by Robin Odell
The medico-legal department which he inherited from Dr Hamilton was attached to the Ministry of Justice, known, rather curiously, as the Parquet, a French word referring to the floor of the courtroom. Egyptian law was not based on the British system but followed the Napoleonic Code. The head of the Parquet was the Procurator-General who controlled the police and decided which criminal cases should be sent for trial. His officers were magistrates who had powers to examine witnesses and make decisions about prosecutions.
The medico-legal section was part of this system and its employees were government officials. The late Dr Hamilton had pioneered the use of medical science in the investigation of crime in Egypt in the early days of such novelties as X-ray examination. In 1904, the distinguished Egyptologists, Mr (later Sir) Elliot Smith and Howard Carter, had caused a stir in Cairo by riding in a taxicab, with the mummy of Tuthmosis VI as a passenger, on their way to an X-ray unit. The section was not as comprehensively equipped as the new incumbent would have liked and he particularly regretted the lack of laboratory facilities. Such scientific analyses as the section required were carried out at either the School of Medicine or the Government Laboratory. Arthur Lucas, Director of the Chemical Department at the Government Laboratory was a distinguished forensic chemist and an enthusiastic collaborator. Nevertheless, Smith wanted to be able to carry out his own analytical work and he made the establishment of a laboratory one of his first priorities.
There followed an exciting period for the young pathologist, building up one of the finest medico-legal departments in the world and investigating a rich variety of cases. The Land of the Pharaohs with its fascinating history and singular customs was also a violent society which experienced a high murder rate. Smith viewed this as something of an anomaly, for he found the Egyptians to be good-natured and gentle people on the whole. Nevertheless, his services were called on to investigate 1,000 murder cases in one year. Indeed, as he put it many years later in his memoirs, ‘Murder was a business’.
This was amply borne out by a mass murder which came to light in Alexandria in 1920. Workmen excavating a trench stumbled across a mass grave as the result of unearthing some human bones when the side of the trench collapsed and undermined the floor of an adjacent house. Under Smith’s supervision, the earthen floor of the house was carefully taken up and the full extent of the discovery was exposed. Fourteen bodies, buried in two layers, were found in varying states of decomposition. All had been strangled and some of the corpses still had the ligatures fastened around their necks. Post-mortem examination confirmed that the victims were exclusively adult females, but it was Smith’s new-found understanding of Moslem customs which gave him a clue as to their origins. The women had all been circumcised which confirmed they were Moslems and yet, unusually, they still had their pubic hair. For reasons of hygiene it was the practice for women to shave that part of their body; the exceptions to this habit were prostitutes who believed their pubic hair had aphrodisiac properties.
Like prostitutes everywhere, the ladies of the street in Alexandria were vulnerable to violent predators and frequently disappeared as a result. With the help of the police, Smith was able to identify most of the dead women who had gone missing over a period of about two years. Understandably, the owners of the house with the mass grave under its floors were being urgently sought after. Two couples were eventually arrested and their sordid murder-for-profit scheme was revealed.
One of the characteristics of Egyptian prostitutes was that they carried their wealth about with them in the form of jewellery. They had no use for banks and converted their earnings to gold and jewellery which they wore as ornaments. Unfortunately, there were those who could see that apart from the normal dangers of their calling they also represented tempting targets for robbery. The foursome in the house in Alexandria contrived a system whereby the women patrolled the streets looking for suitably bejewelled prostitutes who they lured back to the house for the ostensible purpose of selling their services to a rich landowner. Once inside the house, they were easy prey for one of the men who slipped a noose over their heads and throttled them. The murder victim was then stripped of her finery and precious ornaments and her corpse buried under the floor. The perpetrators of these crimes were brought to justice and suffered the death penalty.
In part, the prevailing tide of violence stemmed from the social structure of the country in which men were allowed to take four wives. Polygamy, despite its seeming attractions to the Western mind, was a source of strife, stimulating jealousy and bitter emotions over disputed inheritances. Under Moslem law, divorce was possible without the legal formalities customary in other places. It was possible, therefore, for a man to have a succession of wives, taking on a new partner when he tired of the current one. There was a snag though, for a wife despatched and effectively divorced in an ill-considered moment could not readily be taken back if her original husband changed his mind. She had first to be married and divorced from another man, a provision which was exploited by entrepreneurial marriage brokers. Bribery and all kinds of chicanery were used to settle disputes and, when all else failed, there was always murder.
One of the problems resulting from these social practices arose over the maintenance of the children. A divorced woman had custody of boys until the age of seven and girls up to the age of nine years, with her former husband bound by law to provide maintenance. A much-married and frequently divorced man was likely to carry a heavy financial burden providing for his offspring. The system also created problems over inheritance and a wife might attempt to eliminate the children of a rival in order to construct a situation in which her own children would inherit.
One outcome of this social order was a high rate of murder for elimination, and children were frequently the victims. Poisoning with arsenic to relieve the burden of maintenance or to carve the way to an inheritance was commonplace. It was an occurrence which kept Sydney Smith’s laboratory busy and he noted the surprise on Harvey Littlejohn’s face when, on a visit to Cairo, he noticed the dozen or so arsenic test kits standing on the bench. The Marsh Test, developed by an English chemist in 1836, was the standard procedure for detecting arsenic in human tissues and body fluids. Smith told his startled teacher that arsenical poisoning was so prevalent in Egypt that rarely a day went by when he was not testing for the poison in a suspected murder case.
