Medical Detectives

by Robin Odell

  Further searches were made in the Essex Marshes in the hope of finding the head and legs to match up with the torso. A breakthrough in the investigation came soon after news of the discovery of the torso was reported in the newspapers. The activities of a civilian pilot at the United Services Flying Club at Elstree had been observed by airport workers who judged them to be suspicious. Brian Donald Hume had hired an Auster light aircraft the day after Setty went missing and took off for Southend carrying two bulky parcels of airfreight. When he returned, there was some damage to the aircraft which was duly noted.

  Hume was sought for questioning and tracked down on 26 October. In answer to police questioning, he said that he had been paid to dispose of parts of a printing press used for counterfeiting petrol coupons. He explained that three men had arrived at his flat and delivered the parcels. Bloodstains were apparent on the carpet in the living room which was taken as evidence of violence and Hume was charged with murder. He appeared on trial at the Old Bailey in January 1950 when Camps gave expert testimony for the prosecution and Dr Donald Teare appeared for the defence. Camps described how Setty had met his death as a result of shock and haemorrhage caused by multiple stab wounds to the chest.

  Considerable quantities of blood had been found at Hume’s flat and there were varying theories as to its origin. The prosecution believed Setty was murdered there, despite the lack of any fingerprint evidence, and clearly implicating Hume. Against this was the suggestion that Setty had been killed elsewhere and his parcelled-up remains, leaking blood, were delivered to Hume’s flat by the three men he had spoken about. The two pathologists did not agree about the bloodstains and there were strong arguments in favour of more than one attacker being involved in the murder.

  The jury could not agree a verdict, with the result that Hume was discharged. A new jury was sworn in but the prosecution declined to present any evidence. In consequence, the judge instructed that Hume be found not guilty on the murder charge. He admitted being an accessory to the fact and was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. Soon after he was released in 1958, and in the knowledge that he could not be charged again with the same crime, Hume made a confession. His medium was a Sunday newspaper which carried the headline, ‘I killed Setty … And Got Away With Murder’. No doubt that is what Francis Camps believed when the trial concluded.

  Hume continued to lead an adventurous life, and after he went to live in Switzerland, he shot and killed a taxi driver in the course of a bank raid in Zurich. The Swiss had no difficulty in finding him guilty and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Sent back to Britain in 1976, he spent the rest of his days at Broadmoor where he died in 1988.

  In March 1953, a discovery was made at Notting Hill, London that precipitated one of the most sensational post-war murder investigations. A Jamaican man, newly arrived in Britain, rented a flat at 10 Rillington Place. He was given permission by the landlord to use a ground-floor kitchen because the tenant had absconded. While inspecting the state of the kitchen, the new tenant tapped on one of the walls, which sounded hollow. His curiosity was roused when he realised that he had found a cupboard which had been wall-papered over. When he peeled the paper back and opened the doors, he discovered the bodies of three women holed up in the confined space.

  Camps’s biographer records that on the evening of 24 March, as he was about to start dinner, the pathologist was called by the police to 10 Rillington Place. The three corpses he saw there were taken to the mortuary at Kensington for closer examination. Camps worked through the night and his burden was added to the next morning after police searches at the house turned up a fourth body concealed beneath the floorboards in one of the bedrooms. The corpses found in the kitchen were all identified as prostitutes; women in their mid-twenties known to the police. The fourth body was that of Ethel Christie, wife of John Reginald Halliday Christie, the missing tenant from 10 Rillington Place. While Camps was absorbed with the grisly task of determining how these women had died, police searching the garden found further human remains. The pathologist would eventually piece together the skeletons of two females who had lain in the ground for nearly ten years. A newspaper found in their grave was dated 19 July 1943.

  A manhunt ensued to find John Christie, a fifty-five-year-old office worker, well known in the neighbourhood, who had rented the ground-floor flat at Rillington Place for fourteen years. Meanwhile, Camps proceeded with his examinations and determined that the three bodies walled up in the kitchen cupboard had not been there very long, probably only a matter of months. All three corpses were remarkably well preserved, accounted for by Camps who said the cupboard was dry and well ventilated and the weather had been cold. He determined that the women had been strangled and he found high levels of carbon monoxide in their blood. His conclusion was that they had been gassed, then strangled and subjected to sexual intercourse, either before, during or after death. In the case of Ethel Christie, aged fifty-four, cause of death was strangulation with no evidence of gas poisoning.

