by Val McDermid
The Code was adopted across much of continental Europe and medical authors grew keen to display their expertise in the courtroom. Those authors included the French barber surgeon Ambroise Paré, sometimes called ‘the father of forensic pathology’. He wrote about the effects of violent death on internal organs, explained the indications of death by lightning, drowning, smothering, poison, apoplexy and infanticide, and showed how to distinguish between wounds made on a living and a dead body.
As our understanding of the workings of the human body grew, so did the discipline. In the nineteenth century Alfred Swaine Taylor wrote extensively on forensic pathology and modernised the discipline in Britain and abroad. His most important textbook, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence (1831), went through ten editions in his lifetime. By the mid-1850s Taylor had been consulted on more than 500 forensic cases, but his experience provides an early demonstration that forensic scientists are as fallible as the rest of us.
In 1859 Dr Thomas Smethurst was tried at the Old Bailey, charged with poisoning his mistress, Isabella Bankes. At the trial Swaine Taylor testified that there was arsenic in a bottle owned by Smethurst, and that this was proof of his guilt. Smethurst was found guilty, and sentenced to death. It later became clear that Swaine Taylor had carried out the test inadequately and that the bottle was in all probability arsenic-free. Isabella Bankes had been ill for a long time before, and was most likely to have died of natural causes. Smethurst was pardoned, though he did have to serve a 1-year prison sentence for bigamy. The Lancet and The Times heavily criticised Swaine Taylor and the verdict of murder, and forensic pathology became known as ‘The Beastly Science’. The case cast a heavy shadow over forensic pathology for many years.
Given the theatrical nature of the adversarial English court system, what the discipline needed to restore its reputation was someone whose ability came with a liberal sprinkling of charisma. That touch of glamour arrived in the person of Bernard Spilsbury. A handsome, convincing orator, Spilsbury was never seen in public without a top hat, tails, buttonhole and spats. His skill was evident. His ambidextrous hands could work on a dead body with speed and precision. He also presented his findings in clear, everyday language.
Juries and the public loved Spilsbury. The press portrayed him as a steady rock on which the law could break open the lies of immoral murderers. On his death in 1947 the Lancet said he had ‘stood alone and unchallenged as our greatest medico-legal expert’. Spilsbury had appeared for the Crown in over 200 murder cases.
Dr Hawley Crippen and his lover, Ethel le Neve, in the dock at the Old Bailey. Crippen would be convicted of murder and sentenced to death, while le Neve walked free
The first time he came to the attention of the public was in 1910, as an expert witness at the sensational trial of Doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen. An American homeopath and patent medicine salesman, Crippen had been living in Camden Town with his wife, Cora, a music hall singer with the stage name ‘Belle Elmore’. The marriage had been in difficulties; then Cora’s friends suddenly stopped seeing her around. Doctor Crippen told them variously that she had died and that she had gone to America to further her career. They became suspicious and went to the police, who questioned Crippen and searched his house. They found nothing. But the investigation panicked Crippen, who fled with his teenage mistress, Ethel Le Neve, aboard the SS Montrose bound for Canada. Le Neve dressed as a boy and posed improbably as his son.
Their flight rekindled the suspicions of the police, who went back to search the house a second time, and again found nothing. But they remained suspicious and mounted a third search in which they dug up the brick floor of the cellar. This time, they found what were believed to be the remains of a human torso, wrapped in a man’s pyjama top.
Meanwhile, the captain of the Montrose had noticed two odd passengers on board, and, just before his vessel went out of range, he sent a wireless telegram to the British authorities: ‘Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Mustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.’ Chief Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard boarded a faster ship, landed in Canada before the pair, and dramatically arrested them when they arrived – the first arrest made with the help of wireless communication.
The police called in a surgeon from St Mary’s Hospital, London, to examine the body and he put the young Spilsbury on the case. Spilsbury took a close look at Cora Crippen’s medical records and noticed that she had had an operation on her abdomen. The autopsy did not reveal the sex of the body, but Spilsbury did find traces of toxic compounds.