One of the nastier duties that falls to the forensic pathologist is to preside over the exhumation of corpses. In Egypt, where the climate necessitated quick burial, suspicions about the circumstances of a particular death might not reach official ears until well after the victim had been interred. Hence, exhumations were quite frequent. Fortunately, the manner of burial prevented the worst aspects of disinterment such as the stench and corruption of flesh commonplace in more temperate climes. The Egyptians neither enclosed their dead in coffins nor really buried them. The practice was to wrap the body in a shroud and put it either in a shallow grave or on the surface of the ground and cover it with stones.
Putrefaction within such a makeshift tomb occurred rapidly in the hot climate where the temperatures in the shade might vary between 90º to 100ºF. Air flowed freely between the stones along with flies which infested the body within twenty-four hours. It was possible in these conditions for a body to disintegrate completely within four to eight weeks leaving nothing more than a collection of bones.
The problem for the pathologist was often one of identifying the victim of secret homicide from the fragments of the human form that survived the rapid process of disintegration after death. Smith quickly became an expert on the identification of skeletal remains. Egypt was a cosmopolitan society in which the Egyptian, Arab, African and European races lived and worked side-by-side. Homicide being no respecter of persons, it was thus important to establish racial origin as part of the identification of any set of human remains.
There are no definitive physical characteristics of a human skull or the bones of the skeleton by which racial origin ma
y be determined. But there are tell-tale signs which the experienced practitioner can take into account along with other evidence. Observable differences in life, such as the strong prognathous face of the African or the long, narrow face and high brow of the Arab, may be discerned in differences of measurement between their skulls. Similar differences in the long bones of the arms and legs can be compared using a comparative index of measurement similar to the formulae used for calculating stature from individual bones.
Where an exhumed corpse had not been reduced to just a skeleton, the pathologist had more scope for his role as medical detective. This was a task for which Sydney Smith, with his Edinburgh training, was especially suited. The knowledge that a callus in the centre of the forehead marked a man as a devout Moslem, on account of his forehead constantly touching the ground in prayer, would no doubt have appealed to Dr Joseph Bell. Tattoo marks, scars and indications of occupation on the body and clothing all added to the information which aided the identification process.
The way in which patient examination of a few remains built up a complete story is illustrated by a case in which Smith’s expertise was sought. An elderly, but healthy, Egyptian landowner had disappeared from his home and foul play was suspected. The rumour was that the old man had been murdered by his own son who had dismembered the body and buried it in a field. An informant told the police where to dig and human remains were duly discovered.
The pathologist was presented with a skull, some bone fragments, a quantity of decomposed tissue and some vestiges of clothing. By assessing the measurements of the skull, Smith determined that the remains were those of an Egyptian male and because all the bone sutures were closed, was able to put his age at over sixty years. All the teeth were gone, save three molars in the lower jaw, and the way in which they had worn indicated the man had been fitted with an upper denture. A piece of scalp still attached to the skull had embedded in it a few dark hairs which analysis showed had been dyed. What could be re-assembled of the long bones of the skeleton confirmed they were of an elderly man who, in life, had probably been about five feet nine inches tall. Pressure marks on the lower ends of the shin bones indicated that the man had been in the habit of squatting on his haunches, a characteristic that tended to confirm him as an Egyptian. Among the other material were the broken remains of the hyoid bone from the dead man’s throat, the condition of which indicated death by strangulation.
Thus, Smith was able to identify the remains as those of an elderly Egyptian male, five feet nine inches tall, who dyed his hair and wore a denture in his upper jaw. This description matched exactly with that of the missing landowner and a search of his house turned up a denture plate which the pathologist was able to fit into the upper jaw. Of special relevance was the pattern of wear on the three remaining teeth in the lower jaw. This corresponded perfectly with the molars in the denture. Here was clinching evidence of identity but a final touch was the discovery of a pot of black hair dye that the old man had used to satisfy his vanity. Having established identity beyond doubt and confirmed that a murder had been committed, it was not long before the perpetrator was brought to justice. The landowner’s son had killed his father and hoped that his dismemberment and disposal of the body would adequately conceal his crime. But he had reckoned without the persistence and skill of the forensic pathologist.
The extent and variety of domestic murder kept Sydney Smith and his colleagues busy but added to this was the violence resulting from political unrest. Egypt’s quest for independence lay fairly dormant during the years of the First World War but, within days of the Armistice being signed in 1918, the claims were renewed. The nationalist leader, Said Pasha Zaghloul, had his request for independence turned down by the British Government, with the result that rioting broke out in Cairo and Alexandria. There was insurrection in the streets and Europeans were attacked. In one violent incident, eight British soldiers were taken off a train at Luxor and killed. The government responded by exiling Zaghloul and the other ringleaders to Malta. This had the effect of raising the temperature still further and the violence spread throughout the country.
