by Robin Odell
Twenty-five different fibres were found to match completely between the two sources and there were no similar comparisons with samples taken from the other houses in the tenement. ‘The absolute matching of so many different fibres from the two sources’, said Smith, ‘was, in my opinion, good evidence that the fluff in the sack was derived from the Donalds’ house.’ During the six weeks following the Donalds’ arrests, their house was searched many times and any trace or stain that might be of value to the investigators was studied. Human blood was found on a number of articles of clothing, on two newspapers dated 19 April, the day before Helen Priestly’s disappearance, and on a scrubbing brush and house flannels kept under the kitchen sink. The bloodstains were of Group O blood, the same as the dead child. This was not significant in itself, as 46 per cent of the population fall into Group O, but Jeannie Donald belonged to a different group. Another connecting link was provided by microbiological evidence. The same rare species of intestinal bacteria that were present on the dead child’s bloodstained clothing as a result of her severe internal injuries, were also found on one of the house flannels in the Donalds’ house. Again, this was highly indicative of a common source and Smith’s hunch about this was confirmed by Professor Thomas Mackie, bacteriologist at Edinburgh University.
Smith was aware that Helen Priestly had an enlarged thymus gland in her neck which gives rise to a condition known as status lymphaticus. He bore this in mind when he reconstructed his version of the events which led to Helen Priestly’s death. Enlargement of the lymphatic tissue can predispose a child to loss of consciousness when subjected to a sudden shock. Smith believed that the young girl, returning from the errand set by her mother, had seen Jeannie Donald and taunted her, as she had done before, with the shout of ‘Coconut’. Infuriated, Jeannie Donald grabbed at the child and roughed her up, during the course of which, due to her enlarged thymus gland, Helen reacted by falling unconscious. Terrified that she had killed the girl, Donald dragged her into the house and decided to fake a rape attack by inserting an instrument of some sort into her vagina. The pain caused the child to regain consciousness, adding to Donald’s panic and provoking her into strangling Helen. When she had regained her composure, Jeannie Donald began to clean up and, as a temporary measure, put the dead body in the cinder box which was kept under the kitchen sink. In due course, the body was transferred to the BOSS sack and put into the passage under the stairs outside the house where it was found later. What she had not accounted for in her otherwise careful clean-up operations was the incriminating nature of trace evidence transferred from her house into the sack containing her victim.
Jeannie Donald was tried for murder at Edinburgh on 16 July 1934 and after hearing the evidence of 164 witnesses, the jury brought in a guilty verdict. Donald, who had maintained an impassive stance throughout the trial, collapsed when the verdict was announced. The sentence of death passed on her was commuted to one of penal servitude, which Smith believed was right. In his view, she had no intention of killing the child, and merely wanted to frighten her. He suggested before the trial that the plea might be reduced to one of culpable homicide, a Scottish plea similar to manslaughter in the English courts. The defence would not entertain this idea, apparently preferring to go all out for a ‘not guilty’ verdict; ‘they underestimated the medical and scientific evidence,’ wrote Smith.
This was a landmark case which established Sydney Smith as one of the leading forensic pathologists in Britain. ‘He was one of the few,’ wrote Jürgen Thornald in his appreciation of Smith, ‘who dared to challenge the Spilsbury legend.’ He also demonstrated a refreshingly different approach in that he did not rely solely on his own skills and experience. As the investigation of Helen Priestly’s death showed, he exercised great intuition but, at every turn, sought help and corroboration from other experts. This, of course, was not Spilsbury’s way, but a tribute to Smith’s approach came from the unlikely quarter of Jeannie Donald’s defence counsel who described his work as, ‘careful and meticulous preparation unparalleled in the history of this old court.’ ‘This old court’ was the High Court at Edinburgh whence the trial had been moved to avoid any hint of local prejudice in Aberdeen. ‘It was a change’, said Smith dryly, ‘greatly appreciated by the thrifty citizens of Aberdeen, since the expenses of the High Court would be met by the Crown, and not fall on the Aberdeen rates.’ ‘The Patriarch’, as Smith’s students liked to call him, was in the ascendancy.
