The Brighton Trunk Murder: Another Perfect Murder?
To murder someone and conceal their body in a trunk is an extraordinary thing to do, simply because detection is certain. Sometimes the identity of the victim is obvious, and sometimes it has to be deduced as a result of forensic investigation. Usually there are enough clues on or in the body to point to a killer. The trunk itself may furnish clues to the killer’s identity. A trunk murder is therefore one of the oddest crimes, almost a self-advertizing crime, an exhibitionist crime.
The senior police officer in Brighton was optimistic of success when on 17 June 1934 he went to the left-luggage office at Brighton station to look at the naked torso of a woman. The remains had just been discovered in a plywood trunk. The clerks could remember nothing about the man who had left the trunk there on Derby Day, which was ten days earlier, on 6 June. It had been the busiest day of the year.
Even so there seemed to be lots of clues. The renowned pathologist and forensic expert Sir Bernard Spilsbury looked at the human remains, which were incomplete. She had been a young woman, probably in her early twenties. Her general physical condition suggested that she belonged to the middle or upper classes; she was well nourished, with a good figure, no slack flesh, and well-toned muscles that implied plenty of exercise. The golden brown of the skin also suggested that she could afford to spend a good deal of time in lower latitudes; that suggested wealth. At the time of her death she had been pregnant.
The Brighton police sent out an alert to all other left-luggage offices in England to search for mysterious abandoned packages. At King’s Cross station in London, the young woman’s legs were found in a suitcase. Each leg had been severed at the thigh and the knee, and they were the legs of a well-proportioned and athletic young woman. Some clues were emerging as significant. The body had been wrapped in brown paper and on one sheet was the suffix ‘-ford’. It looked as if it was the second half of a place-name, perhaps Guildford. In the trunk, there were two newspapers, copies of the Daily Mail for 31 May and 2 June. They were of an edition only circulated within fifty miles of London.
Then a porter remembered helping a man to carry the trunk on Derby Day. The man had travelled from Dartford to Brighton. Dartford was a place name ending in ‘ford’ and it was a place where the London edition of the Daily Mail might be bought. It began to look as though the murderer was a Dartford man. It also began to look as though the case was about to be solved. A girl who had sat in the same train compartment as the man from Dartford was able to give a general description of him. Five cheap day returns had been bought that day, and the ones that could be traced were eliminated by the police. The makers of the trunk and the suitcase were traced, but they were unable to connect the items with particular purchasers. Suddenly the trail had gone stone cold. There were no more leads.
The pathologist said the young woman had died on about 30 May, a week before the trunk was left at Brighton station. The man who killed her must have had plenty of spare time, and presumably a home where he could safely conceal a body for a whole week without detection; this would have to be a man with a large property or a single man who had (and expected) no visitors. The fact that a whole week went by before the body was dumped suggested that the murder was not premeditated; the disposal of the body had not been planned, and it had taken several days for the murderer to work out how to do it. A certain amount of reconstruction was possible.
A fairly well-off, strong and athletic man had a secret love affair with a rather similar girl – also well-off, strong and athletic. He lived in Dartford, in the stockbroker belt. The girl became pregnant. On 30 May she called on him to ask him what to do about it. His reactions perhaps revealed that he had no serious intention of marrying her. There was a quarrel, perhaps developing into a fight, and he hit her over the head with something heavy that happened to be to hand. The young woman’s head was never found, but there were no injuries to the rest of the body, so it can be assumed that she died of some head injury.
The man was severely shaken by the girl’s death, which he never intended or wished – he probably loved her and was very distressed at what had happened, but could not face the exposure of the affair or the accusation that he had murdered the girl. He needed time to decide how to dispose of the body. He decided to dismember it. He deposited the trunk in Brighton, travelling on a third-class ticket so as to lose himself in the crowd and not be remembered by witnesses. He deposited the suitcase containing the girls’ legs at King’s Cross. Probably after that, he left the country, knowing that it was only a matter of days before the body parts would be discovered.
