Medical Detectives (7 page)

While being questioned by defence counsel on the third day of the trial in humid July weather, Mahon was visibly shaken when a loud clap of thunder sounded throughout the court building. If this was a signal from above, it probably endorsed the conclusion already being formed in the minds of the jury that Mahon was a calculating and relentless murderer. He was duly found guilty and sentenced to death. The ‘Man of Prey’, as the press called him, was executed at Wandsworth Prison on 9 September 1924.

According to some, he was ‘doubly hanged’, for he was supposed to have used his knowledge of the hangman’s procedure to outwit the system. Despite being hooded, he judged the moment when Albert Pierrepoint opened the trap and jumped backwards onto the solid platform to avoid the drop. The result was that his spine smashed against the edge of the woodwork with sufficient force to kill him, followed by suspension at the end of the rope in the normal way which broke his spine a second time.

But this was a matter on which Spilsbury, not for the last time, had the final word, for he carried out the post-mortem examination of Mahon’s body. It was his first examination of an individual subjected to judicial hanging and was carried out with customary thoroughness. He noted that the spine was dislocated between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae and that there was displacement between the sixth and the seventh. He recorded no evidence of bruising which would surely have been present if the hanging had occurred in the manner described by Sir Henry Curtis Bennett’s biographers.

Spilsbury’s technical feat in re-assembling the fragmented remains of Patrick Mahon’s victim was acknowledged by Sir Archibald Bodkin, the Director of Public Prosecutions, in a letter, when he wrote, ‘… I am sure that the learned Judge and jury, Counsel, and last but not least myself, have deeply appreciated the care and skill which you have brought to bear on this matter.’

Spilsbury’s next big case was one in which his reputation, hitherto eulogised almost as a matter of course, was seriously challenged. His protagonist was Dr Robert Bronte, an Irishman who had come to England in 1922 to pursue his medical career and took up an appointment as pathologist at Harrow Hospital in Middlesex. He clashed with Spilsbury over the Thorne case in 1925 on a matter of medical interpretation. Norman Thorne was a chicken farmer with poor prospects who worked a poultry farm near Crowborough in Sussex. He lived in a converted brooding hut on his plot of land and, although his circumstances were unappealing, if not squalid, he seemed attractive to Elsie Cameron, a London typist in her early twenties, and they became engaged. Fearful that she had competition for his affection, Elsie told Thorne that she was pregnant and reminded him that he had promised to marry her. With a show of determination, she packed a bag and left her home in London on 5 December 1924, intending to move in with her fiancé.

When the young woman failed to return home, her father contacted the police and, in due course, the trail led to Thorne’s chicken farm. At first the police were satisfied with the answers he gave to their enquiries but, on a second visit, a search turned up Elsie’s travel bag. Under questioning, Thorne said that he had found the girl hanging from a beam in his hut but was adamant that he had not killed her. He claimed that he decided to dispose of the body by cutting it into sections which he wrapped in sacking and buried in one of his chicken runs. Having cut off her head, he forced it into a tin box which he also buried.

Elsie Cameron’s dismembered body was disinterred on 15 January 1925, nearly six weeks after she had disappeared. Spilsbury carried out the post-mortem examination after which the body was given a proper burial. By this time, Thorne was under arrest and charged with murder while his defence lawyers gathered their strength for a confrontation with Spilsbury. Their first decision was to retain the services of Dr Bronte as an expert witness. Declining to accept Spilsbury’s findings, his opening move was to demand that the body of the recently buried Elsie be exhumed for a second post-mortem. This duly took place at the end of February, nearly three months after the time of death. Bronte reached different conclusions from those of Spilsbury and he was backed by six other medical witnesses mustered by Thorne’s defence team.

The trial of Norman Thorne became an occasion for those who opposed Spilsbury’s rise to eminence to challenge his opinion and perhaps overwhelm him by force of numbers. The battle lines were simply drawn out. The prosecution, led by the familiar courtroom figure of Sir Henry Curtis Bennett, and supported by Spilsbury was that Thorne had murdered his fiancée. J.D. Cassels, leading for the defence and with a small army of medical men by his side, argued that Elsie Cameron died of shock following an attempt at self-strangulation in the mistaken belief that she was pregnant. With Mr Justice Finlay presiding over his first murder trial at Lewes Assizes, the stage was set for controversy.

Spilsbury’s expertise was to be tested in the interpretation of bruises, a field in which he was justifiably ranked as a leader. He gave it as his opinion that bruises found on the dead woman’s body had been caused before death, one of which had resulted from a severe blow to the head. It was argued by the prosecution that Elsie Cameron had died from blows to the head inflicted by an Indian club. Arguing against this, the defence contended that the bruises had been caused accidentally when her limp, partially asphyxiated body fell to the floor during Thorne’s attempt to save her life.

Spilsbury was adamant that death was caused by shock due to blows on the face and head. He discounted the possibility that the girl had attempted to hang herself, arguing that the laundry rope held to be the means of suspension would certainly have left an unmistakable mark on her neck. ‘There was no such mark,’ he said firmly. There were marks, though, on the dead girl’s neck which Spilsbury discounted as having been caused by a ligature and which he described as natural folds or creases in the skin. Bronte’s interpretation was different; he argued that these marks were the result of hanging and, as such, supported Thorne’s account. Herein lay the main source of contention.