While the Aberdeen child murder investigation was in progress, Smith received a letter from Lord Trenchard, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, asking for his advice about setting up a medico-legal laboratory for the police. The two men met in London and Trenchard, who described himself as ‘an old man in a hurry’, quickly drew up plans to start a laboratory at the Hendon Police College. Smith specified the equipment needed for the laboratories and buildings at the college were suitably adapted. In less than a year, the laboratory was in full operation.
Trenchard offered Smith the post of Director but he turned it down, making way for Dr James Davidson, a lecturer in his department at Edinburgh, to become the first Director. It was a considerable tribute to Smith that he was approached for his views on this innovative step in forensic investigation and he became a regular lecturer at Hendon.
Always a traveller, Smith decided to take his wife on a round-the-world trip in 1935, making a visit to Australia for professional reasons and to New Zealand to see family and friends. While in Sydney en route to Melbourne to attend a British Medical Association meeting, he became involved in what he described as ‘one of the most extraordinary cases of my career’. This was the infamous Shark Arm affair. On 25 April, a startling phenomenon occurred in the Coogee Aquarium which housed a fourteen-foot shark caught by two local fishermen. When this captive denizen of the deep disgorged the contents of its stomach, spectators were horrified to see included a human arm severed at the shoulder. This grisly relic bore a distinctive tattoo of two boxers squaring up to each other which enabled the police to identify the individual to whom the arm belonged. In a list of missing persons were several men with tattoos and, by a process of elimination, the police confirmed that the owner of that particular boxing motif was one James Smith. The arm was identified by his wife and brother and further corroboration came from fingerprinting, for it appeared that Mr Smith was known to the police.
It seemed that James Smith had left home on 8 April, ostensibly to go on a fishing trip with another man whose identity he did not divulge to his wife. The question which the Australian authorities were keen to answer was whether the ‘Shark Arm’, as it was now called, had been ripped off by a shark, suggesting an accidental or possibly suicidal death, or dismembered by an act suggesting something more sinister. The fact that a visiting British Medical Association delegation of 157 doctors, including a distinguished forensic pathologist, was in the country, offered an ideal opportunity to secure an authoritative opinion.
Sydney Smith was asked to examine his namesake’s arm although he admitted his expertise in bites lay more with the camel than the shark. Nevertheless, he had no doubt that the arm in question had been severed at the shoulder joint by a clean incision and that, after the head of the bone had been freed from its socket, the remaining tissues were cut away. The condition of the blood and tissues, despite the fact that the arm had been in the shark’s stomach for at least a week, showed that the arm had been severed after death. There was every indication, therefore, of foul play.
No other portions of James Smith’s body came to light but it was known that he had spent a holiday in a rented cottage on the coast at Cronulla with Patrick Brady, a forger known to the police. Brady denied any involvement in Smith’s disappearance but implicated Reg Holmes, a Sydney boat builder, in forgery dealings. Brady was nevertheless charged with murdering Smith and three days later, following a sensational boat chase in Sydney Harbour, Holmes was apprehended. He had a bullet wound in the head, which was possibly self-inflicted, an
d he told the arresting officers that Brady had killed Smith and disposed of the body. Two weeks later, Reg Holmes, who would have been a star witness at Brady’s trial, was shot dead in his car.
Sydney Smith’s reconstruction of the crime, pieced together from police information, was that Brady and Smith quarrelled at Cronulla and Smith was killed. It was known that a tin trunk was missing from the cottage and it was supposed that the body was cut up and put into the trunk for disposal at sea. The problem was that the trunk was too small to accommodate every portion of the dismembered corpse. The piece left over was the left forearm, which by a stroke of fate was the only part of the body to bear any visible identification. The offending limb was roped to the side of the trunk and, during its burial at sea, was torn loose by a shark which nature determined should disgorge its stomach contents in a public aquarium. It was an extraordinary story and one which Sydney Smith acknowledged as a great deal stranger than fiction. Patrick Brady was tried for murder in September 1935 and acquitted. He denied the allegations right up to the time of his death in August 1965 and the mystery of the Shark Arm Case died with him.