In theory, the crime should have been solved by finding out which Dartford resident emigrated immediately after Derby Day. The sports clubs and riding stables of the Dartford area would almost certainly reveal both the missing man and the missing woman. In reality, the police investigation revealed nothing whatever that led to the Brighton trunk murderer. None of the obvious leads led anywhere at all. Careful searching of left-luggage offices did not reveal the whereabouts of the young woman’s head, which was never found – though they did uncover the bodies of three children, opening up other murder enquiries. From that day to this, the Brighton trunk murder has never been solved. There is not even so much as the name of a suspect or the name of the victim.
The Sinister gP: Dr John Bodkin Adams
In July 1983, an elderly retired doctor died in Hove. A lot of retired people, especially from a genteel profession like his, end up in Hove. But this was no ordinary doctor. This eighty-four-year-old general practitioner was firmly believed by the police to be nothing less than a serial killer, and not only that but a serial killer who had successfully eluded the law for decades.
Because the law of libel is framed as it is, it was only after the old man had died that the newspapers were able to open their dossiers about Dr John Bodkin Adams and level the accusations anew. It was rather like the flood of revelations about Robert Maxwell that followed his death; while he lived, few journalists were prepared to risk litigation to tell what they knew. In a smaller and less sensational way, biographers had to wait until Sir Laurens van der Post was dead before the shadier side of his past, which had long been known about, could safely be revealed.
Dr Adams had been tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of one of his patients, a seventy-two-year-old widow called Edith Morrell. If he had been convicted on that charge, he would certainly have been charged with further murders. Two more charges had been confidently prepared and the Crown Prosecution Service believed they had enough evidence to bring successful prosecutions in another three cases. The police, in other words, were sure that Adams had murdered at least six of his patients. Some officers believed the figure was nine or maybe even as high as twenty-five. Detective Superintendent Charles Hewitt of Scotland Yard believed quite early on in the investigation that the death toll had been that high.
But at the Old Bailey, only the one case was ever discussed or fought over. Dr Adams was acquitted after a classic legal duel between two barristers, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the Attorney General, and Adams’s defence lawyer, Geoffrey Lawrence.
Geoffrey Lawrence was a thorough-going professional. He disliked his client, thoroughly disliked him in fact, but took his side ferociously and uncompromisingly in the courtroom. His adversary, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, was sure he could destroy Adams once he had him in the witness box. Lawrence’s advice to Adams was to remain silent and avoid cross-examination. The counsel for the prosecution and the police believed that that was what saved Adams from the death sentence. Manningham-Buller had staked everything on cross-questioning Adams, and when the opportunity was not given to him the basis for the prosecution case collapsed. The jury therefore more or less had to acquit. After a forty-five minute deliberation, that was their verdict – and Adams walked free.
The Adams trial was such a disaster that the Director of Public Prosecutions had no confidence that any of the other similar charges
could be made to stick either, so he announced that there would be no further action. It was, in the view of the police who had collected the evidence, a disaster for British justice. A dangerous multiple murderer had gone unpunished: worse still, he had been released.
As was customary in all cases in the English courts, the jury had no knowledge about the many parallel cases that were very similar to Edith Morell’s, and also ended with the victim’s death. If they had known that the police had investigated as many as 400 possibly suspicious deaths with which Adams had been associated, they would almost certainly have been less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. A recent case that has some similarities is that of Dr Harold Shipman, another patient-slaying doctor. But Adams was a different sort of killer from Shipman; Adams killed purely and simply for financial gain. He got the old ladies to change their wills in his favour, and then he killed them.
Over a period of thirty-five years in general practice in Eastbourne, Dr Adams had been named as a beneficiary in the wills of as many as 132 of his patients. Most of the bequests were modest, but in all he had amassed £45,000 in cash, which would be worth perhaps ten times as much today, something approaching £500,000. He had also been left jewellery, silver, furniture and cars, including two Rolls Royces.
