Medical Detectives (8 page)

Spilsbury’s meticulous attention to detail and his willing acceptance of a heavy workload was commented on by the coroners for whom he worked. There were some who thought he was unnecessarily zealous at times and, consequently, at fault for not maintaining a proper perspective. Even where the cause of death was demonstrably straightforward, he could not resist the temptation to extend a post-mortem examination and take samples for his own interest. His friend, William Willcox, told his son, ‘Spilsbury is a fool: he’ll kill himself with work done for nothing.’ Sadly, the truth of this was borne out in subsequent events, although, arguably, it was not for nothing.

He brought the same professional standards of competence to his routine work as he did to that which assumed national importance. Sometimes, he confounded his friends with his inflexible attitude, as on the occasion he was asked by Sir Walter Schroder, one of the London coroners, to take a second look at a body; ‘I never do that,’ was the reply.

At his peak, Spilsbury was carrying out 1,000 post-mortem examinations a year, the details of many of them ending up on his record cards. The habits of the loner which had been evident during his student days stayed with him during his professional career. He did not use a secretary and preferred to write his reports by hand, often in the grim surroundings of a mortuary while details were still fresh in his mind. He was a familiar and regular visitor at many of London’s mortuaries whose attendants respected him for his courtesy and habit of tipping.

He also spent a great deal of what others would have regarded as leisure time in his laboratory at home where he had facilities for sectioning and microscopy. Many hours of midnight oil were burnt in the service of forensic pathology and in the satisfaction of the singular motivation which drove him on. He had a sense of his own greatness which surfaced in the professional encounters engineered by those who wished to bring him down and which occasionally emerged in conversational exchanges.

Most of Spilsbury’s work kept him in London and, unlike Smith and Glaister, he did not seek experience abroad. London’s courts, with occasional excursion to the county assizes, were his parish but it was the one per cent of his case load constituting murder enquiries which continued to seize the headlines. In February 1927, he made one of his rare sorties out of London when he took part in a controversial trial in Edinburgh. What was even more unusual was that he appeared as an expert witness for the defence. The case concerned John Merrett who was charged with matricide, which ranks as one of the least practised forms of murder. By a strange coincidence, Spilsbury was to be involved in two cases of matricide in the space of three years.

In Edinburgh’s High Court of Justiciary, the man accused of murder, John Donald Merrett, was a teenager who had come to England with his mother from New Zealand. In 1926, he was a non-resident student at Edinburgh University and lived with his mother in a furnished flat where a daily maid attended to the routine domestic work. Young Merrett’s passion, however, was more for girls than learning, with the consequence that he ducked lectures and quickly consumed his allowance of ten shillings a week.

In March 1926, an apparently tranquil domestic scene in the Merrett household was shattered by the sound of a gunshot. Mrs Bertha Merrett had been writing letters at her bureau in the sitting room. Her son was sitting in a chair reading and the maid was working in the kitchen. Startled by the noise, the maid rushed into the sitting room to be met by Merrett, who exclaimed, ‘My mother has shot herself.’ Mrs Merrett lay on the floor bleeding from a head wound and an automatic pistol lay on the bureau. She was still alive when taken to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary where she lingered in a semi-conscious state for two weeks.

She died on 1 April from meningitis but not before she had spoken about her recollections of what had taken place. She recalled that her son was being a nuisance by interrupting her while she was writing letters and that she told him to go away and stop annoying her. She had no idea of what precisely happened next although she seemed surprised that a firearm was involved. Mrs Merrett was accorded a suicide’s burial.

The dead woman’s estate was left in trust for her son to inherit when he was twenty-five years old. In the meantime, in order to finance his playboy lifestyle, he borrowed money from his relatives. In the ensuing months, it became clear that during the last months of his mother’s life he had been milking her bank accounts by forging cheques. Police enquiries followed and, nine months after the shooting incident, eighteen-year-old Merrett was charged with both murder and forgery.

The trial for murder in Edinburgh brought together a number of leading figures from the medico-legal world. Two stalwarts from the forensic medicine scene in Scotland were called by the prosecution; Professor Harvey Littlejohn from Edinburgh and Professor John Glaister senior from Glasgow. The two professors were advised by Sir Sydney Smith, an outspoken critic of Spilsbury, who was on holiday in Edinburgh at the time, and assisted by Dr John Glaister. Spilsbury, on this occasion appearing for the defence, was partnered by Robert Churchill, the London gun expert with whom he had worked before.

The point to be settled was whether the shot that killed Mrs Merrett had been fired accidentally, deliberately to commit suicide, or as an act of murder. Doctors who had examined the injured woman when she was admitted to the infirmary observed no signs of blackening or tattooing around the wound in her right ear where the bullet had entered. Such evidence would be expected in a case of suicide when it is usual for the weapon to be held close to, or in contact with, the skin. It was reported that a great deal of blood had been washed away from the wound using water-soaked swabs and that the subsequent examination for powder tattooing was only made by means of the naked eye.

The absence of tattooing made it difficult to argue forcibly in favour of suicide. The experts called by the prosecution were inclined at first to the view that the shooting was ‘consistent with suicide’ but then changed their minds. This followed consultation with Sydney Smith, a man of acknowledged expertise in the field of forensic ballistics and the assessment of gunshot wounds, who said, ‘It looks to me like murder.’ He advised Littlejohn and Glaister to carry out a few tests with the weapon involved in the shooting to establish its discharge characteristics.

