Medical Detectives (6 page)

The two men met on 12 February to review the scientific evidence, which included Webster’s analyses. Large amounts of arsenic had been found in the liver and large intestine, the latter particularly indicating that poison had probably been administered within twenty-four hours of death. They appeared, together with John Webster, to give their evidence at the magistrates’ court at Hay-on-Wye. The evidence for poisoning was overwhelming and Major Armstrong was committed to trial for the murder of his wife.

The trial at Hereford produced another powerful line-up of forensic talent. Mr Justice Darling presided and, as was traditional in poisoning cases, the prosecution was headed by the Attorney-General, Sir Ernest Pollock, with the defence in the hands of the redoubtable Sir Henry Curtis Bennett. Spilsbury and Willcox once again appeared together to present the medical evidence.

Major Armstrong was a small man who liked to cut a dash as a military figure with his heavy, waxed moustache and army officer’s British warm overcoat. Weighing seven stone and standing five feet six inches tall, he was every bit the pocket soldier. He practised as a solicitor in Hay-on-Wye, which in the 1920s, was a small market town situated on the border of England and Wales. He was a well-known figure in the district, clerk to the local magistrates, a member of the local Territorial Army unit and a Freemason. This pillar of the community commanded respect by virtue of his position in the town’s social pecking order but people sniggered behind his back at his posturing and because it was widely known that he was completely under the thumb of his overbearing wife.

Katharine Armstrong, a rather gaunt-looking lady, was prone to hypochondria and dosed herself with homeopathic medicines. She did not like people touching her, even accidentally, abhorred smoking, ran meals in her home according to a strict timetable and thought nothing of humiliating her husband in public. ‘No wine for the Major’ was her curt instruction to servants at local social functions.

Mrs Armstrong was taken ill in August 1920 and her doctor, Tom Hincks, arranged for her to be psychiatrically examined. As a result, she was certified insane and admitted to an asylum near Gloucester. She returned after five months and a nurse was brought in to look after her. During February 1921, her health declined and she suffered bouts of severe illness involving vomiting and diarrhoea. Her condition deteriorated rapidly and a stark entry in Major Armstrong’s diary for 22 February read, ‘K died’. She was buried without fuss, the doctor having certified cause of death as gastritis.

The Major inherited his wife’s estate, amounting to some £2,000, and went on holiday. When he returned to Hay to what he doubtless imagined would be a new, trouble-free life, he encountered a problem in the shape of a rival young solicitor running a law practice from an office across the street from his own. The rival, a career-minded man by the name of Oswald Martin, was successful to the extent that some of Armstrong’s clients had transferred their business to him. In August 1921, the two men clashed over a property deal in which Armstrong, acting for the purchaser, had delayed completion for over a year.

Martin began to put pressure on the Major to complete. After several weeks, Armstrong, having failed to respond, suddenly invited Martin to take tea with him at his house. On 26 October, Martin made his way to Armstrong’s home at Cusop, just outside the town. They sat in the drawing room and drank tea and, at one stage, Armstrong offered his guest a buttered scone with the apology, ‘Excuse fingers’. Various pleasantries ensued and in due course Martin took his leave. Late that same evening, he was taken violently ill with severe vomiting. The doctor diagnosed a bilious attack but the sick man’s father-in-law who ran the town’s pharmacy, thought otherwise.

Knowing of Martin’s disagreement with Armstrong and being aware that he had taken tea with the Major, rang alarm bells with the chemist. He remembered that he had recently sold arsenic to Armstrong for the purpose of killing weeds. Apprehension grew stronger when Mrs Constance Martin recalled that a house guest had been taken ill after eating a chocolate from a box that had been delivered by the postman from an anonymous sender. It was agreed that the remaining chocolates and a sample of Oswald Martin’s urine should be sent for analysis.

