by Robin Odell
‘Why?’ asked counsel.
‘Because,’ replied Simpson, ‘… it wouldn’t necessarily cause death; it was the lifting that did it.’
Badgered by Lord Goddard, Simpson refused to give ground on his interpretation of the facts as he understood them. He reiterated that the dead man had been found with a rope around his neck which had been pulled tight and lifted, killing him in the process. He refused to speculate on the circumstances beyond agreeing that the victim had been suspended in some way, adding, ‘we have no evidence.’ Lord Goddard commented acidly, ‘Well, at any rate, we have got as far as that.’ In his biography of Lord Goddard, published in 1977, Fenton Bresler remarked on Simpson’s ‘remarkable stand for scientific integrity, committing himself solely within the confines of his own specific knowledge.’
Dr Gardner was examined in considerable detail about the pathological appearances of asphyxia, and the textbook opinions of both Spilsbury and Glaister were cited. His position, in essence, was that Mudie was strangled by a rope placed around his neck which caused slow strangulation. He contended that the mark left by the rope indicated some form of suspension not involving a drop. His view was that the rope might have been pulled up when the unconscious victim was in a sagging position. His precise words were, ‘I mean, if the loop of that rope were over the knob of the chair, you have got the ideal position.’ In his summing up, Lord Goddard told the jury that he did not propose to discuss which of the two doctors’ opinions was correct, stating that the victim was killed by being strangled by a rope with some upward movement of suspension. The Lord Chief Justice drew a picture of how a man might be sitting in a chair with someone behind him pulling on a rope around his neck and strangling him. That, he said, ‘would be a degree of suspension’. He sent the jury out to consider their verdict at 4.35 p.m. and they were back in the courtroom within an hour to deliver guilty verdicts on both Ley and Smith. The pair were sentenced to death after Ley complained about what he termed the judge’s biased summing up. It might be said that the former Minister of Justice had his day in court.
On 5 May 1947, Thomas Ley was reprieved by the Home Secretary after he was declared insane and committed to Broadmoor, while Smith’s sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. Ley died a couple of months later from a stroke and Eric Gardner, who had been suffering from tuberculosis, died in 1951. Keith Simpson had been critical of his friend who he believed had, ‘stuck out his neck unnecessarily’ and thereby highlighted the problem of trying too assiduously to help the police. It seemed that the desire to seek truth and justice strained their relationship but Simpson said they remained close friends.
Breaking the sequence of the big post-war murder cases was an episode which enabled Simpson, justifiably, to claim a forensic first. The murder of Margaret Gorringe in Kent in 1948 provided the pathologist with evidence of bite marks on her body which led him to believe he could identify her attacker. The bites were made by an individual whose teeth were unevenly spaced and curiously angled. Suspicion fell on the dead woman’s husband and it was known that the couple had quarrelled. As there was no dentist available, Simpson himself took a cast of the suspect’s teeth and showed that the impressions matched the bite marks on the body in every detail. In due course, Gorringe was convicted of murdering his wife and, in his quiet way, the pathologist had chalked up the first identification of a murderer in Britain by teeth marks left on the victim’s body.
The pathologist commented on the lack of interest in forensic dentistry in Britain, although studies were well advanced in Sweden and the USA. In particular, Dr Gösta Gustafson, working at Lund University, developed techniques for estimating the age of an individual from the teeth. His work on Forensic Odontology, published in 1966, was a landmark textbook. Simpson’s own achievements had not gone unnoticed, though, for colleagues in Scotland sought his help with a case in 1967 when a teenage girl was reported missing from her home in the village of Biggar in Scotland. When fifteen-year-old Linda Peacock had not returned home by 11 p.m. on Sunday 6 August, local police mounted a search.
Early the following morning, Linda’s body was found lying in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church. She appeared to have been strangled during a sexually motivated attack in which she suffered head wounds. Of particular significance was a bite mark on her right breast. A police task force under the command of Chief Superintendent William Muncie, made house-to-house and other enquiries. These were passed through what he called ‘the sieve’, including initial checks at a nearby boys’ school. Meanwhile, a photograph of the bite mark on the girl’s breast was sent to the Department of Forensic Dentistry at the Police Training School in Liverpool. The assessment made was that the marks could be used both to eliminate suspects and also to identify the attacker.
