by Robin Odell
As the relationship developed, Marymont explained to his girlfriend that he was divorced and his ex-wife lived in America. He and Cynthia talked about marrying when her own divorce was finalised. On 8 June 1958, the Marymonts were invited out to lunch with friends. Mary Helen looked unwell and she and her husband left early. On the following day, she was admitted to hospital at the USAF base, suffering with gastric problems. Her condition worsened, and when she lapsed into unconsciousness, there were fears for her life. The anxieties were well founded for she did not respond to emergency measures and died in hospital. The base doctor noted that Marymont appeared to be remarkably unmoved by his wife’s death. He gave permission for an autopsy to be carried out to determine the cause of Mary Helen’s death. Then, he attempted to withdraw his consent but was overruled by the military authorities who insisted that a post-mortem was necessary.
Francis Camps was called on in his capacity as a Home Office pathologist and set about removing organs from the dead woman’s body for laboratory analysis. Critically, he also took samples of hair. Dr Lewis Nickolls of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, carried out tests that showed traces of arsenic in the liver which were indicative of a poisonous dose having been ingested twenty-four hours prior to death. Human hair has an absorbent capacity which makes its examination particularly important in cases of poisoning. Poison is picked up from the bloodstream and drawn into the hair, creating a marker which enables an analyst to work out the approximate strength and frequency of dosage. By these means, Dr Nickolls was able to ascertain that Mary Helen Marymont had absorbed doses of arsenic over a period of about six months.
Enquiries into the source of the arsenic centered on Marcus Marymont’s attempt to buy some from a pharmacy in Maidenhead. He did not persist with his request when told he needed to provide some documentation. He was more successful when he visited the laboratory at the USAF base where he was stationed. His request met with a favourable response, which led him to quip with staff that bottles containing arsenic should be kept under lock and key. His humour turned somewhat sour when he was arrested and charged with murdering his wife with poison.
While the Master Sergeant awaited his appearance at a court-martial, Francis Camps exercised his talent for experimentation. He wanted to determine how arsenic might be administered. He learned that, taken by mouth, or even in food, arsenic causes a strong burning sensation which is immediately apparent. Whereas, a strong dose of 10 grains or more could be disguised in, for example, coffee or cocoa, without causing an objectionable taste. He survived to relate his experiences so, presumably, he did not swallow his test beverages.
Marymont’s court-martial was convened at Denham in Buckinghamshire in September 1958. The proceedings were conducted under American jurisdiction, which included a panel of officers acting as judges. The prosecution argued simply that the Master Sergeant wanted his wife out of the way so that he would be free to marry his lover. He tried to poison her with small doses of arsenic and when that failed to have the desired effect, he resorted to a heavy dose with fatal consequences. The defendant maintained his innocence and suggested that his wife’s illness was caused by self-administered arsenic in an attempt to win back his affections. Defence counsel claimed the evidence against Marymont was circumstantial. Cynthia Taylor underwent the ordeal of being on the witness stand for over six hours, during which, letters that had passed between her and Marymont were read out. This had the effect of exposing the lies he had told her about his marital status.
When Francis Camps was called to give evidence, it was apparent that those administering the court-martial procedure had little knowledge as to the depth of his experience. His response to counsel’s question about the number of post-mortems he had carried out created a minor sensation. His answer, that he thought the number was around 60,000 produced sharp intakes of breath on the part of many present. He dealt with issues of how arsenic might have been administered without Mrs Marymont realising it and dismissed the notion that her death was suicide. He observed, knowingly, that people who took poison to gain sympathy were only too anxious to go on living. The military judges deliberated for over five hours before finding Marymont guilty on two charges of murder and adultery. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour and dishonourably discharged from the US Air Force. He lost his subsequent appeal, although the adultery charge was dropped, and he was returned to the USA to serve his sentence at Fort Leavenworth Prison in Kansas.
