Medical Detectives

by Robin Odell

  Sidney Fox was arrested on a charge of fraudulent dealing, while, behind the scenes, the wheels turned very quickly indeed. Scotland Yard detectives were called in and Spilsbury was alerted. On 9 November, the pathologist was at the graveside of Mrs Fox, supervising the exhumation of her body. A post-mortem examination followed and, thus, the die was cast for another medico-legal controversy.

  The circumstances of Mrs Fox’s death, coupled with the behaviour of her son, and his established reputation as a fraudster, had provoked suspicion of murder. The initial focus of attention had been the room in which the victim was found and, in particular, the chair which appeared to have been the centre of the fire. The carpet had been burnt underneath the chair and the burning upholstery of the furniture seemed to have been the source of the dense smoke which filled the room. It was strange, therefore, that Spilsbury found no trace of carbon monoxide in the blood nor in the sooty deposits usually found in the air passages when a person breathes in smoke. Absence of such evidence suggested that the victim was already dead and that a cause other than the fire should be sought. It was Spilsbury’s task to search for that cause and he established it, at least to his satisfaction, when he discovered a bruise at the back of Mrs Fox’s throat. His conclusion was that she had been strangled.

  Sidney Fox was eventually trapped by the thoroughness of two persons – the undertaker, who hermetically sealed the coffin with putty, and Spilsbury, whose eagle eye spotted a bruise on tissues which would rapidly decompose when exposed to the air. When the case came to trial, the pathologist was confronted by familiar adversaries, J.D. Cassels, who defended Fox on the charge of murder, and, of course, Dr Bronte. For the first time too, he also faced a fellow pathologist of considerable eminence and reputation, in the presence of Professor Sydney Smith who supported the defence.

  The prosecution, led by the Attorney-General, Sir William Jowitt, with the aid of Margate Fire Brigade, proved fairly convincingly that a fire had been deliberately started in Mrs Fox’s hotel room. There was a bottle of petrol in the room which Fox claimed he used to clean his clothes. It was known that Mrs Fox had been drinking port bought by her son and the alcohol found in her body suggested that she may well have been asleep when her demise occurred. But how did she die?

  Spilsbury was convinced that she had not died of suffocation – the lack of sooty deposits in the air passages effectively ruled that out. His contention that Mrs Fox had been strangled was based on his discovery of a large, recent bruise at the back of the larynx. He demonstrated its position to the court by means of an anatomical model of the human mouth and throat. The bruise was the result of mechanical violence which tore open some of the small blood vessels, indicating, as he said, ‘the conclusions to which I finally came, that death was due to strangulation.’ Questioned about the condition of the hyoid bone which is situated in the larynx and becomes brittle in elderly people, the pathologist confirmed that it had not been broken in this instance. He acknowledged that the hyoid frequently was broken in cases of manual strangulation but, equally, he knew of many cases where this was not so.

  The trouble with the bruise on the larynx was its somewhat ephemeral existence. After the organ had been removed from the body which had lain in its airtight coffin, the tissues rapidly putrefied when exposed to the atmosphere, obscuring the bruise and making its existence impossible to demonstrate. Thus, by the time Bronte came to examine the larynx, there was no bruise to be seen. The absence of such an injury that could be shown as a physical entity, made it easier for the defence to argue that Mrs Fox had died of heart failure. But, Spilsbury’s word that he had seen it was sufficient to make it a matter of contention.

  Short of accusing his opponent of fabricating evidence, all that Bronte could say was, ‘It was not there when I saw the larynx.’ Sir Bernard would not be moved from his position and his reply to Cassels’s question on the matter put it beyond further debate; ‘It was a bruise and nothing else. There are no two opinions about it’. As Sydney Smith put it in his autobiography, ‘The oracle had spoken. There was nothing more to be said.’

  Smith later mentioned an incident in Spilsbury’s laboratory at University College Hospital when he and Bronte were shown the larynx preserved in formalin. ‘I can’t see any sign of a bruise, Spilsbury,’ said Smith with nodding approval from Bronte. ‘No, you can’t see it now,’ replied Spilsbury, ‘but it was there when I exhumed the body.’ Smith recorded that Spilsbury listened attentively and politely to his arguments but added, ‘Had I known him then as well as I came to later, I would have realised why I was wasting my time. He could not change his opinion now because he had already given it.’

  Sidney Fox, who, in a devastating admission in court, said that he had closed the door to his mother’s room after discovering the fire and running for help, was found guilty of murder. He was a greedy little man and a poseur of the type that it has been said would sell their own grandmother. In his case, he throttled his mother for the insurance money and his guilt was perhaps so borne in on him that he did not bother to appeal against his conviction.

  Thus began the decade of the 1930s, which produced more headline-snatching cases and rumbles of violence to come. One of Spilsbury’s first cases in the new decade was the sensational ‘Blazing Car Murder’. Appropriately enough, the incident occurred on Guy Fawkes Night in November 1930, when two youths returning from a bonfire night dance in Northampton, saw a burning car on the road near Hardingstone. There was a person in the car but rescue was out of the question because the blaze was too fierce.

