Medical Detectives (3 page)

The Crippen case was a watershed for Spilsbury. It was a signpost on a road to a unique career which embraced a dozen at least of the most sensational murder cases in the history of English crime. His appearance at the Old Bailey to give expert testimony fixed his name and personality in the minds of the public at a time when reports of the great criminal trials attracted massive newspaper readership. It was a time before charisma had been invented but there was no doubt that Spilsbury had that indefinable quality which would mark him out as a figure commanding public attention.

As with many charismatic figures, providence provided Spilsbury with material for the proper exercise of his talent. In the wake of the Crippen trial, Augustus Pepper decided to withdraw from public life and recommended Spilsbury to succeed him as Home Office pathologist. This meant working as assistant to Willcox who was now Senior Home Office pathologist. Willcox welcomed the new appointment and so began an outstanding professional partnership that lasted for nearly thirty years. By a strange paradox, the last engagements of the two men included courtroom appearances on opposing sides. But what lay before them in 1911 was a succession of extraordinary criminal cases which began in September of that year with another murder in north London.

Frederick Henry Seddon lived with his wife and their five children at 63 Tollington Park, Islington less than a mile away from the former residence of the Crippens. Seddon was a district superintendent for the London and Manchester Industrial Assurance Company. After he was promoted in 1909, he moved his family into a better district, taking a lease on a three-storey house. He used the basement front room as an office and the safe which he installed there frequently contained large sums of money which he took in from the collectors whom he supervised. Seddon charged the insurance company 5
s
a week for the use of part of his house as an office. A fascination for money was his singular characteristic; he loved the chore of counting the gold and silver into little piles on his desk. It was said of him that gold was his god and that his temple was the Finsbury Park branch of the London and Provincial Bank.

An unhealthy love of money for its own sake not unnaturally inspired greed and meanness. He charged his teenage sons for their board and lodgings and he decided to put the spare accommodation at his house to good use by advertising for a lodger. The successful applicant was Eliza Mary Barrow, a forty-nine-year-old spinster, who took the upper rooms for 12
s
6
d
a week. Seddon’s tenant was a somewhat eccentric person who moved in with a retinue of three retainers to look after her needs. With his talent for meanness, Seddon immediately recognised a similar trait in Eliza Barrow. She too liked the miser’s feel of money and kept considerable sums of gold in a box in her room. He also discovered that she had interests in property and owned large investments.

Two of Miss Barrow’s companions left after an argument with Seddon and only Ernie Grant, a ten-year-old orphan, remained to do her bidding. Seddon now stepped into a protective role, offering the services of his sixteen-year-old daughter at a shilling a day to look after her. He also offered to put her cashbox in his basement safe in order to provide better security for her savings which he soon ascertained amounted to £400 in gold and bank notes.

By an insidious process of persistent questioning and probing, Seddon obtained a complete evaluation of Miss Barrow’s income from property and investments. Little by little, he persuaded her, over a period of fourteen months, to transfer all her assets to his management. The arrangement was that in return for assuming the burden and responsibility of maintaining her affairs, he would grant her a life annuity of £52. All was harmony it seemed and in the summer of 1911, the Seddons took Eliza Barrow with them on holiday to Southend.

On their return to Tollington Park, life returned to normal except that in an exceptionally hot summer the Seddon household was troubled with flies. Mrs Seddon bought a supply of arsenical fly-papers from the nearby chemist shop at the bargain price of four for three pence. At the time, Miss Barrow was suffering a bilious attack and she was bothered by flies in her bedroom. Mrs Seddon very kindly put the fly-papers in saucers and added some water in the prescribed manner. She placed two on the mantelshelf and two on the chest of drawers.

Miss Barrow’s bilious attack was of long duration and by 5 September necessitated daily visits by the doctor, who was concerned at the weakness caused in his patient by continuous sickness and diarrhoea. By 12 September there was further deterioration and the doctor became anxious, indicating that he thought Miss Barrow was in some danger. Mrs Seddon stayed the night with her and fell asleep in the chair. When she awoke, she found Miss Barrow lying stiff in bed – she had died in the early hours of the morning. The doctor was informed and he issued a death certificate without seeing the body. Cause of death was given as ‘epidemic diarrhoea’.

Frederick Seddon’s first action was to search for the keys to the trunk which contained all the dead woman’s worldly goods – at least those which he had not already wheedled out of her. With his eagle eye for hidden treasure, he next searched the room and turned up a few sovereigns here and a few coppers there. His second action was to visit the undertaker and beat him down on price to £3 7
s
6
d
for what the funeral parlour described as a ‘nice turnout’. True to form, Seddon took 12
s
6
d
as his commission on the deal. Eliza Barrow went to her grave with few mourners. Ironically, she was buried at Islington Borough Cemetery at Finchley where, less than twelve months previously, Cora Crippen’s remains had been laid to rest. It proved to be no last resting place for Eliza Barrow, for within a few weeks her body was exhumed for examination by Doctors Spilsbury and Willcox.

Suspicion was first aroused by the dead woman’s cousin, Frank Vonderhahe, who called at the Seddons’ home. After a somewhat strained interview in which Seddon refused to impart any information regarding the late Eliza Barrow’s financial affairs or to produce her will, Vonderhahe voiced certain nagging doubts to the authorities. The Director of Public Prosecutions decided that further investigation was required and granted an exhumation order. Miss Barrow’s body was disinterred on 15 November and Spilsbury carried out a post-mortem examination. His record card noted that the internal organs were ‘extremely well-preserved’ and that ‘no disease was apparent’. The remarkable state of preservation after nine weeks of burial was characteristic of arsenical poisoning.