At the height of his powers, Francis Camps was conducting around fifty post-mortems a week. He, and his friend, Sir Bentley Purchase, coroner for the northern district of London, dominated the forensic map in their area. Camps was a pioneering pathologist and he used his fame to make professional advances, not for personal aggrandisement, but to enhance the status of forensic investigation. He built up state-of-the-art facilities at the London Hospital which became his operational base. Part of his ambition, which he shared with Bentley Purchase and David Napley, was to harness all the advantages of science to aid the forensic pathologist. By the late 1950s, he had gathered around him a team of specialists whose skills embraced serology, chemistry, dentistry and medical photography to complement the core discipline of forensic medicine.
Woven into all the run-of-the-mill cases which came his way, there were always the weird and unusual episodes. None was more curious than the ‘Mummy of Rhyl’. Sarah Jane Harvey, a widow aged sixty-five, lived in the seaside town of Rhyl in North Wales. She occasionally took in paying guests. In May 1960, Mrs Harvey was admitted to hospital for tests. While she was away, her son, Leslie, decided to freshen up the interior of her house with some painting and decorating.
On the landing at the top of the stairs was a large wooden cupboard which Mrs Harvey always kept locked. Leslie decided to open it but, in light of what he found, perhaps wished he had not. Inside was a dried-out corpse festooned in cobwebs, dirt and dead flies. The local doctor viewed the body and thought a forensic specialist was required. Dr Gerald Evans, a Home Office pathologist based at Bangor, was called to the scene. He was confronted by a set of human remains that had been transformed into a granite-hard shell of skin and bone. Clearly, the body had been in place for some considerable time. It was so firmly stuck to the floor of the cupboard that a garden spade had to be used to prise it loose. Dr Evans had the body removed to the mortuary where initial examination indicated the remains were those of a middle-aged woman. X-rays showed no signs of fractures or the presence of any foreign objects. The body was placed in a bath of dilute glycerine to soften the tissues and permit examination of the internal organs. The pathologist traced a groove in the neck in which lay the remains of a cloth ligature. The age of the body was estimated at between forty and sixty.
The discovery at her home prompted a visit to Mrs Harvey from the police. She had an interesting story to tell. During the early weeks of the Second World War, that is, in 1939, she provided board and lodgings for a lady called Frances Knight, who was a semi-invalid. A few weeks later, she found Mrs Knight complaining of severe pain which resulted in her collapse and death. In this unexpected situation, Mrs Harvey decided the best course of action was to say nothing and hide the body. So, she dragged the dead woman along the upstairs landing and pushed her into the cupboard which she firmly locked. And there it remained for twenty years until its chance discovery by her son. During this time, Mrs Harvey continued to collect weekly rent which was paid by her late boarder’s estranged husband.
Enquiries established that Frances Knight had attended a hospital in Liverpool in 1939 and been diagnosed with disseminated sclerosis. The extraordinary condition of her body when discovered was popularly described as mummification; after all, ‘The Mummy of Rhyl’ made a good headline. The remains had become dessicated as part of a natural process accompanied by air movements in and around the cupboard. Cause of death was not immediately apparent but attention focussed on the ligature around her neck and discussion of whether, or not, it had contributed t
o Mrs Knight’s death.
A prosecution for murder was brought against Sarah Harvey and she appeared for trial at Ruthin Assizes in October 1960. Dr Evans was the expert witness for the prosecution while Francis Camps and the redoubtable Sydney Smith advised the defence team. A successful prosecution depended on the interpretation placed on the remains of a knotted stocking found around the neck of the mummified body. Dr Evans was thorough in his presentation of the facts and said that the actual cause of death was unascertainable. He was not able to say whether the ligature had been placed around the neck before or after death. The localised deep groove in the skin suggested that the ligature had been tight.
Although present in court, neither Camps nor Smith was called upon to give direct evidence. Defence counsel, briefed by the two pathologists, cast doubt on the ligature as a means of strangulation. The suggestion was made that the stocking around the neck might have a simple and innocent explanation. Mention was made of the custom in the North of England to tie a sock around a person who was ill as a kind of comfort. Camps noted that this suggestion met with nods of understanding among some of those in the courtroom. The defence was also able to show that Mrs Knight’s illness could have resulted in death from natural causes.
