Medical Detectives (13 page)

The spirit of Joseph Bell permeated the lecture theatres at Edinburgh and by the time Sydney Smith studied there, Sherlock Holmes was well established in the nation’s reading habits. Smith soon concluded that his chosen field of specialisation required more than observation and deduction – knowledge had to be acquired and experience gained. After all, forensic medicine, or medical jurisprudence as it was more formally called, was an amalgam of two great professions – medicine and law. In some instances, the association with law enforcement was very close and at Edinburgh, Harvey Littlejohn, in addition to being the University’s Professor of Forensic Medicine, was also Chief Surgeon to the City Police. Moreover, some aspects of the forensic pathologist’s job were hardly medical, such as the examination of firearms, cartridge cases and bullets, a field in which Sydney Smith was to gain pre-eminence. This work was directed to the pathologist on account of his knowledge of gunshot wounds; also, because in an age before forensic science became established in its own right, the doctors were the custodians of such scientific knowledge that could be applied to the investigation of crime.

After a short spell understudying the master, Smith was given his first major investigation. In June 1913, two ploughmen came across a mysterious object floating in a water-filled quarry near Winchburgh in West Lothian. Their first reaction was that a passing vandal had thrown a farmer’s scarecrow into the quarry where it lay waterlogged and spread-eagled to frighten passers-by. On closer inspection, the two men realised that the object was not one but two human shapes tied together with window cord. With the aid of a tree branch, they dragged out what proved to be the bodies of two fully clothed, long dead children.

The local police had received no reports of any missing children and there was no information on which to start an investigation. Indeed the doctor called to the scene believed that a post-mortem examination of the corpses would be a waste of time in view of the state of decomposition which was so advanced as to have rendered their features unrecognisable. The pathologist took the view that this made it even more necessary to carry out an autopsy in the hope of providing the police with some information whereby the youngsters could be traced.

Smith began by examining the remnants of rotten clothing clinging to the bodies. The children were dressed alike and on one of the shirts he observed a laundry mark which proved to be the imprint of a poorhouse at Dysart in Fife. The clothing yielded no further clues, so attention was directed to the bodies, which exhibited the phenomenon known as adipocere whereby their fat had been converted to a firm, wax-like consistency. This is an unusual condition which occurs over a long period when a body is subjected to damp conditions such as immersion in water or burial in damp ground. The process is one in which the neutral body fats are hydrolysed into a mixture of fatty acids and soap with the result that the body, especially the limbs, retain much of their original shape.

In the remains which confronted Sydney Smith, the bodies had been wholly transformed into adipocere, with the exception of their feet. As his examination progressed, the pathologist was able to establish that both victims were male and, from measurements of their height, he determined that one was aged about six to seven years and the other about four. These estimates were confirmed by examining the teeth which, in the case of the elder boy, showed that his first permanent molars had come through; this tended to confirm his age as about six years. The younger boy had all his milk teeth and as none of his permanent teeth had emerged, his age was put at between two and four years. Inspection of the epiphyses, the soft growing ends of the long bones, in the elder boy confirmed an age of around six or seven years.

Examination of the internal organs showed them to be normal, although remarkably well preserved. Of particular interest was the content of the stomachs which had also been preserved intact. In both bodies, the stomachs contained a quantity of material which included easily identified vegetables; peas, barley, potatoes, turnips and leeks. All the ingredients, as Smith readily recognised, of nourishing Scotch broth. This material which had been preserved by the adipocerous covering of the bodies was of particular importance in helping to establish time of death. The partially digested nature of the stomach contents suggested that the boys had eaten their last meal about one hour before they died. The disused quarry where the boys were found was in a secluded area reached by a long, winding cart track. The likelihood was that the two youngsters had fallen foul of someone with local knowledge, probably a person known to them; possibly even a parent.

The pathologist’s medical detective work had thus provided a few facts for the police to build up an investigation. The adipocerous state of the bodies suggested death had occurred between eighteen months and two years previously, and hence the boys would have gone missing during the late summer or autumn of 1911. Their ages were known fairly precisely and also their heights. The shabby quality of their clothing combined with the poorhouse stamp on one of the shirts indicated impoverished family circumstances. Armed with these details the police soon discovered that two boys, aged seven and four years, had disappeared from the Winchburgh area in November 1911. Their father, Patrick Higgins, a former soldier, was a widower who had been imprisoned for failing to maintain his children. The two boys were looked after in the poorhouse at Dysart while their father served his jail sentence.

Enquiries among local men who knew Higgins made it plain that he had been seen with the boys one night in November and, when asked how they were, replied that he had found a home for them. The police swiftly collected a number of witnesses’ statements which justified issuing a warrant for Higgins’s arrest. He was apprehended in Broxburn and, in due course, tried for murder at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. His defence, based on a history of epilepsy, was that he was of unsound mind when he killed his sons. Despite medical evidence supporting this claim, the jury brought in a guilty verdict by unanimous decision but with a recommendation to mercy on account of the time which had elapsed since the crime was committed.

Higgins was not granted a reprieve and his execution was fixed for 1 October 1913. Sydney Smith attended the hanging. ‘It was the first time I had seen a man hanged,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘and I found it rather an unpleasant experience; especially as I had been partly instrumental in bringing him to the gallows.’ Smith also gave a dispassionate account of the execution, remarking that the magistrates’ clerk had assured news reporters afterwards that Higgins had been calm and his death instantaneous. It worried Smith that when he tested the pulse of the executed man, a feeble heartbeat was still discernible. He accepted that with the neck broken and the spinal cord severed, death was practically instantaneous. But there was always the nagging doubt that, with continued circulation of the blood, a degree of consciousness might still be present.