Dr Warren Harvey, consultant at Glasgow Dental Hospital, who was on holiday in Ireland, was sent a copy of the photograph and he responded by confirming the importance of bite mark evidence to the enquiry. A breakthrough came when one of the boys at the school in Biggar admitted giving false information to the police about the absence of one of his fellow pupils, seventeen-year-old Gordon Hay. It now appeared that Hay had returned to his dormitory in an excited state late on Sunday evening and persuaded his friends to tell detectives that they were all in bed, including himself, by 10 p.m.
By this time, Hay had been transferred to another school but officers interviewed him and brought him back to Biggar. He denied knowing Linda Peacock and insisted he was in bed by 10 p.m. on the night in question. It was noted that Hay had irregularities in his upper incisor teeth which prompted the question whether he would agree to have dental impressions taken to compare with the bite marks on the murder victim. The procedure adopted was to take each of twenty-nine boys in turn to Glasgow Dental Hospital to have casts made of their teeth. Each boy was designated by a number so that Dr Harvey would not know their identity when he compared the impressions with the crime scene evidence. It was at this point that he called on Keith Simpson for assistance, acknowledging the need for additional expertise.
Comparing the casts with photographs of the bite marks, attention was drawn to Number 14 as the most likely match, although Dr Harvey did not think the identification was sufficiently strong to precipitate the arrest of a suspect. Having narrowed the field to five of the plaster casts, Simpson and Harvey adopted a different strategy. They made models in acrylic material and hinged the two halves so that they could simulate a bite. Then, as Simpson later described it in his matter-of-fact way, as soon as a suitable female body appeared during the normal course of mortuary work, we ‘made trial marks on the breast’. The advantage of the odontologist and the pathologist combining their efforts was immediately apparent, with the effect that cast Number 14 was eliminated.
It was back to the drawing board, and the two experts began to concentrate on two small pits visible in the bite mark impression left on the victim, which had been previously noted. Dr Harvey had not come across any references to features such as these in the scientific literature and acknowledged that they were now in unchartered waters. Reviewing all the casts once more with this particular feature in mind, their focus came to rest on Cast Number 11 which showed a damaged upper incisor and another tooth with a small cavity due to a missing filling. There was a perfect match with the bite impression on the victim.
Elated, yet cautious, they discussed their dental investigation, which had taken several weeks to complete, with Chief Superintendent Muncie. He confirmed that from other circumstantial evidence gleaned from the scene of the crime, Number 11 was also his suspect. Yet the experts had some lingering doubts. Forensic odontology was still in its relative infancy and the textbook marker for dental identification was a minimum of four or five adjacent teeth – Harvey and Simpson only had three. So, once again, it was back to the drawing board.
Further impressions were taken of Number 11’s teeth and subjected to intense scrutiny by Dr Harvey. Transparencies made from them were superimposed on photographs
of the bite marks and examined by Keith Simpson. His opinion was that the results were like matching fingerprints. This was sufficient corroboration of identity to prompt the issue of a warrant to arrest Gordon Hay and, in due course, he appeared on trial for the murder of Linda Peacock. Simpson gave evidence and said that in more than thirty years, ‘I have not seen a bite mark with better defined detail than this.’ Dr Harvey’s evidence took a full day to deliver. Simpson described him as the prosecution’s ‘star witness’. His meticulous preparation was apparent to the extent that he had examined the dentition of over 300 youths and found only two with a pit on the tip of a canine tooth.
Hay gave evidence which consisted mostly of denials and his defence counsel was at pains to stress that the Crown’s evidence was circumstantial. In his summing up, the judge referred to forensic dentistry as, ‘a relatively new science’, while emphasising that the law must keep pace with science. The jury took two and a half hours to consider their verdict. They pronounced the defendant guilty and he was ordered to be detained during Her Majesty’s Pleasure. An appeal was lodged and dismissed, leaving William Muncie to record in his memoirs, The Crime Pond, published in 1979, that ‘a case, unique in British criminal annals’ was concluded.