  A week after the discoveries at 10 Rillington Place, on 31 March, John Christie was arrested on Putney Bridge by a police officer who recognised him from descriptions that had been circulated. While he was being questioned, Camps and his team continued their forensic examination of the remains found in the garden. Working at the London Hospital Medical School under the direction of Professor Richard Harrison, he established the ages of the two women, one being about twenty-one and the other in her thirties. The skull of the second woman was missing from the garden grave, although, in a bizarre resolution of the mystery, it became known that the relic had been unearthed in 1949 by Christie’s dog whose master threw it into a bomb-damaged house where it was found by children and eventually brought to the notice of the police who destroyed it. The pathologist paid particular attention to the jawbone belonging to the first set of remains, which contained a tooth crowned in a manner suggesting German or Austrian dental work. The remains were subsequently identified as those of twenty-one-year-old Ruth Fuerst, an Austrian refugee.

  Christie made several detailed statements in which he admitted murdering the six women whose bodies had been found, including the strangulation of his wife. He also confessed to the murder in 1949 of Beryl Evans, whose body, together with that of her baby, had been discovered beneath the floor of the wash-house at 10 Rillington Place. Her husband, Timothy Evans, first confessed to the crimes and then blamed Christie who appeared as a witness at his trial for murder. The twenty-six-year-old van driver was found guilty of killing his child and was sentenced to death. He was hanged on 5 March 1950.

  Now, in light of what had been revealed at Rillington Place, and Christie’s admission that he had killed Beryl Evans, it was decided to exhume the bodies of Beryl and baby Geraldine. This was another grim task allocated to Francis Camps. The exhumation took place on 18 May 1953 at the Roman Catholic cemetery of the Royal Borough of Kensington. Camps conducted the post-mortems aided by Donald Teare who had performed the original examinations in 1949, and Keith Simpson, who was present at the request of Christie’s lawyers. As Simpson put it in his autobiography, ‘Once, and only once, we three were “on the job” together.’ His account of what followed indicated a less than fraternal atmosphere. Simpson was intent on finding possible signs of carbon monoxide in Mrs Evans’s body which, if evident, would have been indicative of Christie’s method of killing.

  The three men gathered around the mortuary table observed pink discolouration of the thighs, a tell-tale sign of carbon monoxide poisoning. Simpson told Camps he wanted tissue samples taken for laboratory analysis and Donald Teare concurred. Camps appeared to be put out by this request and replied, ‘I’m in charge here. I’m going to do this my way.’ He said he would hand over all the specimens to Dr Lewis Nickolls, Director of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory. The cause of death was pinpointed as asphyxia, thereby confirming Dr Teare’s original findings. The laboratory tests proved negative for carbon monoxide and Simpson and Camps agreed that a path
ologist of Teare’s experience would not have missed evidence of carbon monoxide poisoning if it had been apparent at the original post-mortem.

  Among the weird discoveries made at 10 Rillington Place was a tobacco tin containing four tufts of pubic hair. These were presumed to have been taken by Christie from his victims and kept as trophies. Keith Simpson devoted several paragraphs in his memoirs to discussion of the pubic hair which Christie claimed had come from his wife and the three women whose bodies ended up in the cupboard. Microscopic examination did not support this contention, so the origin of the hair remained a mystery. In any event, Camps was not too fussed about this diversion.

  The odious former special policeman, John Christie, was tried for the murder of his wife. Outwardly a respectable, though unpopular man, he had served prison sentences for theft and was an habitual liar. He was known as ‘Reggie-no-dick’ on account of his sexual inadequacy. In evidence, he related how he invited women to his flat, got them drunk and then placed them in his infamous deck-chair where he rendered them unconscious with coal gas. Once they were insensible, he strangled and raped them. He admitted killing Beryl Evans but denied harming her baby. There was little doubt that Timothy Evans was an innocent man caught up in his own false confession. Following Mr Justice Brabin’s public enquiry in 1966, the Queen granted Evans a posthumous pardon. By then, Christie had long since met his fate on the scaffold at Pentonville in July 1953.