It could be argued that a sympathetic doctor with a good bedside manner and a genuine concern for his elderly patients might well be acknowledged in the wills of old ladies, especially old ladies with no-one else to leave their money to. There need not be anything sinister about the matter. There need not be anything exactly sinister about it even if Adams himself had dropped heavy hints about wills or openly asked the old ladies to change their wills in his favour. The key question is – did he kill them?
He was certainly a very popular doctor in Eastbourne, and had made the care of the elderly his speciality ever since he was a young doctor. He arrived in Eastbourne almost straight from medical school in Northern Ireland. He was an unprepossessing little man, only five foot five inches tall, but weighing eighteen stone. His face was pink and fleshy, with small eyes and thin lips. His flabby chin spilled out over the celluloid collars he liked to wear. He looked like Mr Toad. There was no doubt about it – John Bodkin Adams was ugly. Yet he managed to charm all his old ladies. He stroked their hands and even combed their hair for them.
The year-long investigation by Sergeant Hewitt and his superior officer, Detective Chief Superintendent Bert Hannam of the Murder Squad, was to show that there was a much darker side to Adams than the tender loving care that he liked everyone to see. He prescribed addictive drugs for his elderly patients and made them dependent on the drugs. He in effect turned his genteel old ladies into morphine and heroin addicts. Because he was the supplier, their dependency on the drugs could very easily be turned into dependency upon him. He was then able to alter their wills in his favour. Once that was done, he was able to ease them gently on their way out of this world by administering an overdose of the drugs they craved.
The Murder Squad’s investigation showed that for all the patients for whom Adams signed death certificates sixty-eight per cent were alleged (according to what he wrote on the certificates) to have died of cerebral haemorrhage or cerebral thrombosis. This was a very high percentage – incredibly high.
Well before the outbreak of the Second World War there was gossip going round Eastbourne that Adams did his rounds with a bottle of morphia in one pocket and a blank will form in the other. In 1936, Dr Adams had a windfall from the will of Mrs Alice Whitton, who left him £3,000, a large sum then. Mrs Whitton’s niece contested the will, but the court decided in Adams’s favour and he kept the money. The gossip in Eastbourne continued through the 1940s and into the 1950s. Dr Adams’s racket was an open secret. But it was not until 1956 that the police decided to investigate and then the circumstantial evidence started to build up. The problem was that most of the evidence was circumstantial.
There was the case of William Mawhood, where Adams made a bad miscalculation. He reckoned without Mrs Mawhood. William Mawhood was a wealthy steel merchant and also a long-standing friend of Adams. He had lent Adams £3,000 to buy his first house. When Mr Mawhood was dying, Adams visited him and asked his wife Edith to leave them alone for a moment. She was suspicious and listened outside the door to what was being said. It was just as well she did. She heard Adams telling her husband to leave his estate to him, Adams, and he would look after her.
Edith Mawhood was incensed. She burst back into the room, grabbed her walking stick and struck out at the wicked doctor, chasing him round the bed. He scuttled out of the room and down the stairs. Mrs Mawhood threw her stick down the stairs after him. She missed her target and broke a flower vase instead. She shouted after him to get out of the house. She never wanted to see him there again.
It was scandalous behaviour on Dr Adams’s part, and he might perhaps have been charged with unprofessional conduct and maybe even struck off for it. But it was a far cry from that level of misbehaviour to proving that Dr Adams would have hastened the death of his other patients. Dr Adams was obviously a very nasty character, but was he a murderer?