Spilsbury confirmed that he had made a thorough examination of the neck in view of the possibility that death might have been due to hanging. He had cut through a number of creases in the skin and found no area of haemorrhage suggesting that the tissues had been crushed or subjected to pressure by a rope. ‘There was,’ he said, ‘no sign of any sort or kind of damage resulting from attempted hanging or actual hanging.’ His judgement, therefore, was that it was not necessary to carry out any microscopic examination of tissues.

For his part, Bronte had insisted on taking tissues from the neck creases to be sectioned and prepared as microscope slides. Bearing in mind that decomposition of the body had advanced by a further month by the time he carried out the second post-mortem, Bronte had little hope of arguing a strong case from histological evidence. This did not prevent him from trying and he contended that his slides showed evidence of broken blood vessels in what he now termed ‘grooves’ in the neck, which were consistent with death by hanging. His case was that the creases (or grooves) in the neck were not natural folds in the skin as Spilsbury maintained, but the sort of marks that would be made by a cord.

Bronte also believed that his microscopic evidence disproved Spilsbury’s opinion that there were no ruptured vessels in the neck with resultant escape of blood or extravasation into the tissues. The flamboyant Irishman was supported by a number of other medical men in court, one of whom described Spilsbury as very skilled but a trifle dogmatic. With his reputation under attack and, seemingly outnumbered, Spilsbury refused to capitulate. In a withering dismissal of Bronte’s microscopical material, which he believed to be meaningless, he said of the slides, ‘These might have been made anywhere, at any time. I cannot tell at all.’

Use of the word, ‘infallible’, in relation to Spilsbury’s evidence seemed to be on everyone’s lips at the conclusion of the trial. J.D. Cassels in his closing speech told the jury:

What a tragedy of human justice it would be if the life of a man is to depend on the accuracy or infallibility of one individual. We can all admire attainment, take our hats off to ability, acknowledge the high position that a man has won in his sphere, but it is a long way to go to say that because that man says one thing, there can be no room for error.

Mr Justice Finlay told the jury, ‘Sir Bernard Spilsbury would be the first to disclaim infallibility in matters of this sort,’ but he added, ‘his opinion is undoubtedly the very best that can be obtained.’ Faced with the stark choice between murder by clubbing to death and suicide by hanging, the jury opted for murder. Despite the controversy over the medical evidence, the jury apparently found little difficulty in discharging their responsibility – they brought in a guilty verdict after retiring for only half an hour.

The controversy provoked by Thorne’s trial did not stop at the verdict. The case was taken to appeal and Cassels asked the Lord Chief Justice to refer the medical evidence to an independent assessor as provided for by a 1907 amendment to the Criminal Appeal Act. After due consideration, this request was turned down on the grounds that there was no case for suggesting the jury had not understood the evidence put before them. The appeal was rejected and Norman Thorne was executed at Wandsworth Prison on 22 April 1925. Police searches at Thorne’s chicken farm provided two interesting footnotes to the case. The dust on the crossbeam in the roof of his hut from which he claimed to have found Elsie Cameron hanging was said to be undisturbed and, among his belongings, were found newspaper cuttings reporting the trial of Patrick Mahon a few months before.

Criticism of Spilsbury continued after the trial had been concluded. The suggestion that the great man might have erred became something of a running battle for years and Dr Bronte appeared from time-to-time as protagonist for the critics. The
Law Journal
criticised the Appeal Court’s decision to reject Thorne’s appeal and said that the man had been ‘condemned by a tribunal which was not capable of forming a first-hand judgement, but followed the man with the biggest name.’ This was a sad condemnation of the twelve jurors who had reached a unanimous verdict.

An anonymous correspondent in one of the daily newspapers, calling himself a ‘medico-legal expert’, expressed his concern over Spilsbury’s apparently infallible status. ‘For some reason or other’, he wrote, ‘Sir Bernard Spilsbury has now arrived at a position where his utterances in the witness box commonly receive unquestioning acceptance from judge, counsel and jury.’ The knives were out and it would later become fashionable to say that Spilsbury’s talents were too highly regarded. The man himself appeared untouched by the whole business and privately expressed his dislike for what he believed were unprofessional and slapdash methods used by some of his opponents, including Bronte, for whom he reserved the epithet, ‘that man’.

While Spilsbury was dodging the arrows of professional jealousy, other bright stars in the pathology firmament were beginning to rise. Sydney Smith was working in Egypt and developing the science of firearms evidence following the murder of Sir Lee Stack in 1924, John Glaister was in general practice in Glasgow but increasingly helping with police work, and Francis Camps was studying for his final medical examinations at Guy’s Hospital Medical School. In due course, Spilsbury would clash with both Smith and Glaister while Camps would turn out to be something of a maverick in a similar mould to Bronte.

Spilsbury’s biographers addressed a note, ‘to those who know a pathologist only as an expert witness in criminal cases’. They pointed out that murder cases which made big newspaper headlines and caught the public imagination were, in reality, only a small part of the workload. Although he was rarely out of the news, Spilsbury did not spare himself in the efforts he devoted to the routine work required by coroners’ courts. H.R. Oswald, senior coroner of the County of London, writing in his memoirs in 1938, spoke of making Spilsbury’s acquaintance twenty years earlier when he asked the Home Office to send him a specialist to deal with the murder of a girl on Eltham Common. ‘They sent me Mr Spilsbury,’ he wrote, and continued, ‘he was so precise, skilful and exact in giving his evidence that I was impressed, and used constantly, after that, to ask him to investigate any important case that came through my Courts, and other Coroners did the same.’ Ingleby Oddie, coroner for Central London, also made good use of Spilsbury’s services as did Bentley Purchase, coroner for North London.