Oblivious to the fomenting suspicions about his intentions, Armstrong began to pester Martin with further invitations to tea. These were declined politely but firmly and, after six weeks of waiting, the results of the analysis were made known. Both the urine sample and the chocolates contained arsenic. The wheels of officialdom now moved swiftly and, on the last day of the year, an unsuspecting Major Armstrong, strongly protesting his innocence, was arrested. When he was searched, a packet of arsenic was found in his jacket pocket. This was to weigh heavily against him at his trial.

Armstrong was tried at the Shire Hall, Hereford in April 1922 before Mr Justice Darling; he pleaded ‘Not Guilty’. The first expert witness for the prosecution was Spilsbury. He gave a report of his post-mortem findings and made it clear that a fatal dose of arsenic was ingested by Katharine Armstrong within twenty-four hours of her death. With the aid of a drawing depicting the human alimentary system, he pointed out the organs which had been subjected to analysis.

Sir Henry Curtis Bennett in his cross-examination of the pathologist tried to find an alternative to murder, such as a single, self-administered dose of arsenic on the part of a woman who had only recently been discharged from a mental institution. Try as he might, Sir Henry could not persuade Spilsbury to modify his views and the prosecution case strengthened when Webster and Willcox gave their evidence supporting his opinions. But Armstrong’s final undoing was self-inflicted when he went into the witness box. During a six-hour ordeal he answered over 2,000 questions but the crucial exchange was with the judge. Darling asked him about the packet found in his pocket which contained enough arsenic to kill a human being and which he explained was for killing dandelions. Pressed to explain his laborious technique for dosing individual dandelions, his lame excuse was that it seemed ‘the most convenient way’.

In his summing-up, Mr Justice Darling drew the attention of the jury to Spilsbury’s evidence. He highlighted the pathologist’s manner as much as his testimony. ‘Do you remember Dr Spilsbury?’ he asked. ‘How he stood and the way in which he gave evidence? Did you ever see a witness who more thoroughly satisfied you that he was absolutely impartial, absolutely fair, absolutely indifferent as to whether his evidence told for the one side or the other?’ Where he had merely impressed before, Spilsbury now seemed to have been gifted with something close to infallibility. In any event, the weight of the evidence against Armstrong, though circumstantial, was overwhelmingly in favour of guilt. He was convicted of murder and hanged at Gloucester Prison on 31 May 1922. In December of that year, Spilsbury received a letter from Mr Bonar Law, the Prime Minister, telling him that he had been awarded a knighthood.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury was soon in the news again, this time in connection with a case of murder and dismemberment, the solution of which many believed to be his greatest technical achievement. The crime committed by Patrick Mahon was discovered by chance. Mahon, a handsome man with charming ways, found married life somewhat dull and elected for the role of the philanderer. Worried about his unexplained absences from home, Mrs Mahon decided to search his clothes for some item, a letter perhaps, which might give a clue as to his actions. She found a cloakroom ticket issued at London’s Waterloo station. A friend helped with her enquiries and they exchanged the ticket for a locked Gladstone bag. By prising open the ends of the bag, Mrs Mahon’s companion, a former railway policeman, found some bloodstained female clothing and a knife. He immediately went to the police.

Mahon was picked up by the police when he appeared at Waterloo station to retrieve his bag. His explanation that the bag had been used for carrying dog meat immediately collapsed for it had already been established that the bloodstains were of human origin. Close interrogation of Mahon led the Sussex Police to a bungalow at Pevensey on the stretch of the Sussex coast known as The Crumbles. He had rented it in a false name at a charge of three and a half guineas a week. On 4 May 1924, Scotland Yard detectives accompanied by Spilsbury made an examination of the bungalow. What they found ranks as one of the most grisly murder cases in the history of British crime.

The rooms of the bungalow contained perfectly ordinary furniture and other articles and, at first glance, nothing appeared to be an immediate cause for concern. The casual observer might have thought it unusual, though, to find a saucepan full of liquid in the hearth of the living room fireplace while Spilsbury’s trained eye took in a number of phenomena which, even at that early stage, began to tell him a story. There were grease splashes on the fender and bloodstains on the carpet. Worse was to come when various receptacles in that house of horrors were opened.