The Smiths, in their flat in Cairo, were kept awake night after night by the sound of gunfire in the city. The pathologist was obliged to carry a handgun in case his life was threatened on his routine journeys to and from his office in the Parquet building. The mortuary was literally knee deep in bodies, most of them victims of gunshot wounds. Smith kept a supply of fifty large bottles of sulphuric acid in his first-floor laboratory as a weapon in the event that a mob attempted to take over. He kept on good terms with the Egyptians who perhaps recognised him as a colonial rather than an Englishman. Indeed he expressed his feelings of solidarity for local political aspirations when the First Secretary of the Residency asked him to join a group of senior officials to discuss the state of the country. Smith suggested that Egypt be granted Dominion status and that Zaghloul be allowed to return to his country, where he would undoubtedly be elected Prime Minister. ‘Do have a whisky and soda before you go,’ the First Secretary offered this purveyor of unfashionable views.
The 1918 riots were subdued but strong anti-British feelings smouldered on, regularly erupting into fresh bouts of violence. What the increasing use of firearms did for Sydney Smith was to provide him with first-hand professional experience of the damage caused by gunshot wounds. By extension, his post-mortem examination of such casualties led to his involvement in what he called ‘the infant science of forensic ballistics’. It also led to further confrontations with officialdom.
Following the deaths of a number of people during a riot in Alexandria, the medico-legal department were asked to examine the wounds on the bodies with a view to identifying the weapons used against them. This necessitated exhuming the corpses of about fifty victims all of whom were supposed to have been killed by small arms fire discharged at them by rioters. What Smith and his colleagues discovered was that the wounds had been caused by .303 bullets fired by British troops. There was no doubt about the origin of the ammunition, for the lead core of the bullets was tipped with aluminium and encased in a cupro-nickel jacket. Only British ordnance factories made this type of ammunition and, as Smith reported to the War Office, it seemed that in some instances a paper pulp material had been substituted for the aluminium component of the bullets. It appeared that this was for reasons of economy and official assurances that the paper pulp was thoroughly sterilised in order not to create any wound infection was a concession to humanitarianism that he found somewhat ironic, given that bullets are intended to kill people.
Egypt was made an independent sovereign state in 1922, but both martial law and British authority remained intact. Every senior member of the Egyptian administration had a British adviser at his elbow and, so long as the British Army remained as an occupying force, real power still lay with London. There was a kind of uneasy truce for a while and, in July 1923, martial law was ended. The exiled Zaghloul was allowed to return and in January 1924 he was elected Prime Minister. It was the lull before the storm.
The murder of Sir Lee Stack in a dusty Cairo street precipitated a political furore and set back the course of Egyptian independence. While the police used their traditional methods of seeking leads to the crime from their network of informers, Sydney Smith was employing the latest scientific methods. He had turned his posting to a forensic backwater into a potential triumph by his insistence on building up a strong technical capability in his department. Alert to developments in other parts of the world, he read that the American firearms experts, Charles E. Waite and Philip O. Gravelle, had combined the optical systems of two microscopes in order to compare bullets. Smith experimented in his own laboratory and finished constructing his own comparison microscope a matter of weeks before Sir Lee Stack was shot dead.
Armed with his new technique, Smith was able to make an early breakthrough in the investigation of the murder, unequivocally identifying the murder weapons and thereby placing guilt on their owners. Some of th
e bullets fired during the incident had been hand-finished into dumdum projectiles. A search of the house of one of the suspects revealed tools including two engineer’s vices which told their own story. Metallic dust particles clinging to the vices were shown to be identical to filings taken from the crime bullets. There was no clearer proof that the workshop in the house had been used to convert ordinary ammunition into the dumdum variety.
In his appreciation of Smith’s contribution to forensic ballistics, crime historian, Jürgen Thorwald, wrote, ‘At the end of May 1925, Sydney Smith stood up in court in what had come to be a characteristic pose, the murderer’s Colt in one hand, his jeweller’s lens in the other. He was testifying as the final witness for the prosecution. His findings were accepted without question, and sealed the fate of the conspirators.’
A brief reference to Smith’s contribution was reported in the British Medical Journal in 1926 and, two years later, there was a full account by him in The Police Journal. In characteristic fashion, he referred to his use of the comparison microscopes as evolving ‘slowly from a Heath Robinson affair’. Whatever its origins, Smith’s use of the new method to aid a major murder investigation pre-dated the American Sacco and Vanzetti case by at least two years and Britain’s Browne and Kennedy case by the same margin.
Despite the difficult times on Egypt’s political front, Smith continued to teach at the School of Medicine at Kasr el Aine and, aided by his assistant Dr Ahmer Bey, he wrote his first book on forensic medicine which he intended should be printed in Arabic. There were no publishing outlets in Cairo in the mid-1920s so the redoubtable doctor decided to publish the book himself even to the extent of buying paper and supervising the block making. His determination was rewarded, for he had clearly seen a gap in the market and the book was a great success. This achievement was crowned for the authors by an invitation from King Fuad to attend an audience so that he might congratulate them. His Majesty was presented with a specially-bound copy of the textbook which he accepted for inclusion in the royal library.