At Crippen’s trial, Spilsbury presented a piece of skin bearing a curved scar, preserved in formaldehyde, from the torso believed to belong to Cora Crippen. He passed it around the jury in a glass dish. Spilsbury set up a microscope in the next room for members of the jury to examine slides of the tissue. Although the defence pathologist argued that, because it had hair follicles growing from it, it must be folded skin and not scar tissue, the jury believed Spilsbury. Crippen was found guilty of drugging and murdering his wife. He was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London and at his request buried with a photograph of Le Neve. She was charged, and then acquitted, of being an accessory after the fact.
The Crippen slides still exist, in the Royal London Hospital, and in 2002 Professor Bernard Knight examined them. He could not see definite indications of scar tissue. Recent DNA testing of the fragments seem to show that the DNA does not match that of some of Cora Crippen’s descendants, and that the remains are male. Ironically, it seems that the case which projected Spilsbury into the public consciousness as the standard bearer for forensic pathology may have been one in which he was comprehensively mistaken.
A series of slides produced by Spilsbury showing sections of the scar found on the torso buried in the cellar: according to him, this proved it belonged to Cora Crippen, though others disagreed
Five years after Crippen was hanged, Spilsbury was involved in another extraordinary case that neither DNA testing nor any other modern forensic technique could have helped him solve. On Sunday, 3 January 1915, a Buckinghamshire fruit grower called Charles Burnham sat down with a mug of tea and opened his copy of the News of the World. A headline on page three shook him to the core: ‘Dead in Bath – Bride’s Tragic Fate on Day after Wedding’. The short report explained that one Margaret Lloyd had been found dead at her flat in north London. ‘Medical evidence showed that influenza combined with a hot bath might have caused a fainting fit,’ it concluded. Charles Burnham’s daughter, too, had died in a bath in Blackpool, shortly after her wedding almost exactly a year before. Burnham contacted the police, and discovered that Margaret Lloyd’s husband was George Joseph Smith, the man who had previously been married to his daughter, Alice Burnham.
The police called in Spilsbury to perform an autopsy on the exhumed body of Margaret Lloyd. He then travelled to Blackpool to autopsy Alice Burnham. Following this, the police uncovered details of a third woman, Bessie Williams, who had married George Smith and died in very similar circumstances at home in Kent on 13 July 1912.
The coroners had given a verdict of accidental death in the first two drownings but, when the police investigated anew, they discovered that Smith had benefited financially from all of his wives’ deaths: he had received £700 and £506 from the life insurance policies held by Margaret and Alice; and £2,500 in trust money (worth around £190,000 today) from Bessie. Now that they could see a pattern, the police arrested Smith.
George Smith and Bessie Munday on their wedding day. She would later become his first victim
From the bodies of Margaret and Alice, Spilsbury could find no signs of violence, poison or heart attack. On Bessie he found evidence of ‘goose-skin’ on her thigh, which is sometimes an indication of drowning (though it can also be caused by decomposition after death). Spilsbury read the notes of the general practitioner who had first seen Bessie’s body, and noted that she had been clutc
hing a bar of soap.
He had all three bath tubs brought to Kentish Town Police Station, where he lined them up together and examined them minutely. He was particularly puzzled by the case of Bessie Williams. Shortly before her death Smith had taken her along to the doctor so she could talk to him about her epilepsy symptoms. Smith had told Bessie that she was suffering from fits, even though she couldn’t remember having them and had no epilepsy in her family. Spilsbury was not convinced by this version of events. Bessie was five feet seven inches tall and obese. The bath tub she had died in measured just five feet at its longest, and sloped at the head end. Spilsbury knew that the first phase of an epileptic fit causes complete rigidity of the body and that, given her size and the shape of the bath, such a fit would have raised Bessie’s head above the water rather than brought it below.