Alongside Smith’s evident compassion went his hard-headedness. He had the teacher’s instincts and as his first important case had presented him with an uncommon example of adipocere, he resolved to keep a specimen for subsequent demonstration purposes. With Harvey Littlejohn’s startled approval he secured his specimens – two heads, an assortment of limbs and the internal organs – which he had parcelled up and took with him on the train to Edinburgh. He and Littlejohn survived a nervous journey, ignoring the quizzical looks from fellow passengers disturbed by the unpleasant stench which seemed to be associated with their luggage. The specimens of adipocere ended up in the University’s Forensic Medicine Museum where they were used to teach generations of students.

Thoroughly captivated by his first encounter in the realm of forensic medicine, Sydney Smith decided to drop his part-time ophthalmology work and to take up public health which was a better complementary discipline. By 1914, he had obtained an MD and taken a Diploma in Public Health which qualified him to move up the career ladder. In the summer of that year, he applied for the position of assistant to Dr Hamilton, Principal Medico-Legal Expert to the Egyptian Government. He was accepted for the post but the wheels of bureaucracy in Cairo ground so slowly that, tired of waiting, he took a job in his native New Zealand.

Smith was on board a ship bound for New Zealand when events in Europe led to the outbreak of the First World War. On reaching his destination he took up his position as Medical Officer of Health for Otago based at Dunedin but volunteered at once for military service. His application was not immediately accepted but in due course he joined the New Zealand Army Corps and carried out medical duties at various military camps which paralleled his civilian public health work. Despite a number of ingenious attempts to join the momentous events taking place on the other side of the world, he stayed in New Zealand until 1917, when he was summoned to Egypt.

Dr Hamilton had died unexpectedly and the government in Cairo cabled Dr Smith offering him the post of Principal Medico-Legal Expert which carried with it a lectureship in forensic medicine. The New Zealand Government raised no objection and the itinerant pathologist sailed for Egypt on board a troopship carrying men to the Middle East.

The medico-legal department which he inherited from Dr Hamilton was attached to the Ministry of Justice, known, rather curiously, as the Parquet, a French word referring to the floor of the courtroom. Egyptian law was not based on the British system but followed the Napoleonic Code. The head of the Parquet was the Procurator-General who controlled the police and decided which criminal cases should be sent for trial. His officers were magistrates who had powers to examine witnesses and make decisions about prosecutions.

The medico-legal section was part of this system and its employees were government officials. The late Dr Hamilton had pioneered the use of medical science in the investigation of crime in Egypt in the early days of such novelties as X-ray examination. In 1904, the distinguished Egyptologists, Mr (later Sir) Elliot Smith and Howard Carter, had caused a stir in Cairo by riding in a taxicab, with the mummy of Tuthmosis VI as a passenger, on their way to an X-ray unit. The section was not as comprehensively equipped as the new incumbent would have liked and he particularly regretted the lack of laboratory facilities. Such scientific analyses as the section required were carried out at either the School of Medicine or the Government Laboratory. Arthur Lucas, Director of the Chemical Department at the Government Laboratory was a distinguished forensic chemist and an enthusiastic collaborator. Nevertheless, Smith wanted to be able to carry out his own analytical work and he made the establishment of a laboratory one of his first priorities.

There followed an exciting period for the young pathologist, building up one of the finest medico-legal departments in the world and investigating a rich variety of cases. The Land of the Pharaohs with its fascinating history and singular customs was also a violent society which experienced a high murder rate. Smith viewed this as something of an anomaly, for he found the Egyptians to be good-natured and gentle people on the whole. Nevertheless, his services were called on to investigate 1,000 murder cases in one year. Indeed, as he put it many years later in his memoirs, ‘Murder was a business’.

This was amply borne out by a mass murder which came to light in Alexandria in 1920. Workmen excavating a trench stumbled across a mass grave as the result of unearthing some human bones when the side of the trench collapsed and undermined the floor of an adjacent house. Under Smith’s supervision, the earthen floor of the house was carefully taken up and the full extent of the discovery was exposed. Fourteen bodies, buried in two layers, were found in varying states of decomposition. All had been strangled and some of the corpses still had the ligatures fastened around their necks. Post-mortem examination confirmed that the victims were exclusively adult females, but it was Smith’s new-found understanding of Moslem customs which gave him a clue as to their origins. The women had all been circumcised which confirmed they were Moslems and yet, unusually, they still had their pubic hair. For reasons of hygiene it was the practice for women to shave that part of their body; the exceptions to this habit were prostitutes who believed their pubic hair had aphrodisiac properties.

Like prostitutes everywhere, the ladies of the street in Alexandria were vulnerable to violent predators and frequently disappeared as a result. With the help of the police, Smith was able to identify most of the dead women who had gone missing over a period of about two years. Understandably, the owners of the house with the mass grave under its floors were being urgently sought after. Two couples were eventually arrested and their sordid murder-for-profit scheme was revealed.

One of the characteristics of Egyptian prostitutes was that they carried their wealth about with them in the form of jewellery. They had no use for banks and converted their earnings to gold and jewellery which they wore as ornaments. Unfortunately, there were those who could see that apart from the normal dangers of their calling they also represented tempting targets for robbery. The foursome in the house in Alexandria contrived a system whereby the women patrolled the streets looking for suitably bejewelled prostitutes who they lured back to the house for the ostensible purpose of selling their services to a rich landowner. Once inside the house, they were easy prey for one of the men who slipped a noose over their heads and throttled them. The murder victim was then stripped of her finery and precious ornaments and her corpse buried under the floor. The perpetrators of these crimes were brought to justice and suffered the death penalty.