Medical Detectives (15 page)

Despite the difficult times on Egypt’s political front, Smith continued to teach at the School of Medicine at Kasr el Aine and, aided by his assistant Dr Ahmer Bey, he wrote his first book on forensic medicine which he intended should be printed in Arabic. There were no publishing outlets in Cairo in the mid-1920s so the redoubtable doctor decided to publish the book himself even to the extent of buying paper and supervising the block making. His determination was rewarded, for he had clearly seen a gap in the market and the book was a great success. This achievement was crowned for the authors by an invitation from King Fuad to attend an audience so that he might congratulate them. His Majesty was presented with a specially-bound copy of the textbook which he accepted for inclusion in the royal library.

For Sydney Smith this was the beginning of a distinguished literary thread in his career. In 1925, he published his
Forensic Medicine and Toxicology
which he modestly described as, ‘probably the first really well-illustrated work on the subject in Great Britain’. The textbook included a comprehensive chapter on ‘Wounds from Firearms’, an area of specialisation in which he was undoubtedly an expert. This paved the way for his editorship of
Taylor’s
Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence
, a work of great medical scholarship and learning, which in due course he would pass on to Keith Simpson, a forensic pathologist of the coming generation.

At the time of Smith’s emergence as a leading figure on the forensic scene, Simpson was a student at Guy’s in London. Another link in the chain of forensic evolution was being forged in Glasgow where John Glaister the younger was in general practice and researching his doctorate of science thesis on the subject of classifying mammalian hair. In due time, Glaister would succeed Smith in Egypt but, for the moment, ‘The Patriarch’ ruled supreme in his desert kingdom, building both his reputation and experience.

‘On the whole, the desert is a pretty good place for murder,’ Smith wrote in his memoirs. His reasons for saying this were, naturally, well-founded, for the desert is a quick destroyer of mortal flesh. Abandoned bodies are soon reduced to skeletons, thus making identification difficult. Apart from information regarding sex, race, age, height and build which could be gleaned from the bones of long dead human beings, Smith became adept at interpreting other phenomena. In one case there was an abnormal flexion in the hip joints of a skeleton, suggesting that at some stage the body had been doubled up. Remnants of rotted sacking at the scene led him to believe that the body had been thrust into a sack. Such proved to be the case when the murder suspect confessed to his crime. Bullets, bones, fingerprints, clothing and bloodstains were all part of the pathologist’s stock-in-trade.

Whereas the details of Spilsbury’s cases were faithfully recorded on his file cards but sadly never collated into a textbook, Smith used his case experience to very good effect. Editions of his
Forensic Medicine
published well into the 1940s, and still carried illustrations which derived from his work in Egypt.

One of the founding fathers of forensic science in Britain was Dr Alfred Swaine Taylor who, at the age of twenty-eight, was appointed Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Guy’s Hospital Medical School. The first edition of his influential textbook was published in 1836 and has been in print ever since. Like Smith in the next century, he had the opportunity to study the use of firearms and the wounds they inflicted at close hand. In his case it was in Paris during the 1830 revolution. Taylor’s textbook was regarded as the ‘bible’ by students of forensic medicine and it was perhaps fitting that Sydney Smith should succeed to its editorship. The appointment was certainly a mark of the high esteem in which he was held.

While on leave in Edinburgh in the summer of 1926, Smith and his wife called on Harvey Littlejohn. He found his friend and mentor in a troubled state. On 5 April, Littlejohn had carried out a post-mortem examination on the body of fifty-year-old Mrs Bertha Merrett. She had died of a gunshot wound to the side of the head in a position usually consistent with suicide. The casualty doctor at the Royal Infirmary who examined Mrs Merrett when she was admitted saw none of the usual signs associated with a suicidal head wound. There was an absence of tearing around the wound entry and no evidence of any powder deposits or singeing commonly seen in close-range gunshot wounds.

Smith thought it looked like a case of murder and this contention was borne out by the results of tests carried out with the weapon involved. Littlejohn was convinced and wrote a second report stating his opinion that suicide and accident could be ruled out, leaving murder as the likely option. The dead woman’s son, Donald, who had been in the house at the time of the shooting, was arrested and charged.

Donald Merrett was tried in February and it was in many ways a north-south confrontation of experts. The full weight of Scottish forensic expertise was assembled on behalf of the Crown from both Edinburgh and Glasgow – Harvey Littlejohn and John Glaister senior aided by Sydney Smith and Glaister junior. They were ranged against the mighty Spilsbury, backed by Robert Churchill, the gun expert, for the defence. The outcome, which is included in Chapter One, was a stalemate in the sense that the verdict of ‘Not Proven’ allowed Merrett his freedom after serving twelve months in prison for forgery. But, ultimately, the moral victory went to the Scots, for Smith’s prophetic words at the time, ‘That is not the last we’ll hear of young Merrett,’ were fulfilled many years later. In 1954, Merrett murdered his wife and mother-in-law and subsequently committed suicide.

The Merrett trial proved to be a turning point for Smith. He believed that the stress created by the case was a contributory factor to Harvey Littlejohn’s death in 1927. When he visited his former teacher in hospital before returning to Egypt, Littlejohn extracted a promise from him that he would come back to take his place when he died. Smith diverted the conversation away from such morbid considerations but, ten days later, Littlejohn was dead. Shortly after his return to Cairo, Smith received a letter from the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Edinburgh inviting him to apply for the post of Professor of Forensic Medicine. The position is a Regius Chair, being made not by the university but by the Crown. A letter soon arrived from the Secretary of State for Scotland offering Smith the appointment of the most prestigious Chair of Forensic Medicine in Britain.