Pathologists do not like loose ends and unsolved murders certainly fall into that category. Despite many confessions and accusations, all of them false, the murder of Joan Woodhouse in 1948 remains unsolved. The twenty-seven-year-old librarian from Yorkshire was found dead in Arundel Park, Sussex in circumstances which offered conflicting interpretations. What was inescapable, though, was that the young woman had been raped and strangled. Her partially-clothed body was found on 10 August by Thomas Stilwell, an Arundel man, while walking through the park. The body lay on sloping ground in a copse away from regularly used pathways. The dead woman was lying on her back, dressed in her underwear with no apparent attempts at concealment. Her outer clothes, together with a necklace and handbag, lay neatly folded and placed nearby.
Keith Simpson carried out a post-mortem examination on the maggot-strewn corpse which he estimated had lain where it was found for eight to ten days. Looking at the bruises on the head and neck, he thought that she had been forced down by her assailant while he applied a strangling grip around her neck. The hyoid bone was fractured and the lungs and heart showed evidence of asphyxia. The dead woman’s panties were still in place, although the pathologist determined that she had been subjected to forceful sexual intercourse. There were also signs of bruising on her thighs and around the vagina. Curiously, he found a ball of pubic hair in the vagina which he took as a further indication of the rough nature of the sexual assault that had occurred. The soft tissues had been broken down by the activity of maggots, making it impossible to swab for semen.
Chief Inspector Fred Narborough of Scotland Yard met Simpson at Arundel to review the crime scene. They had worked together before and the policeman was somewhat in awe of the pathologist whom he referred to as, ‘That remarkable man’. They viewed the body as it lay under beech trees in a secluded area of the park. As the doctor went about his work, Narborough said later, ‘… my eyes kept returning to that neat pile of clothing – so neat and tidy – so carefully arranged.’ It was a vision that haunted him to the end of his career.
A great deal was learned about Joan Woodhouse’s background. She was an only child brought up in a highly religious Yorkshire family. She qualified as a librarian in London, taught in Sunday school and lived in the YMCA at Blackheath. It was known that she had met and fallen in love with an ex-serviceman and her friends saw her as a bright, happy person with a possible engagement in the offing. But, at Eastertime in 1948, her mood changed when it seemed the relationship with her intended fiancé broke down. He, apparently, did not share her High Church beliefs and a rift developed between them. Such was her unhappiness, that, in April, she tried to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping tablets. Those who knew her felt her personality had changed and she told a friend in July that she planned to visit her family in Yorkshire over the Bank Holiday weekend. Instead, she took a train to Worthing in Sussex and then travelled by bus to Arundel where she was last seen at around 2 p.m. on 31 July. When she failed to turn up for work after the weekend, she was reported missing and her body was found just over a week later.
Chief Inspector Narborough and Keith Simpson tried to work out what had happened on that fateful sunny day in Arundel Park. There were at least two possible scenarios. The first was that she had a secret assignation with the man who had until recently been her fiancé and that things had become argumentative and got out of hand. The second proposition, based on information given to the police by the dead woman’s family, was that she was an ardent sun-worshipper who used every opportunity to sunbathe. This opened up the possibility that she went to a secluded section of the park, partially stripped off to lie in the sun and was surprised by a passing man who thought she might be inviting sexual liaison. Presented with an opportunity, he forced himself on her with violent consequences. In all the discussions, Fred Narborough’s mind kept going back to that pile of neatly stacked clothes.
The detective set out to interview every friend and acquaintance of the dead woman in order to eliminate them from his enquiries. He also had three confessions to contend with from publicity-seeking individuals and wasters of police time. Joan Woodhouse’s ex-fiancé was quickly eliminated from the enquiry when he was shown to have a sound and fully corroborated alibi. The inquest, held on 22 November 1948, concluded that the young woman had been murdered by a person or persons unknown. Dissatisfied with this outcome, her grieving family hired a private detective to search for the murderer. As a result, a report was sent to Scotland Yard naming as a suspect the man who had found her body in Arundel Park.