If an epileptic fit had not been responsible for Bessie’s death, what could have caused it? Spilsbury researched further and learned that an extremely sudden rush of water into the nose and throat can inhibit a vital cranial nerve, the vagus nerve, and cause sudden loss of consciousness, swiftly followed by death. A common subsidiary result of this uncommon occurrence is instant rigor mortis – which Spilsbury thought explained the bar of soap clenched in Bessie’s fist.
Alfred Swaine Taylor had stated categorically in 1853 that it was impossible to drown an adult without leaving bruises, because of their violent struggle for breath, and this had never been challenged. Detective Inspector Neil decided to carry out a series of experiments before the trial, to test Spilsbury’s theory of how the women had died. He found women volunteers who would try to resist being submerged in the bath tubs. The first volunteer stepped into a full bath, clad in a bathing costume, and managed to grip the side of the bath and struggle. But when Neil grasped her ankles and abruptly pulled her legs up, she slid under the water and lost consciousness. It took a doctor several minutes to restore her to consciousness; she was lucky to live. The experiment was not Spilsbury’s idea, but he was aware of it and his reputation certainly benefited from its outcome.
George Smith was tried for the murder of Bessie Williams. At the trial Spilsbury spoke with great authority, and effortlessly carried the jury with him. They deliberated for twenty minutes before finding Smith guilty. He was hanged at Maidstone Prison.
Smith had been a silver-tongued conman who had committed his first theft in the East End of London at the age of nine. As he grew up he began to wear gold rings and brightly coloured bowties to help him impress women, so he could exploit them. Because of the early effects of the First World War, and because so many young British men of his day had moved to the colonies, there were a surplus of half a million women in Britain in 1915, providing Smith with plenty of prey. Stoked by the newspapers, public interest in what came to be called the ‘Brides in the Bath Murders’ was intense at the time. Scores of journalists, hungry for a ‘scientist foil serial killer’ headline, door-stepped Spilsbury throughout the investigation. His star would not stop rising in his lifetime.
Many of Spilsbury’s cases involved husbands charged with murdering their wives. It’s chilling to wonder how many had got away with it before the science had evolved sufficiently to uncover the truth behind those women’s deaths. Increasingly, the press presented a picture of Spilsbury as a hero who had devoted his life to interpreting clandestine clues left on defenceless victims, so that their evil killers could not escape justice or strike again. In 1923, that image was bolstered by a knighthood. A year later, another case cemented his reputation ever more firmly.
On 5 December Elsie Cameron left her home in north London to visit her fiancé, Norman Thorne, a chicken farmer in Crowborough, Sussex. They had been engaged for two years, but Thorne had recently started seeing a new girlfriend.
On 15 January 1925, the police found Elsie’s dismembered body buried under a chicken run on the farm and her head stuffed into a biscuit tin. Thorne had originally told them that she had never arrived but, after the discovery of the body, he changed his story, saying that she had arrived to tell him she was pregnant and wanted to get married. He said that he had then left the house but, when he returned two hours later, he found her hanging from the ceiling. Assuming it was suicide, he decided to conceal the body, cut it into four pieces and bury it.
Spilsbury did the autopsy on 17 January and, in his report to the coroner, said Elsie had met a violent death, probably after being beaten. He had found evidence of eight bruises, including one on her temple, not visible on the surface but revealed when he opened the flesh. As he did not see any rope marks on her neck that would indicate hanging, he did not take a section from it. He had noticed two marks on her neck, but thought they were just natural creases. At the inquest, the coroner inquired how it was possible to examine a 6-week-old corpse, but Spilsbury assured him that the decomposition had been no problem. The accused man, Norman Thorne, questioned the report because there were no external signs of bruising, and successfully applied for a second autopsy.
Bernard Spilsbury, the eminent and suave pathologist. His testimony helped convict hundreds of criminals, though some of his conclusions have since been challenged
Elsie was exhumed on 24 February and Robert Bronte performed an autopsy with Spilsbury watching on. Post-mortem examinations are supposed to take place in the bright light of day or in electrically lit mortuaries. Elsie was exhumed from midnight to 9 a.m, in front of a crowd of spectators and journalists in the dimly lit chapel at the cemetery. The coffin was full of water, and the corpse had had an extra month to decompose since Spilsbury had examined it, but Bronte saw evidence of marks on the neck and took sections away to analyse.
