Medical Detectives
Read Medical Detectives Online
Authors: Robin Odell
Dedicated to the memory of Joe Gaute, crime historian, publisher and friend.
I WISH TO THANK NON
, as always, for her patience and encouragement. Grateful thanks are also extended to Andrew Rose for his support and advice, to Annie Hepburn who processed all the words, to David and Ann Tolley for checking them, and to Alan Greeley for his assistance with illustrations.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of photographs but, in some instances, unsuccessfully. Where this is the case, acknowledgement is given to the original published source. I would also like to acknowledge the Joe Gaute archive of crime photographs and documents.
Foreword by Professor Bernard Knight CBE
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The Coming Man: Sir Bernard Spilsbury
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The Patriarch: Sir Sydney Smith
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The Professor: John Glaister
by Professor Bernard Knight CBE
IN SPITE OF THE CURRENT OBSESSION
of television producers portraying forensic pathologists as willowy blondes, aged twenty-five, this macabre occupation was dominated during the last century by a handful of mostly middle-aged or elderly men of all shapes and sizes, some of whom became ‘household names’.
Robin Odell has taken five of the most prominent of these and expertly welded their personal histories to their most notorious cases, producing an engrossing record of how homicide was investigated during the twentieth century.
As it seemed almost obligatory for such men to write their memoirs – or have them ‘ghosted’ for them – much of the material has already been published, but some of these books have their faults. The early biography of Spilsbury. in 1951, was really an adulatory homage and it took until 2007 for Andrew Rose to write a more realistic assessment of the great man – and now Robin Odell has again offered a balanced view of Sir Bernard.
Though I knew of all five – and had met them all except Spilsbury during my half-century forensic career – my main interest was reading about Keith Simpson and Francis Camps, who I knew so well and whose personalities could not have been more different.
When I left the army to look for a job, I turned up at St Pancras mortuary one morning, still in uniform, and found Camps up to his elbows in a corpse, the inevitable fag in mouth, and was laconically told to ‘start on Monday’ with not even a mention of a salary! How different from the formal, immaculate Simpson, with his archbishop’s voice that delivered superb lectures, compared with Camps’ disjointed ramblings. Yet they both had their strengths and weaknesses, though their personal differences were sometimes too publicly ventilated.
Writing a biography of an eminent professional is not easy, as I found when I did that of Milton Helpern, the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. It is hard to avoid trotting out a dry rehash of journalistic articles and court records, but Robin Odell, a veteran author of true crime, has imbued these pen-portraits with a true feeling of what the men were like, warts and all, offering a book that not only informs, but entertains.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF FORENSIC MEDICINE
in Britain is told through the lives of the five great pathologists who dominated the scene throughout most of the twentieth century. Their careers spanned seventy years of personal achievement and innovation which laid the foundations of modern crime scene investigation.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury was an iconic figure who put forensic pathology on the map with his involvement in the Crippen case. Headlines such as, ‘Spilsbury called in’, turned an essentially shy man into a celebrity. He was in essence a loner; an interpreter who exemplified the role of the expert witness. Sure of himself, certain of the facts and not requiring a second opinion, he stood tall in the witness box. In an age when capital punishment was still in use, his courtroom testimony made him an arbiter of life and death. A roll call of his cases reads like a catalogue of famous British murders. His conclusions, though, were often controversial and contested and remain so to the present day. He was the epitome of the expert; aloof, assured and respected.
His contemporary, Sir Sydney Smith, by contrast, was an innovator, a clubbable man who worked on a broad canvas and drew people towards him. Born in New Zealand, he pursued his training in Scotland, the spiritual home of forensic medicine. He honed his skills in Egypt, where he worked during the inter-war years, and pioneered the development of forensic ballistics. He returned to Edinburgh to concentrate on teaching and helped to put forensic studies onto a sound academic basis.
John Glaister also prospered in the Scottish tradition and played a major role in furthering his nation’s pre-eminent position in forensic medicine. He was a professor for thirty years at Glasgow University where he succeeded his father. His particular contribution was to apply scientific methods to the examination of trace evidence gathered at crime scenes. His work on the identification of hair was a significant breakthrough and, like Smith, he was willing to share knowledge and to call for specialist help when it was needed. This was evident in the Ruxton case when he pioneered photo-imposition as an identification technique.