  The following day, the police decided to remove the charred corpse from the vehicle and away from public curiosity. The burnt-out wreckage of the car was pushed off the road to allow normal traffic to proceed without hindrance. These actions would later be heavily criticised. The owner of the car was traced by means of its still intact registration number, to Alfred Arthur Rouse, a commercial traveller, who lived in north London. But the identity of the person incinerated in the blaze remained uncertain.

  Following reports of the burning car incident in the newspapers, Rouse returned to London from Wales where he had been visiting his girlfriend, and was greeted by detectives. The two young men who had arrived at the scene of the blaze in Hardingstone Lane, identified him as the person who had startled them by suddenly materialising out of the smoke. Rouse told the police that while travelling to Leicester on his firm’s business, he stopped on the Great North Road to give a lift to a man who said he wanted to travel to the Midlands.

  He explained that, first, he lost his way and then ran out of petrol. Before walking a short distance down the road in order to relieve himself, he asked his travelling companion to fill the car’s fuel tank from a spare can of petrol which he provided. At this point, Rouse said he noticed a big flame and realised that the car was on fire. He rushed towards the blaze and tried to free the man who was trapped inside the vehicle but was beaten back by the ferocity of the flames. Then, in his statement to the police, he said, ‘I lost my head.’

  The fire had been tremendously fierce and the destruction wrought on the unfortunate individual caught inside the car was swift. The lower parts of his legs had been burned away as had the hands and forearms. There was massive destruction of the chest and abdomen and the head had burst in the intense heat. The body was never identified and even its gender was in doubt. Spilsbury, nevertheless recorded the victim as male, probably aged about thirty. A wooden mallet found near the burnt-out car was acknowledged by Rouse as belonging to him; he said he used it to loosen the cap on the petrol can. Several hairs on the mallet, judged by the pathologist to be of human origin, added weight to the conjecture that it had been used as a weapon of assault, if not murder.

  Rouse was tried for murder at Northampton Assizes when the task of establishing how the victim of the blazing car met his death was made difficult by the unprofessional handling of vital evidence during the early stages of the police investigation. The charred body had been moved from
the vehicle without first making in situ drawings or taking photographs. Reconstruction of the scene depended on eyewitness accounts, from which it appeared that the body had been lying face down across the two front seats with one leg extended through the open nearside door. In answer to questions put by Norman Birkett, who led for the prosecution, Spilsbury gave it as his belief that the victim was unconscious when the fire started and that, in all probability, the nearside door was open at the time. This certainly put Rouse’s alleged rescue attempt into perspective.

  Another unsatisfactory aspect of the investigation had been the way in which the wrecked car had been pushed to the side of the road and left unattended. In due course, the car was taken to Angel Lane police station where it was examined by Colonel Buckle, an experienced fire assessor, who found that the petrol union joint situated under the fuel tank behind the dashboard was loose by a full turn and there was evidence that the carburettor had been tampered with. The implications were obvious to the jury. Even the defence’s medical witness agreed that it looked as if an unconscious man had been thrown into the car and the sinister interpretation of what followed was that the inert figure was dowsed with petrol and a fuel trail laid along the road which was then ignited from a safe distance.

  Rouse, a salesman whose job enabled him to travel around the country to attend to what he liked to call his harem, was found guilty and sentenced to death. He went to appeal on the grounds that the prosecution should have proved motive, especially in a case where the victim was unidentified. The appeal failed and Rouse was hanged on 10 March 1931. His confession was published a month later in the Daily Sketch. At least, on this occasion, Spilsbury’s critics had no grounds to contest his findings. As his biographers observed, ‘this time no one grumbled – not even The Law Journal.’

  In the course of a long career, a forensic pathologist may expect, sooner or later, to encounter every type of case. This was certainly true for Spilsbury and providence seemed inclined to serve him double helpings of the more unusual cases. He had already worked on two matricides when, in 1934, he was presented with a pair of trunk murders.

  The Brighton Trunk Crimes became one of the sensations of the 1930s and, not least, because, for a long while, both were without satisfactory conclusion. In June 1934, a plywood trunk was deposited at the cloakroom in Brighton railway station. Some days later, the unsavoury smell pervading the atmosphere was traced to the box and the police were called. The offensive smell arose from the decaying female torso, minus head and legs, which was the trunk’s principal contents. As the result of a nationwide alert to railway left luggage offices, a suspicious-looking suitcase was pinpointed at Kings Cross station in London. It contained what proved to be the legs belonging to the Brighton torso.

  In the popular newspaper reporting of the day, it was noted that, ‘Spilsbury was called in’. He confirmed the relationship between the two discoveries of body parts by showing that the saw cuts on the thigh bones of the legs matched the stumps on the torso. The remains were those of a pregnant woman aged about twenty-five who appeared well-nourished and free from disease. Cause of death was not apparent and Spilsbury reported that dismemberment had been carried out after death. He could only conjecture at the likely cause of death which, in the absence of capillary haemorrhages and draining of blood from the heart, tended to rule out strangulation and shooting. In all probability, fatal violence had been inflicted on the woman’s head which was subsequently severed from the body and, together with the arms and hands, remained missing.