Establishing the exact cause of death fell to Willcox, aided by John Webster, the Home Office analyst. Mindful of the furore created by Taylor in 1859, the analysts had been working on a modified method of analysing for arsenic which was both quick and accurate. Their qualitative test, used for the first time in the Seddon case, became the standard procedure and was used as such for nearly thirty years. The amount of arsenic found in the organs of Miss Barrow’s body was estimated at 131.57 milligrams (2.01 grains) and the total content in the body would have amounted to considerably more. The presence of arsenic in the hair and fingernails indicated that the poison had been ingested during a period of about two weeks prior to death. In light of this information, the coroner’s inquest reached a verdict of ‘death due to arsenical poisoning administered by some person or persons unknown’. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Frederick Seddon and he was apprehended in the street near his home on 4 December.

Frederick and Margaret Seddon were tried at the Old Bailey in March 1912, the proceedings being noted for the presence of a number of illustrious legal figures. In keeping with tradition in cases of poisoning, the prosecution was led by the Attorney-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, a future Lord Chief Justice of England. He was assisted by two other counsel who would reach great distinction, Richard Muir and Travers Humphreys. The defence was headed by Edward Marshall Hall and Mr Justice Bucknill presided over what, for the time, was a long trial lasting ten days. The trial was unusual too in that both defendants, man and wife, faced a capital charge involving one set of evidence, most of which was circumstantial.

Spilsbury, elegant in both dress and manner, was first into the witness box for the Crown. Under examination by the Attorney-General he related his chief post-mortem finding which was the remarkable state of preservation of the body. He described the condition as ‘very abnormal’ and added, ‘I was not able to account for it at the time the post-mortem examination was made, but since the analysis which has been made by Dr Willcox I think the preservation was due to the presence of arsenic in the body.’

Apart from some reddening of the intestines, he had found no sign whatever of any disease. He agreed that death might have resulted from syncope or heart failure. The inflammation of the intestine, considered in the absence of disease in any other organ, would, he agreed, be equally indicative of death due to epidemic diarrhoea. But, there was the evidence of the unusual preservation of the body to be taken into account. All things considered, he believed the post-mortem evidence was more consistent with acute arsenical poisoning than with any other cause of death that had been suggested.

Seeking an alternative explanation for the state of preservation, defence counsel brought up the time-honoured phenomenon of the arsenic-eating peasants of the Styria region in Hungary. The Styrian habit of regularly eating arsenic and thereby acquiring immunity to its toxic effects was invariably raised at trials for poisoning by arsenic. It was introduced at Seddon’s trial by the defence in an attempt to show that Eliza Barrow died not from acute poisoning as argued by Spilsbury but from chronic poisoning. The implication was that Miss Barrow had been ingesting arsenic over a long period perhaps to improve her complexion by acquiring a pink glow to her skin in the manner suggested by Florence Maybrick to be the fashion in the 1880s. Consequently, it was suggested that, while she had arsenic in her body, and her corpse was well-preserved, she did not die of arsenical poisoning.

Spilsbury said that the body showed no features indicating that arsenic had been given over a prolonged period. He agreed with Willcox that about 5 grains had been ingested within three days of death and that a similar amount had probably preceded it. Attempts by the defence to move Spilsbury away from the acute poisoning explanation of Miss Barrow’s death failed completely. When Willcox went into the witness box, Marshall Hall asked him, ‘… taking the result of your various analyses, tests and examinations, what do you say was the cause of Miss Barrow’s death?’ Back came the unequivocal reply, ‘Acute arsenical poisoning.’

As part of his preparation for the case, Willcox carried out various tests with Mather’s fly-papers of the type found in the Seddons’ house. Each paper contained between 3.8 and 6.0 grains of arsenic – well in excess of the fatal dose of 2.0 grains. The arsenic could be leached out of the papers by pouring boiling water over them and leaving them to soak overnight. It was known that Miss Barrow had frequently drunk brandy as a medicinal aid during her illness. The spirit would have been an ideal medium in which to dispense a dose of tasteless and odourless solution of arsenic.

Marshall Hall rightly pointed out that there was not a shred of evidence that either of the Seddons had ever boiled a fly-paper. But the overall power of the circumstantial evidence was heightened by Frederick Seddon’s portrayal of greed and, hence, of motive, when he answered the Attorney-General’s questions. In his final speech for the Crown, Sir Rufus Isaacs appealed to the court’s idealism by referring not only to the content but also the tone of the testimony given by Spilsbury and Willcox. There was something about the way Spilsbury projected himself which inspired admiring references to his honesty. If he was embarrassed by such comment he did not show it sufficiently to prevent its repetition throughout his career.

As the Seddon trial drew to a close, Sir Rufus Isaacs said, ‘I would like in passing to say this, that in the course of a very long experience at the Bar I never remember hearing witnesses give evidence as Dr Willcox and Dr Spilsbury did, with more impartiality and more honesty in every word they uttered.’ This fulsome praise from the man who in less than a year would be appointed Lord Chief Justice of England, represented not only a great compliment to the two men concerned but it also marked a renaissance of forensic medicine.

In his closing speech, Sir Edward Marshall Hall argued for a reconstruction of events at 63 Tollington Park that allowed the possibility of Miss Barrow accidentally administering the fatal arsenic to herself. Counsel constructed an ingenious if unconvincing account of the way in which this might have occurred. But it was all too late. Seddon had already left an indelible impression on the jury and junior counsel, Gervais Rentoul, commented that when he went into the witness box ‘one felt that the shadow of the gallows had crept appreciably nearer’. The jury found Frederick Seddon guilty and his wife, Margaret, not guilty. The final drama came when Seddon was asked the traditional question, ‘Have you anything to say for yourself why the court should not give you the judgement of death according to law?’