Francis Camps was an organiser rather than an innovator. He had a vision of coordinating the emerging skills of the broader medico-legal profession and, to that end, created a world-class forensic department at London University. He had his share of important crime cases but was at his best when managing people and resources to advance the knowledge and professional status of forensic work. He was a founding member of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences which succeeded in bringing science, medicine and the law together to serve the ends of justice. Camps also reached out to the USA to add an international element to what he viewed as best practice.
Keith Simpson combined a number of talents as teacher and practitioner. He was also an important innovator, breaking new ground in the understanding of factors which determined time of death and helping to put forensic dentistry on the map as a means of establishing identity. Like his contemporaries, he was involved in many headline murder cases, Heath, Haigh and Christie being prominent among them. He was a highly effective communicator, noted for his succinct delivery of evidence in court, in addition to his lecturing and writing activities.
The five pathologists, each with their unique talents, represented a golden age of forensic development. Their careers overlapped to a considerable extent and there were strains of rivalry in their relationships at times. This was, perhaps, inevitable in the adversarial system employed in British courts which meant that experts were sometimes cast as opponents in the courtroom. As professionals, they did not always agree on the interpretation of evidence.
Despite their differences, they elevated the gritty, not to say, gruesome, business of examining the dead to a multi-faceted profession calling on every available scientific resource and discipline. Crime scene investigation as it is practised today owes a great deal to these pioneers for their questing spirit and innovative genius.
Robin Odell, 2013
THE COMING MAN
Sir Bernard Spilsbury
THE THIRTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD MAN
who stood in the witness box at the Old Bailey on 18 October 1910 was tall, good-looking and self-assured. He was well-dressed, sporting a red carnation in his buttonhole, and spoke clearly and calmly when addressed by counsel for the Crown. ‘I am a Bachelor of Surgery of Oxford University and I hold the position of pathologist at St Mary’s Hospital,’ he told the court. The man was Bernard Spilsbury, whose name would become a household term epitomising the ascendancy of the medical detective, and the occasion was the trial for murder of Hawley Harvey Crippen whose name gained notoriety as a fashionable expletive.
Dr Spilsbury was the most junior of the four experts called by the prosecution to present the medical evidence against Crippen. His appearance was brief, decisive and memorable. From his high perch in the wood-panelled courtroom, the Lord Chief Justice, bewigged and swathed in scarlet, questioned the young pathologist about his opinion. Spilsbury, unintimidated, replied, ‘I have an independent position of my own, and I am responsible for my own opinion, which has been formed on my own scientific knowledge … ’. Those present who understood the workings of the medico-legal world realised at once that they were witnessing something important. A young law student at the time, who would later achieve fame as a coroner, Bentley Purchase, remembered people leaving the court and saying of Spilsbury, ‘There is a coming man.’
Crippen was the inoffensive-looking husband of Kunigunde Mackamotski, a stage-struck woman better known as Cora or by her stage name, Belle Elmore. The couple settled in England in 1900 after Crippen was appointed to run the London office of the Munyon Company, a Philadelphia-based patent medicine firm. Crippen’s medical qualifications, described as obscure and probably acquired through the post, nevertheless allowed him to use the title of ‘Dr’. It is doubtful, though, that he would have been allowed by the General Medical Council to practise in England. His success as a sales representative was matched by that of his wife as a stage artiste; he presided over dwindling fortunes selling quack medicine and she obtained minor parts in the music halls. Neighbours observed that he always appeared to be subservient to her wishes. Small in stature and mild in manner, his demeanour contrasted sharply with Cora’s music-hall persona.
The Crippens lived at 39 Hilldrop Crescent in Camden Town in a gloomy house with a cellar. In January 1910, Crippen parted company with Munyons and began to run into debt. By this time, the little doctor was also running a double life with his teenage mistress, Ethel le Neve. They met secretly and shared warm embraces in the privacy of hotel bedrooms.
On 2 February 1910, Crippen told Ethel le Neve that his wife had gone to America. Ethel joined him at 39 Hilldrop Crescent and a couple of weeks later appeared at a charity ball wearing a brooch belonging to Cora Crippen. The doctor let it be known that he had heard his wife was seriously ill and he was planning to travel to the USA to be by her side. He then announced that she had died and, on the day that her obituary was published in the theatrical newspaper,
Era
, he and Ethel le Neve left England for a honeymoon in Dieppe. On 31 March, one of Cora’s friends at the Music Hall Ladies’ Group reported certain suspicions to Scotland Yard.