The Spanish-made .25 automatic was used to fire ammunition of the same manufacture as that used in the fatal shooting into paper targets at distances ranging from half an inch to twelve inches. At six inches, all signs of powder blackening around the bullet hole had disappeared, although a few tattoo spots were visible without the use of magnification. Aided by Professor Glaister, further experiments were carried out using an amputated limb obtained from a hospital operating theatre. The conclusion drawn in Glaister’s report was that while not entirely ruling out the possibility of a self-inflicted wound, he believed it was an improbable explanation. In other words, he opted for murder.

Spilsbury and Churchill carried out their own experiments using an identical firearm and a different batch of ammunition. The gunsmith advised that the absence of scorching or blackening around the wound was not significant. In the first place, superficial blackening might have been washed away by the flow of blood and, secondly, the particular ammunition which had caused the fatal injury employed smokeless flake powder which caused less discoloration than gunpowder.

Not satisfied with arguments unsupported by experiment, and as Churchill told him that firing at paper targets produced unrealistic results, Spilsbury also went in search of a supply of amputated limbs. Test firings into dead flesh at various distances proved to their satisfaction that flake powder did not tattoo the skin and that traces of blackening were only superficial. Consequently, their opinion was that in the circumstances of the shooting, suicide was a distinct possibility.

The prosecution’s experts did not give the impression that they were entirely convinced by their own arguments and Professor Glaister, in particular, resorted frequently to the use of the word ‘probable’ to qualify his statements. Defence counsel, Craigie Aitchison, drew out this hesitation in cross-examination and he also distinguished himself when Spilsbury was called by addressing his expert as ‘Saint Bernard’. Spilsbury’s contribution in support of Robert Churchill’s testimony was given with customary precision. In essence, his opinion was that he had found nothing that was inconsistent with the notion of suicide. On the vital question regarding the significance of powder blackening around the wound, he felt that no firm conclusion could be drawn in circumstances where there had been considerable bleeding and subsequent cleaning of the wound.

The jury returned a verdict of Not Proven on the murder charge but found Merrett guilty of forgery. He was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. After serving his sentence, he married a teenage girl, inherited £50,000 and changed his name to Chesney. It was as Ronald Chesney that in 1954 he murdered his wife and mother-in-law and finally shot himself. Spilsbury was dead himself by then but his part in helping Merrett to retain his freedom in Edinburgh twenty-seven years earlier did not go unremarked. Indeed Sir Sydney Smith demonstrated some venom when he wrote in his memoirs, ‘The slackness of the police and the credit given to the misleading evidence of Spilsbury and Churchill, who had made a mistake and were too stubborn to admit it, allowed Merrett to live – and to kill again.’ Thus, Spilsbury’s excursion into the realm of the defence expert was pursued by controversy.

A few weeks after the case against Merrett was found controversially Not Proven, Spilsbury was involved in an enquiry that was merely sensational – it concerned a trunk deposited at the luggage office at Charing Cross railway station in London. It had been left on 6 May 1927 and was soon the subject of attention on account of the awful stench which it emitted. The trunk was opened under police supervision and it was not long before Spilsbury had the task of making a close examination of its contents.

The putrefying remains in the trunk proved to be the dismembered body of a woman. From bruises and other indications, Spilsbury was able to ascertain that the woman, whose identity was unknown, had been asphyxiated. Articles of clothing in the trunk carried laundry marks and one bore a tab with the name, ‘P. Holt’, printed on it. The garments were traced to an address in Chelsea and the body in the trunk was identified within twenty-four hours as that of Minnie Bonati, a married Italian lady of promiscuous inclinations who had been working as a cook.

Within a week, a taxi driver had come forward to report that on 6 May he had been hired by a man who lived in Rochester Row to drive him to Charing Cross railway station. He easily remembered the incident as his fare needed assistance to move a heavy trunk. A search of the premises resulted in the discovery that an estate agent by the name of John Robinson, who rented a furnished room in the building, was absent. Robinson was apprehended in London on 19 May and, after a false start, when neither the taxi driver nor the porter at Charing Cross left luggage office could positively identify him, he gave himself away during questioning.

Robinson’s story was that he had met Mrs Bonati and taken her back to his office. There, she had demanded money and became aggressive. She hit out at him and, in the resulting scuffle, he retaliated and she fell, dazed, to the floor. Later, he found that she was dead and, faced with disposing of her body, decided on dismemberment. By an extraordinary coincidence or piece of copycat planning, Robinson went in search of a suitable knife and found what he wanted at the shop in Victoria Street where, three years previously, Patrick Mahon had bought his implements of destruction. He then obtained a trunk in Brixton and, under the very noses of the officers of Rochester Row police station, had it transported with its grim contents to Charing Cross.

Robinson’s thin story line was readily disproved in court and his trial for murder lasted only two days. The medical evidence proved conclusively that the bruises on Bonati’s body were not the result of a fall but of a succession of blows followed by asphyxiation. Asked how the bruises had been caused, Spilsbury’s reply was characteristically direct; ‘Most of them were caused by direct violence,’ he said. In what must have been seen as virtually a lost cause by the defence, the indefatigable Dr Bronte was produced to repute Spilsbury’s findings and lend weight to the accused man’s account of an accidental death. His arguments proved equally thin and Robinson was found guilty.