After much heart-searching but with their young children’s education at the forefront of their minds, the Smiths decided to return to Britain. Sydney had spent eleven years in Egypt and it had proved a happy time domestically as well as being rewarding from a professional point of view. The Egyptian Government honoured him with the award of the Order of the Nile and his colleagues staged a farewell dinner at Cairo’s Turf Club. The dinner menu had a cartoon on its cover depicting Smith wearing a kilt and tarboosh and carrying a copy of
Taylor’s Principles
under his arm. It was an affectionate view of a man who had achieved a great deal to advance the standing of his profession. So, Sydney and Kitty and their children left the desert sun behind them in 1928 and headed for a grey Edinburgh. One possibly small consolation was that Kitty would no longer have to buy Keating’s Powder in the large quantities needed to keep Sydney clear of fleas on his excursions into Egyptian crime dens.

Returning to Britain at the beginning of April, Smith was in time to follow the trial at the Old Bailey of Frederick Guy Browne and William Henry Kennedy charged with the murder of a police constable. He had read the press reports of the shooting in an Essex country lane the previous September, while in Cairo. It was a case in which firearms evidence played a major role and one in which the use of the comparison microscope, pioneered by Smith, represented a breakthrough in crime investigation in Britain. Robert Churchill, who had opposed his views in the Merrett case, was the expert called for the prosecution. Browne and Kennedy’s conviction rested almost entirely on ballistics evidence and Churchill’s biographer, Macdonald Hastings, was generous in acknowledging the stimulus which Smith had provided by developing the new techniques. For his own part, Smith said, ‘I followed the case with an almost proprietary interest.’

Smith soon immersed himself in the work of the university and, although he had succeeded Harvey Littlejohn in the Chair of Forensic Medicine, he was not appointed Chief Surgeon to the Edinburgh Police. That post had been taken by Littlejohn’s assistant, Dr Douglas Kerr, who made a considerable success of it. Smith was too big a man to harbour anything more than a few regrets but there is no doubt that he was disappointed at not having routine access to police work. He also missed the variety and exotic nature of the sort of cases he had encountered in Egypt. But compensation lay in the opportunity to appear as an expert witness in important criminal cases, some of which would justly be described as
causes célèbres
.

He was soon to find himself at odds again with the pre-eminent forensic expert of the day, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, when they were drawn against each other in one of the great trials of the 1920s. Spilsbury was at the peak of his impressive career. He had featured in most of the important murder cases of the century and was immensely respected by the public. But he was neither traveller nor innovator, qualities which gave Sydney Smith greater depth. What Sir Bernard possessed was single-mindedness and sureness of reputation, while Smith was largely unknown to the public and was thought of chiefly as an academic. The truth was that their experience was of equal quality but that Spilsbury had enjoyed the greater publicity.

The clash between these personalities took place at Lewes Assizes in March 1930 where Sidney Harry Fox was being tried for murder; not an ordinary murder but for the uncommon crime of killing his mother. Sixty-three-year-old Mrs Rosaline Fox perished in a fire in her bedroom at the Hotel Metropole in Margate on 22 October 1929. Her son had raised the alarm but too late to save his mother who had apparently been overcome by smoke and fumes. A verdict of accidental death was returned by a coroner’s court and Mrs Fox was buried in her native Norfolk.

It was only when the dubious nature of Sidney Fox’s character began to emerge that suspicion started to form. He had a record as a blackmailer and swindler and it appeared that six days before his mother died he had taken out two insurance policies on her life. As a result of enquiries by Chief Inspector Hambrook of Scotland Yard, Sidney Fox was taken into custody. Meanwhile, his mother’s corpse was exhumed and a post-mortem carried out by Spilsbury. The pathologist concluded that Mrs Fox had been strangled and her son was charged with murdering her.

Sydney Smith was asked by Fox’s solicitor to give evidence for the defence. After carefully examining the medical aspects of the case, he agreed to appear as an expert witness. The details of the trial for murder that ensued are covered in the preceding chapter. Apart from a man’s life, what was also at stake was the reputation and integrity of Britain’s foremost forensic experts. Smith was as well practised in the role of giving expert testimony as was Spilsbury, but he lacked the public acclaim. From the outset, he was intrigued by Spilsbury’s post-mortem report on Mrs Fox and found it remarkable that Sir Bernard concluded from the medical evidence that she had died of ‘asphyxia due to manual strangulation’. There appeared to be no external signs of injury and a complete absence of the usually unmistakable indications of strangulation. As Smith noted later, ‘a person being strangled fights like mad’ and, even though elderly, will struggle furiously to pull away the constricting hands.

The very nature of such a fight for life causes marks and scratches on the neck and, often, minor injuries around the mouth and nose. The unsuccessful struggle to draw air into the lungs results in blueing of the lips and ears and frothing at the mouth and nose, with the tongue frequently protruding. Moreover, there is customarily bruising of the neck muscles as the strangler tightens his grip in order to overcome the victim’s struggles, with the result that the delicate internal structures of the throat are damaged. Spilsbury found none of these classic signs, yet was firm in his conclusion that death was due to strangulation.