On the fifth day of the trial, prosecuting counsel, Sir Jocelyn Simon, told the court that he believed if would be unsafe to pursue the murder charge. The judge agreed and Sarah Harvey was found not guilty, although she was convicted on a charge of obtaining money by false pretences. She was sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment for this misdemeanour. Harvey had maintained her deception for twenty years, leading people to believe that Mrs Knight was still alive and benefiting to the tune of more than £2,000.
Francis Camps was criticised by some for being overbearing at times and lacking in generosity towards colleagues. But, he clearly admired the work carried out by the Welsh pathologist, Gerald Evans, on the mummified remains. In his book, Camps on Crime, published the year after his death, he devoted a chapter to ‘The Mummy of Rhyl’ which carried an account by Gerald Evans on the pathological investigation he had carried out. Camps particularly noted, ‘the meticulous care taken by Dr Evans’ and acknowledged that ‘much useful scientific knowledge had been acquired’.
Camps notched up a hat-trick of cases involving servicemen with the rank of Sergeant when he gave evidence at the Boshears trial in 1961. This centred on a controversial death by strangulation which had distant echoes of the Chrissie Gall case in 1932 when the evidence of Spilsbury and Smith favouring suicide was disregarded by the jury which opted instead for murder. While self-strangulation was uncommon; a strangler killing in his sleep was even rarer.
Staff Sergeant Willis Eugene Boshears, a twenty-nine-year-old married serviceman in the US Air Force, was based at Wetherfield in Essex. On New Year’s Eve 1960, Boshears was alone at his flat in Dunmow, while his wife and children were staying with her parents. Fed up with being on his own, he decided to visit some of the local pubs where he embarked on a drinking spree, which included consuming vodka, whisky and beer. At The Bell in Braintree, he met twenty-year-old Jean Constable who was in the pub with a man friend. She was a regular in the local pubs and was drawn to the US servicemen who had money to spend and were out for a good time. She and her friend joined Boshears in dancing to music played on the jukebox and, then he invited the couple back to his flat where more drinking and jiving ensued.
Sensing that his guests were intent on having sex, Boshears showed them into the bedroom and left them to it. Later, he pulled a mattress in front of the fire and all three lay down together. Jean Constable went to sleep and, around 1 a.m., her companion decided to leave. By this time, Boshears had passed out after his long session of binge drinking. What happened next was described by Boshears after Constable’s body was discovered in a water-filled ditch in the Essex countryside. He remembered laying down beside the girl who was already asleep and then he passed out. The next thing he recalled was something scratching at his face. He woke up and found Constable lying beneath him. He had his hand on her throat and realised that she was dead.
In a state of panic, he cut off the dead girl’s hair to make identification difficult, tidied up the flat and put her body in the spare room while he decided what to do. Two days later, he drove out into the countryside and dumped the body in a ditch where it was discovered by a passing lorry driver. It was not long before the police became aware of how Jean Constable had spent an evening drinking and jiving with a Sergeant from the USAAF base. Boshears was arrested and charged with murder. The US authorities wanted to try him by court-martial, against the wishes of the Essex Police. The Director of Public Prosecutions upheld the police view that Boshears should be judged in a British court and, so, he was tried at Essex Assizes in Chelmsford in February 1961.
Francis Camps had conducted the post-mortem examination of Jean Constable’s body and concluded that her death was caused by asphyxia resulting from manual strangulation. He thought pressure had been applied to the throat for about thirty seconds. In court, Boshears pleaded not guilty to murder. He made many denials; there had been no arguments, no quarrels, no sexual advances and no wish to harm the young woman. Reminded by the prosecutor that he had attempted to cover up the crime, Boshears accepted that he had done so. Asked what crime he thought he had committed, he answered, ‘The logical one.’ Invited to expand on his answer, he said, ‘I had killed someone.’
