Medical Detectives (23 page)

Both of his major pieces of research involved the minutiae of crime investigation. Forensic pioneers such as Dr Edmond Locard at the University of Lyon had shown the potential for solving crimes by examining trace evidence at the crime scene on both victim and suspect. The fact that even the slightest contact results in a transfer of such mundane materials as distinctive hairs and fibres, while violent contact may involve biological traces such as blood, saliva or semen, opened up a whole vista for forensic scientists. The methods for examining trace evidence have grown ever more sophisticated with the use of advanced chemical analysis. When Glaister was telling his students about the ‘key of interchange’, as he called the concept of trace evidence, he might have dreamed of identifying body fluids as unerringly as fingerprints. But it was to take well over half a century before the first murder conviction would be secured by means of genetic fingerprinting.

Glaister, father and son, frequently answered calls from the police together. ‘Young John’ had a happy apprenticeship and readily deferred to his father’s experience. But, all the while, he was building up his own expertise and, in the year that he helped his father on the Merrett case, he was awarded his doctorate of medicine and was also called to the Bar at the Inner Temple. His work on the precipitin test was to have slightly ironic consequences for the father and son relationship when they both appeared as prosecution witnesses in a case tried at Edinburgh’s High Court of Justiciary. The defence challenged the reliability of blood tests and asked ‘Old John’ why he had been so critical of them in a textbook he had written. Glaister senior answered that he had changed his views in light of recent advances and said that future references in his textbook would be amended. ‘Young John’ was unaware of this when his turn came to give evidence. As the author of the new research in blood testing, he was closely questioned by the defence. He was astute enough to realise that counsel was leading him on to say that he was an expert in this particular field, with the implication that Glaister senior knew little about these new advances and was merely relying on his son’s knowledge. Sensing the trap, ‘Young John’ replied by saying that, although he carried out all the tests, the results were checked and corroborated by his father.

The Merrett case, tried in Edinburgh in 1927, brought together both the established and the emerging forensic talent of the time. The Glasgow team comprised Professor John Glaister and his son, who would be his successor in due course, and the Edinburgh pair were Professor Harvey Littlejohn and Sydney Smith, his eventual successor. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, of course, was one of the major participants and the full story has been told in Chapter One. The Glaisters’ interpretation of the evidence, favouring murder rather than suicide, was shown by subsequent events to have been the more correct, although it was not accepted as such at the time.

Later that year, ‘Young John’ completed his thesis on mammalian hair and he was awarded a doctorate of science. He thus completed an intensive period of study which set him up as a highly qualified forensic practitioner and one thing was sure – there would be no shortage of opportunities to exercise his skills. Such an opportunity occurred in 1928 when, following Harvey Littlejohn’s death, Sydney Smith succeeded him in the chair at Edinburgh. This left a vacancy in Egypt when Smith gave up his eleven-year tenure of office and ‘Young John’ was invited to apply for the Chair of Forensic Medicine at the University of Cairo. Smith told him he would see almost as many medico-legal cases in a week in Egypt as he would see in an average year in Britain. Glaister was attracted by the proposition, not least because he believed that forensic medicine should be put on an international footing. In November 1928, John Glaister, with his wife and two daughters, sailed from Liverpool for Port Said.

With an average of 150 post-mortem examinations a month, the new professor soon realised the correctness of Sydney Smith’s prediction. ‘Shooting and stabbing were two favourite methods of murder in Cairo,’ he wrote, and, ‘There was nothing unusual in finding half a dozen overnight murders requiring attention when I arrived for work after breakfast’. Egypt’s ancient traditions enabled him to write a footnote in the medical textbooks regarding the precipitin test. Professor Douglas Derry, Head of the Anatomy Department and a keen Egyptologist, invited John Glaister to accompany him on a number of ‘digs’. The opportunity arose to be present at the unwrapping of a mummy from the Twelfth Dynasty. He took tissue samples from various organs and subjected them to the precipitin test, achieving positive results with material dating back between 3 and 4,000 years. The point was made that the test was reliable even when used on very old samples.

Access to ancient mummified material also enabled him to obtain perfectly preserved samples of hair to add to his already large collection. Indeed, his work on the subject had by now been set out in book form, comprising an atlas of 1,200 micro-photographs, with a very long title.
A Study of Hairs and Wools Belonging to the Mammalian Group of Animals, including a Special Study of Human Hair, Considered from the Medico-Legal Aspect
, was published in Cairo in 1931. The expense of printing the book was undertaken by the Egyptian Government and the author gratefully dedicated the work to King Fuad. Like his predecessor, Sydney Smith, he was invited to meet the King at the Abdine Palace which he found richly carpeted and full of pomp. The necessity for their father to wear court dress and a tarboosh on such occasions inevitably reduced the Glaister children to a state of girlish giggles.

Like his fellow forensic practitioners, John Glaister found that crime seemed to follow him even while on holiday. He and his wife were in Cyprus in 1928 when an important case came to trial involving two doctors accused of performing an abortion. As soon as Glaister’s presence on the island was known, he was asked to help prepare the case for the Crown. A twenty-four-year-old Cypriot woman had died following an alleged attempt to induce an abortion. She had been treated in a clinic in Nicosia where she died following surgery which had resulted in a perforation of the uterus and caused a haemorrhage. Twelve hours later, without explanation, a man delivered the young woman’s body wrapped in a sheet to her parents’ home. Her history was that she had been having problems with menstruation and doctors prescribed tonic medicine and internal syringing. No suggestion was made that she might be pregnant, but her mother was advised that an operation was needed to scrape the uterus. It was this operation, poorly carried out, which had resulted in the woman’s death. The post-mortem examination indicated that she was pregnant and that the surgical procedure performed by two doctors at the clinic amounted to an attempted abortion. The jury also took this view with the result that one doctor was found guilty of manslaughter while charges against the second doctor were dropped on grounds of insufficient evidence.