A hatbox in one of the bedrooms contained several pieces of flesh which had been sawn or cut up and a large trunk bearing the initials, EBK, contained four large pieces of a human body. A biscuit tin inside the trunk was filled with various internal organs. When the greasy scum on the surface of the liquid in the large saucepan was parted, a piece of boiled flesh floated to the surface. The ashes in the fireplace, when sieved, resulted in the discovery of bone fragments and so the trail of discovery continued. Protected by a long white apron and wearing rubber gloves, Spilsbury presided over the kitchen table which had been taken out into the garden. There, in bright May sunshine, he re-assembled the pieces of the body which had been brought to destruction in the bungalow. A contemporary press photograph depicted Spilsbury at work surrounded by watching police officers but the
disjecta membra
on the table had been air-brushed out of the picture in order not to offend public sensibilities.

Spilsbury spent eight hours at the bungalow and, at the end of the day, the remains returned with him to St Bartholomew’s Hospital where he worked through the night to complete his examination. His report was a model of exactitude. He concluded that the body ‘was that of an adult female of big build and fair hair. She was pregnant, in my opinion, at the time of death.’ From the mass of rotting, boiled and burned remains, he had ascertained that no portion was duplicated and, therefore, that he was dealing with a single body. He later described the case as a ‘jigsaw puzzle’ but it was a puzzle from which the main piece, the head, was missing.

The EBK, whose initials appeared on the trunk in the bungalow, was Emily Beilby Kaye, a shorthand typist in her late thirties. It had been her misfortune to encounter Patrick Mahon with whom she fell in love despite the knowledge that he was already married. At the age of thirty-eight, she possibly thought that she was on the shelf and was overwhelmed by Mahon’s winning ways. In March 1924, Emily told her friends she was engaged and that she planned to travel with her fiancé to South Africa where he had secured a job. Before embarking on this adventure, they decided to indulge in a ‘love experiment’, for which purpose Mahon rented the bungalow near Pevensey.

According to Mahon, the experiment went wrong when an argument broke out over his failure to obtain a passport allowing them to travel to South Africa as intended. He alleged that Emily attacked him, stumbling in the process, and fell heavily to the floor, fatally striking her head on the coal bucket. The knowledge that he had been systematically milking the poor, infatuated girl’s savings and had purchased a knife and a tenon saw on his way down to Sussex suggested a different explanation. One of the first objects that had caught Spilsbury’s eye when he entered the bungalow was the rusty tenon saw, it’s teeth clogged with flesh – mute testimony to the violence that had been inflicted on Emily Kaye’s body.

Patrick Mahon’s tale of accidental death unravelled in court in the face of the pathologist’s testimony. The coal bucket, a cauldron-shaped design standing on three legs, was a popular, cheaply made piece of hardware. It lacked the robustness of an inert object capable of causing a grievous wound to the head. As Spilsbury put it in his reply to defence counsel, J.D. Cassels, ‘If that particular cauldron, filled with coal, were the one referred to, a sufficiently severe blow to produce such injury would have crumpled the cauldron.’ In order that there should be no room for doubt on this question, prosecution counsel, Sir Henry Curtis Bennett, asked, ‘In your opinion could Miss Kaye have received rapidly fatal injuries from falling on the coal cauldron?’ Spilsbury’s uncompromising reply was simply, ‘No.’

An axe with a broken shaft was found in the bungalow and it was believed that this was the weapon which Mahon wielded with such force in striking Emily Kaye as to break the wooden handle. The victim’s head was never found. Mahon’s account was that he had burned the severed head in the fireplace at the bungalow and broken up the remains with a poker. No skull fragments were found in the ashes and doubt was cast on the possibility that an ordinary coal fire could have generated sufficient heat to destroy a head. In an experiment, reminiscent of that carried out by French experts investigating the Landru Case in 1921, Spilsbury succeeded in reducing a sheep’s head to ashes in four hours. The stove in Landru’s mansion at Gambais proved much more suitable for its task, consuming a sheep’s head in a quarter of an hour!