In giving his evidence, Francis Camps attempted to reconstruct the sequence of events which had overwhelmed Jean Constable. He said she would have resisted pressure on her throat, even if involuntarily. He made the point that everyone unconsciously protects themselves. Then she would have lapsed into unconsciousness followed by convulsion and death. He believed this process might have taken half a minute. The pathologist’s first conclusion was that the idea of a man strangling a woman in his sleep sounded improbable. But, he later modified this opinion by saying he did not think it was impossible.
In his summing up, Mr Justice Glyn-Jones advised the jury to apply common sense. ‘Have you ever heard of a man strangling a woman while he was sound asleep?’ he asked, although he reminded them that Dr Camps had said it might be possible. Camps did not share the learned judge’s sense of incredulity because he probably knew that in 1952, a consultant psychiatrist giving evidence at a criminal trial in Devon had commented that somnambulistic attacks were not uncommon. On that occasion, a naval officer had been acquitted of attempted murder while sleepwalking. And, in 1943, a teenage girl in Kentucky, USA, had been acquitted of a charge of murdering her father and brother while sleepwalking.
The jury returned a not guilty verdict in the case of Sergeant Boshears and he walked from the courtroom into a barrage of public indignation. Many who had gathered to hear news of the verdict were shocked at the acquittal, while Boshears expressed his appreciation of British justice. Five months later, he returned to the USA where he was subsequently dismissed from the Air Force. Robert Jackson, in his biography of Camps, noted the pathologist’s wry observation that it was rare for a defence based on accidental death to succeed in a case where a body had been concealed.
Camps had, again, demonstrated his measured approach, balancing doubts and probabilities and eschewing the cut-and-dried opinions for which Spilsbury was famous. As subsequent events would show, keeping an open mind was crucial to the whole forensic process. In 1992, for example, a man whose identity was protected by law was acquitted at Newcastle Crown Court on a charge of attempted murder. He had, apparently, tried to strangle his teenage son while sleepwalking. He was judged to have been suffering from insane automatism at the time of the incident. And in 2009, a man was cleared of murder at Swansea Crown Court after he strangled his wife during a nightmare. He had a history of sleep disorders and suffered from a condition termed pavor nocturnus. The background was that he dreamt someone had broken into his accommodation while he was asleep and he attacked his wife believing she was the intruder.
> Francis Camps was appointed Professor of Forensic Medicine in the University of London at the London Hospital Medical School in 1963. He continued to build up his department as a widely recognised centre of excellence and he undertook lectures at numerous London medical schools, including the Middlesex, Royal Free and University College. He also devoted a great deal of time and energy to the British Academy of Forensic Sciences, to which he had been appointed Secretary in 1958, and edited the BAFS journal, Medicine, Science and the Law. Through the publicity which he attracted with his involvement in high-profile murder cases, he had also become a public figure or what, today, would be deemed a celebrity. His photograph frequently appeared in the popular press, always immaculately dressed, invariably smoking a pipe and looking very professional.
One of his many gifts, commented on by Sir David Napley, was that Camps always knew the right people. Thus, he had persuaded Professor Leon Radzinowitz, Director of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, to become the first President of BAFS and he lured several medico-legal luminaries of the day to join his editorial board, including Lord Birkett and Sir Frederick Lawton, both eminent judges, and two fellow pathologists, Dr Donald Teare and Professor John Glaister. By virtue of his persuasive personality, he had succeeded in drawing together exemplars from the fields of medicine, science and the law into a common enterprise.
Napley was Chairman of the Executive Council of BAFS and in his memoir, Not Without Prejudice, he wrote that his most difficult task was to confront Francis Camps. He said, ‘It was like harnessing a meteor.’ His thought processes did not flow along accustomed lines and he tended to flit from one subject to another. Among his friend’s weaknesses, Napley mentioned Camps’s dislike of Keith Simpson and his fear of contracting cancer. For a man with a medical background who smoked cigarettes and a pipe, this must have been a real concern. After his old friend and mentor, seventy-year-old Sir Bentley Purchase, died unexpectedly, following an accident at his home in September 1961, Camps might have felt the pull of mortality. If he did, it was not noticeable for he continued to work at the same relentless pace, devoting much of his time and energy to writing.