While on board ship returning to Britain after his visit to the Antipodes, Sydney Smith learned the first details of a case in which he would be embroiled on reaching home. The remains of two women had been found in a gulley near Dumfriesshire on the Carlisle to Edinburgh road on 29 September 1935. These relics were taken to Smith’s laboratory in Edinburgh where they were examined by his assistant, Dr W. Gilbert Millar, and Professor John Glaister of Glasgow University.
Apart from the grim nature of the discovery which eventually amounted to seventy pieces of two dismembered bodies, the case was significant for a number of other reasons. The perpetrator of these two murders and subsequent disposal by dissection was a doctor and the investigation which followed was distinguished by some remarkable forensic innovation. Sydney Smith and his department played a major role in this but chief credit went to John Glaister. The full story is therefore told in the next chapter which is devoted to Glaister’s life and work. Suffice it to say here that Smith played a characteristically unselfish role from the moment he arrived back in Edinburgh on 7 November. He was consulted by the Chief Constables of Edinburgh and Lancaster to assist in identifying the remains. One of his university colleagues, Professor James Brash, Regius Professor of Anatomy, was already helping the police working alongside Glaister.
The trial of Dr Buck Ruxton took place at Manchester in March 1936. Sydney Smith was the last witness to give evidence and he was cross-examined by Norman Birkett who had so impressed him at the trial of Annie Hearn. Birkett was defending Ruxton and had been advised on the medical evidence by Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Smith made it clear that the two bodies had been dismembered after death by means of disarticulation at the joints, ‘carried out in a sufficiently expert manner to show that the operator was quite familiar with human anatomy’.
The murderous Indian doctor from Lancaster was found guilty of killing his wife and maid and he went to the gallows on 12 May 1936. A curious footnote to this case was provided by the discovery among the scattered remains of Ruxton’s victims of a Cyclopean eye. This is an unusual phenomenon in which the eyes of a malformed animal, usually a sheep or pig, fuse into one. Even more rarely, this malformation can occur in a human being. The condition takes its name from the one-eyed monster described by Homer in his Odyssey and named the Cyclops. In the Greek story, the monstrous Cyclops was blinded when Odysseus destroyed his single eye.
The Cyclopean eye which featured in the Ruxton case was of animal origin and had evidently been fixed at one time in preserving fluid. Smith’s explanation was that Ruxton, who had an interest in ophthalmology, probably kept the eye as a preserved specimen. A possible explanation for the eye being found with the remains of his victims was that he emptied a jar of preservative over them and inadvertently tipped out the Cyclopean eye. Smith, in his memoirs, drew attention to a literary reference to the Cyclops made by Thomas de Quincey the essayist, in a piece entitled A Vision of Sudden Death, published in 1849. ‘But what was Cyclops doing here?’ he wrote. ‘Had the medical man recommended northern air, or how?’ He recollected, from such explanations as he volunteered, that he had an interest at stake in some suit-at-law pending in Lancaster; so that probably he had got himself transferred to this station for the purpose of connecting with his professional pursuits an instant readiness for the calls of the lawsuit’. This story, published in Blackwood’s Magazine under the title The English Mail Coach was thick with coincidence, particularly bearing in mind Ruxton’s residence at Lancaster.
Sydney Smith was at the peak of his career and had attained international status in the late 1930s when he was appointed as adviser to the World Health Organisation. He visited Ceylon in his advisory role to review the country’s medico-legal services and to recommend improvements. It was a project in which he had something of a vested interest for the Professor of Forensic Medicine at Colombo University, Dr G.S.W. de Saram, was a former student. Not surprisingly, while in Ceylon, the visiting expert was prevailed upon to give his opinion of a controversial murder case going through the courts at the time.
As the decade drew to a close, so the Second World War loomed in the shadows. At the age of fifty-seven and with his particular talents, Smith was of greatest use for the war effort as a back-room boy. He spent the next five years investigating the ballistic characteristics of military ordnance and working for the War Office as a consultant in medico-legal matters. One of the factors he looked at was the penetrative power of various types of ammunition, finding, for example, that American cartridges produced more powerful effects than those manufactured in Britain. The chemical composition of the different propellants accounted for this discrepancy but the British manufacturers were not keen to give up their use of cordite.