  The ghoulish events which occurred at 10 Rillington Place have been thoroughly chronicled, most notably by Ludovic Kennedy in his book published in 1961. And Richard Attenborough’s creepy portrayal of Christie in the 1971 film about the murders was memorable. John Eddowes published an account in 1994 and made the case for two killers at Rillington Place, Evans and Christie. The Attorney-General who prosecuted at Christie’s trial, made a point afterwards of commending Francis Camps and his colleagues for their professional skills in dealing with difficult forensic materials. He suggested that the evidence gathered represented a remarkable feat of investigation to which Camps answered, ‘I think it is very satisfactory.’ A further commendation came from the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Theobald Mathew, extending his gratitude to the pathologist and his team for their brilliant work. Camps published his own account of the forensic investigation in his book, Medical and Scientific Evidence in the Evans and Christie Cases (1953). He also had the last word on Christie on whose body he carried out the customary post-mortem following execution at Pentonville Prison. He noted, ironically, that ‘Reggie-no-dick’ has a ‘well-developed’ penis. Commenting on the conviction of Timothy Evans, he observed that the case was particularly controversial and, ‘undoubtedly aided the abolition of the death penalty’.

  In November 1953, an event occurred in Germany involving a British serviceman that would, in due course, embroil Francis Camps in another sensational case. In the meantime, he continued his far from humdrum professional work with the investigation of the murder of a woman whose burning body attracted the attention of neighbours on 28 July 1954. When the police arrived at the scene in South Hill Park, Hampstead, they found the naked body of Hella Christofi in the garden, charred and reeking with the smell of paraffin.

  Camps’s examination was straightforward. He found an area of unburned skin encircling the woman’s neck with the marks of a knot plainly indicating a ligature. She proved to have been strangled with her son’s scarf, the remains of which had been thrown into the dustbin. The dead woman had been murdered by her mother-in-law out of obsessive jealousy. Fifty-three-year-old Styllou Christofi, an illiterate woman of peasant origins, had been tried and acquitted in Cyprus, twenty-three years previously on a murder charge. At the Old Bailey in 1954, she declined to plead insanity and evoked little public sympathy. She was convicted of murder and hanged at Holloway Prison.

  The following year, after startling developments in the death of a British serviceman in Germany, Camps was asked to supervise an exhumation at Cologne. On 30 November 1953, Sergeant Reginald Watters, based at the REME Technical Training College in Duisberg, was found hanging from the banisters in a barrack room stairwell. He had, it seemed, committed suicide. The body, suspended by a rope and with an upturned bucket lying nearby, was found by fellow non-commissioned officer, Sergeant Frederick Emmett-Dunne and another NCO. A post-mortem examination was carried out by a junior pathologist seconded to the British Army on the Rhine. Dr Alan Womack found bruising on the dead man’s neck and noted that the thyroid cartilage was broken. On the basis of this report and noting the circumstances in which the body had been found, an army inquest into Sergeant Watters’s death returned a verdict of suicide.

  The untimely end of a popular NCO was the talk of Duisberg and it was not long before the rumour mills started up. Watters was married to a local German woman and, ostensibly, Emmett-Dunne was his friend. But there was talk of jealousy on Watters’s part, who believed his friend was making a play for his wife. For his part, Emmett-Dunne was not popular among his peers who regarded him as arrogant and overbearing. He was also a man of questionable honesty who, at the time of his colleague’s death, was being investigated for alleged misuse of regimental funds.

  The military court convened to consider the circumstances of Watters’s death, returned a verdict of suicide by hanging. With the enquiry concluded, Emmett-Dunne resumed his normal duties and, in the spring of 1954, he was posted back to Britain. In June of that year, he married Watters’s widow. The provost authorities in Germany were already dubious about the inquest verdict and news of Emmett-Dunne’s marriage and possible motive for wanting to be rid of his rival reinforced doubts.