  Police began the painstaking routine of checking missing persons files and following up the slenderest of clues. Part of the investigation involved house-to-house enquiries and it was a procedure which turned up the second Brighton Trunk Crime. Number 52 Kemp Street, near the railway station, was empty and locked up when a search was made of the district. When the house was entered on 13 July, the offensive smell which caused the searchers to gag, was traced to a large, locked trunk in one of the rooms. Tightly packed into its confined space was the body of a woman, decomposing but otherwise intact. Once again, Spilsbury was called in and he repeated the journey he had made to Brighton a month before in order to examine the victim of this second trunk crime.

  On this occasion, the cause of death was readily apparent and was recorded on the pathologist’s case card as shock resulting from a depressed fracture of the skull. A violent blow had broken a piece of bone out of the skull and forced it down onto the brain. The victim, aged about forty, wore a wedding ring and some of her clothes had been packed in the trunk with the body. Her identity was quickly established as Violette Kaye, a dancer, whose real name was Violet Saunders, and who had been missing since May. She had been considered, but ruled out of the investigation into Trunk Crime No.1, on account of her age.

  Her companion, a supposed Italian waiter named as Tony Mancini, was now urgently sought after by the police. He was apprehended in Blackheath on 18 July and taken to Brighton for questioning. Mancini’s real name was Lois England and, despite his Italian appearance, he was English. He was a petty crook and lived off Violette Kaye’s earnings from prostitution. In answer to the charge that he had killed her, he said, ‘I am quite innocent, except for the fact that I kept the body hidden.’

  Mancini was tried for murder and had the benefit of being defended by Norman Birkett, a man as acclaimed in his forensic field as Spilsbury was in his. The prosecution case was that Violette Kaye had been killed by a blow from a weapon such as a hammer which had been found in the cellar of the house in Park Crescent where she lived with Mancini. Evidence was given of an argument between them which indicated a possible motive. Mancini’s story was that he had returned to the flat on the evening of 10 May to find Violette lying on the bed amid bloodstained sheets. He assumed that she had been killed by one of her customers. To explain his subsequent actions, Mancini said that because of his record, he knew the police would not believe him if he reported what he had found.

  He decided therefore to hide the body by concealing it in a trunk which he bought for seven shillings and sixpence from a stall at Brighton market. When he moved house, claiming that he had left Violette because she nagged him, he took her remains in the trunk with him.

  When he entered the witness box to give his evidence, Spilsbury had with him a skull and the piece of bone from Violette Kaye’s head so that he could demonstrate the violent effect of the blow which killed her. Birkett immediately objected to this, claiming that the defence had not been advised about this particular exhibit. ‘For a piece of bone which has been in existence all this time to be produced on the third day of the trial does put the defence in some difficulty,’ he complained.

  ‘I do not think it would take anyone long to examine it and come to conclusions,’ countered Spilsbury.

  Birkett then tried to persuade the pathologist that a fall down the basement steps at Park Crescent, resulting in collision with the iron rail at the bottom, could have produced a similar fracture.

  ‘I think it impossible,’ was Spilsbury’s brief but polite response. Counsel decided to press the matter.

  ‘Are you telling the members of the jury that if someone fell down that flight and came upon the stone ledge, he would not get a depressed fracture?’

  ‘He would not get this fracture,’ Spilsbury answered emphatically.

  Mancini went into the witness box and, asked by the judge why he had not fetched the police after discovering the body, he replied, ‘I considered that a man who had been convicted never gets a fair and square deal from the police’. Whether out of sympathy for the underdog or, perhaps, swayed by the doubts about motive and cause of death put forward by Birkett, the jury found Mancini ‘Not Guilty’.

  The outcome was a triumph for Birkett and his performance was described as ranking ‘as one of the great defences in the annals of legal records’. But, in the stranger-than-fiction climate which often prevails in the world of crime, Birkett’s success was undermined by his client who, many
years later, confessed to murdering Violette Kaye. Mancini’s story was published in the News of the World in November 1976, in the knowledge that he could not be tried again for a crime of which he had been acquitted.

  In 1978, he elaborated on his confession and this was published in an account of the case in Perfect Murder, written by Bernard Taylor and Stephen Knight in 1987. In the end, Spilsbury was right about the fracture not being caused by falling down the basement steps but neither was it caused by a hammer blow. According to Mancini, he knocked Violette Kaye to the floor during an argument and, in a blind rage, smashed her head against the fireplace fender. Thus, the second of the two Brighton trunk murders which had remained officially solved during Spilsbury’s lifetime, was finally resolved. The first one remains a mystery and the victim was never identified.

  While Spilsbury had been exercised by the murders in Brighton, Keith Simpson was just starting out on his career. As a young demonstrator in pathology at Guy’s Hospital in 1934, Simpson prospered from some of the antagonistic feelings that were directed at Spilsbury, as a result of which the Southwark coroner, Douglas Cowburn, declined to give his work to Sir Bernard. It was a perfect example of the jealousy and small-mindedness which ran as a consistent thread through otherwise impeccable professional lives.