It was while on holiday in Cyprus the following year that John Glaister took another decisive step in his career. ‘Old John’ had written to tell him that he had decided to retire after thirty-three years in the professorial chair at Glasgow. There was thus an opportunity for the son to apply for the vacancy created by the father’s departure, although he realised it was a hard act to follow. He acknowledged that ‘Old John’ was, in all respects, a living legend, yet the challenge was there and he was eminently qualified to succeed. He applied for the Regius Chair of Forensic Medicine to the Secretary of State for Scotland and awaited developments. Asked if he would be willing to attend for interview, he replied that he would let his application speak for him.

During the last weeks of their holiday in the Troodos Mountains in Cyprus in September 1931, John Glaister received a cable informing him that he had been appointed to the chair. ‘Young John’ had come of age and was now truly his own man. There were regrets at leaving Egypt but, from a professional point of view, he found the climate too deferential. While many men would have been flattered to command such admiration, John Glaister found it uncomfortable; ‘Every man now and again needs to be told he is talking nonsense – even if only to give him the chance to prove himself correct,’ he wrote later. So, after three years in the land of the Pharaohs, the Glaisters said their farewells and left to return to Scotland. Egypt had been but a brief interlude although, as events turned out, the connection had not been broken.

John Glaister was aware of the sort of remarks his succession to his father’s position might provoke. But in truth, his professional credentials and reputation were beyond criticism and he had firm ideas about the future direction of forensic medicine. Certainly ‘Old John’ did not linger at the university to offer advice or, worse still, to interfere, ‘… he left the building and never returned to it,’ said his son. Glaister realised that he would inevitably face opposition from the Old Guard, those who had been in practice while he was still a student, but he resolved to plot a course that would further both the independence and international outlook of his professional calling.

There was an early clash when he was privately taken to task by a Procurator Fiscal on account of his practice of sometimes appearing as a witness for the prosecution and, on others, for the defence. The Procurator told Glaister he objected to him giving evidence against the Crown doctors and ordered him not to do so again, threatening that he would not be asked to appear for the Crown in future. John Glaister was horrified at what he had been told and he invited the Procurator to repeat his instructions in the presence of witnesses. This was greeted with a sullen silence and the professor left, marking his disgust by slamming the door.

After just a few months in his new post John Glaister was asked by the University Principal if he would be willing to return to Egypt to lecture for a three-month period every year. The Egyptian Government had written to the university making this special request and it was agreed that he could be released during the non-teaching term. The Glaisters’ return to Egypt was a pleasant experience, marred only by bad news from home. Muff had to return to England to see her brother who was dangerously ill, leaving John to see out the rest of the tour on his own. While at sea on board the
Orontes
bound for England in 1931, he received a cable informing him that both his father and mother had died. They succumbed at home within hours of each other from a virulent influenza epidemic which was raging in Britain. ‘Old John’s’ passing and a sense of a chapter closing persuaded John Glaister to give up his arrangement with the Egyptian Government and despite attempts to dissuade him he stuck to his decision.

He threw himself whole-heartedly into his work at the university using his experience and quiet authority to guide a generation of students whose professional calling would one day take them into the witness box. It was a lonely place, he told them, and one where any hint of posing would be seen for what it was. ‘I’ve always tried to be as natural as possible when giving evidence,’ he wrote, in the belief that professional stature and a thorough knowledge of the subject were the chief requirements. He extolled the virtues of being concise, a habit he had picked up from ‘Old John’ whose answers to the probing questions of counsel frequently consisted of a string of affirmatives and negatives. He believed that the witness who sought to expand on his answers was a boon to opposing counsel; as the maxim had it, ‘A witness in saying more than he ought frequently says more than he means’. Above all, he believed in the powers of accurate and close observation. A sensible working philosophy for the forensic expert was that things are not always what they seem.

In 1935, John Glaister’s approach to forensic medicine was put to the test in a sensational murder case involving a member of his own profession whose criminal activities spilled over into Scotland. The story began on 29 September when a young Edinburgh woman visiting Dumfriesshire crossed a bridge on the Edinburgh-Carlisle road. Glancing down into the stream running in a ravine beneath the bridge she saw what she thought was a human arm protruding from some sort of wrapping material. Susan Johnson returned to her hotel at Moffat and told her brother what she had seen. Alfred Johnson went to the spot and made a closer inspection; he discovered various human remains wrapped in newspapers and pieces of clothing. He called the police.

When the area was searched by officers of the Dumfriesshire Constabulary, four bundles were recovered, each containing portions of a human body together with other pieces strewn about the ravine. One bundle wrapped in a blouse contained two upper arms and four pieces of flesh; another consisted of a pillowcase, the grisly contents of which included two upper arm bones, two thigh bones, two lower leg bones and nine pieces of flesh. A third parcel wrapped in a piece of sheet enclosed seventeen pieces of flesh, and a fourth contained part of a trunk and the lower parts of two legs including the feet. There were also two heads, one of which was wrapped in a pair of child’s rompers. These were the immediate discoveries but, as the police extended their searches, further portions of bodies were retrieved. Nearly a month later, a foot was found at a point nine miles distant from the original discoveries and, later still, on 4 November, a right forearm and hand wrapped in newspaper were discovered.