The trial of Norman Thorne lasted five days. The rival pathologists disagreed over the bruises. When asked by the prosecution whether there were any external marks on the body, Spilsbury replied, ‘No, none at all.’ The defence pathologist, J. D. Cassels, argued that Elsie Cameron was still alive when Thorne had cut her down from the beam, that the bruises were caused by her falling to the floor, and that she had died from shock ten to fifteen minutes later: this would explain the absence of rope marks, as they were eliminated by the circulation of the blood. He criticised Spilsbury for not examining the neck microscopically.
Spilsbury testified that the two final bruises were those on her face, and that she had been beaten to death with some Indian clubs which were found quite near to the scene. As was his adamant courtroom style, he refused to acknowledge any uncertainty in these conclusions. Yet he had said in a lecture two years previously that if medical evidence is strictly tested by cross-examination, ‘that is when the doctor realises his fallibility’.
Throughout the trial, the judge referred to Spilsbury as ‘the greatest living pathologist’, and told the jury in his summing up that Spilsbury’s ‘is undoubtedly the very best opinion that can be obtained’. The jury reached its ‘guilty’ verdict in less than half an hour. Some felt that they had not acknowledged the complexities of the pathologists’ evidence, especially the fact that there were no signs that Elsie Cameron had met a violent death. Among those who were concerned with the jury’s acceptance of Spilsbury’s confident conclusions was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lived close to Norman Thorne. He wrote in the Law Journal that ‘the more than papal infallibility with which Sir Bernard is readily being invested by juries must tend to be somewhat embarrassing to him’.
Norman Thorne was hanged at Wandsworth Prison for the murder of Elsie Cameron, though he pleaded his innocence to the bitter end. In a famous letter to his father on the eve of his execution he wrote, ‘Never mind, Dad, don’t worry. I am a martyr to Spilsburyism.’
According to historians Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton, the Thorne trial focused attention on two rival practices of pathology: Spilsbury the celebrity pathologist making a dramatic courtroom appearance, relying on his scalpel and his intuition; and Bronte the laboratory-based pathologist, relying on the latest forensic technology. They argue that Spilsbury’s ‘virtuosity’ in
the mortuary and the courtroom ‘threatened to undermine the foundations of forensic pathology as a modern and objective specialism’.
In his book Lethal Witness (2007), Andrew Rose suggests that Spilsbury caused at least two miscarriages of justice and several more unsafe verdicts. Convictions were sometimes made on flimsy evidence, because if Sir Bernard Spilsbury said a man was guilty then juries believed he must be guilty. In some of his more than 20,000 autopsy reports Spilsbury suppressed evidence because it didn’t fit with his narrative.
For example, in 1923, due to Spilbury’s evidence, a young soldier called Albert Dearnley was found guilty of tying up his best friend and suffocating him. Convicted of murder, he was only two days away from the gallows when the prison governor read a letter Dearnley had written to a female friend. Its tone worried him and he persuaded the Home Office to grant a stay of execution.
Just in time, the truth came out: the death was not murder, but an accidental asphyxiation that had happened in the course of a sado-masochistic homosexual game. Spilsbury – famous for his homophobia – had suspected the truth, but had kept his counsel because he believed the soldier was a sexual pervert who deserved his fate.
Nevertheless, when Spilsbury committed suicide in 1947, gassing himself in his own laboratory at University College London after a long battle with depression and poor health, it wasn’t only the Lancet that hailed him as the greatest pathologist of the age. Voices of adulation drowned out the dissenters many times over. His image tarnished only gradually after death. By 1959 his fellow forensic pathologist Sydney Smith was able to write, ‘One might almost hope that there will never be another Bernard Spilsbury.’