a summary of his initial findings on one of his famous record cards. Throughout his career he pursued the meticulous habit of recording the details of all his cases on record filing cards which at the end of his professional life numbered some 6,000. The discovery in the cellar amounted to a heap of putrefying flesh and organs; there was no head and no bones. When he was called to the scene, Sir Melville McNaghten, the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, had the foresight, as he recorded in his memoirs; ‘to put a handful of cigars in my pocket; I thought they might be needed by the officers and they were!’

  The sex of this grisly discovery was not apparent, for the genitalia were missing. All the organs of the chest and abdomen were accounted for with the exception of the reproductive organs. Later, on a section of skin measuring seven inches by six, which he thought came from the lower part of the abdomen, Pepper’s experienced eye spotted a mark which he thought was a scar. This blemish was the cue for Spilsbury to step into the public arena.

  The young Demonstrator of Pathology left his family to start their holiday without him while he remained in London and joined a forensic quartet at St Mary’s Hospital – he and Pepper worked on the physical aspects of the remains while Dr William Willcox and Dr Arthur Luff carried out analyses for toxic substances. One of Spilsbury’s three filing cards on Crippen recorded the essential information concerning the discovery in the cellar:

  Human remains found July 13 … Medical organs of the chest and abdomen. Removed in one mass. Four large pieces of skin and muscle, one from the lower abdomen with old operation scar 4 in. long – broader at lower end. Impossible to identify sex. Hyoscine found 2.2 grains. Hair in Hinde’s curler – roots present. Hair 6 in. long. Man’s pyjama jacket, Jones Bros., Holloway, and odd pair of pyjama trousers.

  Examined by Travers Humphreys, Spilsbury told the court how he had examined a piece of skin and flesh with a mark on it. ‘I have formed the opinion,’ he said, ‘that it comes from the lower part of the wall of the abdomen, near the middle – I base that opinion upon the presence and arrangement of certain muscles.’ Of the mark on the skin, he said, ‘As the result of my microscopical examination I say that that mark is undoubtedly an old operation scar.’ Knowing that Crippen’s wife had undergone an ovarotomy in 1892 or ’93, the identification of an abdominal surgical scar by the pathologist was an important plank in the prosecution’s argument.

  The thrust of Spilsbury’s case was that the absence of hair follicles and sebaceous glands in the mark on the skin made it certain that it was a scar. He was at pains to point out that although he had been a student of Augustus Pepper, his opinions were entirely his own. He repeated, ‘I think there is no room for doubt as to its being a scar,’ and, as a final challenge, he declared, ‘I have my microscope slides here and I shall send for a microscope in case it should be wanted.’ Muir was no doubt very pleased with his protégé and took one of the defence’s expert witnesses to task for daring to suggest that a mistake might have been made over interpretation of the microscopic evidence. ‘We are not talking about people unaccustomed to the microscope,’ declared counsel, ‘we are talking about people like Mr Spilsbury.’

  The sliver of tissue bearing the scar preserved in formalin in a glass dish was handed round among the members of the jury and, finally, in an adjoining room, Spilsbury set up his microscope so that any jurors wh
o might have entertained lingering doubts could see his slides for themselves. The defence argument that the mark was merely a surface crease in the unbroken skin was weakened by the appearance of epithelium – the outermost layer of the skin – which had become folded into the scar as a result of the operation for ovarotomy.

  Traces of hyoscine were found in the remains by Dr William Willcox; the presence of the drug linked to Crippen’s known purchases of hyoscine hydrobromide from a chemist in New Oxford Street established cause of death and completed the chain of evidence. Willcox and Spilsbury were destined to work together on other important criminal cases; they made a formidable pair. The jury believed the remains found in the cellar at Hilldrop Crescent were those of Cora Crippen who had been poisoned by her husband. They took just half an hour to find him guilty of murder.

  Spilsbury’s precisely ordered mind was possibly a characteristic inherited from his father, an analytical and manufacturing chemist. James Spilsbury had wanted to train as a doctor but his mother was against the idea and urged him into a trade. The closest he could aspire to his real ambition was as a maker of pills and potions. James left his native Staffordshire in the 1870s and loosed the bonds of parental control. He set up in business in Leamington Spa where he married a local girl. In May 1877, James and Marion Spilsbury had the first of their four children, whom they named Bernard Henry.

  Bernard was considered a handsome child, as photographs of the period testified, and he was cheerful and good-natured. The family home was comfortable and his father, who had suffered disappointment at not being allowed to follow the career of his own choosing, determined that, within reason, his children would be permitted to fulfil their particular talents and ambitions. Until he was ten years of age Bernard was tutored at home and, in 1888, enrolled as a pupil at Leamington College. He soon became a boarder for his father decided to shake the dust of the provinces from his feet and move to London. While James Spilsbury searched for a house in the metropolis that would be convenient for his new employment as consulting chemist to a number of large firms, he moved the rest of his family to his parents’ home in Stafford.