The case of Emily Mortimer was similar to the Mawhood case. In the Mortimer family there was a strict tradition by which the family members intended to keep the family fortune intact. Whenever a Mortimer died, the bulk of the estate was divided among the surviving members of the family. In that way, each time there was a death, the money was recycled within the family. Adams persuaded Emily Mortimer to make a break with tradition. The year she died, she changed her will, transferring £3,000 worth of shares from the family (who would have been expecting that sum) to the doctor. Shortly before she died, she changed her will again so that Adams received £5,000 and the Mortimer family was cut out of the will altogether. Emily Mortimer’s death certificate gave as the cause of death ‘cerebral thrombosis’.
There was a rather different case of two old ladies who owned the house that they lived in. Adams persuaded them to sell their house and move into a flat – for the good of their health, he argued. He refused to hand over the money he made from the house sale until two years later, and then only when forced to do so by a writ.
The police investigation was very thorough. The Murder Squad had obtained statements from local solicitors and bank managers, which showed Dr Adams’s intense concern with the wills of his patients. There were many irregularities. Adams was making visits to banks with his patients to oversee the changes he wanted them to make to their wills. He was making phone calls to solicitors demanding that they come out immediately to change a will or draw up a new one. There was even one patient who was so near to unconsciousness that he could only sign his changed will with a cross. There were also several changes of wills to stipulate cremation instead of burial, which could only have been made so that there could be no exhumation later on to test for levels of morphine or other drugs in the body.
One of the most damning findings of all was the sequence of thirty-two cheques payable to Dr Adams, totalling £18,000, and all drawn out of one old lady’s account during the last few days of her life. The signatures also looked as if they had been forged, presumably by Dr Adams.
But all of this was circumstantial evidence, evidence of Adams’s way of thinking, evidence of his determination to get his hands on his patients’ money. What evidence did the police manage to find of murder?
They did manage to find evidence that some of the death certificates contained information that Dr Adams must have known was untrue. Clara McNeill-Miller was an elderly single lady who had lived with her sister Hilda for thirteen years. When Hilda died, she left everything to Clara. About a year afterwards, Clara too died, leaving nearly everything to Adams. The sum amounted to £5,000. Three years later the bodies were exhumed and post mortems were carried out. Clara had not died of coronary thrombosis as Adams had written on the death certificate, but of pneumonia. This was odd in itself, but then the police were able to interview one of the other guests i
n the rest home. This is what she told the police:
Dr Adams was called to Miss Clara the night before she died. She was suffering from influenza. He remained in her bedroom for nearly forty-five minutes before leaving. I later became worried as I heard nothing from the room. I opened the door and was horrified by what I saw.
This was a cold winter’s night. The bedclothes on her bed had been pulled back and thrown over the bedrail at the base. Her nightdress had been folded back across her body to her neck. All the bedroom windows had been flung open. A cold gush of wind was sweeping through the room. That is how the doctor left her.
It was now very clear to the police from this vital witness evidence that Adams had tried to accelerate the death of Clara Neil-Miller – and probably succeeded. She died the day after this ordeal. The police also found that in the weeks running up to her death Clara had made out large cheques to Adams; these could not have been for medical treatment or medicines.
Adams also had a financial interest in the residential home where Clara died. He sent many of his patients there. Mrs Sharp, the woman who ran it, was likely to be able to advance the police enquiry significantly. Hewitt remembered her later. ‘Mrs Sharp was on the point of talking when we left Eastbourne for a week’s conferences with the Attorney General in London. She was the witness we needed. She knew much of what went on between Adams and his patients. She knew where the bodies were buried and she was scared. When we left, she was about to crack.’
Hewitt was sure that with just one more interview, Mrs Sharp would reveal a lot more. He was devastated to find that she had died while he was away in London, and drew the obvious conclusion: that Adams had got to her, killed her, silenced her. Experienced as he was, Hewitt was unable to pin any of this on Adams. By the time Hewitt got back to Eastbourne, only a week after leaving, Elizabeth Sharp was dead and cremated – on Dr John Bodkin Adams’s orders. Hewitt sensed that Adams had played a key role in Elizabeth Sharp’s death but was unable to prove a thing.
Great Unsolved Crimes Page 27