  This reconsideration led to a decision to exhume Watters’s body and carry out a second post-mortem. Consequently, in February 1955, Francis Camps found himself on an aircraft heading for Germany to supervise the exhumation at Cologne Military Cemetery. He concluded that the injuries to the neck were not the result of hanging but were caused by a blow delivered sideways at the throat, such as a karate chop. The blow broke the thyroid cartilage and was the cause of death. Tests were carried out at the British Military Hospital at Hostert to establish the degree of force needed to break a human larynx. Murder now looked a more likely prospect than suicide and Emmett-Dunne was arrested on 20 April 1955 and sent back to Germany to face a court-martial.

  The tall, powerfully built Sergeant gave a fanciful account of a disagreement between himself and Reginald Watters while they were sat in his car. He claimed that his erstwhile friend was angry about what he regarded as his over-friendly relationship with his wife and threatened him with a gun. Believing Watters intended to kill him before taking his own life, Emmett-Dunne hit out in self-defence. When he man-handled Watters out of the car, he realised he had killed him and decided to string up his body in a fake suicide.

  The court-martial lasted nine days, during which Camps gave evidence and attended a reconstruction of the crucial incident which was supposed to have taken place in the car. Emmett-Dunne, with the help of a volunteer playing the part of Sergeant Watters, demonstrated the way in which he claimed to have struck his fellow soldier. Camps observed this re-enactment with a critical eye. He knew that the injuries resulting from the blow demonstrated by Emmett-Dunne would have landed on the side of the neck, whereas the fatal blow had been directed at the throat. It seemed that Emmett-Dunne, who was known to have undergone commando training in 1942, felled Watters with a chop to the throat delivered with the side of the hand.

  Returning to the courtroom, armed with diagrams showing the anatomy of the neck and with the dead man’s larynx mounted in a transparent box, Francis Camps continued his evidence. He described what had happened as, ‘… straightforward mechanics’. Asked if death had resulted from hanging, he replied simply, ‘No.’ He said that the injuries carefully described by the army pathologist were consistent with the body being suspended after death. The court-martial concluded with a guilty verdict and Emmett-Dunne was sentenced to death. He was spared the gallows, th
ough, because Britain had signed a convention with Germany whereby the death penalty would not be acted upon in crimes committed by British military personnel. A sentence of life imprisonment was imposed, of which the ex-Sergeant served ten years before being released in 1965.

  In the wake of this affair, Francis Camps was appointed Honorary Consultant Pathologist to the British Army. He had shown the value of experimentation in the Emmett-Dunne case by arranging with a Japanese ju-jitsu expert to show him how a traditional martial arts blow would be delivered and with what amount of force. The purpose of this improvisation was to judge the difference between the way in which certain unarmed combat blows were delivered. He judged that the position and direction of a ju-jitsu blow was inconsistent with the injury that killed Sergeant Watters, whereas a commando-style chop would have delivered sufficient deadly force.

  Christmas Humphreys, who appeared as prosecuting counsel in many murder trials, including that of Donald Hume, had numerous encounters with Francis Camps. In his autobiography, Humphreys referred to the pathologist in his index, perhaps mischievously, but certainly erroneously, as, ‘Sir Francis’, and went on to criticise him for occasionally answering first and thinking afterwards. He did, though, praise him as a pioneer in experimentation, what he called, ‘practical pathology’. Camps himself looked upon experimentation as a valuable means of avoiding worn-out theories. The astute lawyer perhaps recognised an impetuosity in Camps’s character that was not always his best quality.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle observed, through comments attributed to Sherlock Holmes, that when a doctor goes wrong he is the ‘first of criminal minds’ because he has both nerve and knowledge. This seemed to apply to Dr John Bodkin Adams when he was charged with murder in 1956. Several of his patients died in suspicious circumstances after leaving him substantial legacies. Rumours had swirled around the general practitioner in his hometown, Eastbourne on the Sussex coast, for several years. These grew in intensity as his name frequently appeared as a beneficiary in the wills of his deceased patients, many of whom were elderly, wealthy widows. To all intents and purposes, he was an upright citizen and a servant of the community. He had practised in Eastbourne for over thirty years and lived the life of a bachelor. He had some 2,000 patients on his list, many of whom paid privately for his services.