The behaviour of high-velocity bullets was very much part of Smith’s stock-in-trade and the war years allowed him to extend his already considerable knowledge of the subject. The home front produced its own casualties and, tragically, not always due to enemy action. One night in July 1940, a Royal Air Force Sergeant challenged a car being driven late at night in Edinburgh after an air-raid warning had sounded. The car, which did not stop, was being driven to police headquarters in the city and one of the passengers was the Assistant Chief Constable. The Sergeant fired at the car as it sped by and a .303 bullet passed through the celluloid rear-window, striking the Assistant Chief Constable in the face. The unfortunate officer died three days later and the RAF Sergeant was charged with assault and culpable homicide.
Although it was thought that only one shot had been fired, an examination of the car revealed a number of holes in the vehicle, including two in the windscreen, and there were dents in the metalwork. Consequently, it appeared as if at least two, and possibly more, shots had been fired. Smith carried out the post-mortem on the policeman and was able to reconstruct the course of the single deadly bullet which severely wounded him and caused his death. The bullet, a .303 aluminium-tipped projectile with a cupro-nickel jacket, struck the man on the right side of the jaw, completely shattering the bone and disintegrating as a result of the impact. Fragments of the bullet punched holes in the windscreen and the aluminium tip struck the metal frame and ricocheted to the back of the car where it was found on the rear seat.
Lord Aitchison, presiding judge at the High Court of Justiciary, ruled that although subject to military discipline, the RAF marksman was still within the law of the land. It appeared that he was legitimately armed in the post-Dunkirk period, with invasion fears running high when servicemen on leave took loaded weapons home. The Sergeant was on leave and had spent several hours that evening carousing with friends. When the air-raid siren sounded at about midnight, he took it on himself to act as a roadside sentry. Before the police car appeared, he challenged and threatened a car driven by an Auxiliary Fire Service officer. Then came the shooting tragedy. Despite his protestations that he was entitled to fire
on vehicles not answering his challenge during an air raid, the RAF Sergeant was found guilty. He received a rather lenient sentence of six months’ imprisonment.
In another tragedy on the home front, Smith was called in to examine a Home Guardsman shot dead during an exercise ostensibly involving blank ammunition. The exercise was staged near Edinburgh in the summer of 1942 and involved both regular troops and the Home Guard. The mock battle was stopped as soon as it was realised that one of the participants had been badly wounded. The man had been hit with a high-velocity .303 bullet which disintegrated on impact, creating injuries from which he later died.
Eyewitness accounts of the way the soldier reacted when struck by the bullet enabled Smith to determine the direction of the shot. Assisted by detectives from Edinburgh CID, he found an empty cartridge case that had fired a live round, among a number of blanks in an area occupied by a force of twenty-six soldiers representing an attacking group during the exercise. The rifles used by this group were collected by the police and test shots fired from each weapon.
Sydney Smith, a pioneering forensic ballistics expert, was in his element. He was able very quickly to identify the rifle which had fired the fatal shot by distinctive marks made on the cartridge case by the firing pin. The man responsible for this weapon had decided to make the military exercise more realistic by firing the occasional live round of ammunition. Following psychiatric examination he was found to have acted under a sense of diminished responsibility.
After the cessation of hostilities, Smith took part in a commission to assess the medical aspects of German war crimes. He and his colleagues, meeting in Frankfurt in 1946, heard a great deal of evidence about medical experiments carried out in the Nazi concentration camps. Every conceivable type of experiment was conducted, ranging from the pseudo-scientific to the merely sadistic. What struck the Allied doctors was that given access to unlimited human guinea pigs and with no ethical constraints, the experimenters worked without objectives or proper methods. ‘The experiments,’ wrote Smith, ‘were not merely carried out with gross indifference to the value of human life and callous disregard to human suffering, but were incompetent in both conception and execution from a purely scientific point of view.’