The Director of Public Prosecutions gave it as his opinion that there was insufficient evidence on which to base any meaningful prosecution. Undeterred by this apparent setback, Woodhouse’s father applied to magistrates for a warrant to arrest the man in an attempted private prosecution. This was the first time such an application had been made in eighty-five years and it prompted a hearing at Arundel in September 1950 when the magistrates ruled there was no case to answer. Thus the family’s hope of finding closure over Joan Woodhouse’s death petered out.
In a subsequent development, Scotland Yard decided to re-open the investigation under the leadership of Detective Superintendent Reginald Spooner, as Fred Narborough had, by then, retired. Keith Simpson expressed surprise at the turn of events and, particularly as Spooner did not consult him before launching his own theory regarding Joan Woodhouse’s death. The detective’s view was that the young librarian had not been raped or even murdered, but had committed suicide. The pathologist thought this was an absurd notion. After all, he had clearly established that a sexual assault had taken place and that the victim had been strangled. His view was that Joan Woodhouse had been raped at the spot where her clothes lay neatly folded, a mute testimony to her relaxed frame of mind, and that she attempted to run away, only to be pursued by her attacker, who killed her. She was left for dead under the shelter of trees about thirty feet away.
Of all the theories, once the main suspects had been eliminated, was Keith Simpson’s reconstruction based on his post-mortem findings. Joan Woodhouse, possibly in a disturbed state of mind following the break-up with her boyfriend, wanted to get away from it all and simply relax by soaking up the sun. Thinking she was safe in a secluded, wooded corner of Arundel Park, she took off her outer clothing and stretched out on the grass with the sun on her face. Her misfortune was to be seen by someone, a passing opportunist, who saw the possibility of a lustful adventure. When she ran off after he sexually assaulted her, he gave chase and silenced her before she could call for help. Perhaps the last word, quite literally, on this unsolved murder, should rest with Fred Narborough. His book of memoirs published in 1959, concluded with the line, ‘All the time, there is that murder on my mind.’
A path
ologist’s repertoire of cases would not be complete without a few poisonings. They make a change from the round of fatal shootings, stabbings and strangulations and are often more imaginative than other forms of killing. Poisoning usually involves careful premeditation and calls for subtlety, stealth and cunning. Keith Simpson had his quota of poison cases and often shared their investigation with his old sparring partner, Francis Camps. A number of these are described in Chapter Four but one which stands out in Simpson’s archives is a case which he described as ‘one of the coolest murders by arsenic that ever came to lie in my crime files … ’. Margery Radford was very ill with pulmonary tuberculosis and was being treated at Milford Sanatorium at Godalming, Surrey. She was pale and very thin and relied on relatives to bring her food and drinks to stimulate her jaded appetite. Her husband, Frederick, was an attentive visitor, invariably bringing her fruit and soft drinks. He worked as a laboratory technician at nearby St Thomas’s Hospital.
These bedside rituals were dramatically interrupted one day in April 1949 when Mrs Radford experienced constant vomiting after eating a fruit pie which her husband had given to a relative to take to her. She confided in a friend, Mrs Formby, who visited her in the sanatorium saying she believed that she was being poisoned as a result of eating some of the things brought in by her husband. She asked her friend if she would send the fruit pie to Scotland Yard for analysis. This was an unusual request and her friend responded not by contacting the police, but by leaving the pie in the office of the sanatorium superintendent with a note saying a letter of explanation would follow. This was a course of action that was to have a dramatic outcome.
Unaware of the significance attached to the pie, the Superintendent took it home with the thought that some well-meaning visitor had left him a little treat. He took a few bites out of the pie and quickly became unwell with violent stomach pains and severe vomiting. He spent the remainder of the weekend in bed recovering from his sickness and wondering about the provenance of the fruit pie. He returned to work on Monday where Mrs Formby’s letter voicing Margery Radford’s concerns was waiting on his desk. He showed the remainder of the pie to Mrs Radford who identified it.